Turning waste to wealth

The story of Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman reminds one of first, of the cart pushing trash collectors who are regular callers at homes in Lagos, especially in places like Festac and other estates in the metropolis. Second, it reminds one too of Lagos State Government’s trash collectors who do their business in a more sophisticated way - with trucks moving from street to street and from close to close.

I am not sure if these two categories of waste disposers know they are into a money spinning business. When I see tonnes of wastes piled up in Festac and several other parts of cosmopolitan Lagos, I begin to wonder the millions of naira that is buried in such wastes so to speak. Think of recycling opportunities, think biogas, etc, you will know what I mean. Do our waste collectors think this far? I doubt if they do.

Success Magazine has the story of Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman, two college pals who are taking out the trash in style are different. As college kids, they spent their break earning money by hauling  away unwanted  junk from attics and garages  in Soliman’s mother’s cargo van. This would have ended after Soliman graduated from the University of Miami and Friedman from Pomona College in California but it didn’t.

In his senior year, Soliman had written a business plan  for a junk hauling business operated   by employees with clean-cut  collegiate image – College Hunks  Hauling junk – which won  a UM entrepreneurship competition. He saw it as idea worth pursing and so turned Friedman, his friend since high school in Washington D.C., who was also eager for a new challenge. They realised they were taking a big risk by leaving their corporate jobs. But they also knew they had a good idea worth testing.

Friedman and Soliman were confident they were a good match, they were confident they could work together. Afterall they were long time friends who had worked together for a long time. Friedman, now president, has a background in finance and CEO Soliman is in marketing and management. Start-ups who complain their problem is how to get start-up fund have a lot to learn from these junk haulers. Good sources for such funds are family and friends. Friedman and Soliman explored this as well as the bank to buy their first truck. In the early days, they had appointments as early 5 a.m., worked weekends and employed their friends’ younger siblings for many jobs.

Talking about appointments, this is one initiative that our local junk haulers have not thought of. Appointments for trash collections can be made with residents or resident associations. This can even go up to industrial (perhaps some are doing this now). But it is possible not all firms are covered now. One can recall that the issue of spin-off industries came up in one of ones several facility visits to Nigerian Bottling Company, Dangote Industries, etc. One that we found outstanding was factory cleaning and waste disposal.

Progress

Since they quit their jobs in 2005 to start College Hunks, the company has grown from a single operation with two guys and a truck to include 12 franchises – with more on the way. Sales doubled from $550,000(N64 billion) in the first year to $1.1 million (N128.2 million) the second year.

In this era  of  job losses that  have come with the global credit crunch and high level dearth of new jobs, waste management is an area that fresh graduates should look at  and endorse. After all, more than any other time in history, we are in the era of self employment. Dawn Rivers Baker in his weekly column in Microbusiness NewsBriefs throws his weight behind self employment. In his piece titled Self is the new employment wrote, “Where I diverge from Keynes is in the focus on jobs. From my 21st century viewpoint, the issue is not ‘jobs.’ It’s ‘work.’ Why? Because, in many cases, ‘work’ has the potential to get you better-paid than a ‘job.’

You can have multiple clients instead of a single employer and, for some reason, clients seem to consider you more valuable than employers do. All of which means that eventually ‘work’ will replace ‘jobs’ as the best way for the average citizen to meet their material needs. In fact, their ability to do that might be considered one way to measure the success of the economy. Which, in its turn, means that Congress needs to wake up to self-employment. It is this century’s labour market.