College Hunks Hauling Junk founders, Omar Soliman and Nick Friedman, went to “Love Doctor” Patti Stanger for some relationship lessons.
At the outset Soliman is worried that women just want him for his money, and Friedman is skeptical of Stanger’s matchmaking skills.
Friedman says he had never seen the show but did some research after he was approached about appearing. He heard that Stanger was a pushy, abrasive woman. He wasn’t keen on having her supervise his love life.
On the show, Soliman wants to take his date on a junk haul to test whether she would still like him if he lost his money and had to start his career over. This doesn’t sit well with Stanger.
Friedman and Soliman are quickly becoming well-known reality stars after their first apperance on The Shark Tank, pitching their new business, College Foxes Packing Boxes. They have premiered each TV show’s season episode.
In his senior year, Soliman’s business plan for a junk removal service and online junk exchange won a $10,000 entrepreneurship competition.
The two buddies teamed up and started College Hunks Hauling Junk in 2004. They now have more than 25 franchises nationwide. Friedman says they relocated themselves and the company’s headquarters to Tampa two years ago. They were looking for an ideal locale to set up a national call center (for 1-800-Junk-USA).
Why would someone take a first date on a junk removal job? Find out here:
Nick Friedman had an idea. Suppose you could take the natural high spirits that compel college students to kidnap one another’s team mascots and toilet-paper rival frat houses and harness it for good?
Friedman is president of College Hunks Hauling Junk, a $3 million franchiser headquartered in Tampa. The company’s 23 franchises employ mostly college students and recent grads; even about half of the franchise owners are in their 20s. Friedman motivates employees almost exclusively through internal competition. Franchises and individuals vie for bragging rights and (generally modest) monetary rewards in contests over total revenue, average job sizes, customer loyalty, disposal costs, and a long list of other performance measures.
“A person’s day-to-day tasks don’t necessarily connect to external competition,” says Friedman, explaining this we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us approach. “Internal competition helps them be more productive at what they are accountable for. And ultimately, that puts the company in a better position to win market share.”
Friendly rivalry, of course, is endemic to college life, and the company’s early employees translated their frat-war sensibilities to the job. Shortly after College Hunks’s launch in 2005, haulers from its Virginia branch went out to their truck one morning and found it lathered in shaving cream and draped with a University of Maryland flag. They retaliated with a dead fish in the Maryland branch’s truck. Rather than reprimand the offenders, Friedman and CEO Omar Soliman fanned the flames. “We wanted to harness that competitive, prankster enthusiasm and channel it for good,” says Friedman. “So we challenged the two locations: Who can haul the most junk by summer?” He offered a Bahamas vacation to the winning team. Maryland triumphed, and a culture was born.
The founders soon dispensed with volume of junk collected in favor of key performance indicators as the bases for contests. They developed a dashboard — available to the entire company over an intranet — and created competitions around the numbers tracked there. Most employees check the dashboard every day for their own and rivals’ latest standings. To keep things fresh, Friedman and Soliman periodically add new contests. In the latest, franchises vie to see which can donate or recycle the most junk, thus burnishing College Hunks’s green cred while reducing landfill costs.
Everyday, COLLEGE HUNKS HAULING JUNK will be posting zipcodes that we will be servicing THAT day, on our twitter account. If you book for SAME-DAY junk removal service, in one of the zipcodes that was tweeted, then you will receive a substantial $50 discount off ANY truckload size! (LIMITED TO ONLY DENVER METRO AREA RESIDENTS) Just mention that you saw our Tweet!
Not only can you receive same-day, priority service, but also receieve a huge $50 discount! This is a thank-you from the College Hunks to all of you that follow and support us on Facebook and Twitter.
For more information about our services, what items we can remove, and other convinent services, like labor services, please visit www.JunkUSA.com or call 1-800-Junk-USA (800-586-5872).
TELL EVERYONE TO FOLLOW US ON TWITTER! We realize that not everyone has junk so we ask you to please pass this blog post onto other friends, family, or collegues that live in the Denver metro area so that they too can benefit from our fast and efficient junk removal services. Scroll over the ‘Share/Save’ button at the bottom of this post to pass on the savings!
Like a modern-day alchemist, Washington, DC-based Envion has developed a system to produce oil from waste plastic. Considering that the price of crude oil is once again on the rise, that’s not unlike turning rocks into gold. Envion, founded in 2004, is keeping the lid on the details of its proprietary technology, but does reveal that it involves extracting the hydrocarbons from plastic, and that low temperature thermal cracking in a vacuum is part of the process.
According to the company’s website, the Envion Oil Generator is both efficient and environmentally sensitive, producing a net gain in energy recaptured, with vent gas generating electricity to drive the unit. The machine accepts most types of waste plastic, without the need for pre-sorting or cleaning, and is able to handle plastic currently sitting in landfill sites. Given that in the US only 4% of the 48 million tons of plastic waste produced every year gets recycled, there’s plenty of raw material for Envion to work with. The company claims that a single oil generator can convert 10,000 tons of plastic into more than 50,000 barrels of oil a year, at a cost of USD 17 per ton. Given the cost of the alternatives—landfill at USD 70–200 per ton, and recycling at USD 50–150 per ton—Envion looks set to clean up. Envion is also developing an application of the technology to convert car tires into oil.
Although some will challenge that more oil consumption is not what the planet needs, Envion has come up with a commercially attractive solution to the problem of plastic waste, which should appeal to local authorities for whom waste management is an increasing struggle. - from Springwise
College Hunks Hauling Junk founders, Omar Soliman and Nick Friedman, went to “Love Doctor” Patti Stanger for some relationship lessons.
Nick Friedman had an idea. Suppose you could take the natural high spirits that compel college students to kidnap one another’s team mascots and toilet-paper rival frat houses and harness it for good?
Like a modern-day alchemist, Washington, DC-based Envion has developed a system to produce oil from waste plastic. Considering that the price of crude oil is once again on the rise, that’s not unlike turning rocks into gold. Envion, founded in 2004, is keeping the lid on the details of its proprietary technology, but does reveal that it involves extracting the hydrocarbons from plastic, and that low temperature thermal cracking in a vacuum is part of the process.
