“I’d say an 8.5 because I know I’ve disappointed people sometimes,” says Spencer, who owns Smiley’s Junk Removal & Recycling in Austin. He is grading his own reliability, and he does not round up.
He can say where the missing points go. A trailer gets a flat. A truck breaks down. Weather turns. Spencer usually hauls with a 16-foot trailer with four-foot sides, and he does not take it out when the rain is coming down hard or the roads are iced. Anyone who has pulled a trailer on ice, he says, knows “it’s not very fun.” The company’s hours carry the same rule in small type: no pickups after dark or in severe weather.
When something does go wrong, he tries to keep the customer in the loop. “I always try to do my best and stay communicated with people, let them know what’s going on,” he says. One customer with a last-minute request described him rearranging his day to fit the job in, then coming back the next day for what was left.
He traces that habit to how he reads setbacks. What matters, he says, is “how you react,” and whether you “learn from it and keep on going.” He has had to apply that to the business itself.
Spencer started in May 2011, scrapping metal and doing yard work, and the hauling grew from there. He formed his LLC around 2016, he says. When COVID hit, he shut down for a while because of all the unknowns, then started back up. There were stretches, he says, when he wanted to throw in the towel. “I just kept going because I figured something good would happen, hopefully.”
He owns the company and runs the day-to-day work himself. The jobs are residential and commercial, and he says he does a lot of work for realtors and businesses. Some of it means walking into what other people have left behind: the company takes on estate cleanouts, tenant move-outs and storage units. Spencer says he tries not to judge what he finds. “Don’t judge people for what they have, because I realize things happen in life, situations happen.”
He tries to lead by example, he says, and to hire people who share that outlook. “I try to hire people that have those same kind of qualities.”
The work still runs through the material he started with. Every load is sorted by hand, the company says, to keep metal, electronics and reusable furniture out of local landfills, and it puts the share recycled or donated at up to 70 percent. Scrap metal and cardboard go to recycling, and usable furniture goes to local charities.
That sorting is also what he wants to build on. He would like to run more of an employee operation and grow the company a lot bigger, and the reason he gives is recycling. “I believe a lot more can be recycled, and I realize I can’t do what I want to do by myself.”