There's literally an article in 24 Hour News Vancouver, which at the time was like a big newspaper out here.

And the COVID page said, professional snowboarder drops sponsors to become Garbage Man.

And you're like, I resent that.

I was like, wow.

You didn't want to use entrepreneur or business person or anything other than garbage Man.

The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years.

Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

And we couldn't agree more.

This is the Business Development Podcast, based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get expert business development advice, tips and experiences.

And you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business.

Brought to you by Capital Business Development capitalbd ca.

Let's do it.

Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Hello.

Welcome back to the Business Development Podcast.

And today it is my absolute pleasure to welcome to our stage Barry Hartman.

Barry is the co founder and CEO of Fiverr 505 Junk, one of Canada's fastest growing junk removal companies and the visionary behind Bolt Accelerator, the premier coaching platform for junk removal entrepreneurs across North America and Australia.

From his early days as a professional snowboarder to building a $5 million empire in waste management, Barry's journey is anything but conventional.

Through innovations like the pay by weight model and a relentless focus on team culture, he's redefined what it means to scale a service based business with purpose and precision.

Now, as the head coach at Bolt Accelerator, Barry is leading a movement helping junk removal owners transform into CEOs, dominate their markets and build empires of their own.

He doesn't just teach business growth, he builds freedom.

And if you're ready to stop surviving and start scaling, Barry Hartman is the game changer you've been waiting for.

Thank you for gracing our stage today.

What an intro.

Thanks so much for having me, Kelly.

You know, the listeners don't know this, but this has been literally months in the making.

We had technical difficulties the first time around, so it was just, it had, it was not meant to be at the time, but we had a great conversation.

I got to know you a little better and that I always find that makes these interviews like a thousand times better.

I totally agree.

Actually it's.

I did a podcast recently and there was, it was a full podcast in that case.

And on the other end that time, this time was my end I was traveling Australia, so Internet tech difficulties, but on that end it was on the, the host side and they lost the whole thing.

And it was like, I, I, we.

Kind of.

Chalked it up as like round two is now we've got a whole hour and a half of prep leading into it.

So it's going to be way better.

That's right.

If there's one thing I've learned on this journey, it's that we're people first, business people second.

Yeah, that's right.

You can't outrun your humanity no matter how hard.

No, that's a hundred percent true.

Barry, I'm super excited for this interview today.

We actually haven't had anybody from the junk removal space before, so I'm very excited that you're the first and I just love your energy and I'm excited to have this chat with you and teach our listeners, who is Barry Hartman.

You're doing incredible things, not just here in Canada with regards to your company, but in teaching the next generation, which is exceptional and something I believe super heavily.

And so we definitely connect on that front.

But before we kind of dive in deep today, lead us down the journey, man.

How did you end up on this entrepreneurial journey?

Were you always this driven?

Yeah, I mean, I've got the classic sort of entrepreneurial start.

When I was 12 years old, I was going door to door.

I had a three tier sales program, you know that I always joke as a 12 year old.

And, and the first thing was, I'll wash your car for five bucks and we'll do that on a monthly basis.

If they say no to that, then the second thing was I'll walk your dog once a week at $7 a walk and we'll do it for whatever it was half an hour or something at the time.

And if all else fails, I asked them if they wanted to buy some chicken strips because everyone needs chicken strips.

And we bought them from Costco for 20 bucks and we sold them for 30.

Oh, wow.

So that was the starting point of it all.

Amazing, amazing.

I always like to ask, like, were your parents entrepreneurs by chance?

They were very entrepreneurial and it was actually until my dad was about 55 years old and he was laid off from his job.

He was in human resources and the company got acquired, they restructured.

And you know, that's such an interesting age because you're sort of 10 years leading up to sort of retirement if that's the age you're targeting.

And, and for him, they, they started looking at different options and you know, they landed on purchasing a franchise from a fellow named Mike Drever, and he ended up being our first mentor in business, actually, down the road.

But he bought the seventh franchise off Mike, and it was a retail travel agency specifically for selling cruises.

So it was called Cruise Ship Centers.

They opened up a brick and mortar shop.

They did really well with it, actually, in the.

In the 10 years leading up to selling it.

But I think their biggest claim to fame is they've been on, like, 55 or 60 cruises because they need to product test them.

All,.

Make sure they're selling the right thing.

And so it ended up working really well for them.

It was a good segue into the retirement.

And, yeah, they.

They've been a big influence on me and very supportive over the years.

Wow.

Okay.

Okay.

How old were you when they.

When they got into that business?

I was in high school still, so probably, like, partway through high school.

Really had no idea what it was.

I remember, like, looking at.

At the retail.

At the actual, like, travel agency and thinking, like, wow, this is a beautiful renovation.

Like, this place is perfect.

Like, why doesn't our home look like this?

Just like a high school kid not knowing anything about business.

And then.

But I did a bit of work for them over the years.

It started just with, like, filing and stamping their brochures that they would hand out.

And then.

Yeah.

And then later on, you know, when I was taking a break between my stint in professional snowboarding and then, you know, entrepreneurship, I was studying marketing at college at the time, and I asked them.

I was like, I don't care what you pay me, but I really think I can help generate some leads for you.

And of course, you know, as parents, they want to help, but more so, they want the leads.

And so they took me up on the offer.

