Stanley Pygott was working in property management when he ran into a problem he couldn’t hire his way out of. He was already doing a lot of the hauling himself, and there was no reputable company to hand it to. The area he served, he says, doesn’t have a lot of national franchises.
So he decided to get a pickup, set up a business and take out the insurance, all so he could do the work properly for the company that employed him. Then that company went through a management shift, and he lost his job.
He went all in, he says, and poured everything he had into the business.
Patriot Hauling and Junk Removal was established in 2022. It is now an LLC based in Salem, with two 12-yard dump trucks and five employees. Pygott, a U.S. Navy veteran, runs it alone. He calls himself anti-partner, having watched companies come apart when a partnership did. Crews work Monday through Friday across Marion and Polk counties, from Salem and Keizer out to Silverton, Monmouth and Dallas. Pygott has no plans to sell. He says he has fallen in love with the work.
The thing he couldn’t find as a property manager was a hauler that looked and behaved like a professional outfit, and much of the company is built around closing that gap. Everyone on a crew wears a similar uniform. Pygott says it puts a customer at ease right away, because it shows they are working with professionals rather than some guy with a truck.
The company is licensed and bonded as well as insured, though he says the local municipality doesn’t require it. To him it adds a layer of protection for the company and the homeowner alike. He sees it as a large trust signal for anyone letting a crew onto their property.
Customers still include the kind of people he used to work alongside. The company clears apartments between tenants, handles eviction, foreclosure and estate cleanouts, and hauls for offices, retail stores and contractors, alongside its residential work.
Reputation is a word Pygott comes back to. The Navy helped, he says, but much of it is simply doing what you say you’ll do. His father taught him at a young age that reputation is the only thing you get to take with you, and that he had better take good care of it.
In practice, that means the company has never had a no-show, he says. When a crew is running behind, the customer hears about it. When it is running ahead, the customer hears that too.
The jobs that test that standard hardest are hoarder cleanouts, which the company specializes in. There is usually a lot of trauma in a house like that, Pygott says. A crew has to walk in with a little compassion along with the shovel.
He says those jobs tug at the heartstrings, and he counts himself lucky to have a crew that shares his enthusiasm for helping people in the community. Outside paid work, the company takes part in Salem’s Adopt-a-Street program.
He doesn’t win every job, and he doesn’t pretend to. What he does with the ones he loses is unusual. If a customer has a bad experience with whoever they hired, he says, he doesn’t want them to think badly of the whole industry.
So he follows up with every customer. Even when Patriot Hauling wasn’t the company picked, he checks that the problem got resolved.