Breaking Down a $650K Junk Removal Business

This is Andrew. He runs a junk removal business. He made $650,000 in revenue last year, but is losing money during the offseason and struggling to grow revenue at his second location. This is the Business Breakdown Show where we take real home service businesses and analyze exactly what's holding them back. Our goal is to give Andrew a strategy to turn around the company in the next weeks. All right. So the name of the business is Top Dawg Junk Removal, and they serve Athens and Atlanta, Georgia. Let's take a look at their application video.

Hey, Mike. My name is Andrew Workentine. I'm 26 years old and I am the founder of Top Dawg Junk Removal. I started it out of college. I'm actually a dropout when I was 21 years old. And we started in Athens, Georgia, scaled to about half a million a year within 2 years, reached a cap. And then I moved to Atlanta to start a second location where I'm currently doing about $100,000, $150,000 a year. And I'm actually having a little bit of trouble scaling because I feel like I'm held back on my bandwidth as an entrepreneur or just as an owner where I have guys in Athens that I have to manage and then I don't have employees doing things for me in Atlanta. I'm doing it all myself. And so I really feel like I don't have the bandwidth to get as much done as I would like. And I don't have the know-how to grow my business.

Okay, so the first thing we want to do for Top Dawg's is actually look at their website, break it down and see what's working and what's not working. All right, so we're looking at topdogjunkremoval.com. I really like the overall design, the red, the white, the black. It's very sharp. Looks like we've got the two locations up here, Athens and Atlanta, different phone numbers. How we work, getting started, same day, next day, full service, step 1, 2, 3. Yeah, this, I love this. So anytime I can see the brand of your trucks, your uniforms, and your crew, far better than using stock images of junk removal. So love that. This is a lot of words, honestly, for a homepage, but still okay. We have a bit of a coupon, save $20 by booking online, get an instant service quote, junk removal in Athens. We got a plugin for all their Google reviews. That's great. Overall looking really good. We got all the different service areas, it looks like, and you probably have pages for every single one. Yeah. So, so for example, here I understand having different pages for search engine optimization, but this would be tough. Like if I wanted my, my grill removed, for example, I've got to look through what is it like 40 or 50 pages here to find what that is. And there it is right there. Piano removal. Like these are very specific things. And I understand you're doing this for SEO, search engine optimization. From a design perspective, I would probably bundle some of these up. And try to make it where it was like either like under residential, for example, it could be like if they are doing home renovations or if they're doing cleanouts, for example, and then like having a bundle of these pages because otherwise this just becomes a mess. It just looks kind of sloppy. So overall, though, I like it. Different phone numbers. Book now. Let's see what this does. So if I click Book Now. Okay, cool. I can see which time works best for you. Okay, so that's a bit of a workaround. 'Cause right now, if you click Book Now, it goes past the zip code thing. So that's interesting. I don't know which one you have set up for that, but it looks like one of your locations you have it where if you click Book Now, it goes directly to booking. On your homepage though, if I go here, it asks for my availability. So my question is, is this availability thing actually necessary for the zip code, or is Book Now? Because I would rather when they click Check Availability, I don't have to put their zip code in, having that extra step is going to create friction. It would be great if this plugin right here was right here, because my question is like, if I put a random zip code in here, does it actually change anything or is it just going to take me anyways to this booking page? If it's just going to take me to this booking page, show the booking page, because then immediately the customer's like, oh my word, today, literally in a couple of hours, they can get me on the schedule. Boom. And then they go ahead and fill in all our information. So again, if you need the zip code, leave it in here on the homepage. I'm okay with that. Typically this is where an estimate request form goes, but because you're trying to serve two different locations from one website, it's likely that your availability does change based upon zip code. If that's not the case though, just take them, have this show right on the homepage, 'cause you'll increase the conversion 'cause customers will immediately be like, wow, that's like really soon. Like for example, I'm recording this on March 9th, at 9:30. The fact that you're available in an hour is amazing. And so the fact that I could see that from here, that would immediately probably cut out 30 to 40% drop-off of people that just don't want to put