The employment outlook for young people in Spain is bleak. According to the latest data, there are 479,000 young people under 25 years of age unemployed in our country. We have an entire generation that accumulates university degrees, master’s degrees and language courses that find themselves in a saturated market that barely offers precarious contracts or long periods of unpaid internships.
Many dream of offices, teleworking or starting a business. startup that revolutionizes the market, however, they find themselves as the months go by without a single real opportunity to earn a living or even become independent.
Despite this, on the other side of the pond is Daniel Tom, a young man who breaks this pattern. Faced with the constant search for the ‘perfect job’, this entrepreneur has built a highly profitable business from scratch in a sector that almost no one would look at: the rental and cleaning of portable toilets.
While some wait for the call from the company they applied to, Daniel gets up early every day to drive a truck and empty commercial waste, demonstrating that financial success is often hidden in jobs that no one else wants to do.
“You are your own boss”
Daniel’s daily life begins long before the sun rises, which is when he checks his route and prepares his tanker truck. As he himself jokes, “that smell wakes you up.” And he is not wrong. The crudeness of his work involves hoses, tanks, valves and chemicals that help him deal with excrement on a daily basis.
Being on the road managing his own time and without a supervisor watching his every move, he assures that “you practically become your own boss.” Dealing with vandalism or portable toilets set on fire and filled with graffiti It’s part of his job. “This business isn’t glamorous and I don’t have people lining up to clean the bathrooms, but there are definitely things that make this job attractive,” he says.
But what is that attraction? As he details, physical effort pays off quickly: “The work is constant and smells like money,” he details. Since launching its project, the company has grown steadily.
In 2025 it had already reached 4.3 million euros. A large part of the income comes from long-term rentals, with monthly rates starting at 160 euros and those for one-off events reaching 200 and 400 euros. Currently, Daniel is in charge of 19 people, whose labor costs represent 30% of income.