Lessons - Focusing On The System | Brian Scudamore, Founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. 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 nerds 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 idea. So I grew the rubbish boys, which became one that 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 Wauw and De Peining. We've done it a lot faster because now we have the proven recipe for how to franchise an organisation. 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. Every CEO will always say, oh, I want the employees to feel empowered and to feel like owners. But it doesn't really ever happen, candidly, unless they have equity or they're on the cap day, but they have a little bit of the company because it's hard for anybody to be as passionate about the company as a CEO or the founder or the owner is. So the franchise model solves for this. But how do you do the franchise model correctly? What's the thing that allows you to maintain the quality of the organisation amongst all these smaller owners? Yeah. Back to the hat again, it's all about people. So as franchise owners, it really is finding the right people and making sure that they are empowered to grow a great business with us. We use the word franchise partners. One of the earliest things I did was change the word from franchisee to franchise partner. Because I felt we depend on their success, they depend on us, and this is a partnership. So we would often over the years get a franchise owner who says, where are your customer? And I'd say no, where are each other's partners? If you don't succeed, if I don't succeed, we have to work together to make magic happen. Franchising is interesting because it's not for everybody. I would never have become a franchise owner, where I don't think I would have. But you take Paul Guy, who's our first franchise partner, who started in Toronto. He actually worked for our operation in Vancouver, drove a truck across the country to Toronto and started the first franchise. It took me eight years to get to a million in revenue, which is slow. It took him one year to get to a million in revenue because he had a proven recipe. And today he's got a hundred million in revenue across his franchises. Now what I found interesting about franchising is very similar to sports. I've had conversations recently with Shaquille O'Neill, who spoke at our conference. And he and I have kept in touch. And here's a guy who doesn't need to build the race car. He just wants to drive the race car. You look at him with sports. He's the franchise king. He's got about a half a billion in wealth through franchises that he owns. And I asked him, why did he get into franchising? He said, it's just like sports. He goes, I know how to build a winning team. I know how to lead someone to a championship. I find the right people. I plug them into a brand and off they grow. I don't need to invent the systems and the brand. But I know how to grow it with the right people. And that's where franchising, back to Paul Guy, our first franchise owner, he understood that his leverage was use a playbook that's already in place and crank it up quicker than I ever did. And when you deploy a franchise, what are the things that you want to teach over to the owner versus what part do you want to let them run with on their own? Is there any benefit to any portions of the business them having creativity in the execution or the deployment? Yes, so we say to our franchise owners, take the first year just to follow the recipe. If you have better ways to do things that you discover, make notes of those. And after the first year, let's talk. Our best ideas absolutely come from the system. Think McDonald's, the big Mac, the Ronald McDonald, these things came out of franchise partners' heads. We know that our best and brightest ideas come from our franchise ownership. And so we tap into those. And everyone benefits when there's a winning idea. But we don't want them in the beginning. We want people to follow the recipe and understand some of its faults. Our systems are never perfect because things are dynamic and they change. But it's taking the best practices, understanding them and then layering on top. So if you think of a pilot, a very checklist oriented job where you just don't want to risk anything. You don't want someone being innovative in maybe we do this differently and actually testing it on the fly. You want someone to have the patience and discipline to go, here's something we should consider. Let's talk about this, but let's not just try it right out of the get go. How do you establish vision? Because people hear about vision. It's on some companies' websites. Sometimes it's not really adhered to or really understood by anybody outside of the copyrighter for a few landing pages when they first spun up a site. So how do you actually build a vision that matters, that permeates the organization that everybody can buy into and evangelize, and that's something that means something? Yeah, well, I'll start with the story, Scott, of how I discovered the power of vision. And I didn't know it at this very moment in time when I came up with this. But I was at my parent's summer cottage, a little shack on the water. And I was in a bit of a doom loop where my business was at a million dollars. But I thought, I don't know if I love what I'm doing. I don't know if I have the education having dropped out of school. I don't know if I have the business idea that can be as big as something could possibly be. And so I said, okay, enough negativity. I pulled out a sheet of paper and I started to write what I could see in the future, using my imagination and nothing but. And I said, we'll be in the top 30 metros in North America by the end of 2003, which was five years out. I said, we'd be on the Oprah Winfrey show. We'd be the FedEx, a junk removal. And I envisioned what this could look like. I took the picture from my mind, put it into words, and then I started to share this with others. And I got, it invigorated me. It got me focused and excited on something I could see, but I shared it with people. And one of two things happened with the group that I shared it with in my company. Half the people ish said, Brian, you're smoking some hope dope. Like you are not going to be on Oprah. You are not going to be in 30 cities like give it a break. The other group said, wow, I don't know how we're going to get there, but this is compelling and I want to be a part. So.