They’re Babson College Students—and Last Year, Their Business Made $3 Million

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Bryan Lipiner

Bryan Lipiner is the Senior Manager for Social Media and Content Marketing at Babson College. Since arriving at Babson in 2019, he has dramatically scaled engagement and followings on Babson’s social media channels, led award-winning social media campaigns, written for Babson Thought & Action, and more. Prior to Babson, he worked as a reporter and editor at the Record-Journal newspaper in central Connecticut. Bryan received his undergraduate degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University in 2015.

April 23, 2026

Jacob McKinney '28 and Kirk McKinney '26, co-founders of junk removal business, Junk Teens.

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In his younger years, Kirk McKinney ’26 came across a high-quality pair of speakers on a trip to the landfill.

To one person, they were junk. But to him, it was an opportunity to make a quick dollar.

“I brought them home and sold them on Facebook Marketplace and made $50 in less than an hour,” he says. “That’s when it all flipped, and I realized there was money and opportunity in the trash.”

$3 million in the trash, to be exact. It’s how much junk removal business Junk Teens, co-founded by Kirk and his brother, Jacob McKinney ’28, made last year in revenue, all while the two pursued their undergraduate degrees as current Babson College students.

Kirk and Jacob discuss it all with Babson Thought & Action.

What does it mean to you to make that kind of money as a founder and current Babson College student?

Kirk: As a Babson student, having those kinds of numbers while we’re still in college, it honestly makes college even more valuable to us than if we didn’t have that business and weren’t at that stage.

There are so many great resources at this school that every year we grow our business, we’re able to tap into more and more, and a lot of the resources that we have been able to take away are things that will help us years down the line.

How has Babson helped you accelerate Junk Teens?

Kirk: Babson has helped me see things a lot bigger than the vision I had before coming here. This is a global, international school with people from all around the world, and now some of my best friends are people from different countries where it used to be people from my hometown.

Being able to see a vision as big as the world now makes me see the vision for Junk Teens that much bigger.

Hearing a lot of these high-level business insights from the classes like operations, management, accounting, finance, learning all of these categories of business all in our classes, and hearing the terms circulate around the school kind of fills my mind and my subconscious with the things that we need to see our business that much further.

What’s a piece of advice you would give to student entrepreneurs?

Jacob: The reason why Junk Teens actually became successful is because we stuck to it, and we never gave up. And in the beginning, it really wasn’t anything even close to a junk removal company. We just had our pickup truck. We were doing random jobs on the weekends and stuff like that. It turned into a legit company because of the fact that we never gave up.

How do you balance your academic and social life?

Kirk: Balancing academic and social life while running a multi-seven-figure business as a college student is really difficult, but organization and delegation are some of the keys, and that’s something that, over time, we get better at. We’ve learned how to structure our business and organize it so well and delegate a lot of the tasks that we used to do, so much that it gives us that free time to be able to be college students, to be able to have friends.

Where do you see Junk Teens in the next three to five years?

Jacob: Kirk’s about to graduate. I still have a couple years left. We’re still growing slow and steady over the next couple years, but after that, we’re going to really push into just trying to make it like a full-time thing, ideally going nationwide. We’re scaling up to a couple more locations this year.