https://junkremovalauthority.com/. Those that welcome and make change will go places. Those that dog their heels in don’t. What will you do?
Hey, good morning, everybody! Good morning! I hope everybody is doing excellent today, and I’m sure everybody’s just slam busy. We’re probably about as busy as we’ve ever been right now which is good. Every year we’ve grown and grown and grown revenue wise, so it’s not surprising. June’s normally one of the busiest months of the year. June, August, and October are consistently defying for the busiest part of the season, or of the year for us. Going into July, a lot of times the lines are a little bit of a downturn, but it was not last year. Last year we did as much in July as we did in June, and August, but in years past it was pretty much always kind of a downturn year. Anyway, I hope you guys are doing great.
Embracing Change
Everybody needs to make it a habit to embrace change. It’s very difficult for people to do that. There’s several different things that have gotten me thinking about that, that’s the reason it I’m talking about it this morning. I think I mentioned in past videos I’ve had the opportunity which has led to a lot of my success to become friends from a very young age with people much older than I am. People born in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The 1950s is my dad’s age, but the 30s and 40s I still have my best friends that are 80 years old or over. One day I’ll tell you, you will notice with them is, as everybody knows, old people do not embrace change. They can’t stand it, and that’s part of the reason generally people in their 80s are stagnant. They’re not growing, and maybe they don’t want to. They’ve gone out there, they’ve done it. I’m sitting here at 28 years old saying I’m not going to be that way, so I’m going to push until I’m pushing 6-foot daisies. They just get stagnant, and they don’t progress. Without change you’re not going to progress at all. Other things I’ve noticed is more experienced, or older business owners, a lot of times they get set in their ways. I’ve only ever worked for one company other than myself, it was a roller skating rink, and I learned a lot as far as customer service from that guy, and how to treat people from the owner of that place, and it’s paid off very well. It’s helped me out a lot in business. That place, they were stuck in the 80s or 90s, 80s early 90s. They wouldn’t change, because I had some great ideas and they did actually take some of the ideas – some stuff some stuff on birthday parties, when we were restructured it that was my idea, and to this day they’re still doing it that way – and I had a lot of other ideas I think would have done really well to help the place out, but they just were afraid of change and didn’t want to try anything. At the time I was 18, or 19 years old, so that might have hurt me a little bit, but at the same time I think they were just afraid of change. They would not change the way they’ve always done, the way they were going to keep on doing it. To this day, they’re still in business which a lot of roller-skate rings can’t say that. They’re still in business, and they’re doing decently well, but just afraid of change.
I’ve seen it in a lot of Junk Removal Business owners too. Some of these guys that have been in business 10, 20, 30, or 40 plus years, and they just won’t change. They won’t try anything new, and they get left in the wayside. Just the other day there was a guy that spent most of the phone call trying to educate me on junk removal. I wasn’t pushing back much. He had been in business for 40 some years, and we had a good conversation, and he was talking about how our paper job program wouldn’t work, there has to be some flaws because it’s too expensive. I said “Here’s the numbers, here’s how it does work” and I also said “You could be right at your current pricing. It might be too expensive for you, but you could raise your rates.” and he was pushing back saying they can’t raise rates. I said “Well sir you probably can’t raise rates on your current customers.”, because he’s getting a lot of repeat customers he’s used over 40 years. He has older customers, and some older customers aren’t willing to pay a whole lot, especially ones on fixed income, social security all that kind of stuff, and that’s fine. There needs to be somebody out there to service those people. Maybe you give them a break. If your prices are higher, maybe you give those type of people a break. What I kind of told him was it’s a different customer that finds, somebody they just want it done fast. The reason that customers find you is they’re not shopping around. They’re going into the top 2, 3 results on Google, maybe the top result on Google, they’re calling, and if your site answers that question about your service pretty easily, and it makes it easy for them to call, and you’ve got somebody that can answer the phone, answer the questions, book their job quickly, somebody that actually answers the phone, you give them a way to book online, because customers don’t want to call anymore. That customer is all about convenience, that customer is all about “Bring me somebody into my home that I’m not going to feel threatened by that I don’t think is going to damage my property, and that I don’t think that is going to come back and rob me or do whatever else to me.” It’s a different customer. That is what led me to think about how people don’t want to change. I talk to a lot of these people that live in my neighborhood.
Getting Into Amazon
Amazon – I’ve got a little bit of inside information on it, because I know somebody that that knows somebody that is in partners with Jeff Bezos. I don’t want to give too many details out over this, but Bezos invested in his company. It’s a very large and trending company. They have quadrupled in size over the past two years. The word I’ve gotten is the Raleigh area is in the top two. Now the only thing that has been released is Raleigh I believe is the top 10, but according to this inside information the Raleigh area is in the top two to get Amazon Headquarters 2 – 50,000 jobs would be coming this way. Apple is all but about a done deal. Apple’s supposed to be bringing about 10,000 jobs to this area. Nothing officially has been announced – that’s even been released in the news that Apple’s kind of started opening up hiring for positions that will be part of that 10000 -, so everything points to at least locking down Apple. There’s a good chance 50,000 jobs into downtown Raleigh. Jobs, not people; 50000 jobs. You figure out there, that’s probably 100,000 plus people injected over about a two-year span, and billions of dollars on real estate. The rental market around here, people that own apartments right now are about to get filthy rich if that comes in, because our average rent right now is $1,300. It’s projected that Amazon will probably raise rates by about 30%, about $300 or $400. You raise rental rates, they’re going to be building a lot more, jacking stuff up. Traffic is going to get worse, but I’m excited, it’s opportunity. It’s opportunity out there, there’s a lot of great chance they’re going to have a lot of junk. It’s a lot of junk, it’s a lot of construction work. Buildings are going to have to be removed. We don’t do a whole lot of construction right now, but the market will be overwhelmed with construction debris trash. We charge a lot more than anybody else. We’re like three times more expensive than everybody else. We do a better job for this new construction removal, but we’ve only got a few builders that use us that really appreciate that convenience, and that ease of service. They never have to tell us anything, we just take care of it automatically. We’ve only got a few builders that work with us that, but now we’re going to get a lot. That’s going to jack trash prices up. It’s a hell of an opportunity, and you’ve got to embrace it.
