Ep 79 – $99 Junk Removal Pricing Trap with Barry Hartman

As a business owner, answer us one thing: do you equate more leads with more money?

It’s ok if you do. It seems logical, but it’s a trap. More leads do sound great until you realize you’re paying to stay busy instead of making money.

In this episode, Amanda and Devon sit down with Barry Hartman, CEO and co-founder of 505 Junk and founder of Bolt Accelerator, to talk about what it really takes to build a profitable business.

Devon (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Trade Secrets Contractor Marketing Podcast. We are stoked today to have CEO of 505 Junk. We’ve got Barry Hartman, and he is also the founder of Bolt Accelerator, an awesome, I guess, newer business coaching kind of platform and program for the junk removal space, which I think I think you’re the only one, Barry. Are you the only

Barry Hartman (00:21)
Yeah, there’s not a lot that have niche

down to junk removal. There’s a lot of like broader home services, but we don’t know all home services, but we know junk removal inside out, so it was a good fit.

Devon (00:31)
Heck yeah. Well good I know it’s taking all these like years of knowledge and I know 505 Junk has grown to be this huge junk removal company, I think over like seven million, which is just huge. So you know what you’re talking about and I nerd it out and listened to a bunch of your other podcasts. So I know that you started from just got you got a truck and you built this thing from the ground up. You wanna tell us like a little bit more about the beginnings of 505 junk and then we’re kinda gonna

Dive into a whole bunch of great questions about scaling a junk removal business.

Barry Hartman (01:02)
Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. so I was kind of at the tail end of like a professional snowboarding career. I say that in quotations because I was like 21 years old. but like a lot of professional sports, he sort of, especially in extreme sports, like unlike business, the older you get, the worse you get. In business, it kind of has the opposite effect. and so yeah, I just kind of caught myself one day sitting at home at my parents’ basement. I was home for Christmas break and I had a broken ankle.

And I kind of was thinking about the next like three to five years and snowboarding wasn’t the answer. I’d enrolled in in college to learn a little bit about marketing and and just general business. And I just kept in this itch to become an entrepreneur and

I couldn’t stop scratching it, like I just I needed to figure something out. And I kept reading about 1-800 Got Junk, who was sort of the Vancouver like they were the global leader, they still are today, but they were founded in Vancouver, and so they were just literally in our backyard.

And they were the early inspiration. and yeah, I ended up writing a business plan in college for it. That’s where I met Scott, my business partner, so co co-founder at 505 Junk, and he’s also partner in Bolt. And yeah, we just kind of hit the ground running with a classic old pickup truck and a $700 trailer that we drove by one day. It was on the side of the road. We offered the farmer, I think, $500 and drove away. And that was kind of the early days.

Devon (02:24)
my gosh, did you too did you end up finishing like graduating from college or were you like, like, we’ve got this, we’ve got a plan, like let’s go. And

Barry Hartman (02:31)
This is kind

of embarrassing, but Scott and I both we started at the same time, we were in the same curriculum. We both have one class left to get our college diploma, and for whatever reason, we just never did. That must have been about 15 years ago. And it’s actually a practicum. We’ve had four sets of students run their practicum through 505 Junk since then, but no, we’re not graduates by any means.

Amanda (02:51)
my gosh. I I love that.

Devon (02:52)
But well and but I think I do

too. My same thing with my my parents. They they got into mortgages and my dad later got into contracting, but it was he was always a math guy, always good with numbers and and I think like this day and age, like that’s really not nobody’s taking that traditional path anymore. So no shame, nothing to be embarrassed about at all. yeah, you’re you clearly know what you’re doing. So that that’s just a piece of paper.

Barry Hartman (03:16)
I appreciate it.

Devon (03:17)
Yeah.

Amanda (03:18)
Yeah, you’ve definitely learned it from the School of Hard Knocks at this point. So I mean what’s a piece of paper? So yeah.

Barry Hartman (03:24)
Yeah, I don’t know if that’s gonna help us like close more clients or like get better at

marketing at this point. But I will say those early days, and like there was about two or three teachers, particularly the accounting teacher, the small business essentials teacher, and the marketing teacher, they challenged me in ways that I actually cared about. I remember in high school I was very indifferent to school. Like I attended, but didn’t really

Devon (03:46)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (03:47)
care for it at all.

Amanda (03:48)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (03:49)
When I got into business in college, that’s when like the light bulb turned on. I went from like a C student to an A plus student. And it was only because I genuinely cared about the subjects and I just wanted to like soak in all the information. So I will credit college for the initial inspiration and and drive, but yeah, taking

Devon (04:08)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (04:08)
it off the finish taking it across the finish line, you definitely need to go out and execute.

Devon (04:12)
Yeah.

Amanda (04:13)
over the lifetime

of the company, like what would you say has changed about the junk removal space since you first got started to kind of the w the way the the industry is moving today? I’m sure there’s a lot, but

Barry Hartman (04:24)
Yeah, I mean the most obvious one is AI. When it comes to like implementing things within your business, that is such a big difference at this point. you know, what used to take months to write standard operating procedures for an operations manual, that was sort of the first tick in AI. Now it can take

a a few hours, I mean an entire manual maybe longer, but especially with like voice prompts, like the memory that it’s having, the skills you can build in Claude to understand your business inside

Devon (04:51)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (04:52)
out, that’s becoming a lot easier. the softwares have gotten like exponentially better over the years. So we have more access to information and data. you know

Where we’re you know, you’re both experts in. marketing has shifted a lot on the digital side of things. you know, how we I mean it’s it’s harder. I will I will say that. Like we used to get our customer acquisition costs used to be like thirty or forty bucks. and the average job size was you know four hundred, but then

As people get more aware of the effectiveness of Google Ads and SEO and all these other functions, then all of a sudden we don’t have ten competitors in Vancouver running Google Ads campaigns. We’ve got, you know, 80, 90, 100 competitors that are all bidding on the same keyword. So that’s

Amanda (05:35)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (05:36)
becoming

Both a blessing and a curse in a sense. A blessing in a sense that it’s harder. So if you’re good, you win. And it kind of cuts out a lot of competition. But a curse in a sense that obviously customer acquisition customer acquisition at 40 bucks is is great. but times have changed. So yeah, I would say those are like the big the big shifts. I think commercial clients are adopting junk removal as a service a lot more now. we just closed a 12 month contract on a construction site yesterday.

