#12 - The 1-800-GOT-JUNK Story

together this president and i had almost bankrupt one eight hundred got junk we were down forty million dollars in revenue in one year the financial meltdown of two thousand and seven and eight didn't help there was no one in my business that thought i was saying that thought i made a good decision they didn't get it because people didn't really understand or see what i saw and somehow i stuck with it while it took eight years to get to a million dollars we do a million dollars on any given day like today by next guest who found a basic serve that wasn't being met and now he's making hundreds of millions of dollars that's right hundreds of millions of dollars there i was out of on a boat with two very senior executive offered seventy five dollars to a hundred million dollars is what they were talking and i said you i wouldn't sell it for a billion alright we are talking to brian sc the founder of one eight hundred got junk if you're like me you've seen the billboards for one eight hundred got junk it's one of the sort of the catch businesses that i've seen and it's also a very simple business brian's a guy who when he was eighteen years old he saw somebody else had a truck and said you know all hollow away your junk and he was like that's a business that i could do and he went and rented a truck and started this business and has grown it from you know just him in one seven hundred dollar truck all the way to basically doing about a half a billion dollars in revenue this year so he's been doing this business for thirty years and he's a pretty inspirational dude but you'll hear that in the episode to date and so i'm excited to talk o'brien we talk a little bit about how we got the business off the ground his sort of knack for p you know how he ended up on hoard and doctor phil and oprah and all these other different outlets and how he's used that to grow the business as well as his philosophies around hiring and some of the mistakes he made and it's been a long road over these thirty years and so it's it's very cool story here comes brand sc the founder of one eight hundred got junk ready to go for those who are listening brian is the founder of one eight hundred got junk as well as a couple of other businesses that we're gonna be talking about kind of an amazing story honestly for a lot of the guests that have come on there usually stories that people have never heard of but i'd say you actually have done a good job of getting your story out there is that is that something intentional do you like talking about your story or is p r part of your strategy talk to me a little bit about that before we even jump in into talking about how one eight hundred got junk got started it's a great question i think i realized early on in building a business that a brand is the story that it tells now as a brand whether you're starbucks or air airbnb or one eight hundred got junk you have to live up to the story that's the difficult part right but when i saw early on a couple years into my business i saw a potential opportunity actually my girlfriend at the time said yeah had trouble finding a job you created your own get out there and tell the press that story because i think they're gonna eat this thing up and the next day we were run on the front page of the vancouver province the largest newspaper in the city our truck our phone number it was unbelievable and the phone rang off the hook so i learned the value in free press and we got out there to tell our story but i think it's even bigger than that we are about changing lives if i look at our franchise partners and the lives they're creating for themselves with our recipe with our formula why not recruit more great people by telling that story over and over why not change people's lives as customers whether they're toy away their junk or painting their house in a day with wow one day painting we believe that stories help change lives when you started and that that article that came out that story was more about hey i'm having trouble finding his job so i created my own so it's really like an entrepreneurial story it didn't matter what the service was at that time is that right that's correct i think there was a little bit of so you you couldn't find your own job and you went and bought a truck and started hauling junk type feeling this wasn't just a you know wasn't a glamorous business it wasn't a a sexy business by any means and and then when we understood the power of story we started to look for the next story right so while i created something to fund my way through college and couldn't find a better job and started one eight hundred got junk i also with the year left in my degree dropped out of university and that's where again went to the press where they were like you dropped out university you sat down and talked to your dad who's a liver transplant surgeon and told them you were leaving university to become a full time junk man you know it just didn't add up in people's minds and i like story and so we're gonna we're gonna go back to the beginning and we're gonna talk about how you originally got the idea and where you got started but the thing that else i'll i'll point out so i i read a bunch coming into this because i wanted to get familiar we hadn't met before and i wanted to understand and the question had you know i sort of read the story that i think you've probably told a thousand times now or maybe more which is you know you're you're seventeen eighteen years old you wanna figure out a way to pay your way through college i think it was like you're sitting at a mcdonald's and you saw somebody else's truck right you saw a a hauling truck of somebody else's and you had the idea now the thing i'm gonna ask you is probably something you don't get asked very much but i've learned you know the dirty secret in entrepreneurship is that sometimes the origin story comes a little bit later you sort of you go back and you sort of polish up the origin story and you saw to stretch and skew it a little bit to be my you know worth telling and guess have come on this podcast and i kinda asked them the same thing which is like to what extent is you know is this a hundred percent exactly how it went down where you really were just sort of had the epiphany and you were struck by the idea or were you already thinking about a business idea at the time and this really accelerated it i guess give us the backstory you know it was this really how it went down well first of all kudos to you because it is so rare that i