They Left Corporate America for a College HUNKS Franchise

Franchisee stories · Hunks Talking Junk, Ep. 18

Todd and Anne Smith own the College Hunks Hauling Junk & Moving® franchise serving Asheville, North Carolina, and they got there after about 25 years in corporate careers that kept relocating them. Nine moves, and by their own account they never once picked where they lived. When the chance came to choose, they chose Asheville, North Carolina, and they bought a College HUNKS Hauling Junk & Moving franchise to go with it. Then COVID hit, and they became the first franchise owners in company history to go through training entirely on video, from an Airbnb, with their moving trailer still parked in the yard.

Five years later they have a wall of local awards, a management team that came up from the trucks, and a story about Hurricane Helene that is the real reason to watch this one. On the newest episode of Hunks Talking Junk they walked co-founder Nick Friedman through all of it, including the parts that were genuinely hard.

Who are Todd and Anne Smith?

Todd and Anne Smith are the College HUNKS Hauling Junk & Moving franchise owners serving Asheville, North Carolina. They are married 30 years, they had never worked together before buying the business, and neither of them came from moving or junk removal. Anne spent her career in career and technical education and career development. Todd came from corporate operations and finance, including a stretch running a startup in China where the family relocated when their daughters were eight and ten.

They opened in 2020 and marked five years in business this year. Anne took the people side of the operation, hiring and community, while Todd took operations and the numbers. Todd’s summary of the split on the episode: “we’re the head and the heart, and obviously I’m the heart,” which got a laugh from everyone in the room including him.

The community work was deliberate and it started immediately, because it had to. They landed in a town where nothing was open and nobody could meet anybody.

“I’m a believer in you’re building relationships. You’re not selling.”
Anne Smith

That approach put them in front of the Asheville chamber, the Henderson County chamber, domestic violence shelters, and the nonprofits moving people who were unhoused. The recognitions followed: Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce small business leader for companies over 20 employees, a Henderson County Chamber of Commerce small business leader award, Best of WNC for both moving and junk removal, and Best of AVL for moving, junk removal, and one year as a place to work.

How did they go from corporate careers to owning a franchise?

They took a year to decide, looked at several brands, and picked the one where they would have the most control over how the business grew. Todd spent that year off work asking himself whether he wanted to go back to corporate at all. The answer was no, and the list of things he did not want anymore was a lot longer than the list of things he did, starting with having a boss.

What sold them on this brand was the mission and the values, plus what they could see about it in their own market. What they got in the first months was not on the brochure. They describe six to eight franchise owners who went on the speed dial early and stayed there, people who picked up the phone at a moment’s notice to say they had seen this problem before. Todd’s line on it: they are not competing with Kalamazoo or Orlando.

The training itself was a first for everyone. Their class was the company’s first fully virtual franchise training, run over five days of lockdown while they were three weeks into an Airbnb stay, waiting to get into their Asheville rental. Anne’s read on that period is that in COVID you made the next best decision and there was not much time to overthink it.

Once the business was running, the thing they built it on was buy-in to four core values, and they have been unusually blunt with the team about where the line sits.

“We’ve told our team repeatedly over the years that we’ll bend, we’ll break, we’ll do anything except for those core values. We’re going to hold those up as our gold standard.”
Todd Smith

The hiring filter is simple enough to repeat. Anne hires for who somebody is rather than what they have done, and one of her standard interview questions is whether the candidate actually likes people. Clients are stressed, they are moving, there is a lot going on, and somebody who does not like people is in the wrong job. Their entire current management team came off the trucks, which is the same route Adrian and Austin Thomas took to franchise ownership in North Columbus, Ohio. One former team member, Hudson Armstrong, went from their location to the franchisor side as a franchise business coach.

What happened to their franchise during Hurricane Helene?

Helene hit Asheville at the end of September 2024, and the Smiths turned their location into a resource hub while their own house had no water for 40 days. Their whole team was accounted for and safe, which they say freed them to decide that everyone else had it worse and to work from there. They ran a GoFundMe that raised about $15,000. The franchisor sent two truckloads of supplies, which realtors and neighbors came and hauled straight out to the hardest hit communities, generators included.

Other franchise owners sent people. Fifteen hunks from Greer, South Carolina and seven from Johnson City, Tennessee came to Asheville, went on the Smiths’ payroll, and lived in an Airbnb while they worked.

