We've Found Independence... With a Small Town Garbage Route!
(Page 3 of 5)
Well people, Larry and I installed that silly transmission ourselves late one night during the spring of our first year of operation. I remember the evening well, because that was the night I converted myself into the world of "hells" and "damns" forever (putting a transmission in a truck is THE PITS!).
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The next day, however, all the hard work we had done really was worth it . . . and then some. Instead of picking, pulling, raking, tugging, and pushing tons of ashes and trash off the flatbed of the livestock truck we had been using . . . we simply raised the hatch on our new garbage hauler and let the blade roll back and effortlessly (for us) dump the whole load in minutes. Larry and I thought we had the world by the tail the first time we saw that happen!
THE DOLLARS DO MOUNT UP . . .
We charge a "regular" family $1.50 a month for once-a-month pickups, $3.50 for weekly service, and 54.25 for twice-weekly stops. Retired folks and single residents both produce less garbage than "regular" families, and—for this reason—both are charged somewhat less ($2.50 for once-a-week pickups, for instance, instead of $3.50). We have a sliding scale for commercial accounts, depending on volume and frequency of service.
Our business has been growing constantly since Day One, which makes it a little difficult to give you specific "averaged out" yearly earning figures for the operation ... especially in its earliest days, when we were heavily supplementing the garbage route with odd hauling assignments and a parttime night watchman's job. Remember, too, that our operating expenses run somewhat less than 25% of our gross . . . which means we net out a little over 75% of the total number of dollars that we handle.
When you keep all that in mind, it becomes more meaningful to learn that our trash route grossed about $6,600 (netted roughly $5,000) during its first year . . . $16,000 ($12,000) on a schedule of four short workdays a week the second ... and $23,000 ($17,250)—counting extra hauling and the sale of scrap—when operated on a full five-days-per-week basis throughout most of year three .
. . . THE "SIDE" MONEY AND BENEFITS CAN BE GREAT...
I do want to take the time here to emphasize that the monthly payments we receive for our services add up to only the first of several ways we profit from our business. For instance, there are also the odd jobs (which mostly involve one form or another of hauling) that are offered to us nearly every day we're on the job, we've hauled everything from tree limbs to cast-iron bathtubs and, once, we even picked up over $300 by moving a lady to Omaha!
Actually, there's more of this kind of work going begging than we want to do and we always have a rotating list of customers waiting for us to get around to them. That list, of course, is just like money in the bank: Whenever one of us wants to pick up an extra twenty or thirty dollars on a Saturday, we just go down the lines to the next name ... and there it is! (The best deal of all is the owner of the local roofing company who pays us $15 a load to use our truck . . . and he does all the work!)
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