get at a question that i have not been asked so bingo that's a new one yeah you know it's a great question and i've certainly met enough founders to know that that is the truth where many of these things progress and they rewrite history and so on so my story is a hundred percent true and you know i can i can think at you know back in my mind when i here here's the story and i'll give you a little more detail on but yeah i was in mcdonald's drive through there's a beat pickup truck while i'm in the drive through i see this truck and i look over at it and i'm like wow that would be a great idea it's filled with junk maybe because i'm having a hard time finding the job why don't i just buy my own truck and for seven hundred bucks it was actually seven hundred and fifty three dollars to be precise i bought that truck saw a classified ad went out and checked it out and the off i went to build a business but i remember back to that moment and i can see that truck it was a black cab with a red box it said mark's h on the side it had a little yellow lightning bolt on it it was filled the truck junk and the truck itself was junk and it it was one of those things where it it i didn't realize what the business would become in the future it was really just a vision to pay for college it was something simple so while there wasn't a vision there of what i was starting origin story if you will was absolutely legit love it and so you know most people when they see you know a hauling truck or a junk truck they don't think oh i wanna go do that in fact when i was on my way over here i texted a friend i said i'm talking to a pioneer of of the sort of junk space or the waste management space and he thought i was talking about the mafia yet i he thought like you know people who you know waste management is sort of code for you know being in the mafia but but for some reason you were drawn to it and i i like that it was seems like one reason is because it was simple it was like hey i could actually do that was there anything more to it or you know are you just wired in a different way than most people i don't know you know the the moment was real the moment happened and why it happened you know was it serendipity was it do i have an eye for spotting ideas i always remember as a kid i would look at companies and think oh i could do that better and i think this was one of those moments where i looked and went i've always been interested in business my grandparents ran an army surplus store in san francisco lo surplus and i worked there and and experienced the game and excitement of of building a business with them albeit that i was a a little kid i felt a part of it and i think when i saw that truck it was just wow i can do that something simple and i think in today's world people often think up i gotta be the next instagram and and they're figuring out how to catch lightning in a bottle but what people often don't understand about a lot of these founder stories whether you're instagram or airbnb is how it started isn't where it ended up and i think that's no different with my one eight hundred got junk story it was a way to pay for college and it ended up becoming a franchise opportunity that has now grown into four other home service brands yeah i think airbnb is a good example of that where today airbnb is this amazing brand and you know they booked more nights than hilton hotel around the world every night but mh when it started it was two guys living in san francisco rent was super expensive and there was a conference in town and people didn't have a place to stay and so you know all the hotels were booked up so they just said hey we have a air mattress we can let somebody sleep in our condo we make a little extra cash and they get to go to this design conference and that was the origin story of that which is also very simple born out of necessity and so i really like that and so you saw this truck and you were like i'm gonna do this go get the truck and actually you had a different brand name at the time it wasn't one eight hundred got junk at the time right what was the what was the brand that you started with it was a smaller brand so it was more regional and the phone number was seven three eight junk i remember meeting a guy once who told me i know your name has to be your phone number and i remember that and i came up with this phone number that i called the telephone company and tried to get something you know three numbers and junk and i am bla the side of my truck with this phone number which proved to be you know while it might sound really smart i think it was just something i had heard and went out and did but it became genius in the sense that whenever we got press people would see the phone number on the side of the you know the front page of the newspaper or in cnn or oprah whatever show we'd get on and it just became this wow they'd see one eight hundred got junk they remember the number it was very visual and it it was hugely impactful for us yeah i think there's a billboard right above my parents house essentially that's i've seen what hundred got junk like you know hundred times this year and it is it is so catchy it is memorable and i i read something that was like the rubbish boys was that something is that is that one of the names that you had at the time it was so you know here's the brand confusion that happened in the early days such a confusion that i even gave you a different brand than we had initially called ourselves so here's how it worked i called the company the rubbish boy is it was really just me but had a vision for something bigger and the phone number was seven three eight junk but the side of the truck really had that phone number and bla on the side that people chose to call my company seven three eight junk versus the rubbish boys that i had originally named it because that's what they saw yep and that's what led me partially to okay if we wanna build a brand outside of vancouver and grow into other markets that are bigger than vancouver in size we can't be getting local phone numbers in every market that's gonna be too confusing and so we came up with this one eight hundred got jump nice and so just give give the listeners a sense of like the timeline here so what what year were we talking when you started this started in eighty nine and wound down the rubbish boy seven three eight junk name and changed to one eight hundred got junk eight years later and there's certainly a good story behind how i got the phone number but i seven three eight junk and the