Say the appointment is for one o’clock in the afternoon, and the two morning jobs ran way over. That is the example John Roe II reaches for when he explains how Your Junk Our Trunk handles a day that goes sideways.
He gets word to the customer as soon as he can. “I’ll try to shoot them a new ETA, give them a quick rundown of what happened,” he says. Then he checks whether the delay still works for their schedule. If it doesn’t, the company sets another day, or a slot later the same day if both sides can agree. “You just give them a couple different options,” he says, “and that usually makes them feel better about who they chose and why.”
Roe doesn’t claim a clean record. Some jobs take far longer than anyone expected, and Houston traffic does the rest. He puts the company at “a solid nine out of ten, easily, maybe even nine and a half,” and adds, “obviously no company is perfect.” What he promises is the heads-up. One customer noticed it from the other end: the texts about the crew’s arrival time and progress were accurate, he reported afterward, and the truck even turned around and came back when he remembered an item he had forgotten.
Your Junk Our Trunk is a father-and-son company based in Humble, and both men are named John Roe. The elder served in the Marine Corps, then made a career with the New York State Police before retiring.
The business was formed in 2020. Its first job came in 2021, in the middle of the storm known as Uri, before everything was fully ready. A couple of calls came in anyway, Roe says, and the company started from there.
The younger Roe came to hauling from machine shops. He has always been particular and thorough about certain kinds of tasks, he told Voyage Houston magazine in 2023, and as a CNC machinist he had to be. In that work, he explained, a careless moment could scrap a part worth thousands of dollars. He still thinks about junk removal in terms of details. Most anyone can pick things up and put them in a truck, he says. What makes a crew efficient is how it loads the truck and how well it packs it.
The work runs from furniture and estate cleanouts to office cleanouts and what Roe calls light demolition: hot tubs, sheds, swing sets, but nothing inside a house. The company has a couple of pieces of equipment that make the heaviest items easier to handle. Residential jobs stay mostly on Houston’s north side and around downtown. Commercial clients pull the trucks farther, and the crews have worked as far out as The Woodlands, Katy, Pearland and Baytown.
The harder part, Roe says, is getting a crew to treat a schedule the way he does. Showing them helps, but only so much. “Leading by example doesn’t always work for everybody, because everybody’s different,” he says.
The lesson he wants to land is small, “just a simple heads-up” that the truck is behind. So sometimes he waits for the right situation, or slightly creates one, to put an employee on the receiving end. “They have to experience what they could be potentially putting a customer through when they don’t show up,” he says.