One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and Ricardo Hernandez has built a very successful business on turning garbage into cold, hard cash. The Dallas-based entrepreneur began hauling away unwanted furniture and accessories 20 years ago when his father gifted him a van.
“I started posting on Craigslist, then Google came around, and my junk removal business started soaring,” Hernandez recalls. “I was going back and forth picking up people’s junk, and one day… my friend said, ‘Hey, with all this junk you’ve got, you should make a haunted house.’ I thought it was the dumbest idea ever.”
But he still took a chance, charging residents in his first location, his warehouse on Sylvan Avenue in Oak Cliff, just five dollars to get in. By the time he hired his sister Maribel as a set designer three years later, Hernandez says he was raking in more than $100,000 for the season…