The Power of Entrepreneurship to Own Your Future

Since the first conversation launched on September 2, 2020, Wharton Global Youth’s Future of the Business World podcast has welcomed 46 high school students talking about their unique commercial visions and technology-driven innovations. While many illustrate the entrepreneurial mindset, few see their ventures as exclusive paths to employment and financial well-being.

Episode No. 47 features a new perspective. Joahluis Molina, introduced to us by our friends at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), started a service-based business at age 17  with the hope of making a living as an entrepreneur – and giving back to his community. He is still in the early stages of business ownership and is working one new client at a time toward building a stable financial future for himself and perhaps someday his family.

Be sure to click the arrow above to listen to our conversation with Joahluis Molina. An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Wharton Global Youth Program: Hello and welcome to Future of the Business World!

I’m Diana Drake with the Wharton Global Youth Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Our monthly Future of the Business World podcast is a celebration of youth innovation across borders and business sectors. We’ve interviewed teen entrepreneurs developing tech for the pet industry and trying to launch eCommerce on the blockchain, as well as earnest mission-driven bakers and nutritional gummy makers. It’s amazing to explore the thriving entrepreneurial spirit in so many different business landscapes.

But something that we haven’t always talked about is youth entrepreneurship driven by personal financial need. In other words, starting and running a business to make a living and pay the bills.

Today’s guest is a great example of an evolving entrepreneur with a mission of business success and personal finance empowerment. Joahluis Molina just graduated from Met High School in Providence, Rhode Island. His business, That Junk Removal Company, won first place in the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s (NFTE’s) New England Regional Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge.

Joahluis, welcome to Future of the Business World.

Joahluis Molina: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity to be here on this podcast talking a little bit about That Junk Removal Company and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

Wharton Global Youth: All right, so tell us about your company. When did you start the business? And it sounds pretty self-explanatory, but what type of junk are you removing, and from where and where does that junk go? Give us all the details.

Joahluis: A few years ago, I was running a powerwash company by the name of Joahluis’s Powerwashing, and it was fun to say the least, but it wasn’t exactly what I loved to do. So, Joahluis’s Powerwashing evolved to the company that I have now, which is called Molina Management, where we offer snow plowing, power washing, fall and spring cleanup.

But I tried to figure out a way to market my company and give back to the community at the same time. I live in South Providence, which undeniably is one of the most polluted cities in the state of Rhode Island. Every corner you turn, you’ll see a mattress, a beat-up sofa, or just garbage all over the streets. So, what do I look like running a junk removal company coming home to South Providence, where there’s garbage everywhere. That led me to starting That Junk Removal Company, where we donate 5% of all of our profits to a community cleanup hosted the first Sunday of every month. We call it our Sunday service, or how I like to call it ‘a double dip,’ a way for me to give back to the community and also market my company.

Wharton Global Youth: So, you also have a social mission with this. Is there actually a business mission with That Junk Removal Company? I mean, are you providing a service to clients, and can you maybe share an example?

Joahluis: Absolutely. So we offer the standard junk removal. You’d call us out, and we measure it by how much junk it is and what material it’s made out of, and then we take that trash to the central landfill here in Cranston, Rhode Island, which is only a few minutes away. And the price is measured on how far you are from the landfill, and like I said, how much garbage you have and the material it’s made out of.

Wharton Global Youth: What is the weirdest junk you have removed?

Joahluis: One of the weirdest jobs we’ve done, in my opinion, would be on a farm. We were dismantling a tractor and taking all the parts to a local recycling facility. All the money we got from that was implemented into our Sunday service, allowing us to pick up more garbage.

Wharton Global Youth: I’m interested that your company, both That Junk Removal Company and Molina Management, are set up as LLCs, which are otherwise known as limited liability companies. Can you explain a little bit about what that means and why did you choose that structure for your businesses?

Joahluis: The reason we set up LLCs for both That Junk Removal Company and Molina Management is to protect me and other workers. If anything goes wrong, if any of our customers get injured in the process, or we damage anything inside of the house or in the exterior of the house, the company’s at fault. So it kind of separates me the owner and the company.

