How To Grow Dumpster Rental Business Fleet – Real Haulers

Justin: How y’all doing? I’m Justin. This is Kelly, my wife. We’re from A1 Waste here in Jackson, Tennessee. We’ve been in business since 2008. We kind of did it as a niche in the beginning to circumvent some of the legalities of not being able to operate a rolloff company in our city. Instead of hiring it out, we decided to keep it internal as we were building and doing demolition. We started off with hook lift rolloff trucks from day one because of the market we were in and have grown as the market allowed and opened up for us to grow. We’re still running cable 30-yard tandem axle trucks today, and we’re currently in the process of having these guys build us a single axle under CDL truck to do more smaller residential projects. Awesome.

Chad: Good morning everybody. I’m Chad with Dumpster Today. I founded Dumpster Today in 2018 because I owned a water restoration company and I was tired of poor service providers in our marketplace, which was Orlando, Florida. So much like you guys, I bought a trailer and five dumpsters, dropped them on my job sites. That went okay for a little while. Then we discovered that we either had a bunch of assets sitting around or we had no assets. So we decided to open up Dumpster Today in 2018 in Orlando, Florida. In 2020, we decided to start franchising. Now we’re in 10 states, 20 locations, and we’ve done everything. We started out with trailers, then moved to the switch and go systems because it was a low cost of entry. Now we are mostly running hook trucks in most of our locations.

Steve: I’m Steve with Go Trailer Rolloffs. We started about three years ago, and we started truck trailer in Arizona. We grew from that into 30s and 40 yards. We’ve got tandem axles, triple drop axles, and we’re going into Florida, Missouri, and Texas now alongside Arizona. We started out with three dumpsters. We kind of fell into it. We started out as a trailer rental, bought some dumpsters, and they took off. We sold off all the rest of that stuff and just kept going. Awesome. If y’all want to have a seat up there.

Getting the Most Out of Your Fleet and Equipment

First question is, when you were getting started, how did you position yourself for future growth? Or did you have a plan for future growth? And if you did, how did you position yourself?

Chad: I would say for us, we didn’t. We were more in the now. What was cheap and easy is what we did, which was a trailer and some cans. Hindsight, I’m now a big believer in just go big right from the beginning. Nothing motivates like payments. Payments are a great motivator. Anybody else on that one?

Justin: Well, as I kind of got into a minute ago, we started off doing demolition. It was a no-brainer for us to go straight into the rolloff with the 30s and 40s to be able to handle the equipment. It seemed more convenient and easier than hiring a bunch of dump trucks to come run up and down the road when we can do one driver, have three dumpsters, and sit there and flip them. Also, being able to service our job sites when there weren’t trucks necessary as we were building or renovating different projects.

Next question. When should you transition from trailers to trucks or from small trucks to larger trucks or, in A1’s case, from larger trucks to smaller trucks? It’s a different way to go.

Justin: Because of the nature of how things started and what we were doing, we have recently found a niche in our area where a lot of homeowners have been calling. They’ve been seeing advertised online and whatnot that there are now smaller options available. Customers were asking for 10s, 15s, 20s, which 20s are kind of normal. We decided to drop down into that more residential market by buying a CDL, 30,000-25,000 lb truck to haul these 15s around on a single rear axle for convenience. Hopefully, this will do it a little cheaper than using these 60,000 lb rolloffs to handle a 15-foot-long dumpster. So good.

Steve: We started out on a truck trailer rig. I assume some of this room did. I would say we transitioned into larger trucks when we decided that our dumpsters were being used differently. When we’re getting a lot of those calls, delivering two 20s in place of a 40, delivering 20s constantly to construction job sites, and when we snatch a couple of D-rings off the front of those 15s and 20s needing to move into that heavier range, that’s when we transitioned. I think it matters most on how your dumpster is being used, who’s using the dumpster, who’s calling, and where your workload is. If you’re in the commercial space, you’ll likely want the trucks that can lift heavy weights rather than just the truck trailer rigs.