The moment that stuck with the Smiths came from one of their own crew, a guy who was taking the storm hard and who came in during those early days and told them he was done with the regular job list.

“I’m not moving any more rich people… I want to do something good.”
A College HUNKS team member, as recounted by the Smiths

They had exactly the job for him. An apartment building in town held 250 families displaced by the storm. Over the following couple of weeks the team moved 170 of those families out of that one complex, and he was on every single move. The Smiths say that was the point where the crew saw the work as making a difference rather than making money. The franchisor gave the location its Move the World Award for the response. One practical footnote for anyone modeling this business: because of the storm work, they had no slow season that year.

Do you need business experience to own a College HUNKS franchise?

No. A business ownership background is not required to become a College HUNKS franchise owner. Candidates need a minimum net worth of $200,000 and $75,000 in liquid capital, and most owners come from corporate America or the military rather than from moving or junk removal. Training runs through Franchise Management School, and every owner gets a dedicated franchise business coach and a marketing coach. This is an owner-operator model, so the person who buys it is the person who runs it.

The Smiths are the same profile as several other owners on this podcast. Scott Leffel left a corporate sales job at 50 to open in Dallas, and Erica Fine came out of corporate finance at GE and opened in Chicagoland as a single mom. The Smiths are a clean example of the profile the brand actually recruits for. Two career professionals, zero industry experience, both of them betting that 25 years of managing people and numbers would transfer. Todd’s take after five years is that it did, and in ways he had not predicted. He keeps catching himself thinking about something he used to do in his previous life and finding a use for it.

The hardest adjustment had nothing to do with trucks. Both of them name energy management as the real lesson of small business ownership. As an employee you can mentally clock out, and when you own the thing the wheel never stops. Todd calls it an energy game and says you have to watch where you spend it, because whatever you burn on the bad things is gone when the good things need you. He also has a running joke about the franchise training exercise where you juggle seven spinning plates. In his experience there are 57.

They took a real pay cut in lifestyle terms too. Todd played roughly 120 rounds of golf the year before he joined College HUNKS. He has played twice in five years, and he frames that as a choice rather than a loss.

If this path sounds like yours, they built it in North Carolina, and you can see which markets are open right now or read through how the business works.

Where to listen to this episode

The full episode is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. New Hunks Talking Junk episodes drop every other Thursday, and the rest of the series lives with our other franchisee stories.

More franchise owner stories from Hunks Talking Junk

Every episode in this series is a first-person account from someone who bought and runs a College HUNKS franchise.

• Shelly Sun Berkowitz on what makes a good franchisee, from the founder who built BrightStar Care and now sits on the College HUNKS board.
• Scott Leffel: corporate job at 50 to Dallas owner, including the 18 months he went without a paycheck.
• Erica Fine: single mom to seven-zone owner in greater Chicagoland.
• Adrian and Austin Thomas: from the back of a truck to owning the franchise in North Columbus, Ohio.
• Erick Ramirez on scaling operations in Albuquerque.

Want the path they took?

Todd and Anne picked a market on purpose after a decade of being told where to live, and they built something in it with a team that mostly started on a truck. If you are weighing the same kind of move, walk the model, the open territory map, and the numbers for your zip code with the franchise team. Start a conversation, or look at how the business works and what it costs to open first.

This story reflects the experience of individual franchise owners and is not a representation of the results any other franchisee will achieve. Financial information shared in this content is drawn from Item 19 of the 2026 CHHJ Franchising, L.L.C. Franchise Disclosure Document (Issuance Date: April 30, 2026). See Item 19 for material assumptions, the underlying data set, and full required disclosures. Past performance does not guarantee future results. New franchisees may earn less.

This information is not an offer to sell or solicitation to buy a franchise. A franchise offering can only be made through the delivery of a Franchise Disclosure Document. Certain states regulate the offer and sale of franchises; if you are a resident of one of these states, we will not offer you a franchise unless we have complied with applicable pre-sale registration and disclosure requirements in your state.

College Hunks Hauling Junk®, College Hunks Moving®, and the H.U.N.K.S logo are registered trademarks of CHHJ Franchising, L.L.C. © 2026 CHHJ Franchising, L.L.C. All rights reserved.