Kirk and Jacob McKinney started hauling junk after school with one pickup truck. That small job has grown into Junk Teens, a Greater Boston company that earned $3 million in 2025. The company says it expects to touch $5 million this year.
How a small side job became a full company
The brothers began in 2021, when they were still teenagers. Their first big find came at a dump, where they spotted a pair of working speakers. The speakers sold, and soon they were collecting more usable items and listing them on Facebook Marketplace. Those early resale items brought in about $1,000.
Today, Junk Teens serves Greater Boston, Cape Cod and Rhode Island. It runs eight trucks and has 25 full-time employees. By the company’s estimate, it has handled around 7.4 million pounds of items so far. Whatever can be used is not thrown away. It is donated, resold or put to some other use.
The company also works with community groups. In one drive with Computers 4 People, refurbished laptops and desktops were given to families who could not afford them. In another tie-up, with WellStrong on Cape Cod, money was raised for wellness and peer-support programmes that help people recovering from substance abuse.
Kirk and Jacob McKinney started Junk Teens with a $4,000 truck as teenagers. Today, their business earns millions and is preparing to expand nationwide. (Image: Facebook)
Growth was not smooth. For a long time Jacob handled almost everything on the operations side. He made the employee schedules and decided where each load would be dumped. This was manageable with one or two trucks. With three or four, it became too much. Jacob says he was working 12 hours a day with no break, and he had no time left even to think about hiring help.
The brothers broke his job into smaller roles and handed them out. One of their long-serving workers, who was taking a gap year from college, became a manager. He started calling in staff every day and checking the schedule. Once that load was off his head, Jacob could sit with Kirk and work on training and better systems, which is what allowed the business to grow.
Two Boston Brothers Turned a Pickup Truck and a Junk Habit into a $3 Million Business
From phone notes to a homemade app
In 2024, when Junk Teens made $1.2 million, the whole business was running on Apple Notes. Jobs were written down there. Jacob would sort them out and paste the schedule to the workers heading out each morning. Kirk says that is how they ran a company worth a million dollars.
That has changed. The company now uses Jobber to manage customers, GoHighLevel to collect customer data and Connecteam to manage staff. It also uses light automation that links information across these tools.
The most unusual step was building its own app. A longtime employee with basic tech skills made it using Base44, with help from ChatGPT for the look and feel of the screens. The app carries a leaderboard and tracks numbers such as how much revenue a worker earns per hour and how often he closes a sale. Kirk points out that a teenager built the whole thing, and that the entire company now uses it every day.
Social media has also been put on a system. Earlier, Kirk filmed and edited videos whenever he found time. Now he shoots footage on jobs and sends the editing to outside help. About eight months ago, he began training other team members to film their daily work with Meta glasses and GoPro cameras. This gives Kirk plenty of material, and he acts as the link between that footage and the team.
The numbers are decent. Junk Teens has over 213,000 followers on TikTok, 269,000 on Instagram and 69,000 subscribers on YouTube. Kirk says the videos help in another way too. When workers see themselves on screen, they feel part of the company, and new people who watch the videos want to join.
A young team and the plan to go national
Most of the staff are school or college students. The company tries to pay better than its competitors to get good people. Including hourly pay, commissions and tips, the average works out to roughly $25 to $30 an hour.
Kirk says many workers feel they are building the company along with the founders, and their own chances grow as the firm grows. He believes being young themselves is one reason for this forward-looking attitude.
Work is seasonal. Some employees leave when the new school year begins, but the brothers plan for that. Volume almost doubles in the summer months. The Cape Cod branch, which is new, alone booked $350,000 worth of work in the peak season last year.
Jacob adds that a young crew brings energy. If someone arrives at work feeling low, he says, ten or fifteen cheerful colleagues around him soon pull him back up.
The next target is a national roll-out, which the brothers hope to start within the next couple of years. Before that, they want to tighten their systems. Kirk says what excites him most is giving young people a chance. In his view, there will always be junk to remove and students looking for part-time work, and many young people now want a path other than the usual college route.