rubbish boys i saw the the revenue in my market shrink to half within a year because as we switched over to one eight hundred got junk i'd even have friends and family say to me even though the trucks looked the same it was just a different phone number others just competitor out there you gotta watch them they look just like you they're called one eight hundred got junk so people got confused between the brands and i knew that it was short term pain for long term gain and we stuck with it and obviously the right decision in the long run and i feel like when people listen to these podcasts they are you know typically commuting to work or doing you know doing an errand something like that and this is an escape and this is you know the goal is it for it to be both inspirational and educational and so like one thing that i personally was inspired by was you said long term just now like this is a long term business this is we're talking thirty years of this business and they're not many i mean especially i'm here in silicon valley there's not many thirty year old businesses around here that you could still talk to the founder and they have the same passion and the business is still around and they didn't pivot ten times or go and try to start five new businesses and ditch the old one so you really were long term with this and i i really respect that and it sounds like you know that first eight years you were building up and you you hinted at something said there's a good story behind the one eight hundred got junk number i'm a sucker for a good story so so i'd love to hear that and i'd love to hear you know first maybe about going long term sure so it's interesting sean i am such an ad personality i mean to spend an hour on a podcast and not be staring out the window and i'm thinking other things and wanting to go on the internet you know i very very ad and what's interesting though is as often as i see all these squirrels fly everywhere i have somehow stuck with one business now even though we've added other brands under the ot brands umbrella they're still home services they're still franchise it fits but it it amaze me sometimes that i stuck with it and i'm not sure why i went to fourteen schools from kindergarten to college the only one i ever finished was kindergarten the the diploma i have true story but i i just un fascinated by ent printers and how ad we can be and most entrepreneurs i see by a company start a company then they sell it then they move on to something else and they're always chasing this success and i think somewhere early on i realized grow where you're planted stay with the business you've got and just do your best mh and somehow i stuck with it while it took eight years to get to a million dollars we do a million dollars on any given day like today so it it took thirty years to ramp up to that point but you just build this flywheel momentum by sticking with something it's like diet and exercise diet and exercise and work hard for a week you don't notice results but if you stick with it for twelve weeks wow if i go to the story now of of one eight hundred got junk and how i got that phone number there i was eight years into the business and deciding i wanted to expand into the united states start the business in seattle is the first prototype location outside of canada and wanted this phone number and i remember sitting down brainstorming with my team and we came up with this if we're not gonna be seven three eight junk and we're gonna go more national one eight hundred something junk and we came up with got junk a play on the got milk campaign a big advertising campaign in the nineties and i said okay i i can see it and i pick up the phone and call the number and it taken i don't know where it's taken because i couldn't reach the actual phone number just said it wasn't working from your local calling area so i did some research i looked around i i called everybody i knew in the states and asked them to make phone calls to the number nobody could get through it's months later i finally realized it was working in idaho the department of transportation in idaho own the phone number i had made sixty phone calls trying to get the number i had hired a design company and and actually was paying invoices on them designing a logo and a brand for one eight hundred got junk before i'd had the number or any indication that i could even get the number because that's how much i believed in my vision or my destiny and finally i get in touch with department of transportation i narrow it down i get through to michael in the phone room you know if your government you must have someone that runs your phones and michael finally says you've called me three times in the last couple of days i don't know why you want this phone number here's the at and t forms i'm gonna send them off to you by fax i've signed off on it the number is yours and bingo i get this one eight hundred got junk number for free the the point of that whole story i think is we have to sometimes as entrepreneurs put the cart before the horse spending a couple of thousand dollars on the logo for a brand that i didn't really know i could get i had to have some blind faith that if this was really a good idea i was almost going to will it to happen and don't know how the universe came together but it did and the phone numbers are and i called michael back a couple of days later just to thank him when it all settled and he was no longer with the business so i have no idea what the story is there probably we'll never know i i love it and so this is not the first time you did this sort of will it into existence sort of visualize and then go for it i read another anecdote heard something about you where like i you've told your story really really well you've been on oprah you've been on you know doctor phil you've been on a whole bunch of different you know as mainstream as mainstream gets and the most interesting part of what i read there was that you had some kind of wall in your office where you were you and the team were sort of putting up you know a vision of where you wanted to be where things you wanted to have happened through this journey of this company and one of them was get on oprah and so i'd like talk a little bit about do i have that story right and then is this a is this something you do repeatedly or was that just a one off sort of vision board thing you did yeah it's something i do repeatedly and you know i wrote a book called wtf willing to fail and what of my favorite stories in that book would be