Amanda (06:05)
no.

Barry Hartman (06:05)
Which is going to keep a truck essentially busy the entire time. It’s a huge contract.

Devon (06:11)
Awesome.

Barry Hartman (06:11)
Either we weren’t aware of them when we started, or construction didn’t think of junk removal as a trade, but we fought really hard over the last 10 years to make construction companies aware that junk removal is a trade, no different than plumbing, electrical, roofing, like everything else. So that’s been a big focus of ours as well.

Devon (06:31)
Yeah.

Amanda (06:31)
Do you

feel like some of your competitors are realizing that or are you guys like kind of at the forefront of it? Is that kind of like a honeypot for you that you’re not com having to compete for as much?

Barry Hartman (06:40)
Yeah, that’s a really good question. We we found out early on that it was definitely a blue ocean strategy. Like there was almost next to no

Amanda (06:47)
Mm.

Barry Hartman (06:47)
construction. There was the residential construction, like debris removal, in a sense that, you know, companies would go to a home builder and pick up the crap laying around the job site, clean it up, sweep it and haul it away. I mean, that’s been around forever. You either use a company like 505 Junk or you drop a big bin on site depending on the space of the project. where things have changed quite a bit.

is if you’re a junk removal company that has the fortune of of being operating in a big city center.

the the turnover of tenants in these commercial buildings is insane right now with tech companies moving they might get like

Amanda (07:23)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (07:24)
a twenty thousand square foot office space and that’s good for one or two years but if they double their headcount they gotta pack their bags and leave and open it up at an office space you know down the road that’s 50,000 square feet. And so we’re seeing a lot of like transition on commercial construction right now. And then as a result of that the commercial property managers are also

So

you know, needing a lot of support because it’s not just the actual renovation of the office as it goes up and down. It’s also the removal of everything in the building that gets left over. So yeah, gener like overall, I think it’s it’s it’s part of it is us like like paving our own path and and carving our way our way through it. But then a lot of it is I think, you know, just business in general in the last like 10 years has been has been cooking. If you look at like the S P 500

Or the like growth in like tech companies, like they’re occupying so much of this office space, maybe except for 2020 to 2022 when everyone worked from home. but I think those

Devon (08:21)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (08:22)
days are are long gone, and people are realizing that working in office, especially in like bigger companies where you’re establishing a big culture,

Amanda (08:29)
Mm-hmm.

Barry Hartman (08:30)
I think that’s well on its way back, if not already there. and so you know, we always say in junk removal, anytime there’s transition, that’s where we thrive.

Offices

going up, offices getting moved, homes going up, homes coming down, people moving in, people moving out, unfortunately, people dying, people being born. You know, it’s like it’s anytime there’s transition happening, that’s where we see the most movement and junk removal. So you try and just like predict those trends and and be early to them before they happen.

Devon (08:59)
Yeah, that and I’m sure you’ve got a lot of experience now with like looking at the seasonality and kind of riding the waves and knowing what that looks like once you gather enough data year over year. I’m you said something talking about commercial space, it makes me wonder now like that you’ve gotten 505 junk to really and and maybe other junk removal trades, you know, I’m not sure. to be viewed as one of the construction site trades, is there

And I’m just asking this for anyone listening who’s like, yeah, I’m in junk removal. I just haven’t pursued the commercial side. I think there’s probably like kind of a unique value proposition there and that maybe like you are experienced in kind of like, I don’t mixed waste removal or construction waste or like wood versus steel, or is it a green building and to be lead certified, you know, we’ve got to get rid of we have the way you get rid of waste is different. Is it like

I guess my question is thinking about this, because I I hadn’t really thought about it before, but that’s like a huge opportunity if they haven’t started to go commercial. And is that jump from residential junk removal into commercial, what what does that jump look like? Is it like does the team have to be so big? And I mean I I imagine the information and the the things you’d have to be able to do to meet the requirements for those kinds of projects, there’s a s there’s gotta be a barrier to entry there, right? I don’t know.

Barry Hartman (10:14)
Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. No, yeah, it’s so there’s two parts there. There’s one is like, you know, accepting that you’re great at residential, and that’s every junk removal company that truly cares about services. They’re they’re really good at residential junk removal. Commercial’s a whole different beast. And

Devon (10:31)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (10:32)
You know, it’s sort of like would you go into a job interview? And some people do and they don’t get the job, but let’s say you want the job,

would

Devon (10:39)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (10:39)
you go into a job interview without researching the company inside out and apply for it? If probably not. Not a good strategy. So then this is what I often tell the companies in bolt.

Would you start doing business development or outbound sales without knowing their language, knowing their metrics, knowing their org structure, knowing how they operate, knowing what service and value they add to their tenants? Probably not a good idea. So there’s two ways you can get in. One is just accept that you know nothing and start researching it. and to be fair, that’s where Bolt can really help: is like fast-tracking that. And two is just

Devon (11:14)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (11:15)
trial and error. we

Devon (11:17)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (11:17)
did the trial and error side.