Chad: I would say the same thing. It’s demographics and customer response. Some of you may be in a non-CDL truck and that’s great forever. We’ve got locations that are in that because of the size of the communities and the streets. Especially in the northeast part of the country, those are a good fit. I think it’s mainly when your customers ask for it. We all want to be a one-stop shop, and to do that, you’ve got to have options. Great advice. Show of hands: How many are under CDL only? Quite a few. How many are CDL only? Then how many do both? It’s a pretty good mix out there. We laugh at the office, right? We say we’ve never met a trailer guy that wishes he didn’t start in a truck, right? And very rarely do you see an under CDL guy that wishes he didn’t start in CDL. We tell everybody, just chalk up on the board every time you miss a 30-yard, 40-yard, or you can’t sell two 20s for a 40 or two 15s for a 30, and keep that tally going. You’ll find out pretty quick, but it depends on the market. In most markets, the 30-yard, I’ve been selling cans for 30 years, and about 60% of my business year over year is a 30-yard container. So, if that tells you anything over 30 years, you can take away with that.

Pros and cons of moving from non-CDL to CDL trucks. You’re going the opposite direction, which is unique.

Chad: Have y’all made the transition? You’ve made the transition. Obviously, there are pros and cons to both, right? Our whole franchise system is non-CDL. The pros for us are ease of use, ease of hiring, and work-life balance. If we need to replace a driver, our hiring pool is wide and vast. With CDL, it’s more narrowed, you’re going to pay more. The flip side is we may miss some jobs because somebody wants something we can’t haul. It’s a balancing act. It really depends on what works best for you in your market and business model.

Justin: Mainly, the demographic we have, our town has grown a lot. We’re right at 100,000 people, and it’s sprung up new residential areas. People are either making a move or doing cleanouts or small remodel jobs and they don’t have the area to put a big 30 in it. One of their biggest requests is they don’t have enough room for a 30-yard dumpster. So, we’re missing the sale. Even if we were to come down on our price, they don’t have the room because of ordinances. You can’t put a dumpster in the road, it has to be in their driveway, and their driveway is only 20 feet long. The dumpster’s 22. What are you going to do? We realized we were missing a market that hadn’t been tapped, other than one other competitor in our area. We’ve ordered 15-yard dumpsters, and we’ve had them rented out pretty much every day that we’ve owned them. That’s awesome.

Hook Lift or Cable and Why?

That’s an easy one, right? Yeah, ongoing debate.

Justin: We’re cable. We’ve been cable from day one. In 2008, when I was 25, I didn’t know there were any other options. That’s what her dad bought. That’s what we used. I see the pros to some degree and I can think of some cons for the other one. But I’ve heard the same speech about the cable having its cons. That’s what we started with, that’s what we’ve maintained, and it’s what we know. In our area, nobody runs a hook truck.

Chad: So, I’ve got probably 30 cable trucks, albeit small cable trucks, and we’ve got probably eight hook trucks now. I would trade every one of those cables for a hook. For me, it’s ease of use and hiring pool. I’ve had 70-year-old drivers, female drivers. It’s easy for them to operate a hook truck. It’s harder for them to climb under a dumpster, hook up a cable, and those sorts of things. Tear their hands on the cables. It’s more on your hands and knees. For longevity, those sorts of things, I would say hook.

Moderator: Thanks. I’ll chime in on that subject as I get asked that question almost daily, most every week, being on the equipment side of the business. This slide shows these are all cables, but we do just as many hook lifts at Keystone. When people ask me non-cable hook, where should I go? There are two factors we always consider from a consultive approach. Who’s around you? I think Justin, you mentioned it. What’s your area look like? What are other haulers using? We’ve seen success in partnerships among competitors. A lot of you operate even in this room in similar geographic areas and you might lean on each other. Hey, my truck’s broke down. Will you go to this neighborhood, pull this can, dump it? My truck’s going to be back up on Thursday. Help me out. Then when you’re in the same situation, I’ll help you out. If you have similar equipment, that makes that job easier. The other thing is what’s your long-term plan? And I’ve talked to many people who say, “Hey, my goal is to scale this business, get my EBID up to a level attractive for somebody to buy me out.” It will be more attractive for that company to do a buyout or acquisition if your equipment mirrors what they have with the hoist, truck, and dumpsters.

One, I’ve never seen a truck with that low mileage for that price. I’ve seen huge trucks, but they’re usually 300,000-350,000 miles. A new diesel motor is $45,000 on a big truck, $30,000 on a non-CDL truck. When you weigh those things, an Allison transmission will cost $15,000. You’re not much further off. It gets harder in my view when you get into $250,000 trucks. To save $50,000-150,000 on that truck is appealing. But again, it depends on your size. If you’ve got a fleet of five trucks, you can roll the dice on a used truck. But if you’re buying your first truck, I would never recommend a used truck, personally.

