AZ Haul

I’m an entrepreneur at heart and because of that I run very lean so while I’m not necessarily racing to the bottom with price so to speak, I do tend to beat out most prices because I save of a ton in overhead and operational cost. Because I spent most of my adult life doing marketing, I don’t spend a lot to acquire customers and in doing so I pass that savings on to you.

I try to get pictures of possible and depending on the state of what I’m picking up I might sell it to someone else to refurbish or donate it. if either of those two things are possible, then I charge less. Other than that, it boils down to how time-consuming and how costly it is for me to use waste management services to get rid of it.

This one is hard to answer because in the military, I was trained in all sorts of things that involve moving heavy objects and clearing pathways. I do have OSHA training, hazmat training, PMP, Agile and Lean Six Sigma certificates. Beyond that I spent about four years at a battery recycling facility and 80% of that job was collecting old, broken batteries, and stacking them up in order to sell them to a recycling plant. As far as business professionalism, pricing, marketing, and customer service I would attribute to common sense, but I do happen to have a masters degree in business so that might help a little.

Well, if you include my time in the army, it’s been since about 2010. Although most of my work has been in marketing throughout my career.

As far as Junk Removal is concerned, I mostly deal with people that just want to get rid of their bulk trash or a recently deceased family member left a bunch of stuff that they don’t want. Sometimes property managers hire me to do a bulk trash pick up when they have turnover tenants. Hoarder houses aren’t exactly out of the norm either. So many different types over the years. I worked in a jail for a short time and that changed my perspective on some people who are incarcerated. While in the military, I worked with people from all walks of life. Not that there are “customers” so to speak, but in the army you do end up doing a lot of shows and parades because people of all ages, especially little kids like to see the big military equipment. If I had to pick one customer base that was the most out there, I would say it was when I worked in off grid solar. Especially here in Arizona where there are thousands and thousands of off grid homes in the middle of the desert that most people don’t even know exist is interesting already. However, they fall into really fun categories on both sides of the political aisle and you’ll know which side they’re on because they’ll say it immediately. It was also fun being a part of the building process for somebody’s extra extravagant toy. One notable customer comes to mind when I think of this story and it’s because I asked him what he did to get to this place in life and it turns out he did really well selling suspenders. I had another person that wanted to be able to charge his Tesla with the little solar array, we designed for him. Mathematically, we had to explain to him that we would need a football field in order to achieve that. All sorts of interesting characters out there.

About a year ago, I had to remove two industrial batteries out of an off grid home which wouldn’t have been that difficult if we had a pallet jack or a forklift. The batteries were about 1000 pounds apiece and we were able to rig a pulley system and use some steel Bars in order to roll it onto the liftgate.

Timeliness and communication. There’s a two things that grind my gears so if they get in touch quickly and show up when they’re supposed to, they are 80% of the way to a perfect job in my opinion.

I think this one is very situation dependent but for Junk Removal I would just make sure they could show up on time with the right equipment and not charge me hourly while taking three lunch breaks. Another trick I learned a while ago that works in most situations like interviewing or hiring a contractor is to ask them to tell you something that you should have asked, but didn’t know to. after all we don’t know what we don’t know and it’s hard to ask questions if we don’t know that the question exists exists.