Speaker 1right now we're doing 50 grand a month he just wanted to make an extra two thousand dollars a month we were broke and we didn't have the money to throw into advertising we had no business experience at all he started it as a side hustle with just a beat-up pickup truck working nights at safeway get off at like eight in the morning and that's when he would start we did eighty
Speaker 2seven thousand dollars part-time we just finished forty nine thousand dollar job recently one thing i love about the trash business is we're making money picking up the trash we're making money if we sell the trash and we're making money if we scrap the trash you go in the house and you're wondering why they call you up to get rid of this nice couch so you can take that couch put it on marketplace for 200 bucks 300 bucks and make money on top of money you're charging a few hundred
Speaker 3bucks to take it and then you're selling it exactly beautiful what would you do if you were broke 35 years old just went to prison and just got out of rehab and you need to make money well you start a junk removal business that's what matt did and today he's making fifty thousand dollars a month with 35 profit margins my favorite parts about this story are his marketing methods they are old school but they work anyone can do these marketing methods to start any service business and get their phone ringing off the hook so if you have any interest in starting a business with very low startup costs very high margin very approachable with a zillion ways you can market it you're going to love this episode what was the first thing you saw or heard that made you want to start this business
Speaker 2so pretty much i actually got out of jail went to rehab and i was working on the salvation army trucks and we were picking up donations and a lot of times it was like stuff that we couldn't take it had like cat hair on it or dog hair on it or scratched up so people would always ask if you
Speaker 3can't take it who can we call and that's where i got the idea from so were you working or was
Speaker 2this a volunteer thing no i was actually in rehab for eight months okay what were you in rehab for if you don't mind me asking drug addiction so i went from being homeless to jail to rehab to being broke as hell working in a deli making fifteen dollars an hour to actually starting a business from scratch with only five thousand dollars and now we're making fifty thousand
Speaker 3dollars a month so from rehab to broke to prison i know i'm messing up the order here to working in a deli making sandwiches making fifty thousand dollars a month with your hauling business correct that's inspiring that's impressive okay i gotta hear the story so you get out of jail you get out of rehab and you start to see that there's a need for junk removal right and that kind of plants the seed right yeah 100
Speaker 1what do you do from there well he started junk removal you know as a side hustle because he was working at safeway making 15 an hour and when you are having to restart your life again when you're five years old you know you're you're really starting from scratch so you know he started it as a side hustle and really had no idea how much money is in the trash business he just wanted to make an extra two thousand dollars a month that's all he wanted just to be able to you know not just make ends meet but fifteen dollars an hour you're barely making ends meet so you definitely aren't saving any of that so he started it as a side hustle with just a beat-up pickup truck you know he was working nights at safeway and then he would you know get off at like eight in the morning and that's when he would start picking up people's trash and i remember that he he would like leave at one o'clock in the morning and he was you know pulling this little utility trailer that we eventually was able to add to our truck and he was pulling that out quietly because we live in an apartment complex and hooking that up to the back of his truck so he could like take it to work at 2 a.m so he can haul junk after work so it definitely isn't an overnight success and it was hard work and dedication and just really that hunger of needing to change and doing whatever it takes to you know to make it happen so that's that's how it got started that's amazing so how
Speaker 3did you get your first customer matt so the first customer came from craigslist
Speaker 2i did a free post on there in the labor section and i got a phone call from a realtor she gave me a call i went over there and there's a bunch of trash inside of the garage so i underbid the job i said i'll do the whole job for 200 so i loaded up my pickup truck i'm heading to the dumps and i remember thinking do i have enough money to cover the dump fees because i was so broke at the time and i actually did i got on the scale it was like a hundred dollars for the dump fee so i made a hundred bucks and i got a hundred dollars for the dump fee and i got a hundred dollars for the gas but minus the gas and stuff so i didn't really make that much money but i popped my junk
Speaker 3removal cherry that day okay you it's you saw the light of entrepreneurship had you ever done anything for yourself anything entrepreneurial before that not really to tell you the truth
Speaker 2only thing i ever did was sell drugs and sell cds in a parking lot okay and you were 35 when you
Speaker 3started this right so i was 35 years old yeah okay so that first craigslist ad gets you your first customer how do you get your next 10 customers