Justin: Another aspect with the used truck category is for me, it’s not the motor or the transmission I’m worried about. There are usually small things around that can be fixed relatively quickly. They’re not cheap, but the wear and tear on the chassis itself, all the hydraulic lines, the coolant lines that are constantly vibrating with every mile. Rolloff’s hard on a truck. We all know it’s rough. You go in and out of the landfills, catch stuff sticking up. It’s just part of the job. The wear and tear and the nickel and dimming of every day you could go out in a used truck and have a different hydraulic line blow. That’s not something you can carry around with you. That’s like a whole other truck in the toolbox you’d have to carry around. We’re fortunate to have a nice hydraulic shop in town that can build it on demand, but we started with used trucks. We were buying $10,000, $15,000 old Mac RDS, in ’08. I think we got one for 12 grand. We still have it. It’s parked out in the pasture. Thing still runs, but it probably leaks from every orifice it has. But yeah, we started off with that to get our feet wet because again, we were doing it for us, not to provide a service for anybody else. That might come into play as well. With our under CDL truck, we picked up a 100,000-mile under CDL rider. It was a box truck from some rental company and we’re having them outfit it with new hydraulic surplus on it. That way we are confident in not having the nickel and dime downtime in the truck, knowing that it was a road chassis that wasn’t really abused the whole 100,000 miles of its life like a rolloff would.

Steve: To beat a dead horse, I think these guys nailed it. When you buy a new truck, understand the difference with the used truck. The used truck, you’re buying a project. There’s never going to be a day where you stop spending money to keep that truck on the road. Ultimately, does it wind up being less than the new truck in the long run? We’ve got trucks that we’ve bought in the $50,000 to $70,000 range where we constantly put money into them. We’ve got trucks in the $100,000 to $150,000 range and we put probably as much money into those trucks as well. You are buying a project, and it comes down to your budget, how you’re going to use the truck. You really are going to continue to dump money into it. If it’s not hydraulic one day, it’s going to be a coolant issue or an electrical issue the next day. Understanding trucks before you start buying them is important, understanding what motors are good out there versus your different lift kits that are on the back of those trucks. Then, of course, who’s going to fix it, right? If it’s going to be broke down, not everybody’s going to be able to put a wrench on it. So understanding where your accounts are, understanding who exactly has the expertise to work on that truck is critical. Then, of course, if you have a used truck, for instance, 08 to 2015, you have stuff on that truck that’s on national back order for three years, you’re not going to get that kind of stuff. Before you buy a truck, and you scale up to that model, you really need to understand different types of trucks, models, and all the components with it from the tarp all the way to the hydraulic kit that lifts that dumpster. You need to understand that stuff. Talk about old systems—that’s a nightmare. Okay, thanks.

Choosing the Right Dumpsters

How do you decide when it’s time to adjust your dumpster inventory?

Steve: For us, it has always been off demand. What type of customer are we servicing at the end of the day? We started out heavy residential. Anything that we could put in a driveway, which is typically a 10 or a 15-yard, that’s what we did. When we started doing large-scale roofing jobs requiring three to four dumpsters a day, five to six dumpsters a day, it’s hard to charge those guys 20 yards every time they swap out. They want the 30s and the 40s. Whoever your primary customer is, that’s how you should scale your dumpster size within your fleet. Sometimes it’s hard to tell in a market unless you’re there for two, three, four years, and you’re getting the calls day after day. That’s how we’ve done it.

Chad: Ours is when we run out of dumpsters. We simply run out and we need more boxes. We call Keystone. Brent, he’s not here, but he’s my go-to salesman. He’s a great guy. He actually made something happen. Within two weeks, he got us a load of boxes and that’s unheard of. Same thing with our truck. If y’all have any questions, they’re going to have the answer. They do everything. They’re great people. We love Keystone. We thank the world of them.

Moderator: One thing I would like to add, using Docket for an example, looks back to working on your business versus in your business every day when you know your business cycles are coming and you’re going to get busy. I’m from the Midwest in Michigan. I’ve talked to a lot of people from the Midwest. We get cold, hard winters, and then we ease into spring and it goes gangbusters this time. Historically, if you know you were light on boxes last year in May, maybe call us in March and have those conversations. We do our best to keep our lead times down for manufacturing but we also get a lot of calls where people say, “Oh, geez, I looked out in my yard and I’m out of boxes. What’s your lead time?” Sometimes during peak seasons, we can have lead times several weeks out. We had a lot of you call us early in the year this year. We had an extremely busy winter and spring leading up to the busy time. We’re happy to talk through that with you leading up to when you expect the busy season to hit.