Municipalities need to be careful with change. They can’t grow too big, too fast, and not have the infrastructure in place – the water, the sewer, the roads, the transportation – and that can be the same when your business. If you go out, and say you take on a bunch of new construction work you’ve never done before – and we did this mistake, so I’m speaking from experience – you go out there you take on a bunch of new construction work, but you don’t have the trucks, and the people to keep up with it. We charged what everybody else charges. We were getting business hand over fist, but then we realized why we were getting the businesses because they were unhappy with the last people that they used that were the same price. We realize why we were unhappy, because we can’t make any money. You service people like they need to get service in the construction industry, and you charge what everybody else is charging, at least in this area, then there’s no money to be made. So, we had to renegotiate contracts, and we said “Sorry guys, if you want to continue doing this this, well we have to charge.” They tried to negotiate down. They said “If you only did this, if you only came out with this amount times to come down.” and I said no. If we do a job, we’re going to do it right. If we do a job, we’re going to do it where you don’t have to call us, we’re going to do it where you’re 100% satisfied, because as soon as we start pinching pennies, then you start not being as happy in our company, even if it was your idea in the first place. What we’re charging is like 1% of the costs you are going to sell the house. I was like “In this market, you can probably get another 1% out there. This real estate market is straight up and vertical right now. You could probably get more money and 1%.” Again, that was somebody that was afraid of change, afraid to raise prices. That’s a common mistake in junk removal. Never in my entire 6 years I’ve been in business that we had pushed back it all over a price increase. If anything, we’ve got more business because we were able to spend more on advertising.
Change Is Good For Your Business
All I’m telling people is change is a great thing. It’s got to be controlled, but it is an excellent thing when it is controlled. You must embrace change. Always be looking for change in your business, and sometimes you’re the change maker. Junk Removal Authority is trying to be the change maker. We’re out there experimenting. This paper job to our knowledge has never been done anywhere ever before. We’ve got three people doing it now, or coming on board, s three people coming on board right now, we will start having video testimonials from those guys as soon as they have a few weeks under their belt, as soon as we are sending them 30, 40, 50, or 60 jobs a month, and they’re adding $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 in profit to their bottom line for the year. We’ll start putting those videos out there. We’re confident that is going to happen. Now, it’s not surprising that everybody that try and get initially are either young, or they’re new to the junk removal business. These people got guts.
I imagine there’s some experienced business owners out there, and this is where the experience comes in, and this could be smart, they’ll be like “Well we’re going to let this young inexperienced guy get out there try it out.” and if it works, then they’re going to have these people talk about the fact that it works with video testimonies and whatever. I’m sure we’ve got some old sly experienced business owners out there that are kind of just watching. They’re going to be saying “What’s going to happen here.” That’s like with diesel trucks. Ford had the best diesel engine ever made in that 7.3-liter diesel, and the Dodge guys, the Cummins guys are probably not going to appreciate that, but they did. That engine was rock damn solid, a lot of power, a lot of torque, very reliable. You get 500,000 miles at that engine easy. I know somebody that has got 850,000, never done any whatsoever on it at all. Then, they came out with the 6.0. That was the EPA, the government regulation. They always manage to screw stuff up. So that 6.0 was a bad engine. You had people that ran out there, and they balled that truck right out the bat, and all of a sudden it was it was breaking down 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 miles. What happened is I know a guy, he switched to Chevrolet, the Duramax, and he has always been a Ford guy, and he’s kind of waiting and see what this new Ford is going to do after it’s been out for six, seven years; is it going to last. If it’s going last, he’s saying he’s going to go back, because it’s got a lot of power. He likes the Fords, he likes the lay out of the Ford trucks, but he’s waiting and watching. That’s smart a lot of times. Let’s see if it proves out, let’s see if it’s correct, let’s see if turns out to be what it’s made out to be. Those of you that are not even going to pay attention to something new, that aren’t even going to dig in and say you want stuff to stay the way it always has, you’re going to get left behind. Maybe that’s what you want, maybe you want to get left behind. The people that are out there that embrace change, or either create change are the ones that are going to go places in life. Which one are you going to be? Are you going to embrace change, are you going to create change, or are you going to dig in and say “I don’t even want to acknowledge it? I don’t want to do it. I want things to stay the way they all have always been.”
It’s up to you guys. Everything in life is up to you. Anything that happens to you, you’ve calls for the most part; good or bad. It’s all up to you. It’s all in your mind, it’s all the decisions you make, the way you think. Negative things tend to happen to people that think negatively. People tend to get sick if they think they’re going to get sick. A lot of it’s just kind of in your mind. You got to make a decision: are you going to create change? Are you going to embrace change, or are you going to dig in and not change at all?
We’ll talk to everybody real soon. You all have a great day. Keep it busy this week. Thanks guys.