222. How a Broke College Kid Built a Business That Scales in Real Estate

0:00Nick didn't start college hunks hauling junk with a grand vision of franchising or a$300 million dollar business in mind. He started because his corporate job felt wrong and because an old cargo van and a funny name revealed something most people miss, demand hides in plain sight. What began as a summer side hustle turned into one of the most recognizable service brands in the country with 200 franchises,$300 million in revenue, system-wide sales, and a business that has survived the 2008 housing collapse, COVID, and volatile housing market while continuing to grow. And Nick's story is about building systems before scale, turning skepticism into fuel and embracing what makes you different instead of sanding it down.

0:43This episode is gonna break down how college hunks went from flyers in a beat up van to national franchise machine, but service founders can steal from that playbook today. Nick, thank you so much for joining the podcast here. Great to see you again. I know I did the YouTube shoot with you, but thank you so much for being here again. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's gonna be so good. And if people haven't seen the iconic huge orange trucks, are thinking, what is College Hunks? What is College Hunks? So we are a national franchise that offers moving and junk removal. Think about anything that trucks and labor can do.

1:14We go into homes, we go into offices, haul away unwanted furniture, debris, and then also move people from point A to point B. We say, remove the things you love, we get rid of the things you don't. And as you mentioned, we've got 200 franchises around the country that are operating and performing that work. And it's so cool to see all your guys' trucks. I was telling you when I came back from that shoot, I actually saw your truck outside. So I think that was like a sign from above about like how big you guys are and how cool that interview was. I always say when you see that truck just for that moment, you know that all is well in the world because of what that represents and the story behind it.

1:43I love it. And I alluded to it in the intro here, but what revenue are you guys doing here in 2024? I know we're at the end of 2025, whatever you can share there. Yeah, absolutely. We're on track to do about 300 million in annual sales, which is hard for me to even wrap my head around being that we started, as you mentioned, with a beat up cargo van and kind of just a dream and a catchy name back in college. Well, let's start back in college then. So, you know, you had the dream, you had the cargo van. I mean, how, what is the origin story of college hunks? Yeah, I would say most kids don't grow up saying, Hey, I want to own a moving company when I grow up, or, Hey, I want to be a junk hauler when I grow up.

2:14And I was no exception to that. I was brought up to follow the more traditional career path. You work hard in school, you get good grades, you get a job, you move up the corporate ladder, but it was actually the summer before our senior year of college. We were home for summer vacation. My best friend from high school, his mom had a beat up cargo van from her furniture store. And she said, once you guys go take the van, you can move furniture, haul junk away. And then she looked us up and down. She goes, you guys can be college hunks who haul junk. And we laughed about it at first. That was, I think, the first time anybody even called me a hunk.

2:40So you can come by it honestly. But I was like, you know what? That's kind of catchy. Why don't we make that into a flyer and stick in the mailboxes? And people had a need for the service. They thought the name was catchy. So that was really the light bulb moment for me, where it was something we could do. We did it that summer. Went back to school, graduated, got regular jobs briefly and said, you know what? let's make this a year round venture. I think most college kids would probably stop after college. We decided to, you know, see how far we could take. And here we are 20 years later. I call it a 20 year overnight success.

3:07We've made it into quite a business. Yeah, quite the business indeed. So you started before your senior year of college. So did you work on it all during your senior year? Or is it just a summer thing, like a summer fling in a sense, but like a summer thing? Yeah. Talk to me. Probably more like a summer fling. Although our senior year of college, we had an opportunity to write a business plan for an entrepreneurship competition. And we submitted it and it ended up winning first prize out of about 150 entries when we were seniors in college. So that did give us a little more confidence in the idea.

3:35I think a little more credibility to the concept. But even with that, we still decided to go into the quote unquote real world after college and get a real job. And I remember being just very unfulfilled about three months into that experience and emailing Omar, my business partner, my best friend at the time, still my best friend, by the way, and said, hey, what's our timeline for starting this business on a year round venture? He emailed me back all capital letters by timelines right now, exclamation point, let's do this. So, you know, there was some skepticism from people, outsiders, you know, you're gonna quit your job to haul junk and I call it college hunk.