We got rejected a lot. You know, junk removal in construction doesn’t work. We use the term live loading construction waste because they live loading to them means we show up with a truck, we live load the material off the site, and off we go. in property management, you’re using more terms like tenant turnover. we were just talking about this in a in a call just before this, and you know, the idea of doing lunch and learns with buildings so that they can understand.

Understand the company value prop that you’re bringing, but you can also educate them on why it makes sense to keeping your building clean and clear. And so, you know, if you if you quantify a certain amount of like tenant turnover days over the course of a year, you’re they’re gonna be missing out on a lot of revenue.

And if you speak that language to them, because everyone thinks revenue, if we can, you know, propose someone and say, hey, this is the budget I would allow for at your building, call it $20,000 a year in junk removal, if we work with you and can provide this service with like a 24-hour turnaround, and we can clear out tenants after they turn over, we can clear out storage units and just keep this building completely clear of junk.

you’ll likely reduce tenant turnover days by about 15 days or whatever it is per per unit. And

Amanda (12:34)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (12:35)
if you multiply the amount of days, which is half a month, by the number of units, they can start to see where the cost savings really come into play. And so it’s not just an added expense on their building PL, it’s actually an opportunity for them to make more money. but it’s really hard to have that conversation with someone if you just go into a meeting and say,

Hey, I’m Barry from 505 Junk. Do you want junk removal? And they’re like, not really. Like, thanks though. Have a good day.

Devon (13:02)
You’re like I’ve got

Amanda (13:02)
Yeah.

Devon (13:03)
a great logo, a great a great truck. yeah. We’re local. We’re family owned. Huh? Yeah. Yeah, you can’t do it. Yeah.

Amanda (13:08)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (13:09)
Exactly. No one cares. I mean, you have to

put that on your website, and that’s great for residential.

Devon (13:16)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (13:16)
but a property manager likely isn’t gonna care if it’s family owned. They’re gonna want to see the ROI, and same with a construction company.

Devon (13:22)
Right.

Barry Hartman (13:23)
Whereas a residential

customer

Amanda (13:24)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (13:25)
100% wants family-owned, local, diversion,

Devon (13:28)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (13:29)
donating reusable goods, like all that kind of stuff. It just doesn’t always like transfer over to the commercial side, so you almost need to treat it

Devon (13:36)
Right.

Barry Hartman (13:36)
like a separate division.

Devon (13:37)
Yeah, you I

Amanda (13:38)
Yeah.

Devon (13:38)
mean you do. You have to study it and you can’t you can’t just like fake it. So that’s awesome that that is something that Bolt specializes in. Like, okay, you’re ready to take the leap. When they’re ready to take that leap, I would imagine you guys are like, Are you ready? Let’s take a look at your residential numbers. Let’s let’s make sure that your scorecard’s in order before you before we attack this, ’cause

I I I would imagine if you get into commercial when you haven’t perfected or come close to on the residential side, like you could probably collapse your your business with the size of those contracts and failing on one of those.

Barry Hartman (14:11)
Yeah, yeah, and also there’s only I don’t know what the Vancouver numbers are, but I would say like eighty percent of our commercial revenue is ran through like twenty clients. And I’m not

Devon (14:20)
Wow.

Barry Hartman (14:21)
gonna say who those clients are, but you know, it’s

Amanda (14:23)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (14:23)
they control all of the units, they’re buying up all the buildings, they’re oftentimes multi-billion dollar firms, and

Devon (14:30)
Wow.

Barry Hartman (14:31)
they’re acquiring

Amanda (14:32)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (14:32)
You know, one of our clients bought a building for like $250 million recently. And, you know, another one just paid over a billion dollars for a building in Vancouver. And these are big towers,

Devon (14:44)
Wow.

Barry Hartman (14:44)
but there’s

Amanda (14:45)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (14:45)
only so many of them. So if you show up to a meeting and you go over twenty.

You’re gonna have to probably wait a few years before you can come back and go, hey, it’s me, Barry. Remember the guy that doesn’t know anything about what you do? Can I have another shot? and so yeah,

Devon (14:59)
Yeah, yeah.

Barry Hartman (15:01)
you you wanna come prepared and you wanna know the language,

Devon (15:03)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (15:04)
you wanna have your marketing dialed in so it actually speaks to your ICP and commercial and and yeah, you you don’t wanna waste your limited opportunities. because there’s a lot of units and buildings out there, but there’s not a lot of companies that control it.

And the same goes in construction as well.

Amanda (15:19)
Yeah. So I was gonna ask before before we move

Devon (15:19)
yeah, truly. This kind of ties Go ahead, I managed it.

Amanda (15:23)
on from this, because I feel like we will, I’m curious, like currently for you guys, how is it mainly relational marketing that’s working to get those big those big contracts or are you having some inbounds now because you guys have such a reputation for it?

Barry Hartman (15:36)
When we get an inbound, it’s just like the everyone’s just jumping with joy. It’s so hard to get one. so if someone clicks on like an ad

Amanda (15:42)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (15:42)
and they’re like, hey, it’s this person from this big construction company, I need something cleared up this afternoon. It’s just like we all know that’s not one afternoon pickup. That’s like one company that probably has 20, 30, 40 active construction sites throughout the year that has multiple superintendents that can hire us. and so yeah,

Amanda (16:00)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (16:01)
it’s a it’s it’s amazing. The truth is if I

Go through like our top 50 commercial account lists, I would say 90% of it came from some outbound sales efforts, and

Amanda (16:11)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (16:11)
it’s it’s everything from prospecting to the initial phone call to lunch and learns to meeting them in person to taking them out to sports events to I mean flying one of our top clients down to Mexico every like it’s just you know what I mean. There’s it’s

Amanda (16:24)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (16:25)
such a it’s such a large effort, which is why it’s a blue ocean strategy, because it’s not to say that.

some junk removal companies don’t try, it’s just they don’t succeed. And so once they don’t

Devon (16:36)
Mm.

