I want to use this installment of the Crane Truck Startup series to talk about the dumpster bag side of the business — because after months of slow, uneven progress, we just had a week that made all of it feel real.
If you’ve been following along, you know the crane truck is the headline act. But the dumpster bag service has been running quietly in the background since early this year, and it just had its best stretch yet. Here’s how we got here, what it’s actually costing and earning us, and where it’s still falling short.
People Are Starting to Notice
Something shifted recently, and it wasn’t a marketing campaign — it was just showing up. Locals have started recognizing the crane truck from job-site photos we post on social media, and now the truck itself has become a bit of a fixture: it’s parked at a commercial location in downtown Black Mountain most days, visible to anyone walking or driving by.
That parking spot isn’t ours by accident. It’s a benefit of joining Bedrock Guild, a hub for the trades based here in the mountains (bedrockguild.com). Membership gets us a high-visibility spot for the truck downtown, plus a stream of leads for hauling, lifting, and trash pickup work that comes through the Guild. It’s turned out to be one of the better low-cost moves we’ve made — the truck does double duty as advertising just by sitting there.
How the Bag Service Actually Started
We didn’t start this service with a bulk order and a supplier contract. We started by buying individual dumpster bags on Amazon — other companies’ branded bags, from suppliers who don’t operate anywhere near our market. We weren’t worried about their logos or contact info printed on the bags, because every sale came directly through us, and we made sure our own contact information was what customers used for pickup.
That was the point: validate that people would actually buy a bag and pay us to haul it away before we committed real money to inventory. Once we had a track record of sales and pickups, we moved to a bulk purchase from an actual bag supplier — and picked one that makes bags in yellow, so they’d match our brand.
Committing to Inventory: The Bulk Buy
The math on the bulk order was straightforward, but it still felt like a real commitment. At the minimum order of 25 units, bags run $20 each. Add shipping, and the landed cost comes to $29 per bag — a $725 purchase, all at once, for a service that’s still finding its footing.
Keeping It Simple: The Packaging Philosophy
Every extra touch we add to the product adds cost, so we’ve kept things deliberately plain.
Custom printing on the bags themselves is out of reach for now — it’s a real expense we’re not ready to take on. Instead, we print instructions on a standard 8.5×11″ sheet of paper and slide it into the clear pouch sewn onto the bag.
For packaging the folded bag, we skipped the plastic bag entirely and bought a roll of paracord instead — black, for contrast against the yellow and to stay on-brand. It’s a small detail, but it does double duty: it keeps the folded bag bundled tight for delivery, and at pickup, the same cord ties the bag’s straps together for loading. One material, two jobs.
The Pricing Math
We pass the bag cost straight through to the customer with no markup — $30 covers what we paid, nothing more. The margin lives entirely in the pickup, so we want as little friction as possible on the upfront purchase.
Pickup runs $130, which puts the all-in cost to the customer at $160 — a bag plus a pickup. That lands at roughly half the price of a 10 cubic yard dumpster rental, which is the comparison that matters most to homeowners sizing up their options.
Finally, a Real Pickup Day
From the start, the plan was to run fixed pickup days — Tuesday and Thursday, for example — to keep routes efficient and profitable. Getting to a volume that actually supports that has taken longer than we expected.
But we just had a week with multiple pickups scheduled on the same day, and on the busiest one we picked up five bags. At $130 a pickup (bag sales don’t count here since there’s no margin in them), that’s $650 gross. Dump fees for the run came to $85, and fuel was roughly $30. After those direct costs — before equipment maintenance and other overhead — we netted about $535 for the day.
It’s not our most profitable service. For comparison, a full day of crane work at our current hourly rate of $125 would gross $1,000. But as a revenue stream that fills in the gaps between crane jobs, a $535 day is a genuinely nice number, and it’s the first real proof that the route-day model can work once volume is there.
The Bottleneck: Our Flatbed Wasn’t Built for This
Here’s the honest part. Our flatbed truck is inefficient for this work, and the five-bag day made that obvious.
Every bag we load has to be strapped down and tarped, which can eat up 20 minutes depending on the load. Then, at the dump or transfer station, we have to undo all of that — pull the tarps and straps, fully deploy the outriggers, and use the crane to lift each bag off. It’s slow. While we were unloading five bags at the local transfer station this week, a half-dozen trash trucks pulled in, dumped, and left in the time it took us to unload one flatbed.
Why We’re Not Upgrading Yet
The obvious fix is a dump bed with walls — lift bags in at pickup, dump them out at the transfer station, done. But it’s not that simple for us right now.
Retrofitting the current flatbed into a dump bed isn’t cost-effective, and the added hardware weight would cut meaningfully into our payload. A towable dump trailer looks like a simpler option on paper, but it requires a CDL, which we don’t have, and it would push the combined length of truck and trailer past what works on the mountain routes we drive regularly. So for now, new vehicle and equipment plans are on hold, and we’ll keep working the flatbed as-is, knowing it’s the constraint.
The Pleasant Surprise: Costs Coming In Under Estimate
Not everything is working against us. When we first modeled this service, we calculated dump fees against the bag’s full rated capacity of 3,000 lbs. In practice, the heaviest bag we’ve weighed so far has come in around 1,500 lbs — half of what we budgeted for.
We also modeled fuel costs against a trip to the landfill, which is roughly three times farther than the local transfer station we’ve actually been using. Between the lighter-than-expected bag weights and the shorter hauls, our real costs are running noticeably below our early estimates.
Where This Leaves Us
We’re coming off this week encouraged. Two solid pickup days, and we sold more bags for future runs on top of it. It’s likely we’ll see this ebb and flow — this may be a standout week we don’t repeat for a while — but it’s still real progress toward a service that pays for itself between crane jobs.
And there’s a quieter benefit underneath all of it: every pickup, every downtown parking day, every load strapped down in public is the crane truck out in the community, building awareness we don’t have to pay for separately.
If you’re running a service business alongside your core offering, I’d love to hear how you validated it before committing real money to inventory or equipment. Drop a comment or reach out directly.
Up! Up! Lifting is a crane truck service based in the Asheville, NC area. Follow along with the Crane Truck Startup series for an honest look at building a crane truck business — and the services around it — from the ground up.