4:04Are you throwing away your college degree to start a junk business? But we decided to prove those doubters wrong and just kind of keep going. I wanna make this actual for our listeners as well. So the college hunks hauling junk, that's obviously super catchy. You're 22 out of school. I'm sure you look great now. I'm sure you looked phenomenal back then as well. That's like an advantage because like it is catchy. It's kind of fun. Like College Hunks like definitely has a ring to it. How should founders like think about naming their business? And next question for that is like, why was College Hunks hauling junk such an advantage early on?

4:34You know, I think of it as kind of a pattern interrupt. It's not what people typically associate with moving or hauling. And it's, you know, bright orange and green colors, bright, shiny trucks. And so I do think that the name and the image is important to stand out. I realized very quickly it was a conversation piece. People would be like, wait, what are you doing? What's it called? We got kind of annoyed. They'd be like, well, are they all really hunks? Are they all really in college? But we said, you know what? At least they're asking questions. They're curious. They want to find out more. And there was a book we read called The Purple Cow by Seth Godin.

5:02And he's talking about if you're driving down a country road, you see a field of brown cows, you've seen it before, you're just going to keep driving. But if there's a purple cow sitting in that field, you're going to pull over, take pictures of it, put it on social media, tell your friends about it, ask about why is that cow purple? And so to me, that's really the key is if somebody is getting started in a business, think of something that's going to stand out in a crowded landscape, both the name, the colors, but then you also have to have the stake behind the sizzle. So it's not just enough to have a catchy name and catchy colors, but you got to have a service or product that really backs it up or is also different and unique and remarkable in its own way.

5:34Another question that comes to mind here as well as standing out early on, obviously channels have changed. It was over whatever, 20 years ago to become such an overnight success. But like what you know now, someone wanted to start a similar company from ground zero. They're like, hey, I want to be the next Nick and just start this myself. Like of what you know now about like acquiring customers, like what would be the best customer acquisition strategy early on? I'll throw in a plug for our franchise. If you don't want to go it alone, you can look at our franchise opportunities. But if somebody wants to get into a business and get started on their own, whether it's in this field or any other field, start with a simple, you know, old school method of business card, logo on the truck or the vehicle or a magnet on your personal vehicle, flyers.

6:12and social media didn't exist when we got started. So it was kind of old grassroots door hangers, park in our truck, invisible locations. People thought we had multiple trucks, even though we just had the one truck is because we strategically put it in different parts of town where people would notice it and think that we had more than one vehicle. And then I always say, don't be ashamed or self-conscious about promoting what it is that you're doing, especially at the beginning, because if you're not the one advocating for your solution, who will? Eventually, yes, you'll get great ambassadors and your clients and evangelists and your team members.

6:42But coming out of the gates, you gotta be the one that's telling everybody about what it is that you're doing and how you can help them. So we were knocking on neighbors' doors. We were calling on local real estate offices and just kind of being, we like to say, the mayor of our market in the moving and junk removal space. Putting the truck everywhere is like, that is your strategic advantage. Talk to us a little bit more about that, yeah. We call it parketing. It's really simple, right? A monthly billboard on a high traffic area might cost you 5 ,000 bucks a month, But that truck is a rolling billboard.

7:11And we say nothing gets the trucks on the road like the trucks on the road because people see it. It creates a brand impression. Somebody has to see a brand seven, eight times, maybe nowadays 27 times before it even registers in their subconscious. And so being in a visible location, we would cut deals with a local gas station or a vacant lot, you know, like where you see the Christmas trees or you see the fireworks pop up seasonally. Those lots might be looking for some, you know, additional income when the Christmas trees and the fireworks aren't there. So we would pay them a small amount monthly to be able to put our truck there when it wasn't being used.

