16-year-old boy who collected junk got the idea for his own business after seeing his boss carrying a lot of cash, now his company makes Rs 14,00,000 a month

At 16, Carter Grandbois was doing the grunt work on someone else's junk-removal crew in Johnstown, Colorado, when he noticed something that changed the course of his life: his boss was carrying a thick stack of cash. That one glimpse was enough to convince him he could be doing this for himself instead of working for someone else's paycheck.

Grandbois went home and spoke to his father about the idea. Within days, the two of them had bought a trailer, and Carter's Junk Away was born. Two years on, at 18, Grandbois runs a business that can bill as much as $15,000, or roughly Rs 14 lakh, in a strong month, according to an interview he gave to Fortune, which published his profile recently.

From a trailer to a real operation


Grandbois's first job on his own paid him $500 for just 30 minutes of work, an early result that told him he had stumbled onto something worth pursuing seriously. That single job set the tone for how he approached the business in its early days: fast turnarounds, direct dealings with customers, and a willingness to take on work that bigger, more established companies might not have bothered with.

As the business grew, he moved on from the trailer his father had helped him buy and eventually purchased a lightly used Ford F-250 truck, giving him the equipment to take on bigger and more frequent jobs. A local newspaper report from May 2025 independently confirmed that Grandbois was already running the business as a 17-year-old at the time, heading into his senior year of high school, which suggests the operation had already taken firm shape well before his interview with Fortune.

The business now runs with the help of a small team of W-2 employees, all of them Grandbois's friends from high school, who help him manage the volume of work that comes in during busy months. Rather than trying to build a large fixed workforce, Grandbois has kept his team lean, relying on people he already knows and trusts to help him get jobs done without adding unnecessary overhead.

Building systems, not just hauling junk

According to Fortune, Grandbois struggled to turn the business into something reliably profitable in its early days. Junk removal, after all, is physically demanding and time-consuming work, and simply hauling more junk was not enough to scale the business on its own. That changed once he built his own pricing calculator, a tool that helped him quote jobs quickly and consistently instead of guessing at prices on the spot. He also started tracking data on every job, and put systems in place to keep a steady stream of leads coming in rather than relying purely on word of mouth.

Those tools now form the backbone of how Carter's Junk Away operates, and Grandbois says he increasingly manages the business from home rather than being on the truck himself for every job. He has reportedly built more than one version of his pricing calculator, including a simpler tool for those just starting out and a more advanced one for operators with more experience in the business.

A coaching business on the side

Grandbois's venture has since expanded well beyond hauling junk. He now coaches other people who want to start similar businesses, sharing his pricing systems and business advice, including on social media, where he has built a following around his story and his methods. He estimates that this coaching side brought in around $40,000 in 2026 alone and now makes up roughly half of his overall business, a sign of how far the venture has moved from its original, purely physical roots.

He told Fortune that the interest in his coaching content has come from a wide range of people, including men in their 40s looking to start junk-removal businesses of their own, drawn in by the visibility of his own success as a teenager.

Still in high school, already running a company

What makes Grandbois's story notable is not just the revenue figure, but the age at which he has built it. Balancing a growing business with school has meant learning to manage scheduling, customer communication and invoicing largely on his own, all while still a teenager. His story has become a talking point in conversations about young entrepreneurs choosing hands-on trades and service businesses over traditional part-time jobs, at a time when such ventures are increasingly documented and shared online.