Junk haulers look to franchise their Kensington business

Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Naomi Brookner⁄The Gazette Nick Friedman, president of Kensington-based College Hunks Hauling Junk, heads to a home in Rockville to pick up a customer’s junk.

In 2003, in the summer before their senior year in college, childhood friends Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman borrowed a cargo van from Soliman’s mother who owns a furniture store in Adams Morgan. She also came up with a catchy name: College Hunks Hauling Junk.

The rest was up to the boys. By posting fliers and through word-of-mouth, that first summer in business they made $8,000.

Today, Friedman is president and Soliman is chief executive officer of a company on pace to bring in more than $1 million by the end of its second year in business and in January, College Hunks Hauling Junk will start selling franchises nationally.

After only six months in business, the company turned a profit. It now operates out of an office in Kensington and employs 15 to 20 ‘‘truck captains,” ‘‘wingmen” and ‘‘customer loyalty representatives” — more in the summer when demand for the business is greater and there are more college students seeking summer employment.

Fresh out of college in 2004, Friedman, now 25, and Soliman, now 24, became bored and antsy after brief stints pushing papers in the corporate world and decided it was time to shift gears and put their dream into action.

With help from a $10,000 first-place prize Soliman won from submitting his business plan to the 2004 Rothschild Entrepreneurship Competition while attending the University of Miami, and relying heavily on savings, friends and family to foot the bill, the business partners financed a truck from the bank and College Hunks Hauling Junk was born.

‘‘We did all this to escape the 9 to 5 behind a computer, and in some ways we’re doing that now. But we’re doing it for ourselves,” Soliman said. ‘‘Our operation and business was more successful more quickly than we imagined.”

Planning for the future, the duo purchased the company phone number, 1-800-JUNK-USA, in June 2005 for $13,500 from a doctors’ office in Little Travers, Mich., to make the transition to a national franchise easier.

Since then, they estimate they will have invested about $200,000 in developing customized software, new office space, legal fees and other costs associated with creating a sustainable franchise.

‘‘We always had franchising in the back of our mind,” Soliman said, ‘‘so every business decision we would make we’d ask ourselves, ‘How would this work for other people?’”

According to industry Web sites, there are an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 different franchise companies operating in the United States, employing more than 8 million people and accounting for 35-40 percent of all retail and service revenues, which in 2000 reached $1 trillion.

‘‘There are no statistics on how many franchises are successful,” said Harold Kestenbaum, the franchise attorney hired by College Hunks Hauling Junk to prepare for the transition from small business entrepreneur to franchiser. ‘‘And nobody really knows what will be successful. It really depends on what you think is successful.

‘‘Franchising is a great way to expand your company if you don’t have the capital or human resources to grow your business yourself,” he said.

Friedman said they plan to start selling franchises locally, building on regional brand recognition and loyalty. Currently they haul junk from Washington, D.C., and the adjacent counties in Maryland and Virginia. Already, they have plans to start a franchise in Annapolis, and one of Soliman’s college friends expressed interest in starting one in Orlando, Fla.

By the end of next year, they hope to have at least five franchisees. After five years, their goal is to have one in every major metropolitan area in the country.

‘‘We knew that franchising was a valuable way to expand our business,” Friedman said. ‘‘With franchising you can grow a cohesive brand. We’re confident it will succeed in every metropolitan area.”

The inglorious job of hauling junk has been successful for other companies like 1-800-GOT-JUNK based out of Vancouver, Canada; My Roll Off (1-800-DUMP-JUNK), a distributor that provides driveway dumpsters; and 866-JUNK-2-GO, which offers hauling as well as driveway dumpsters in the metropolitan area.

‘‘These guys are great, but they’re not the first to come up with this idea,” Kestenbaum said about College Hunks Hauling Junk. ‘‘Not everyone has to be an innovator. But being the second or third one on the block doesn’t mean you can’t be successful.”