Building Piles of Trash Into Heaps of Cash

Omar Soliman, left, and Nick Friedman started College Hunks Hauling Junk in college with mom's van. They expect to gross more than $2.5 million this year. (Company Photo)

They learned how to price jobs by trial and error. When they lost money hauling away concrete, they decided to charge extra for heavy items like dirt and concrete. They pay dumps $60 a ton to get rid of the trash.

Another headache was knowing how many employees they needed on a given day and getting them to show up. Hunks pays $10 an hour to their part-timers, but they started adding bonuses of up to $50 a shift based on customer feedback. It became easier to find help.

They also had trouble getting taken seriously. One property manager in downtown Washington didn't like the image of college kids hauling stuff from a law firm in Class A space. Hunks put together reference material from customers like US Airways. They got the job.

The single homeowner is still their biggest customer, constituting 60 percent of their business. But the housing slowdown has reduced demand. So Hunks is targeting commercial office buildings, currently 20 percent of revenue and growing, for more business. The rest comes from real estate agents and remodeling businesses.

The biggest cost is $400,000 for labor annually. The next biggest cost is $75,000 for insurance. Gasoline, dumping fees and $3,000 a month for the warehouse round out the rest of the costs. The only current debt is $240,000 on the eight dump trucks in their fleet.

And they recently founded a new company called College Foxes Packing Boxes.

The name of the spinoff is a display of the same tongue-in-cheek marketing employed by its anything-but-hunky founders.

"We started out with the idea that clean-cut college guys doing the work," Friedman said. "Operating an unglamorous business with shirts tucked in and doing manual labor, had some allure to it."