Apr 2, 2019
My guest is Brian Scudamore. Brian is the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Brian and his team have grown 1-800-GOT-JUNK into the world's largest junk removal service. Not only that, they scaled that bad boy and started three more home service brands. He's got his eye on $ 1 billion. He’s living the DREAM THINK DO life… so let’s get to this! Listen To The Podcast: Resources: Brian's Book: WTF?! (Willing to Fail): How Failure Can Be Your Key to Success Find out more about Brian: Click here Interview: Brian Scudamore: Thanks for having me, Mitch. Mitch Matthews: Let’s talk about how this got started. Brian Scudamore: There I was looking for a way to pay for college. But my college education took a back seat when I realized I was making more money and having more fun and learning way more about a business by building a business versus studying in school. So, I had a conversation with my dad, who's a liver transplant surgeon. Three years into my degree in college. I said, “Dad, I got some awesome news for ya. I said I'm quitting school and…” Mitch Matthews: Get ready, dad. Brian Scudamore: He says, “how is that good news?” I gonna learn so much more about business running one, instead of studying from textbooks, from professors that have never started a business in their life. While my dad did not get the good news train, 10 years later he sat down. He said, yeah, Brian you did the right thing. Mitch Matthews: Good, good call. But obviously this willing to fail was something you were willing to do early on. Would you say that ... At what point would you say this started to set in that being willing to fail was key. Brian Scudamore: I think I've always been a bit of a risk-taker as an entrepreneur. I grew up with grandparents who had a small business. Now they ... It was an army surplus store in San Francisco. I used to work there every summer and Christmas vacation. I don't think they took a lot of risks. But I enjoyed the game of business and was fired to take that entrepreneurial leap. Maybe it was just a part of my DNA. I don't know. But I found myself whenever I was starting a business, I didn't mind putting myself out there and making some mistakes. It just felt like the fastest and easiest way to learn. Brian Scudamore: Five years into my business, to the half a million in revenue, I felt good about what I was building. But not good about the people on board. That old phrase of one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. I probably had ... Nine of my 11 employees were bad apples. It was a leadership moment for me to get rid of the entire crew. I brought all 11 in and I said, sorry guys I've let you down as your leader. I have not given you the love and support or found the right people and fired everyone to only start again. But to take that leadership lesson of, okay I failed here. This hurts. I've gotten rid of my entire company. Yet starting again there was that valuable lesson and it got better. Mitch Matthews: Not bad. Well, That's ... I love that story in the book. That took some guts. As I'm sitting there, here you had to be thinking, oh gosh this is rough. This is embarrassing. Also, you had to look down the barrel of running the business solo for a while, too until bringing on the right people. But, that's the kind of thing where that took guts at the time where you needed it, right? 'Cause you could have just kind of tried to maintain it with status quo. I'm guessing you would have been a completely different place today. Brian Scudamore: Yeah. We learned or I learned that day 'cause it was just me, that building a company is all about finding the right people and treating them right. The company would not be what it is today. Today will ... This year we'll do $440 million in revenue. There's no way we would have come anywhere close to that hadn't we found this important mantra of finding the right people. For someone like ourselves heavily branded in everything we do,