Carter Grandbois was 16 years old, working for a junk-removal operator in Johnstown, Colorado, when he noticed the cash. His boss kept a thick stack of it in the center console of his truck. Grandbois went home and talked to his dad, and within days, they bought a trailer. The first job paid $500 for 30 minutes of work. “That was kind of an eye-opener,” Grandbois, now 18 and working for himself full-time, told Fortune.
Carter’s Junk Away bills as much as $15,000 a month in peak season, Grandbois said. His W-2 employees are his high school friends, but he admits that he wasn’t able to scale up and reach profitability until he created a pricing calculator, started tracking data, and started using systems to get consistent lead flows.
“I’m really into vibe-coding and creating software,” he explained. “After that, we were able to be profitable on every single job,” he said proudly. “When our team is out… they’re bidding jobs spot-on every single time. So every time they complete a job, I mean, we’re making anywhere from $50 to $200 without being on the truck.” He said he earns about $125 to $1,000 per junk-removal job and he is increasingly overseeing the business from home as he scales, which is what he means by not “being on the truck.”