Barry Hartman (16:36)
succeed, they give up and they leave it for the companies that actually know what they’re doing. so yeah, it’s it’s a good question. I it’s a lot of outbound sales, biz dev and account management.

Amanda (16:44)
Yeah.

Yeah. But it’s

Devon (16:46)
Yeah.

Amanda (16:47)
it’s worth it when it finally happens. My husband’s in software sales and it’s inbound leads are like that actually close are very small, but when they come in, everyone celebrates but no one’s waiting around for Yeah.

Barry Hartman (16:57)
Yeah, yeah,

and my wife came from software sales. She worked at Hootsuite for I think it was ten years. And, you know, her

Amanda (17:03)
yeah.

Barry Hartman (17:04)
accounts were like, the United States government, the you know, like the FBI, NYPD, State Farm had like 70,000 users. And so like I learned a lot from her on business development because it’s it’s not a single person.

It’s it’s not like you’re not just like residential where it’s like, I need joke remove, cool, we’ll send a truck tomorrow. 99.9% of the time you do a great job. In like BizDev and and big corporate account management, it’s like you need your finance person on it. You need your, you know, you need to assign an account manager to it. Even if the owner is doing it all, you have to wear like all these hats to make sure it seems seamless.

So it’s it’s way more complex, but I I love it. I think it’s fun. And to your

Amanda (17:44)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (17:45)
point, it’s all recurring revenue after that. So it makes like predicting revenue in our industry a lot easier. because

Devon (17:52)
Hm.

Barry Hartman (17:53)
it’s pretty hard to predict, you know, you can use marketing KPIs, which I love residential. There’s pros and cons to everything. Residential is good for cash flow, job book today, customer paid tomorrow.

Amazing. construction sites, not so much. and so there’s pros and cons to everything, but the biggest pro to commercial is that it’s predictable revenue, which is really hard to find in home services sometimes.

Devon (18:15)
Yeah, definitely. So, okay, I’m gonna change the channel a little bit here and let’s I like I like the construction or the commercial side, very pie pie in the sky. I like big aspirations. Call Bolt Accelerator when you’re ready. residential side. So let’s talk about this a little bit. We see all the time that whole like, you know, $99 junk removal. You see that that’s like the leading messaging for a lot of junk removals in residential specifically. And

As marketers were like, ugh, do you wanna be the cheapest guy? So that’s like that’s our lens from your perspective. Why is this such a trap and why do so many junk removal companies like in the residential space lead with the whole like ninety-nine dollar, you know, junk removal ad, you know, that that messaging, that value prop. Like what why does that happen?

Barry Hartman (19:01)
I would say one of two ways. Either they have no clue what they’re doing, and I’m just being candid, or they have a full understanding of what they’re doing and they’ve calculated their lifetime value and repeat rates and they understand that it’s more of a customer acquisition play. It’s not that. Because if they knew their numbers, the repeatability of a residential client is like 1.2.

call it 20%. So one in five clients will book

Amanda (19:22)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (19:24)
a second time that year.

Devon (19:26)
Wow.

Barry Hartman (19:26)
So it’s not an LTV play by any means. and so then you go back to they don’t know what they’re doing. If they did, they would know that if the average cost per lead is 50 bucks, let’s say on a PPC campaign and their sales conversion rate is you know 50%, then their customer acquisition cost is a hundred bucks. We haven’t even sent a truck out yet, and we’ve already

Lost 100% of the profit,

Amanda (19:50)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (19:50)
and and then you have to send the crew out, and there’s fuel, and there’s you know the disposal fees on the other end. You know, the companies that are doing it for a hundred bucks are typically a single owner operator with no

Devon (20:05)
Mm.

Barry Hartman (20:05)
employees, and they trick themselves into thinking that if I do five of these a day, I’m making 500 bucks a day.

And that’s more than the $20, $30, $40, $50 an hour job that I had before I started the company. The second they start adding layers to their business, software, advertising, employees, so they’re not in the trucks all day, whatever it may be, people quickly realize that $100 is not gonna work. And so,

Amanda (20:29)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (20:30)
you know, I think our minimum job is job size is closer to $200, but

It needs to be routed properly. The truck the crews need to be in and out in like fifteen minutes. and because

Amanda (20:40)
Mm-hmm.

Barry Hartman (20:41)
there’s also like drive time to the next job and and so

Devon (20:44)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (20:45)
Yeah, pricing is so important in drunk removal. I think most people look at 1-800-got junk and they think like if I’m half of them, then maybe they’ll go with me. It’s not true. You can be five percent or even five dollars less than one-eight hundred got junk. They’d still rather go with you because they want to support that local company. so unless you’re Walmart or or something along

Devon (21:06)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (21:07)
those Amazon, you know what I mean? Unless you have like

infinite insane data around why it makes sense to be the lowest cost product or service in the in the market. Don’t don’t do that in junk removal. Like it it just doesn’t

Devon (21:19)
Don’t

Barry Hartman (21:20)
work at scale. It just doesn’t.

Devon (21:22)
Did did 505 ever start that way? Did you guys ever, ever do that? Or from the jump you’re like, t our business plan does not call for this. We we we need something better.

Barry Hartman (21:31)
Yeah, we had a hard time with pricing in the beginning. I you know, I don’t even know what our pricing is today. I think it’s ninety-nine dollars plus like fifty, sixty, seventy cents a pound. ’cause we do it by weight. In the beginning, if I remember correctly, we were like nineteen dollars plus like, you know, seventeen cents a pound. And so on a hundred pound pickup, it’s like fifty bucks. And then we did a Groupon play and it was like twenty bucks, ’cause the first you know what I mean? This is way back in the Groupon days. And and we quickly

Devon (21:58)
Loved a group on.

