The Exchanges

Q So you were, so you were, what, 18, I guess, at the time. Were you, were you working? Like, were your parents helping you out? How did you even have money to go to school?

A My parents, when I approached them and asked for some money for, for school, they said, are you kidding me? You didn't even finish high school. Why are we going to fund your college education? And it turns out they were probably smart, but what it taught me is I had to get out there, fund my own education, and what I did was I was in a McDonald's drive-thru in Vancouver. I saw this beat-up old pickup truck, plywood sides, junk filled up in the truck, and it had a sign on the box that said, Mark's Hauling. I was having trouble finding a job. I didn't know what I was going to do to pay for college, and when I saw that truck, I immediately connected with, that's something I can do. I looked at the truck and I thought, I started those car washes as a kid. You can see how easy that was to get out there and advertise and wash people's cars, and so to me this was, buy a truck and haul junk.

AI assessment note: “what it taught me is I had to get out there, fund my own education”

Q Yeah, it's so cool. You are still the public face of one 800 got junk. Um, like if you go to the website, there's, there's a video of you right there on the homepage. Um, do you, do you think it's important as, as a founder to be part of the story or the presentation of the brand?

A I think there's a voice that a founder brings that no one else can. And so I was asked by Roy Williams, who does our radio creative. When he first curated our radio campaigns, he said, Brian, you need to be the voice on radio. And I said, well, I don't know if I want it to be all about me. And he said, it has to be. You're the founder. You've got the McDonald's drive-through story, and that's where the ads are going to start. And so I went with it, and no looking back. And, and everyone buys into a founder story in a different way than a hired gun. Now, us founders need higher guns. I've got my Eric Church, who is unbelievable at scaling our business as an implementer, but the founder has a persona and a commitment and passion for a business that's been there from day one.

AI assessment note: “I think there's a voice that a founder brings that no one else can.”

Q And, and these were people who were interested in, in buying franchises?

A Yeah. I mean, 506 calls. Imagine listening to that and trying to write them all down and calling everyone back. We were overwhelmed. So, I got on the voicemail, and I said, due to an overwhelming response from Fortune Magazine, we are unable to call people back. If you would like to learn more about our opportunity, please call into this conference call at this time. And what we did is we'd have like a hundred people show up on a conference call. And we would do a roll call of, you know, ok, what city are you from? And we, you know, go through one by one all these different people. So everyone's like, well, I got all this competition. I want to get in. And it drove the process quickly, and we ended up doing 53 franchise deals that year, which was just unheard of in the franchise space, and things just started to hockey stick and completely explode.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, 506 calls.”

Q Yeah. I have just one more question for you, Brian, uh, which is, uh, which is, what is the weirdest thing that you ever hauled off?

A I, the weirdest thing I probably hauled off was I had a, an entire truckload of escargot shells. So some company who imported escargot went bankrupt, and we loaded the truck, and it was very light because, you know, these shells were all air. Yeah. And this guy says to me, he goes, come on, you can fit more in than that. And I said, we've got a full truckload, sir. You can see the truck's full. So he came up with this idea, and the customer's always right, so we did it. He said, go up into the second story of the office, jump into the back of your truck, collapse all those shells, and fit in another load. And so, uh, we did it. It was kind of fun, you know, screaming, woohoo, as you're jumping out the window into the back of the truck, and, uh, we did. We got another load in, and we had fun. He was happy.

AI assessment note: “the weirdest thing I probably hauled off was I had a, an entire truckload of escargot shells.”

Q Were you like a, like a Genius student? Like, were you super good at school?

A Whatever the polar opposite of genius student would be, would be who I was. What would happen is things like reading, I, I just, that was one area I got stuck. I am so ADD that I couldn't focus on the words. My mind would go to other things, and I, I would have a hard time with that. So, I learned to read, but I didn't learn to understand, and that became a challenge through school, and, and really, I Sort of held me back from, from learning through books. So, uh, I failed many years throughout high school. I ultimately was one course short from finishing high school. So, 12th grade, didn't finish, didn't graduate, but then I saw all my friends, every single one of them get accepted into colleges, and I said, I don't want to be left out.

AI assessment note: “Whatever the polar opposite of genius student would be, would be who I was.”

Q What was the kind of stuff that, uh, you, you would haul out of people's homes?

A We would haul away old furniture, appliances. We're very much a keep up with the Joneses type world, and I think, unfortunately, people renovate too much and always want new furniture and the latest and greatest and TVs, and so we haul away their old stuff. We try and recycle as much as we possibly can, but furniture, appliances, yard debris when someone cleans up the yard, and it was a simple model, but it was, it was fun because you, you, You'd find weird things. And I remember there was a woman who had soup cans. She had a whole wall of Campbell's soup cans. I mean, it looked like a real live, uh, uh, art piece, right? And, and I remember, you know, looking at this and going, What are you doing? And she just said, well, you know, she was saving up for the next big war and just wanted to have all this food stocked away, and finally her kids just said, like, you know, even if there was a war, you couldn't eat that stuff. It's, you know, 50 years old, so we ended up cleaning out a whole wall of, you know, Andy Warhol-ish wall of Campbell's soup cans.

AI assessment note: “We would haul away old furniture, appliances.”

Q How close was the company to falling apart?

