How a Junk Removal Side Hustle Hit $3M in 4 Years
EntrepreneurshipKirk and Jacob McKinney started hauling junk with one pickup truck as teenagers in 2021. Last year, that side hustle did $3 million in revenue — and the framework behind the jump has almost nothing to do with the junk itself.
The Framework
Junk Teens went from $1.2 million in 2024 — while it was still a side hustle — to $3 million in 2025, with $5 million projected for 2026. The business now runs 8 trucks and 25 full-time employees across Greater Boston, Cape Cod, and Rhode Island, moving 7.4 million pounds of items with an emphasis on donation and resale over landfill disposal. None of that growth came from a novel business model — junk removal is about as unglamorous and un-disruptable a category as exists. It came from systematically fixing the operational bottlenecks that keep most small service businesses capped at “side hustle” scale.
Delegation and Systems
Jacob had been personally handling all scheduling — a role that consumed 12-hour workdays and put a hard ceiling on how much business the company could take on. The fix was splitting that single point of failure across multiple managers. It’s the most common bottleneck in owner-operated service businesses and the least glamorous fix: not a new revenue stream, just removing the founder as the constraint on how much work the business can actually accept.
Technology Integration
The company adopted Jobber for CRM, GoHighLevel for customer data, and Connecteam for employee management — none of it bespoke, all of it off-the-shelf software built for exactly this kind of operation. The more interesting detail: a teenage employee built the company’s own performance-tracking app using Base44 and ChatGPT, without a dedicated engineering team or budget. That’s a small but real signal of how far a non-technical team can now get on internal tooling without hiring developers.
Marketing and Culture
Kirk systematized social media production itself — training team members to film daily operations using Meta Glasses and GoPros — turning what could have been ad-hoc content into a repeatable process. The payoff shows up in the numbers: 213K TikTok followers, 269K on Instagram, and 69K YouTube subscribers, built from documenting actual junk-hauling work rather than produced marketing content.
Competitive Compensation
Employees earn $25-$30/hour including base pay, commissions, and tips — well above typical entry-level rates for physical labor, and the likely reason the company can staff up with high school and college students reliably enough to run 8 trucks without constant turnover.
The So What
Kirk’s framing cuts against the standard advice young people get: “young people are looking for different career paths” than a traditional college-to-office track. Jacob’s advice to anyone starting out is blunter — “start, even if it’s not going to be the business that you retire with.” Junk Teens isn’t a story about picking the right industry; it’s a story about what happens when an unglamorous, low-barrier business gets real operational discipline applied to it early.
Source: Entrepreneur
Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.
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