How Dumpster Panda Went From a Restoration Side Business to 50 Dumpsters and a Hydraulic Trash Cat 47
Zach from Trash Cat sits down with Anthony of Dumpster Panda in Northern Indiana as he picks up a new Trash Cat 47 hoist on a pre-owned Freightliner M2. Anthony explains how a restoration business became a 50-dumpster roll-off company, why he left the trailer for a truck, why he is moving from an electric to a full hydraulic hoist, and how he trains and keeps drivers.
How a Restoration Company Started Renting Roll-Off Dumpsters
Zach: Zach here with Truck Fab Resource [Trash Cat Roll-Off Hoists], and I’m sitting down with Anthony Eric’s of Dumpster Panda. Anthony is here from Northern Indiana to pick up his brand new Trash Cat 47 [roll-off hoist] on a pre-owned Freightliner M2 chassis. I want to take a few minutes with Anthony and just talk through what are the points that have led you to today: your journey in scaling a roll-off business, and what brought you to today. So I know you started the roll-off business from another business. Tell me a little bit about how that took place and what the start-up phase of the dumpster business looked like.
Anthony: Yes. Our primary business is a cleaning and restoration business, so we do fire, water, and mold restoration. We always needed dumpsters, and we needed them at times when people were closed. So we had the opportunity to buy five dumpsters in a trailer from someone local. We did that, and then people were asking, “Hey, do you rent them?” because they see them sitting in driveways. Pretty quickly, after saying no a bunch of times, I’m like, “Sure, why not? Rent them out.” Once we started renting them out, it grew pretty quickly to 15 dumpsters. And I would say at the 15 point, we’re like, all right, the truck and trailer works, it’s just slow. For us, we have a lot of narrow areas. So we wanted to get into something that was more compact, easier for people to use. A lot of folks aren’t real confident with the trailer. So when we switched to a truck setup [roll-off truck], we were able to do way more loads per day, and it was just a lot safer.
Zach: That makes sense.
Why Move From an Electric to a Full Hydraulic Roll-Off Hoist?
Zach: What you’ve been running is an electric truck [electric roll-off hoist] that’s got the electric winch and then an electric over hydraulic pump. And what you have now, today, is a full hydraulic system [hydraulic roll-off hoist] that’s got the DewEze clutch pump, the Warn hydraulic winch, and just a heavier-duty unit. So what do you see in this versus what you’ve been running, and why now?
Anthony: Yeah. The biggest thing for us is reliability and speed. The electric winch is fine in most applications, but it likes to get really slow if you have a little bit of weight on it. So our guys get a little frustrated with the winch running really slow. And then for us, just a little bigger chassis, so we have a little more capacity for it. The other thing is the reliability of the hydraulic system compared to the electric system. It’s a lot more heavy duty, I guess you’d say, for running as many loads as we do per day. We feel like it’s a reliability gain, and we feel like it’s faster for our operators, which ultimately we hope will allow us to squeeze in an extra load or two per day.
Zach: That makes sense.
How Dumpster Panda Grew From 5 to 50 Dumpsters
Zach: You said you’re sitting right around 50 dumpsters right now. That’s cool. What have you done along the way? Equipment is certainly one part of what it takes to grow a business. What have you done along the way to get from 5 to 15 and now 50 dumpsters? That’s a point where a lot of guys want to get. Equipment aside, what’s it taken to get there?
Anthony: I would say the biggest thing from a growth standpoint is, we talked about social media. We use social media almost exclusively to build this business. It’s still one of our best referral sources for new customers. We don’t do a ton of shingle loads, we don’t do any concrete, we don’t hold dirt. We really specialize and go after the folks that are looking to gain more room in the garage, clear out the basement. So we’ve really focused on those folks, because they tend to be lighter loads. They tend to fill them up on the weekend, so even though it’s a 7-day rental, we can get that dumpster back faster and turn it again quicker. We’ve really focused on how we get that residential customer who needs to declutter and get them to book either a 12- or 16-yard [dumpster]. Like I said, the weight’s really low, and they turn them fast.
Pretty quickly, we ran the business off of spreadsheets till probably 20 dumpsters. Then we switched to Docket [booking software], and Docket’s been fantastic for us. Online booking, people love, so that’s been really good. But I would say for us, it’s that social media: really being active on there, trying to find loads, and then just having a really easy system for folks to use.
What Anthony Would Do Differently: Trailer to Truck
Zach: Looking back at each of those breakpoints, each of those milestones, would you have done anything differently as far as equipment goes? Whether it be buying more dumpsters at a given point before you bought that truck, waiting till more than 15 cans, or buying sooner? What are some things you would advise someone in a similar situation, two, three, five years ago?
