We Grew 40% and Made Less Money: What Five Years in Business Taught Me About Growth

Turner: Cameron and the team over at Trash & Stash are America's first and only B Corp-certified junk removal company. We walk through the journey of becoming a business owner — how Cameron wrestled with whether he was doing enough when it came to hiring, when it came to the mission — and he relives some of the experiences he's had with clients. It goes beyond just moving things from one place to another. It's about making sure things stay out of landfills, get reduced, donated or recycled wherever possible. So without further ado, Episode 244: Profits and Purpose. Cameron, before we get into everything, tell everybody a little about yourself and what brings you on the show today.

Cameron Ungar: My name is Cameron. I live in metro Charlotte on the South Carolina side of the border — I've been here about eight years, originally from San Diego.

Cameron Ungar: I used to be an events professional. I managed stadiums and arenas, spent most of my career on college campuses, and my last event venue job was at the Olympic Training Center in San Diego. Post-COVID is really where this story begins. I started a company called Trash & Stash. We're America's first and only B Corp-certified junk removal company, which means we balance purpose with profit. Our task at hand is to help people manage the clutter in their lives and do it as responsibly as we can — and to pay particular attention to the human beings and the feelings attached to that clutter. The material possessions are kind of a byproduct of what it all works out to be.

Turner: What specifically about B Corp drew you to building your business around it?

Cameron Ungar: B Corp is an independent entity that verifies businesses are balancing purpose with profit — think Patagonia, Tom's of Maine. There were really three moments that made it click for me. First, junk removal wasn't the plan. I was in the events business, and when the world told the public it could no longer assemble, my job prospects got a lot more challenging. I was laid off from the Whitewater Center, where I was director of guest services. I didn't feel heartbreak over it — I think that season of life was closing for me anyway. But I felt like a widget. Without a building or people to manage, I was having a hard time feeling valuable. So I got obsessed with the idea of a "sweaty startup" — how do I go out and earn with my hands? I'm looking around and seeing garages full of stuff and empty of cars, moving trucks on every street, storage units going up faster than houses. I thought, collectively we have a stuff problem, and I can be part of the solution. I also think of Trash & Stash as an act of rebellion. I was watching my kids become little consumers, glued to screens, buying things they never wanted before. I wanted to put my fist in the air against that. Instead of buying things, we were going to make things go away. From my venue management days I'd always been environmentally aware — I once ran a "green game" at a college basketball game where we went zero-waste for the night. That was the seed of thinking there might be some purpose in the mission. Then, during COVID, we brought a new dog home and ordered a bed from a small independent manufacturer. They emailed to say they'd just become B Corp certified, and that put it on my map — I didn't know small companies could do that. I thought it was a corporate thing, reserved for the Patagonias of the world. That's when it just became doing the job. I always tell the story of a woman whose husband had passed away. We were in her basement — he'd been a collector, not a hoarder — and she was walking through pointing: "that can go, that can go, that can go." No real rhyme or reason. I could tell she was making physical space, but also emotional space, because harder decisions were coming. We took the stuff out and drove it to the landfill. My guy and I looked at each other and said, "This feels bad. We solved her problem, but now we're contributing to a bigger one." That's what pushed us to start weighing every decision: is this the most responsible choice? Does it involve stewardship? Does it improve profitability? Those small steps led us down the path to B Corp.

Turner: Do you feel like your background in event and venue management gave you an easy transition into Trash & Stash, or was there a real learning curve?

Cameron Ungar: There's still a learning curve every day. What I loved about events is that you can plan and plan, and then the doors open and you get to react. You hope your plan laid the groundwork, but you can't account for every variable — so what steps do you have in place to make the best decision you can, and if you make a mistake, debrief on it and avoid repeating it? That preparation helped. I'd also run my own small events business as a side hustle for years, working with sports events to find venues to host them — but it was really just me, no employees, no layers. It didn't prepare me for running a fleet of trucks, managing full-time employees or handling HR. Junk removal is different from a lot of home-service businesses, too. We don't have a strictly recurring model like a housekeeper or HVAC company — ours is more of a reoccurring model, where people hire us multiple times a year, but always project by project. We run two trucks right now, and each one should be doing four jobs a day, so we've got to be closing 30-plus jobs a week just to keep both trucks full. It's constant selling. What does happen over time is you get practiced — you get better at making decisions, a little more numb to the pain, better at recovering from it, with more contingencies in place so a bad outcome isn't devastating. It's just a Tuesday at that point.