Speaker 2so pretty much what we did was i stopped at the dollar store bought some candy dishes ordered some business cards off of vista print and we hit up every single real estate office in sonoma county and dropped off candy dishes introduced ourselves gave them business cards and let them know what we did and i started getting realtors on the team that way
Speaker 3candy dishes you mean like a just a dish with candy to put in it that they put it like their
Speaker 1front desk yeah so you know it's a dollar store you can get all kinds of cheap glass dishes right and we would just put you know dollar store candy in there with our business cards around and we would just walk in introduce ourself and at the very first what we did was we were giving them out to all of them we would go in their cubbies and put you know and then this way was so much better because really only the realtors that were interested in your service was taking the card so it was much much more you know it was a lot of fun and it was a lot of fun you know less wasteful and more efficient that way but we actually got a lot of realtors on our team
Speaker 3from doing that okay so i'm like i have such a a keen interest addiction obsession with like unique marketing tactics and so i want to dive in on this i think this is incredible you go to dollar general you spend a couple bucks you buy a bag of starburst or suckers or something and you roll into a keller williams i'm just making sure i understand this correctly any real estate office and originally initially you start putting a dish in some candy in every like cubicle for every realtor and then you realize uh we're not getting our bang for our buck here this is kind of wasteful they're not all using it we just need to put one at
Speaker 1the front desk is that right or in their staff okay whichever you know you walk in and you talk to whoever's behind the desk introduce yourself let me know what they're doing and tell you know and then they'll either keep it right there in the front or put it in the back of the desk
Speaker 2in the staff room and then we started doing it to storage unit facilities apartment complexes senior living facilities just everywhere what gave you this idea the reason why we started the business and no one knew who we were so i was like we just gotta separate ourselves from the competition to get our brand out there so we were doing everything we're doing that i was advertising on facebook in groups i was on instagram advertising i was actually on facebook in the search bar realtors in sonoma county and now i'd add those realtors to my facebook page so whenever i started posting pictures of junk removal jobs that we started doing they would see that so i got over 2 000 realtors that i'm friends with right now and i would say we have a big percentage of them that use us on like monthly i think one of the things that really helped us is you know when
Speaker 1we started we were broke and we didn't have the money to throw into advertising and google ads so we had to be really creative in ways to get our name out there and um these are all things that you know yeah you have to put your boots on and you have to work a little hard but they're free it doesn't cost you anything and um it's really helped our business grow so much because we have such an organic reach another thing we used to do is drive around and see open houses and we would stop and make sure and we'd actually go in there and introduce ourselves to the realtor that was there or at the very least we would look at the sign and type their name into facebook and see if if we weren't friends with them yet we would friend them but a lot of times we just started seeing oh we're already
Speaker 3friends with them we're already friends with them yeah i'm just picturing you like about to walk in the door you look up mary williams you add her as a friend you walk in you say we're facebook friends oh it's as of three seconds ago so like you said you were your greatest superpower was that you were broke and i i wish more people could understand that one thing i say on this podcast more than any other saying and the people listening or watching right now are rolling their eyes because they know what i'm about to say is constraints equal creativity like if i were a tattoo getting man i would put that on my forehead constraints are good in life in business and anything it forces you to be creative it forces you to come up with ideas like a candy dish what like specifically what are the things that you're specifically do you remember what did you see what did you experience that made you go there like first we need to buy candy dishes
Speaker 1because that's just so random but genius yeah i'm pretty sure that we've seen that somewhere
Speaker 2you know what it was is actually my father my father's a hustler he used to sell cars and he told me matt you got to do it the old school way get some candy go drop off some business cards at every single real estate office i was like you know what pops that's a smart idea so that's what
Speaker 3we did yeah so a dish of candy some candy what are the what are the flavors of choice like what kind of candy are we talking i know it doesn't really matter but yeah it doesn't i would typically
Speaker 1get um you know like the the green i think they're andy's chocolate mints oh yeah okay
Speaker 3yeah stuff like that that's good little nicer stuff and do you have any bearing on like how many realtors said no like i don't want that no thank you not really only when we redid it
Speaker 2again during covid when people were like oh stand back to stay away where's your mask at other than that when we first started doing it no one said no they were happy oh thank you for coming by hey let's introduce you to the real estate business and i was like oh my god i'm so excited to be here with you today everyone in the office hey this is matthew with sonoma strong hauling and one cool thing is too when a realtor uses you and likes you they're gonna tell everyone in the office
