Jake Still On Going From One Job To A Thousand

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Jake Still owns Junk Rescue, and he does not talk about it like a hauling company. He came out of marketing, runs the business on an integrated software stack, and describes his own role as a mix of marketing, operations and what he calls vibe management. On Unscripted Small Business, host Zaneta Chuniq Inpower asked for his advice to anyone starting out. He began with a warning rather than an encouragement.

You Are Going From One Job To A Thousand Jobs

His starting text is Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth — he mentions the company even explored doing their own E-Myth engagement with Gerber, but “it was very, very expensive, so not in the cards right now.” What he takes from it is the diagnostic:

“The first thing is to talk about that entrepreneurial seizure, and really know: are you just in a technician type of entrepreneurial seizure, where you’re like, hey, I’m a master technician, I can go do this on my own? And master technician just means whatever your day job is, your frontline doing the work itself — once you go into business you’re doing everything else. You’re going from one job to a thousand jobs, right? Like you don’t understand that. So know what you’re getting into.” — Jake Still

The phrasing does something the usual version of this advice does not. “A thousand jobs” is not a metaphor for being busy — it is a literal count of distinct functions. Payroll, insurance, dispatch, collections, hiring, permits, fleet maintenance, marketing, disposal compliance. Each is a job. None of them is the job you were good at.

“Like you don’t understand that” is aimed at the reader, and it is fair. The gap is not information — everyone has heard that running a business is hard. The gap is that the specific list is invisible until you are holding it.

Know What You Are Getting Into

Jake’s second piece of advice is the cheapest due diligence available, and almost nobody does it:

“The second thing would be, go work for somebody doing it — because maybe you don’t work at that job, you’re like, you know what, my passion is in, say, I love sports, I want to open my training facility, but you’ve never done it, never worked there. Go work at that company, go volunteer, go offer to work for free.” — Jake Still

Offering to work for free reads as extreme until you price the alternative. A few weeks of unpaid work against the cost of discovering the same information after signing a lease and buying a truck is not a close comparison.

It also surfaces the part of the business that is invisible from the customer side. Anyone can imagine running a training facility from the experience of using one. Almost nobody can imagine the scheduling, the insurance, the no-shows or the equipment maintenance, because none of that is visible from the floor.

Sorting Loads Instead Of Filling Landfills

The operational description of the service is where the environmental position lives — it is built into the workflow rather than bolted on as messaging:

“Our main thing is really: take a situation where you’re moving, you’re about to go to closing and your new stuff can’t come into the new home. We’ll come in, remove everything that’s left over, and we’ll source separate everything — donation, trash, recycling — and take it where it needs to go. So it’s all one stop shop where you don’t have to deal with all those headaches.” — Jake Still

He is clear-eyed about why customers actually pay, and it is not primarily the sorting. It is that the alternative has become genuinely difficult: “you go try to take it to Goodwill, and Goodwill has a surplus now, and they don’t take much stuff now too, so you might get turned away, and then you forget what you’re gonna do with it. And township regulations are getting tougher and tougher because there is such a surplus. Landfills are getting full.”

That is a useful lesson well beyond hauling. The service is not “we take your things away.” It is “we absorb a decision tree that has quietly become unmanageable.” The value went up because the alternative got worse.

What The US Gets Wrong Versus Sweden

Asked about sustainability, Jake did not soften it:

“So what’s going on in the US is not sustainable. Other countries are ahead of us on the curve, especially countries like Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, that part of Europe. They’re getting really good with renewable energy. So even though we think it’s recyclable, a lot of it doesn’t end up being recycled. Our filtering and our systems just aren’t up to par. Landfills are getting overrun. There’s a lot of things that you don’t even realize when you go to a landfill that can contaminate the water source below.” — Jake Still

“Even though we think it’s recyclable” is the important clause, and it is a claim about infrastructure rather than intent. The material is recyclable; the system that would have to process it is not up to the job. Which means the household act of putting something in the correct bin is not the end of the chain most people assume it is.

He puts the root cause upstream of disposal entirely: “we live in a consumer buy-buy-buy society, and with plastics being involved now in the last roughly a hundred years, where things are shifting from metal.” The durability of goods changed, and the waste stream changed with it.

Running A Hauling Company Like A Software Company

The most transferable part of the interview is Jake’s stack, and his reason for it:

“I’m a big believer in tech, right? Because again, it takes the human error and human emotions out of a lot of things.” — Jake Still

The specifics: Vonigo for CRM and field dispatch, HubSpot alongside it because “that CRM has limitations,” WhipAround for fleet maintenance, and GPS units in every truck with AI facial recognition producing driver safety reports.

His selection criterion is the part worth stealing:

“We’re always looking for what technology integrates. So for example, our truck maintenance software integrates with our GPS software and the computers inside the trucks. So we can get alerts when guys are speeding in those trucks specifically, and then the cameras can match their face and everything else. We know when it’s due for maintenance. So we’re always looking for tech that integrates.” — Jake Still

Integration over capability. A best-in-class tool that does not connect to anything creates a manual reconciliation job — another of the thousand jobs. He notes that webhooks and open APIs have made this dramatically more achievable than it used to be.

And the people side is deliberately not automated. He describes “vibe management” as watching the energy of the crews, “identifying people issues, and not people issues in the traditional way” — pulling someone aside once something happens, giving direction, coaching constantly. Systems for the predictable, presence for the rest.

Connect With Jake Still

Jake Still runs Junk Rescue (junk-rescue.com) and is on LinkedIn. His full conversation is in the episode recap.

More founders who built something out of an unglamorous problem in the interview archive — including the home rescue business built by accident.