1-800-GOT-JUNK?: Brian Scudamore

Brian Scudamore didn't dream of a life hauling away other people's trash. But when he needed to pay for college, he bought a $700 pickup truck, painted his phone number on the side, and started hauling. Now 1-800-GOT-JUNK? makes over $200 million in annual revenue. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I was learning much more running a business on the streets versus studying in school. And I remember sitting down with my father, who's a liver transplant surgeon.

• 0:10Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  But I remember having to sit down to him and just say, Dad, I've got some good news for you. And I presented it as good news, because to me, it was good news. And I thought if I could get him excited, he might agree with me. And I told him I was leaving school. And he said, You're dropping out of school to become a junk man.

• 0:31Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:45Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz. And on today's show, how an old pickup truck and a simple idea inspired Brian Scudamore to build the largest junk hauling service in the world.

• 1:04Guy Raz?

  By this point, if you've been listening to the show, you know all about the inspiring people who had an idea and then ran with it. Whether it was Sarah Blakely with Spanx or Tony Hsieh with Zappos, they had a vision and they pursued it. But almost all of them, they had to go through a complicated process to get from idea to implementation, which is why today's story is such a contrast. Because while junk hauling may not sound sexy, Brian Scudamore's idea was comparatively elegant and simple. He didn't need a whole lot of money to start. He didn't need any outside investors. And he didn't need to hire anyone, at least at first. And to be clear, Brian did not dream of a life hauling

• 1:49Guy Raz?

  away other people's trash. But he did dream of starting a business, even as a kid in Vancouver, Canada.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Let's see, 7th grade, I remember in Vancouver, starting a car wash one summer. I saw my neighbor across the street, Eric had started this car wash, and he was charging $3 a car. And I thought, wow, what a great way to make money. I saw him washing cars and making money. So I went and took a piece of plywood and made my own sign. And I decided to charge two bucks.

• 2:20Guy Raz?

  Wow, you undercut your neighbor across the street?

• 2:23Speaker 00

  I undercut my neighbor by a full dollar. And I thought, this is cool. There I was, learning about a price war. And it was awesome, because literally cars would show up on my side of the street. I'd wash their cars. He'd get more cars. We'd start competing on price. So the funny part is, I got down to 65 cents.

• 2:42Guy Raz?

  You were a ruthless, cruel, heartless businessman in 7th grade.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  You know, it was funny. We both made money. We both had fun. And we would do this several times throughout the summer. And we'd, we'd up the marketing. So I'd get some friends, you know, a couple of girls that were in my class. And I'd get them to go hold signs at the busier street a block away to flag people over. And you start to learn about pricing and profit. And I was making so much money that I just, I couldn't even believe it.

• 3:12Guy Raz?

  Were you like a, like a genius student? Like, were you super good at school?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Whatever the polar opposite of genius student would be, would be who I was. What would happen is things like reading. I just, that was one area I got stuck. I'm so ADD that I couldn't focus on the words. My mind would go to other things. And I, I would have a hard time with that. So I learned to read, but I didn't learn to understand. And that became a challenge through school. And, and really, sort of held me back from, from learning through books. So I failed many years throughout high school. I ultimately was one course short from finishing high school. So 12th grade, didn't finish, didn't graduate. But then I saw all my friends, every single one of them, get accepted into colleges. And I said, I don't want to be left out.

• 4:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  So I went to one of the universities and said, I don't have my high school graduation. I'm smart enough, I can do this. I wrote them letters and I spent time in the admissions office. And finally, they said, okay, we're gonna let you in.

• 4:17Guy Raz?

  So you were, so you were, what, 18, I guess, at the time? Were you, were you working? Like, were your parents helping you out? How did you even have money to go to school?

