The Ultimate Junk Removal Start-Up Guide

Introduction

Who is this guide for?

This is a guide for people looking to start their own junk Removal Company, specifically aimed at those who want to grow and turn it into a serious company with many teams and trucks going out every day. If you are simply doing this as a side hustle and don’t intend to grow this guide is not for you although I’m sure you can find some useful information in it.

Why trust me?

You may be asking yourself "Why should I trust what this guy has to say?" And that's a very fair question to ask, and my response is that I've spent years in the industry, making clients happy and managing a multi-million dollar franchise location.
Here are my credentials:

College Hunk Foxboro if you search the reviews of this location for my name "Aaron" you will see over a hundred reviews I got while I was on the trucks and in the office.

Debris Dragon is a company a friend of mine started that I have helped with for a long time as well as building up his website. Feel free to call him up and ask about what I've done for him.

Who will succeed?

A lot of people think they have what it takes to run and start a successful business, but there are quite a few key characteristics that are needed to truly succeed. You may not have them now, but everybody has the ability to grow and change into the person they want/need to be.

Start-Up

1. Planning

Goals

A strong business plan is your roadmap to success. Before anything else, you need to set clear, specific, and measurable goals. Vague aspirations like "make a lot of money" or "become a big company" are unhelpful because you can't track your progress.

Instead, define your goals in a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) way. For example:

Once you have a clear, large goal, break it down into smaller, actionable steps.

Let’s use an example: a company aiming to "generate $20,000 or more in revenue every month for 3 months in a row."

This ambitious goal can be broken down into a daily target. To hit $20,000 a month, you need to average about $666 in revenue per day (assuming you work 30 days each month). This is the first small step—figuring out your daily performance target.

Identity

This may be one of the most important things you do before actually going out there and generating revenue. Your company needs to have an identity if you are going to succeed.

When you think of identity in terms of business, you may think of mascots, logos, and advertising campaigns. And you wouldn't be wrong, but those are not the only things that make up a brand identity. The much less talked about, but equally if not more important are the character of the company and those that represent it.

For exmaple, a great book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur talks about there are 3 areas of innovation for a business: price, convenience, and quality. You can do multiple, but you should choose one to focus on and never sacrifice it for the other two. So at this point as your planning your business you can decide if you will be a Junk Removal company that is really clever with it's disposal so you can provide exceptional pricing, or will you be a high quality service that leaves customers with a smile so they don't care what the price is?

There is also thinking about now whether you will be a company that cares about and gives back to the community. Will you ensure that your company is full of employees that would help an old lady cross the road or pull the truck over to remove some road debris that is making the road unsafe? Or are you more focused on highly skilled individuals that ruthlessly get the job done so your clients never have to worry about the "it seems like we're not going to be able to make it out to you today" call? You could even decide now that you will be a company that donates labor to charities such as soup kitchens, or Habitat for Humanity.

Flexibility

Being a new business it is completely understandable that you may set goals for yourself that end up being unachievable, or you've decided on an identity that you later find out is not feasible. These are the growing pains of business, and especially if this is your first venture, there's no shame in it. This is why flexibility and adaptability are so important, but it is also very important to set yourself up with something to strive for; "Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars". - Norman Vincent Peale

Systems and Processes

These will grow and evolve as your business does, but you should have at least a daily process and a process for each job before you begin going out there and getting clients.

Daily Process

This is a process that will tell you and your future employees what needs to happen throughout each day that you are operating. This will look different from business to business, but a basic day-to-day process for a junk removal business is as follows:

  1. Inspect your truck: make sure there are no unknown damages to the truck, assess the contents to determine if you can fit the currently scheduled jobs, as well as if you should be going to the dump/scrap yard/donation facility before anything else
  2. Familiarize yourself with today’s schedule: What towns/cities will you be visiting today for jobs, what order makes the most sense, what facility if any are you going to based on step 1
  3. Call your clients: Whether you’re running behind, ahead of schedule, or on time, you should be letting the first couple of clients know as soon as you start the da,y when you are planning to get there, so they are not waiting around for you. Invite them to go out and get breakfast or do some shopping if you won’t be there for a while
  4. Do the jobs you have scheduled: self-explanatory
  5. Fill up your truck: You and your employees should get in the habit of gassing up the truck at the end of each day, so no one ever has to worry about grabbing gas early in the morning before a client who potentially wants their job done first thing.
  6. Set up the truck for the next day: When possible and logical, you or the team should empty the truck at the end of the day so the following team does not have to worry about dealing with what’s in the back before heading to their first client, potentially putting them behind schedule. Any tools that were removed or single-use items that were used should be replaced so that the following day, the team is going out prepared, even if they forget to check the tools.
  7. Do your paperwork: As the business owner, this could be filling out your budget report for the day, or for a team, it could be logging all their numbers. There should never be a day that goes by without a paper trail.
  8. Take pictures of how you left things: You should get yourself and your team in the habit of taking pictures of everything, including how they left things the day before. This avoids needless blame and allows for easy accountability.
Job Process