this one we have the can you imagine wall there was this big empty wall in our office that were were all about visuals and putting up big whiteboard and lots of color and and different imagery and and quotes and this wall didn't have anything so i remember having a conversation with someone in the office who said i can't think like you can about vision brian and i said of course she can't everybody can think about vision and this guy's name was cameron harold our coo and so i said you know what let me get take this wall i put a big vinyl d call up on the wall that said can you imagine question mark and i put it up on this wall because i wanted people to start to think about vision what could they imagine for themselves themselves in the business let's think about big bold ideas and i challenged cameron to think big mh he still said he couldn't so one of the things i put up on the wall was imagine being featured on the oprah winfrey show that was the first so so called quote unquote can you imagine put this quote open on the wall can you imagine being featured on the oprah winfrey show with my name below it as my commitment that i was gonna make that happen people would walk by it look at it be confused by it ask me questions and i started putting a bunch of pens and and paper down to the wall for other people to write up their own big bold can you imagine but the cool thing is is when you can see it and you put it up in a big vinyl d cal on the wall it's something that you start to think about and others start to think about and we took tyler our first p r hire who was in the business and he would go sit beneath that wall and look up it and go can't you imagine oprah mh i can see it i can see it he used to tony me he could see it so he made it his mission to get on the phone and send emails and do all those sorts of things to pitch harp studios and we tried every which way we could to get in touch until fourteen months later we've got this open office environment tyler's wearing this blue wig which he used to do to get in the spirit winning pitch and he stood up and he said i did it i did it we're like what is going on he got us on the oprah winfrey show the harp studios called and said we need you down here we got a hoard we read about you guys we heard about you and you've pitched us we need you and we were this was in los angeles we didn't have any franchises there and so we had to get creative we called our san francisco bay area franchise owners and said we need you to drive down to help us in la and we're gonna fly down and meet you we cleaned out a job for a hoard and sure enough the next monday i was in oprah green room about to go up on stage for my four and a half minutes of fame and man did the phones ever light up when that thing ran wow hell of a story i love that story that story is like the reason i do this podcast is to hear stories like that and it makes me wanna it you know just even for my own for my own self not even just for my business is that something i mean the can you imagine is that still up or has that sort of run its course now for you no it's still up and and we've gotta do a call out to get some this is a good reminder thank you sean yeah a call out to get people to submit even new more fresh ideas but we did cool things like you know and this is where i love that i can come up with an idea or someone else can come up with an idea and a completely different person can execute on it and make it happen you know the whole teamwork makes the dream work if i think of my oprah vision and tyler single handedly made it happen there was a vision up there that a woman andrea marketing manager in our office said can you imagine hers was being featured on the side of a starbucks cup and starbucks back in the day i used to have this campaign on the side of their latte and kept cappuccino that said the way i see it with quotes from famous actors and musicians and poets and so on and she pitched them the idea of a quote for me now starbucks had to help me write it on a high school dropout so clearly needed some help and i remember this quote ended up there and it was it was really the fact that i didn't care that my name was on the cup that said founder and ceo of one eight hundred got chunk the one eight hundred got junk brand ended up on ten million cups with the with starbucks for free because andrea baxter had the freedom to conceive something unusual and big that she wanted to make happen and and she did the quote was you are what you can't let go of and so it it really fit with junk removal you know if you can't let go with things you know what what are you holding on to and so was a it was an amazing amazing experience i mean we had so many people that saw that but that also inspired others in our company to dream big and come up with their own can you imagine and so this is one where i gotta ask because you know once it happens it's like wow that was a great idea so glad we did that can't believe it happened that's awesome what a rally but when you first put up this vinyl and you say can you imagine and you i love how you're talking about andrea and you're talking about tyler and you're talking about i forgot the name of the first person who you were you were first challenging to think big but cameron cameron and so you so i do a lot of things like this in the in in our office and our when we were running our startup we we just sold the company but when we're were doing our startup at all these posters on the wall i would challenge our team to do these funky exercises and you know not everybody loves it especially right off the bat sure and so and a lot of times i feel like i don't know if you watch the show the office but i feel like michael scott who's this like you know sure this goofy boss who's you know on the on the edge of you know sort of like delusion in insanity and then sometimes it turns out to be genius but what are some of the other things that you do that are like this and i'm guessing if i felt that way that there's probably other ceos who you know we're all making it up as we go and you wanna try some new things but your staff may not always always be comfortable with it or it may not be standard but sounds like this was an example where you did it any anyways and it worked can you talk a little bit about that you know as advice for essentially me and anybody else out there who you know sometimes feels like michael scott when we do this sort of thing yeah i've certainly felt like michael scott more than once or twice but it's one of those