• 4:26Speaker 00

  My parents, when I approached them and asked for some money for for school, they said, are you kidding me? You didn't even finish high school. Why are we going to fund your college education? And it turns out that they were probably smart. But what it taught me is I had to get out there, fund my own education. And what I did was I was in a McDonald's drive through in Vancouver. I saw this beat up old pickup truck, plywood sides, junk filled up in the truck. And it had a sign on the box that said, Mark's hauling. I was having trouble finding a job. I didn't know what I was going to do to pay for college. And when I saw that truck, I immediately connected with, that's something I can do. I looked at the truck and I thought, I started those car washes as a kid.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  You can see how easy that was to get out there and advertise and wash people's cars. And so to me, this was buy a truck and haul junk.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

  Wow. So did you, did you like rush out and go look for a truck?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I grabbed the classified section of the paper and started looking for trucks. And I found one that I, I don't know if I fell in love with it, but I certainly could afford its price tag of $700. I had $1,000 of my own money and I spent $700 on a beat up truck of my own. And it was this little blue Ford F-100. And I got my girlfriend's father at the time to help me build the plywood sides on there. And off I went. I spray painted 738 junk, which was the phone number I was able to get from the phone company as my phone number. And my company was called The Rubbish Boys.

• 5:59Guy Raz?

  I mean, you know, lightbulb moments, we all hear about them. But the reality is there are, there are very many lightbulb moments. Usually it's a long process and iterations and trying things and failing. And like, this was a lightbulb moment that just happened to pass by you at that moment. Like, if you weren't at that McDonald's, you would not have seen that truck and you may not have thought of that idea.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely true, but I would have found something else. It's in my DNA. It's how I think. And so, sure, I found a junk truck. Hey, I'm not passionate about junk. I never will be, but I love customer experience and I love building businesses. I love building things. So if I didn't see the junk truck, I could have seen a completely different, I could have seen a carpet cleaning business and said, hey, that's what I'm going after.

• 6:45Guy Raz?

  So you, so you go out, you get the truck. And how did you even know what to do at that point? Like, how did you even know what to charge people or? Or where to find customers or anything?

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I just started looking around in the classifieds. I started looking and going, OK, there's other people doing what they called rubbish removal. And they say they charged by the truckload or the portion of a load. I'd call them up and find out how much they charged. And you call someone up and you say, I've got a couch. They're going to tell you, you know, it's going to be 100 bucks, 150 bucks, dumping fees, whatever it would be. And I would pay attention and make notes. And then I decided I started my my charge rate at $80 a truckload.

• 7:27Guy Raz?

  Which is pretty cheap.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was pretty cheap. And it was it was probably too cheap because in the beginning, I wasn't really making money. I underpriced myself, thinking that when you go out as a business, especially as an 18 year old kid starting a company, I had to be the cheapest.

• 7:42Guy Raz?

  How were you getting the word out? I mean, how did people know that you were even available to do this?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  So I had painted my phone number on the side of my truck, 738 junk. It was just emblazoned on there. It was bigger than anything else you could possibly see. And I would park my truck at a high traffic intersection. And so people would see this and they'd call. And I really quickly figured out that people would say, oh, I saw your 738 junk truck parked at Arbutus and 12th. How much do you guys charge? And so I learned very quickly that that was my mobile billboard.

• 8:17Guy Raz?

  And what would you do? You would go to a house and you would, yourself with no help, clear all the stuff that they wanted removed?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  I would. I'd just go into their attic, their basement, wherever the junk was, in their garage, and haul it away. But I realized there's a lot of things like refrigerators and deep freezers that were too heavy for just myself. So I needed employees. And I recruited my best friend, David Snyderman. He became too connected to the junk. I mean, we're still best friends today, but it was pretty funny because he would just look through the junk and go, look at this, check this out.

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  Awesome.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  You know, the history behind this. And he would keep things. And I'm like, this is not going to work out. We need to work here.

• 8:57Guy Raz?

  So how did you figure out what you do with junk? Like, because you have to pay a fee, I'm assuming, to like a dump site, like a landfill site. Where did you? Where'd you find those places?

• 9:10Speaker 00

  I called up the city, the municipalities, and they said, where do I take a load of junk if I've got some? And they gave me the addresses of all the different places. And I tried them all out. Some were closer than others, some were cheaper but farther away, experimented a bit. But it was pretty easy stuff. I mean, it really was a business of pick up someone's junk, see the smile on their face, take their stuff off to the dump or to be recycled, and repeat.

• 9:39Guy Raz?

