Tips & advice
1. Do your homework before jumping in to anything. Contact all the industry bodies and government agencies and research your proposition thoroughly: get as much advice as you can. The legislative side really is the main challenge in waste. Jason of AnyJunk.co.uk suggests that for particularly tricky pieces of law, it may even be worth it to bring in a consultant.
“For health and safety, we struggled. So we just used a consultant to come in and review our processes and help us. For any business that involves manual handling or moving parts and that employs lots of people, it’s definitely an investment worth making.”
2. Like with any startup, it’s important to have a very focused service offering. People need to know exactly what you do.
This is a bugbear of AnyJunk.co.uk’s Jason, who says: “An awful lot of people in waste talk about ‘waste disposal’ as their thing, or ‘waste recycling’, but they don’t actually talk about the service.”
He advises that you focus on the front end, on what the customer is getting, or how they’re going to order it. You also need to consider who’s going to help your customer effect their order as well as how they’re going to be invoiced and what information they’re going to get.
3. The waste and recycling sector is very tough, and much of your competition will be larger and more established. When you’re starting out, it’s worth taking the time to find bigger brands to sit beside. If appropriate, look for big clients – even if they do not necessarily use you very often, it will give you more credibility.