their zip code in because they don't know what you're going to do with that information. Overall, though, the site looks great. I think we could definitely reduce some of the service pages, just bundle them up from a design perspective. Let's go and look at your Google Business Profile. So this is in Athens, Georgia. We got 122 reviews. You got your online booking link now. That's great. Okay, cool. Now let's look at your Atlanta location. So this one is 1,100 reviews. Wow. Okay. I don't know if you move these reviews over or if you paid for them, but it sounds like this is the new location. So the fact that you have 1,100, I don't know if you move them over or did something there. If you bought them, just know you're probably going to lose a lot of them over time. Or they look a little fishy. So like if you go through the reviews, you just might want to be careful with that. Like I love the fact that having pictures on these reviews makes them much more valid, but just be careful if you are actually purchasing them. Instead of just saying, "Thanks Dustin," I would actually copy this entire review into ChatGPT or Gemini and then ask it to give back an owner's response that is SEO friendly and then use that as your response from the owner. 'cause that's gonna drive a lot more SEO, search engine optimization, and AEO, answer engine optimization when it comes to AI, is if you're responding back thoughtfully with keywords around your services, your service area, et cetera. So overall, really good Google Business Profiles. Like even if you look at your images, you're updating it constantly, you're showing your trucks, your uniforms, your crew. So, oh yeah, like this is really great. These are great images on your Google page. I'm really wanting to dive into though is like this multiple locations thing. Let's look at the actual ranking on Google if I just search for junk removal in Athens versus junk removal in Atlanta. So let's go ahead and do junk, junk removal in Athens, Georgia. All right, so when I do that, you're right here, boom. You have so many reviews for your Atlanta location, it's pulling your 1,100 review Atlanta, Georgia location in for Athens, which is amazing, 'cause you're just way more reviews in the local area of Athens. Let's scroll down a little bit though, see if you're on the first page in terms of native search. I don't see you there, but at least I see you inside the Google Business Listing. All right, so that's great. Now let's go ahead and do Atlanta, 'cause I have a feeling Atlanta's gonna be a much more difficult market to penetrate. Yeah, sure enough. Look at that. You got College Hunks Hauling Junk. You have 1-800-GOT-JUNK. You have some big brands in here. And so you're not ranking at all in terms of native and you're not ranking on Google Business, even though you have 1,100 reviews. It's just challenging when you're up against 24,000, right? I didn't see you on either for Google Business. Google Local Services might be something to think about, but it's going to be very difficult to rank super high in an Atlanta location. Simply due to the fact that there's huge operators and you're just getting started. I would rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a massive pond. And so going after, after Atlanta with the $150,000, you're basically doing all the work yourself. I feel like if you just focused on Athens, you'd actually get a bigger business in the next few years and you can always come back to Atlanta down the road. I think that all of our time and attention being spent on Athens would be the move. Like, if you actually look at this, your Atlanta Google Business Profile is ranking inside Athens. I would just say, why not just get your Athens location having 1,200 or 1,300 reviews and just dominate in Athens? Like Athens has, to my recollection, like 200,000 or 300,000 people. You can absolutely build a big business off the back of that. There's plenty of work to be had. And so like, what I really wanna focus on though is how far Atlanta to Athens, Georgia drive time. I want to see how far of a drive it is. An hour and 20 minutes. Okay, so if you read The Copy and Paste Millionaire, you know that for multiple locations like you're doing, I want to have less than 1 hour of drive time between my locations unless I'm having a separate manager that is very heavily incentivized on profit sharing managing a location without me. The reason is because it's very difficult to manage 2 locations in and of itself, let alone when they're that far apart. So it sounds to me like you're living in Atlanta. The Athens location is kind of like the forgotten stepchild, but it's also the one that's making all the money. I would really be interested to know what happens if we just spend all of our time and attention on the Athens location. It has $500,000 annual revenue. With all your time and attention spent on it, all the reviews and the Google Business Profile listing acumen that you throw back into Athens, I think you can build a million-dollar business in Athens. And then when you do leave Athens, it's kicking off enough cash. So when you go into a bigger market, you can actually