  So simple. How long did it take before you were actually, you know, you paid off the truck, the cost of the truck?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  So within two weeks, I'd made enough money that it paid for the business. I adjusted my prices quickly. I worked hard. And I made $1,700 in net profit that summer.

• 9:57Guy Raz?

  This was 1989, roughly?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  1989. All I remember was that $1,700 was enough to pay for my school and some left over.

• 10:06Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  And I would do this every summer until I finally had the bold decision to drop out. I was learning much more running a business on the streets versus studying in school. And I remember sitting down with my father, who's a liver transplant surgeon.

• 10:21Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  This guy's done more school than anybody I know.

• 10:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  And very successful, very smart man. But I remember having to sit down to him and just say, Dad, I've got some good news for you. And I presented it as good news because to me, it was good news. And I thought if I could get him excited, he might agree with me. And I told him I was leaving school. He said, you're dropping out of school to become a junk man? I mean, he was just destroyed. My oldest son is leaving school to become a junk man.

• 10:50Guy Raz?

  It's a haul of trash.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:52Guy Raz?

  I'm a liver transplant surgeon.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  On the glamour spectrum, I mean, it couldn't be closer to the bottom. And I just said, no, Dad, I'm learning so much more. And he said, you know, Bry, you've got a year left in your university education. Just go finish it. I said, Dad, my business opportunity might not be there forever. I said, I guarantee the University of British Columbia will be there for years and years to come if I ever choose to go back. So we agreed to disagree, and I dropped out.

• 11:22Guy Raz?

  So at this point, this became your full-time gig, right? Like, at this point, it's you and is it you and a partner? Or was it just you alone?

• 11:31Speaker 00

  So when I dropped out, I ended up having a guy who went to school with me, John. And John Riedel and I, we went from one truck to three trucks right after I quit school. And the whole thinking there was these mobile billboards work. If I can add two or three mobile billboards around town, we're going to get that much busier and things are going to grow and we're going to have this little empire.

• 11:55Guy Raz?

  You weren't even paying for advertising because you just had this on the side of your trucks?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  We weren't paying for advertising. And my girlfriend at the time said, why don't you call up the local press? Call the newspaper and tell them your story. I said, what story? And she said, well, that you guys have created your own job. It's a tight summer labor market. Nobody can find work. You guys created your own job. And I said, OK. I picked up the phone and I called up the Vancouver Province, our biggest newspaper at the time. And it must have been a slow news day because I said, I got a great story for you. And they said, what is it? And I told them and they sent out a reporter and they sent out a photographer. And the next day, boom, we were on the front page of the paper. We got a front page ad for free.

• 12:39Guy Raz?

  With your phone number on it?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I remember the photographer saying, you guys are going to be busy tomorrow. And sure enough, he was right. We had bus drivers driving down the streets waving their newspapers with our picture on it out of the window going, that's you. And it was pretty fun.

• 12:56Guy Raz?

  By the way, did you ever have to like get a bank loan or like outside money to fund the company?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  I didn't. I was lucky. I built a business out of cash flow.

• 13:08Guy Raz?

  And there was and your costs were low, right? It was you and your partner and you were just hauling the stuff out?

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I ultimately bought my partner out after about a year. And what I did is I just invested everything back into the business to grow it. But I never expanded beyond my means, at least not in the early stages of the business.

• 13:28Guy Raz?

  What was the kind of stuff that you would haul out of people's homes?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  We would haul away old furniture. Appliances. We're very much a keep up with the Joneses type world. And I think unfortunately, people renovate too much and always want new furniture and the latest and greatest and TVs. And so we haul away their old stuff. We try and recycle as much as we possibly can. But furniture, appliances, yard debris when someone cleans up the yard. And it was a simple model, but it was fun because you'd find weird things. And I remember there was a woman who had soup cans. She had a whole wall of Campbell's soup cans. I mean, it looked like a real live art piece. And I remember looking at this and going, what are you doing?

• 14:13Speaker 00

  And she just said, well, she was saving up for the next big war and just wanted to have all this food stocked away. And finally, her kids just said, like, even if there was a war, you couldn't eat that stuff. It's 50 years old. So we ended up cleaning out a whole wall of, you know, Andy Warhol-ish wall of Campbell's soup cans.

