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One Man's Junk: It started with just two young guys and a truck. Now Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman are finding a treasure trove of business opportunity in hauling junk away.

SmartCEO Magazine
July 2007; P. 29-32
by Buzz McClain

You wish you had as much on the ball as these guys.

Steel trap minds. Firm grasps of data. Ambition to burn. Solid goals and the dedication to achieve them.

Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman haul junk.

Actually, they don’t do the hauling themselves, not any more, but they started their careers heaving heavy boxes and bags of who knows what out of basements and attics. They have a staff of about 25 that does that now.

They went from two men – them-selves – with a beat up borrowed van as a seasonal business to a fleet of seven customized dump trucks working year round – in two years.

Friedman is 25. Soliman is 24.

“I think the easiest part of growing business is just to separate yourself from all the other competition.”

Junk is Born

The offices of College Hunks Hauling Junk are in an unassuming two-story building in an industrial park off Nicholson Lane in Kensington, near the District line. Truth be told, the building is grungy, rode hard and put away wet. But for two young men just starting out, the suite of second floor offices seems like home; they’ve appointed the rooms with post-modern orange chairs and minimalist desks – and the occasional slightly worn couch pulled from a customer’s discard pile.

President of the firm Friedman and CEO Soliman, like their street crews, wear bright green and orange golf shirts, the distinctive colors of the business that are used consistently in the company’s marketing, from the trucks to the advertising door hangers. If the colors are reminiscent of those of the University of Miami, it’s not a coincidence: That’s where Soliman went to college after graduating from Washington’s Sidwell Friends School, also Friedman’s high school alma mater.

During Summer breaks the two borrowed Soliman’s mother’s dented cargo van – the one used to deliver furniture from her Adams Morgan store, Skynear and Company.

“We did moving jobs, whatever we could get,” Soliman says. “Then one day [my mother] asked if we’d tried junk removal so we said, ‘OK, yeah, let’s try it.’”

“We would run around clearing out people’s garages and basements and attics, advertising with neighborhood fliers ‘College Hunks Hauling Junk,’” says Friedman.

“The first day we put out fliers I got home a 6 p.m. and the phone rang,” Soliman says. “that was awesome. I knew something was up. I couldn’t believe the demand.”

Friedman adds, “We recognized that people placed a premium on having young, friendly, personable and courteous teams coming in to do the work.”

In their senior year of college, Soliman – with input from Friedman – wrote a business plan and Soliman entered it in the University of Miami’s Rothschild Entrepreneurship Competition. The plan won the $10,000 prize.

“That gave us a little more confidence and credibility in our concept, “ of beginning a junk hauling business, Friedman says.

And at that point, the plan went on the shelf.

Freidman came home in 2004 after graduating from Pomona College near Los Angelas as Soliman was returning from Miami. Naturally, they were compelled to get “regular jobs.” Friedman worked for a downtown economic consulting company “where I basically did economic analysis for corporate litigation cases,” he says, with no hint of resentment or regret. “I studied economics in college, so I was applying the stuff I learned. But it was just sort of crunching numbers and coming out with spreadsheets that didn’t have any real meaning to me. It was pretty much helping billionaires save millions. It didn’t have any real meaning to me.”

Meanwhile Soliman was a marketing and sales associate for the Advisory Board Company, pitching health systems and medical centers on best practices services.

At that point the business plan came off the shelf.

Franchising and Systemizing

And it seems to have paid off. According to Friedman, who has a firm grasp of the company’s facts and figures but nonetheless pauses in conversation to get the numbers right, last year the firm grossed a half million dollars. This year it’s on pace for $1.1 million.

“I will bet in year five I think we could be grossing three to four million (dollars),” he says.

It seems to be a matter of right place, right time. The Washington market – 70 percent of the business comes from the District, Friedman says – is a prime one. “You have a lot of disposable income, busy people who don’t have the time or energy to make any sort of effort to do things themselves,” Friedman says. “They’re more inclined in pay to pay someone to do things for them.”

