Being a former realtor and real estate appraiser I had seen my share of cluttered homes. Gerry Cote who owns the appraisal pratice where I worked was storing old furniture and household items in the basement of the office. These accumulated items were the leftovers from his inlaw's home when they decided to scale down from a large single family home to a townhome. Little by little he was parceling out items from the basement to the dumpster. Of course this process was going to take some time.

Soon afterward Gerry found out about 1-800 GOT JUNK? and realized that he would have gladly paid someone to take on this task that he committed to out of the kindness of his heart. After checking into the business model, and looking into the availability of franchises in our area, (Chicago was wide open at the time), he decided to look into opening a franchise. When he asked me if I was interested in getting the first franchise in Chicago started, I couldn't resist the challenge. It's been great to see this company grow to well over 300 franchise partners system wide and in every major metro in the U.S., Canada, and now Sydney and Melborne.

The one thing I demanded was a good company car, (that's me on the left), and since we are gear heads, (that's Gerry on the right), we made sure we satisfied our craving for horsepower.    

Our operations managers, Karl and Robert work hard to keep our crews on time and our customers happy, (that's Robert in the back).