Kelly: Going to the Docket thing, we use the reporting in Docket a lot and it will tell you before you run out of cans and you look outside. If you’re paying attention to your reports, some of our KPIs constantly run is what’s our number one seller, is it our 12-yard, 20-yard, 25-yard, what’s it? What’s our weight? If you pay attention to those reports, you’ll be proactive instead of reactive.

Audience Member: I had a question when you were talking about trucks. I was wondering when do you get rid of your trucks? How long do you keep them?

Chad: When he was talking, I was going to chime into his ear that I’ve never sold anything I love other than one car. So for me, we get rid of our trucks when we can’t stand them anymore. If any of you are looking for used trucks, come talk to me. I definitely have a couple of projects for you.

Steve: When the warranty runs out, that’s when you get rid of it. 5,000 mi prior. I think we got five trucks sitting in the weeds right now. We don’t sell everything. We have used trucks of all prices. I’ll sell you one for $5,000 if you want it, but you’re going to be turning wrenches on it for a long time. We try to keep them in motion, though, for five years. In the first five years, I haven’t had to do any major repairs.

Audience Member: Thanks. This is for Keystone. Do you guys do any truck refurbishing like for used trucks?

Moderator: We do, to answer your question. It certainly depends on what it is, but we have a lot of resources at Keystone. As Craig laid out, Keystone is a large umbrella, and we even have a heavy-duty truck service shop on site. When it comes to engine, transmission, differential, we get into everything. On the waste side, we can service your hoist, tarp system, hydraulics, and electronics that go with that. Does it make sense to refurbish? That’s a conversation. If you’re going to buy Justin’s $49.95 special that keeps the dust down underneath the truck, that might be a tough conversation to have. But we recently took some really nice trucks in on trade. Keystone, Bram, we put maybe $5,000 into these things, cleaned up some issues and turned them back into the market. These are rolloff trucks we have high confidence in that are going to serve customers for quite some time with minimal downtime. Refurbish is a conversation we’d have to have one-off. We do a lot of used chassis, brand new hoist, brand new tarp system. The sky’s the limit and we’re happy to work with our clients on all of the above. Good question.

Audience Member: What is the truck to box ratio for you? How many turns on each box are you looking for? I know it might be different for everybody.

Steve: This is a great question for everybody. We have three garbage trucks and 218 dumpsters. You can do the math. On the garbage side, we’re doing 20 to 35 dumpsters a day. We have a single truck servicing 20 dumpsters that turns eight dumpsters a day, six days a week. It depends on your service radius more than anything else. We have a pretty small but condensed town. We operate in a 40 to 50-mile radius with some a few 60s but most everything is within 10 miles of home base which is right next to the landfill. I think it really comes to your area that’s going to make that decision. We’ll see what these guys have to say.

Steve: I would have to agree. I think we’re somewhere between 50 to 55 dumpsters per truck there. Our service area is about an 80-mile bubble. We’re in southeastern Arizona, so everything is stretched out really far in the same direction, very straight. We don’t have a whole lot of elevation climb either. It kind of depends on a few things for us. Primarily, it’s how fast is your driver moving. Some drivers will do six to eight cans a day. Other drivers, they’re younger, move faster. They’ll get eight to 10 cans a day. It depends on all the factors out there. What’s the traffic like? What’s the landfill like that day? How far out in that radius are they going? It all kind of depends. I think seven to 10 dumpsters per day, per truck is or per driver at least is solid. And 50 to 55 cans per truck is manageable for us.

Chad: We’re a little closer to you. It depends on our market. I’ve got a market in South Carolina. If we stay inside the county, I can do 12, 13 a day, no problem. Our landfill is easy to get in and out of. But if we go into the Greenville County north of us, we drop down to seven or eight. Our standard is we look to get eight done a day per truck, in an 8-hour day. That’s our standard. We do about 35 cans per truck. We specialize in short-term rentals unlike some of you who do long-term rentals. We want to roll that asset as many times in a 30-day period as we can. We’re usually turning a 20-yard dumpster five, six, maybe seven times in a 30-day process. It allows us to buy fewer assets, turn them more often. Our radius is under 30 miles. We don’t go past 30 miles unless it’s a specific client in most markets.

Audience Member: This one kind of goes in hand with the truck question about longevity. We’re in Michigan so we deal with salt and snow in the winter and the question is about can longevity. We’ve been in business about we’re going on our fourth year. We’re starting to run into cans that are starting to rust. What’s the service life of a can? When do you refurbish it? Take your marketing off of it and redo that at the same time?

