This is clearly going to be a bigger haul than originally quoted. He hasn’t put anything in the truck yet because he has to plan it out. “It is a lot like Tetris.” Tetris is a puzzle-like video game developed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The player has to carefully maneuver brightly colored blocks into interlocking patterns by manipulating the pieces. James played a lot of Tetris when he was a kid. “I destroy at Tetris. You really gotta know Tetris to pack a truck. You got to break down the boxes, not letting any air in there. Really filling it and packing it.” He stands back and tilts his head one way and then the next. He looks back and forth at the pile. He starts to make decisions about what needs to be nestled in, strapped in, wrapped up, or lashed down. “It is more art than science. I see it in my head.” I didn’t have one handy to test this out, but I am fairly certain James could do a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes.
All the guys who work on the Junk Busters trucks have a special skill. There’s Frank, who is the brainy former mover. He was hired for his chill temperament and superhero spatial relations. He seems to have a secret power to shape-shift furniture through the doorways of some of Austin’s smaller arts-and-craft-style homes. Scott is a country boy, and when it comes time to take down a barn, he is the man. “I’m in charge of demolition,” he says proudly. “It is really important to control the fall.” Finally there’s Chase. He is quiet and thin. His complexion suggests that he is both young and into fast food. Chase likes to drink French Vanilla International Delight coffee creamers for a treat. He grabs them at fueling stops. He peels back the foil from the little blue cups and just pops them in his mouth. The kind with no refrigeration needed. Shake Well. UHT processed.
Steve Welhausen, the founder and owner of Junk Busters USA, saw something in Chase. It was the same thing he looks for in everyone he hires. Chase is a good kid. “So we start with the character, ‘Are they good people?’ I want good people. Personally, I don’t care if they can bench press four hundred pounds. If they’re not good people, people I can put in someone’s parents’ homes unsupervised and still sleep at night. That’s kind of the defining factor that we start with, and sometimes they’re younger than they are older. They have no bad habits. But unfortunately, a lot of times, they have no habits, good or bad. But one of the gentlemen, Chase, that you met, to put it in context, as far as common sense, street smarts, we were getting gas one day. And he had just started with us. And I said, ‘I’ll swipe it, and you fill it up.’ ‘Uh, how do you operate it?’ He had never put gas in a car. And then he finishes pumping it, and he’s, like, ‘Now what do I do?’ It’s, like, ‘OK, we’re going to teach you this. This is where it goes.’” Now just past fifty, with smiling eyes behind his glasses, Steve is a soft-spoken, straight-talking teddy bear of a Texan. He has a sharp mind and strong convictions.
He wanted to give the young man a chance and some guidance. Steve taught him to shake the customer’s hand and to make eye contact. He reminded him that you don’t spew your dipping tobacco into an empty soda bottle in front of a customer. This is the kind of mentoring that Steve believes is important. He seems to enjoy the opportunity to help a young person who hasn’t had certain advantages. He always knew that when he had his own business, he would run it the way he always dreamed a company could be run.
“After corporate America for twenty-five years, I always made little notations of how things were done right, and how things were wrong, more wrong than right. And I put them in the back of my head, that if I ever did start my own company, I’d call on all that experience and bring it to bear, so to speak.”
In 2004 Steve’s wife, Betsy, saw an opportunity. When they needed to get some stuff out of their house, a job that was a little bit bigger than the two of them could handle or had time to handle, the Welhausens looked for help. As they remember it, they could only find what they describe as “two creepy dudes and an old, beat-up truck. The kind of guys that know the Texas Department of Correction’s school song forward and backward.” Betsy wondered if the time was right and if by using Steve’s skills they could do better. She remembers, “He was in high-tech at the time. And I don’t know, he was kind of burned out, I think. And he has always put such a professional spin on just whatever he’s done. He’s just a good people person. And he, you know, takes good care of people, business relationships, and personal, and everything else. I saw an article on 1-800-GOT JUNK. And kind of brought it to his attention, too. And I think just the combination of those two, we were kind of like, ‘You know what? He could do that.’”