7:42And it just, again, it's eyeballs and impressions and something that we continue to this day to preach to our franchise owners as a critical part of their business. Talk to us about the orange truck as well. I mean, was that your idea? Was that Omar's idea? Cause that's something to me, like if I see the orange truck now, I'm like, I like, I don't even have to see the name. Like I know like who exactly that is. And like, I'm happy to say I've been able to interview you like twice now. I'm very grateful for that. But like, talk to us about like the orange truck. Like how did that come out to be?

8:06Yeah, well, we were, we were looking at college and professional sports teams to try to come up with a color scheme. And we were just, we were looking at different combinations and sports teams that really stand out and are viewed as somewhat iconic. And we were talking to a designer and they said, hey, you know, orange and green really goes well together. They pop. And a light bulb went off for us because that's actually where Omar went to school for undergrad and got his business degree was University of Miami. And that's a smaller private university, but everybody knows the Miami Hurricanes.

8:34So we were like, yeah, that's it. Like let's sort of mirror and imitate something that's already sort of commonly known. Now we tell people that the orange represents our fun, playful culture. The green represents our environmentally friendly recycling practices because not everybody likes the Miami Hurricanes, of course. We don't want to discount customers that might be, you know, avid Miami Hurricane haters. But yeah, I mean, those colors stood out. We knew that if we got those on our trucks, we got those on our uniforms, it could create a memorable impression in a crowded landscape. And that's what we continue to do.

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9:40That sounds like a little bit of like guerrilla marketing in a sense. When did you guys make the shift into like paid then? And like, what should founders know about like, when's the right time to go into like paid channels? I think marketing has to be a mix. You know, the guerrilla marketing is tried and true. It's been around since probably the stone ages, right? Just, just pounding the pavement, getting your name out there, whether it's door hangers, signs, flyers, posting up on local bulletin boards and the coffee shops. So we continue to do that to this day. But right as we were starting was actually right around the time paid Google searches started to be a thing and things were moving away from the yellow pages into paid Google search.

10:17And so we started dipping our foot in the water and realizing, hey, this is where people are looking for this type of service. So we got to get in the game. And then Facebook came about and now Instagram and TikTok and some of the other social media platforms as well. And I think it's actually also sort of a resurgence now, even in TV and cable television, because there's so many messages that are getting bombarded to people that are scrolling through their phones. So you got to try to meet people where they are. And so I would say it was about six months into our business where we were able to cashflow the business enough.

10:47We didn't have a lot of overhead. We were still working from home. We were parking the truck in our parents' driveway. And we realized, hey, let's start experimenting with some more paid advertising. And it started with Google Pay Per Click. That's still a big part of our advertising mix today. And now it's evolved, as I mentioned, into more of a holistic marketing mix. And I think a marketing, almost like an investment portfolio. You see those pie charts where you have no-cost advertising, but then you have other investments of where you might deploy. Some might be TV, radio, which are higher cost.

11:16Others might be Facebook and Google, which are more lower funnel where people are actually looking for the service. We've done some direct mail as well. And so I think evolving and exploring and being willing to try things and making sure you're measuring the results was critical. Were you guys able to hop on early trends then and identify like what works. That's kind of what it sounds like with the Google, where it was transitioning away from yellow pages. You guys were able to like kind of identify like, oh, people are starting to go to Google. Let's like test it and like double down on it. Sounds like you guys kind of did that with TikTok and et cetera.

11:44A hundred percent. I mean, I remember we took out yellow page ads. That's how old our business is. We advertise in the yellow pages and the yellow page sales representatives, but recognize that those are becoming almost like stone age tablets that people weren't looking at anymore. And people's eyeballs were on the computer. People were going to Google for their answers. Now with AI search, that's going to become something that we're evaluating and looking at as well, because AI is giving people answers beyond Google pay-per-click. And so I think just being open-minded and being a learner and leaning into some of these new strategies and trends is critical as you're evolving your business and hoping to scale the business.