things where i see my role as the ceo to be this sort of chief visionary chief possibility guy where i can help people imagine big things and dream in such a way where you never know if you come up with some big ideas you might actually make some of them happen and so putting these things up on the wall i mean that oprah challenge to the company to myself was people going how would you ever get an oprah why would oprah a covered junk removal company i don't know but i can see it happening i can see myself giving oprah that big hug which i did i don't know how it's gonna happen and then sure enough tyler goes out and makes it his mission and makes it happen and i can give you so many stories of things that we've come up with that have been so bold and audacious and crazy that shouldn't have happened to like the phone number like the starbucks cup but they do happen and it's only impossible until it it happens and it comes true and i think that as a leader you can help inspire possibility and others you know it's only impossible if someone really wants to believe in their mind they can't do it but what if you can help them think what if and i think that's the great challenge so if you gotta be a little michael scott ish to to make that wonderful possibility and magic happen hey so be it yeah there's that there's that old cliche like whether you think it's impossible or possible you're right and this is sort of an example of that of of course so it sounds like you know when you talked about tyler you know you said something in passing which was like you know he would put on his blue wig when whenever he'd get in sort of the pitch mode or sales mode you that sort of sounds like you assembled this crew of people who you know fit your vibe and your style but that wasn't always the case and so one of the kind of famous things of your story is that it wasn't just all roses and rainbows you even as you were growing you hit two major road bumps and so i wanna talk about those because this is it's not standard you know to hear about this and to hear the kind of transparency that you that you've you know shared with this but the first one comes you're now twenty four years old you've got five trucks and you've got an eleven person team the company's revenue is like five hundred thousand a year i think and something happened you you did not like the direction of the company was going even though at the surface it seemed fine talk about what you were feeling and then what happened with that at that stage when you had that eleven person team mh and when you say it wasn't all roses and rainbows i mean you you're a hundred percent right and i've always believed in this wtf willing to fail attitude where you make enough mistakes you're gonna you're gonna win a few times you're gonna learn and so i've made way more mistakes than i've had successes just to be clear you know getting to a point where we're almost a half a billion dollar company today across our brands came from a lot of sweat and tears and and a lot of mistakes and so i think my biggest mistake which at the time when it happened was horrific i mean i was just devastated but i'm so grateful for today for that mistake for that failure in learning and what happened was i had eleven employees and they say one bad apple spoils the whole bunch i had nine bad apples and i just didn't know what to do i mean these were people who just weren't the clean cut professional happy smiley people that i saw in the vision for my little company and there i was just not knowing what to do not enjoying coming to work any longer and so i sat down with the entire team at once and i brought him in for a morning meeting and i said i i'm sorry i started with those two words very important i'm sorry that as their leader i'd let them down i didn't make the right decision in who i brought on board i didn't give them the love and respect they deserved i just wasn't having fun and i chose the wrong people and i didn't see any path forward other than starting again and again going from five trucks and half a million in revenue down to just me trying to do it all clearly i can't drive five trucks at a time and it was a painful time in my business life where i was losing business and upsetting customers and had to rebuild again and over working but i learned the valuable lesson that it's all about people finding the right people and then treating them right and i made the big decision you know after that period of time where i said i'm never gonna compromise again on the quality of people that i bring into my company and you know did i make mistakes after that point in time of course but i got very cautious and careful and became very much a slow to higher quick to fire type leader or or company and we really tried to pick people based on their their attitude and cultural fit with our our business and when you had to make that decision and it's not an easy decision obviously anytime you let people go from your business is very very tough but specifically to let essentially everybody go and and hit the reset button while you're mid flight that isn't that is very very tough how did you actually make that decision did you have mentors that you talked to was it something you thought about for weeks did you just wake up and realize today's the day you know talk us through what you were you know how you actually made such a big decision yeah i don't totally remember how i got there i i clearly remember the the moment of getting rid of everybody because it was so painful but i don't think i need mentors at that point i i don't think my business maturity was there where i knew to ask for help i think i just got fed up and said enough enough i'm not having fun and i think well most people would have said let's get rid of the nine and keep the two and rebuild i just knew that i couldn't do it again without completely starting from scratch i didn't know who i could trust i didn't know who was you know worth keeping and and i just said you know what i i just got a clean house and i'm gonna a completely rebuild and i remember you know my first hire after that i was like okay i'm gonna groom this person to then run the second truck and recruit someone else that fits perfectly with them in that vehicle and just scale it up and we we got the culture right and i'm still friends with many of those people that i brought on in those early days like dave ludwig who you know was one of my closest friends and was an employee in the truck and and was one of those ones in the early days