Speaker 3yeah yeah like they're working with multiple clients on a regular basis other realtors on a regular basis like i've said this a zillion times as well but the woman who founded this chain of restaurants called chicken salad chick all they sell is chicken salad it's a franchise it's a national brand hundred million dollar brand she got her start by only going through a real estate agents teachers lounges and salons because she's like those three people are interacting with hundreds of people on a regular basis and they will spread my gospel so it sounds like you were you were ahead of the curve there you probably don't remember this but how many like how many realtor offices would you say you place these candy dishes at oh my gosh well really our goal
Speaker 1was every real estate office in sonoma county so and that's super overwhelming when you think about it but we broke it down so let's see how many are in hillsburg which is a real estate office which is a small town of about 10 000 people and so you know you go on google search and get all of their the names and addresses and you just you drive around and do that and then you see how many is in windsor and then santa rosa so a lot of times people are like oh that's so overwhelming how do you do it but you just break it up into chunks and then sometimes we separated and you know he took an area and i took an area and we just always had some in the car so when we were somewhere and we seen a office that we didn't hit up that we would just run in there really quick i just did a quick
Speaker 3search there's half a million people in sonoma county i know there are about two million real estate agents so about half a percent of every person in america is a real estate agent right so let's say in sonoma county that's going to be 2500 people let's say there's five agents per office that's 500 offices now many realtors aren't in an office let's say there's 300 real estate offices in sonoma county that's a lot right but if someone really like literally wanted to get all of them husband and wife i mean you could knock that out in a week 10 a day per person that's incredible and that's just like you could probably build a whole business on that week's worth of passing out business cards like eventually you know you would have you would exhaust that route and have to go something else but did that feed you like leads for a good bit just that one strategy we landed one huge job from one of my
Speaker 2favorite realtors in sonoma county and i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm back in the day it was a forty five thousand dollar job and i had no idea how to even price the job and the cool thing was it was about five minutes from the dumps so if i didn't walk into that office i never would have got that job so one thing that i call myself i call myself a realtor stalker so i'm going into these offices introducing myself we're walking into these open houses introducing ourselves i'm adding them on facebook i'm adding them on instagram and i'm adding them on linkedin so sooner or later we're going to be friends and they're going to see me posting all the time about junk removal so we make a lot of money with our realtors yeah what
Speaker 3other marketing methods did you do those first few months that paid off or did that one keep you busy
Speaker 1oh gosh we did so we did never did just one thing we did lots and lots of different things storage units you could pretty much do the same thing go in there introduce yourself and sometimes they'll put you on a on a vendor's list but you can get some jobs doing that so pretty much i order signs
Speaker 2off the line on youtube and i'm like oh my god i'm going to be a realtor stalker so i'm going to put you on a vendor's list but you can get some jobs doing that so pretty much i order signs off the line on youtube and i'm going to marketing we're putting those all in the busy intersections by funeral homes by apartment complexes by storage units we were doing that i was posting every single day in facebook groups so your viewers out there that have a service business if they don't know you can add yourself to a bunch of facebook groups like buy now groups in your area houses for rent in your area free stuff in your area and you can post every single day in those groups and i got a lot of business that way too and then pretty much just rolling around if i seen like a lot of people that are like a mover i would introduce myself let them know hey i'm a junk hauler here's my business car we can shoot work to each other i would see a maid service i do the same thing with them if i seen a handyman i introduce myself i always say like this closed mouths don't get fed so i was out there passing out my business cards like halloween candy so i want everyone to know who we were because no one knew who we were really we had a website but it was just it was no seo yet no nothing so no one really knew who we were yeah do you remember what you
Speaker 1first month sales were i do because when matt first uh came up with the idea junk removal and stuff i was like okay because you know i'm all for him starting his own business but i asked him i was like what's your goal with this like where do you want to take this and he just said i just want to make an extra two thousand dollars a month and i didn't say anything out loud but in my head i was like oh that's two thousand dollars a month picking up people's junk you know and i just said you know what you'll probably get that someday and uh we definitely made over two thousand dollars our very first month amazing