Anthony: For us, the big change was I stopped doing the deliveries with the truck and trailer. As soon as we put somebody else in it, it became very evident quickly that the truck and trailer wasn’t the best option. We needed to go the truck route because of the ease and the safety of it. The other thing we saw: as soon as we got to the point where we’re doing probably five to seven loads in a day, the trailer became really tough. We would end the day with a full can, because we couldn’t get to the dump in time to empty it. Once we got to the truck, we could turn these cans and the stops a lot faster, and we weren’t coming back to the yard full. Our goal was always to empty the dumpster, have it on the truck ready to go for the next delivery, and start the day with the delivery. So we feel like that five-to-seven-ish stops per day was one the trailer just didn’t work for us, even with myself running it.
Training Roll-Off Drivers: Truck vs. Trailer
Anthony: For us, the biggest thing is you can get somebody in this truck. You can do a couple of days of ride-along. As long as they’re a decent driver and aware of their surroundings, given a couple of days of shadowing a driver and going through the operation side of it, you can get a driver up to speed really quick with the truck. The trailer could have been weeks just teaching people how to feel comfortable backing it into tight spots.
Zach: We were talking earlier, off camera, about what it takes to scale a business, and principles that apply to a roll-off business, to cleaning and restoration, even to building a truck business. No matter what that is, no matter how good you are, you can only do so much as one person. It takes a really good team, really well equipped and really well trained. It takes other people outside of ourselves to build that business. So it sounds like that’s something you’re being really conscious of: training and equipping and leading your team well, to go beyond what you could ever do just by yourself.
Anthony: For sure. If you have big dreams, you need a lot of people. You can’t do it all yourself unless you don’t want to see your family or you want to work yourself to death. So as we’ve built the business, we’ve thought, “If we do this, how does it impact that new person that comes on?” That’s a term we use in our business a lot: are we putting people in a position to be successful? Are they properly trained? Do they have the resources? Do they have the confidence to go do things? When we look at growing the business and really growing the team, every time we build a new position, are we giving that position everything they need to be successful? And if they go out and they’re not successful and we fell short, it’s not really their fault. It’s our fault. We’re going to do our part to support them and give them the tools and resources they need to be successful.
Going back to the truck, I feel like that’s a really big part of this, because we know a trailer is difficult, especially just a regular trailer. Now you’re trying to get it lined up with rails and get the can under it. For us, as we add drivers, it’s way easier for somebody to go out and be successful and fulfill all their stops during the day in a safe manner in a truck, because everyone knows how to drive. Now we’re just teaching them some fine-tuning: here’s how we load cans and operate the system. From the dumpster business perspective, we feel like the truck is the best way to put someone in a position to be successful.
Zach: In an economy like this, where good help can be hard to find, so many employers don’t pay attention to what it takes to make someone successful. Ultimately, that team member is going to feel more successful. They’re going to last longer, and chances are they probably have friends on a similar timeline. When they’re successful, you’re successful, and everybody wins on that front.
Why the Right Chassis Keeps Roll-Off Drivers
Anthony: The other thing about going to a truck like this: you guys found us a really great truck with a little mileage. I would love to drive this all day. I don’t want to put somebody in a truck where they’re like, “Oh, I’ve got to go drive that truck again.” We talked about what we wanted in this chassis, and you found us exactly that, because we want the person to be able to go to work. We don’t want the truck to beat them up all day. We want the job to be easier for them, because it is hard to find people. We want the truck to be part of what draws them to the job. If you ask somebody to come in, and there’s no air conditioning and they’re 12 hours a day in a truck that’s bouncing them around and beating them up, they’re not going to enjoy that very much, and eventually they’re going to look for something different. So the equipment is really important to us in keeping the drivers happy. It doesn’t matter how much you save. If you’ve got high driver turnover because they can’t put up with the equipment, you’re not really saving much money. If we’re saving 500 bucks a month, but I have to go do the route because everyone keeps quitting, that’s a loss.
Zach: How much further ahead are you? You’re not.
Anthony: Exactly.
Why Anthony Chose the Trash Cat 47 Hydraulic Hoist
Zach: Of the options on the market, what led you to the Trash Cat? What made sense for this to be the unit to grow your business?
Anthony: We have a truck setup that’s pure electric. About a year or so ago, we started having problems with it, and just the speed and all that. We knew we wanted something different, but we didn’t know what it was. At the time, we didn’t know about Trash Cat. We started doing some research and watched a ton of the YouTube videos. We saw the reliability of it, the consistent winch speed. We saw that it wasn’t relying on electric. For us, very quickly, we realized this is the perfect setup for the type of can we want to run. It’ll be a great truck for the operator, it’s going to have fewer breakdowns, and hopefully it leads to a lot more lifts per day.
Wrap-Up
Zach: Cool. Thank you for your trust and for giving us your business, and for allowing us to be a part of your growth journey. We’re truly excited to see where this takes you. Thank you again for your trust.
Anthony: Thank you. We appreciate everything. This whole process was super easy. You guys were great to communicate with, and the product’s been phenomenal. I really appreciate it.
Zach: Cool. Thanks so much.