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.
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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.
