write-up as it appeared in The Herald News in
the "our town" section on 02/25/08

Seeing treasure in Garfield amid the trash

By HEATHER KAYS, HERALD NEWS | 02/25/08

Rifat Ferhatovic, owner of Rick's Cleanouts in Garfield, has a business cleaning out people's homes. His antique shop is stocked with discarded items he salvages from his garbage hauling business. (MICHAEL KARAS / HERALD NEWS)

GARFIELD -- Rifat Ferhatovic isn't afraid to admit where he started -- even though it was in a garbage can.

A decade ago, the 52-year-old native of Yugoslavia could be found rummaging through Bergen County trash almost every night of the week.

What he found was a multimillion dollar business and his life's passion. Ferhatovic is now the owner and operator of Rick's Cleanouts on River Drive in Garfield -- a garbage hauling company and antique shop.

"One man's trash is another man's treasure," Ferhatovic said. "That's me. I'm one of those guys."

Ferhatovic, who identifies himself as "Rick" on the company Web site, makes most of his profit from the cleaning and disposal done by his company. The antiques, collectibles and interesting items found during that process are fixed up and sold for cheap in his store. Whatever he is unable to sell in his shop is put up for auction.

Essentially, the garbage hauling pays the bills and allows him to sell what he finds. There lies his passion.

"I want to make sure I preserve the history of America," said the Paramus resident. "If it's thrown away, that means it will die. I'm giving these treasures a chance to continue to exist."

Ferhatovic's treasures have included everything from Playboy magazines featuring Marilyn Monroe to an 18th-century schoolhouse painting worth $14,000.

His mission of treasure hunting and preserving history started solely because he had an idea and stuck with it.

"I started this business with an idea," Ferhatovic said. "That's all I had."

After struggling as a waiter for 12 years, Ferhatovic decided that without any experience, education and very little money, that he should open his own business.

He gathered up items from his own apartment and scoured the county for antique furniture and other unusual items from trash and garage sales to clean up and sell. He opened a small store called Aladdin's Thrift Shop on Parker Avenue in Clifton's Botany Village section.

Three months later, the business was so successful that he had to expand and open a larger location.

Then, in 1996, he took a chance and decided to open a garbage hauling company. The idea was to clean out estates, garages, attics, sheds and offices in search of "treasures."

Instead, he received call after call from people needing construction sites cleaned up.

"I had this fantasy in my head that people would call me and ask to have their homes cleaned out and I would find all of these amazing treasures," Ferhatovic said. "But we kept getting calls to clean up construction and debris. I was thinking what the hell is this? This is not what I am supposed to be doing."

Eventually, the other calls came. Many of the jobs now handled by Ferhatovic's company are cleaning out homes of the deceased, people who are moving, or people that just don't want to be bothered with whatever they are leaving behind. Rick's Cleanouts receives hundreds of phone calls a day during the busy summer season. In the winter off-season, they still average more than 50 calls per day.

As a result, Ferhatovic never stops. He researches items that he finds on the Internet, goes on calls and tries to build one-on-one relationships with his customers.

He organizes and prices the items in his antique shop, which include everything from 50 cent knickknacks to $10,000 furniture items.

"I find strange things every day," Ferhatovic said, adding that paper is the most common type of collectible that people are willing to part with. "It sometimes surprises me how people care so little about historical and antique pieces."

Over the years, people have become more aware of how much what they have is worth.

"But people still give up even their personal family photos and things," Ferhatovic said. "A lot of people don't seem to care. They just throw it away. That always made me uncomfortable."

Other times, it's the way people live that has shocked Ferhatovic.

In one instance it took his staff three whole days to clean a single two-bedroom apartment. Garbage was piled so high in the apartment that the door couldn't be opened and had to be taken off the hinges.

Douglas Opirhory, broker manager of Opirhory Realty, said that he uses Ferhatovic's business extensively.

"He's a straight shooter. Honorable. Reputable," Opirhory said.

When Ferhatovic talks about his business's success, he sounds surprised rather than conceited.

In the beginning he drove an old, beat-up van that didn't start half of the time.

"Now we have a fleet of trucks," Ferhatovic said.

Eleven trucks, to be exact. As well as nine Dumpsters and 30 employees.

Ferhatovic said he hopes others will be inspired by his success and realize that if he could do it, so could they.

"I built a multimillion dollar business basically from nothing ... starting from scratch in the street," he said.

By HEATHER KAYS, HERALD NEWS | 02/25/08

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