Junk haulers look to franchise their Kensington business
College Hunks Hauling Junk grows from $8,000 startup to a $1 million enterprise
It was impressive for a summer job, but nothing compared with what was to come.
In 2003, in the summer before their senior year in college, childhood friends Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman borrowed a cargo van from Soliman’s mother, who owns a furniture store in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C. She also came up with a catchy name: College Hunks Hauling Junk.
The rest was up to the students. Advertising by posting fliers and through word of mouth, they made $8,000 that first summer.
Today, Friedman is president and Soliman is CEO of a company on pace to bring in more than $1 million by the end of its second year in business. This month, College Hunks Hauling Junk will start selling franchises nationally.
After only six months in business, the company turned a profit. It now operates out of an office in Kensington and employs 15 to 20 ‘‘truck captains,” ‘‘wingmen” and ‘‘customer loyalty representatives” — more in the summer when demand is greater and there are more college students seeking summer employment.
Fresh out of college in 2004, Friedman, now 25, and Soliman, now 24, became bored and antsy after brief stints pushing papers in the corporate world and decided it was time to shift gears and put their dream into action.
With help from a $10,000 first-place prize Soliman won from submitting his business plan to the 2004 Rothschild Entrepreneurship Competition while attending the University of Miami, and relying heavily on savings, friends and family to foot the bill, the business partners financed a truck from a bank and College Hunks Hauling Junk was born.
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