Chris Boozer of The Trash Porters will use his $50k EDGE grant to buy a rear-load garbage truck that will let him expand his business.
WILMINGTON — Chris Boozer could never – in any way, shape, or form — have pictured himself two years ago meeting Governor John Carney and winning a $50,000 EDGE Grant to buy a rear-load garbage truck and expand his business.
This is a guy who had spent a total of 11 years of the previous 18 years in Philadelphia jails, serving time on a variety of charges. Today, two years after getting out for the last time, Boozer runs The Trash Porters, a company he started after watching seniors struggle to carry their trash out to overfilled dumpsters.
He decided to provide “trash valet” services through apartment property managers. The Trash Porters also serves event planners, office buildings, and, in many cases, apartment and home residents to remove trash and junk at an affordable price.
“Our original plan was to focus on the apartment complexes with the trash-valet services, but it takes a long time to get traction there, so we’ve pivoted to the trash and junk removal area.
The Trash Porters has close to 50 residential and commercial clients for weekly garbage collection. He has three employees and will soon hire a CDL driver. He says he can hire and train one new employee for every 50 units contracted for his trash-valet services.
He has a clear vision for his expansion, planning to apply for funding for dumpsters and another truck once he secures contracts for 1,500 apartment units.
Trash Porters’ first taste of funding success was winning first place in the New Castle County Chamber’s “Swim With The Sharks” pitch competition in October 2023. That enabled Boozer to buy a hydraulic dump truck to complete special pickup jobs and residential service contracts.
CSC Vice President Scott Malfitano recommended Boozer for the EDGE grant, saying, The Trash Porters “was founded with a mission to address the common frustrations associated with waste disposal services, emphasizing accountability, reliability, and customer satisfaction…In addition to his business acumen, Chris is a passionate advocate for improving community health and safety. Chris’s dedication to excellence has not gone unnoticed.”
Boozer is humble as he tells his origin story, which few people have heard.
“You’ve got to find the silver lining in every situation. In [jail,] when somebody tells you to do something, you just have to deal with it. I felt I owed my life to other people, but my little ones were the ones that should have mattered more.”
Wake-up call
Boozer was out on parole in May 2020 when his best friend killed himself on Chris’s daughter’s birthday. Chris had just been laid off from a local hotel, and he says that call about his friend Drizzy’s suicide “woke me up.”
So he opened Drizzy Motor Services.
“That was my therapy,” he says.
But that wasn’t the end of his challenges. Selling cars in a rough neighborhood, he ran into a bit more legal trouble, which he ultimately extricated himself from after a short return to jail.
This time, he changed his life. He worked out. He read a lot of self-help books. Instead of drinking coffee, he drank hot water to pay for a lawyer to help get his case dismissed.
“The book I read most often was “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz, which changed my whole outlook, he says. “I would say ‘thank you’ to corrections officers even when they were being [jerks]. I was nice. I stopped gambling and smoking in jail. I carried myself differently and got different results.”
After getting out of jail in 2022, he watched from the third-floor window of his Beck’s Pond apartment complex in Newark as neighbors dragged 15-pound bags down the stairs, crammed them into car trunks (if they had them), and then drove to an overflowing dumpster.
He had found his calling but went to “trash school” using Google to find articles and watch YouTube videos. He talked to the maintenance guy at his apartment complex, who suggested he join the Delaware Apartment Association and start pitching his services.
He joined that day.
From discouragement came encouragement
But it was a hard sell to the property managers, and he started getting discouraged.
Chris Boozer says he believes that for his The Trash Porters business, respect started with trash.
And then he met Eric Logan from Westover Companies, an apartment association member.
“He allowed me to pitch my first time. My pitch deck was terrible, but he took the time to listen to me talk trash. He told me that everyone is selling the same thing, and I needed to focus on what made me different. He told me to keep going because once you get one, they all come.”
Boozer even quit his warehouse job to focus on trash full-time.
It was “the first time in my life I ever quit my job,” he said with a smile.
Boozer’s pivot to residential collection happened after talking to his junk-removal clients.
“The residential clients were complaining about the big companies’ pricing and service, so I said, ‘I guess we do residential as well.”
Getting back to the original concept
He’s now trying to pivot back to his trash valet concept – picking up trash door-to-door as a tenant benefit in apartment complexes.
The new truck will enable them to collect up to 800 residential properties per load before unloading at the landfill. Today, their dump bed’s capacity is about 35 units. The new rear-load garbage truck can collect loads from up to four apartment complexes before going to the landfill.
“I just put a proposal in the other day,’ he says. “The person wanted litter control, but I gave him an estimate for litter control and trash valet, which would solve all the problems in one. But yeah, trash valet is our niche and what Delaware needs. I’m refocusing back.”
“Chris has a natural talent for entrepreneurship, and it’s been incredible to watch him grow into his brand over the last two years, says Bryce Fender, co-founder of Wilminvest, a UD-born community development company.
Fender met Boozer as a business advisor through the Launcher Program, a part of West End Neighborhood House.
“He IS The Trash Porters, and I believe he’s creating the next 1-800-Got-Junk,” Fender said. “Many entrepreneurs have to learn how to tell a story, sell a vision, and execute, but Chris has had that from the start.”
“This is a proud moment for West End Neighborhood House and our Launcher Entrepreneurship Program,” said Executive Director Paul Calistro. “We’ve had the privilege of supporting Chris on his entrepreneurial journey, and seeing his dedication, vision, and hard work recognized with the EDGE Grant is incredibly rewarding.”
In addition to the Launcher program, Boozer praised the Delaware Division of Small Business, Wilmington Alliance, Small Business Administration, Pete DuPont Freedom Foundation, the Black chambers of commerce, and New Castle County for enabling him to join cohorts and form a business plan.
Advice to others who struggle
Asked what advice he’d give entrepreneurs from tough neighborhoods who have gotten off to a tough start in life, Boozer says, “I come from a time and place where you don’t ask for help. [You need to] ask for help and let people know what’s on your mind and what’s in your heart, and just go with your gut. Don’t let nobody tell you, nah, it’s not going to work because it’s YOUR vision, it’s your dream. You can’t help nobody until you help yourself.”
Boozer says it’s “unbelievable” how his life has changed over the past two years.
“People are telling me I inspire them. It’s crazy to me after being told for so many years that I was a threat to society, to my community.”
To this day, Boozer says he has no one to blame but himself for his past.
“I own it. It was bad decision-making,” he says. “I used to look up to the drug dealers and the people doing those things and they’d say we earned our stripes [in jail]. What I was wanting out of life was the wrong thing.”
What’s next? Boozer says he takes it step by step.
You know how back in the day, they always asked you, where do you see yourself five years from now? I used to think that was the dumbest question now. Two years from now? I want to be a household name and own two garbage trucks and about four dump trucks. We should be way past Middletown. We want to be in Sussex and Kent County. I’ve just seen how amazing a year can be. So I know the next two years, man.”
He’s surprised by the way the business community has embraced him.
“Beforehand I didn’t want anybody to know. I felt like ‘FELON’ was tattooed right on my forehead. So I didn’t talk about it. I really love Delaware because without knowing who I was, they embraced me from Day One. And even when they did find who I was, nothing changed.”
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