Barry Hartman (22:00)
Yeah.

we quickly realized like that wasn’t gonna work. and

You know, I was fortunate to have a good mentor early on. He had just exited a franchise system called Cruise Ship Centers that he’s that he founded and he sold it for like $30, $40 million. And because my parents bought a franchise off of him, like the 10th one or something like that, he took my call and you know he helped us basically build our strategic plan over like three or four sessions for free. and yeah, it just it

Amanda (22:25)
Wow.

Barry Hartman (22:27)
helped so much. We built our operations manual and our first three.

Months we built our we had Google Ads running in the first three months. Like we figured out our inbound sales process. You know, we figured out we we had our first hire in the first six months. Alex Elsie, he’s he’s now a partner in the company and and and is our VP of sales and operations. And so I think we were just a little bit lucky to have that mentorship to structure the business in a way that was ready to scale from day one. And

Devon (22:56)
Well, yeah.

Barry Hartman (22:57)
Yeah, I that’s kind

of the whole point of Bolt is like I got lucky early on. you know, luck can be a combination of preparation and opportunity, but we were

Devon (23:06)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (23:07)
prepared, we took the opportunity. but the reality is it there’s an element of luck in everything. and and so yeah, that’s our goal now, is just to help people like skip steps, bypass all these early learning lessons that we had. I mean, we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.

just screwing up.

And and I always say like for the people in bolt, it’s like half of it is we can help you understand what to do, but the other half is understand like what not to do. And I almost think there’s more value in understanding what not to do than there is in what to do.

Devon (23:37)
Yeah.

Especially yeah, especially now as like people start to they get a little dangerous with AI and thinking they’re like, I can I can do anything. I mean, I guess that’s more on our digital side, but we’re like y y you can, but your output’s only as good as your input. Do you know what you’re asking it to do? A little a little bit different in junk removal, but I’m I’m sure there’s still a lot of that y saving people like the dumb tax, if you can with

with bolts. So that’s it’s a fantastic play. I do remember one thing too about and this I don’t know if this goes here, but the culture at 505 junk. I remember and this was years ago, but there was you guys did a social post and Cody told me about it where your crew I think they found like a pile of money inside of like a nightstand or a dresser or something. And they like gave it back to the homeowner when they found it. But what

Why do you remember this?

Amanda (24:31)
Yeah.

Devon (24:31)
Do you know what I’m talking about? How much was that? Really?

Barry Hartman (24:33)
Yeah, I was on site for that one. So first

Amanda (24:35)
Wow.

Barry Hartman (24:36)
of all, that happens all the time now because we’re one of the market leaders in estate clear outs. We have some government contracts that I can’t really speak to, but essentially when people pass away, we’re oftentimes the first on site. And and so that was

Amanda (24:50)
Well

Barry Hartman (24:51)
the first time, but it happens all the time now. So that first time

Devon (24:55)
My gosh.

Barry Hartman (24:57)
it was a residential

Homeowner,

her mom had Alzheimer’s. her mom’s home had also flooded in the basement. And so they had to make a hard decision to move her into a senior’s home because it was a little bit early because it was like stage one Alzheimer’s, but with the house flooded, they were just like, let’s just let’s just rip

Amanda (25:16)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (25:17)
the band-aid off. So it was a very sensitive and emotional situation.

As it turns out, like that stage one Alzheimer’s had actually, you know, her memory loss had accelerated quite a bit. And so when we were on site, we found, I think it was $3,000 in cash, $24,000 in uncashed government checks that she had just forgotten about. All of her wedding rings, engagement rings, like everything was

Amanda (25:41)
my gosh.

Barry Hartman (25:43)
just like hidden in places that, you know,

Devon (25:46)
No one would know.

Barry Hartman (25:46)
Maybe they would have

found, but more they would have found it if they had done this job themselves, but they weren’t about to

Amanda (25:52)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (25:52)
do that. The

Devon (25:53)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (25:53)
trick is finding the right company that when they inevitably do come across this stuff, are they gonna hand it back? And the coolest part about that job

Amanda (26:00)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (26:02)
was I was on site with I think Alex the day before to kick off the project with the team, but it was actually the crew members that found all the stuff the next day.

And they were the ones that had like called Alex immediately and said, Hey, this is what we’re finding. Alex drove down, put it in a Ziploc bag. And then when the job was done two

days later, we drove to the client’s office where she was working with the Ziploc bag. And we knocked on her door and she’s like, What are you doing here? And we were like, you know that estimate that was 2,500 bucks? She’s like, Yeah.

We were like, Do you want the good news or the bad news? And she’s like, The bad news and I was like, Okay.

We don’t have any bad news. and she’s I just like doing that to people. the good news is

Devon (26:42)
Ha ha ha

Amanda (26:42)
Ha ha

Barry Hartman (26:44)
the good news is though, here’s three grand, that’ll pay for your job, and here’s twenty-four

Amanda (26:48)
Mm.

Barry Hartman (26:48)
thousand dollars for your mom’s you know retirement plan, and here’s every

Amanda (26:54)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (26:54)
all the other goods that we found as well. And she just like broke out into tears. And so that was a

Amanda (26:58)
my gosh.

Barry Hartman (26:59)
good yeah, that and she I can’t remember who did, but somehow the local newspaper caught wind of it and they didn’t

A big story, and it was it was good for the brand, but I don’t know, it was it was just a it’s just a win-win-win for everybody. and

Devon (27:12)
It it is

Amanda (27:13)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (27:14)
and it kind of opened us up to like the idea that estate management is like critically important in junk removal to be more than just like a hauler, like you almost have to be like a part of the estate management team and and

Amanda (27:27)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (27:28)
be like end-to-end with them throughout that whole process.

