Continuing To Serve: South Bay Veteran Opens Junk Removal Company

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — When Mountain View resident Sheldon Rhoads retired from the U.S. Army in 2019 after serving for over 32 years, where he was deployed to Afghanistan, South Korea and Germany, he came back to the Bay Area and thought about his next steps.

Business ownership appealed to Rhoads, an outdoorsy person who enjoys physical activity. So last July, he launched a local junk removal company under the JDog Junk Removal & Hauling franchise.

“I couldn’t think of anything more physical than junk removal and hauling stuff away,” Rhoads said to Patch. “I’m not ancient, but as I get older, I think staying physical and physically active is very important.”

Rhoads said that he was drawn in by JDog’s mission of supporting veterans through job opportunities, including their goal of reducing unemployment among veterans to 1 percent. Rhoads also partnered with the VA Palo Alto Health Care System through their Compensated Work Therapy Program.

“Being able to serve the community like I had in the military was something that I connected with and was really passionate about,” Rhoads said. “Being able to continue to offer opportunities to folks for employment as well as create something for me for my family as a business that can grow.”

While some veterans have an easy time figuring out their career path after returning from a lengthy deployment, others struggle. But there are skills that veterans pick up from serving in the military which can be applied to civilian jobs like "patience [and] a little bit of discipline,” said John Wade, one of Rhoads’ employees and a fellow veteran.

“You can be prepared for the ups and downs," Rhoads continued.

Wade and Rhoads crossed paths in the military and they became close when Wade moved into Rhoads’ Mountain View neighborhood a couple of years ago. When Rhoads floated the idea of starting a business during retirement, Wade offered to help.

“I like that there’s a personal touch to what we do,” Wade said. “I always believe that in any job — construction, or any customer oriented job — the real job is in the details. Anyone can throw junk on a truck, but it’s the details. The sweeping up, leaving a place better than you found it.”

Sixty to eighty percent of the items that JDog hauls away are donated and recycled, according to its website.

“It makes me feel good that we’re going to recycle something rather than fill a landfill with it,” Wade said.

Rhoads didn’t intend to launch a business during a pandemic, but he said he went ahead with the risk. As it turned out, people quarantined at home “looking at stuff they probably had sitting around the house for years are making the decision to get rid of it,” according to Rhoads.

“So we’ve been getting business off of that,” he said. “We’re not booming by any stretch of the means, but we are getting busy.”

Rhoads’ JDog branch currently serves Mountain View, Palo Alto and Los Altos, but Rhoads hopes to expand further north and around the Bay Area. For the first eight months of this business, it was just Rhoads and Wade doing the work.

But lately, they’ve been able to hire more employees to help and Rhoads has been able to use his team-building skills from the military.

“I have this ingrained sense where I have to be very conscious of everybody’s well-being while we’re out there doing a job,” Rhoads said. “It’s very satisfying to be able to not only care about somebody while they're working for you, but to get something done and provide a service as well.”