What’s up! How’s everybody doing today? It is Tuesday, is it Tuesday? Yeah it is Tuesday. Half the time I don’t know what day it is. It’s hard to keep straight sometimes when you’re real busy, but that’s good. I’m enjoying life, I hope you are. I hope you’re having a great day today. I hope you’re out there making some money, getting some jobs done. I hope everybody’s weather is nice. I know parts of the country have been kind of bad here recently. It’s kind of an overcast day, we had a little rain chair come through earlier, but we are rocking and rolling here. All three locations are slamming, and we’re doing the best we can to keep up and help as many people as we can today with Junk Doctors.
Listen, some of you all want to know how I got in the Junk Removal Business. What’s my story, and how did I start? I’ve always been very entrepreneurial, I’ve tried different businesses in the past, I’ve tried washing cars, washing airplanes, I had a mobile shredding trucking company we did for a while. I wasn’t cut up, I hadn’t learned enough at the time to make it successful. That was probably mainly it, and I could probably do those businesses now, make them a success, I’ve learned enough. Maybe they were just bad timing. The business was covered up too much competition, too much high level, well-funded competition to really hang. I worked at a roller skating rink, and while at the same time I was racing NASCAR style race cars in North Carolina, and I ran out of money so I quit racing. I love racing, I would love to get back into racing, but it’s not that I have the time because I could make time right now, but I’ve got money that I want to invest in building Junk Removal Authority. I’ve got my extra money I want to put into real estate and purchasing apartment buildings. I don’t really have the money I want to put toward racing, and I don’t really want to devote the time to racing, but I’d love to get back into racing, it was a lot of fun. Anyway, I ran out of money, so we got out of racing. I sold everything but my pickup truck. I didn’t sell the truck because I had to be able to get around. I was never one to ride a bicycle or walk anywhere, so I kept the pickup truck. I put some ads up on Craigslist just to try and kind of get a little extra money going. Craigslist was great back then. It was free – I know they just recently started charging. You would get tons of business off of Craigslist. Now we were cheap, and that’s the people you’re going to get on Craigslist.
When we first started, the first loads I did over the first week or two, I think I charged $50 for pickup truck load. I believe that they went up to like $95 or something like that for a pickup truck load. After a month or two, Christian Fowler joined up, and he became my business partner. We purchased a 6×12 wooden trailer and let me tell you we thought we were the king of the world with that 6×12. We spent probably days just thinking about it, researching it, should we do this. I remember we typed up this purchase order “These are our requirements of our 6×12 trailer for Triangle Removal Incorporated. We felt we were hot stuff. That $1,200, we were sweating that $1,200 payment. Now, we probably put as much thought into it with a $25,000 payment as we did that $1,200 then, and now below $10,000 we don’t really think that hard about. We decided whether we needed it or not, and that if we need it we purchased it. Back then, that $1,200 purchase, we sweated that baby. That was like a like a $50,000 purchase to us now. Anyway, we bought that trailer. I think we first started charging like $150 for the trailer load, and then we went to like $250 or something like that. Then, I posted something on the Internet “I need help on running this business”. At the time I thought it needed to be cheap. You’re competing against 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and there are a few other ones like College Hunks were in our market; Junk King wasn’t. It was just Got Junk, College Hunks, there was a local company called Junk Patrol which we’ve since balled out, there was a company starting at the same time called Make Junk, which still has one truck. They might have just purchased a box truck, and we talk back and forth. They send us quite a bit of business when they get too busy to keep up. We’re always able to take it. Anyway, there were some competition and all, and a guy from Chicago that used to own another Junk Removal Business – I’m not going to say where, because they actually add and non-compete signed – he owned a competing Junk Removal Business. He helped us out for free. He kind of mentored me, and he’s no longer in the Junk Removal Business, but he’s the one that got me charging more. He’s the one that got me on Google AdWords.
Once we got on Google AdWords, our business exploded. We could hardly keep up. We were working seven days a week as hard as we could be trying to keep up. When we first started, we didn’t dump. Around here, or around in the Raleigh area there are citizens convenience centers. It’s for free. You can dump for free, open Monday through Sunday from I think 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., but it’s not for commercial vehicles. It is supposed to be full for residents only. We’d have this trailer and pickup, we put signs on the side the trailer, we’d have signs that we’d screw in on the trailer the kind of chloroplast signs, we’d have magnets we would put on the side of the pickup truck. So, Triangle Removal, and we have polo shirts for Triangle Removal. We do the job with the signs, all dressed up, and then after we left we’d pull over and a filling station, gas station whatever, and we would take off the shirt, we’d take the signs off the truck, we roll in these convenience centers. Sometimes people questioned saying “There’s no way you’ll have this much stuff” so we say “We’re helping out a grandmother”. We definitely would fib a little bit so we could keep dumping for free because it was for free. You have to hand unload though, so we were hand loading, and hand unloading out of a trailer; it was hard work. We did three or four jobs in a day, we would be hand unloading. We were flat beat when we were working hard. What we want to do was we started kind of just giving stuff we’d find on jobs, or we bring a cup of coffee to these attendance in their convenience centers and do whatever. We did that for probably about a year and a half or so, and then we got that first dump truck. We went down to Florida and picked that first dump truck up: Ole’ number one, Big Bird one. The guy had it, tt was an old Got Junk truck, but he put a little top on it. He put a top on it for a chipper, he was running a chipper, but his tree business went out, so he was selling it. We bought that thing for $11,500. That truck has probably made over $600,000. It had about 110000 miles on when we bought it, and it’s got about 350000 it now. It’s just a great truck. She’s not super strong now, but still super reliable. It keeps chugging, smokes a little bit, but still making this money even to this day.
The key for me, I knew I wanted to build this thing separate for me, but what I really started thinking about how I build this business separate from me. I started learning accounting, and I started really researching business, and that guy contacted me and helped me out. That was when things really started to take off for me. We built Junk Doctors, $2,000,000 at the end of our fifth year of operation. and that’s when we started Junk Removal Authority. I want to help hundreds and hundreds of people and do what that one guy did for me. I want to help them succeed, I want to help them get a level of freedom in their business that is just incredible. I want to help them make more money they’ve never made before, I want to help them by making more money, and by having more freedom, have better relationships with their spouse, better relationships with their kids. That’s what I want to do. That’s the reason we didn’t franchise Junk Doctors. We determined we could help a far more number of people doing the business packages, so helping prospective business owners, but not forcing them, not handcuffing them to us having to pay a royalty debt per month, and then also helping Junk Removal Business owners acquire more customers. Offer support in the terms of call center, free up their time, allow them to make more money, and allow them to gain knowledge to make their business an actual business and not just does not another job. That’s our inspiration behind Junk Removal Authority, and that’s how myself and Christian started Junk Doctors and gotten the Junk Removal Business.