Wharton Global Youth: Take us back a few years, when you first started exploring the power of entrepreneurship. What intrigued you about running your business, and what does entrepreneurship represent to you?

Joahluis: That’s an awesome question. I’m the first entrepreneur in my family, and a few years ago, I worked at Walmart part-time, trying to balance school, family issues, and of course, Walmart at the same time. It’s a lot having to go to work and getting yelled at by your boss, not seeing the money that you want, not being able to work the hours that you want. It’s tough. It really is tough, especially for such a young person – a 16 or 17-year-old. It just wasn’t cutting it. For me. I hated the idea of potentially getting yelled at by my boss, you know, getting scared to do something wrong and just not getting paid or working the hours that I wanted to work. So, I started looking into businesses and what business to start, and that’s where it all started.

“Creating something that can be passed along to my kids and their kids —  it’s so motivating…Not many people are committed to making a legacy from junk, but I’m happy to say that I am.” –Joahluis Molina

Wharton Global Youth: What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are as an entrepreneur? Have you had a particularly challenging moment, and how did you overcome it?

Joahluis: I think I don’t know when to stop. So a few years ago when we were just a power-washing company, I’d go door to door to book my jobs and it was terrible. I’d be out there for hours and hours on end, trying to figure out what [I could do] to crack the code and book the jobs. I didn’t understand when to stop. I’d be out there on no food. I’d be out there on no water, just in the boiling hot sun, pushing all my power-washing equipment around. And it was tough trying to figure out [how] to take my business to the next level. The way I overcame that was just research and realizing that it’s not going to happen overnight. Being out there on the days where I was knocking on 100-plus doors and not getting any jobs was very discouraging for me. And being the only entrepreneur in my family, there’s no one in my corner, pushing me to give it another shot, to get some rest and go out there again tomorrow. My mom, my father and all my siblings constantly telling me to get a job. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to work out. The bills have to be paid. So it was rough, you know? And I think that motivation is something that you have to derive from deep within yourself. And it’s tough.

Wharton Global Youth: You feel as though finding that inner strength as an entrepreneur is what motivates you to keep going after setbacks?

Joahluis: Absolutely.

Wharton Global Youth: Did you have access to any financial funding to help you start your businesses?

Joahluis: No, I saved up all the money from Walmart. I bought my first truck a year and a half into owning Joahluis’s Pressure Washing. Other than that, there’s no funding. I didn’t get anything from my parents, as unfortunate as it is. But we aren’t all blessed with giving parents, I guess, or parents in the position to fund our businesses and our entrepreneurship ideas.

Wharton Global Youth: That is a point that I want to talk a little bit about. Because where did you get this entrepreneurial spirit? Do you feel like part of this was coming from the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Or how did you find that you just really wanted to be an entrepreneur? I know you talked about your job at Walmart, and I understand that you wanted to kind of take back the power in terms of your employment and your financial future, but what about just becoming an entrepreneur? You didn’t really have a role model there.

Joahluis: About two years ago, I was sitting in my classroom and I heard about a classmate of mine that goes to the same high school by the name of Raneem. She was the global winner for last year’s [Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship] competition. And I heard she won over $13,000 in funding for her business. I could not believe it. That amount of money in high school was, to me at the moment, unheard of, and it just sparked something in me to sign up for NFTE, learn what NFTE was, what NFTE has to offer, and where I could get this funding, and just what I could do with it potentially.

Wharton Global Youth: Do you have mentors in the NFTE network to help you in your efforts?

Joahluis: Yeah, my teachers Jodie Woodruff and Brandon Lane gave me all the information I was looking for in the NFTE world. They work for the Met High School, and they’re the teachers who set everything up for NFTE and enroll students in the competitions.

Wharton Global Youth: Did you also win money from the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship when you won your prize?

In June, I won first place in regionals and that set me ahead $1,500, which went directly toward That Junk Removal Company, and we used half of those for our Sunday service cleanups.

Wharton Global Youth: Great. All right, so the Sunday service cleanups are where you’re really enriching the Providence community, right? Can you talk just a little bit more about those you talked about it at the beginning, but I’d, I’d love to know more about what that looks like. I mean, you’re cleaning up some of the garbage around town. Do you feel as though it’s a community effort? Do people rally around?