They paid me 15 bucks an hour, and I remember getting them ranked number one on Google.

My business.

We created a separate blog post or, like, a blog website for them to sort of start creating, like, their influence in the space outside of the franchise system.

We built at the time a Twitter account for my mom.

She didn't post on it.

It was all me.

But it actually ended up working quite well, particularly the local marketing side of things.

Unfortunately for them, I quickly realized if I could do that for them, I could do it for me.

And started.

Someone else.

Quickly afterwards.

Okay, okay, I love that.

I love that.

I always like to ask that question when possible, because I do find that with a lot of incredibly successful people, they come from entrepreneurial families at some level or another, whether it's an uncle or a parent, there was somebody close to them that ultimately modeled the start of it.

Whether or not that's exactly what they did is usually negligible.

But I. I really do think being able to see it on some level when you're younger, even in high school, is a massive, massive asset to your kids.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'll never forget one thing my mom said to me when I had decided on 505 junk.

I wrote the business plan and was actually ready to drop out of college and go full time on it.

We were on a vacation somewhere.

Not a cruise ship, surprisingly, but we were on vacation somewhere.

And I remember being at the front desk, and she said, what do you see?

And I looked around, I said, there's a desk, there's a person, and I want to get into the hotel room.

And she was like, okay, here's what you're going to see in the future.

Because when I stand at the front of a hotel room, I'm wondering, what's the training program for their employees?

Why did they choose this type of flooring?

Why did the customer service rep at the front desk say this thing to me?

What kind of software are they using to run the hotel?

She's like, once you start your own business, you will never be able to switch that brain off.

It's not a negative thing.

It's not a positive thing.

It's just something for you to be very aware of.

And just knowing that actually has been really helpful over the years, because it's true.

I look at everything through the lens of a business and you can't shut it off.

And I.

Turns out, I love it.

So it's a great thing.

But, yeah, it was a very influential comment that she made at the early days of starting a business.

It's so funny, the interview before you today, we were talking about that how, like, even if you leave entrepreneurship, you never really leave the entrepreneurial thinking.

That's.

Like, it literally becomes a part of who you.

Are.

Yeah.

I was at a high school yesterday, actually presented to a class about.

It's called Yale Young Entrepreneurs and Leadership Launchpad.

It's sort of like an extracurricular thing that they can sign up for.

They still get credit.

So, you know, the kids in the room are really curious about this because they choose to be there.

And I remember asking them, I was like, what does entrepreneurship mean to you?

And someone raised their hand and they were like, solving a problem.

I was like, very good answer.

That's great.

Someone else raised A hand and they wrote community.

So you know, community of people, employees, whatever.

And I remember just showing them around the classroom, like that desk, that paper, that pen, this laptop, the screen.

Everything is a business.

And you, the.

The cool thing about entrepreneurship is you can choose whatever you want to get into.

And I remember their, their eyes just opened up and, you know, they're focusing on a lot of tech stuff.

Like one of them was actually building a.

A robot that would go sort of door to door and pick up the trap.

I don't know, maybe they did that just for me kind of thing.

But it's, you know, you could see all the, see the wheels turning in these grades, tens, eleven and twelve students.

And it's.

Yeah, it's true.

Once you get a taste for it, it's hard to shut it off.

Wow, that's incredible.

Tell me a bit more about that initiative that, that you were going to schools and talking to kids.

Yeah, so it's a not for profit program.

I remember that, like when I was in high school, I was very lost.

I was kind of hanging out with the wrong crowd and had amazing parents, amazing support, and it still wasn't enough to get me out of my sort of like funk that I was in for a few years.

And, and so it was, I remember thinking when someone brought this program up to me and asked me to speak at the high school, like, man, I would have loved to find a program like this and be able to like sink my teeth into the idea of launching a business.

Even though most of them probably won't pursue the actual model they're building in high school.

Some of them might, but just the process of going through it was invaluable, or seemed invaluable.

And I was thinking like, the first time I joined them actually was pre business coaching.

So now that I'm into business coaching, it makes it even more intriguing to me because that's what I do now.

So coaching these teenagers is, is.

It feels great for me.

But yeah, I just remember thinking, like, I would have loved to have that as a kid.

And you know, if I can, I always, whenever I'm doing like a speaking engagement or even a high school session or, or college session, if I could just positively impact one person in the room, then it's a hundred percent worth the time to go and do it.

And yeah, so it's just a program I believe in.

We try and put some time into it every year.

So.

Amazing.

Man, I look back to being in high school, we had nothing like that.

And like, I'M in Alberta.

So everyone just thinks we're going into the trades.

I think for the most part.

But like the high school had trades programs, but they had nothing in the business space.

And it's like, I think I knew too, when I was quite a bit younger that I liked the idea of business.

I had no idea what the hell that.

Meant.

Yes,.

I like the idea of it.

Right.

In grade 11, grade 12, I had no clue.

But at the same time, I don't necessarily think you have to have all the clues in the world.

I think, you know, I mean, if you know, you know.

And it was so cool because this year I was hanging out with my nephew and he's like, you know, uncle, I'm in business classes in high school.

And I'm like, like, for real, like, why did those not exist when I was a kid?

100%.

Yeah.

So schools are doing better.

They're doing much better.

They're evolving for sure.

Yeah.