spend what is required to break through and see results. That's the website breakdown. Let's go ahead and give Top Dogs a grade. I think for the website, it's a solid A-minus, a really solid design. I think there's a few little tweaks around the estimate request form, around some of the page layout of all the different services being listed off, like 50 of them as a massive text block. But overall, really solid branding, bringing over what you see on the uniforms and the trucks into the website, building that cohesive brand. So it's solid A-minus. And if you want a website like Top Dawg's that is really professional, go check out Home Service Web Design. And if you're in the green industry, go check out Lawn Care Web Design for other examples of businesses that we've built their website for. We do this for hundreds, now over 1,000 different businesses to be able to get more leads from their website. Now that we've looked at the website, let's dig into the financials And unfortunately, the financials that we got seem incomplete. So I'd asked for 2025 numbers and it looks like I got these in the first couple of months of 2026. So I'm guessing, I'm just guessing that this might be the first since the 1st of January is when you start being more professional about the numbers and putting it into QuickBooks. So first off, super happy about that. What this does tell me though, even though I have limited numbers as I scroll through this, First thing I'm always looking at is top line revenue, bottom line. So top line revenue for the first 2 months of the year was $16,000. And so if you annualize that out, that's only around $100,000 in revenue. That tells me you have a huge spring rush because you did $650,000 last year in revenue. And so if for 2 months you only had $16,000, that tells me there are probably months you do $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a month in revenue. And I'm guessing it's somewhere between like April and July, August is where all of your, a lot of your revenue's coming, which is fine for a lot of home services. This is a feature, not a bug of our industry. So $16,000 top line revenue for the first couple months of the year. We have a negative $34,000 profit. Okay, so something is off. We're obviously having negative profit. Let's look through some of the numbers here. Gas seems relatively normal. You got payroll of $25,000 plus payroll taxes, so $27,000. So, we're spending more in payroll. We're spending almost double our revenue on just wages. I don't like that. And so, I'd highly recommend checking out my free book and free course. You can check it out at mikeandes.com. It's the Off Season book and the whole course is free, the workshop, for you to be able to figure out what to do during the off season, 'cause this is what I call seasonitis. It's where revenue drops off a cliff, leads drop off a cliff during your winter or during your off-season, and this will cripple the business. Having negative $34,000 for the first 2 months of the year means you likely aren't becoming profitable until July or August in terms of above zero for the year, like year to date. As much as I wanna talk about growth and expansion, all the rest of it, I think you might have now, because you split these 2 locations, have a lot more overhead. And the reason is because now that you're not in this Athens location, you have a team and you need a couple of people just there to keep the lights on during the off-season, that's crushing our margins. Like, we are spending twice as much on wages as we are in revenue. Now, you could do two things. One, you could just shut down for 3 to 4 months of the year when it's really, really slow. If you're losing this much money, that actually becomes a viable option to just lay everyone off. Because if you took the $25,000, $27,000 of wages and just got rid of it, you laid everyone off, I happen to believe you'd be able to produce $16,000 of revenue yourself. And so you basically could go back to being a solo operator for 3 to 4 months of the year and then offer a return to work bonus for your crew to actually come back in the spring when you need them, because that would be a better option right now than what you're currently doing. I do think the goal, though, is to be able to stay busy during these months by offering adjacent services or other upsells to your existing customer base. To keep yourself busy during the off-season. And junk removal is tough because people do want it so immediate. It's hard to be like, yeah, we'll get to you in like 3 months. It's hard to create that backlog of a schedule. But what I want to be able to do is be able to have promotions and offers during the slow season to be able to pull some of that demand out of the spring and especially going after my existing customer database, because I would imagine you have a few thousand people in your database and I can promote around Christmas, around getting ready for the spring, trying to pull some of that spring demand and spring cleaning forward into January and February. That would be really my goal. So I think that's probably the biggest problem I see is the fact that we are losing