Joahluis: I try to give opportunities to those who could use the life skills that you learn from going around the community and picking up garbage. I rally around volunteers from my high school, and ask around who would like to volunteer, who would like to come with me on one of these dumps, and learn the responsibility and the life skills of being out in the neighborhood and being in the real world — blue-collar work trying to clean up the streets and beautify our neighborhoods.

Wharton Global Youth: I’m interested too in this line of work, because all kinds of regulations and requirements relate to this type of business. How and where to discard items, recycling. We’ve talked on the podcast before about the circular economy, which is a way to give junk new life and put it back into productive use. How do you plan to stay updated on trends and changes in the business world like this that might impact your business?

Joahluis: I like to stay up to date with what other big junk removal companies in Rhode Island are doing, see what they’re doing for the community, see what is working for them. And I even set up a few interviews with other junk-removal companies in my area. We have Powerhouse Junk Removal and Junk Kings in my area. They’re great companies, awesome companies who [have taught me] a lot.

Wharton Global Youth: How do you market your company?

Joahluis: We have business cards and custom t-shirts. We have posters that we post all over coffee shops, telephone poles, all over the city of Providence and the state of Rhode Island. We’re running paid ads on Nextdoor, Instagram and Facebook.

Wharton Global Youth: We talk a lot about the power of innovative and entrepreneurial thinking on this podcast. I love our conversation today because I believe in entrepreneurship as a tool that offers the potential for higher earnings, financial independence and wealth creation, even generational wealth, where you generate income for future generations. Have you thought about this? What kind of legacy do you hope to create by starting and running your own business?

Joahluis: That topic in particular is what keeps me driven today. Creating something that can be passed along to my kids and their kids —  it’s so motivating. It’s a shame that my parents didn’t have the opportunity to start a business and hand something like that off to me, but I appreciate the opportunity they’ve created for me to make that possible and have kids and pass That Junk Removal Company along to them. Not many people are committed to making a legacy from junk, but I’m happy to say that I am.

Wharton Global Youth: You just graduated from high school. Congratulations. What are your plans? Do you intend to combine education and continue building That Junk Removal Company? How do you plan to balance entrepreneurship with other aspects of your life, like school?

Joahluis: What I plan to do is go to my community college to stay connected to some sort of educational system. And what I like to say is I want to study hard by night and work hard by day to make this bold mission possible.

Wharton Global Youth: Let’s end with our lightning round of rapid-fire questions. What is something about yourself that would surprise us?

Joahluis: I love working. People despise work, but I think that you have to love what you do. And I can truly say that I love picking up junk. There’s nothing like beautifying somebody’s home and then being so happy with the result. Having their mind decluttered and their living situation decluttered.

Wharton Global Youth:. When you’re not running your business, what do you spend your time doing?

Joahluis: This might sound a little funny, but I either spend my time in the gym or figuring out ways to grow and scale my business when I’m not actively doing a job.

Wharton Global Youth: What business idea would you like to explore other than junk removal?

Joahluis: I talked a little bit about my mentor Brandon Lane. He actually took me out on a weekend to do dry stone stacking for one of his neighbors. And it’s amazing. It’s incredible. It’s almost up there with pressure washing and junk removal. It’s definitely a business I would love to explore and potentially start in the future.

Wharton Global Youth: Okay, you are starting your own business-themed talk show. Who is your first guest and why?

Joahluis: My first guest would be a man by the name of Alex Hormozi. He’s an influencer, and he’s amazing. He has so many motivational talks about entrepreneurship and why you should keep going. He’s one of the most motivating people I’ve ever listened to and seen in my life. I’d love to sit down with him and have a conversation with him, and pick his brain a little bit.

Wharton Global Youth: Joahluis, thank you for joining us on Future of the Business World.

Joahluis: Thank you so much for the opportunity. It was amazing, and I’d love to do this again, if I could.

Conversation Starters

How does Joahluis Molina demonstrate an entrepreneurial mindset?

Does his company have a double bottom line? How is he meeting the needs of both profits and planet?

Do you also plan to build a service business as your livelihood? Describe your own experience in the comment section of this article.