Too Much EQUIPMENT... Not Enough WORK (Fixed in 24 min)

This junk removal business is $30,000 on a credit card.

Yeah, we're maxed out. Credit card is maxed out. $30,000. We have zero money in the bank.

They have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt.

115,000.

15,000 of the dumpsters.

And this truck right here, we owe about 115, and then the other one's 130.

And they haven't paid themselves as owners for several months.

Me and my wife do all the work. We just work every day. Since February, both of us haven't been.

Taking a paycheck, and yet the business right now is probably going to do 150, max 200,000 annual revenue, and most that just go.

So I took her retirement in 2020, and then she helped me out by leaving her job. She had a really good job. She left her job to help me.

I honestly don't know if having the business is necessarily the right move at.

The other end of it, too. I felt like I'm too far into this to quit.

It's very rare that I tell someone to close their business down, but this might be one of those times.

Thanks letting us come out. I appreciate it. What was your name again?

Christina.

Christina. Good to meet you. Clea. Good to meet you. What's up, buddy? How's it going? Fist bump.

Let's go.

What was your name? Jesse. Jesse. Good to meet you, man. How long ago did you guys start your company?

Three years.

Yeah, it's gonna be three this week. It'll be three years. We'll have on June 28th, will be our third year mark.

And do both of you kind of do it then together, like, all the time?

Sometimes I can do jobs by myself, but a lot of times, like, you know, moving, like, furniture. So Christina goes with me.

How do you guys like working together?

You know what's really cool? Like, before, when I was working at law enforcement, I always worked, like, night. I was a truck driver for a little while, but I always had night jobs, so.

And I had a day job, so.

We never see each other. So now we get to spend time. You know, we. Like, if nothing's going on, we can go take a break, go get lunch somewhere.

I know it's nice. You know, it's nice to just take. Take a lunch. Lunch break, go places, you know, like while the kids are in school.

First started out, we. We started. We have a Ram 3500 up there.

Yeah.

And we had a trailer. Everything was good because I bought 10 dumpsters from Texas. I paid cash for all of Them I paid cash for our truck. So everything was going good. And then a contractor called us up and he was like, he need 15 to 20 dumpsters. Can you handle that job? And we're like, yeah, absolutely. So bought the Freightliner right away, another 15 of these dumpsters.

Usually I don't like to have more than 30% of my annual revenue coming from one customer. Although it's nice to have big contracts and whale of customers that bring a lot of revenue.

Everything slowed down. So like, instead of having 15 dumpsters out, that same contractor, we only have like six out.

It's also a massive risk to the business because if they were to ever leave, you could have already hired people, bought trucks and equipment, and built the infrastructure required to support all of that extra revenue. And once that customer leaves, you're now stuck paying for all the overhead.

We started off as lightweight RV rentals. We were renting RVs out of our house. We rented a trailer to a fireman and he, when his off time, he was doing junk removal and renting out these dumpsters. And as soon as he told me what he was doing, I was like, I'm hooked. So what we did, we sold all our trailers and then we bought our first roll off dumpster truck and renting out dumpsters.

And then so there's 28, a mix of kind of this size and then a largest size one. And what did those rent out for usually?

So the. Our smallest one, we have a special one right now. We're trying to rent it for 399.

And that's per week or month for.

A weekly rental up to one week.

Got it. Okay.

And then this one is our medium, medium one. 675. 675 for this one, this 15 yard. And we rent it up for one week. And then we include one ton into.

The price, into the price of it.

Our largest one is a 20 yard. We went down for 795. So if we had 15 of them, we're making 15,000amonth just on that one.

Wow.

Everything was good. And when it went down to 6,000, then it kind of. That's when we started running a little bit of more issues. Now it's like the price of dumpsters, what people pay for them. The customers went down a lot. So someone. So I feel like we're. We always have this argument because like, I feel like we're overpriced. She's like, no, don't go down. Because what happens when we're.

Good job. Yeah.

I was like lowballing A lot. I don't know why I'd go to a job. And they're like, how much for this? And I know it's like a half load. It should be like, $400, and I'll be like, 300, and then they'll say 200. I'm like, okay, let's do it. And then. Then she' with me to do the.

Job, and she's like, I'm mad because it's hot. And we did all this work, and just to get to break even, you know, with the dump fees, it's like, what? Like, I could have been doing something else, you know?

And then right now. Are these all financed, the ones that you've purchased?

Yeah, actually, we did finance these ones. Right. I think our dad actually helped us out.

Okay.

Yeah. So we make payments to him for all our dumpsters. Yeah, we took a loan out, then he gave us the money so we didn't have to worry about the financing.