To keep things standardized and allow for every job done by your company, regardless of whether you or other employees are there, to meet the same quality expectations, it is important to set up a process that everyone should follow when completing jobs under your business's name. This is another thing that will differ company to company, but here is a pretty standard example:

  1. Do a walkthrough: You should have the client point out every item and/or pile of trash they want removed before proceeding with anything, that way there are no surprises on either end.
  2. Provide an estimate: At this point, you or the team should be informing the client of what the total price of the job will likely look like. This can be a breakdown or just a flat estimate. This should be done before any work is started, because if you start moving things, but the client does not like the price, you have wasted your time.
  3. Sign the paperwork: Some companies only provide the estimate and do the paperwork after the job. I think that is a mistake as it allows the client to go back on their word, even if verbally agreeing to the estimate. I suggest once they agree to the price, make out your paperwork and have them sign there so you have it in writing that they agree to pay.
    If you need paperwork or just want some information, there are free resources here.
  4. Carefully remove the items: This is the part where you actually do the job, naturally being very careful of walls, ceilings, and windows. Needless damages are how you ruin a company.
  5. Review with the client: Ensure you have removed everything the client wanted gone. At this point, you can upsell and offer to take things that you noticed they may not need or haven’t even realized they had. If they add items, make sure you inform them of the price increase.
  6. Take Payment: Once the job is completed, you take payment through your preferred payment method, I prefer Square, and get any additional signatures that are necessary.
  7. Ask for a review: One of the most important things you need to do in order to boost your website and Google Business Page is to get reviews. At the end of every job, you should ask the client to leave you a great review if they liked the service. If you are desperate for reviews, you can always offer a discount in exchange for one.

2. Incorporation and Insurance

Before you even think about going out and doing jobs for people, you need to set yourself up with an LLC and get yourself general liability insurance. You need to incorporate, because if you don’t, you are setting yourself up to be personally legally liable for anything that goes wrong on a job. If you break a window and you don’t have any way to cover that damage financially, the customer can then legally go after your house, your car, or any other asset you may have to recoup their losses. While if you have your business incorporated as an LLC, as long as you have it set up right, the worst that will happen is the business going bankrupt, but your personal assets will stay intact.

In that same situation, what saves your business from going under is your general liability insurance. You obviously want to avoid damages as much as possible, but accidents happen, and it’s much better to end up paying a slightly higher monthly premium than to completely lose your business over a mistake.

These are not expensive things to do either, incorporating is state by state, but generally $150-$500 to set up, and all you need to do is fill out a very simple form on a website. General liability insurance for a small business is typically under $1,000 for a full year, with a high-end of a couple of thousand.

You will also want to get yourself workman’s comp insurance before bringing anyone besides yourself onto the job site, because, as much as you may trust the people you’re working with, they can still sue you if they get an injury while working with you, and it’s simply not worth the risk.

3. Getting Your Equipment

Truck

Once you’ve built yourself a solid plan and set yourself up with an LLC and insurance, it’s time to start getting the tools for the job. The first and most obvious expense will be getting a truck to transport all the junk you are taking from clients. The best choice will always be to set yourself up with a nice junk truck that can easily dump its load. Starting with a junk truck will save you nothing but time, money, and headaches in the future, but it is an expensive up-front investment, and I know a lot of you thinking about getting into this business don’t have $20,000+ sitting in the bank. Other options in order of usefulness are a dump trailer, box truck, pickup truck, or regular trailer.

Those with good credit scores can obviously get a loan to purchase their first fleet vehicle, but for others, a great option is Facebook Marketplace to get yourself a beater. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with starting off with a $2,000 piece of junk that you plan on running into the ground because it should pay itself off within a few jobs, and after that the goal is to save money so you can get yourself a really nice truck that’ll last you a while.

Tools

The most important tool in your arsenal is going to be your dollys. A solid set of a hand-cart and a 4-wheeler will save you so much time and money, not to mention your back. It’s a no-brainer to go and get a nice one to put in your truck. With a solid set of dollys you will put yourself in a position where you can do most apartment jobs on your own. As long as there are no stairs, you can get just about anything out of an apartment and into your truck with not a lot of effort.