• 14:32Guy Raz?

  What were some of the challenges that you faced in the early days? Were there any regulations that you had to get around or competitors that tried to shut you down or anything like that at all?

• 14:45Speaker 00

  The biggest challenge I faced in the early days, five years in, we were about a half a million in revenue, and I realized I wasn't having fun any longer. I was avoiding spending time with my employees. And I just, I had the wrong people and I realized that one bad apple spoils a whole bunch. And I had nine of my 11 staff were bad apples. So I just decided to clean house and I got rid of everybody and I did it in one sitting. And I took responsibility as their leader and said, hey, I've let you guys down and I'm sorry, but this isn't going to work out.

• 15:18Guy Raz?

  What was the problem with them?

• 15:20Speaker 00

  They weren't clean cut. They weren't professional. They didn't see what I saw. And it was as simple as they didn't care about the customer. They were hauling away the junk. Taken it to the dump and they didn't have the sense of let's allow the customer to have that sense of relief that their junk is gone, that they've got their space back. Let's chat them up a little bit and make them happy. And they weren't aligned with my vision.

• 15:47Guy Raz?

  How were you able to, like, how were you able to run the business the next day? All of a sudden, you fired your entire team and presumably you had jobs to do the next day and weeks.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was hard. I went from five trucks down to the ability to only run one at a time. And so I had my truck, I had my cellphone, I was the call center, I did the booking, the dispatch, the junk hauling, I did everything. But what it taught me was you build a company that's all about people, find the right people and treat people right. So I vowed from that day to never make the same mistake. Of course, I've made hiring mistakes, but relatively few. I really focused on finding people that I wanted to work with.

• 16:33Guy Raz?

  When we come back, how Brian Scudamore pleaded with the state of Idaho to get the number 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 16:58Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the mid-1990s. Brian has fired all of his employees. And after a rough few months, he begins to rebuild the team. But at this point, his company is still a small business, running in just one city. When did you decide that, you know, this thing could be bigger than just like a junk hauling company in Vancouver?

• 17:26Speaker 00

  So, you know, at this point, 1997, we were actually at $1 million in revenue and I joined something called YEO, the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. And I found myself surrounded by people who had some pretty cool businesses. Tech companies and growing ad agencies and just stuff that seemed a little sexier than junk removal. And so I think I found myself feeling sad because I was comparing myself to others and I didn't feel good enough. So what I ended up doing was I Went to my parents' summer cottage. They had this little cottage and I sat out on their dock. And I said, okay, this isn't who I am. I'm an optimist. So I pulled out a pen and a sheet of paper.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  And I said, okay, what if I could just dream up possibility? What could this business look, feel and act like five years down the road? And I said, we'll be in the top 30 metros in North America, even though we were only in one. We would be the FedEx of junk removal, clean shiny trucks, friendly uniformed drivers. I just started to put these big hairy audacious goals down on paper. That we would be like the McDonald's of junk, that we would, you know, just what Ray Kroc did, where he got all these owners on board. We would do the same thing with the junk removal business. And I took Paul Guy, who was the operations manager of mine in Vancouver. And I said, you're going back and forth to Toronto every couple of weeks to see your girlfriend.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Why don't you move there? Why don't you take a truck? Why don't you start the first franchise?

• 18:55Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, how did you even know how to structure a franchise? Like, how did you figure out how that would work?

• 19:01Speaker 00

  I looked at other franchises. I looked at Subway. I looked at businesses and thought, what kind of royalty are they charging? What's the business model? I got out and talked to a bunch of experts. So again, being a guy that doesn't learn from school, I just picked up the phone and I called people. I called and I approached a bunch of experts and said, this is what I'm thinking of doing. What do you think? They gave me some feedback and advice on how to structure fees and royalties. I brought on a franchise lawyer who's still with us today. And I remember that he helped to give me a lot of the advice and the systems. He believed in us and knew that we'd build something much bigger than where it was at that time.

• 19:41Guy Raz?