helping me rebuild and i think it's so important to focus on the people you bring into your organization because that's all the brand at the end of the day really is you know i talked about storytelling stories that you talk about about building your brand and then living up to it as the hard part you can only live up to it if you've got the right people for you and for your business when you had to reset and hire the next batch of people you obviously were being very conscious of who you wanted to bring in if they fit a certain mold that you were looking for what what was that mold did you write something down like here's what i'm looking for the must haves or you know how did you think about it and what was it that you were looking for and people when you reset the culture if i think of what was wrong at that point in nineteen ninety four when i fired all eleven was i just wasn't enjoying working with those people they weren't the happy smiley people i envisioned and so i said okay i'm gonna a hire happy smiley people that i wanna spend time with and so my litmus test was spend a day on the trucks with them driving around did i have fun were they smiley and happy with customers do they love life versus complaining about everything that that happens to them and i just looked for cherry optimistic people and still still to this day i mean you know that's a word we use constantly as just hire happy people and i think that hr professionals that term for a second versus what we call our hr department which is our people department i think in the hr world people go out and they spend so much time trying to ask the right questions and doing all these tests and they over complicate the interview process when i think really it's just figure out what matters most a positive attitude someone you wanna spend time with and treat them more like you're finding a friend versus bringing a new employee on board yes we've gotta look for skill and make sure that the person fits with the job that needs to be done but we really hire on culture first and foremost nice that's something that right now i'm i'm in the middle of a of a process where we are creating a new team and i have half people who have worked with before for many many years and i know them trust them implicitly and we're trying to merge that with another the other half of our team is a bunch of new people some of which are you know great right off the bat and the others we're trying to figure out that they fit the culture and it's not an easy one for sure but it sounds like at some point you you did get that to click and the business starts growing and so you go you know from that sort of half a million to a million in revenue to twelve million in revenue to a hundred million in revenue and the business keeps growing and there was another sort of you know people problem that came up at one point so at some point you hire you know sort of these the superstar coo o i think this person was the the president of starbucks is that right yeah this person was the president of one of the the divisions in starbucks the us operations and so i thought i hit the the jackpot we had hired a big recruiter and were spending a lot of money and they were out there head hunting like crazy and i was introduced to someone who was this ex president of the starbucks us and wanted to relocate to canada where they originally from and i was like man i i don't even know how i can afford this person let alone have my little company tracked this person and i was so impressed with the pe that i thought wow if i can land this man i won the lottery and i made it happen but what i didn't do was take my own advice and really spend time getting to know someone to see was this person the right person for me did they pass the beer and barbecue test would i see myself wanting have a beer with them hanging out with them becoming friends did they fit in in a company barbecue would they put on a blue wig and dance around whatever the case might be this person wasn't the perfect fit very smart did a great job in you know past jobs and and new jobs but wasn't the right fit for my company and it reminded me if you've got eleven employees in your whole company and and it's not working out you know that can be a disaster but you grow a business that's well over a hundred million dollars and you've got one person that isn't quite the right fit and they're at the top back can have the same devastating effects you know this is a a great example of the best lessons you often have to learn repeatedly and so you know those lessons that you that you that come up again and again those are the most important ones and so this time you're four hundred employees and you have to make a similarly tough call so how did that go down and you know what was your feeling like at this time because i you know you're you seem like an optimistic positive person i can tell you're an inspiring guy but you're human and everybody has you know bad days dark days everybody sort of you know gets down talk to us about what it was like when you had to make that another tough call and how you were feeling and how you came to that decision yeah it was a it was a sad day i remember you know had to make a change with that person the president of my company had to get the cfo out of the business now to give you a bit of a backstory together this president and i had almost bankrupt at one eight hundred got junk we were down forty million dollars in revenue in one year a financial meltdown of two thousand and seven and eight didn't help but that wasn't the real reason we weren't joined at the hip we weren't firing and all cylinders together and believing in the same vision and it wasn't that we weren't getting along we just weren't really aligned but the same spirit motivation of where the company could go and how to get it there and so made that tough decision so there's two key people out of the organization this person's entire leadership team i had to get rid of i had to elevate middle level management up to be my leadership team and take over and there was no one in my business that thought i was saying that thought i made a good decision they didn't get it because people didn't really understand or see what i saw that this wasn't working and it wasn't going to work and it was gonna be in the end of the business for everybody if i didn't make this decision they they know today it was the right decision but at the time people were scared and i think the the only word i can use to describe how i felt for months was