ABOUT FLY BY

We started in June 2023 with 1 truck and my 9-year-old daughter as the only boss employee. One of our first jobs was a 200 pound filing cabinet on the 2nd floor of a beautiful home in Chagrin Falls. I won't tell you how we got that one done, but we've come a long way since!

Before Fly By I spent 12 years working for technology companies and VC firms in other cities who knew nothing, and cared little for the people in my own community. What would it look like to reinvest that time, stress, and energy to the people I see and interact with everyday?

Today, Fly By Junk Haulers exists to meet the needs of our local Northeast Ohio communities. We started with simply wanting to provide sustainable job opportunities in a healthy environment for anyone looking for a 2nd chance: addiction recovery, prison, or general life brokenness. Every person on our team is on a 2nd or 72nd chance of some kind.

After a few months of seeing the enormous amount of waste being dumped at landfills we started leaning into a broader vision. Could we do more than just provide jobs? Much of what we haul away from jobs is true junk — old couches, stained mattresses, water logged household items. For items that do still have useful life, what would it look like to create a model that salvages? How could we keep them out of our landfills, meet other needs of our community, and do it all in a way that keeps our pricing competitive with other companies who have a fraction of our overhead?

It would look like a big, beautiful, broken building in the Slavic Village neighborhood, that's what!

Many companies like ours market things like “eco-friendly” and “donate to local non-profits”. Logistically though, what this means is that items are only donated when it's convenient to our necessary business model of getting to the next job. Is the donation partner in the same direction of where we need to head next? (not usually.) Will that donation partner take everything we think is worthy to keep? (not usually.) Is it 4pm on a Friday and all of our employees just want to empty the trucks and go home? (almost always, yes!)

Most junk removal companies operate out of small spaces or home garages with little space to store inventory. Ours started in my Old Brooklyn driveway! All of this together means that unless a perfect storm of circumstances line up, only a small fraction of what could actually meet somebody else's needs would actually make their way to them. There had to be another way.

In July 2024 we purchased our 13,000sf space to create room to store, upcycle, and distribute items throughout the city to our local donation partners. We've since expanded the vision again. In May 2026 we'll be opening up a thrift store providing jobs to single mothers through YoungLives Cleveland, a sitting area for our community, and an outlet for many items that would otherwise end up buried on a hill.

Most of the problems we solve for our customers are not pleasant. Abandoned houses. Heavy furniture in hard to access areas. 50,000sf warehouses with debris everywhere. Evictions, bugs, feces, hostile tenants. Wet basements. A pizza store freezer filled with food that was without power for 2 months…in late July.

Today though, we operate a fleet of trucks, employ a committed crew of team members who love the city they're in and the work that we do, and maintain partnerships with local recycling facilities and charitable organizations. Our commitment to sustainability has diverted more than 400,000 pounds of waste from landfills, and we've had the privilege of playing a part in many, many 2nd chance stories along the way.

Thank you to our community for all of the cat pee covered couches and back-breaking baby grand pianos you've sent our way over the years! It's thanks to your support that our employees can go home at night providing for their families. We look forward to being an anchor in our city for years to come and hope to see you at one of our community events soon.

With love and hope,
Kevin Traub