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Planning a Vivid Future: Brian Scudamore's Key Move

It’s one thing to make lemonade out of lemons. But how about making a fortune out of someone else’s junk?

Brian Scudamore was a college student in Vancouver in 1989 when he got the inspiration for turning the mundane and filthy task of removing junk into a growth business. He spotted a beat-up truck with “Mark’s Hauling” painted on the side and decided to spend the last $700 of his savings on a used pickup.

The Rubbish Boys – as he called his company at first – would cart off things that even garbage trucks and charity pick-up services wouldn’t touch. Then Brian would cherry-pick, recycle or donate it.

Brian grew his company in fits and starts over the next few years. He changed the name to 1-800-GOT-JUNK? after pestering the U.S. government for months to finally relinquish the rights it owned to the matching toll-free number.

By now, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has made more than one million truckloads of junk disappear, ranging from prosthetic legs to boats sawn in half, from high-end teak furniture to a diffused bomb from World War II. It now has more than 200 franchisees and a presence in most large cities. And 2005 revenues of $68 million grew more than 90% from the year before.

Brian’s Key Move: Painting a Picture of the Future

By the summer of 1998, nearly a decade into his thriving little business, Brian was getting bored. The company already was generating revenues of about $1.5 million a year, but that wasn’t enough for him.

“I was sitting out on the dock on an island near Vancouver,” he remembers, “and I said to my parents that I wasn’t very excited about my business anymore. I had to open my mind up to really think about whether this business could grow.”

Then Brian stood up with his answer: Yes!

He immediately set a goal of expanding his company to the top 30 metropolitan areas of North America by the end of 2003, a mere five years later. “There were 30 cities bigger than Vancouver when we started, and my theory was if it worked there, why not everywhere?” he says.

But Brian was engaged in more than possibility thinking. What he did next became the Key Move that led to the explosive growth of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?: He painted a vision of the company’s future and vowed to make it come true.

That same day, Brian sat down at his PC to paint that picture with words in a two-page document. “I wrote, ‘Top 30 Markets’ as the headline,” he says, “but it was more than just stating a goal. I actually drilled down into what that moment in 2003 would look like, what it would feel like, how our company would be acting at that point.”

Brian cast a vision that was breathtaking in its scope – and quirky in some of its particulars. So, he projected, the company would have 118 franchisees by 2003; it would have a culture driven by fun; it would have a fleet of clean, shiny trucks and spiffy, friendly drivers. And oh, yes – 1-800-GOT-JUNK? would also be featured on Oprah!

“I decided that I would share that document with potential franchise partners, potential employees, current employees,” he says. “Because if we were going to make my dreams and goals happen and make that picture a reality, everyone had to be a part of the business we were building. And people could determine if they wanted to be part of what we envisioned.”

Yet, Brian decides whether he’s hiring, or franchising to, an interviewee before sharing the picture with them. And he generally doesn’t share it with customers because he doesn’t need their buy-in to the vision for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? – just their business!

The very act of painting such a bold and detailed picture, Brian says, actually began to lead to its fulfillment. “It helped us figure out what we needed to do today to start acting in a way that would make the picture happen,” he says. “It gave us a very clear path to the end game.”

In mid-2003, for example, the company’s head of franchise development reminded Brian that 1-800-GOT-JUNK? had penetrated only 28, not 30, of the top metro markets. Pittsburgh and Milwaukee remained untapped.

“So we specifically went hard after those markets,” Brian says. “Not just waiting for calls to come in from there, but we networked and spread the word. And we signed those final two franchisees 16 days before the end of the year. Then we all went up to a big ski resort near here and celebrated.”

Now, Brian insists that he didn’t compromise on his Pittsburgh and Milwaukee franchisees just to make the painted picture accurate. “We didn’t say, ‘Let’s cut our price or our standards,’” he says. “It’s about achieving the vision in a good, solid way.”

In 2003, Brian put together his vision of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? for the end of this year, calling for 250 franchisees and $100 million in system-wide sales. He’s got some tweaking to do, though, because right now the company is tending toward $119 million in sales -- but only 224 franchise partners.

But there’s no doubt he’ll fine-tune his operation, not his vision. “I don’t allow myself to change one word of the document because the second I change the picture, it tells everyone in the franchise system that I was wrong, and it wasn’t that important, and we really couldn’t hit it.

“It’s almost as if I believe that if I put it down on paper, maybe there’s some kind of magic to it,” Brian says. “So I put down aggressive things and big wins. For 2006, I included things like being featured on [the David] Letterman or [Jay] Leno [shows]; we have a lead on making that happen. I imagined a strategic alliance with Home Depot; now, we’re inches away from being their exclusive junk-removal partner.”

Already, Brian even has a picture painted for 2009: $420 million in sales. And by 2012, says the artist behind 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, the picture already shows a $1-billion company.

“Just talking about it constantly and believing it can make it happen,” Brian says. “You lean into the future and peer around and start to imagine what things look like, and a picture crystallizes in your mind. And because you buy into it, you have to achieve it.”

And Oprah? She did a 4-1/2-minute story on Brian and his company in March, 2003 – nine months before the deadline he had imposed with his “picture” five years earlier.