Two brothers from Massachusetts who started a business in high school are hoping to take things to the next level.
21-year-old Kirk McKinney and his 19-year-old brother, Jacob McKinney, are the proud owners of ‘Junk Teens.’
It’s a junk removal business that started with their love of trash.
Years ago, Kirk said he had been riding his bike when he stumbled upon his local dump.
He saw a really cool radio and asked if he could have it. He took it home, cleaned it up, and it worked perfectly.
It became his prized possession.
“That’s when I realized first that there’s opportunity in the trash,” said Kirk. “I started to get other things. I couldn’t just throw the stuff away so I would sell it on Facebook Marketplace and I realized, ‘Wow, I can make money doing something that I love.'”
Kirk had been working at a local grocery store but he quit to go dumpster-diving full time.
“Then one day the guys at the dump had us come work for them once to do junk removal with them and we realized, through seeing them, that we could make more money and have a bigger impact by removing junk,” he said.
Kirk, who was a junior in high school, recruited his younger brother Jacob who was a freshman.
He saved enough money to purchase a pickup truck.
Then they started to spread the word around that they were able and willing to pick up people’s junk.
They initially called themselves ‘K&J Removal and Disposals.’
“It’s been four years now and from there we’ve been scaling the business and providing other opportunities for young guys like ourselves,” said Kirk. “I would go up to kids in the hallway like, ‘Hey, after school today I’m going out with my truck to pick up some couches. Do you want to help me with that?'”
From there, business boomed.
While going to high school full-time, they made it work.
“I’m younger and combining with school was tricky because obviously running a full scale business takes up a lot of time and usually people pursue that after they graduate school,” said Jacob.
The McKinney brothers said they made their business legitimate and saved up enough money for a dump truck.
During that time if they removed anything of value that was to be thrown away, instead, they kept it at their parents house.
Eventually, there was too much stuff.
“We outgrew our driveway,” said Kirk. “We try to repurpose as much as we can, one, because it saves on dump fees but two, it’s simply because I hate throwing things away and so does my brother.”
Then, a little while later, after saving even more money they were able to purchase a few dump trucks and hire many of their friends and kids their own age.
“We realized that there are so many junk removal companies out there and there’s also a lot of other young guys like us that wanted to work hard and do the right thing to make money, but, there’s not always a clear opportunity of where you can go,” said Kirk. “Since the beginning our parents never gave us money to start off because they wanted us to learn from the ground up like they did and we’re super grateful they did that for us.”
Two years ago, the ‘Junk Teens’ began renting out a warehouse in Norwood, Massachusetts.
It’s the hub of their business.
Inside, everything is creatively decorated with disposed items they’ve saved from jobs.
It’s an organized, awesome, man-cave that they call the ‘Junk House.’
“Well take some stuff to the dump like straight up trash. Well remove metal, recycle that and whenever we get things that are good, things that can be repurposed well try to donate those,” said Jacob.
“This big space it’s almost like the heart and home of the Junk Teens where we can all come to this place and as you can see, there’s graffiti everywhere, it’s super colorful in here, because we don’t want to create a boring work environment where you’re just showing up to get your paycheck. At the end of the week, we want to create a community and a place where people want to show up and work hard. It’s more than just a junk removal company, it’s a community and it’s a lifestyle. We live it up around here at Junk Teens. We work hard and play hard.”
‘Junk Teens’ services many parts of Massachusetts.
Each job is quoted beforehand.
“When it first started for me at least it was really just like a good side hustle. A good good way to make money and I really enjoyed that I could do it with my brother and I could do it really anytime. I could choose my schedule and everything so that was like a great motivator from the start,” said Jacob. “And then when we started having our friends work with us and obviously like a lot of the guys from our school and like schools in the neighboring town, it became just so much fun, so much fun.”
“Intiailly we were working for money and we realized that we had a deeper opportunity through this path that we’re on,” said Kirk. “And the deeper opportunity is our mission to empower the youth and inspire other young, ambitious people like ourselves and through our story, and what we do here, we’ve been able to change so many peoples lives in the last four years of what we do.”
“It started off with a goal of money and then grew into a deeper purpose of wanting to empower the youth, and I think that’s what drives me every day,” added Kirk.
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Publish date : 2024-09-19 06:30:00
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