Lessons - Building a $700M Junk Empire | Brian Scudamore - 1-800-GOT-JUNK Founder

In this lessons episode, explore why leadership often becomes the primary barrier to growth, and how stepping aside enables scale. Discover how getting out of daily operations and power stronger operators, understand how choosing the right leaders for each growth stage prevents costly mistakes, and uncover why systems and ownership-driven models allow businesses to grow beyond the founder's limits. Let's do some leadership lessons. Some things that you know, you said, when I was in it, it wasn't so clear, but hindsight is more or less 2020. So what are some leadership lessons? That particular one I thought was a great story. So getting out of your own way as a leader, why is that an issue with people? How did you solve for it? Oh, it's the biggest thing Scott. It's entrepreneurs get in their own way all the time, and we are our own limiter in terms of the ceiling of growth I think we can experience. Because an entrepreneur has a great idea, and they have this predetermined way that they see the world, but we can't build things alone. I don't imagine you're building what you're doing by yourself. You're out there raising money, you're raising awareness, you're trying to build something with the help of others. That's what entrepreneurs need to do is get out of their own way. There's that quote, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Most entrepreneurs I've met over the years believe that they are the smartest person in the room. I've worked hard to be the least smart person in the room so that I'm always surrounded by someone who can contribute bigger, better ideas. Our president, Eric Church, who runs O2E Brands, ordinary to exceptional, he's been with us for almost 11 years, and the guy is a rock star, and he can do things that I couldn't possibly ever do. I had to get out of my own way to empower Eric to grow the business. Now, proof that he was the right person and that he's done it the right way, and I couldn't do it. I got the company to about 100 million in revenue. Once I got out of the way of the day-to-day operations, Eric took it to 500, to 500, to 600. He'll get us to a billion. I couldn't grow our other brands while one day painting where we paint people's homes in a day and shot shine, where we shine people's homes, their windows, their gutters, power washing, the whole bit, Christmas lights. Those brands are growing like crazy through our franchise model, finding great people and helping them build on a playbook. We couldn't do that and grow those brands if I was in the day-to-day at the same level that I was with 1-800-gut junk. We had to find other leaders. I'm not scalable. No one is, and so it's a big lesson. I'm glad you highlighted that one, because we're getting each other's way all the time, not you and I, but ourselves. I'm sure we work together. I'd probably get in your way, too, but we've got to work through that, everybody has this issue. It's not just one entrepreneur. It's not an individual, okay, everybody gets in their own way. I think that the most successful entrepreneurs, and now I see it's like, it's your hat, my goodness. It's your brand. It's people. It's how do you find the right people? You've done that a few ways. You've done that in your own organizations. You probably got a really harsh dose of that when you had to get rid of 9 of 11 people at 500K. That's not an easy thing to do. Then now you're hypersensitive to how do I find the right people? But then it's also in your franchise model, where again, you're finding the right people. Let's break down both. Let's talk about finding the right people in an org. Let's talk about how you found somebody to scale it from 100 million to 45, 600 million. What is the right person, and how does an entrepreneur look for that so they don't end up in the spot where they have to let go of 80% of their team? Then let's also talk about the franchise model, because there's also a right person concept that you're trying to solve for when you look for a franchise. There's a reason why you're doing franchises versus just scaling out operations internally. None. Let's do internal first. Finding the right people and treating them right. How do you find the right people? My answer on that is my opinion is find the right person for you. In my new book, BYOB, Bill Drone Business Beer on Boss, I talk about a woman Lonnie Skinner, who was president of Starbucks of their US operations. When I brought her in to run my tiny little company, here's someone who had 30,000 people in her employed. Amazing woman, super sharp, incredible smarts. She wasn't the right leader for me. Why she wasn't the right leader for me is I don't think she had a lot of experience working with entrepreneurs. After 14 months of trying to work together, we did some great things, but essentially the business almost went bankrupt because both of us weren't working together in the same way that we needed to. I needed to find the right leader for me. Now she's gone on to be wildly successful, bigger than she would have been probably with us in something else. What I realized was the right leader for me had to compliment my strengths and my weaknesses. It had to be a year and a yang. I got out there and I looked for Eric. What I wrote was almost a little mini-painted picture, a vision of the ideal person I was looking for. I got it out to my networks. Three people unrelated in different parts of the planet wrote me back and said, you're looking for Eric Church. They didn't say, here's five people you should consider. I might know someone. They said, this is that person because I was so clear on who I described. The reason why Eric was the right person for me in the end because we're all different as entrepreneurs was he just understood