Key Takeaways
- Junk Teenagers hit $3 million in income in 2025 and is projected to achieve $5 million this 12 months.
- The brothers have applied a collection of methods to develop the enterprise and eye future scale.
- Junk Teenagers additionally depends on an app vibe coded by considered one of its teenage workers.
In 2024, when Entrepreneur first linked with brothers Kirk McKinney, 22, and Jacob McKinney, 21, their Larger Boston-based junk-removal enterprise, Junk Teenagers, was nonetheless a aspect hustle, albeit a $1.2 million one.
The then-teenaged brothers launched Junk Teenagers again in 2021 with a single pick-up truck. A pair of working audio system discovered at a dump grew into a set of resellable gadgets — $1,000 price — offered on Fb Market.
Now, the brothers’ largely student-run service, which additionally serves Cape Cod and Rhode Island, operates eight vans and has 25 full-time workers. The enterprise has dealt with an estimated 7.4 million kilos of things, sorting usable items for donation, resale or repurposing at any time when attainable.
Junk Teenagers hit $3 million in income in 2025 and is projected to achieve $5 million in income this 12 months, per the corporate.
The corporate additionally grew its group partnerships. A pc drive with Computer systems 4 Folks distributed refurbished laptops and desktops to under-resourced communities, and a partnership with WellStrong on the Cape raised funds for wellness and peer-support applications that assist substance abuse restoration.
Right here’s how the McKinney brothers unlocked their blue-collar enterprise’s large development — and what’s subsequent for Junk Teenagers.
Breaking out of the bottleneck
For a very long time, Jacob scheduled worker routes and found out the place to eliminate the gadgets they picked up. Managing all of it was difficult when the enterprise had a fleet of three to 4 vans, simply half of what it’s now.
“I used to be working 12 hours a day, nonstop,” Jacob remembers. “So I didn’t actually have any extra time to strive to determine the way to rent another person or something like that. Lengthy story quick, one of many greatest first issues we did was delegate my job place.”
The brothers break up Jacob’s function into a number of totally different ones, which helped streamline worker bookings and hiring.
“We promoted to supervisor considered one of our guys who had been with us for a pair years who was taking a niche 12 months from school,” Kirk provides, “and gave him a number of the duties that Jake had, like calling within the workers day-after-day and reviewing the schedule.”
With that in place, Jacob broke out of the bottleneck; he had extra time to work with Kirk on constructing higher methods and coaching, permitting the enterprise to scale.
Benefiting from know-how and AI — together with vibe coding
When Junk Teenagers hit $1.2 million in income in 2024, the whole lot of the enterprise’s day-to-day operations existed on Apple Notes.
“Then Jake would type these out and replica and paste these schedules to the fellows that had been going out day-after-day,” Kirk explains. “That was how we ran our enterprise. It was mainly a $1 million aspect hustle at that time.”
Now, Junk Teenagers is making the most of tech instruments. The corporate makes use of Jobber for buyer relationship administration, GoHighLevel for buyer information assortment and Connecteam for worker administration.
The enterprise can be embracing AI in its many kinds, from the built-in “slight automation” that is sensible of knowledge throughout the software program applications it makes use of, to vibe coding its very personal app.
A Junk Teenagers worker who was on the workforce for a number of years and had fundamental tech abilities constructed the app, utilizing Base44 and ChatGPT for lots of the UI and UX referencing. The app contains a leaderboard and different statistics that assist observe worker efficiency — as an illustration, an worker’s income per hour or closing fee.
“Our whole app was developed by an adolescent,” Kirk says. “That’s one other attention-grabbing factor — that know-how’s on the level the place highschool children can create full apps. And our whole firm makes use of that app each single day.”
Within the early days, Kirk edited content material and posted movies on social media when he had the time. However Junk Teenagers has since systemized its social media technique too. Now, Kirk collects footage when he’s out on the job, then outsources the enhancing to assist understand his imaginative and prescient.
About eight months in the past, Kirk introduced different Junk Teenagers workforce members on board too.
