5 years ago, my brother and I started a junk removal company with nothing but a truck and a dream and had no idea what

we were doing. But today, we've done over $2.5 million in sales and have over 400,000 followers online. But if we knew

all the things we knew now [music] back then, we would have been way further ahead. So, in this video, we're going to

be breaking down our journey year by year, going from our first job and scaling all the way past seven figures.

And we're going to give you the biggest lessons that will help scale your junk removal business. So, let's get right

into the video. So, in our very first year with just our pickup truck, what we ended up doing to make 120,000 in

revenue was pretty much hustling in every niche we could. We were doing moving, junk removal, landscaping,

everything we could do with junk removal being the biggest thing. It was a lot of hustle. We didn't have a lot of money to

start either. We eventually bought some power tools, but we were pretty much working with tools that we found on jobs

and everything. But in the hustle stage, there were a lot of important lessons we learned. And here are the three that I

think were some of the biggest in that first year. First is learning how to sell. So people aren't hiring you for

junk removal. They're hiring you for the value that they're getting. And you want to understand what their situation is so

that you know how to communicate your value to their situation. And that's one of the secrets to selling the job. And

then here's the second lesson because once you start to get more jobs, you're going to need to figure out how to get

them done. And that's when it came to hiring employees. And honestly, in our first year, it's pretty simple. We just

hired our friends, paid them $20 an hour because we were the ones driving the trucks. And honestly, in your very first

year, hiring is very simple. But you have to hire people that want to go above and beyond and work hard. No B

players, no people who are mid. Anyone who's not going to work hard is going to drag you down and really prevent you

from reaching the success that you want to. And one of the best ways to find people to hire in your first year is

just through your network. people that you know. You could even post on Facebook, post on your Instagram story,

whatever it is that you can do to reach more people. Just let everyone that you know what you're doing. And in your

first year of running a business, there's a lot of different areas you could be spending money. But your goal

is to learn how to keep money in your first year, how to stay profitable. And that's going to take a lot of looking at

all of your expenses and making sure you're only spending money on what you need to to make money. Those are my

three biggest lessons in the first year. What do you have, Jake? My biggest lesson that I learned is just

communication. I was the one who answered all the phone calls, text all the customers, lined up the schedule,

lined up the guys, etc. And communication goes a long way. So really just having a genuine conversation with

these people. Don't look at it like a transactional deal. People want to work with who they like. And so if you can

make the customer like you on the phone, then that's essentially going to give you the job right there. It's not about

charging the lowest amount or providing the best service on site or bringing a shiny truck. It's literally just good

communication on the phone before you go. It preps the job. It basically sells it 90% of the way there and then you

just have to show up and follow through once you show up on the property. So, as simple as it is and that's definitely

the biggest lesson I learned. Now, we're on to year two. This is when we took that money and reinvested it into

starting a real business and >> dump truck >> and we stuck to junk removal as our

niche. We branded ourselves as junk teens. We bought that dump truck >> and we took things to the next level.

This is when we pretty much learned to delegate. We started investing in marketing and we pretty much doubled

down on everything that worked. So in our second year, we did 430K in sales. And one of the biggest lessons that we

learned that helped us get there was utilizing equipment the right way. And for us, that was taking that dump truck

and doing bigger jobs. And it was also investing in better tools. saws, the barrels, using trash bags, things to rip

up carpets, everything that you would need to show up to the job and not have to scramble to figure out how to get it

done. And like I said, in the first year it was all hustle, but the second year being prepared and organized is one of

the things that let us get to that next step. With that though, we needed an more steady lead source. And that's when

we started to invest in marketing. Most of our marketing on our second year was actually organic, but we did start to

mess around with some paid stuff. We had a billboard. We tried some small local marketing strategies, which they all

worked, but really like prioritizing marketing in our second year and telling our story was the thing that got us that

consistent lead flow. And we built up a community within our community to support us. And that's really how we

began to take it to the next level with marketing. And the last thing for me is delegating, planning, and organization.

On our second year, Jacob over here started to master scheduling. Year one, there wasn't too many jobs to schedule.