sad i was sad i was lonely i was depressed but i was determined to rebuild my business and get it to a point again for the long term where we would be in a place we were proud of again and why was the business down forty million that seems like a huge swing at that time it's surprising you know even even some bad decisions could could lead you down the path so it tell us what what caused the business take such a big swing in such a short amount of time i think we took our foot off the gas in p r and a lot of our strategy there we were shifting franchise partners to do more commercial work at the time we weren't ready for that strategy we we just had them changing gears and changing their focus and the leadership wasn't there in the same consistent way that it had been in years prior and it just it didn't work and when you've got one person in your business who again is at the talk who doesn't agree with your strategy or your direction even if you seem to get along as day passes as you get further and further apart and you're trying to pull and push two different directions revenue will not grow your culture will not improve things will just get worse to the point where it ultimately broke and i had to make a change and so you you make that change and how did you get the faith of the people back in you how did you get people to to feel like this is gonna work especially when you're you yourself you know were feeling down at the time but you were determined was there something you did was there did you take people off sight did you have a big big rally meeting you know what did you do to get people back to believing yeah i was transparent i was open and honest so i remember going on a road show and meeting up with franchise partners and i'd get you know fifty of them in a room and we'd sit down together and i'd say here's some flip charts i want you to write down every question that's on your mind right now i'm gonna leave the room i won't know who's asked what and i'm gonna come back and i'm gonna answer every single question and if there's something legal that i can't answer i'll tell you i can't but for the most part i'm just gonna be open and honest and say it like it is and so i told them what was going on and why this happened and that i didn't necessarily have belief that i was the right person to take it from here but that i was gonna be the interim person to get it to a better place and i started a search to find eric church somebody who came in almost eight years ago we call it a two in the box model where two heads are better than one i've got the the vision and the the the culture side of the business he's got the strategy and execution and of course there's some overlap between us but we spent time when i tried to find eric said okay i've learned from the previous situation i'm gonna find the right leader for me to help someone who believes in entrepreneurs and believes in the wacky crazy dis focused of of how we operate sometimes but who can help guide me and take the direction that we're going that that this person believes in and and make it happen and so i i got out there and i described in a mini painted picture a mini vision of what i was looking for and i described in a few paragraphs eric church to the point that i didn't know eric yet but when i sent out through linkedin and my networks here's who i'm looking for i was so clear that i had three people unrelated in different parts of the country reach out and said the person you described as air church they didn't refer five names of execs that they thought would fit the bill these people said you're describing eric church he's a guy i know here's this information you should reach out and get in touch we spent time in that court ship period mutually getting to know each other to say is this really the right fit and one of the things i noticed about eric that he didn't even notice about himself at the time is all he had ever worked for was an entrepreneur he was always the executor the implement her to an entrepreneur and and that person's vision and it was such a perfect fit because he years prior had actually said and this makes it you know shows how serendipity can play a role but he was telling his wife one day when she asked you what do you really wanna do in life and he said you know one day i wanna run a company like my buddy does he happened to have been friends with cameron harold who was our coo years ago and he said i wanna run a company like cameron his one eight hundred got junk and so sure enough it all worked out and here we are today and since eric's come in we've quadrupled our revenue you know we're on a path to a billion right now so you know close to half a billion in revenue with a an opportunity to get to a billion in revenue over the next four or five years because we're aligned because we believe in each other and we're working together as a team amazing it really is amazing with once you get clear on what you want and you put that out there into the world it's amazing how it's like a magnet it'll pull the right people to you because the message you had was clear and so it it resonated with the right people and they knew who to send to you i wanted to wrap up with a couple of quick questions rapid fire style but you know just you you can take them as you will things that i wanted to know when i was reading about you and before we met these are the questions i wanted to ask you the first one is i think in every business there are the like sort of breakthrough moments where like stuff starts to work or you hit some milestone then they just feel like eu for and in fact it's you know probably it probably felt better than even now when you're gonna do a half a billion in revenue there was probably a moment in the early days that felt even better as you first started to see things click what was that moment for you yeah i've been asked that one before and i don't believe there was ever a breakthrough a moment i can tell the stories of when we fired eleven people when we hit our first million when we first got a hundred million when we got an oprah just wasn't one moment it's been the cumulative result of every single decision good and bad but i think i and we as a team have ever made because things like oprah i remember it took fourteen months of hard work to make that moment happen and those that sort of willingness to never give up you know with the phone number sixty phone calls to finally persuade someone to give me that phone number and to give it to me for free what would have happened