Turner: Do you feel like there are advantages or disadvantages to being based in the Carolinas?

Cameron Ungar: Being where we're at is a huge advantage. There's still a lot of people moving to the Charlotte area — it's a banking capital, there's constant financing and tech job growth, and plenty of people relocating from the Northeast and Midwest. Our business is connected to real estate, so anytime people are in transition — moving, downsizing, empty nest, parents moving into assisted living, death, divorce, marriage, kids — that's when we get involved. There's seasonality, too. December and January are our slowest months; December runs about 60% of our average. It never feels that slow, but you lose a lot of time around the holidays, and January is such a hangover month that projects get pushed off. But we don't have the seasonality that snow-belt markets deal with. Charlotte sits right on the North Carolina–South Carolina border — I can walk from my backyard into North Carolina — which makes local service ads and keyword strategy interesting, since we're working across two states and five counties that all butt up against each other. And we get real variation day to day: one afternoon we're out on a rural farm with acres to turn a truck around in, and that same day we could be backing a trailer into a high-rise uptown.

Turner: When it comes to marketing, what's actually been driving traction for Trash & Stash? How are people finding you, and how are you retaining them?

Cameron Ungar: Honestly, that's a challenge for us — the consistency of it, month to month. We've got five years of history, so we roughly know what to expect, but there's still real variation. Last April was our best month ever by a wide margin, so this year I told everyone April 1 was opening day — we bought a new dumpster system, moved into a warehouse, hired a couple of guys, ready to go. April was fine, strong even, but nowhere near last year. Then May was really bad — historically never that slow — and I've now got overhead on dumpster loans and new hires I'm trying to keep busy. Nothing changed much in our marketing at that point, so I don't think it was a marketing problem so much as we didn't have a reliable, consistent channel we could point to and say, "this input gets us this output." Last year, my director of operations resigned, which meant my own role had to shift back from visionary/sales into operations, managing the guys directly. To stretch myself further, I brought on an SEO company and a social media manager. By the end of 2025 we'd grown gross sales about 40%. Great — something worked. But we didn't make any more money; profitability actually went down. Going into this year I was staring down the question of whether the goal should be to 3x the business — read the growth playbooks, break the systems you've outgrown, go big. But that just meant overhead was going to keep climbing without us having a consistent, provable source of demand. So we re-evaluated pretty quickly and said: let's focus on profitability first. We've got to put money in the bank and feel stable before we chase exponential growth. It felt like last year I'd turned the treadmill up — I was running faster but staying in the same spot. This year is about getting somewhere and getting stable. If something catastrophic happens — a truck accident, a big unplanned expense — and you're overextended, that's really hard to recover from, and I didn't want to be in that position. So we scaled back. I brought SEO in-house; we're not doing any paid SEO right now, and I'm handling our own social media, mostly because the return on those outside expenditures was hard to measure. Vanity metrics were up — more site traffic — but bounce rate was way up too, meaning we were pulling in the wrong kind of traffic, or conversion was low. The metric I actually care about is money in the bank, and that wasn't improving. So we've pulled back to a little bit of local service ads and just telling our story directly — conversations like this one. Because I didn't even know what a junk removal company did before I started mine. When we left California, there was a franchise truck parked on my street that I drove past every day for five years and never once thought to call. I spent my last three days there running loads to Goodwill and a friend's restaurant dumpster myself. If I'd known I could just call a company and say "come clear the garage," I would have — but in my head, "my stuff's not junk." Conversations like this one are how people actually connect the dots.