A We couldn't have been closer. I mean, I, I would have given us another 90 days if we'd continued down that path. We had overspent so drastically. On big bets that didn't pay off, and I had to hunker down. I had to lay off 52 people. I needed to elevate another team, the middle level managers up, and I said, You know, I know you might not agree with my decision. You probably think I'm crazy, but I need your help, and it was the hardest period in my professional life. While my middle-level management team, who was elevated, continued to run the business, I scoured the country for the right leader. I interviewed 75 potential presidents slash COOs. I said, I need to find someone whose strengths and talents Would take all the things I'm bad at and make them happen. And so I painted this little vision describing exactly who I was looking for. I got it out to my networks, and three different people, totally unrelated, said the person you describe is Eric Church, because you've only described one person on the planet. And, ah, I reached out. Eric and I got connected. He was very happily employed. He was president of a big travel tourism company, and when the magic happened, it was just, okay, we can see building this thing together. We can see how we would each contribute strengths to the recipe, and we entered this partnership, and, ah, it's been almost six years, and together we just…

AI assessment note: “We couldn't have been closer. I mean, I, I would have given us another 90 days”

Q Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the mid-nineteen nineties. Brian has fired all of his employees, and after a rough few months, he begins to rebuild the team. But at this point, his company is still a small business running in just one city. When did you decide that, you know, this thing could be bigger than just like a, a, a junk hauling company in Vancouver?

A So, you know, at this .1997, we actually had a million dollars in revenue, and I joined something called, ah, YEO, the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. And I found myself surrounded by people who had some pretty cool businesses. Tech companies, and, and growing ad agencies, and just stuff that seemed a little sexier than junk removal. And so I think I found myself feeling sad because I was comparing myself to others, and I didn't feel good enough. So, what I ended up doing was I went to my parents' summer cottage. They had this little cottage, and I, I sat on their dock. And I said, okay, this isn't who I am. I'm an optimist. So I pulled out a pen and a sheet of paper, and I said, okay, what if I could just dream up possibility? What could this business look, feel, and act like five years down the road? And I said, we'll be in the top 30 metros in North America, even though we were only in one. We would be the FedEx of junk removal, clean shiny trucks, friendly uniformed drivers. I just started to put these Big, hairy, audacious goals down on paper that we would be like the McDonald's of junk, that we would, you know, just what Ray Kroc did where he got all these owners on board, we would do the same thing with the junk removal business. And I took Paul Guy, who was the operations manager of mine in Vancouver, and I said, you're going back and forth to Toronto every couple of …

AI assessment note: “at this .1997, we actually had a million dollars in revenue, and I joined”

Q For sure. Brian, any last words of wisdom for Jake?

A I don't know about wisdom, but I'm just, I'm excited for you. I, I like your brand, I like your story, and I think that if you make some changes in how you tell your story and tap into your history, you know, something on your website, if you've got a photo of your grandfather doing anything in the cosmetic space, I mean, he's your grandfather, I don't know the age difference there, but this has to be an old photo that you can find, and then recreate that photo with you today. You have instant credibility in the cosmetic space because it's a third generation family business. I think you've got a cool product, and I think you've got a great business ahead of you.

AI assessment note: “if you make some changes in how you tell your story and tap into your history”

Q Like what'd you do? What would you do?

A We, we would overspend in, in areas where we would, we would take some risks and we wouldn't really think through with any rigor and discipline and How it would affect our franchise partners. We had a truck rollout program where we said, hey, everybody needs more trucks. Just get more trucks out there, and we, we put it in the franchise agreement that our franchise partners had to increase their fleets by a certain period of time, and there was some rebellion. I mean, and I don't blame them. It was too aggressive, and I realized that we were making mistakes, and you can't have the two ADD types at the top, and, and I needed to find a new leader, and Having to tell your best friend that this is no longer going to work out is a tough, tough, painful thing to go through for both of us, but we've healed and moved on, and, and, you know, Cameron would tell anyone today, Brian made the right decision.

AI assessment note: “We had a truck rollout program where we said, hey, everybody needs more trucks.”

Q And just to clarify, at the beginning, your company was called The Rubbish Boys. When did you come up with a new name? When did you become one-hundred-gachunk?

A So Paul was in my office. We were working, and I said... If we're going to go for this franchise model and build something across North America, I knew the word rubbish was going to be a problem. It was more of a Canadian British term. And the other problem we had was people would either think of the company as being the rubbish boys, and some people thought of us as seven, three, eight junk. So effectively, they saw us as two companies. So I remember sitting down with Paul, and we were, we were brainstorming, and I said, what if we did a one-eight-hundred number? Something like one-eight-hundred-flower, something that was more descriptive. So we started brainstorming, and the whole Got Milk campaign that was running at the time inspired me to, one-eight-hundred-got-junk. And our phone number had a question mark in it, and it would ask the question, got junk? And, well, of course I do. Then give us a call. And so, and so I tried to find who owned one-eight-hundred-got-junk.

AI assessment note: “we were brainstorming, and the whole Got Milk campaign that was running at the time inspired me”

Q And so, at what point did you stabilize? At what point were you able to say, okay, we've totally passed this crisis?

A Well, when Eric Church came in, the first thing he did is he had the goals that I had put in place. He lowered them. He said, listen, Brian, it's not that I don't believe in you and that I don't believe in the goals, but we're going to lower the bar because we're going to teach people what it feels like to win again. We are gonna make sure we win. We are gonna put the bar low enough that there is no way in the world we're not gonna win, and when people start to feel and taste that winning feeling again, the confidence will build, the team will come back, and so he thought about it in a very strategic, planful way, and we made money in the first year of this new, this new business. Really taking one-eight-hundred-got-junk and restructuring, hunking, hunkering down, we, we made money.

AI assessment note: “when Eric Church came in... we made money in the first year”