Amanda (27:31)
Yeah,

and what like a unique

Devon (27:31)
What a differentiate.

Amanda (27:33)
thing for your trade. Like most trades don’t get the opportunity to do something like that for somebody and that’s just like, my gosh, like you can hang your hat on that.

Barry Hartman (27:41)
Yeah, it’s

Devon (27:41)
No

Barry Hartman (27:42)
it’s a good story. And we get the other ones too,

Devon (27:44)
It says.

Barry Hartman (27:44)
where like, you know, I don’t hear about them as much anymore because I’m obviously never on site, but I was on site for this one and same thing. you know, the the client’s father had passed away. I don’t think they had a very good relationship. She had zero emotion about it. but I pulled up a mattress and there’s five thousand dollars in cash, and her reaction is like, Of course he’s hiding five thousand dollars, give that to me.

Devon (28:08)
You’re

like, okay. I would

Barry Hartman (28:10)
So it’s like you see it all, but yeah, it’s

I mean, it’s it’s every day there’s something new in Junk Removal.

Devon (28:16)
Fun.

Amanda (28:17)
I don’t know. I feel like you could have a whole YouTube channel just for those kind of things. Or a Netflix show. I would tune in for sure.

Barry Hartman (28:21)
Definitely. But yeah.

Devon (28:21)
Yeah. Yeah, just some shorts on that, let what you find.

So it sounds like with the guys finding the crew is finding it, like you have clearly like at 505 junk, you built a culture inside of 505 that is just like I mean it sounds unparalleled. How I guess how would you advise, you know, a business owner who has heard you are supposed to, you know

Hire for culture, make sure it’s a great fit or else you’re gonna have the worst time trying to scale. Like how how did you guys hire for like and build the culture and and find people that are gonna return thirty thousand dollars worth of goods? You know, that’s that’s incredible.

Barry Hartman (29:02)
Yeah, I would say that was my responsibility very early on, is to bring on great people and

I gotta credit Alex now for that. He has built a culture of technicians that is I’ve just never seen it before. That they they love showing up to work, they’re paid well to do their job. some of our crew members have have been with us for I mean, we just celebrated celebrated a 10-year anniversary with Jose, who he’s now our director of operations, but he started in the trucks. And you know, our director of marketing, Neil, who he’s on paternity leave right now, he just had twins.

Actually, he’s approaching 10 years.

Devon (29:36)
correct.

Barry Hartman (29:37)
He also started in the trucks.

Devon (29:40)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (29:41)
and so

Amanda (29:41)
Tomorrow.

Barry Hartman (29:41)
it’s you know, I was a part of those like early decisions to find people that wanted to go through the effort of being a technician in the trucks, but always had a bigger vision to become like a manager or a marketing person or a salesperson one day. but that’s not scalable, and what is scalable is what Alex is building.

Is finding great people, giving them like a sense of purpose, training them, holding them accountable, having the hard conversations with them if they’re late, not accepting you know people’s BS, inspecting their work on like a frequent basis, coaching them. He’s a really good coach, I would I’ll say that as well. And

None of that has to do with like the little basketball hoop that we have in our office, or like the

Devon (30:25)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (30:25)
staff parties that we throw, or the box that we get at the sports games, like

None of that actually really matters, to be honest with you. it’s entirely based on the level of standard that Alex has set in the company and then holding people to that standard on a daily basis, rewarding people for when they keep up with it. And when somebody refuses to be in line with that standard or values, we just move off of them.

Almost immediately. and that’s hard to do, but

Devon (30:49)
Is it?

Barry Hartman (30:50)
you know, it is what it is. There’s only 40, 50 people on a sports team every year. Same thing at 505 junk. And so you you gotta you you’re not guaranteed a roll forever. You gotta continue to level up. If you do, there’s tons of opportunity. I mean, some of our crew members that were working in the field early on are making six figures now. and

Amanda (31:09)
Sigue.

Barry Hartman (31:09)
The the inverse of that as well. If someone joins our company and and they’re late for four shifts in their 90-day probation and they’re complaining and you know, they do whatever, like they’re playing what Alex says is like they’re playing a solo in an orchestra that no one wants to hear. we just move off of it. Like we’re like, that’s fine. You’re gonna get a job in a week. It’s just not gonna be at our company because we can’t have that standard for for our customers because there’s too much too much reputation on the line.

Devon (31:36)
Do you think that Alex follows the like hire slow f fire fast? Then is it a pretty long process before you actually can get hired?

Barry Hartman (31:45)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean we’re always advertising and recruiting.

Devon (31:51)
Okay,

yeah.

Barry Hartman (31:51)
Because

we like to know who’s out there. but you know, there

Devon (31:53)
Smart.

Barry Hartman (31:54)
might be like a backlog, or you know, there might be you know, we have a pretty thorough interview process, you know, in terms of like the application and then the initial phone convert like call conversion with our HR rep BV, and then she’ll if they’re qualified through her, she’ll pass them on to our director of operations, Jose, who will then interview them and Alex.

Might come in even at the VP level, he’ll come in on an interview just to give it the LC check. That’s his last name, and just like, you know, he’s got a good gut check at this point, but that’s not scalable. so

Devon (32:24)
Yeah.