Steve went into research mode. He would get up at three in the morning and scour the web and business books to figure out how to do this. The main thing he learned was that the field was wide open. “It is rare. If you think of any other industry, they’ve been around fifty years. There’s four hundred competitors—carpet cleaning, AC repair, pest control. And when I did the national search, it came up blank, except for that one company.” Rather than be intimidated, Steve saw a potential flaw in their franchise model. “GOT JUNK? still, to this day, has a very FedEx, big corporate America feel to them. You cannot, in my humble opinion, get a warm fuzzy, or it’s challenging to. At least not in my area; it might be different, depending on the franchise owner, somewhere else in the US. So we want it to be like Southwest compared to GOT JUNK? being American Airlines. A different feel—and not take ourselves too seriously, and I think that’s reflected in not only the website, but how we do business.” Their marketing results in what might be called the double-take-then-smile method.
Junk Busters’ motto is “Satisfaction or twice your junk back.” Steve’s official title is CJO—Chief Junk Officer. For him it is ultimately about the customer’s experience. “I train the employees on, ‘Let’s have coffee with them.’ Let’s have that tone in our conversations with them, like you’re talking to your neighbor, or having a cup of coffee with a good friend. And that’s kind of how we built the company up. But better value, more personable, more than anything else.”
One thing Steve realized that the big guys perfected was the junk removal vehicle. The trucks were awesome and he wanted one. When it comes to business, Steve follows Picasso’s belief that good artists copy, great artists steal. “I actually tracked down who made the GOT JUNK? trucks out of Alberta, Canada. And I called up there, and got the owner of the company on the phone. And they were processing, like, five a week to GOT JUNK? and I said, ‘Well, I’m starting a recycle company down here in Austin, I was curious if you’d build us a truck.’ And he’s like, ‘Recycle? Do you want to put bins on the side?’ And I was, like, ‘Uh, no, we would like them in the back.’ And it was so funny. And he drew it for, like, twenty minutes, and he goes, ‘Do you just want me to build you a truck like the other guys?’ And I said yeah. He said, ‘I’ll make a couple of changes to it, and we’ll ship it to you.’” From the first moment he considered the idea to when the business opened was four months. Irene was his in the summer of 2004 for $45,000. Bertha joined in 2005 and Agnes came along in 2007.
By the time they are ready to move the piano, Irene arrives with Frank and Chase. Steve pulls up in his car behind them. He wants to make sure the piano gets out in good condition and that this very good customer is happy. The plan is to give the instrument to a member of his church. The family has a talented son but they can’t afford a piano like this one. The client said yes to the unorthodox donation chain.
James pulls Steve aside and explains that the job has grown and how it will certainly exceed the estimate. Steve nods patiently and just tells him to go with the original price. It is one of those moments that someone who spent his life in corporate American loves. He is the boss. On the spot he can make the decision to cut a repeat customer a deal. James shrugs. He later tells me, “He truly believes in customer service. Even if it cuts into his own money.” While a young go-getter guy like James seems a little confused by the choice, Steve Welhausen knows what he is doing.
And James knows that Steve knows wh
at he is doing. That’s why he has been in business for about a decade. Steve is a pioneer in junk removal in the Texas Hill Country. Each and every one of the guys who work for Junk Busters has great admiration for their boss. Scott, who has worked fifteen or sixteen jobs, says Steve is the best boss he’s ever had. “Steve is the reason I am here,” Frank says. Steve credits his wife, Betsy, as the reason that he can be the boss he wants to be. “We never would have made it without her support, marketing, and ideas, and thoughts, and no way we would have made it past the first year without her.”
