The junk removal business plan: sections that matter

What to take away

What the plan is for

Two audiences, and they want different things.

An outside reader, a lender or an adviser, wants to know whether your assumptions are sourced and whether the business survives a slow quarter. You want a document that forces you to answer the questions you have been avoiding.

Write it for the second purpose and the first takes care of itself.

Section by section

1. What the business does. One paragraph. What material you remove, for whom, in what area, and what you refuse. If this paragraph is vague, everything downstream will be.

2. The market. Not population. Movement: housing turnover, rental share, renovation activity, the presence of estate sale organizers and property managers, and how much of the housing stock is old enough to be renovated. The method for reading this properly is in the startup and market guide.

3. The facility. Which permitted facility takes your loads, how far it is, what it accepts, what it refuses, and its fee structure including any minimum charge. This section is short and it constrains every number later in the document.

4. What you may carry. What your state environmental agency and the facility have told you, with dates and names. Paint and solvents, batteries, fluorescent tubes, tires, appliances holding refrigerant, electronics and anything wearing a hazard pictogram usually sit outside a general hauling operation, and the EPA's overview of products with corrosive, toxic, ignitable or reactive ingredients describes the general categories those local answers sit inside.

5. Services. What you sell, with the scope and exclusions attached. Resist listing everything you could theoretically do.

6. Operations. How a day works: booking, routing, the job, the facility run, and the records that come back. What the constraint is, which in this trade is the truck rather than the crew.

7. People. Who does what now, and what triggers the first hire. Say what the trigger is in a measurable form rather than as an intention. Finding those people is covered in the article on hiring reliable staff.

8. Equipment. The vehicle you chose and why, given your facility drive and your local access. What else is on the truck. The reasoning behind each shape is in the equipment and setup guide.

9. Money. Startup outlay, monthly fixed cost, the pricing basis, and the volume needed to cover it. Show the arithmetic rather than the conclusion.

10. Risks. Three or four real ones, with what you would do. A risk section listing generic threats convinces nobody.

11. What happens next. The first ninety days as dated steps with owners, and how you will know whether the plan was right.

The three numbers a reader will test

The facility drive. It sets a ceiling on loads per truck-day, and a plan that ignores it is a plan with an invented capacity.

Loads per truck-day. State it, say where it came from, and say what happens to the model if it is one lower. If the business only works at your best-case figure, the plan has told you something.

Disposal as a share of revenue. Anyone who has been near this trade will look for it. A plan that never mentions the fee at the gate reads as written by somebody who has not tipped a load.

Everything else in the document can be argued about. Those three decide whether the plan is credible.

Where the numbers should come from

Say where each figure came from, in the sentence, and the plan stops looking like a wish.

Wage assumptions can come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational employment and wage estimates by area, a defensible floor for physical work where you operate before employer burden.

Disposal rates come from the facility's own published schedule. Insurance comes from three real quotes on identical limits, and vehicle cost comes from a specific vehicle you have priced.

Registration and tax obligations belong in the money section rather than as an afterthought, and the IRS maintains a practical starting point for starting a business covering entity choice and the obligations that attach.

Getting it read by somebody who will argue

A plan nobody has challenged is a plan you have only agreed with yourself about.

The Small Business Administration's counseling and guidance pages point at local advisers who will read the numbers and push back at no charge. Take the version with the arithmetic visible, not the polished summary, because the arithmetic is what they can actually help with.

Ask them to attack the three numbers above. If those survive an hour of questioning, the plan is in reasonable shape.

Keeping it alive

A plan written once and filed is a document that describes a company that no longer exists.

Revisit it at ninety days against what actually happened, and then every six months. The money section will need rewriting first, because the first twenty jobs tell you your real cost per load rather than what you assumed.

What growth looks like beyond the first truck, and when a second one is justified, is worked through in the expansion and market guide. The step-by-step version of getting to the first job is in the article on starting a junk removal business.

Common questions

How long should the plan be?

Long enough to answer the eleven questions and short enough that you will reread it. Most of the value is in sections three, four and nine.

Do I need a plan if I am not borrowing?

Yes, because the questions are the point. The document is a side effect of answering them.

Should I include five-year projections?

Only if you can say what each year depends on. A five-year figure with no stated assumptions tells a reader you are guessing.

What if I cannot fill in a section?

That is the section to work on. An unanswerable question in a plan is a decision you have not made yet.

Does a template help?

A structure helps. A template filled in with generic language does not, because a reader can tell instantly and stops trusting the numbers.