And you know, I was, I was saying to you before, my wife's from Australia and Brisbane, and I know that's a topic that they're starting to explore a lot more is these, like, it's crazy to call entrepreneurship an alternative path because starting a business to me is like, it's a very viable career, especially if you can actually,.

It might be one of the oldest paths ever.

It is, it literally is.

And like, we spend so much time training and coaching and educating people on how to land this dream job, which is amazing and a really big part.

No business can survive without a great team.

So you need that balance.

I just think we forget to bring up the fact that someone needs to start in the first place.

And that's a whole different set of skills than walking into an existing business and applying the skills that you learn along the way.

Absolutely, absolutely.

You are my very first professional snowboarder.

So I feel like I want to touch on that really quickly.

We've had a former pop star, but we've never had a professional snowboarder.

Dude, that sounds amazing.

It was a wild experience.

So around those sort of like darker high school days that I was speaking of before, I found snowboarding.

And holy crap, that I fall in love with it like immediately.

Yeah,.

Unfortunately.

I grew up in a small town called Tawasan about, I don't know, and it's about 45 minutes from downtown Vancouver and then about an hour and 15 minute drive to the mountain.

And if you don't drive, it was about a three hour bus ride.

So.

Okay.

Fortunately for me, my parents decided to open this travel agency that we were speaking of before right near the mountains, because it was a bit of a wealthier community.

And so a nice sort of silver lining of that was that they had to drive by the mountain and so they would drop me off.

I remember starting to get really good because I was going up almost every day.

I always joke I fired my high school friends because they were a bad influence on me and it wasn't trending in the right direction.

And snowboarding was my replacement.

And, you know, they had all these cool movies coming out, and the professional snowboards were doing all these crazy tricks.

And I remember just thinking, I want to do that.

That.

That looks awesome.

I don't know what it's going to take, but I assume you just have to snowboard every day.

And so started going up the hill around, like, grade 12.

I remember speaking to our high school principal and counselor saying, I'm going to make it into the Olympics for snowboarding, and so I'm going to need time to do this.

Snowboarding wasn't even in the Olympics by at that point, but that's okay.

And the.

The principal, they worked with me.

They were like, okay, we'll give you credit for pe, Physical education, the gym class.

We'll give you two spares and the career and personal planning.

It sounds like you've already made.

You know, you've got that sorted out, Wink.

So we'll give you credit for that, too.

And so I got every other day off school to pursue snowboarding, and.

And it started to really take off.

I got, you know, as you build up your skill set and you sort of get recognized by different people on the hill.

Got some film opportunities, got my first set of sponsors around 17 years old, traveling down to California to do a bit of filming.

And I remember moving up to Whistler like I was just fresh out of high school, and I saved enough money washing dishes to move up there and move out on my own.

And I did a full year in Whistler Snowboard every day, night janitor in the evening for the local mountain.

So I got my free pass.

And.

And at that point, Whistler is like the pinnacle of professional snowboarding.

So not only does everybody live there, it's such a challenging mountain, especially the terrain park, that if that's your home base, like, inevitably you're just going to start to master the skills over the years.

Yeah.

And so I had.

I had some sponsorships, but I remember coming home one day or I moved home for the summertime, and I got a call from this random number.

And the lady on the other line was like, hey, are you Barry Hartman?

And I was like, I sure am.

And she's like, oh, I'm calling from Eastern Mountain Sports.

We're out of New Hampshire in the United States.

Someone pass your name along.

Do you want to come to Argentina with us in a month?

We're going to film our entire catalog for the year in two weeks.

And I thought it was a joke.

I thought it was a prank, because at this point we're talking dishwasher, janitor.

17 Year old snowboarder had no money.

And I was like, sure, but what do I need to do?

She's like, I'll send you all the details.

Just give me your email address.

And so I made up a proper email address on the spot because my other email address was not good to tell her.

Whatever high school when I made,.

I remember, I remember the days.

And, and so, and then, so she sends it over.

She calls me back a couple days or sorry, a couple, like literally 10 minutes later.

I hadn't even had time to run downstairs and tell my parents yet.

And she's like, oh, you're getting paid $350 a day to be there and any expenses you incur will pay you back dollar for dollar.

And I remember thinking like, they ended up stretching that trip to three weeks.

So it was like, it was like $6,000, which.

Was.

Like my annual income at the point.

17 Is pretty good.

It was a lot of money at the time that allowed me to not only experience that, gained a lot of like good footage and reputation.

And traveling with these different photographers that flew in from across the world allowed me to buy my first pickup truck and snowmobile.

And so we, and it just started to take off from there.

Wow, wow, wow.

Okay, so you did that for what, four years?

You were a professional snowboarder.

And I did notice that the year you stopped being a professional snowboarder was the year that you started 505 junk.

And so I wanted to understand that.

I was like, okay, what, what happened?

Where did that shift happen?

And then, why Junk?

There's literally an article in 24 Hour News Vancouver, which at the time was like a big newspaper out here.

And the COVID page said professional snowboarder drop sponsors to become Garbage Man.

And you're like, I resent that.

I was like, wow, you didn't want to use entrepreneur or business person or anything other than Garbage Man.

But they weren't wrong because when we launched 505 junk, I was literally hauling garbage so,.

Okay, okay,.

You know what?

I got to a point in my sort of snowboarding career where it, the, the writing was on the wall that this was not going to be a forever thing.

