Growth can sometimes be the hardest thing for an up and coming business to manage properly.
But for this year’s winner of the Small Business of the Year award, 505-Junk, it was well anticipated and became a strength they hope to build on with some significant future expansion plans, said Barry Hartman, who founded the junk removal and recycling firm with business partner Scott Foran in 2012.
“To be honest, our success has been a mixture of a number of things,” Hartman said, adding ensuring their systems prepared them well for an anticipated increase in business was key.
“When we did that, it allowed us to more than double our growth, which we’re on pace to do this year,” he said. “And the only reason we were able to do that was the fact we had a lot of the infrastructure in place. And that enabled us to hire some really great people and together we’ve been able to grow the company.”
For the first five years, Hartman and Foran worked on a business they believed was primed to grow, using their unique system that has customers pay for the service based on the weight of what is being removed.
Plus, there was the commitment to reuse or recycle as much of the waste as possible.
“This was the first year we could actually focus on the growth and bring in new clients and people to our team,” Hartman said, adding the customer call centre added two new positions to handle the rising numbers of clients.
Currently, 505-Junk employs 14 people.
“We’ve come a long way since it was just Scott and I,” Hartman said. “But we actually projected the growth — it didn’t happen by surprise. But at the same time, it didn’t automatically happen. It took a lot a lot of hard work to hit our revenue targets and hire the people that would fit our culture and our team.”
With a good foundation in place, 505-Junk plans on expanding into Victoria next spring. And Ontario is firmly in their sights.
“In business, someone coined the term BHAG, which stands for big, hairy, audacious goal. That’s us, looking five years out,” Hartman said, adding Toronto, with its large population base, is the plan for 2018.
“There’s a massive market in Toronto,” Hartman said, “and they are just starting to adapt this concept that diversion and recycling is a good thing. Vancouver is so on with that already, but we think we can help keep a lot of stuff out of the landfill in Toronto, as well.”
And a little further down the road, expansion to the U.S. market is on the books.
“We’ve got our eyes on Seattle, which is just a few hours drive away from Vancouver and is a logical step,” Hartman said.