  So you get your first franchisee in Toronto and how, how did that go?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  It was funny because I got a phone call from Paul Guy. So he, it took him, I don't know, a week to get to Toronto. He made a few stops and he calls me up within the first couple of weeks. And he said, this isn't going to work here. What are you talking about, Paul? He said, well, I found out that the city will haul away anything for free. He said, you can just put it out on the curbside. They've got special garbage collection days. They'll take fridges, stoves, couches, you name it, it doesn't matter. I said, Paul, you've driven across the country. Trust me, please just try it. And so he did, and he started to get business. And he started to hear from customers that, you know, someone was doing a renovation. Maybe they didn't get a city permit, so they didn't want to call the city to haul away the junk.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Or maybe the junk was in their garage or their basement. The city workers wouldn't come collect it from anywhere but the curbside. And Paul started to realize, wow, I, okay, this is gonna work. He did a million dollars in revenue in his first full calendar year.

• 20:45Guy Raz?

  Wow. So at that point, you're thinking, okay, we've gotta expand. We've gotta move beyond Vancouver and Toronto. And what was the next step? What was the next place to go?

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Next place to go was in the United States.

• 20:59Guy Raz?

  And just to clarify, at the beginning, your company was called The Rubbish Boys. When did you come up with the new name? When did you become 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

• 21:08Speaker 00

  So Paul was in my office. We were working, and I said, if we're going to go for this franchise model and build something across North America. I knew the word rubbish was going to be a problem. It was more of a Canadian-British term. And the other problem we had was people would either think of the company as being The Rubbish Boys, and some people thought of us as 738junk. So effectively, they saw us as two companies. So I remember sitting down with Paul, and we were brainstorming, and I said, what if we did a 1-800 number? Something like 1-800FLOWER, something that was more descriptive. So we started brainstorming, and the whole Got Milk campaign that was running at the time inspired me to 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  And our phone number had a question mark in it, and it would ask the question, got junk? And, well, of course I do. Then give us a call. And so, and so I tried to find who owned 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

• 22:03Guy Raz?

  Oh, somebody owned it, but it wasn't available?

• 22:05Speaker 00

  It wasn't available. The phone company said they couldn't get me the number, so I had to dig around. I ended up making about 60 phone calls. I had people, friends and family in the United States, calling the number. It was only working in one state, and that was the state of Idaho.

• 22:22Guy Raz?

  Who in Idaho had this number?

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the Department of Transportation in Idaho owned this 1-800-GOT-JUNK phone number. They didn't know it spelt Got Junk, but they were using this phone number. And I thought, OK, I need this number. So I called into their office, called up their main switchboard, asked for the phone room, and I got this guy, Michael. And Michael ends up, you know, talking to me, and he goes, why do you want this number? And I just said, it's a business idea. I really want it. He goes, well, we're not really using it that much. It took three phone calls to him before he finally said, OK, here's the AT&T forms, fax them over to me, the number's yours, I signed, and we had a deal.

• 23:02Guy Raz?

  Wait, wait, he just gave you the, he gave you the phone number for free?

• 23:06Speaker 00

  I think he wanted to get rid of me. I think he was sick and tired of me calling.

• 23:10Guy Raz?

  But I mean, you, you really needed that phone number. I mean, that was, that was an incredibly lucky break.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  It was a lucky break, but you make your own luck. I mean, I could have given up after call number 54.

• 23:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Or 55. I just kept going. And I've heard so many stories of, you know, Colonel Sanders knocking on, what, 183 doors? And then the 184th, the guy goes, yeah, I love the recipe. And so you just can't give up.

• 23:35Guy Raz?

  So how did you expand into the US?

• 23:38Speaker 00

  So we expanded through franchising. We found a lawyer, started networking through our Canadian lawyer, found a great attorney in the US, and we created our franchise documentation. It got approved by the FTC, and they said, OK, off you go. And then we just really started to aggressively go after the US press. The big turning point for us, the, the big media hit in the US was Fortune magazine.

• 24:02Guy Raz?

  Why did you think it was so important to get press coverage?