Working with family certainly has its pros and cons. On the upside, you can usually trust that they are gonna have your best intentions at heart.

She tracks all the numbers, so I'm always asking her, like, hey, did this get paid? How much money do we have? You know, it's just a lot of pressure on her.

And they're not looking to undermine you or the business, especially if it's your spouse, because it would directly impact them.

Will and I are like, total opposites, you know, and, you know, I'm the scheduler. I'm the organized one. I'm the one that's, like, very, very, you know, I have to know what's planned, you know, for the next week, and he thrives. Last second stuff, you know, the downside.

Is that when there's hard times in the business and decisions need to be made, it can be very difficult to separate the personal relationship from the business relationship and come to the right conclusion for the business, because I forget that.

She does more than me, actually. She has to go with me, plus do all the. All the, you know, administrative. Administrative stuff. So she's got, like, three jobs and a mom and cooking dinner and all that.

A lot of hats.

Yeah. So she's up to, like, 12 midnight every night doing stuff, and then me barking stuff or like, hey, what happened with this?

This sort of murky relationship can also lead to a lot of conflict, simply because disagreeing at business now all of a sudden turns into disagreeing in the personal relationship.

I think you have to realize that, you know, you're two different people. It's just like working with a co worker, you know, that has a different style. You have to acknowledge that they have a different style, and you try to find a middle ground, you know, and try to work together, you know.

One way to increase the odds of a family dynamic working inside of a business is to have clear and responsibilities so everyone knows what the other person is responsible for and supposed to be doing. That way it's less frequently going to be stepping on each other's toes or assuming that they're doing nothing when reality, they're doing a lot of things behind the scenes that you don't know about. For these. What's this an average one of these cost?

So we bought all these dumpsters in Pennsylvania, so we had to have them shipped out here. Okay. Total price with everything out the door per dumpster is like $8,000.

So you can. As long as they're out, you can make pretty good on them.

Yeah, See, that's a big. Our biggest problem is get. We. I feel like we probably bought too many dumpsters too fast.

So out of the 28 that you currently have, how many are out right now?

Probably what, seven?

Yeah, about seven.

And where are the rest of them?

So all these are at our yard. So we have like another 15 to sitting in. Sitting there.

Wow.

Getting it Sundown Mercy.

Yeah.

And then, you know, she left her job just to support me and help me with this. And then it's like, you know, I feel like that's pretty horrible for me to like, pull her away from her job and then start this adventure. And then. And I felt like at the other, other end of it too, I felt like I'm too far into this to like, quit. You know, there's. I can't go get another job.

So right now, in terms of the debt, if you kind of break it down by truck and then the dumpsters. So what's that kind of look like for the Freightliner, The Suzu and then the dumpsters?

Yeah. So the dumpsters, how much we own that dumpster's about.

Yeah.

115.

115, 000 of the dumpsters and this truck right here, we owe about 115 on the Isuzu.

Yes. And then the other one's 130.

Okay. So all them are at 350, 360. And the dumpster loans are those monthly payments or just kind of like. Okay, okay. So what's our payment total like for all the debt?

Nine to about 9,000.

Well, and that's the other problem. I didn't realize I saw another video someone put out and they were like, you shouldn't have more than 50, 15% going to one customer. Right. But they're probably 90%, you know, of the dumpster. Yeah, we're pretty much feel like we're just working for them.

That's worse than I thought. All this revenue being concentrated on one customer. What happens if they leave? The business would literally have almost no revenue.

We're kind of thinking that like maybe selling our dumpster, selling the freightliner, using the trailer and then just sticking to these sides.

So if we sold the say 20 or so that were the 15 and the 20 yarders, would that pay off the 115?

Oh yeah.

So on that freight line and we still owe 115, right?

I think 129.

130.

130.

And the thing's awesome. The only problem is like, like, okay, if I want to get some tires on it, I can't just go to the tire shop to call like. And then we only have one freightliner in San Diego and those guys are so busy that if I drop this thing off for service, I would never see it again. That literally be there two months. You know, I feel like this truck is like tied to our house and if I can't make the payment, our house is going to get taken away. Because we, when we bought this truck, I had a like co. What do you call it? Like cosign for the business on this tr and yeah, so it always like makes me feel sad, you know, Like I'm like, man, if I couldn't make the payments on this truck and then these guys would be like forced out of a house and my kids and everything. And so like, I always just felt like really.

You know, just really bad.