Like, 98 of the sponsored money goes to 2% of the professional snowboarders in the world.

And I wasn't part of that 2%.

And I had done it for so long that I actually kind of fell out of love of snowboarding.

The progression of it was getting insane.

Like, you know, not to get too technical, but if back then I could do like a 900 as a trick, kind of going over like a 70 foot jump and spinning two and a half times in the air.

There were kids that were coming out that were 14 years old that were just starting to do tricks that nobody had ever seen before.

And I remember thinking like, I'm not trending in that direction.

I need a plan B here.

Gotcha, gotcha.

You're like these punk.

Kids.

Yeah.

That next generation.

Hey,.

Yeah.

And yeah.

So then I, I enrolled in our local college and started studying marketing.

And I kind of fell in love with business.

I mean, I was just, I knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur.

I didn't know what it was going to be.

I didn't know if it was going to be a product or a service or what it was going to be.

And a friend of mine, his older brother, had started sort of a side gig hauling junk on the weekends.

And he'd go out and we'd go out for two or three hours.

He'd make eight, nine hundred dollars recycling material, pay for a bit of fuel.

And he gave me 200 bucks at the end of the shift.

And I was like, I've only been here for three hours.

My time is not worth $70 an hour.

Trust me.

Yeah, yeah.

And.

And he was like, no, no, it's all good.

Like, it didn't take me that long.

Like, just have it.

I'll keep the rest.

No big deal.

And I remember thinking like, no big deal.

What?

What do you mean no big deal?

Like,.

You don't make.

Money.

No big deal.

Not having come from it, like, it's a very big deal.

Yeah, yeah.

And so then I got to work.

I started writing a business plan.

I was like staying up all night studying 1-800-got-JUNK and Brian Scudamore, the founder and researching all the local companies, the American companies.

There's one that just came out on Dragon's Den at the time, which is sort of the Canadian shark tank.

And I remember seeing like, holy, you could this doesn't need to be a side gig.

We could build, like, a proper legitimate business out of this.

And you don't need a lot of capital to start, which I didn't have.

And you don't need really any skill sets to start, which I also didn't really have.

But I did learn a lot on the business side, almost like subconsciously from snowboarding, more so on the marketing side.

I didn't know what an invoice was when we started.

505 Junk.

My co founder will joke about that still today.

But I did understand marketing.

I understand branding.

I understand how to work the press.

I understand, like, you know, how to kind of be competitive and, like, differentiate yourself from others and the personal branding side of it.

And so that's when I realized that maybe those skill sets are transferable to junk removal, just not in ways that you might think it would be.

Sure, sure.

But once again, it's one thing to start a junk removal company.

It's a whole nother thing to scale it to one of the fastest junk removal companies in the whole country.

And I feel like that takes business savvy, and that's what I'm excited to kind of get into.

You today is like, how did you take an idea, something that essentially you could run with one person and then scale it to such an extent?

Yeah.

The founder of cruise ship centers, who sold the franchise to my parents.

I reached out to him at two weeks into business and was like, here's what we're doing.

Here's what I want to build.

I don't want it to be just like a small local service with a couple trucks and a couple employees.

Like, I. I do want to build, like, a big brand and.

And long term, have national presence with it.

And he's like, all right, I'll meet you at the coffee shop.

It was a Sunday afternoon.

I'll give you an hour of my time.

He had just sold cruise ship centers for, like, $35 million to Expedia.

And so he.

He knew what he was doing.

For lack of better words.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

And he sat me down and he helped me understand how to build a vision.

He understand.

He walked me through building a strategic plan.

He understood.

He taught me how to build, like, standard operating procedures so that we could quickly get off the trucks and delegate the work.

He taught me how to do financial planning.

He gave me three or four books to read.

One was the E Math, which is sort of the go to startup book for entrepreneurs.

And he just set me off on this, like, Trajectory and met.

We ended up meeting up with him a couple more times after that.

So that was very beneficial.

Early on, something very beneficial as well was my business partner Scott Foran.

He was exceptional at running Google Ads.

And so we were able to really like really increase our customer acquisition rapidly enough so that we could put our first hire, Alex Elsey, who's now a partner in the company and our VP of sales and operations today.

He was our first sort of hire about six months in.

And that allowed me to basically get off the truck and dedicate my full time work towards figuring out how to build this business.

And so I had the time which is like the biggest thing is a business partner and a full time employee allowed me to kind of step back and look at this thing and understand how are we going to scale this thing up.

Yeah, like instead of you being on the job, you or working in the job, you could work on the job.

You could figure out how to actually grow this thing.

Long.

100 And that's the classic E myth.

It's like you need to not work in your company, you need to work on it.

And I just, that was the first book I read.

So that's all I knew.

All I knew was that I shouldn't be working in the business.

I need to be constantly working on it.

And anytime I see myself going back in it, which is working in the trucks or picking up the phones to book jobs or sending invoices, I always had this, and I still do today, this mental cue, this book, just telling me you should not be doing this.

You should find someone else that is happy to do it and go and work on building the business.

Well, that's the right, that's the right self talk.

Yeah,.

That's what, that's what happens when you're wired properly.

Yes, that's right.

Well.

And that's a very good point because in Bolt, which I'm sure we'll get into in a bit.

But that is one of the biggest limiting beliefs or mental roadblocks that people have is that.

