A bike ride to a local dump led Massachusetts brothers Kirk and Jacob McKinney to start a business that has grown into a multimillion-dollar junk-removal company.Kirk was a teenager when he found a pair of working speakers at the dump and became interested in finding and reselling unwanted items, CNBC reported.The brothers launched Junk Teens in February 2021 in Norwood, Massachusetts. Kirk was 17 and Jacob was a high school freshman. The company generated $3.04 million in revenue in 2025.“I was hooked. I just kept going back to the dump and, eventually, my bedroom looked like a mini hoarder’s house,” Kirk said. He began selling items found at dumps and on Facebook Marketplace as a side business.His interest in discarded items soon connected with a local demand for junk removal. Kirk said he met people at the dump who were willing to pay local teenagers to remove unwanted items from their homes. He left his grocery store job and asked Jacob to join him. The brothers then bought a used 2006 Ford F-150 pickup truck for $4,000 of their own money.“We didn’t really know that we wanted to start this business,” Jacob said. They initially took on other jobs, including landscaping and moving work. Junk removal and reselling eventually became the part of their work they found most enjoyable and profitable.
From one to five dump trucks
Customers also showed interest when they learnt that Junk Teens was repurposing items instead of simply removing them. The business grew from its early pickup-truck operation into a company with five dump trucks and two locations in eastern Massachusetts covering Boston and the Cape Cod area.The company completed more than 5,500 jobs in 2025, mostly residential and commercial junk-removal work. The brothers said they generally charge $300 to $600 per job, depending on its size and the service required.Junk Teens now has 10 full-time employees and about 10 to 15 part-time employees. The workers are high school students, college students or people taking gap years. The brothers plan to add two more dump trucks later in 2026.Kirk and Jacob are also studying entrepreneurship at Babson College while running the company. In 2025, each paid themselves salaries in the low-to-mid six figures. Some of that money went towards their college tuition, while their parents covered the rest.“The money is great, but that’s not what the whole point of this is,” Kirk said. “We want to build futures for our friends, and we want to do what we love and not have to work at a job that we hate.”
Learning business from parents
The brothers had some business experience at home because their parents run a local tree service company. Kirk said this gave them an early understanding of administration and bookkeeping.“One thing that we were very fortunate for is growing up in a family business background,” he said. “We grew up watching our parents do all of that stuff for their business, and we would ask them questions in the beginning,” Kirk added.The brothers also used YouTube to learn how to run the company. Kirk said they searched for “how to start a junk removal business” and learnt about setting up the legal structure and putting aside money for taxes.Junk Teens later began posting its own instructional videos, including content about negotiating prices and deciding whether items should be disposed of, flipped or donated. The company now has more than 400,000 combined followers on Instagram and TikTok.
Running business while in school
In the early days, the brothers worked around their school schedules. They sometimes handled only one or two jobs a week after school or at weekends. As the company grew, they hired friends, gave up hobbies such as playing video games and changed their schedules.Jacob said they became “really crafty” with their time. During his senior year, he negotiated a block of midday free time with his guidance counsellor because local dumps operated during school hours.The brothers sometimes parked their dump truck in the school car park. Kirk said they would ask teachers for forgiveness when they were late for class.The company nearly cleared six figures in profit during its first year, Kirk said. The brothers then bought their first dump truck and kept it and their pickup in their parents’ driveway. They also stored electronics, appliances, furniture and bicycles under a tarp. “Our parents were not happy with that,” Kirk said. In March 2023, Junk Teens began renting warehouse space for $1,450 a month.
From $1.2 million to a $5 million target
Junk Teens crossed $1.2 million in revenue in 2024, Jacob’s final year of high school. “Being a seven-figure business-owner in high school felt pretty crazy,” he said.The brothers now focus mainly on administration and strategy and have not gone “into the field” in nearly two years, Jacob said. In 2025, they used marketing software, promoted employees into leadership roles and opened their second location in the Cape Cod area.The brothers said these changes helped Junk Teens more than double its annual revenue and almost double its annual profit in 2025.Running the business while studying remains difficult. Kirk said he has considered dropping out of college three times to focus on Junk Teens full-time. He stayed, partly for his parents and partly because of what he has learnt at college.“College has taught me things that business never will,” he said, referring to social and communication skills. “And life isn’t all about making money and having a successful business.”Junk Teens plans to expand across the rest of Massachusetts before eventually moving into other parts of the East Coast. The company is targeting $5 million in annual revenue by the end of 2026.The brothers are also open to franchising the business, bringing in outside investors or selling it in the future, although none of those options is part of their immediate plans.“I have a really strong feeling that after college, things are going to take off more than they ever have,” Kirk said.