Turner: Let's talk about the team. As you were building Trash & Stash in a new state, in a business you were still learning yourself, what did building that team look like?

Cameron Ungar: People are the hardest part, all the way around. When I got laid off, I spent time figuring out my next step — I'm not naturally patient, and a lot of my sense of value comes from my ability to produce, so sitting there feeling unproductive was hard. I told myself to pump the brakes and get curious instead. I tried learning network security for a while — turns out I don't have the aptitude for it, though I did build my own computer. Then I got interested in marketing, thought about starting a content agency, and realized that felt hollow — I'd be advising business owners on marketing their business while my own business was an agency marketing itself. That's when the "sweaty startup" idea clicked, and I reached out to a few people in my circle I trusted enough to ask, "Tell me honestly if this is a good idea." Those people became the first generation of Trash & Stash employees. Others were friends — a guy moving out from California who wanted a job; a lot of people want to escape the cubicle and imagine working with their hands and hanging out on a truck, which we can offer for about three months, and then they're tired, dirty and realize it's not the escape they pictured. My closest friend since sixth grade came out to be our B2B salesperson, and it didn't work — he felt so much pressure to not disappoint me, pressure I never actually put on him but that he internalized, and it just got worse. We're still good friends; it was an amicable departure. The guys we have now have grown up inside the system, because this is a pretty unique role — we need people who can sit with a grieving widow while she goes through her husband's belongings, who can physically carry heavy things, drive a truck and trailer, and use technology to quote jobs on the spot. There are only four of us full-time, so one person represents 25% of the workforce — that person can make a huge positive impact, or be a huge burden if they're the wrong fit. We've hired fast before and it's failed, so now we hire slow and intentional, paying a lot more attention to the bottom line.

Cameron Ungar: I think trades business owners in particular feel this pressure that if you're not growing, you're dying, and I'm not sure that's true. There's also a real difference in our model versus a recurring-revenue service business that private equity likes to roll up for a 3x or 5x exit multiple. We don't have that recurring model, so building purely for an exit may not be our best strategy — we're probably better off optimizing for healthy day-to-day cash flow. An exit may come eventually, but in the meantime we have to be profitable now, because sometimes you're one catastrophe away from it all going away.

Turner: Let's talk about the emotional side. Do people often have a hard time letting go? How does the team navigate that?

Cameron Ungar: There's a lot of psychology in the stuff we keep. Those things represent a memory, a person, a place. It's different for me — when I walk into your house, I don't see any of that meaning. I see a thing, and now it has negative value because you're paying me to take it away. The B Corp part is interesting because we talk a lot about the circular economy and landfill diversion, and sometimes that resonates — but most people aren't going to pay more for it. If I told you it costs twice as much because we're going to sort and separate everything responsibly, you're probably not going with us. If I can do all of that for the same price, that's an easy yes. I use the china hutch example a lot — we removed one just recently. Most people don't need a china hutch anymore; it's a big piece of furniture nobody uses. But if you're moving a parent into assisted living and that hutch has been the center of the house their whole life — it represented their wedding, the home they built together — and I say "we're throwing it in the truck," that's genuinely hurtful. But if I can tell the adult child, "this may not matter to you, but it matters to your mom, and we're going to make sure someone else takes it in and loves it," that completely changes the conversation. It becomes about stewardship instead of loss. There's also a lot of pain-versus-pleasure at play — usually by the time someone calls us, the stuff has crossed a pain threshold: too much noise, too much friction. And you can see the physical relief once the house starts emptying out. A customer once told me, "messy bed, messy head" — she had farmhands who could have physically moved everything, but she needed it done professionally because the noise in her head was too loud. I get that. My daughter's room is a disaster and she doesn't see it, because she's in it every day — I see it because I only go in when I have to. I think there's a real vibrational shift when your space is clear, the same way a tidy hotel room feels different from walking back into your own cluttered house. That's the internal discord the stuff is usually a symptom of.

Turner: What's the craziest job you've ever done?