Speaker 3what about by month six or month 12 what were your sales and profits looking like so i was doing a
Speaker 2part-time in our first year we did eighty seven thousand dollars part-time and our profit margin profit or revenue 70 because i wasn't paying wow labor nothing like that she would help me on the jobs all we had all we had really were dump fees and insurance and a few things but our
Speaker 3yeah we're making good money so sixty thousand profit roughly your first year doing it part-time correct and still working at safeway still working at safeway yeah and then joni were you working or
Speaker 1did you guys have kids to juggle we don't have a small kid so i was working i was working in a school system you know if it was a job that needed two hands he would schedule it for after three and then on weekends so he was solo all day and then um and then i would help him when i got off work and then on weekends man you guys are inspiring like
Speaker 3you're out there like working in the educational system you clock out then you go start lifting couches with your husband yeah like that's incredible that's the american that's literally the american dream what were some inflection points along the way in your business like what were some discoveries like what did you learn along the way that changed everything or like the way you price things or when you first hired someone or when your sales really took off
Speaker 1i'm curious to hear about those moments yeah because you know we we had no business experience at all so absolutely everything about running a business we just learned and if we didn't you know we couldn't pay somebody to build our website so i just learned how to do one and i'm not wasn't tech savvy at all but so i did our website and i learned learned what seo was i didn't even know that so we've really learned along the way actually that there was a lot of things that we did right and we didn't realize we were doing it right we were just doing what we could afford to do you know and learned how to do one of the things that we did right off the bat was our name i had no idea i i liked sonoma strong because i like everybody's saying that and it sounds like good strong hauling junk removal name but um little did i know that having sonoma in our name was very very helpful with our seo search so that was good and then a lot of things that we do on google business business profile we take pictures and upload them and we're always taking pictures of us like in uniform but that's one of the things matt learned is to show up professional because we didn't do that in the very beginning he would show up in just a t-shirt and yep you know you wouldn't you can't really charge enough people don't really take you seriously so it's one of the very first things we tell people to do like when you do your first job reinvest and get if you can't just just a shirt and one hat like yeah just one so you can you know show up and look professional and then we also learned how important it is to to brand and not just take pictures of junk because we would take a picture of a pile of junk and then an after picture of junk and post that and we learned that that's not that's just a pile of junk that's not going to make anybody stop and stop a scroll no one's going to remember who you are you got to put your name your brand like in your face and you're you're the person that's going to be you know hauling away their trash and show that you know to people so we've definitely learned things along the way yeah did you have something i was going to say yeah when
Speaker 2we started posting pictures and kind of like telling our story like say hey we're a family owned business i'm the owner of sonoma strong hauling we just started this business in 2000 2018 after the fires. this is a family-owned business they see pictures of us looking professional smiling those got more hits and likes and so i started boosting posts like that or facebook boosts like that and we started getting more hits that way more jobs that way just looking more professional
Speaker 3yeah so when you started you just had like a beat-up old pickup truck and you were thrown in the bed and then you added a trailer is that right correct what was the next iteration like a box
Speaker 2truck so we went from a pickup truck i put some wood walls on the sides started charging three hundred dollars for that for a load then i bought a utility trailer after the utility trailer i saved up my money i bought a bigger truck that can haul a dump trailer and from there i went to the npr izuzu dump truck which all the big franchises use like 1-800-GUY-JUNK and junk can use those it's easier to send guys out so we got two of those and we just added a box truck too okay what do your uh employees look like today so we got me the jojo i got my main guy julio we call him the baby maker because he has five kids so he's the head leader of the one truck and then i got my stepson he's uh we call him hot tub because he moves a lot of hot tubs all the time and then we actually got a marketing guy now my buddy blake from top dog digital he does our facebook ads now this is all brand new we always did everything ourselves i got him working for us too and then i got a va named donna out in the philippines which is scraping a bunch of commercial emails and stuff like that so we're gonna start attacking more commercial business so there's quite a few of us
Speaker 3behind the scenes okay yeah what does your pricing look like today how much do you charge for a load