Rolling down the highway, the guys tell stories like old war vets. They remember their first hoarder house. For years the owner had engaged in a practice known as the “shop and drop.” The person would buy something, then just bring it home and never even open the bag—just drop it on the floor and never touch it again. They found loads of purchased items that had not been used with tags still on, in bags so old they were disintegrating. At another job they found a huge dog statue that they put in the front passenger seat as a gag. It turned out to be worth $500. Then there was the divorcée who was the executor of her late ex-husband’s estate. She wanted to clean out a storage unit that she never knew her husband had rented. “We show up. They open it up and it is full of porn! Playboy. Hustler. Videos!” James can’t stop laughing as he tells the story. Apparently the gentleman had this unit for about fifteen years. He spent closet to $20,000 to keep his stash hidden. James remembers the woman being furious and just wanting it all gone, but her son was a bit wiser. He spied a first edition of Playboy from December 1953 with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. Copies of that edition have sold for as low as $7,040 dollars and as high as $39,000.1
Irene and Agnes pull up to a cul-de-sac to unload the piano. When they are parked in a normal middle-class neighborhood with normal driveways rather than in front of a McMansion, you can see how huge the trucks really are. Carefully, the four Junk Busters get the piano off of Irene.
The family is clearly moved by the donation. With a little bit of encouragement from the guys, Scott jumps on the stool and opens the top of the instrument and gives an impromptu concert. He begins to play and sing the John Legend smooth jam, “All of Me.” He has a warm, husky voice that fills up the room. The piano sounds great, and so does Scott. And because we are in Austin, live music capital of the world, of course the junk removal guy plays the piano and can sing! “You’re gonna hear about me one day,” he says with a big smile when we get back in the truck. He was in a band, but the two other guys got a great offer to tour, so they left. “I don’t blame them.” Scott couldn’t go because he has a lot of responsibilities. At nineteen he is helping to raise a niece, and his fiancée has a rare neurovascular disorder. He is working to put her through school to become a sonogram tech. “We gotta do for ourselves. We didn’t have anyone to pay for college or buy us a car when we were sixteen. We have to take care of ourselves. So I may have to put my dream on hold.” The plan is that once she is established and can be the breadwinner for a while, he can pursue his music. He still has an occasional gig and is excited because he was just booked for a wedding.
Everything about that one morning of junk removal, from the minimansion to the piano-playing worker with a tough life story, sums up the town of Austin, Texas, these days. Tech industry boom. College kids. Musicians with day jobs. Other Junk Busters calls on the docket for the week reveal the rest of the story: an office clean out, a barn clean out, a quote for a hot tub removal, and a college grad who needs his couch gone because he is upgrading. If you look at a town’s junk, it can tell you a lot about what’s going on locally. In 2013 Austin was one of the fastest-growing major cities in the United States. Metro Austin saw its population jump by nearly half a million people in the first decade of the twenty-first century.2 One demographer published an astounding finding in 2014: 110 people move to Austin every day.3
The growth has created some problems. Traffic is insane. Traffic is the enemy to professional junk removal because time on the road is time away from a job. Steve decided the workday would start at 7:00 AM and end by 3:00 PM in an effort to avoid having trucks trapped in a bumper-to-bumper jam, not making money. And there’s an ongoing fight for the soul of the city. The “Keep Austin Weird” campaign, created by folks who helped foster the creative, fun vibe of the place, is fighting to keep the city from becoming too sanitized and generic. City originals are also fighting to keep the area from being carved up and sold to the highest bidder. At a local bar, I overheard an older Texan who had clearly never been acquainted with sunscreen tell the bartender, “Some realtor told me I lived in Travis Heights? What the hell is Travis Heights?” According to a real estate blog, Travis Heights is an “eclectic historic neighborhood.”
All the development is good for a junk removal company. However, one particular challenge is that Steve has done such a good job with marketing, logos, and his website that some people think Junk Busters USA is national chain—and that’s not necessarily a good thing in Austin. People like to spend money locally. Steve explains that he had to tack USA on the name because of other businesses with the same name. He then concedes that maybe his site looks a little too slick. He has recently amped up the locally owned angle, but he does not begrudge the city’s growth. It has saved the company. He jokingly says he thought he was a genius from 2004 to 2008. Things were going great. He added trucks, had an office, and even tried to expand into San Antonio.
“We had a fourth truck on order. We had more employees than where I needed to put them. We had a nice big office. We had people answering the phone. Yeah, times were good. Yeah, we were knocking down some pretty good numbers every day, running two trucks solid, three trucks, possibly, yeah, three trucks. And it was like somebody threw a switch.” The financial collapse in 2008 almost killed Junk Busters. The jobs just dried up. Steve had to downsize, fast. The office went. The San Antonio branch was closed. Some people who needed to be laid off were. They stayed open, but things changed. Now Steve works from home and has created a virtual office. And not all days go well.