About that because like right now if we were able to cut say $6,000 a month out in payments, the debt payments and the insurance that is literally six times. That's a 30% of our revenue right now is basically going out the door to just that one part we could cut out. And then if we can still maintain 60, 70% of the revenue that the dumpsters are bringing in using the trailer, I think that's probably a good move. Get rid of the massive freight liner to get rid of a bunch of debt that'll also bring down your insurance cost a lot. And then you can zero in on like a few of the services that are higher profit, more frequent, and they can go after marketing to get their own leads and generating buzz from these Contractors and getting jobs without spending so much on marketing. Where's your mind with the business now? Like, where are we at right now in terms of even, like, your desire for the business?

So I took her retirement, 2020. And then she helped me out by leaving her job. She had a really good job. She left her job to help me. She does all that administrative stuff. And then we started thinking, like, you know, we weren't sure, like, where the business was going to lead us, but I just need a job, something to do. I'm a disabled veteran, 100 disabled through the VA. And I was a. I worked for immigration, so I took an early retirement. So that's what's floating us by right now. I've always been that type person where I just, you know, I don't know, it's weird. I'll jump into things like law enforcement, you know, worked. I went to a bunch of academies and stuff, and I ended up leaving those jobs because it wasn't like, the. The job or getting the job or dealing with inmates or the scary part of the job that was stressful. It was, like, weird things. Like.

A supervisor over me would, like, give me high stress.

I wanted to get your perspective on.

Serving in the military, you know, accruing.

Some injuries and some ptsd.

Oh, yeah. I was dealing with that for a long time. And then finally, like, I just couldn't. I couldn't hang with that, with my job anymore. And then when I got diagnosed with ptsd.

I was like, man, I knew something was wrong, but I just couldn't put a finger on it.

I've done a lot of research and stuff that's helped me with understanding, you know, like, anxiety and PTSD and stuff like that.

Kind of like the fight or freeze.

Pretty much. I found out that's exactly what it is. Like, you had some traumatic incident. I had a bunch of those in the military where someone got killed.

A person that has different types of traumas will react differently to stress, to just life challenges.

You know, you just carry that into your daily life. So if someone. You have a trigger. I had a lot of triggers where, like, I might see somebody, like, walking across the road right now and thinking that I want to fight the guy just because he's walking up to my car. He just wants to get over the road. I think he's trying to attack me.

Yeah. Sometimes I tend to, like, say I'm stressed and I'm dealing with a lot of things. And so I'm acting normal, you know, my normal. And I'm reacting How I react when I'm stressed, that might trigger him, you know, So I have to understand, like, hey, okay, I gotta slow it down. And, you know, and really. And not try. Try not to trigger him, you know, because.

Yeah, I think people with PTSD and they have severe different severity levels. And then the thing is, too, is, like, we just don't want to talk about it because you want. You don't want to feel, like, abnormal.

They might look happy, they might look, you know, a certain way, but you know, what's underneath, you know, you know, that they have some kind of trauma, they're hurting or, you know, and just to know, like, how to talk to them or, like, what to say or not say, you know, is really helpful. You're gonna have conflict, you know, and you're not even gonna understand, like, where it's coming from or what's causing it, you know? Yeah, just understanding, like, what the trauma is and what results from that, you.

Know, kind of like if your body's reacting to something, kind of. Take it easy. Yeah. So pretty much that's why I say, like, this is pretty much a lot.

Of times I have to go with him.

Yeah. So she's like my caretaker a lot of times.

Yeah. If he has, like, anxiety or something, like about going to a job site or something, then I go with him because it makes him. Reassures them, I guess.

Yeah. And some days I'll be like, hey, you talk to a customer, I'm just gonna load, you know, just kind of like, it's weird. It passes, it goes through, you know, so. But I know now it's a cycle, and it's like, it comes and goes, you know, but it's like. But I think that's the biggest thing. Just understanding what it's about, what it is, you know, Know, and then you can. You can get help for it. I don't know. After those four months came and it got really slow, I'm. Now I'm kind of like, gun shy for this next season coming. I'm going, man, this is a good time to, you know, it's the season to sell stuff. If we are going to sell it and then just do more junk removal, maybe hire somebody later down the road for help with junk.

Because here's the. Here's the thing. You could. We could play defensive. But also keep in mind, like, if you look at the entire dumpster market in this area or like your serviceable area, you probably control all of 2% of it. If you want to go on the offensive, there's definitely a route to do that. And I was like, how do we take market share? How do we get aggressive with going to these contractors, meeting up with them, really, you know, going a whole different route here. Or do we do the more defensive measure, which is we sell everything, get rid of it.

I think.

I think we'll be on the offensive and then, and I think we're gonna, we're gonna.

Work on it aggressively.