Power tools are also a necessity; you will run into many situations where you will have an item that either does not fit at all out of its location without disassembly or taking it apart will simply make your life a thousand times easier than trying to take it all in one piece. There is no worse feeling than showing up to a job and realizing you lack the proper tools to complete it, so you take an extra hour or two over what was necessary, trying to make due with what you have. It’s also just extremely unprofessional. Good luck getting any recommendations from a client who sees you show up completely unprepared.

Another huge help is contractor bags (big, heavy-duty trash bags). You will be forever thankful when you show up to a hoarder job, or any job that has tons of small miscellaneous items, that you don’t have to just walk back and forth to the truck with handfuls and can instead fill up the bags and carry them out. It will save you hours of labor time.

PPE (personal protective equipment)

Make sure your truck is stocked with the necessary PPE as well. Many dump facilities require you to wear both a hard hat and a reflective vest when on the premises. You also don’t want to be walking around in a moldy basement without masks to protect yourself. And you can not forget gloves, whether you’re dealing with disgusting things or trying to avoid getting splinters, it’s better to have them just in case.

4. Budgeting

Effective budgeting is a critical step that can make or break a small business. You must treat your business's finances with discipline and separation from your personal accounts. Every cent of income and every expense must be meticulously tracked.

To manage your budget, create a spreadsheet that tracks:

To start you off I have a free simple budgeting spreadsheet here

This tracking will allow you to calculate your revenue, total costs, and, most importantly, your profit. There are a lot of different options for accounting software you can use to help with keeping track of these expenses, such as QuickBooks, where you can scan all of your receipts.

How to Handle Profit

The way you manage your profit is key to your business's long-term health and growth. Many new business owners make the mistake of taking all the profit as their salary. This practice limits your ability to reinvest in the company, hindering future expansion.

Before you start, decide on a clear, sustainable strategy for paying yourself. Here are two recommended methods:

For the business, you should have both a separate checking account specifically for the business that you can use to make business purchases, as well as a savings account so you can earn interest while sitting on the money you will use in the future.

5. Marketing

Every business owner I’ve talked to has the same moment in common when setting up, from lawyers and doctors, to junk removal owners and handy men. You set yourself up with a nice business space, got all this equipment you’re ready to use and it dawns on you “Where are my clients?”

One of the most important, daunting, and very often overlooked aspects of starting your own business is the process of getting clients. It’s a challenge for every business and it really is the make-or-break factor for just about every small business. Convincing people to spend money on you is hard, no matter how you look at it, even if you’re providing an excellent service/product for a great value. Here, we will discuss the many avenues you can use to bring in more clients. A great business will focus on multiple, if not all of these methods as opposed to just one or two.

Physical Guerrilla Marketing

The beauty of a Junk Removal company, especially one that also provides moving services and labor, is that you are a company that everybody has a need for. You can advertise to both consumers and other businesses, so every building is a potential customer.

With this in mind one of the great ways to get your name out there for a relatively low cost is to plaster it every where.

Yard Signs

For a decent yard sign the most you would be looking to pay is $20/sign with that going down exponentially the more you order. These are fantastic because you can put them on busy roads or (with permission) inside traffic heavy business parking lots and be seen by hundreds, potentially thousands of people each week. And their design does not take a lot of effort, you can pay someone for a truly beautiful design, but all you need is your logo, number, website, and a little info about what you do (cleanouts, metal scrapping, hauling). As with most things, this may not be an instant generator of leads, but the more important thing is that it quickly gets your name out there to a large group of people, so when they do need a service you provide, your name is one that’s in their mind.

Door Hangers

These are a little more direct than yard signs, but have more potential to generate you more business. You can gets packs of a thousand of these for around $100 and like yard signs are pretty simple to design yourself, or you can outsource it for something more eye-catching. They can include more detail than a sign because people can hold them and read them, and a fantastic way to increase the chance someone will call is to turn them into a coupon for a discount on your services, whether it’s a dollar amount or a percentage. People love saving money.

Once you have these, you or your guys should be spending any day that you don’t have jobs going to neighborhoods you want to target and putting these on every door you see. When you do go out to a job, you or one of your guys should be dropping as many of these as you can around the neighborhood you’re doing the job in.

Business Cards

Business Cards are great because they make you look like a much more professional company. Especially when it comes to doing B2B, no one is going to take you seriously with a “here take down my number” as opposed to “here’s my card, call me anytime.” And business cards are extremely cheap; you can go to Staples and get hundreds of them for $20.