There’s competition, to be sure. For proof, just try driving a main thorough fare without seeing a sign on a stick advertising “We haul junk, no job too small.” But Friedman and Soliman won’t talk trash about other firms.

“There are perhaps eight junk removers in this area,” Soliman says. “There’s competition, but it’s not as organized.”

Competition, says Friedman, “actually breeds more awareness about the (hauling) service.”

That’s unlike in Orlando, Fla., where College Hunks Hauling Junk opened its first franchise earlier this year. Residents of central Florida are still unfamiliar with the concept that someone will come to your house and take away your old refrigerator or clean out your attic.

“I put everything into this. I consider it like my baby.”

Wait a minute. Franchise?

“In the back of our minds from the very beginning we wanted to be more than just a local company,” Friedman says. “We wanted to be a franchise business, and in order to do that you honestly have to have a system that somebody else can just pick up and follow.”

Soliman says, “Both Nick and I want to, for example, fly to L.A. and see an orange and green truck there. We want to be across the nation. ”

Friedman spends much of his time these days systemizing the business for franchising while Soliman spearheads the regional development.

“I’m doing some operational stuff, in terms of this location, and also (working with) commercial clients,” Soliman says. “We don’t want to overlap; we want to set certain positions and not both doing the same thing. We outline what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Soon more help was needed and the first hires were – guess what? – college students. “They were mostly younger alumni from our high school who were looking for summer jobs,” Friedman says.

But with more employees, the company owners realized they needed to standardize business practices.

“We really had to systemize things to be capable of growth,” he says. “For instance, we had to start writing manuals for each of the positions and writing step-by-step checklists – how do you relate to the customer, how you load the truck, how you estimate the jobs and things like that. It was sort of helter-skelter for awhile.”

The young executives worked fiercely to get the company off the ground, making the thousands of phone calls and e-mails needed to navigate and negotiate the sometimes cloudy paths of corporate America.

“It took us a good six months to research and figure out everything we needed to actually start operating the business,” says Friedman. “Even after we started the business we were still figuring out things, like licenses we were supposed to have but didn’t discover until we needed them. You get pulled over for a (Department of Transportation) inspection and it turns out you don’t have flashers on the truck or something, something that may have been evident, but we just didn’t turn that rock.”

Finally the 100-point checklist – all the paperwork, manuals, marketing materials, logo design, 800 phone number, permits for disposal sites, human resources procedures, surety bonds and other details, minute and major – had been ticked off.

“It was not easy, believe me,” he says. “and that’s why I believe it makes sense for a potential franchise to buy into our system, because we’ve already done the due diligence and the trial and done the trials and error. It would take some body six months to figure it all out. With us it takes six to 12 weeks to get rolling.”

College Hunks Hauling Junk creates instant branding. “I think the easiest part of (growing business) is just to separate yourself from all the other competition,” says Friedman. “So when they think of junk removal they think of us first…it’s putting a clean, crisp image to work that really isn’t all that glorious.”

Advertising rather takes care of itself: 40 percent of the business is from word-of-mouth pass-along; another 30 to 40 percent, says Friedman, is a “very active pay-per-lick on Google.” Forget the Yellow Pages “because there’s no heading for junk removal.”

In may, the company won three of the five categories they were nominated for in the 38,00-member American Marketing Association’s annual awards: Corporate Identity (must be the green and orange colors), Marketing Web site, and Marketing Campaign on a Shoestring Budget. “The rest of the nominees were major advertising moguls,” Friedman says. “This was a pretty big deal for a trash hauling company.”

So the system is effective in Washington, why not in Orlando as well?

“The best thing you can do is create something so you can replicate and drop it anywhere else in the country, no matter what it is,” Soliman says. To that end College Hunks invested about $100,000 to have proprietary software developed that will facilitate franchising; they also employ a national franchise head-hunting firm to help find leads.