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Well, I saw that when we were this little local business as The Rubbish Boys, and we would get stories in the newspaper, people would repeat our stories back to us. They're like, wow, you dropped out of college and you're building this business, and what a great thing that you're doing, and, you know, it's, it's an awesome story. So we just started telling the story.

• 24:28Guy Raz?

  So, OK, so you get this article, and then what, like, as a result, people were calling you, saying, hey, you know, I want to buy, like, I want to buy a franchise?

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we ended up getting an article in Fortune magazine. They saw one of our trucks in San Francisco. And Adam Lashinsky, the writer, called and said, "Saw this truck. Heard about you guys. Just seems like a crazy business. You're building a brand in junk removal.

• 24:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Who does that?

• 24:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  And the story came out, hit the ground on a Thursday. And we ended up getting 506 phone calls from Thursday to Sunday. So that week, we were flooded with leads.

• 25:05Guy Raz?

  And these were people who were interested in buying franchises?

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, 506 calls. Imagine listening to that and trying to write them all down and calling everyone back. We were overwhelmed. So I got on the voicemail and I said, "Due to an overwhelming response from Fortune magazine, we are unable to call people back. If you would like to learn more about our opportunity, please call into this conference call at this time." And what we did is we'd have like 100 people show up on a conference call. And we would do a roll call of, you know, "Okay, what city are you from?" And we go through one by one, all these different people. So everyone's like, "Whoa, I got all this competition. I want to get in." And it drove the process quickly. And we ended up doing 53 franchise deals that year, which was just unheard of in the

• 25:54Speaker 00

  franchise space. And things just started to hockey stick and completely explode.

• 26:00Guy Raz?

  So I mean, you had to adjust from running a small business to a pretty big company, like almost overnight. I mean, like, all of a sudden, you had all these new franchise partners. I mean, that must have been a huge challenge.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Well, in the beginning, it was great excitement. Things were just building, all this great momentum. And we raced pretty quickly to $100 million in revenue.

• 26:24Guy Raz?

  But what year, what year did you hit 100 million?

• 26:26Speaker 00

  2006.

• 26:27Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  And so it was exciting and there was this energy and this momentum. But what was interesting about that time is at 2006, I realized I had my president of my company, my COO, Cameron Harold. I was the best man in his wedding, great friend. We're still friends today. We grew together from 2 million to 106 million in a very short period of time.

• 26:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  But what started to break was that you had two ADD, fire-ready aim types at the top of the company.

• 27:00Guy Raz?

  That's you and Cameron.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that just doesn't work. We started to make poor decisions together.

• 27:06Guy Raz?

  Like what'd you do? What would you do?

• 27:08Speaker 00

  We would overspend in areas where we would take some risks and we wouldn't really think through with any rigor and discipline how it would affect our franchise partners. We had a truck rollout program where we said, hey, everybody needs more trucks. Just get more trucks out there. And we put it in the franchise agreement that our franchise partners had to increase their fleets by a certain period of time. And there was some rebellion. I mean, and I don't blame them. It was too aggressive. And I realized that we were making mistakes and you can't have the two ADD types at the top. And I needed to find a new leader. And having to tell your best friend that this is no longer going to work out is a tough, tough, painful thing to go through for both of us. But we've healed and moved on.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  And Cameron would tell anyone today, Brian made the right decision.

• 27:57Guy Raz?

  And so obviously, I'm assuming you found someone else to run the operations side of the company?

• 28:02Speaker 00

  I did. So one of the biggest mistakes I made was the second person I brought in as the second president. And I brought in an ex-Starbucks COO. And this person had been a president of one of the US divisions of Starbucks and had done amazing things for that business. 30,000 employees under this person's report.

• 28:24Guy Raz?

  So you're thinking, this person's just a slam dunk. They're going to do a great job for me.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I'm just like jackpot. This is just unbelievable. But we almost bankrupted the company.

• 28:35Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  After 20 years of growth, we went from 119 million in revenue is what we'd hit at that peak at that time, and we dropped down to the 80s.

• 28:46Guy Raz?

  What happened?