Well, this is the thing. You have a very fixed expense business with the bins, which means you've already paid for them. It doesn't cost you a single penny more to get them sitting on someone else's property versus your own. If I was you and I was going offensive with the dumpsters, I would be given for free. You pay for debris only on their first, first visit. Like you get your foot in the door for the next two weeks, I'll give you free. It's fifteen hundred dollar value. I'm giving you free. The only thing you got to pay for is the $0.06 per pound. They'll pick you up on it. I'd rather the bin sitting at their property than at your shop. Get the bins out of here. We got to stop storing them and literally paying for, for them to sit here and make absolutely no money. At the very worst, get them off the property and to customers properties for free. Like give them the bins just for the sake of advertising the business. And then you literally just need two more people like you currently got. You're going after, you know, a 399 person minus out your time and fuel and all the rest of it. And if you pay 50 or 80 bucks for the lead by the time you pay Google and then 50% close ratio or whatever, we're just not going to be able to make money on that. Whereas this contract like that you currently got, we just need two more of them. I promise you there's other contractors just like him in this area.

We have everything we need and all the experience. We just gotta get out there and do more, more work, just do more of it. And like what Mike was explaining was awesome because dude, Z, he, he kind of knows exactly what he, what he was saying. He knows what he's talking about as far as working with contractors. That's where the, that's where the real money's gonna be at for us, I think. And yeah, I'm excited. I really want to like take everything he's saying and like implement it and, and just watch it grow.

Feels like we've been leaning on SEO. But like contractors aren't leaning on SEO, they're leaning on the person they used last time. B2B stands for business to business. In other words, they're going to go after contractors. The alternative is B2C business to consumers. Consumers are the residential customers that might do one off projects. Now, although there's probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of B2C customers they could go after, there's probably less than a few dozen businesses they could go after. That's why a lot of times people will default to going after B2C is because there's just so many more in volume of those customers. However, if you get these larger customers, they're gonna be better paying, they're gonna be less price sensitive. And if they can lock in four or five or six of these contractors, they could literally double or triple the revenue they're currently doing on the bins. That's a tough market to break into. And it seems like most of our dumpster business was built on one contractor. Well, this is the other side of the coin. There's other contractors out there. If you got two more like that, you have a really profitable business.

Well, I believed in him. You know, I believe that he had a great idea and you know, and it would work. You know, we'd figure it out.

And then the other part is just knowing that we have something really good and it's just we just need to tweak something but not knowing what to tweak.

You know, I almost would say for a month I would try really hard. Like if your heart's in it, like I don't know where that, that's, that's the biggest part. I don't know. Here is like, do you want to push?

Yeah, I definitely do. You know, I think our biggest problem was just getting leads. That was, we've been struggling with that for three years.

You know, if you're running ads on Google, you're going to get a whole bunch of people that are like looking for a weekend project. They're clean up their yard, all that garbage. This is a business to business and like your best customer is a business person, right? These are the people who are going to be having them consistently. They're going to have multiple of them. They don't care about the price and you picking it up on time. They were willing to pay twice as much because they gotta get to the next job and they don't look like an idiot in front of their customer because you're blocking their driveway.

He actually said it and then he really believed in. After he heard her story, he kind of could tell that that's something we really need to do. And then now it's super obvious. Hey, you know, it's weird now that just because he said it, it seems super obvious now. That's the. That is the path.

You know, I also think that just even from a longevity standpoint, the dumpsters from just like as you get older is a great business. The junk removal. I'm gonna guess it's tough on the body.

Oh, yeah. Especially right now in the heat and everything out there. My knees are shot and I'm like. I said I was disabled veteran, so I got back problems, knee problems, arm.

Problems, you know, and she doesn't want.

To do it exactly.

With us spending time, you know, like, like we said, you know, having lunch or breakfast or, you know, talking about, like, you know, what our, you know, what we plan on doing with the, you know, business. And, you know.

Yeah, that's good. That's the other thing. You know, they say two heads are better than one. It's true.

There's still people building. There's plenty of builders. It's just we got to get our foot in the door with them. If you just said we're going to give you a free dumpster, all of a sudden you get their attention. And that's going to cost you basically the fuel and maintenance on that truck. Your labor isn't going to cost anything more. You're. You're doing this anyways, right? We're either sitting and twing our thumbs or in the truck. We already have the bins. Yeah. Cuz you could even like on the side of your dumpsters, put like. Cuz every time a dumpster is sitting there next to a construction site, every other contractor is taking a look at that job site. It could just be like, hey, get your first week free.

And we noticed that too. Like, if you're just driving around to the dump, like one day I'm like, depressed. I'm like, oh, nothing's happening. She's like, go dump some dumpsters. And then they see us driving down the road and next thing I'm getting calls. We'll take the, the Suzu truck and then advertise, you know, and sometimes we get jobs by just going out to lunch.

Yeah, actually we've gotten a few. Yeah, yeah.

Getting some breakfast. And he was like, hey, I always see your truck here. He goes, are you working right here on the job? And I'm like, yep, we're eating breakfast. He goes, well, we need a time. Come over here. So he walked over there.

Yeah.

Got a job. And then he's just like two or three more times.

Like, literally could just have it on your website. You can be like, show your contractor's license, get a free week. Then you're getting contractors. I like that the person who's paying all of your bills right now is a contractor. We got to get the dumpsters on people's property because I just need those. Like, I would if I was you. I think, almost like your shop doesn't exist. The dumpsters have to be people's property.

Okay. And then. Oh, there.

Hey.

Yeah, it's been crazy. It was so weird.

You know, what we've been doing. He called up all our contractors that have already been working with us, and the ones that we haven't heard from for a while. I was like, hey, you're you. But I told him was like, hey, we're. We're doing this thing where every six dumpster is free. And we're like, hey, you. Looks like you guys are due for a free dumpster. And they're like, all right, cool. So we sent a couple out like that and then just got them back in the pipeline, working with us. And then a couple new ones. We. We said that. We're like, hey, we have a free dumpster for you. You just pay. What I. What I was. Because at first I didn't know how to say it, but I kind of got it down to where it sounds pretty cool. Where I just like. I'm like, hey, I have a free dumpster for you. We'll take you. Just cover the dump fees. We'll take care of everything. So I'll tell them straight up. I'm like, once you use this, you're going to be. What are you going. You're going to realize what you've been missing, you know, what you've been missing out on. And so I'll say something cocky like that, you know? So then they go, okay, this guy really thinks we're going to use this dumpster.

It's weird. Like, we had, like, three schools right now we're working with that are doing.

Yeah.

Solar panel parking lots.

And they've never called us before.

Like.

Like, schools never. You know, contractors that work with schools have never called us before. So it was weird.

Yeah. So we just dropped one this morning, actually over here, close to a city close to us. We put one in there for a contractor and. Yeah.

Just recently.

Another one. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, three at least. Three businesses so far, so.

And it started with that one giant one, what, three days after you guys came here? Oh, yeah, it was crazy. It was just after that, it's been like. Like one after another. Oh, my gosh. I'm like the most reserved person. I don't like to be on camera. I don't like pictures or anything, but. But no, I mean, you guys have made us feel real comfortable. They're just real life questions, you know, about our business. And. And it's been a great experience. You guys definitely make us feel comfortable.

A lot of contractors, it was kind of amazing because I'm like, wow. Now it's like, it's kind of like one of those things like say you buy a car and then now you see it on the road everywhere you go. That's how it feels like now. We once we said, okay, we're doing con, we're gonna work with contractors. Now all this contract work is just flowing in. It's crazy. Yeah, it's been amazing, man. I wrote some numbers down. We went from like having like, we're working with four to five contractors. Now we're at 10 contractors within the three weeks. And then we have two potential contractors that we're going to work with us that we. We offered free dumpsters, you know, for their first one. And they're going to take us up on it pretty soon. Soon. And I'm like, man, it's just been like stacking. I could see it like building and growing like pretty rapidly. So they, you know, and then we're working with this guy right now, another contractor. And we already dropped off three to. No, I think four dumpsters. Yeah, four dumpsters. And they're just texting us like all day. Like they could text us any moments. Like, flip, yeah, we need another one. And I'll just shoot right over in 10 minutes. Take it to dump, drop it back off. We did two to yesterday. Yeah. So it's been pretty cool.

Well, and I. And I think having a third party come in and give their opinion and see from. From the outside in, you know, I think that was helpful. Hone in on what we need to focus on and like, really, you know, and then with the roles. Well, for these new jobs or businesses.

Yeah.

And then as far as, like, roles.

Yeah, he's like, we'll talk to him later. Yeah, yeah. I think those seriously, like, I think also too is this identifying fight the opportunities that we didn't see. We kind of like didn't see the opportunity there for. Because I totally was like, geared toward going toward junk removal. I don't know why I went astray. We. We always. We were always strong in dumpster rentals.

And that was more about dumpsters.

Yeah.

So we could, you know, I don't.

Know, after the show, it was kind of like, to me, it was, like, clear. It was like, oh, man, we're going back to what we. That's, like, our first love, you know, was the dumpsters. And. And that's what. You know, I don't know why, but I was kind of, like, going away from that. But. Yeah, so now I'm just super hyped up and super excited about dumpsters, you know, just. Yeah. I look at it a whole different game now.