Your first thirty days

Everything in this course compresses into one month of sequential work. Not thirty days of hauling, thirty days of building the thing that hauls. The order matters because each week's output is the next week's input.

Week one: make it legal, make it findable

Paperwork and presence, zero jobs. File the sole proprietorship or LLC, get the EIN, open the business account. City business license application in. Two insurance quotes pulled, general liability bound, the commercial auto question answered in writing. Then the storefront: Google Business Profile claimed and filled completely, with your first photos, the truck, the trailer, a clean garage if you have one, because the profile needs images before it needs reviews. Nextdoor account joined for your neighborhoods. Ten door-magnet or decal quotes, order the cheapest credible one.

Before the week ends, make the two phone calls that price your whole business: the city clerk on hauler licensing, and the transfer station on commercial accounts, current fee schedule, and surcharges. That fee schedule goes in the glovebox and becomes the disposal column of your price card.

Checkpoint: insurance bound, listing live, fee schedule in hand. No jobs yet, and that is correct.

Week two: build the rig and the ladder

Buy the core kit used: appliance dolly with straps, furniture dolly, blankets, gloves, pry bar, drill, tarps. Two hundred to three hundred dollars if you shopped like a tradesman. Run the zero-dollar test haul from Should you be the one hauling if you have not, a real load, really carried, really weighed.

Then build the price card against your truck's actual dimensions: minimum charge, quarter, half, full, heavy debris by weight, surcharge line items from your county's schedule. Call three competitors as a customer and slot your ladder honestly. Rehearse the driveway script from Pricing jobs and the dump fee pass-through until it comes out without thinking.

Checkpoint: you can quote a photographed pile in one text message with a straight face.

Week three: open the phone

Turn on the free machine at full strength. First service post on Marketplace and Craigslist. First Nextdoor introduction. First ten realtor and property-manager messages sent. Practice loads for two neighbors at cost, in exchange for reviews, because the review engine starts at two.

If you have budgeted a paid-channel trial, this is the week it starts, at the ceiling you can lose. Local Services Ads at a junk-removal average near $48 per lead or a shared-lead marketplace for reps, and not one dollar more than the experiment allows.

Book everything, including the small jobs you will later raise the minimum on. Speed-to-lead from the moment the inquiry lands: fifteen minutes or less.

Checkpoint: first three paid jobs completed, three reviews requested at the door, disposal receipts logged next to every invoice.

Week four: read the numbers, then decide

Fill in the job log's first month and answer four questions. What did the average job actually net after disposal, fuel, and marketing? Which job type paid best per hour, and can the ladder push more work toward it? What did the leads actually cost, per booked job, per channel? And the physical one: how does your back feel, honestly, because the answer prices the helper decision.

Then make the month-two decisions: raise the minimum or hold it; keep, pause, or kill each paid channel; hire the first helper by the day or stay solo; and, if the season is turning, start the winter pipeline from The money system and the slow season now, not in January.

Thirty days in, you will know more about your market than any course could tell you, including this one. What remains is where to go deeper.