Things that no one could do it better than.

You and they can't, they haven't figured out delegating yet and it's just not true.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the things that you guys are known for in the junk industry is pay by weight.

I can't even believe that that wasn't a thing.

Talk to me, what was it like before that?

Still the same as it is today.

People show up to a job site, they look at it, they give it a ballpark Estimate on how much volume fills the truck, the truck gets filled, and then hopefully everybody was right.

Yeah, that's hard.

That doesn't work every time.

It doesn't.

And so we wanted to find something that differentiated us because while it was somewhat easy to get into junk removal, we also happened to really pick a dog fight with an 800 pound gorilla who happened to be in our backyard, which was 1, 800, got junk.

And so figuring out A, how to differentiate ourselves and B, how to be exceptional at marketing, to me, those were like the top two priorities that we needed to like figure out ASAP in like year one or two.

And so it started by charging by weight but not having scales in the truck.

So we go to a job site, go to the transfer station, get the weight ticket, drop off the items, scan it, email it to the client, and hope they pay us.

Not very efficient.

Yeah,.

You also can't stack jobs because there's no way of getting the total weight of one job site if we're combining them into two.

And then, so then we, my business partner Scott and I went on this journey of just figuring out how to put scales on the truck.

And there's a lot of different ways you can go about it.

The one way that we figured out was a way on how to put an onboard Wayne system on the truck as a sub chassis that allowed us to sort of like measure the components in it.

It had a digital reader on the side.

It had a, a what they call the world's smart smallest printer.

So it could print out these little weight tickets.

And that allowed us to load material, print the weight, build the client on the spot, go to the next job.

Once the truck's full, then we go to the transfer station.

And it increased our efficiency, our roi.

It really helped with the commercial clients because they didn't need to be on site.

And we had proof of purchase through the weight tickets.

It really sent us in the right direction.

And that was about 2014.

So we were three years in when we first built that truck.

Wow.

Wow.

Okay, I want to, I want to talk to you about that 800 pound gorilla.

Because he's a big gorilla.

Yes.

That's a big company.

Right?

Walk me through that.

You know, were you ever like, I don't know if we can compete with 1, 800 got junk?

Like, did that thought ever cross your mind when you were kind of getting started?

What was it that allowed you to say, you know what, they're big, but I think there's room for us too?

Yeah.

So they were doing about $150 million at the time, and that was spread out across North America.

And I kept seeing their trucks everywhere.

And I always kept thinking, like, every time I saw a truck, it just like, lit me up.

We had our old pickup truck with our crappy trailer and barely any branding on it.

And I just remember seeing these, like, these blue trucks driving everywhere.

And they were these Isuzu cabovers with the nice dump body on the back and they always look clean.

And I just couldn't help but think, like, I want that.

I want that.

I need.

We need that.

We need the brand, we need the website, we need the.

The customer experience, we need the great employees.

Like, we need everything.

And so I don't think it was ever that we couldn't compete with them.

I saw them more of like an inspiration, if anything.

And I've actually got to know Brian quite a bit over the years and he's been really giving of his time and brought me into his office.

And, you know, we go back and forth on emails with, like, shared ideas now and stuff like that.

But yeah, he's, he's been great, honestly.

He's one of the nicest entrepreneurs that I've met.

And at first I was like, are you just sort of like putting up a.

A face here?

Because, like, I'm the competitor and you're keeping me at arm's length.

But it turns out he's just a nice guy.

Yeah.

And you know what?

I see that more often than the, than the alternative.

I see so many entrepreneurs who are psyched to give back, who are excited to help the next generation.

And actually, you know, I've carried that forward too, into my coaching and training.

Like, yeah, I have a business development firm.

There's room for hundreds of business development firms in this country.

Right.

I have no issue training people to be the next competitor because at the end of the day, there's so many businesses.

And I think in your case, at the end of the day, there's like millions of people who need junk removed.

Absolutely.

Just in Vancouver alone.

I mean, there's.

There's 25,000 junk removal companies in North America.

Wow.

I had no idea.

That's crazy.

And.

There's 250 just in our market.

So what's 251 for me at the time it was like, it's not nothing.

I just wanted to make sure we could climb to the top because I didn't want to be the 108th best junk removal company.

Like, we.

Want.

We were in.

This to be the best, however you define it, maybe best in our market.

Never the biggest.

Right.

I don't need.

They're doing 800 million a year now.

Like, that's not my goal to do 800 million a year.

It might be for some people, but it was always just that, like steady eddy growth and making sure we could hire great people, build a good brand, have a really strong reputation, the market.

And if and when all that goes to plan, then we start looking at expansion after that.

Sure, sure.

Like I said, you're like the very first person from the junk industry, or even the garbage industry, we could call it.

Ultimately, take me into that industry.

Like, what is it?

Like, what's scaling a business like in, you know, specifically in the junk removal space.

Yeah, so it's half marketing and half business development.

So we early days, we were about 20% commercial, 80% residential.

The 80% residential are your typical homeowners.

They're looking to get rid of bulk items.

They use us once or twice a year.

You know, we've got to be dialed in with Google Ads, SEO, our referral programs, even, like with AI these days, like having like a good AI voice agent so that if we miss a call, it never actually gets missed.

Hiring good people, like fighting for reviews, you know, the, the typical service stuff that is like essential in order for a local business to thrive.