money like crazy during the offseason. We have to fix that. We have more wages being spent right now than revenue for these couple of months. And unfortunately, we have incomplete, incomplete financials. I can't really talk too much more outside of just January and February in terms of the numbers that I currently have. I would give the grade on the financials a C-, mostly because I feel like you're just getting started getting it professionalized and putting it inside of QuickBooks. And so I think that within this year you could easily get that grade improved to a B+ because your numbers look accurate, like they're really clean. It's just that I only have 2 months. I think if you continue doing what you're doing over the next 10 more months of 2026, you have really solid financials and a QuickBooks statement, a profit and loss statement that was truly accurate. So I only am giving you a C- because I have incomplete data, but you actually, the cleanliness of your data looks really good. Now, if you need clean numbers like this for your business, go check out Home Service CPA. This is my firm and this is my accountants in-house here. We have 3 now full-time people working on this to do your bookkeeping, your taxes, your payroll. So you can go check it out today. All right, so let's jump into the 4L framework because we've identified several issues. First off, we have some massive problems around the off-season. This is actually, I think, the biggest problem in addition to this sort of— I don't want to call it a mess, but kind of a premature move into doing multiple locations. So let's look at the 4L framework because the 4L framework shows why every home service business stops growing. And we're trying to get Zach to be able to grow the business past $650,000 in annual revenue. So when I look at problems, let's first identify problems in each of the 4Ls in the 4L framework, and then we'll identify a 6-week plan for Zach to follow. So liquidity, cash in the bank right now, we are losing money. A lot of it. We can't have where we make, what is it, $17,000 in revenue, $16,000 in revenue, and we lose $34,000. That's a huge problem from a liquidity perspective. All right. From a leads perspective, I have to say that the off-season is the killer. And for everyone that thinks that having an off-season, a whole bunch of leads dropping off a cliff is a, you know, it's part of having a home service business. I agree with you. And if you solve that problem, you'll dominate your competitors because you'll be able to hire when they're laying everyone off. You'll be able to buy trucks and equipment when they're getting rid of stuff and be able to advertise when they're not thinking about spending money on Google Ads or Facebook Ads or anything. All right. So when it comes to leads, I think that we've got to have— we've got to fix the off-season and we've got to figure out a way to upsell existing customers during the off-season. So we're not spending gobs of money on advertising, but rather just selling more to our current contact database. So I would highly recommend using something like HomeWorks to be able to send a mass text out during the off-season and have specific timing around like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and then right after, be like, okay, you had Christmas and now it's like, let's clean everything up 'cause we had the family over. And then you wanna try to pull as much of March, April, and May's demand forward into January and February. We send text messages out 'cause we have the same problem when it comes to spring cleanups. Everyone wants their spring cleanup done in April in my market. And so we try to pull them back into January and February by saying, hey, we appreciate you being a loyal customer. Once we hit the spring, we get super busy and super backed up. So if you are willing to do your service now, January, February, this will allow us to give you a discount as well as prioritize you on the schedule so you're not left waiting once everyone joins. Highly recommend using upsell. I would do a text and an email blast, and I would figure out what the offers are going to be based on seasonality, whether it be Christmas, whether it be spring, whether it be going back to school, whether it be Thanksgiving. All of those you can create an offer around. All right, so when I look at labor right now, the only thing I can really see is that wages are really high. Again, I'm only looking during the off-season, but I have a feeling this has a lot to do with the fact that we have 2 locations. Inflating your wages by keeping the Athens location staffed during the off-season because you're not there. And so this is why creating multiple locations, in my opinion, you don't think about multiple locations until you solve the off-season, because otherwise when you leave, the off-season will crush you once you have to just staff the place and keep the lights on and you lose money every single month. All right. When it comes to leadership, I do think the two-location problem can be solved very quickly, but I do believe that is causing you to feel the way As you said in your video, like, you just