Truck Wrapping

This is extremely important for a business that wants to grow and be taken seriously. Customers and businesses will not take your company seriously if you roll up in an unmarked truck. Ignoring the psychological aspect of how others will view your business without it, you are also simply passing up an insane amount of opportunity by not spending the money to wrap your truck. Think of all the people you drive by on your way to jobs, then think of all the people who drive by you while you’re parked at a job site, taking care of business. Every single one of those cars is a potential client that will definitely never call you if you don’t have your information on the side of the truck. You’re truck is a giant roaming billboard when it’s properly wrapped, and there is no good reason not to get it taken care of as quickly as possible.

Direct Marketing

Direct Marketing is a hard thing to do well, but it is a great way to get started on a smaller scale, just to get some jobs under your belt. But for a junk removal company, it is unsustainable due to the low volume of success you are likely to see even with a large amount of effort.

Door to Door

This is an out-of-style tactic that is less frequent now than it used to be, which may work out in your favor if you choose to engage in it. Although I would not recommend it personally, people still go door-knocking to this day because it truly does work. If you are a great salesman and you are charismatic, you can definitely get jobs by simply approaching people in their home and asking if they have any junk they want cleared out, especially if you hit them with the “I’m already here, so I can knock this much off the price and take care of it right now.”

Cold Calling

Cold Calling is another approach that has gone out of style compared to what it once was, but can definitely bring in jobs for the right kind of person. I would not recommend a cold calling approach for residential jobs, but cold calling businesses, especially apartment complexes and estate agencies, is a fantastic way to get your foot in the door and set yourself up with meetings with the decision makers. Getting business clients is a great way to start bringing in consistent revenue as opposed to solely relying on calls from consumers.

Digital Marketing

This and physical marketing go hand-in-hand, people love seeing something they know in person, online. I don’t know the psychological science behind it, but most of us know the feeling when you’re watching the news or scrolling through TikTok and see something about your home state, or even better, a local landmark you’ve been to before. On a smaller scale, that’s the same feeling your customers get when they see your sign on their commute all the time, then see one of your Facebook posts, or your site shows up on a Google search.

Google Business Page

This is one of the first things any good junk removal business should get set up in regards to their online presence. Having a Google business page allows for you to show up under the “businesses” section of a Google search as well as showing up on Google Maps if a potential customer is searching for local companies. Having a Google Business Page also helps with the seo (search engine optimization) of your website, meaning it will rank higher when tied to a Google Business Page.

A Professional Website

A Good Website will benefit you immensely in many ways. The first and most important is that having a website allows your site to show up in Google searches. Google is the most used website on the planet, and if you are not setting yourself up to be found there, you are simply ignoring massive amounts of potential leads that your competition is capitalizing on.

It is also a sign of trust for your customers. Having a well-made website that showcases what your company has to offer demonstrates to a potential customer that you care about your company’s image and that you intend to stick around for a while.

Another great thing about a website is the ability to implement online booking. Not only does this free you up from time on the phone, taking down information, and putting it on your schedule manually, but it also allows for clients who don’t want to have to call in and want to do everything online to feel comfortable using your business. There is a growing trend with restaurants where more and more of their orders come through online without the customer having to call in. By catering to this customer base, you are setting yourself up to bring in clients that other companies may be alienating by not implementing such a simple feature.

There are a number of reasons to go with a professional website over one you can make for free, but that's not to cover, so if you'd like to read more about how a professional website pays you, you can read about it here.

Online Directories

You should work to get yourself listed in as many online directories as possible, sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc., because people do still use these sites and will find you through them. They are also fantastic for your seo, helping both your website and your Google Business Page rank higher in search results, in turn bringing you in more clients. It is not a lot of effort either, for the majority of these kinds of sites, you simply have to create an account and then easily create your listing.

Social Media

Social Media is a very polarizing topic when it comes to marketing, I have personally worked for a boss who had absolutely no faith in social media and believed it to be a waste of time that would have little to no ROI, but I have also talked to a number of small businesses who swear by their social media marketing and say that the majority if not all their jobs at the time were coming solely through social media.

With social media being a free platform you can use to get your name out there, there is simply no excuse for not leveraging it to try and bring in more clients. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all full of people from all walks of life who probably have junk lying around they don’t want to look at.

Facebook is probably the first place you should go to start posting about your business and services, since it’s much easier to start aiming at a more local population, especially if you get yourself into groups local to your area. While TikTok and Instagram, while still potentially useful, are far less local, and someone from across the country seeing your post doesn’t do much for anyone. However, if you manage to make something truly unique that goes viral, your business will easily explode, but that’s more luck than anything.