And that got us to about half a million in revenue by 2015.

So from from our perspective, we were growing at a good rate.

I mean, still in our twenties, half a million in revenue, we could finally pay not only the bills, but give ourselves a little bit of an income.

And a friend of mine walked in one day and he's like, those commercial clients, like, tell me about them.

And I was like, property managers, construction companies, real estate agents, estate managers.

There's lots of different types of.

And then like our general commercial, which is offices and law firms and anyone that just needs to get rid of anything.

And he's like, those are all recurring clients.

And I remember thinking, yeah, I know, it's great.

That's why it makes up 20% of our revenue.

And he's like, what are you doing to get more of those clients?

And I said, nothing.

So he, he walks in my office, he grabs a Sharpie, we go to the whiteboard, and he drew out a full pipeline for our future business development plan or commercial sales plan.

And, And I remember thinking like, that seems pretty straightforward.

So we picked up pipedrive, we got our scripts in place, we.

We adjusted like our B2B marketing and, and Sort of started to prepare for launch, if you will, and we ended up growing from about 500,000 to 1.5 million in 24 months.

And wow.

Honestly, it moved our commercial revenue up to about 50%.

And of that 50% of commercial revenue, 95% of the clients were all repeat clients booking every week or month.

Yeah.

And that's, that's been our scale factor today.

I mean, we still, of course, we do a ton, all of the marketing for SEO, meta ads, social media, whatever.

But there's this other side to the commercial where figuring out the process of, of finding and onboarding new recurring commercial accounts and then also figuring out the account management side of keeping them and scaling them and building those relationships even when they move to another company, which is honestly great because you retain the prior account and follow the new one that has what has allowed us to scale to 5 million.

Amazing.

And I love that you touched on the account management space because when I'm working with clients, typically one of the caveats that I have to give them is I can open the door for you, but I'm not the right person to manage that customer.

That needs to be somebody high level in your organization, who you trust, who isn't going anywhere, who's going to treat them like gold and consistently, not just once or twice, but like on a quarterly basis at least.

Right.

I'd love to better understand your account management strategy because I think that's something that gets super overlooked by a lot of organizations.

Yeah, so that's a really good question.

So first of all, we look at the different buckets of types of clients.

Right.

So for us, that's our construction clients.

It's all within real estate.

So real estate is the main umbrella that we're looking for.

And then we branch it out into two core segments or verticals.

One is new construction, which is anything from new homes to renovations to commercial tenant improvement projects.

Like, my business partner Scott just landed a massive.

It was like a $350,000 job spread out over 18 months.

Wow.

And that was one client, one job.

Wow.

So there's all the new stuff, which is essentially construction, and then there's all the management of the existing buildings, which is our property managers, the estate managers.

Unfortunately, people die and, and, but we can really help there as far as like removing the items.

Hoarding is a huge one for us.

You know, that's another unfortunate situation.

We run into a lot, but the silver lining is that we can really help them.

And if we are empathetic towards that situation and they can get their house back, man.

It can be transformational for people.

So first we break it down and then we're looking at, okay, who are all the key decision makers in the account?

Because for us there's usually the decision maker and then sort of the site contact.

And those are two different relationships.

For us, the decision maker is usually more of like a senior manager or sometimes a vp or if it's a small business, it's the business owner.

And.

Yeah,.

Our goal is not to like bombard them with, hey, you got any work?

Or anything like that.

In fact, we're not even really engaging with them on that frequent of a basis.

It's more just to build.

To build the trust with them so that they can deploy our company to multiple construction sites, multiple properties, if they own and operate a real estate office, to all of their agents.

So that's the decision maker that we're really trying to build a relationship with.

And then for the people on site, which in construction is superintendents or in property management, it would be the actual building manager or the real estate agents.

Those people, like, we just have to literally, we do anything for them.

Like we've got 10 trucks going out tonight from 6pm till 2am because this client is doing a demolition in downtown Vancouver and they need all the waste removed by Sunday morning.

Oh, wow.

So account management to me is like the relationship side, but the execution is probably the most important side of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

But once again, you might do this job right, but if somebody isn't still connecting the dots, making sure that that person is looked after, lunches, meetings, things like that, the relationship can deteriorate and suddenly it does become a.

Well, I don't know.

I'm going to use your.

I'm going to use 1-800-got junk.

Right.

But the account management is like the force multiplier for making sure that you do get that next opportunity.

And so many companies just neglect it and it blows my mind every time.

And then I see a company like yours, it's like, obviously you're looking after these people or they would not be coming back, you know, year over year over year.

Right.

But that is a missing piece in a lot of organizations.

Yeah, it is.

And especially in Bolt, right.

When we're coaching people, like the first thing I say, what's your commercial sales process?

And usually they just go, sorry, what?

What is that?

And that's like literally the first thing that I like to focus on, knowing how much of an impact it had on us that it very well likely will have.

The same impact on them.

Yeah,.

But you're.

I mean, to your point about, like, the lunches and all that kind of stuff, like, that actually is important.

Like, we take our clients golfing.

My business partner just went to Mexico with one of our first commercial client who has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on our company over the years.

Yep.

He's not looking for, like, a kickback or anything weird like that.

He just wants to know that he's valued.

And he absolutely is, because it's.