don't really know what you're doing. You're doing great. You have a $650,000 junk removal business. You're crushing it, but you're feeling inadequate because 2 locations should only be done after you've nailed the first location. You have a general manager in place that's compensated very well based upon the profit of the business. You've solved the offseason. And so I think you're getting a little bit ahead of yourself when it comes to leadership by starting a second location. So We have broke down the website, we broke down all the numbers, we figured out some of the problems in each of the 4 constraints to growing a business, which is liquidity, leads, labor, and leadership. Now let's create a 6-week plan for Top Dogs and for Zach to take the business to the next level. The first thing is we've gotta fix the off-season revenue. We've already talked about this. Now what I'm gonna specifically say is we're gonna use Cure 2. So inside of the off-season book and in the free workshop, We talk about this being more and better, meaning we are not going to try to start a new service. I don't want you to do like, okay, we're going to do like Christmas lights now because it's during our off-season. No, not yet. Cure 2 is one of the 5 cures inside the book, and it's my favorite. It is how can we actually make sense of advertising and upselling our existing customers when the rest of our competition is not doing that? And I think most of this will come down to having seasonal offers and making sure that you customize them based upon all the different dates of the year, the holidays, et cetera. Get really creative with that so you can actually advertise and upsell to your existing customer database around those offers, around those very specific times of the year where there's urgency and there's scarcity around how many people you can serve before spring rush, before the holiday season, before Thanksgiving, before go back to school. All of those need an offer. So we gotta get creative with those are gonna be, and then text and email all our customers and use upsells. So upsells is the one I really want you to do in more and better. But by getting creative with the offers, I also think that you could also do more. So better is upsells. More is how can you actually figure out a way to advertise those seasonal offers when the rest of your competition, like you, don't have leads beating down the door? If you can get creative with that, that is the ultimate fix by fixing the offer as well as selling more to the people that are already in your database. And if you don't have a tool for this, use HomeWorks because there's mass text unlimited for free until July. Contact your customers with these seasonal offers and they'll crush. All right. The second thing we've got to really work on is seasonal demand. Seasonal demand requires seasonal Labor. So until you get number one firing on all cylinders, which is you have leads coming in during the off-season, you have upsells happening throughout the entire off-season, until you have that solved, I need you to realize that seasonal demand means you're gonna have seasonal labor. You're either gonna have to lay people off, you're gonna have to have a come-to-work bonus. We talk about this all inside the workshop for the off-season. If you gotta offer someone $2,000 at the end of October, And say, hey, when you come back next spring, I'll offer you $2,000. That's better than losing $25,000 per month because you have them just sitting around not doing anything or being super inefficient. And now you're spending more money on customer acquisition cost to get leads to fill their schedule, and they're not even efficient at it 'cause there's only 1 or 2 jobs a day, for example. I have to realize that until I get consistent leads during the off-season, seasonal demand means I must have seasonal labor. All right, the third, probably the hardest thing, honestly, for you to do, Zach, is going to be Cut second location. I know this one hurts. I know it feels good to have two locations. It's a step in the direction of entrepreneurship and it's a big challenge. Once you've done $500,000 in annual revenue at one location, it does feel like, man, like, what's next? What's the next hill to conquer? And starting a second location absolutely provides a huge challenge. I just want you to be more profitable and stack cash from Athens. I want you to boil the puddle. And so when I think about large markets like Atlanta, where there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, where there's huge entrenched competitors and it's very difficult to rank on Google, you're going to pay so much to get attention. Even with 1,200 reviews in this market, you're still not ranking like on the first page. I think if you go to Athens, though, where there's 200,000 or 300,000 people as a population, you can boil the puddle. You have way better ranking on Google because there's not as big competitors. And the question is, can you build a million-dollar business in Athens doing junk removal? I think you can. And so if you put all that time, attention, all the reviews on Athens, I truly believe you would be able