12:23The other day I was like, I might actually just start like an AEO agency, like an IEO, I guess, artificial intelligence engine, like optimization agency. So I might be giving you a cold call and asking if you need some services. Absolutely. I think a lot of the SEO companies are having to add that into their competencies because the organic search on Google is now becoming a little bit overrun and overloaded by the Gemini search or the chat GBT searches. And so, you know, those searches are crawling a different type of result and providing a different type of feedback than what your traditional kind of search engine optimization, organic results in Google is giving you.

13:02So how are you guys standing out in the market? Like currently, because there is no lie, there are a lot of moving businesses out there. You guys are like really in the belly of the beast with it. You guys are obviously a titan in the industry, but like, there's a lot. How do you guys like stand out? Like when you guys are marketing, like, what's the keys to that that people should know? I think it's nuanced. I think it starts with the image and just making sure that you're visible as a consumer brand, we always are promoting, always branding is one of our core values. So we just sort of made that ingrained in our DNA at the franchisee level.

13:32We encourage them to get out into networking groups. We encourage them to continue the guerrilla marketing efforts, but then it evolves. So like you get a customer or a lead, that lead is gold and you got to treat it as such. So being the first to be able to answer the call or first to respond to an online inquiry, when you do book an appointment, and making sure that it is a positive experience, it's going to turn into an online review or potentially a referral to turn into more business. So you create that loyalty, that loyalty loop, because people aren't moving every other month. It's not a subscription service.

14:01And so loyalty and reputation and reviews and referrals are so critical to creating a sustainable business. And so, of course, we made an intentional focus on the marketing and advertising, but I think we made an even bigger focus on how we train our labor, how we train our estimators, our hunks, as we call them. And we made HUNKS actually into an acronym, which stands for honest, uniform, nice, knowledgeable service. And that's become our brand promise. And so we tell our clients and we tell our team members, like, that's what people are expecting. That's what we're promising them. So we've got to deliver that on every single touch point so that we can stand out.

14:35And services in general, whether it's our industry or otherwise, can be littered with mediocrity. And so if we can do things better from an execution standpoint, we can create longevity in this business. And you can, too, in any business. I think that's what's so important about any home service base. Honestly, any company is like, you know, just doing the little things right can set you ahead of so much farther than competition. I think it's cliche to say, like, focus on the customer experience. But it's true. Your customers are paying your bills. But you also got to focus on your team member experience because your team members are delivering the customer experience.

15:06And so we do an exercise both with our team members and how we train them is what do our team members expect when they come to work for us? what might upset them as a team member and what can we do as a company to 100 % of the time to meet their expectations. Same thing on the customer side. We do an exercise where we make a list, a column, you know, what are customers expecting when they call us out to move their furniture, haul their junk away? What are things that could go wrong? Usually it's a missed expectation. So late, damages, rude, not a frictionless experience. And then we come up with a list of non-negotiables that we call them 100 % of the time activities that we can do to sort of mitigate the likelihood of those complaints or likelihood of those missed expectations happening.

15:45And so training is, I think, critical in any business. We say if you're not training, you're not gaining. We say that training is something we do. It's not something we did. So it's just an ongoing reinforcement of the college hunks way of interacting with the customers and delivering the service. That is so good. I want to get into the ops standpoint of this because we've hammered home marketing. We talked a little bit more about hiring and leading and that. We'll talk more about leadership as well. But ops of this, I mean, when you guys were just getting started, were you the ones actually hauling everything away?

16:14Like and how long did it take for you to actually like hire someone else to do and like step out of that role? We were doing all the work ourselves. We were driving the trucks. We were answering the phones. We were hauling the junk. I think I told you on the YouTube video. We had an 800 number because we want to make ourselves look like a national company. We put it on the back of the truck, but it was still routed to our cell phone. So people called to complain about driving. I'd be in the driver's seat answering the phone saying, oh, yeah, we'll fire those guys when they get back to the office.