Speaker 2and what are your margins like today so we charge anywhere from 6.95 all the way up to 9.95 depending on what kind of stuff it is is it heavier material is it a hoarder house when it's a hoarder house and you got a lot of stuff in there so we're gonna start attacking more commercial business so we're gonna start attacking more commercial business so we're gonna start attacking more commercial business so we're gonna shovel this stuff up and load it in the truck and it's a nasty job you want to charge more money but if you show up it's a bunch of cardboard or a bunch of green waste people aren't going to pay that high price so you got to drop it down a little bit so right now we're doing 50 grand a month and we're doing about 35 net payrolls around 15 grand dump fees are around four thousand dollars the commercial insurance we have credit card fees a whole bunch of other stuff goes in there
Speaker 3but we're netting around 35 i mean that's incredible 17 that's like 17 grand a month and i imagine your employees are doing most of the work like you're doing more administrative stuff at this point is that right i'll be on and off the truck every once in a while
Speaker 2like today the guys went out and knocked the jobs out me and her went shopping for a granite we're doing some new countertops at the house really i do a lot of the marketing and i do a lot of the pricing the jobs on big jobs other than that they do all the small jobs and stuff so we'll hop on the truck so we can film youtube videos because youtube actually helped us a lot in this business we had no idea we started a youtube channel and what happened was we started getting followers people following us right and then it started being people in our area that actually own a junk removal business too and then what happened was they felt like they knew us so whenever they couldn't get to a job they'd refer us and then what would happen too is everyone that would watch us would hit our website up and check it out and then we start ranking more on the web yeah even though
Speaker 3they weren't potential customers them looking for you increased your search visibility in sonoma county exactly it made you more relevant oh man okay so 35 margins you got a handful of employees what was that fifty thousand dollar job like like what type of a job was that and could you get more of those oh yeah we just
Speaker 2finished one that was a forty nine thousand dollar job recently it was a hoarder house in pinning grove it was what like i think 50 loads there and then the first one we did that was forty thousand dollars you can tell them about it it was a it was a horrid situation too huh
Speaker 1yeah our very first one yeah yeah our very first one it was a huge job and when we first pulled up and looked at it matt's like oh no oh no and i'm like hey if we want to be big we got to do big things but i mean most people that were just starting would have said no to it because it was so many loads and all we had was the truck and utility trailer at the time it wasn't even the big one so we actually had to rent a dumpster for that one because it was huge and that took us a while too because he still had you know he was doing it part-time um it was still a side hustle but there were squatters there and it was like it was very much a learning situation for a first
Speaker 3big yeah but i have to think it was very profitable still right like your only costs were the dump truck rental and your time and some gas yeah so when i actually got free labor too because when i
Speaker 2showed up to the job there was a guy that was a squatter out front throwing wood into a fire he had a two-string with a c-shell on it and he seemed like hey how's it going i said hey we're here to clean up the property he said okay i'm gonna help you guys load up he started helping
Speaker 3us load up the trailer so i got free maybe he thought if he helped you he wouldn't get kicked out pretty much what's been your biggest job ever and how did you get that job so we had
Speaker 2two that were 40 000 and one that was 49 000 and all three of those ones were hoarder jobs one was a facebook ad one was from a realtor and the other one was a referral so they came from
Speaker 3different directions okay are most of your leads coming inbound now like you're just your phones
Speaker 2ringing yes so most of my leads are coming from a lot of repeat business a lot from google business profile and mainly facebook and then us is ranking on the map pack just helps us a lot
Speaker 3what's one thing about this business that you just love that you didn't expect the stuff that
Speaker 2you find you find the cool stuff you can resell it you can donate it there's so much cool stuff you
Speaker 3find if someone wanted to start this business what would you advise them to do differently than what you did when you first started what would you have done differently that you'd advise
