Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue: 1-800-GOT-JUNK founder Brian Scudamore explains how he built a business hauling garbage into an international success.
More than one man’s trash turned out to be this man’s treasure
Clark Gable’s piano, John Wayne’s Bible, a 1954 Martin guitar and a mummified cat are just some of the things found by 1-800-GOT-JUNK haulers. Vancouver founder Brian Scudamore describes how he used clever branding to build a franchise that is set to hit $100 million in revenue this year.
“I was trying to find a way to pay for college. I was at a McDonald’s drive-through and saw this pickup truck in front of that said ‘Mark’s Hauling’ on the side, and I thought I should start hauling junk. It became my ticket to pay for college.
“Eventually I ended up in UBC, and my business was funding my way through college. The Rubbish Boys is what it was called. It wasn’t a new concept. I had taken someone’s idea and reinvented it. There were plenty of people with pickup trucks hauling junk. We professionalized an industry. We added a level of professionalism, we added clean shiny trucks, we added uniforms, branding. It was just a different spin on an industry, which was historically as a very fragmented, dirty industry.
“I was studying commerce, and I found I was learning so much more about business by running a business. With one year left to graduate in 1993, I made the bold decision to drop out. I say bold decision because my father is a liver transplant surgeon, and he wasn’t too pleased that I dropped out of high school, let alone decided to do it again.
By the end of that year of dropping out, I tripled the size of my fleet. I went from one truck to three trucks, and realized I was onto something here.
“In 1994, I fired my entire team. It was basically nine bad apples, the other two spoiled by the other nine. I, as a leader, let them down.
“I [had] hired people who weren’t necessarily the clean-cut, professional types that were going to help take my business to the next level. I had people that didn’t care about the business, and I was getting complaints from the customers.
“In 1997-98, I started looking at the franchise model. The E-Myth Revisited inspired me to franchise my business because it teaches you the best businesses in the world are so systematized that every process is set up in such a way that everything’s scalable.
“In 1999, that’s when I brought Paul Guy on board. He was the first franchise partner. He runs a $6 million franchise today [in Toronto]. We changed the name from Rubbish Boys to 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
“It’s less about being in the junk removal business and more the branding and customer service business. We’ll finish this year at $105 million. We’ve got 130 employees between Vancouver and Toronto. Our target is, by the end of 2016, to be a $200 million business. •