at call number fifty nine if i said okay this is clearly nuts and and i'm done so i don't think it was one moment we're even close to it and it's not a public company correct so how did you get you know do you do a profit share how do you get liquidity in the business for yourself yeah from profits we you know i've certainly taken my share of dividends out over over time and we do a profit share called the great game of business inspired by jack stacks model of open book management where we share our profits this year we you know gave well over a million dollars to people in the company where we wanna share profits with the people that are behind helping us to to build the special group of brands and you know my financing strategy because i didn't go public or raise money was really franchising people would pay us a franchise fee that we would use that pool of money to help us build up more infrastructure and more growth and it's been a great model for us and of course the podcast is called my first million which is just really kind of like a catchy name sure but the the premise you know i think what what ends up happening a lot for entrepreneurs is you either you get you either get excited by ideas you get excited by solving problems or you get excited by making money or sometimes a combination you know if everyone has a different combination of those three and of course money really doesn't go that far in the sense of changing the quality of your life but i do believe personally i believe that there are certain amounts of money that do you know a step change in the quality of your life either you you know you have certain security because you have that money or you have freedom of your time because you don't have to get a job and get a paycheck every month for you what amount of money made the biggest difference in the quality of your your life personally i don't know if it ever really did i mean it you know it it's it's easy to say that i've been doing this for thirty years you know i've had a lot of opportunities where you know waste management i remember it was on a fishing trip with some of their execs they took me out to there i was out of on a boat with two very senior garbage executives and they offered you know seventy five to a hundred million dollars is what they were talking to buy my little business and i said you know i wouldn't sell it for a billion the money wasn't ever a motivator it was building something special accomplishing the impossible what amount of money has changed my life i mean it's nice to not have to worry about money but who knows what's around the corner i mean are we gonna hit another recession at some point of course we are do we make some bad decisions that really end up hurting the business i mean things happen so i think it's just hold on to the the fact that i love this business and i love that we're changing lives i just came out of a meeting a regional meeting with our shack our window washing gutter cleaning named franchise partners and young hungry hands on hardworking guys that are building this great brand for us what excites me is the lives they're building the motivations that they have and how we through our franchise systems in our organization are helping to change their lives that's what motivates me i mean if i lost every penny tomorrow i think i'd still be a happy guy who would figure out how to take off again from that that point well that is my next question which is if i took away this business and you had to start over you you you still have all the knowledge but you weren't allowed to do the same business again and you were starting from scratch so let's pretend your you're twenty one years old your bank count is empty and you can't go do another business just like the one you have now what do you think you would wanna go do i am service guy so if i look at ot brands which our parent company stands for ordinary to exceptional we're taking ordinary businesses like junk removal and making them exceptional through customer experience all i've ever done my entire life is service so whether it's junk removal or whether it's wow one day painting where we pick people's homes in a day or shack they're all home service businesses i would pick something with low cost low barrier to entry a highly fragmented business like window washing if i couldn't do any of these brands i'd find something different you know is it in home irrigation or landscaping or lawn care or card to cleaning who knows but i would find something where i could buy or even borrow some equipment and i'd get out there and i'd start going door to door and selling myself i'd build a happy brand and i'd start to grow something all over again slowly but shirley wonderful and last thing is for people who hear this and they are inspired what often happens is people wanna get in touch either to just share you know hey that was amazing i love hearing your story thank you for sharing or they have something that they wanna you know send you an idea or get feedback on something are you are you open to that and basically for the people who are listening to this right now how should they follow you how how should they get in touch with you and who do you want actually reaching out to you so anyone can reach out to me you go to any of the social platforms i think one of favorite is instagram because there's not a lot for me to read but you know someone wants to go to at brian's go more and connect with me send me a message one of the ways i often encourage people to reach out is i'm such a believer in vision and creating a painted picture that i wrote some articles and put some material together that if anyone ever wants to learn more about that i'm happy to you know send me a note on instagram just saying could i see a copy of your painted picture we'll share our vision for the company and an article about how to create one it for yourself there's nothing in it for me other than just inspiring the world to to know that you know what you can dream big possibilities great things can happen and you might just surprise yourself awesome brian thanks so much for coming on the show i really i really enjoyed this know myself and i think a lot of other people will too so i appreciate your time and i appreciate you coming on well you know what i i i learned so much about the things i've gone through and all the reflections i mean it's so fun to relive when i do these so thank you for having me because it just it's a great trip down memory lane and love sharing wisdom with others awesome