10:19
Our focus isn't making money and profiting off the stuff we remove. It's distributing it out to people that need it so that our customers want to hire us more because they know that their stuff isn't being just thrown in the dump. But then we're also giving back to people in need. We want to build futures for our friends, and we want to do what we love and not have to work at a job that we hate ever again. I'm Kirk and I'm 22 years old. And I'm his brother Jacob, and I'm 20 years old. Here's how we turned our high school side hustle into a junk collecting business that brought in $3 million in 2025.
In 2021, we started Junk Teens with just my brother and I. I was a freshman in high school. He was a junior. And now 2026, we have five trucks, a sixth truck on the way, and a team of about 25 employees. Junk Teens junk removal is a junk removal company based out of Norwood, Massachusetts. We're a group of teenagers and college students that remove junk. And we properly dispose of those items by bringing them to transfer stations, bringing them back to our warehouse, reselling, donating, and doing our best to keep items out of the landfill. And in 2025, we completed over 5,500 jobs.
Before Junk Teens, we never knew that we wanted to be business owners or entrepreneurs. It's a beautiful, sunny Massachusetts morning. So after doing that for about a year, I had saved up some money. Jake had a little bit of money, and we kind of realized throughout that time, just me being at the dump, that people would pay us to take their junk to the dump. That's when I was like, all right, I can't do this alone. I need to team up with somebody. That's when Jacob came into the picture, and it was pretty short after that, where we bought our first pickup truck for $4,000.
We never knew we wanted it to be some big company. We didn't even know what our niche was. It was K and J removal, but we were doing landscaping, moving, junk removal like anything we could with that pickup truck to make money in the first year. But then we realized if we want this to be big, we need to niche down and pick something that we become the best at. And we realized out of all things, junk removal was the most competitive. But I saw that as the most scalable opportunity. And honestly, it was the most fun out of everything and I felt like it was the most profitable. Some businesses and some industries, of course, have certain catalysts that change the business overnight. But for a service based business and for at
least what we were doing, that was never the case. It was just slow, extremely consistent growth all the time. We reinvested everything back in our second year, and we bought our first dump truck with all the money that we made in our first year. We've never financed our trucks. We've never invested over what we were capable of getting in cash. Our strategy was to run things lean and pay in full for everything and grow slow and steady and own everything. And that's exactly what we did. And I think it was really like the second year when we started to be able to pay ourselves. All right, you can put your end down.
We've always been profitable and essentially debt-free since the beginning. The biggest business expense is definitely labor. In the very beginning, obviously, we were pretty slow, so if we only had one job a week, it would only take us an hour. We could totally do it after school or on a weekend. But when things really started to get busy, this was probably around like my sophomore year, Kirk's senior year, and we were doing jobs like every day. It became like a whole challenge of like, how do we do this stuff? At that time, I was dealing with all the customers. I had to figure out how much we were pricing these jobs at. And obviously, like when we were going to fit them in the schedule.
And the trickiest part was we were in school during all of the hours that the dumps were always open. Because we were transparent and we told people what we were doing. I feel like we had a little bit more flexibility sometimes, but there were 100% times where like, I think I got detention one time because I was late so many times for school because of like having to dump the truck in the beginning, like there were a lot of sacrifices we made and some sleepless nights as well. And you're going to school the next day on like maybe three hours of sleep. But that's kind of what it takes if you want to do
something extraordinary or different. Our weekends were fully packed. We would be doing jobs every Saturday and Sunday, especially in our second year. Once we really started to build up the business, I would say for the first two years, it was really hard for us too because we were working out of our parent's driveway. We would basically like take some of the stuff that we would get and like put it in the corner of the driveway and put a tarp over it. And if we did sell stuff, we would have to sell it like the next day on Facebook. And it's kind of hard to find a buyer sometimes. But eventually we outgrew our parent's driveway because we were getting another truck, so we were going to have three.
There were so many good resellable items that we didn't want to like, throw them away. And that's when we actually ended up renting the warehouse that we're in right now. And this place when we first moved in was just all run down and it was just so dirty. This place is one of the biggest things that allowed us to repurpose a lot of the junk and resell it, and donate too. Me and Kirk haven't been in the field for probably two full years. If anything, maybe even more than that, none of us are really involved with the day to day operation too much besides just overseeing things. All right, we'll start this thing up.
All right. I thought I was going to drop out at least three times already. And college is really difficult, especially when owning a business. One of the biggest things for us is that we're doing it for our parents because we trust them. But also through being in college now, for almost four years myself, I've come to realize that college has taught me things that business never will.
And life isn't all about making money and having a successful business, because there are a lot of other aspects of life that will make somebody a well-rounded person and successful in other areas. We want to make that next big step for the company within the next couple of years. We want to grow beyond this location, whether it's privately owned locations or a different model to scale the business, whether it's franchising, licensing. There's many different ways that we can scale from here.
We're aiming for 5 million in sales, and obviously we're going to need a bigger team. So we have more employees on standby. We're really just kind of growing things as we go. We want to create opportunities for people, but we also want to give back because the world's given to us. And this year we're really focusing on making more donation partner connections. I think when we moved to college, it kind of unlocked a new level of growth for the business because of that extra time and freedom that we did have. But I have a really strong feeling that after college, things are going to take off more than they ever have.