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Well, the recession hit, which didn't help. But I don't buy for a second that that was really the issue because what really happened was... My president's leadership and my vision weren't aligned.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I needed an executor who could translate my vision and say, here's the vision, let's translate it into a plan. Here's all the steps, let's make these things happen. I needed somebody that believed in me and where I could also believe in them. So I, I got that person out of the business.

• 29:18Guy Raz?

  How close was the company to falling apart?

• 29:20Speaker 00

  We couldn't have been closer. I mean, I would have given us another 90 days if we'd continued down that path. We had overspent so drastically on big bets that didn't pay off. And I had to hunker down. I had to lay off 52 people. I needed to elevate another team, the middle level managers up. And I said, you know, I know you might not agree with my decision. You probably think I'm crazy, but I need your help. And it was the hardest period in my professional life. While my middle level management team who was elevated continued to run the business, I scoured the country for the right leader. I interviewed 75 potential president slash COOs.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  I said, I need to find someone whose strengths and talents would take all the things I'm bad at and make them happen. And so I painted this little vision describing exactly who I was looking for. I got it out to my networks and three different people, totally unrelated, said, the person you describe is Eric Church because you've only described one person on the planet. And I reached out, Eric and I got connected. He was very happily employed. He was president of a big travel tourism company. And when the magic happened, it was just, okay, we can see building this thing together. We can see how we would each contribute strengths to the recipe.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  And we entered this partnership and it's been almost six years. And together we just, I mean, we can debate and discuss and work together. I'm the culture guy, I'm the vision guy. He's the implementer, the rigor. He's the team building guy. And it's, I mean, it's unbelievable.

• 31:03Guy Raz?

  And so at what point did you stabilize? Like, at what point were you able to say, okay, we've totally passed this crisis?

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Well, when Eric Church came in, the first thing he did is he had the goals that I had put in place. He lowered them. He said, listen, Brian, it's not that I don't believe in you and that I don't believe in the goals, but we're going to lower the bar because we're going to teach people what it feels like to win again. We are going to make sure we win. We are going to put the bar low enough that there is no way in the world we're not going to win. And when people start to feel and taste that winning feeling again, the confidence will build, the team will come back. And so he thought about it in a very strategic, planful way. And we made money in the first year of this new, this new business, really taking 1-800-GOT-JUNK

• 31:54Speaker 00

  and restructuring, hunkering down. We made money.

• 31:58Guy Raz?

  How many cities do you guys operate in now?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  We are in every major metro in the United States, Canada, and Australia. So you name the city, we're there.

• 32:08Guy Raz?

  Wow. So I'm just curious. I mean, I talked to obviously lots of entrepreneurs on the show, right? And some of them go the franchising route and then some of them decide not to do that. Why did you decide to do that?

• 32:21Speaker 00

  I think the answer ties to the person I am and what motivates me. I've never been a money motivated person. I probably would have made more money in the long term if I'd done a corporate model and an IPO and raised money. But what motivates me more than anything is taking someone who's got the American dream, build their own business, but they don't know how, giving them a recipe, giving them the cheerleading and the support and the team of other franchise owners who can come together. And so the franchise model to me was the, you know, you've got skin in the game, this is your business, and we could build something much bigger together versus what we could have ever done alone. And that feels good.

• 33:02Guy Raz?

  If you were to go back to the 18-year-old Brian, right? Like in that McDonald's drive-thru? And you're just there and you're like, dude, I know what's going to happen to you over the course of your life. Listen to me. What would you say to him?

• 33:19Speaker 00

  I would say, Brian, listen to your gut. Make the right decisions that you know with all your heart are the decisions that need to be made. Don't be afraid to make them and trust that everything's going to work out. I've learned that you have storms in life. And just like any storm in real life, they don't last forever.

• 33:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I have just one more question for you, Brian, which is, what is the weirdest thing that you ever hauled off?

• 33:53Speaker 00

  The weirdest thing I probably hauled off was I had an entire truckload of escargot shells. So some company who imported escargot went bankrupt and we loaded the truck. And it was very light because these shells were all air.