When you’re just starting out, you will have a lot of time on your hands due to a lack of jobs, and you should most definitely be spending some of that time to set yourself up with a routine of posting at least once a week, ideally once or more a day in different places. If you find yourself lacking in time, there is always the option of hiring someone to manage your postings.

Reputation Management

A very important facet of your brand’s identity is your reputation. How well you interact with the general public is something a lot of people will pay attention to and decide if they want to use you based on that alone. You should almost always be responding to reviews you get on Google and Facebook, thanking them very much for the review and talking about how great it was to work with them. Commenting on other people’s posts on social media is another great way to get across a very friendly brand image.

Handling negative reviews and comments is where it gets a bit hard, though. One thing you should never do is respond to negative reviews with more negativity. I have seen plenty of companies that respond to a bad review with all the reasons it’s actually the client's fault, or worse, I’ve seen companies threaten to sue people who leave bad reviews for defamation, which is just a terrible look for a company. The best way to handle this negative feedback is a simple apology and an offer of some way to make it right.

Ad Spend

This is where you should be reinvesting a lot of the money your company makes back into. In the spreadsheet you made to track your budget, you should be including your marketing budget as a line item. This can either be a set dollar amount, or if you’re really looking to grow quickly, a percentage of your profit could be going back into advertising your business.

Facebook Ads

If you’re going heavy on the social media advertising, Facebook allows you to pay to boost your posts to get greater exposure. While Facebook Ads can be a powerful tool, their effectiveness is highly dependent on a well-managed campaign. Success stories often involve a deep understanding of audience targeting and creative ad design, while failures often stem from a 'set it and forget it' approach.

This is the bread and butter of most successful junk removal companies. When people go on Google to look up junk removal in my area, they are doing so because they have already made the decision to spend money on removing their unwanted items; now they just have to choose which company they are going to use to do so. The simple fact of the matter is that most potential customers will go with the first company they see in their search, unless they see something they very much dislike about the company that makes them reconsider.

By using Google’s pay-per-click system, you set yourself up to show up at the very top for your desired search results from time to time, setting yourself up to be that first click. The more you spend, the more often you will show up, and the more opportunities you have for someone to look at your site and decide “this is who I want to haul my junk away.”

6. Disposal

One of the most important parts of running a junk company is dealing with all the items you remove for people. It can be a much more tedious process to properly dispose of everything you take, but ultimately, it will be much more fruitful and save you from throwing away all your profit. The pitfall a lot of companies fall into that prevents them from growing is trying to take the easy way out when it comes to disposal, and that is chucking everything into a dumpster.

In almost every situation, a dumpster is more expensive per ton than bringing your things to a dump or transfer station, which is why a dump trailer or junk truck will end up saving you so much money in the end.

But more importantly, you need to sort through all the things you take. Most people are aware that you can scrap metal at a recycling center and actually get money for it instead of having to pay to dump it. A lot of people do not realize, though, that you can sort the metal at the recycling center and make a lot more money. They will almost always direct you to the light iron pile, which is where you get the least amount of money per ton, but if you separate your cast iron, copper, etc. You could easily see your typical metal money double. Just ask them about it.

You also need to make sure you’re donating/selling everything you can. Donations are the easy option because you can just pull up with a truck full of nice furniture and knick-knacks, and if you go to the right place, they’ll empty your truck completely free. Selling the items is much harder to do as you have to list each item, set up a time to meet with the buyer and deal with people negotiating. But it is inevitably worth it in the end as you can end up with a lot more revenue.

What if I need help?

After reading all this, you may feel a bit overwhelmed, and that’s understandable. It is a lot to think about and get done. However, if you’re truly in this for the long haul, it will not feel nearly as overwhelming once you get started. Once you start getting your first clients and realizing that you are building something amazing, you will look forward to the hard work you have to put in every day. There will definitely be days when it feels like it’s all for nothing, and you will not succeed, but if you can push through it’ll all be worth it in the end.

If you feel as though this is a journey that you don’t want to start on your own, or you feel as though you need help now, Moradic Studios is here. This company was founded specifically with the goal of helping small businesses grow. We understand how lonely it can feel going it alone, and how difficult it can be, especially when you’re just starting. That’s why we offer complementary calls/resources as well as paid services for extensive help with your business. You can read about the help we can provide here.

Growth

This section is for after you’ve completed your set-up and you’re starting to get pretty constant work, you’re making decent money, better than a 9-5, but nowhere near where we want to be. We will cover how to go from a small-time junk business that could be someone’s side hustle to a full-fledged junk company that makes you money in your sleep.

COMING SOON