Our business wouldn't be the same without that client as well as, like, the very similar ones that are in the same industry using us little things like going to sports games.

Like, I. I like all these types of things because it's not just.

You're not just like, giving them the tickets.

We do do that because they don't always want to hang out with us.

But, like,.

Sure.

But it's more just like it's an opportunity to genuinely get to know someone.

And I find if you actually like being with each other, then the idea of breaking up doesn't make any sense at all because you actually like the other person.

I was gonna say, how many of these people have become friends?

Lots of them.

Yeah.

No, it's.

Yeah, a lot of them are friends.

I mean, they come to.

Some of them came to my wedding in Australia.

I mean, and.

And so now I don't even look at them as clients.

They're.

People do their thing, and our people do our thing together.

But it's more just like, yeah, they're.

We just became close friends.

Aside from the actual business relationship,.

The best account management is that it's.

It's when you essentially make friends.

Right.

And at the end of the day, I always say, like, if you're looking to build account accounts, if you're looking to solidify those relationships, do things that you would do with your friends.

Right.

Like, you didn't.

You did fun things with your friends.

They became friends.

The exact same thing applies to business and people.

People.

Like, what do you mean?

Well, why wouldn't it?

Yeah.

It's so true.

And yeah, I mean, who.

If someone genuinely likes to golf.

Not everyone does, but let's use golf, because I'm talking to the people that do like golfing.

And I wasn't a big golfer, but I decided to learn the skill of golf knowing that a lot of people in business love golf because it's a nice excuse to spend an afternoon outside.

And also, I read once, I was like, learn golf because it's four hours.

Yes.

Like.

You're assuming that you're a nice person and enjoyable to be around and know your stuff about business so you can keep up with the talk.

What a great way to build a relationship with someone than walking around a golf course for four hours and just having fun.

I'm a huge advocate of nine holes because by the end of 18, I'm absolutely exhausted and want to go home.

But yeah, I'm right there.

I do like the nine hole strategy.

That is solid.

Oh, man, four hours.

Yeah, four hours is just a bit too long.

I, I, I do agree.

Yeah, that's amazing.

And obviously, you know, I want to lead into bolt accelerator because that's something that you're passionate about now and, and it's really awesome.

And I just, I'd love to learn more about how you got into that.

Yeah.

So I've had a business coach my entire life.

It started to some degree with my parents, and then it was the mentor Mike.

And then I realized I had to pay for it because not everyone wants to, you know, help the little kids anymore.

Yeah.

And that was one of the best investments I had ever made.

And I think every time we've hired a business coach since then, it's been the best investment that we've ever made.

Because I like to find business coaches that are either actively living the vision that I see for our business or for my personal life, or they've already done it.

Because that way there's no sort of guru talk or like philosophical type stuff.

Like these people have literally done it.

And so when I go to them with my problems or when they give me positive feedback in return, I know it's true.

And so, you know, I always look for someone that had.

Yeah.

A, lived out the vision or actively doing it, and B, could provide candid feedback because I didn't need sort of the emotional support.

I can get a counselor for that.

Right.

This was like a business connection.

It was a business relationship.

And I really wanted to make sure that they were going to give us like, sound advice.

And, and so it kind of hit me one day, I was getting all these junk removal entrepreneurs emailing me and calling me and texting me.

And in one of the business coaching programs that I was in before, you know, they would reach out to me in that there's one or two other junk companies in that.

And I remember thinking just like, why not just build a business around it?

There's a lot of inspiration, just like junk removal.

There's a ton of good business coaching programs out there, you know, I've done the Tony Robbins stuff currently right now Dan Martell is my business coach and, and he built SaaS Academy, which is one of the largest software coaching programs in the world for software entrepreneurs.

And so I was like, perfect, I'll align with this guy because he's built a $40 million coaching business.

Clearly he understands how to run that model.

Yeah.

And so I feel like we, this thing is 14 years in the making because we have all of the standard operating procedures, we have all the systems, we have all the coaching and training and resources.

We've built like a bit of a brand presence in the industry, not just for clients, but sort of eyes on us as sort of a fast up and coming junk removal business.

And so I thought if we can just package all of this together and provide really done for you resources, templates, systems, all that kind of stuff, the coaching so that we can actually help them problem solve issues that we've experienced sometime in the last 14 years.

So never really come across an issue that one of the smaller companies hasn't, we haven't been able to help troubleshoot yet.

And the third one, and I think the biggest one is the community.

And so having like minded entrepreneurs in for the most part non competing markets allows them to build that trust and friendships ultimately with each other.

And so we're building that online but also doing like an in person event every year as well.

And so it's grown quite quickly.

We started with our first person last year and brought in our second person and I think we're around 30, 35 companies in the program now that are sort of spread out across North America and Australia.

And yeah, it's, it's, I love it.

It's so fun.

Like we're just literally helping people.

That's it, that's what we do.

Totally.

I was going to say if you could drop everything and just you coaching full time, would you do that?

Okay, so I've thought about that and here's, here's what happened for me is I to, to lift up the business coaching program.

First of all, the answer is like yes, I would do this full time.

Yeah.

Now there's this interesting sort of like dilemma that I've had in my head over the last 12 months as I've seen both companies grow.

And I almost felt like I was abandoning the operating company to start this new venture.

And then I would go and reflect on that and go, hold on.