Amanda (32:27)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (32:28)
yeah, no, it’s it’s been a thorough process, but again, back to those like early day systems. We’ve always done this. The only difference is it would be like Barry would be on the conversion call, and then they’d come in like

I wouldn’t maybe say my name and then they’d come in for the interview the next day and they’d be like, yeah, I spoke to this guy yesterday. good, how was the call with him? Yeah, no, he was he was friendly or I didn’t like him or whatever. and

Amanda (32:50)
Ha ha.

Barry Hartman (32:50)
and then you okay, great. So now we’ll start with your interview. But it’s it’s a f hiring is it it it should be really systematic.

so that you increase the odds of someone staying with your company after the first 90 days. maybe the thing that isn’t quite as systematic is when you’re like interviewing for, you know, culture fit or like their attitude or are they defensive to feedback? Like that’s one of the biggest things I find in trades is like, are they defensive or not?

because

Devon (33:18)
Mm.

Amanda (33:19)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (33:20)
most companies have figured out their secret sauce by our stage and even five years in. And if people refuse to follow a system, it’s gonna be

Amanda (33:29)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (33:29)
pretty hard to have a good relationship with them. That doesn’t mean we’re not open to feedback. We but we have systems to collect feedback and and we will actively change our company if the feedback is warranted. but we also need that on the other side with the team member.

Amanda (33:43)
Yeah.

Devon (33:43)
I didn’t want to talk over Amanda. I’m like

Amanda (33:45)
I know I I was just

thinking too, I just have to let you know, Barry, that like ch talking to Paul earlier today too, basically everything you guys are saying resonates in our business too. So I know Devin’s and my brains are both are going like this as well. And we you know, hiring is such a huge thing for every company no matter you know, it’s th there’s so much more that goes into it and the time it takes to train someone and pull them in and like you said, you just have to make sure that they’re they’re a good fit from start from the start because it’s

We’ve learned it the hard way a few times, trying to force something that’s we’re trying to make it work and it just it doesn’t work.

Barry Hartman (34:14)
Yeah. Yeah,

Devon (34:14)
That’s truth.

Barry Hartman (34:15)
it’s so true.

Devon (34:16)
It yeah, it’s it’s so culture is important. Don’t pricing is obviously very important when you’re you know, starting a business. And then this this kind of this question leads in, I promise. Instead of my random culture question earlier on. but what is what’s something that you’ve seen that immediate you’re immediately you’re like, hey, that’s bad business. Nope.

Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, don’t do that. That’s like what is a pitfall, a trap, something outside of poor pricing? Like what’s another what where’s some like dumb tax that you could save someone who’s like, well, I heard there’s low barrier to entry and junk removal? I’m gonna get a loan, I’m gonna get a truck, I can do this. What’s like what if you could like impart some wisdom to to that young guy that’s like, I got this, what would be some advice you would give him

The that where you would say, Don’t do that, that’s bad business.

Barry Hartman (35:04)
Yeah, yeah. junk so first of all, junk removal is easy if you’re gonna go do it yourself. You need a pickup truck and you as the owner will obviously care about customer service to the highest standard because you’re obligated to. So even if it’s not natural for you to to be outgoing and friendly and and fair and honest, you have to, otherwise you won’t last a year in business.

scaling a business is is not easy at all. And so you can go buy a truck. Even building a business is not easy. starting a business, pretty easy. Incorporate it, get your LLC, get a bank account, get a truck. A lot of people already have their own truck. Buy a trailer. you don’t need a big fancy dump trailer. You can literally get like a flat deck and build up wooden sidewalls like we did in half a day.

It’s very easy to start a drug removal company. That’s why there’s over fifteen thousand in North America.

What’s not easy is everything to do with building a business. Sales is hard. Marketing is hard. Operations is hard. Hiring people is hard. Keeping people is hard. Training people is hard. Being profitable is hard. Having good cash flow is hard. Having a good relationship with your bank is hard. Everything is hard. So don’t start a junk removal company if you think it’s gonna be easy. It’s just not.

And it never will be. And it’s only gonna get harder because it’s gonna get more competitive. the bigger companies are gonna have access to more data and intelligence and AI, and they’re gonna get even more market share. I think the top 10 franchisees in a $20 billion market, top t top 10 franchisors, I should say, are controlling like 30% of the market share. business is hard. So if you wanna sign

Devon (36:41)
So weird.

Barry Hartman (36:42)
up for hard.

Then do it. Like I signed up

Devon (36:45)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (36:45)
for hard. I never once expected scaling a business to be easy. I watched my parents start a retail cruise ship travel agency. Like they sold cruises. On their first week, after my dad got laid off at 50 years old, they had no business experience. They put their entire life savings and more debt into starting this franchise.

That was I think two weeks before nine eleven.

Literally.

Amanda (37:11)
my gosh.

Barry Hartman (37:12)
So not only did no one book cruise travel for the next twelve months, on top of that, when you book a cruise, you don’t get paid until they go. So they had like 18

Amanda (37:21)
Right.

Barry Hartman (37:22)
months of negative cash flow and I just watched them stomach it. It and it was it

was hot. So that’s what that was my lens going into business.

they eventually built it up. They were doing like millions of dollars in sales, they had a great reputation. I learned a lot about marketing because they paid me 15 bucks an hour to figure out like Google My Business, blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, like all that kind of stuff.

Amanda (37:46)
Awesome.

Barry Hartman (37:48)
and so, you know, but I I’ve witnessed how hard it was to build a business coming from a franchise system which is supposed to be bulletproof. Well, it turns

Devon (37:57)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (37:58)
out 9 11 isn’t bulletproof when you need.

to fly to a destination and travel on a cruise ship. And Junker Rubble is no different. I mean not like digital marketing is no different. Like business is hard. And as

Devon (38:09)
It is

Barry Hartman (38:11)
long as you sign up for hard, you’ll increase your chances of win. If you sign up for easy, keep your job.