Chad: Obviously, Geographics are going to play a part. Your manufacturer plays a big part. We started buying what we considered medium-duty cans, but that was really just code for cheap. Those cheap cans did not last. We’ve got a yard full of those, too. If anybody’s looking for slightly used cans with a couple of holes, we’ve got a market. It goes back to buying the best you can afford. Buy the best can you can. Inspect the can. We do maintenance every January. A lot of my locations are in the southern markets, so we don’t slow down much, but in Michigan, unfortunately, you live there. Go Buckeyes. In January, if I run an operation in Columbus, Ohio, we tear down our trucks and fix as much as we can. We do proactive maintenance whether needed or not. That’s serpentine belts and things we know have an issue that could fail. We want the trucks on the road every day, six to seven days a week if we can. We run every Saturday in almost all markets. I would just say buying the best can you can and maintaining it. If your dumpsters are starting to look rough, peel your labels off. You can get an LPV sprayer from Harbor Freight for 150 bucks and spray it in your parking lot with little overspray in two hours. We do it all the time and then re-label it. It’s going to look good. It’s going to last longer.

Steve: We’re fortunate, we don’t have a whole lot of that down in Arizona. We’ve got some of that up in Missouri. It’s not as much as what you’re dealing with but we just have a no rust policy on our cans. As soon as we see rust, we break out the grinder, break out the paint gun, and get it done. No rust on the dumpsters. That helps it last a long time. Don and these guys always help out. If you order dumpsters from them, they’ll put you in contact with the paint supplier and having 20, 30, 50 gallons on hand. It may seem like a big investment for folks, but it’s worth it. No rust on the cans because it gets away from you very quickly.

Justin: So, on the other end, we bought 40 dumpsters in Louisiana after Katrina. They were flooded from ocean water. We picked them up for a couple hundred bucks each. 30-yard-square heavy-duty dumpsters, $250 plus shipping to Tennessee. Four to a load and we got 40. Within a year, the sides were rusted out. We had to scab and plate up a foot on each side. It lasted three years and rusted back out because all of the saltwater was encased in all of it. You might have seen my posts on Facebook. I’ve been selling like 40 or 50 dumpsters trying to get rid of them. They’re gone, by the way. Once the rust starts, there’s no stopping it. You can patch and repair and they’ll keep rusting.

Keystone: To address that issue, as a manufacturer, there are different paint qualities we can use in the south versus north. There are undercoating options that would help with that. Ensure that whatever manufacturer you use does a full prime job, priming underneath, inside, outside, and then exterior coating would be a benefit to go on the bottom. I would say paint protection is key in a salt area. In the south, not so critical. In the north, absolutely. Just work with your manufacturer for options and weigh it versus cost versus benefit. Try some undercoating options to increase the life cycle of that container.

Evaluating a Supplier’s Reliability and Quality for Equipment

How do you all do that? What’s your experience in the past?

Justin: With us having 220ish dumpsters, from probably 10 different brands, more recently we’ve been spoiled by the quality. We’ve gone through several along the way, found things we like and don’t like. Not to give a sales pitch, but I haven’t yet found a thing I dislike about their tub style dumpsters. We predominantly like the tubs because we do jobs where we will slide one inside another, go to a job site, deliver one, go to the next, and do a swap there. It cuts down travel time because they’re easy to maintain and pop two dumpsters together. You can’t do that with squares easily. We’ve done it, but not as easily.

Steve: There are so many manufacturers out there. You see them all over Facebook, the internet. What we look for is the quality of the weld, gauge of steel. We don’t like a dumpster that will fold under a backhoe bucket. We want a tough dumpster. We really like the quality that Keystone puts out. I think we’ve purchased from maybe half a dozen manufacturers and these guys build tough dumpsters. What we look for is the quality of the welds. When you get into the tight areas, you can tell if they are cutting corners. The gauge of steel used primarily on the floor and walls will tell you whether that dumpster will hold up under a beating. They will. Your dumpster is going to go under a beating, brand new or used. You have to buy something that lasts. That’s what we look for.

Chad: Yeah, I would say the two things we look at are welds and paint. There’s a big difference between welds and paints with manufacturers. I’ve probably toured, at least eight manufacturing companies, and I use that term loosely. I visited one in Jacksonville, Florida, and they were painting them in the yard next to the landfill. We bought maybe 50 or 100 from them, and it looked like they painted them in the grass next to the landfill. Now for us, that’s a big I don’t buy cans from somebody I haven’t met and I haven’t personally seen their facilities and their quality. I won’t do it. I won’t spend a couple hundred thousand with somebody and roll the dice on what’s going to show up. If this is your business and you’re serious, you can take a weekend, meet the guys at Keystone, see their quality. You can bang on their cans, ask them to lift, look underneath, see if they’re cutting corners when spraying underneath. Those things will cut down on your longevity, which will cut into your bottom line.