The less I do in the operating company, there's almost 50 people there.

Every time I do an actual task in the company.

I'm technically cannibalizing the growth of someone that is either able to and wanting to do it or doesn't know how but willing to learn.

And then they can add more value to the company, get a promotion, get paid more money.

And so I, there's things I love about the operating company and I'm finding myself really wanting to make sure that that never gets taken away because my role today is the CEO of both companies.

And so while I am actively involved in the sort of day to day of Bolt right now because it's a startup, things like we're taking our leadership team on a strategic planning mission to Phoenix in a few weeks.

We're gonna go site tour Tommy Mello, he built a one garage doors to about $300 million.

So we're gonna show them his operation and build the inspiration and build our roadmap for 2026 and the leadership.

I, I work closely with a lot of our leadership team and I still love the financial management side of it to make sure that the company's healthy and cash flow positive and we're not, we're balancing growth with profit very well.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I don't think that will ever leave me.

I love that side of entrepreneurship.

I just, I can't get too into the day to day because I feel like every time I do I'm just interrupting.

You've done a lot to make sure that you didn't have to be there.

Right.

And on a certain level it's like, of course, if you can get yourself to that stage that makes the most sense.

And then now what are you going to do with that time?

And I think if the passion is coaching, which I, you know, I haven't met a coach yet who isn't like, I friggin love this.

Yeah.

It's just figure out how the heck you scale that.

How do you get Bolt Accelerator to not just a hundred, but thousands?

Yes.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

Yeah.

Our vision is, is, is helping 500 members.

That's the target.

Amazing.

And you know, there's 25,000 companies in North America and frankly we probably don't want to work with 24,500 of them.

I don't think coaching's for everybody.

I think, I think there's probably 95% of the companies out there are just wanting to make a quick buck.

They're doing it off of Craigslist or Marketplace and they don't want to actually build like a proper structured business that has a leadership team.

And a strong brand and a good local presence and maybe an expansion plan at some point.

I like working more with the companies that are all in on their business because I find that they can get the most value out of Bolt versus the companies that are sort of like half in, half out.

Maybe I'll keep my full time job but kind of do this part time.

Yeah, it's so both.

Not for everybody, but you know, there's, I'm sure there's tons of other coaching programs out there that could really help those types of entrepreneurs.

Well, and there's different, you know, I mean there's different stages.

Right.

Like, sure, that Craigslist junk removal company today might be feeling like, yeah, we're good, but in a year they might change their mind.

And I would say like at any given time without a much capacity, you could maybe work with 1 to 2% at a time anyway.

And any company that makes it past, you know, four or five, six years, they're probably going to be thinking about how do we do this better?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

Most people don't do the same thing for five years.

And I was like, yeah, we're good.

No, it's, it's a really good point to bring up.

It's, it's such a good, a good point to bring up.

I mean most of, the, most of the companies are somewhere between three and 20 years in.

I would say the average is probably five to seven years.

Right.

So they've like, they've made it as far as they've made it, but they hit a roadblock and they want to figure out what's next.

Yeah,.

But, yeah, no, you're, it's, it's so true.

I mean nobody, you know, stands still for five years straight.

It's not going to light too many people up.

No.

And, and not to mention things change so rapidly, especially these days.

Yeah.

That you have to be on your feet.

You have to be thinking, what's next?

Like you can't make five year plans because five years from now we might have flying cars.

Like that's just literally the world we live in.

It's so true.

I was, we were talking to, we were, I was talking to the kids yesterday and, and the teacher was having them brain create their businesses on a blank sheet of paper.

And I was like, I don't, don't want to be rude here or anything but you know, if you go ask your parents for $30 a month and go to lovable.com l o v A B L E, it's basically chatgpt for coding, in a sense that you can type what you want it to make and on the back end, it creates all of the code to engineer it and then it actually designs it on the front as well.

So literally anything is possible at this point.

When it comes to Internet technology, with the most recent advancements in AI, like, it's mind blowing.

And that's amazing because that's today.

And we are like, we're like at iPhone one of what AI is going to be.

I have not heard that yet.

And I'm going to use that.

It is so true.

It is so true.

We are at the iPhone One of AI at the moment and the iPhone One was like, wow,.

I have an ipod and a phone.

Yay.

Yes.

It's so true.

Barry, this has been absolutely incredible.

I enjoyed every minute of it with you.

Thank you for sharing your insights with us.

For the people listening who want to get in touch with you, either want to get on the Bolt accelerator or just want to learn more about 505 Junk or just want to hang out with you, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you?

Yeah, I'm most active on Instagram, so it's just Barry Hartman.

B A R R Y H A R T M A N. Very active on LinkedIn as well.

Those are kind of my big two.

And bolt accelerator is probably a quick Google search and it'll pop up all over.

Same with 505 junk.

We're active on all the social channels.

But if you guys, you know, if anybody wants to check out like our marketing or website or anything like that, quick Google search should pop everything up.

Amazing.

And I'll make sure all the links are in the show notes both for the accelerator and for 505 junk and your LinkedIn as well.

So we'll make it real easy for them.

Dude, what a pleasure.

Thank you so much for spending time with me today.

Thanks for having me.

This has been great.

Until next time.

You've been listening to the business development podcast and we'll catch you on the flip side.

This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists.

For more, we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.

See you next time on the business development podcast.