the quirks and the intricacies of entrepreneurs. He didn't realize this until he and I were chatting, but all he's ever worked with was the right hand to an entrepreneur and he understood how to manage them and what was different and unique and all their shiny objects and squirrels running all over the place. He's been an amazing friend, mentor and professional to grow the business. It was finding the right person for me and it was learning from my failure of how I got what I thought was the right person. I mean, X Starbucks president, man, I hit the jackpot. No, I didn't hit the jackpot for me, wrong person for my business. I've heard this a lot actually and this is actually something that I've taken into my own company. I've always shied away from hiring MBAs or execs from Fortune 500 because it's difficult to operate in a startup environment. If you could even distill some of Eric's personality traits or management style, so at least somebody has a framework for what to look for because maybe they don't know what to look for today. What would that right hand be? Well, you know, I'm going to answer that with a book. There's a book called Rocket Fuel and Geno Wickham and the other name is escaping me, but Rocket Fuel. We, Eric and I read this book or I did what an entrepreneur like I do is I skim. Eric read it and we compared notes and we both said, wow, this is us. This is I'm the visionary. He's the implementer and the book gives a framework as to which one are you? Most entrepreneurs are visionaries and how do you find the implementer? Someone to execute on your vision, your plans. And so the personality of Eric is rigorous, disciplined, follow through, accountability, things that don't often describe entrepreneurs. I get to be the idea guy. No, Eric brings amazing ideas as well, but we just we know our unique strengths and opportunities of how we work together, but his personality of just that rigor and discipline and precision, he's he's unbelievable. And so I think an entrepreneur needs someone to balance them out. So again, where we're as entrepreneurs often very ADD and shiny objects, how do you find your balance of someone that can stay focused for long, long periods of time and ensure that you execute on what you see? Very smart. And then let's let's pivot from the hiring the best possible people internally to also because I also just want to point out that the type of personality that you hired for an Eric, of course, that was at an executive level. But the people, the balance, the yin and the yang and the understanding the entrepreneurial and startup environment, that permeates every position in New York. If you hired somebody even that wasn't an executive that just had an exceptional amount of years of experience, I find that and feel free to comment or whatnot, but I find that that can be detrimental just because their process is so ingrained and entrenched that they can't see any way of doing it outside the way they did it at an F100 or Fortune 500 company. So I think that that personality, the startup mindset and the ability to understand your strengths, your weaknesses and your existing team strengths and weaknesses, even if it's a five person team, you still got to be cognizant of that. And like the two big person, the person, I think that another example is like Mark Rober from HubSpot. He hired like a account executive from a huge software company and it was just like a mess. It was an absolute mess, right? Because they only operated in that environment. But okay. I think it comes to mind is it's the stage of your business. So I had Cameron Harold, who was our COO from two million to a hundred and six million and great friends still to this day. We were fire ready aim types, both of us. So instead of being planful and disciplined like Eric, we were like, let's just go absolute mavericks. But Cameron was the right person for that right stage. Eric is the right person for where we are now in a ton of runway. So I think it's how do we find the right person for us and the right person for the stage of growth that we're at. It's not easy, but I think it's something to keep top of mind. Let's talk about franchising. Let's talk about franchising as a model because I've never spoken to anybody on this show that has franchised anything. Actually, it's probably a detriment to the show, but it's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and for business owners. So why did you decide to do this? You didn't scale 1,800 got junk through a franchise model, correct? It was just a pure or did you? No, no idea. So I grew the rubbish boys, which became one we kind of got junk for eight years to a million. And then I started to look at franchising. It took me 10 years to get to the point where I had something that I could franchise. And for me, franchising was how do you like McDonald's? How do you have these cookie cutter type systems and processes that others can follow? It's a playbook. And I chose it because I'd always been in love with what Ray Crock, the one who popularized the McDonald's brand, how he built a business where people had skin in the game. This was their business. He just gave them a playbook and a recipe. And then the coaching and support to really grow. And we did that with 1,800 got junk. Once we franchised the business, we went from 2 million to 100 million in six years. And it was just hyper growth for us. And we've done the same thing with Shaq Shine and Wow and Day painting. We've done it a lot faster because now we have the proven recipe for how to franchise an organization. But I chose it because I wanted people to be owners. I wanted them to think and act like owners. I wanted them to be owners. And I wanted us to build something we were really proud of together. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.