So, it was kind of just as soon as we got something, it was on the schedule and we would do it the next day. But in

year two, we started getting you multiple jobs per day. I started having to figure out how to route these

different jobs. And it's a lot more difficult than you think because each job has different junk in it that has to

go to a different dump. At least for us in Massachusetts, there's different facilities that only accept certain

items. So, we had to separate things. And not only that, we were also in school, so we could only work after

school where all the dumps were closed. So, it was just really kind of a tricky thing for us to deal with. But overall,

just really sitting there thinking about it, working with the customers to line things up. Again, when you have that

good communication on the phone, customers are extremely willing to work with you in terms of any time on your

actual schedule. I hear a lot of people say like, "Oh, like just do what's best for the customer." We've almost always

never done what's best for the customer and just what's best for our schedule. And it's simple. It still works for the

customer and they are happy to do it. just cuz they, you know, want to work with us. So, kind of scheduling in a

nutshell, I guess. >> So, on year three, we started to hit some big numbers. We almost got to that

7 figure mark. We ended off the year with 930K in sales. And we had two dump trucks on this year. We we bought a

second one with our money that we made from the last year. And at the same time, I bought my dream car, took a

little bit of money for myself, and then this is when things started to get real. We started to reinvest heavy into

marketing, rented our dream shop, and then this is when Jake stepped out of the truck, stopped removing junk, and

pretty much full-time started taking phone calls. And I was still out there pretty frequently with the guys. But we

started our social media, took everything we did, again, rinse and repeat. And here are the lessons that I

learned. I realized how important it is to copy what works for me on social media. That's how I discovered viral

videos. I would post all the time and then once I found something that worked, keep posting it more. Same thing with

our marketing strategies. We've at this point probably spent over $100,000 on marketing stuff, random stuff, and then

we would find out what works and put even more money behind that. We figured out which guys are good. We only wanted

to keep the good guys around. So, keep hiring people like that. Keep going to the dumps that work the best for us. So,

within 3 years, we've been able to experiment so much to figure out what worked for us and just doubling down on

that. This is when all of our existing customers started to rehire us more frequently. So that was a whole another

level of compounding that happened on our third year more than I would say the others. Year three was a lot of just

like rinse and repeat copying the other years. >> Yeah. By year three, me and Kirk were

both not working the truck virtually at all. And so it came down to our crew. You know what I mean? I would say

effectiveness comes before efficiency. You need to be able to actually run the thing before you optimize it. And that's

a lesson that I learned later on. But for this specific example, running a crew efficiently. And that's obviously

we talked about scheduling, talking to the customers, etc. But now this is actually getting the jobs done and

making sure that they get done and that we actually receive payment, we're making profit, etc. So that was one of

the biggest things. And what that looks like is just I talked about having genuine conversations with your

customers. And this is the same thing with your employees. You want to be willing and able to talk to your

employees. Figure out what they want. Figure out if you can align those things in their mission and just really bring

that to life within your company. Power your employees to be able to do the right thing. Give them a job position

that gives them a little bit of power, a little bit of liberty for them to create their own little thing, whatever. And um

that's one of the biggest things is just really getting your employees in there to um to actually get stuff done and

building a solid team. Which brings us to year four where again we copied what we did the year before and just added

another layer on top. So we ended off that year with 1.3 mil having three dump trucks. And this is when we kind of did

a little bit more experimentation. Again, we kind of experimented with a lot of different ad types. We also

bought a different sized dump truck than the other two that we had. We started our YouTube channel at this time as well

and we kind of started doing more side quests. So, we implemented more fun into the business, elevating the culture and

the different parts of junk teens. It makes it more than just a junk remover company. And with all of that, I learned

that teamwork makes a dream work. And it's super cliche, but really without the team, there's no way where we we

would have got to where we are today. And not everyone is bought in for the long term when they work with you in the

beginning. So I think in this fourth year we started to figure out each other's futures and knowing that Dylan

and Charlie are going to work with us after school and Colin deciding not to go to college. These are all big things

that we started to process through in the fourth year cuz we're like all right this is not going away. And solidifying

the team was one of the keys for us to add on a little bit about what Kirk was saying but the team you know really

solidifying that. I think the biggest thing that I personally learned in year four was delegation and like system

implementing. Your first year, I would say keep as lean as possible. Me and Kirk were literally on I think a 100% of

every single job. Our first year we made every single dollar. We kept it very lean. So our profit margin was like 85%.

But moving into our fourth year, we waited too long to set up the systems. So now things were starting to fail.

things were starting to break because we didn't have those guard rails and those boundaries in place and we were just

relying on your guys remembering certain things or relying on me just consistently being there to pick up the

phone every day, etc., whatever. And it just got to a point where I just couldn't deal with the volume. You know,

I was probably on the phone with 75 different people every single day at least. Not to mention that I was still

in school. I still had to schedule the job. This was also when we were quoting jobs beforehand. So people would send us

pictures. I had to quote every single job, give people estimates, and it was honestly just a nightmare doing that 7

days a week, every single day with no break cuz I was the only one who could do it. And that's because we didn't have

systems in place. So, learning how to kind of, I guess, restructure the business, allow other people to be able

to handle those job positions, and also just trust them, right? I had to trust someone else to be able to answer the

phone. I thought that I was the only one who could do it. I thought that nobody else would have the the skill to do it.

You know, I've been doing it for three years. No one's ever going to get as good as me. But I was wrong. And you

guys have to learn to trust other people and your skills to do things that you need to delegate because at the end of

the day, you will not be able to do every single thing in your business. And you have to have a team that's able to

handle certain things around you. Which brings us to year five where we're still in it right now. What is it like month

nine and we're on track to do 2.5 million in sales this year. We also bought two more dump trucks this year.

So, it's our first year of buying two trucks in one year. And the team has like expanded almost double. Like we

have like 10 to 15 guys that we're going out every day at our busiest day of the summer. And at the same time, we also

launched our second location. So we're now operating in a whole new service area that's like an hour away from where

we're used to. So that's another big step. We also started hiring more on the back end of our company. So like our

office staff, accounting, more like highlevel back-end business strategy is where we started to focus and that is

one of the things like Jake said delegation it kept our business very organized where I think even on our

fourth year we were still hustling a lot where this year I feel like the transition we made was running the

business rather than letting the business run us and we were able to do that by implementing different systems

like our CRM. So, we actually use Jobber right now. We were trying to figure out which CRM to use for so long and like

there there's a lot of different ones out there, but Jobber is just quick, simple, and it works for us. And we're

running a $2.5 million business on it, so it works. You guys also want like a 20% discount code. Just check the link

in the description. But lesson I would say we learned this year is to build a business, not a hustle. Took us 4 years

to learn that. And if you can learn that from day one, just think about it. Think about how much quicker you could get to

that $2.5 million mark if you're looking at your business like it's a business. What that really means is staying

organized, building systems that run the business for you. And another huge thing was hiring managers. So, we started to

promote guys like Colin to become managers. So, Colin's pretty much the GM now, taking care of all the a lot of the

stuff that Jacob was doing every day. So, he kind of working hand in hand with Jake. And then we got Charlie being the

manager of our tools. Behind me, we got Max helping me manage the social media. So, we got managers all around that make

it possible for us to still be humans and live a life while we run the business. All right, year five, I'm

going to split up into two different groups. First half and the second half. Basically said this every single year so

far, delegation. And this was the first year that we really did it to an extreme amount. Like Kirk was saying, managers,

these are people that are getting paid much more than the average worker. You're also people that are doing much

more complicated tasks that I personally thought nobody would ever be able to do and I would be the only one who could do

it. And I'm sure a lot of you guys are thinking that same way. Oh, it's it's my personal touch that gets that seals the

jobs or it's because I talk with the customers on the phone or I'm the only one who's able to quote the job.

Whatever the excuse is, it's not valid. you can delegate every single position in your in your business and you just

have to learn to find the right person and empower them and align the mission and the goals to be able to do so. And

that's what we focused on the first half of this year. We put a lot of people in power within our business, opened up

essentially just the different positions and you know we started to build a real team, not just employees and boss but

like a team. Everybody has a position in the company and we all feel like we're important. And then the second half of

the year, which is like I don't know, we're about like three months to second half. We still got a few months after

that. I'd say optimizing, right? I said earlier, you have to build something. You have to become effective before you

can come efficient. So, we've been very effective over the last few years, and this is the first kind of time that I'm

really focusing on becoming more efficient. Just that's figuring out, all right, how much total drive time are the

trucks going out for each day? We have five trucks. It's a total drive time of 6 hours, per se. How can I get that down

to 5 hours? spending less money on the guys in the truck, just sitting there driving the trucks and having more ROI

on them actually removing the junk on the job, which makes less money, etc. That's just a small metric you could

look into. But the main point is optimizing. There's a million different things you can optimize. For example,

the amount of missed calls you have in a day, the amount of time that you get back to a person, the turnaround time on

sending out an invoice, the cash conversion cycle, whatever. I mean, there are things that you can look at in

terms of making more efficient. And that's the thing that you want to focus on after you built an effective team and

an effective quote unquote business. I hope this was helpful, guys. And if it was, just make sure to like and more

importantly subscribe and let us know what other types of videos you want to see in the process cuz we're trying to

make some good stuff for you guys. and we'll see you next