Devon (38:16)
Yeah, keep your job. Is I know it’s in in roofing specifically ’cause of Cody, but and and I think we’re seeing it with a lot of our other contractors. In in in junk removal in that space, is there a lot of private equity coming in now? Are there are the are the sharks smelling blood in the water there the same way they are with other trades?

Barry Hartman (38:33)
Yeah,

they’re trying. I don’t think they’re thriving. I think there’s been one roll-up that had a little bit of an exit. you know, the the biggest challenge is that junk removal is still a very young industry when it comes to

The professionalism and maturity of how the entrepreneurs are running their business. Junk

Devon (38:55)
Mm.

Barry Hartman (38:55)
removal was essentially pioneered in 1989 by Brian Scutemore when he started 1-800 Got Junk. He started franchising in 1995. By 2000, they were across the big 40 markets in North America. That was only 26 years ago.

Like that’s not that long.

Amanda (39:11)
Wow.

Barry Hartman (39:12)
And there is about five to ten bigger f or or other franchisors that have spanned since then. but that’s only 25 years of companies that have really started to look at that model and be like, I can do that. Plumbing’s been around forever, electricians have been around forever, roofing has been around forever. and so there’s a lot more industry data, there’s a lot more, you know, collaboration on what works and what doesn’t work.

work. so junk the the way people that they’re running their junk removal businesses is it can be often very, very elementary and you just can’t acquire an elementary business. So there are some and that’s what Bolt is trying to do. We’re trying to get people to

Devon (39:51)
Yeah.

Barry Hartman (39:52)
increase the enterprise value of their business. That’s how you get the most ROI in Bolt is when you have a business that can run without you that’s worth a whole bunch of money that’s cash flowing every single day.

If you can pull that off, then you win as an entrepreneur. But

There’s a lot of things in that are needed to be in place in order to be able to pull that off. You need a good brand, you need good systems, you need good people, you need good profitability, you need good cash flow. If you can build all of that, and not ironically, this podcast has been done in Brisbane on the other side of the world. We’re here for seven weeks. it’s because we have good systems in place, we have good repeatable marketing, we have good recurrent commercial accounts. There’s a leadership team in place that’s taking care of not just the day to day, but also

the month by month. And so my value add at this point is on developing our leaders, the vision, the cash flow, the profitability. But there’s a lot of other great people that could probably do just as good, if not a better job than I can as a CEO. That makes a a really sellable business to private equity.

Amanda (40:56)
Mm-hmm.

Barry Hartman (40:56)
I don’t think

Devon (40:56)
Mm.

Barry Hartman (40:57)
there’s a lot of junk removal companies that are there yet. I can I I know almost every junk we’ve probably researched the majority of junk removal companies in North America. There’s probably a dozen. And they’re not gonna wanna sell because they know that they’re just in the beginning of where they’re at and they’ve got a lot more of room to grow and they don’t wanna sell too early. So I think private equity wants to get in on junk removal, but they haven’t figured out how quite yet.

Devon (41:21)
However who, yeah. Yeah, well look out because they’re gonna be coming after all of

Amanda (41:22)
Wow. That’s

Devon (41:26)
the Bolt Accelerator graduates and trying to come after your guys. But I think it’s such a such a great way to give back to the industry what you’re doing with Bolt Accelerator and really teaching these guys. And it’s really just I mean, trying to move the industry forward and teach them like, you know, good business practices. Obviously with that comes the

Probably the culture you’ve built with 505 and just really teaching them grassroots, like do the right thing and then and then how to build the business the right way and what numbers to look at and and building a brand, like it’s such a good thing. Where where can people find you, Barry, and how can they get in touch?

Barry Hartman (42:03)
Yeah, I would say Instagram is the best spot. That’s where we’re posting daily. We’re putting out a lot of content on you know how to run a great junk removal company and everything that goes into it. So it’s just my handle is Ut Barry Hartman. Bolt Accelerator is Bolt Accelerator. You can Google it, it’s the URL as well. and then in November 19th and 20th, we’re holding hosting the Bolt Summit. It’ll be our second one. so we’ve got a lot of great entrepreneurs and sponsors and suppliers.

and speakers. So if people want to learn about that, they can go to boltsummit.com as well.

Amanda (42:37)
Yeah.

Devon (42:40)
Awesome. Well thank you so

Amanda (42:40)
Somebody.

Devon (42:41)
much Barry. We’ll definitely we’ll put all kinds of links in the show notes for everyone so they have some great places to find you. Instagram, your website, LinkedIn. I actually saw you have do you post your you have your YouTube channel too, Barry Hartman, right?

Barry Hartman (42:54)
Yeah, we just started firing up YouTube recently. We hired a long

Devon (42:57)
Love it.

Barry Hartman (42:57)
we’ve we’ve got Connors a our content manager. He’s just right behind me here. and so he was doing a lot of the work and then we hired a a short form editor because that’s where the biggest bottleneck is. And we just brought on a long form editor as well. So yeah, we’ll be putting a lot more out on on YouTube over the next few months here.

Devon (43:13)
I yeah, I can tell everyone your Instagram channel. I love the content. It’s hilarious. It’s good. So

Barry Hartman (43:19)
Thank you.

Devon (43:20)
And very inf very informative, but it’s done in a in a relatable way. So good job, Connor. And he my son’s name is my oldest son’s name is Connor too. And I think they both spelled the same. So I’ve got an affinity for Connors that that’s spelled the right way. Anyways. All

Barry Hartman (43:33)
I love it. It’s a great name.

Devon (43:35)
right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Barry. And we hope to have you on another time. This was so informative and I’m sure that our listeners got a ton out of it. So thank you.

Barry Hartman (43:45)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This is great.