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Business Hauls Hunks Of Junk

Tribune photo

Nick Friedman, left, and Omar Soliman are the owners of College Hunks Hauling Junk, a national chain of trash haulers using the “ hunk” image to create name recognition.

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By KENNETH KNIGHT

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 29, 2008

TAMPA - Faisal Ansari is a strapping, 26-year-old college graduate who hauls junk for a living.

It's not the kind of job you would expect for an alumnus of the University of Miami with a finance degree. Neither did Ansari when he graduated in 2004.

"No, I really didn't envision it," he said, "but I don't mind getting my hands dirty."

Ansari owns the local College Hunks Hauling Junk franchise, a new Tampa company that specializes in collecting and hauling unwanted trash from homes and offices. He also owns the Orlando franchise.

The two young entrepreneurs who launched the company in 2005 recently moved their corporate headquarters to Tampa to take advantage of the area's friendly business climate and pool of service-industry workers.

Omar Soliman, 25, and Nick Friedman, 26, two enterprising former high school buddies from Washington, said they founded a business using "hunks" in its name to brand the company rather than promote the physical appearances of its employees.

The upstart company is part of a fast-growing industry of garbage-removal businesses sprouting up across the country.

There were more than 23,000 refuse and recyclable-material collectors employing nearly 69,000 workers in the third quarter of 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

College Hunks Hauling Junk competes locally and nationally with other residential and commercial trash haulers such as 1-800-Got-Junk and Hippo. They serve a niche that requires workers to remove furniture, appliances, yard waste, and building materials from homes and businesses on a smaller scale than the major curbside collectors and heavy waste haulers such as Waste Management, Republic Services and Allied Waste Services.

Soliman and Friedman fit the bill when they started their company.

"Clean-cut college students doing dirty work," said Friedman, the company president.

Three years after college, Soliman and Friedman have turned College Hunks Hauling Junk into a $3 million enterprise with franchise locations in some of the nation's largest cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Baltimore and Washington. They project nearly $4 million in sales nationwide this year.

"The vision was to be more than a local junk-hauling company," said Soliman, the chief executive officer. "We wanted to be a national brand."

In April, the business partners relocated their corporate headquarters from Washington to the West Shore Club office complex on Gandy Boulevard in Tampa.

Soliman and Friedman say they fell in love with the Tampa Bay area during visits to help Ansari set up shop.

"Tampa kept popping up as a good place for call centers," Friedman added. Friedman and Soliman said they plan to buy local office space large enough to house a centralized call and training center for franchisees in about a year.

Most job applicants are college males, but education isn't a requirement, said Ansari, who bought the company's first franchise in February 2007. Women are welcome, although there are none on the street team.

Ansari has done well recruiting on college campuses, mainly advertising on college bulletin boards. However, he has been most successful finding workers through Craig's List.

He hires for two positions on his street teams: truck captain and wing man. Starting pay for a truck captain, who is responsible for making the sales pitch and closing the deal, is $9 an hour. The wing man, whose job is to load and sort items as well as serve as an extra pair of eyes for the truck captain, makes $8 an hour. Ansari employs four street team members plus himself in Tampa and has nine employees in Orlando.

Co-founder Soliman helped finance the company with $10,000 he received as winner of the 2004 Rothschild Entrepreneurship Competition at the University of Miami. A business plan he wrote for College Hunks Hauling Junk earned him the first-place prize.

Ansari, who met Soliman in college, decided to invest $140,000 for the Orlando franchise. He paid about $160,000 to expand into the Bay area.

"The Tampa market has been generous to me," Ansari said, citing nearly $32,000 in sales since April.

The popularity of upstart junk haulers can be attributed to the low-cost investment of doing business, said Chaz Miller, director of state programs at the National Solid Waste Management Association.

All you need is a driver with a commercial license, a flatbed truck and workers to lift heavy furniture, boxes or appliances, Miller said.

A College Hunks crew will haul almost anything that will fit in one of the company's 8-foot-long orange and green delivery trucks.

The company offers free estimates. The minimum price for a single item or one-eighth of a truckload is $99; it costs $498 to fill the cargo bed. Not everything ends up at the landfill. As much as 60 percent of the items are donated to charity or recycled to help defray dumping fees, Ansari said.

Ansari said he doesn't mind giving up a suit and tie for heavy labor.

"We are still a new business, and I want it to grow," he said. "There is a lot more junk out there to be hauled."

Reporter Kenneth Knight can be reached at kknight@tampatrib.com or (813) 865-4842.

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