#12 - The 1-800-GOT-JUNK Story

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Brian Scudamore** (0:33)
Together, this president and I had almost bankrupted 1-800-GOT-JUNK. We were down $40 million in revenue in one year. The financial meltdown of 2007 and 2008 didn't help.
There was no one in my business that thought I was sane, that thought I made a good decision. They didn't get it because people didn't really understand or see what I saw, and somehow I stuck with it. While it took eight years to get to a million dollars, we do a million dollars on any given day like today.

**Shaan Puri** (1:09)
My next guest who found a basic service that wasn't being met, and now he's making hundreds of millions of dollars, that's right, hundreds of millions of dollars.

**Brian Scudamore** (1:17)
There I was on a boat with two very senior executives offered $75 to $100 million is what they were talking. And I said, you know, I wouldn't sell it for a billion.

**Shaan Puri** (1:31)
All right, we are talking to Brian Scudamore, the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. If you're like me, you've seen the billboards for 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It's one of the sort of the catchiest businesses that I've seen, and it's also a very simple business. Brian's a guy who, when he was 18 years old, he saw somebody else had a truck and said, you know, I'll haul away your junk. And he was like, that's a business that I could do. And he went and rented a truck and started this business and has grown it from, you know, just him and one $700 truck, all the way to basically doing about a half a billion dollars in revenue this year. So he's been doing this business for 30 years and he's a pretty inspirational dude, but you'll hear that in the episode today. And so I'm excited to talk to Brian. We talk a little bit about how he got the business off the ground, his sort of knack for PR, you know, how he ended up on hoarders and Dr. Phil and Oprah and all these other different outlets and how he's used that to grow the business, as well as his philosophies around hiring and some of the mistakes he made. And it's been a long road over these 30 years. And so it's a very cool story. Here comes Brian Scudamore, the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
We're ready to go. So for those who are listening, Brian is the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, as well as a couple of other businesses that we're going to be talking about. Kind of an amazing story, honestly. For a lot of the guests that have come on, they're usually stories that people have never heard of.
But I'd say you actually have done a good job of getting your story out there. Is that something intentional? Do you like talking about your story? Or is PR part of your strategy? Talk to me a little bit about that before we even jump in to talking about how 1-800-GOT-JUNK got started.

**Brian Scudamore** (3:04)
It's a great question. I think I realized early on in building a business that a brand is the story that it tells.
Now, as a brand, whether you're Starbucks or Airbnb or 1-800-GOT-JUNK, you have to live up to the story.
That's the difficult part. But when I saw early on, a couple years into my business, I saw a potential opportunity. Actually, my girlfriend at the time said, you had trouble finding a job. You created your own. Get out there and tell the press that story because I think they're gonna eat this thing up. And the next day, we were on the front page of the Vancouver province, the largest newspaper in the city.
Our truck, our phone number, it was unbelievable and the phone rang off the hook. So I learned the value in free press.
And we got out there to tell our story, but I think it's even bigger than that. We are about changing lives. If I look at our franchise partners and the lives they're creating for themselves, with our recipe, with our formula, why not recruit more great people by telling that story over and over? Why not change people's lives as customers? Whether it's hauling away their junk or painting their house in a day with wow one day painting, we believe that stories help change lives.