to get this business to $800,000 to $1 million. And I'm not saying you shouldn't ever start a second location, but for now, I need you to cut it. The only reason that this might be different, and I don't know this part, is if you move to Atlanta for other reasons besides business. If there's like other things that require you to be in Atlanta, then hey, maybe we have to make a sense of a bad situation and just going to take a couple more years for you to figure out a lot of the leadership aspects and the financial aspects of solving the offseason. And it's going to be a little painful. But my recommendation is if you can be back in Athens yourself, you will almost vicariously solve a lot of these problems because you will inevitably be able to sell and upsell better during the offseason than anyone else. You'll also be able to do more work because you're already doing it in Atlanta. I'd rather you just do that in Athens during the offseason, lay off your entire team and be profitable until you can get leads during the off-season. All right. The fourth thing I want you to do is simplify and standardize. The reason that you're feeling this way with, with the two locations is because you're offering so many different things. And I understand with junk removal, it is a lot of different things that you have to offer in terms of SEO, like different things that people are searching on Google. But I want you to look at 80% of your revenue and say, okay, the other 20%, Can I cut it? Is it tiny little things that happen once or twice a year? If so, it's likely that's causing a lot of the stress when it comes to multiple locations, because it's very difficult to juggle a complex service or something that's not standardized when you're an hour and a half, 2 hours away in Atlanta and they're in Athens. And so one of the reasons you're having the stress is if I can standardize and simplify Simplify is make it easy. Standardize, do it the same way every single time. The more you can get to that, and I think you've done a great job with your pricing, your website to get close to this. I would look at the services you're offering, all 50 of them, and say which of the ones are always causing the trouble, where there's bad reviews or you personally have to get involved in the job. I would try to reduce all of those so that when you start another location down the road, and I'm not saying you won't ever, when you do down the road, the business will run better without you because you've simplified and systematized Everything. By doing that, you can then train a general manager. And I think that's somewhat of the struggle you're having now too, is you don't have a general manager in place that is getting profit sharing consistently. And I know that because they're losing money for the first 2 months of the year. So it's very difficult if you're losing money to also do profit sharing with a GM that's not going to think about like, all right, you'll get your profit sharing in a year. They won't think that way. And so I need incentives around profitability for this GM in Athens. Before you ever go back to Atlanta. And so this leads to the fifth part, which is I highly recommend getting past $800,000 in Athens with simplified services, creating systems for your general manager to follow. And once you've passed $800,000, then I give you the green light to go to Atlanta. And some people are going to watch this and be like, well, why can't you just do both? Can't you grow Atlanta by, you know, can't you grow Athens by 60%, go from $50,000 to $800,000? Yes, you can do that. I don't think that your current management is going to grow the business by 60%. I also think that if they did, you just increase the losses that you have during the off-season. And so instead of like, yes, in the short term, it feels like a step back to go back to one location. But I think in a year or two, you can get this first location in Athens to over $800,000 with simplified services, by the way. It's not $1 million or $1.2 million doing everything you're currently doing. Maybe it would be $1.2 million, but we're going to pare it down to the services we know we get done on target, on budget every single time, and the customers are always happy. So it's only $800,000 that we're going to do. At that size, with simplified and standardized services, I'm going to get a general manager in place. And then by doing that, this location will likely now be producing $150,000 to $200,000 in net profits that you can take out of the business. Now you have the capital to go start in a larger market because you can go spend all of this cash on advertising and infrastructure required to go into a much more metropolitan area where there's big incumbents and you're gonna likely have to pay to play and do a lot more on advertising. All right, if you want me to come out in person to your business and break down your website, your numbers, and fill out a turnaround paper just like this for your business, just go to mikeandes.com/turnaround. You can apply, it takes like 5 minutes and it's completely free thanks to everyone inside the community that supports everything that I do here.