How Junk Jockey and Bullseye Movers Grew From $370K to About $1.2M on Referrals

How did Junk Jockey start?

Junk Jockey started with a Nextdoor post from a 15-year-old. Campbell was making $8.50 an hour at a pizza place and did the math on how many hours it would take to earn a million dollars. “I was like, this isn’t going to work,” he said.

He had seen other teenagers in his parents’ neighborhood hauling junk with trailers, so he posted on Nextdoor asking if anyone had junk they wanted removed. A lot of people did. He rented a trailer from a friend, and because he could not drive yet, his dad drove him to the appointments.

He kept the business alive through a year at Auburn. He left after his 6 p.m. Friday class, drove back to Atlanta, hauled junk all day Saturday and Sunday, and left around 4 a.m. Monday to make his 8 a.m. classes. During the week an employee ran the trailer while Campbell answered customer calls from the hallway outside his lectures.

What turned a side hustle into a real business?

COVID did. It sent Campbell home, customers started leaving junk on porches and in garages, and he says the business grew about 300 to 400%. He bought a first dump truck, then a second, and did not go back to college.

At about $60,000 a month in revenue, he was flooded with calls and had no idea how to handle insurance, a website or standard operating procedures. He asked his dad, who owns a technology company and had worked for IBM, to become his partner. They are 50/50, and his dad now works in the business full time on the systems, accounting and technology while Campbell runs the people side: selling jobs, managing crews and making sure the work gets done.

Today the company runs five trucks. Campbell is 25 and the business is 10 years old.

How does Junk Jockey get customers without Google Ads?

Through referrals and networking. Campbell said the company has never run Google Ads and only recently started Facebook ads.

The referral program runs on its own:

• When a job is marked done in Workiz, the company’s CRM, the customer is pulled into a referral tool that creates an account and sends an email and text explaining the program.
• If a referral books and pays, the referrer gets $50 in cash deposited in their bank account. It is not a gift card or a credit.
• The new customer gets $50 off.
• There is no cap. A real estate agent who refers every client can earn thousands of dollars a year.

Getting those partners in the first place is the hard part, especially for a 20-year-old walking into an office. Campbell’s answer was to give the first job away. He told agents, retirement homes and storage facilities to hand one client a free $750 job, with no obligation. Once they saw the work, they had a reliable company that also paid them.

It still costs money, he said, but each of these “super spreaders” knows hundreds of people who need the service. “They’re basically a salesperson for you.”

Why did a junk removal company start Bullseye Movers?

Because customers kept complaining about their movers. Campbell heard the same things again and again: movers broke items and would not fix them, arrived three or four hours late, or canceled on move day for a better job.

He waited until junk removal was repeatable, with procedures and KPIs, before adding it. He wants the company to be “the Chick-fil-A of junk removal,” the same service every time. He started moving three or four years ago, and it is now about 65% of the business, with local moves and long-distance moves across the lower 48 states.

How does Bullseye Movers keep moving customers happy?

By over-communicating and owning damage right away. Campbell pointed out that a move ranks with a divorce and a death among the most stressful things people go through, and sometimes they are happening together.

Bullseye’s approach:

• Set expectations up front. If the customer says they will move the lamps and does not, they are told in advance it will cost more and the move may not finish that day.
• Repeat it. The office calls the day before, the crew calls on the way, and the move manager does a walkthrough on arrival.
• Report damage immediately. The crew manager sends operations a picture, and operations calls the customer within five minutes with a plan.
• Fix it either way. Campbell said they have paid for repairs even when the item may already have been broken.

Where is the company headed?

Campbell’s goal is a $100 million company in about 10 years, when he is 35, and he does not plan to sell it. Revenue went from $370,000 one year to about $1.2 million the next, and he expects to double again.

His view is that marketing is the easy part and consistent delivery is the hard one, so the company builds the procedures for the next size first and then turns up the marketing. The biggest lesson so far was about people. A key manager of three years quit without warning and put Campbell back in a truck. Now the company checks in with its crew regularly, and he says morale went “through the roof.”