WINDHAM, N.H. — In the bed of a beat-up Isuzu dump truck sits a busted piano with crooked keys and bent wood, a treadmill caved in on itself, and boxes and bags overflowing with wrapping paper and discarded packaging.
It’ll all go to the dump, the scrap yard or a storage unit owned by Windham High School graduates Aidan Oliveira and Jake Sullo, both 19.
“Our goal is to keep all of this out of the landfill,” Oliveira said of the junk the EasyScrap team picks up from people’s homes and businesses. “If it goes there, they don’t do anything with it. It just stays there.”
Though the business only kicked off in May, mere weeks before Oliveira and Sullo graduated high school, the pair came up with the idea to start a junk removal company last winter. But the concept was a long time coming for the best friends, who always knew they wanted to work together.
“We ran a landscaping business before. It was a joke, we didn’t take it seriously, but we ended up learning a lot from it and thought it would be better to work for ourselves than to work a job for someone else,” Oliveira said. “We started looking for ideas, one of (Sullo’s) dad’s friends owns a trash company and we hung around him. We thought it was something we wanted to do but with our own twist.”
Instead of traditional trash pickup with dumpsters and bins, they thought to offer collection services for large items, like furniture and exercise equipment, which they can donate or resell, while also hauling trash, scrap metal and more. About 40% of the items they pick up can be reused or sold.
“It might have been hard for people to take us seriously at first because we were so young and just using random trucks and stuff but once we got our own dump truck, it was a game changer,” Oliveira said.
Working through the summer, the company collected thousands of pounds of scrap and took on all sorts of odd jobs for people looking to get rid of bulky, unused items. By the end of July, they had enough money to purchase their own truck.
“Seventy-five percent of our revenue over the summer came from someone making a Facebook post about it,” Oliveira said. “After that, we got flyers and business cards and started doing paid ads.”
In their respective roles, Oliveira manages clients and fields phone calls from his dorm room at Emmanuel College in Boston where he studies entrepreneurship and plays basketball. Sullo, meanwhile, keeps his sneakers on the ground, working in and out of the truck, tracking revenue and preparing for financial investments from his home base in Windham.
“I left college to pursue this full time,” Sullo said. “Between the schoolwork, the baseball team and this, I had to sacrifice something, and I wasn’t really there for the schoolwork, I was there for baseball. It became hard to focus on EasyScrap and put my full attention into, so I thought it’d be best for the business as well.”
Oliveira and Sullo knew the sacrifices they would have to make in choosing this path for themselves, especially during their senior year – skipping parties, working late nights and weekends and saving wherever they could. Without third-party financial support, all of their earnings have gone straight back into the business.
“Whatever we were doing, our friends didn’t care, they just supported us,” Oliveira said. “We did feel like we missed out on stuff, but we knew it’d pay off and would continue to pay off if we sacrificed certain things.”
“Yeah, it’s always worth it when you’re working toward something that big,” Sullo added.
Looking ahead, Oliveira and Sullo, who employ a manager and several full-time scrappers, hope to purchase a second dump truck in the spring and hire additional employees to run it as they explore other business ventures.
“We need people that can work in the truck,” Oliveira said.
“A lot of people think it’s really cool and it’s fun, and it is fun, so a lot of kids wanna help us out and work for us.”
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