Dave Hughes, North Little Rock, Ark., bought a College Hunks Hauling Junk franchise last year for his son Nolen, then 22 and graduating from college. Dave had to cash in a retirement account, and Nolen had moved back home with his dad to conserve money.

“You have to be willing to make sacrifices when you own your own company,” Dave told Nolen. When the two disagree, Dave says he has learned to step back. “If we butt heads, most of the time I just walk away and say, ‘OK, fine, I told you what I had to say,’ ” Dave says. But Nolen has worked hard, often rising before dawn to drive his big trash-hauling truck around the city during rush hour. “It’s a big billboard,” he says.

His father is pleased. “Nolen has more business savvy than I did at his age,” Dave Hughes says. He heaved a sigh of relief when the business broke into the black a few months ago. After that, “I didn’t worry any more. I think Nolen will be rolling on his own by next year,” Dave says.

READ THE FULL WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE

Until recently, we had little, to no experience with larger demolition projects. Last week the College Hunks tackled a 17-foot camper trailer that needed to be removed and recycled. This was no ordinary job and it has quite the back story. Sadly, the circumstances are most unfortunate. A homeless man who had been spending his evenings in the camper died and remained their unfound for weeks. Once the family who owned the camper found the dead homeless man, his body was removed and the trailer was cleaned by Crime Scene Cleaners. College Hunks Hauling Junk then got the call to remove the camper. It was quite the daunting task, but well within the capabilities of the multi-talented College Hunks. With Sawz-All in hand the Colleg Hunks cut the camper apart piece-by-piece and removed the entire camper in record time. Over 65% of the camper was recycled as well!

While this scenario is unlikely to happen, the College Hunks are always prepared to handle any demolition job sent their way. Next time you need something large demolished call the College Hunks and let them have at it.
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Looking to earn some extra cash during summer break, two college seniors put their heads together and came up with what would become a multimillion-dollar junk hauling company.

But they knew in order to succeed, they needed to stand out from the rest, so they came up with a catchy name and unique branding.

“We were just trying to come up with something catchy, and the name seemed to resonate with people and catch their attention as well as make them smile,” said Nick Friedman, co-founder and president of College Hunks Hauling Junk, who started the Tampa, Fla.-based company in June 2005 with longtime friend Omar Soliman. “Our clean-cut collegiate image, our progressive thinking in terms of recycling and community involvement, and our focus on providing our clients with a fun and memorable experience that is not typical of a trash hauling service.”

What started with one cargo van became a franchised business in 2007 and now has more than 40 trucks, 22 franchises and 26 locations across the country, making Soliman and Friedman the youngest franchisors in America.

To read the full article, check out Waste & Recycling News.

“The purpose is to serve as a symbolic and inspirational message to our franchisees that the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ is the economy and we are going to be riding it head first into 2010 to overcome the obstacles that the 2009 economy set before us,” Friedman said in a release.

For the second year in a row, the corporate staff, franchisees and client loyalty associates gathered in Tampa at the Intercontinental Hotel for the “College Reunion” convention. New and existing franchise owners get together and discuss what’s working for them, exchange strategies and tips, and build new connections.

We are ALWAYS creating a fun and enthusiastic team environment (the elephant and the mascots!) and we were also building leaders (the high school marching band!). Watch the video!

The CrossFit Games are the ultimate test of fitness. It’s a grueling three-day competition in which the world’s fittest athletes compete in a variety of workouts. What are the workouts? Each year they change, and the details of them are not announced until a couple days before the event. The regional games are a means to qualify for the 2010 World Crossfit Games held in Aromas, CA on July 16-18, 2010.

The 2010 US North Central Regional CrossFit Games will be April, 30 – May, 2 at:

The Douglas County Event Center
500 Fairgrounds Dr.
Castle Rock, CO 80104

Click here to BUY TICKETS and watch some awesome athletes!

Hoarding can cause more problems than simply aesthetic ones. While clutter does cause an unsightly mess it can also be the cause for much more serious problems. Families are torn apart, homes are lost, and childhoods are ruined because of hoarding. In serious cases the problem gets so bad that homes are deemed unlivable by the city and families are forced out. Children in extreme cases have been taken away from their parents because the home is no longer livable. This is an issue that is much more serious than most think and needs to be fixed in the early stages before the problem progresses to the point where the earlier mentioned problems arise.

Those who need help with hoarding should begin by seeking help from a professional who deals with the mental/medical causes of hoarding. This is the best place to start when attempting to cope with the problems that hoarding can cause. The next step is to get organized and de-clutter. A professional organizer who specializes in dealing with hoarders would be a great person to contact in regards to this. The professional organizer will help you sort through the mess and separate what should be kept from the items that need to be discarded. The organizer will be a wonderful resource and can objectively look at the items without emotions coming into play. The organizer will help sort the items and help prepare for the next step which is removal of the excess items. This is where a junk removal company such as College Hunks Hauling Junk, would come into play. These professional junk haulers will come in and remove the excess items so that the home/space can be clutter free and livable.

The average home in an active senior community has two bedrooms and a significantly smaller number of square footage than their previous home. Retirees also spend more time at home than adults under 65 years of age. Both factors lead to an increased risk of overcrowded rooms. Cluttered and unsafe storage create hazardous surroundings for seniors and contribute to falls and injuries in the home. More than one third of adults 65 and older fall each year in the United States and twenty percent to 30% of people who fall suffer moderate to severe injuries such as bruises, hip fractures or head traumas. These injuries can limit mobility and hamper independent living.

College Hunks Hauling Junk removed a number of unwanted items from the seniors homes and provided the labor and know-how with moving large items within the households.

Volunteers of America is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping older Americans live safely and independently in their own homes.

See the Video and the Channel 9 News Story

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:

• Read about NICK’s Matchmaker Experience
• Read about OMAR’s Matchmaker Experience

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.

Read Full Article at INC Magazine.

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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).

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