Removing rubbish from people’s homes calls for stamina and teamwork, along with an ability to navigate tight corners.
But Mark Weiss, co-owner of a 1-800-GOT-JUNK? franchise in Bergen County, also puts a premium on patience and compassion in the people he hires. Many of his customers are cleaning out their parents’ homes or are elderly themselves, and often face tough decisions.
“We can’t have anyone with a temperament that’s not customer-oriented,” Weiss said at a recent clean-out in Fair Lawn. “You have to be very patient in this job. You get customers who are struggling to decide what from their lives or their parents’ lives to keep and what to throw away.”
Hiring has taken on added urgency in the past two weeks, with flooding forcing many families to discard the contents of basements and garages. Weiss and partner Derek Ralston have booked 10 to 15 jobs a day since the rains fell and plan to boost their payroll this year from 14 employees to 20.
But Weiss insists that growth won’t come at the expense of quality.
“I’ve been sitting people down and explaining every scenario we’ve ever seen – every type of customer or attitude or circumstance,” he said. “The number one rule is be nice at all times.”
At the peak of the recent floods, Bernice Herskovits watched helplessly as water seeped through her basement walls in Fair Lawn. Lost were many of the antiques her late husband had gathered over the years, along with a freezer she had hoped to give her children.
“They had to take out 41 years’ worth of things from the basement,” she said of Weiss’ crew. “The boys took out very large items but were careful. I brought them back again for another [truckload.]”
And yes, she said, they were indeed “nice boys.”
Weiss and Ralston own GOT-JUNK? franchises for two territories: Bergen/Rockland and Westchester County, N.Y. Weiss said about 80 percent of customers’ stuff is true junk, 15 percent can be recycled, and the rest is donated. (The company sends a receipt to customers.)
“In the training we give team members, we make sure they double-check with customers if something seems to have any value,” Weiss said.
A former institutional broker, Weiss, 36, moved to Rockland County with his wife in 2000. He and Ralston had heard about GOT-JUNK? on a financial news program. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, the company has 284 franchises in the United States, Canada, England and Australia.
The partners liked the company’s fast growth, easy-to-remember name and hard-to-miss blue and neon-green trucks. Weiss found the call center well-organized when he phoned in.
Then, to their delight, the two men found two franchises available in the most densely populated region of the country. Their franchise offices are based in Ramsey and Nanuet, N.Y.
“The fast-food places or the lady’s workout centers seem a dime-a-dozen to me,” Weiss said.
“And this [chain] is still small enough that I can go to the office of the CEO and he’ll say, ‘Hey Mark.’ ”
Weiss said it took him and Ralston two years to get their franchise license. Since then, he said, business has doubled each of the past two years. The average cost of each haul is $400, which is based on how full the truck is at the end of the job.
“Often the price goes up as people point out more things they’d like to trash,” Weiss said.
Sheri Ziskin heard about the service from her handyman, who passed on the 800 number after dropping a clean-up crew that had doubled its rate.
Ziskin recently helped her 80-year-old mother move into an assisted-living center in Montville. It then fell on the 54-year-old Pequannock woman to clean out her mother’s Fair Lawn home and put it on the market.
Weiss and his brother-in-law, Dan Gorman, showed up one day last week wearing jackets that matched the blue of their truck. Touring the house with Ziskin, they placed Post-It Notes on anything that was to be trashed. Ziskin took a businesslike approach with most things, but wavered on a few.
“I’m not quite ready to make a decision on that,” she said as they passed a set of furniture.
Later, as Weiss and Gorman took a sledgehammer to one of her father’s old cabinets, Ziskin contemplated a hanging scale that her grandparents had used in their Paterson poultry shop in the ’40s. Then she pulled her father’s scuffed-up, wooden-barreled rifle from an old canvas bag.
Both items were keepers, she told Weiss.
A half-hour later, the two-man crew wrapped up, their truck about three-quarters full.
“How about that,” Ziskin said as they prepared to pull away.
“They even swept out the garage.”
By DOUGLASS CROUSE for NorthJersey.com