Cameron Ungar: We don't do a lot of hoarding jobs — that's the first thing people ask about — but when we do, it stops being a curiosity fast and becomes about a person who was genuinely suffering, usually after some loss that triggered it. You start to know someone through their stuff. The one I come back to most: a woman hired us to pick up furniture for donation, a nice house in a more rural part of town. We walk in and there's white powder all over the floor, feathers in the corner, and I look past her into the backyard and there's a flock of ducks. She just says, matter-of-factly, "it's duck poop." We got to know her over time — her husband had passed away unexpectedly, and her whole world turned upside down. The ducks were in the house because they were safe, and nothing else mattered to her at that point. She wasn't apologizing for any of it — it is what it is, life got the best of her, she was trying to put it back together. We ended up working with her five or six times after that, coming back, taking a little more each visit, watching her heal and grieve at her own pace, until we eventually helped her move into a new place and start over. We could have walked out of there and made it a joke. We didn't, and she let herself open up because of that. It's the one that reinforced our purpose more than any other job we've done.

Turner: Looking ahead, what does the future look like for Trash & Stash?

Cameron Ungar: Growth is still a goal. My ego might want the trash empire. But there's a lot of introspection in whether that's really what I'm looking for, versus a profitable business with well-cared-for customers, well-paid employees who can build a life for themselves, a way to provide for my family, and a balanced life outside of work. That feels closer to the real goal — though I still wrestle with whether "that's enough" is wisdom or a limiting belief.

Cameron Ungar: From a business standpoint we have three main pillars, plus two newer additions. Residential junk removal is the everyday core — the highest volume, tied to life transitions. Commercial is the second pillar, and it's where the biggest growth would come from if we chased 3x — we did a 126-room hotel cleanout in January, which is a much bigger ticket than picking up a fridge from someone's garage. I've pulled back on B2B sales activity a bit while I focus more on operations and profitability, but that's still very much part of the picture. The third pillar goes back to my events background: event waste cleanup for road races, festivals, concerts and sporting events — bringing dumpsters, doing event portering, cleaning up sites. It's a growth area partly because of my own expertise there, and partly because it's a blue ocean — not many companies understand that world and can do the physical work, too. The two related areas are resale, part of the circular-economy piece — when we pick up an item, we can throw it away, recycle it, donate it or resell it, and we've built out real retail space in our new warehouse for that. And material recovery: we're in conversations with a company that does large commercial server-rack installs, where the crates and pallets need to be disassembled, recycled or repurposed after the install. Eventually I see Trash & Stash becoming more of a materials-recovery business than strictly a junk-removal one.

Turner: Any last words for other business owners or entrepreneurs who might be feeling stagnant right now?

Cameron Ungar: Keep questioning yourself. Be honest about why you're making the choices you're making — is it in the best interest of the business, or are you trying to keep up with other business owners around you? I started a networking group called C4, just for trades business owners — more of a coffee club than a formal referral network, built around sharing experiences, because somebody in the room has usually already crossed a bridge you haven't. That's valuable, because entrepreneurship can be lonely. But I've also found a caution in it. There was a stretch where business was so good I couldn't put the phone down — my son actually told me I was "drowning in my own success." Then I went to a networking meeting where other guys were struggling, and I started feeling guilty about doing well, then almost anxious, like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop on me too. Whether it's vibrational or just behavioral, somebody else's energy started changing how I answered my own phone. So the networking, the coaching, the camaraderie — all valuable. But staying centered in yourself, not letting someone else's slow season talk you into a scarcity mindset during your own good one, is something I think we don't talk about enough as business owners. I don't have a clean answer for how you do that. But it matters.

Turner: Where can people find you and learn more about Trash & Stash?

Cameron Ungar: Trashandstash.com is the best place to start — there's click-to-text on there, so if you've got a project, send pictures or video and we'll have a conversation, even if you're not local and just don't know where to start. We're most active on Facebook and Instagram. Our warehouse is centrally located in Pineville, so we can get to just about anywhere — we're not a franchise and we're not territory-restricted, so as long as it makes sense for us and the customer, we'll go. Keep an eye out for our trucks.