The day after the feel-good piano donation, they stumbled on an office clean out from hell. After a Texas drought, it rained. Biblical rain. Eanes Creek flowed over Bee Cave Road, so it was closed during morning rush hour. This made the second truck forty minutes late.
Dollies were needed to haul big, industrial-sized trash cans full of old office supplies, memos, papers, and boxes. “Where did you put the pliers, bro?” Scott shouts, realizing the dolly has blown a tire and they still have many file cabinets to remove. The tire needs replacing. There was a fair amount of grunting even from big Frank. Then James sliced his hand pretty good on some metal. This was all before noon.
They work out a system where one of the guys loads stuff into a thirty-two-gallon can, two other relay it up to the truck, and then James figures out how to load it. This office clean out requires them to walk down a muddy embankment and through the basement. They were suspiciously eyeing the ground for poison ivy.
The recession may not have closed down Junk Busters, but poison ivy once did. Steve shakes his head as he retells the story. “We get a call from a guy who says he tore down this barn. Can you come haul it away? And we were out there for, like, three days hauling just lumber and all sorts of stuff. Never saw a poison ivy bush. And a couple of days later, somebody broke out. The next day, another one of the boys broke out, the next day the other boy broke out. And I am horribly allergic to poison ivy. I can go in our backyard and there can be one plant in the back end of the property, and I will come down with it. We shut the whole company down for, like, four days because we were down with it. We’re like, ‘We’re going to take Benadryl, we’re going to turn the lights down, we’re going to lay in bed and moan for days,’ because we couldn’t get ahead of it.”
No poison ivy here, just mud and heavy files. “I can tell what kind of day it is going to be by looking at my shirt.” James’s shirt was filthy. He had to change by noon.
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nbsp; But most days are not that dramatic. They are small jobs that make people’s lives a little bit easier. “I just want it gone, gone, gone,” is what the woman said as she waved her hand at the old red barn behind her. The house had a FOR SALE sign. “I just got to the point where I was tired and I couldn’t find a habitat for it.” “It” being all the stuff in the barn. They tell her, No problem, quote the price, and let her know to wait in the house. They will come get her when they are done. Sometimes it is easier when the client doesn’t watch. James likes the look on their faces when they come back and whatever space that had been jammed with stuff is empty and broom clean. It took about twenty minutes to get a barn full of plywood and old tools in that condition. He and James look back at their work.
“When it is all gone. That’s the magic.”
It is a different kind of magic and junk, city to city.
Trash Daddy Junk Removal: Akron, Ohio
Brian Kaiser is on a reconnaissance mission for an upcoming eviction “set-out.” Driving a big, shiny, black 2006 Dodge Ram 3500 truck with dark-tinted windows and no company logo, Brian sets off to a part of Akron that has seen better days. Brian’s business, Trash Daddy Junk Removal, is often hired by real estate agents or rental agencies to remove the belongings of someone who will be getting the boot for not paying rent.
“When you [the property owner] evict somebody, the bailiff sets an appointment.” Brian knows the ins and outs of the law better than some agencies. “We have to be there during the appointment. If the people are there, he [the bailiff] kicks them out. And then we set all their stuff on the curb or the front yard or driveway. And we have to make sure that we bag it, what can be bagged. If it’s a couch, a fridge, we can’t, obviously. But things, we have to take respect with their stuff and put it out there respectfully. And then we have to wait twenty-four hours from the scheduled time of the eviction set-out. A lot of Realtors don’t understand that. They think we can pull up, load all of these people’s stuff in our truck. Well, we’re liable to be sued at that point. So, those are some issues that we run into.” Another issue is that the deadbeat tenant might not be too happy he or she is being asked to leave. This is why Brian or one of his lieutenants does an initial drive-by of the property in an unmarked vehicle, to see if the house is still inhabited or if there are any dogs or signs of illegal activity. “We’ve had them to where we’ve actually had the sheriff out before.”
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