Keystone: Great advice. I would say get to know your supplier. There are suppliers requiring 50% deposits. Cans may or may not show up. There are horror stories out there, so get to know your supplier. Go by and see them. Is it a real facility? Are they manufacturing containers? It’s important in this day and age.

Biggest Challenge You Faced and How’d You Overcome It?

Steve: Loading, man. Everybody’s got challenges, right? In the beginning, your biggest challenge is marketing. If you buy a truck and 20 cans, you have to find somebody who wants to rent those cans from you. Once your marketing is built and you get reoccurring business, your biggest challenge may change. It may be financing, revenue, cash flow. I think that’s tough to answer. That could be different for everybody.

Chad: I was trying to bring it to a personal level. Your biggest challenge? My biggest challenge is living with Evelyn back there. She makes me work way harder than I want to most days. Like this morning, she was up at five o’clock on docket booking jobs, so now I’ve been up since five o’clock because of that.

Steve: It’s a loaded question. It’s tough. There’s a million challenges and they never stop. I’ll just pick one. I think the biggest challenge is when you’re ready to scale to that next level is understanding that you’ll never scale until you get out of the truck. If you’re in the truck, dispatching, doing something at an operator level requiring an hourly pay scale, you’re never going to go to that next level. You’re not going to see your total addressable market until you step back and manage from a distance. I would say if you’re looking to go from a quarter million a year, 1 million a year, 10 million a year, to the next level, you have to get out of where you are. You need to hire good people, which is always hard to come by. But you have to step back. Step back from the little hirable positions in your company.

Justin: That’s probably a great point. So another thing is I didn’t know this in the beginning. I keep looking at the revenue a company generates. You can’t judge how big you are based on the revenue because a lot is turning around and going out. Then with tax implications and the ability to move money. Just don’t get caught up on the number somebody says. It’s personal. It’s what makes you happy in your line of business. Don’t judge yourself based on someone else’s numbers.

Moderator: How much time do we have for Q&A? Two minutes. Q&A.

We apologize. We had about probably close to 20 questions that we skipped, but we will be available for different questions after. Just look us up.

Audience Member: This is a question for A1. You mentioned about nesting some of your cans, bringing them to job sites. Tell me more about that. How do you prevent your drivers from damaging that property when running the cans?

Justin: It’s a sticky situation. Obviously, it takes experience. The best place to do it is in gravel because the box won’t take off downhill. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video on YouTube, but somebody’s dumpster was running down the road, and that was horrible for everybody involved. Know your terrain. The drivers need to be experienced to operate the truck. Of course, we’re running cable. There’s less control with a cable truck versus a hook truck. Hook truck is better at unloading a can out of another can, but gravel or dirt is where you want to do it. If the job site is big enough, that’s where you want to do it. If not, find a place that is, run it, and then come back and grab that one. Many times, we’ll have to drop a box a mile or two up the road at one little gravel turnaround yard that’s public, drop the box, do what we need to do, come back, grab that one, and take off.

FAQ

How did A1 Waste start their waste management business?

A1 Waste, based in Jackson, Tennessee, began in 2008, starting with hook lift rolloff trucks to manage internal demolition projects and avoid legal restrictions on external rolloff operations.

What growth strategy did Dumpster Today implement?

Dumpster Today, founded in 2018 in Orlando, Florida, started franchising in 2020 and expanded to 10 states and 20 locations, transitioning from trailers to hook trucks for better asset utilization.

When should a company transition from trailers to larger trucks?

Companies should consider transitioning when they receive frequent requests for larger dumpsters, indicating a demand that trailers cannot efficiently meet. The decision depends on customer needs and market size.

What are the pros and cons of non-CDL versus CDL trucks?

Non-CDL trucks offer a broader hiring pool and ease of use, while CDL trucks can handle larger loads but require more specialized, costly drivers. Businesses choose based on market demands and operational needs.

How does rust affect the longevity of dumpsters?

Rust significantly reduces the lifespan of dumpsters, especially in areas with high salt exposure. Proactive maintenance, such as regular painting and rust treatment, can extend the service life of dumpsters.