The Orlando franchise is slowly overcoming the uniqueness of its service and residents are gradually catching on. Friedman and Soliman think larger urban centers are more likely – and quicker to succeed – locations.

“We have a vision for the company to have a franchise in the top 30 cities in the country,” says Friedman. “I think we will have five to 10 franchises by the end of the year and another 12 to 20 by next year, based on our leads.”

Did we say ambitious?

Vancouver-based 1-800-GOT-JUNK, another junk hauling company founded by a college student, Brian Scudamore, has 200 franchise locations after 18 years. Friedman says they’d happily be “the Burger King or Avis to their McDonald’s or Hertz.” For now, anyway.

In separate interviews both Soliman and Friedman refer to their burgeoning company as “my baby.” “I don’t have children but if I did I’m sure I would feel this way about (a child),” Soliman says.

“I put everything into this,” says Friedman. “I consider it like my baby.”

So: Would you sell your baby?

Friedman doesn’t hesitate. “You never know when somebody is going to come in and offer you a certain amount,” he says with just a hint of a grin. “Your goals and visions may shift and change, but right now, I go to sleep thinking about [the company] and I wake up thinking of it.”

Trash to Treasure

It can get hot in the basement and attic of a decrepit Chinatown row house. Very hot.

And that’s where Soliman and Friedman found themselves one mid-July day two years ago. “There were bags of trash, literally, up to your chest,” Soliman recalls, recoiling at the thought.

“And God knows what else,” says Friedman. “There was no air-conditioning, dust everywhere. That was the most physically grueling job.” He estimates he and Soliman themselves emptied “about 500” basements, attics and garages before letting someone else do it.

“It was funny,” Friedman reflects in the safe distance of time from the events, “because you don’t feel glorious or glamorous doing that sort of work, but it was a little bit fun to share war stories at the end of the day. You tell your friends who have stuffy office jobs about the crazy stuff you found.”

The biggest challenge the young College Hunks has landed was for U.S. Airways after its merger with American West. “They actually hired us to come clean out the warehouse at Reagan National (Airport),” he says, taking away tons of everything from signs to airplane seats.

The hauling crews – two person teams with a “captain” and “wingman” – each day drive off in Isuzu diesel trucks, with custom designed dump bodies to facilitate loading, hauling and removing cargo, particularly oddly shaped items.

Employees are paid an hourly base of $11, but with “profit sharing” (what Friedman and Soliman call a performance bonus based on the day’s haul) and the occasional tip from a customer. “It works out to about $15 an hour,” Soliman says.

College Hunks gives free estimates and customers are likely to accept it because the haulers are there and ready to do the work. The minimum load of one-eight of a truck is $119; a full truck from one source is $568, about the equivalent of the contents of a one bedroom apartment.

The average job takes two hours; the average cost is $300. College Hunks’ fleet does between 15 and 2- jobs a day during warm weather months, down only slightly to eight to 12 jobs a day in the winter.

Another bonus for the Hunks on the trucks is their employees don’t mind if they keep junk that appeals to them. Sometimes those items might show up for sale on eBay. (As an aside, Soliman thinks eBay “put a little bit of a hit” into their hauling business as potential customers sell their refuse instead of have it hauled).

Much of the stuff College Hunks hauls away is, well, junk. Some of it is moderately useful, such as an old TV ideal for a dedicated video game system or, as in the case of Friedman, an outdoor bar. But a lot of it is “ratty sofas, things like that,” Soliman says.

But there’s the occasional cool big game trophy head or interesting painting that may or may not be an original Grant Wood, as happened recently (they still don’t know if it’s genuine).

But the franchise in Orlando hit the jackpot, and Friedman and Soliman are envious: A cache of autographed baseball bats, balls and rookie cards signed by Willie Mays and Hank Aaron in a storage area.

You might want to check eBay.

 

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