“ I began coaching different guys on our workforce to go on the market with Meta Glasses and GoPros and movie a few of their day-to-day operations and what they’re doing out within the discipline day-after-day,” Kirk explains. “So now I’ve all this nice content material to work with, after which I can sort of be the translator between that footage and the workforce.”
Presently, Junk Teenagers has surpassed 213,000 followers on TikTok, 269,000 followers on Instagram and 69,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Not solely has systemizing Junk Teenagers’ social media method helped market the enterprise, but it surely’s additionally served as a serious team-building device.
“An organization is only a group of individuals on the finish of the day, and if you see your self in these movies and the social media’s capturing it, you’re part of that, and it actually elevates the tradition,” Kirk says. “Then new folks see what we have now happening right here, and it really attracts extra individuals who need to work with us.”
Cultivating a vibrant tradition round a younger workforce
Most of Junk Teenagers’ workers are highschool or school college students, and the corporate goals to pay them greater than its opponents to draw high expertise.
On common, that pay works out to about $25 to $30 an hour, together with hourly charges, commissions and ideas.
“Plenty of the staff really feel like they’re constructing the corporate with us as a result of they’re additionally constructing their alternative as the corporate grows,” Kirk says. “Due to that, we have now loads of forward-thinking folks, and I believe that us all being younger is part of why that occurs.”
Though Junk Teenagers loses some workers when the varsity 12 months begins again up, the seasonality of junk elimination aligns effectively with the ebb and circulate, and the brothers at all times plan for it.
The enterprise’s quantity almost doubles in the summertime months; the brand new Cape Cod location alone booked $350,000 in companies throughout peak season final 12 months.
What’s extra, Junk Teenagers’ younger workforce members convey an open-mindedness and excessive power that make for a vibrant firm tradition, the co-founders notice.
“In that situation the place somebody had one thing occur of their life the place they may be slightly down coming within the subsequent day, they get picked proper again up as a result of there’s 10 or 15 different guys that each one have excessive power round them,” Jacob provides. “It’s unimaginable to nonetheless act unhappy or down if you’re in that kind of setting.”
Perfecting methods for a nationwide scale
Now, the McKinney brothers are centered on perfecting their enterprise’s methods as they eye a nationwide growth, ideally inside the subsequent couple of years.
“ For me, probably the most thrilling factor is empowering the youth,” Kirk says. “With know-how, there are such a lot of alternatives to make cash. However everybody’s at all times going to want junk eliminated. There’s at all times going to be excessive schoolers searching for after-school and summer time jobs. And younger persons are searching for totally different profession paths aside from the standard school route.”
The co-founders obtain every day DMs from younger folks asking for recommendation on beginning a enterprise. They’d encourage anybody who’s contemplating it to cease procrastinating and go for it.
“I don’t assume there’s ever an ideal roadmap until you have already got $1 million and are a enterprise knowledgeable, which we weren’t, and most of the people beginning companies will not be,” Jacob says. “So begin, even when it’s not going to be the enterprise that you simply retire with. We simply began with one thing that we thought was adventurous and entertaining, not even one thing that we thought would make us probably the most cash.”
This text is a part of our ongoing Younger Entrepreneur® collection highlighting the tales, challenges and triumphs of being a younger enterprise proprietor.
Key Takeaways
- Junk Teenagers hit $3 million in income in 2025 and is projected to achieve $5 million this 12 months.
- The brothers have applied a collection of methods to develop the enterprise and eye future scale.
- Junk Teenagers additionally depends on an app vibe coded by considered one of its teenage workers.
In 2024, when Entrepreneur first linked with brothers Kirk McKinney, 22, and Jacob McKinney, 21, their Larger Boston-based junk-removal enterprise, Junk Teenagers, was nonetheless a aspect hustle, albeit a $1.2 million one.
The then-teenaged brothers launched Junk Teenagers again in 2021 with a single pick-up truck. A pair of working audio system discovered at a dump grew into a set of resellable gadgets — $1,000 price — offered on Fb Market.
Now, the brothers’ largely student-run service, which additionally serves Cape Cod and Rhode Island, operates eight vans and has 25 full-time workers. The enterprise has dealt with an estimated 7.4 million kilos of things, sorting usable items for donation, resale or repurposing at any time when attainable.