16:36probably fired ourselves three or four times that first summer. And we started to burn out a little bit. And one of our mentors recommended to us a book called The E-Myth Revisited by a guy named Michael Gerber. And really the key message in that book is that in order to scale a business, you've got to learn how to not just work in it, but learn how to work on it, which basically means creating systems and processes for the business to grow. So when we read the book, it felt like it was written about us. And it was like the next light bulb moment for us where we said, hey, if we're ever going to have another truck, let alone another location, we got to just start documenting how we do everything.

17:08And so we just started creating simple checklists. Nowadays, you know, we didn't have the luxury of a chat CBT that could help, you know, map out those checklists for us. We had to kind of create them manually. And then when we started hiring people, we would encourage them and empower them to help improve whatever systems might be missing. If somebody was saying, hey, this isn't working or this customer situation went sideways, we would always ask ourselves, well, what system could we put in place to help prevent that or do a better job with that in the future? And so I think that mindset shift is what allowed us to ultimately hire people and then shift.

17:38And that probably was six months into where we were like burning out on the trucks and we were like, hey, we got to figure out another way of doing this. Otherwise, we're just going to be sort of slaving away in our own business perpetually. And I think a lot of business owners fall into that trap and don't figure out a way to sort of delegate and elevate themselves out of it. Delegate Elevate. That's really good there. I think building systems is like, it's so critical, but like for me and my own company, like it's like a hard step to take. I mean, was it hard for you? I don't know if it's just me and like my IQ level, obviously, but like, I mean, was it hard for you to do that?

18:08Nothing in business is easy. I mean, some stuff comes a little bit more naturally to people than others when it comes to entrepreneurship or business leadership, but all of it is, I think, develop muscle memory and muscle improvement and creating systems was no exception. So like I said, it just started with writing in a notepad, what we were doing every day and stuff that we just sort of were doing a second nature, like loading the truck in the morning or answering the phone to a customer. We just started writing down scripts. Again, nowadays you can go to like a chat GPT or other AI platforms.

18:36It can help at least write that first draft for you. And I think that shortcuts a lot of the heavy lifting that maybe we had to do ourselves or same with your platforms that you guys offer, right? The master class that I did with you guys, those things didn't exist or weren't as easily accessible. So I had to read books and go to conferences and listen to speakers and try to adopt those best practices that I was hearing from books and speakers and bring them back into my business. So I think playbooks and formulas are a lot more readily accessible nowadays, which makes the execution side that much more critical.

19:06It's so, so critical. This is a large question here. If you could give advice to someone that is starting a moving company, obviously you guys have it all scripted out. So go to you first. Second, if they're like, I'm absolutely not doing that, they should, but they're not. What would be like the first two or three that someone should absolutely like SO key out for actually moving because no one wants to continue to move stuff. So actually moving the stuff. So believe it or not, I always say with businesses, you got to have a foundational framework first. And so the what and the how is the tactical, but I actually like to start and encourage people to start with the why and the where and the who meaning why are we doing what we're doing?

19:43Like, why do we even exist? Yes, we want to make money. Yes, I want to create a living and a lifestyle and be able to have nice things. But like, why am I really here as a business? And it's to solve people's problems. It's to make a positive impact. It's to be a great platform for franchise owners and team members. So we started with the why. And I would encourage any business owner to start with the why first. And then the where is, what are you trying to create? Like, we had this vision of being a national brand. That was our destination, starting with the end in mind. So, you know, having a destination of where you want to be three years from now.

20:11And then having a set of values that defines the type of people that you want to bring into your organization to help make that vision a reality. So get those steps in first. I think that gets overlooked by a lot of business owners because you rush straight to the how and the what. And then the how and the what is the tactical stuff. That's the blocking and tackling. So the how and the what would be a phone script. How do we answer the call? How do we close a sale? How do we overcome objections? The how and the what would be the in-home estimation. How do I walk through and estimate how long this job is going to take and how much I should charge for it.