Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Building a $700M Junk Empire | Brian Scudamore - 1-800-GOT-JUNK Founder

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Lessons - Building a $700M Junk Empire | Brian Scudamore - 1-800-GOT-JUNK Founder · Success Story with Scott Clary

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