• 34:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  And this guy says to me, he goes, "Come on, you can fit more in than that." And I said, "We've got a full truckload, sir. You can see the truck's full." So he came up with this idea, and the customer's always right, so we did it. He said, "Go up into the second story of the office, jump into the back of your truck, collapse all those shells, and fit in another load." And so we did it. It was kind of fun, screaming "Woo-hoo!" as you're jumping out the window into the back of the truck. And we did. We got another load in, and we had fun. He was happy.

• 34:40Guy Raz?

  Brian Scudamore, founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. By the way, last year, the company and their franchise partners made close to a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue hauling off people's junk. And sometimes that junk is kind of interesting. They told us that in recent years, they've come across a Bible that belonged to John Wayne, an old airport X-ray scanner, and an ATM machine that still had $26,000 in cash inside.

• 35:16Guy Raz?

  And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about what you're building.

• 35:25Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story comes to us from Robyn Gerber, who works for a bank in New York. And she wanted to solve a problem that actually has nothing to do with her day job.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I get super frustrated looking for parking. If I'm driving, if I'm a passenger in a car.

• 35:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you know, probably one of the most annoying things about having a car in a big city.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  People fight with their spouses.

• 35:53Guy Raz?

  Is trying to find a parking space when you need one.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Go take that spot and they didn't drive there fast enough. So it's really a source of tension.

• 36:03Guy Raz?

  So about three years ago, Robyn noticed that her dad had actually come up with a kind of low-tech solution for the city's parking problem.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  He devised this system where he would put a piece of paper on his car window with a smiley face if he was leaving the next morning. And drivers in his neighborhood began to look out for his car if they saw the smiley face.

• 36:24Guy Raz?

  And of course, when Robyn saw that.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  I thought to myself, there should be an app for this.

• 36:29Guy Raz?

  And how many of us have thought the very same thing? But Robyn actually did something. She got a friend to help her do the coding. And then she made an app that allows drivers to share information about parking spaces.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  We have a find a spot option and a host a spot option. So if you were looking to find a spot, you could click that button and it would search for all the spots within your vicinity. And it would show you the 20 closest spots.

• 36:54Guy Raz?

  So you choose the spot you want to snag. You get the make and model of the car that's leaving. And then you navigate to your space.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  And they are actually tracking you on GPS. So you know if the person is on time, you could chat with them. And each person has to say if it was successful or not.

• 37:11Guy Raz?

  Of course, for the app to really work, Robyn needed hundreds, actually thousands of New York City drivers to download it and start sharing their spaces. So to get the word out, she made a music video.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  No, I'm not trying to be rude. But let me get that parking spot from you. I wish we had a better way than I let good spots go to waste. That's why I'm always.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  OK, so that is my cousin Brad Meyer. And my whole family either sang in it or danced in it.

• 37:38Guy Raz?

  And even though Cousin Brad pulled off his best R. Kelly,

• 37:44Guy Raz?

  the video did not exactly go viral, but Robyn kept pushing. She put flyers on thousands of cars all over New York City.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  People chase after me when I'm handing them flyers, asking for more flyers to give to their friends that live in the neighborhood. They love this, and that enthusiasm is what keeps me pushing forward.

• 38:07Guy Raz?

  Robyn calls her app Park Car, and since she launched it last summer, she's signed up more than 3,000 active users, including, of course, her dad.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  But he still has the smiley face on, but he's not using it anymore. I think we should frame it, actually, and put it on the wall.

• 38:24Guy Raz?

  That's Robyn Gerber of New York City. By the way, she's hoping to spread the idea to cities across the country. To find out more about her app, Park Car, head to our Facebook page. And of course, if you have a story about something you are building, please tell us about it. Go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more about who was on it, go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. You can also follow us on Twitter. That's at howibuiltthis. And you can write to us at h i b t at npr.org.

• 39:03Guy Raz?

  Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Claire Breen. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  Hi, it's Rachel Martin with NPR News. And you know what? We're doing something new, and we want you to be part of it. It's called Up First. It's the morning news podcast from NPR. It's a way for you, in about 10 minutes or so, to get up to speed on the news of any given day, the most important stories, the biggest ideas, the stuff you need to know as you go through your day. Up First, you can get it at NPR1 or anywhere you listen to your podcasts.