Speaker 2people to do so what i would do is look more professional in the very beginning that's a tough question what i would do is charge more money too i know it kind of sucks when you first start out you're lowballing yourself because you want to get every single job but if you look more professional you show up with a price sheet i didn't have a price sheet so i was just kind of like off the head giving prices make sure you got a price sheet you show up and you sell yourself first before you even give a price before i show up not looking professional with a white t-shirt i'll look at the pile and i would just tell them a price so what you want to do is you want to look professional show up with a price sheet have that gift of gab talk to the customer make a compliment on their house their dog their wrist on their watch and build that trust walk around the property bs a little bit and then hit them with the price so you got to build that trust first that's one thing i would do and then i would say just get out there and just do exactly what we did and reinvest when the market tells you when to grow i see a lot of guys they see a youtube video or they see someone on instagram saying they made a thousand dollars in two hours and so what they do is they go buy that brand new pickup truck that brand new dump trailer and now they got payments but they ain't got the business so you want the market to tell you when to grow that's one thing we did we worked yeah we we just grew our business a little bit slower we didn't pay for adjunct like that and i felt like that really helped us in the long run yeah you
Speaker 3want to expand when you feel like stretched to your limits right any other advice you'd give
Speaker 1people in this industry to help them have success well one i mean this seems really simple but just start some people yeah are are afraid to start and they research they research so much and they want everything to be perfect and it's it's not going to be perfect and there's some things that you're going to do that you may not you like that may not be successful right away and then you just you know you learn to pivot and try it try it this way another thing some people do is they'll they want to grow so fast that they'll pay people they'll pay people to do their their seo they'll they'll pay to be put on um you know to rank them number one they'll pay all the all this stuff when you pay somebody to like do all their facebook posts and stuff like that but if you if when you start if you're not doing those things yourself then you're not really going to know what's working and that clicked with me one time when i was doing some work on our website and then i hit update and then the next day matt's phone rang off the hook and then if i had somebody else that was doing that i would have been able to do that there would be no aha moments oh when i posted that this got a ton of shares and my phone is ringing or when i updated this my phone started ringing more but when you're doing things yourself you can you notice those little things and that's really important and then when you eventually hire
Speaker 3an agency you'll know if they're doing a good job or not you'll know to hold them accountable because so often we hire an agency on day one and it's like where are my leads when they might have a lead yet right like the ads are still warming up or conversely like oh my gosh i'm crushing it and really you could be doing much much better but you have a crap agency you know you don't know that stuff if you never spent time in the weeds yourself is there anything i didn't ask you that i should have asked you that i might have missed out on oh revenue streams yeah so what are your revenue streams outside of just junk so that's one thing i love about the trash business
Speaker 2is it's money on top of money on top of money so we're making money picking up the trash we're making money if we sell the trash and we're making money if we scrap the trash when i say scrap we come across copper we come across aluminum so you make money that way and a lot of times people we're in the suburbs a lot of times those are the people that use our service. So you go in the house and you're wondering why they call you up to get rid of this nice couch. So you can take that couch, put it on marketplace for 200 bucks, 300 bucks and make money on top of money. And that's one thing I love about the
Speaker 3trash business. You're charging a few hundred bucks to take it and then you're selling it as
Speaker 1well. Exactly. Beautiful. And then one of the things that has been extremely rewarding and extremely profitable is we have people that watch us on YouTube that have started a business because of us. And we decided to hold a junk expo where we have speakers that really know how to run a business and they can learn even more and they can network with one another and meet us and get motivated and maybe see the truck that we own up close and stuff. That's incredible. Matt,
Speaker 3gentleman. You two are inspiring. Thank you for inspiring me and everyone listening or watching. This is an awesome business and you're doing it. You went from nothing to something very big and admirable. So I thank you for that. Where can we find you if we want to learn more?
Speaker 1You can go on YouTube and search Sonoma Strong Hauling and we have hundreds of videos that walk you through how to start a business, how to make money with just a pickup truck and how to grow your home service business, even if it's not junk.
Speaker 2Yeah, you can find me on Facebook, Matt and Vic. You can find us on Instagram, Sonoma Strong Hauling and like the Joe Joe said on YouTube. And one thing I want to do is I want to get one of those back there that you got. Yeah, I see it. That plaque back there.
Speaker 3We need one of those. You will. It'll happen faster than you think. Right on. Well, thank you guys. You're awesome.
Speaker 1Thanks for having us. It's been great, really. Yeah, I appreciate it. For sure.
Speaker 3Absolutely. If you're watching or listening to this right now and you're thinking, oh, my buddy would like this idea. Oh, my buddy worked in that industry. Please just share it with him. Like, share with him. That'll help enable entrepreneurship for everyone, which is my ultimate mission. Thank you.
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