To Make 1-800-Got-Junk A Success, Its Founder Had To Rethink Everything (Including Himself)
This is my main man Tom,” says a smiling Brian Scudamore, gesturing behind him to one of his junk removal guys. “And my other main man.Tom,” he says, pointing to a second.
It’s the opening of a 1-800-Got-Junk? commercial that, since 2015, has racked up 7.7 million views on YouTube. This is how most people know Scudamore, founder of the wildly successful company: He’s been the face of a booming brand so straightforward that its name is literally its phone number, and his college-dropout story and PR savvy have earned him appearances on Oprah, Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, Hoarders, Undercover Boss, and other national outlets.
Scudamore is a guy who likes to grow -- his business and his profile, each of which seems to fuel the other. He’s a clean-cut, friendly, smiling figure who puts himself in his commercials, and is quite the opposite of the person most customers expect to be at the top of an industry once associated with the Mafia. (Tony Soprano’s cover, after all, was “waste management consultant.”) Scudamore has pretty much nailed the part. With 250 franchise operators across the United States, nine in Canada, and six in Australia, and more than $300 million in system-wide sales, his Vancouver-based company once seemed unstoppable.
But then it was stopped. By its own success.
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“We had nothing left to sell,” Scudamore says. “There was no more real estate.” In 2007, eight years after it began franchising, the company had run out of U.S. and Canadian territories to sell, and had determined that international expansion wasn’t a good option. This is, perhaps, the ultimate franchisor dilemma. Franchising is an industry driven by expansion -- opening new units, and bringing new owners into your system. So what happens when there’s nowhere else to expand?
The short version of Scudamore’s answer:
