GOT-JUNK? trashes competition

Cameron Herold, aged 43 and based in Vancouver, is known worldwide for turning a small business into the global juggernaut 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.

He talks to Amanda Gome about his plans to build a sustainable global business, and his tips include how to “fire with love”, why it’s time to stick a hose down your drowning competitor’s mouth, and why your staff need a Herman Miller Aeron chair and a $50 desk.

Amanda Gome: Tell us about 1-800-GOT-JUNK? You arrived in 2000 as the 14th employee. What happened then?

Cameron Herold: I came into 1-800-GOT-JUNK? as the chief operating officer in October 2000. I was the 14th employee and we were operating in 12 markets, and when I left six and a half years later we were operating in 330 cities, 46 states in the United States, 10 provinces in Canada and in about five or six cities in Australia as well.

What is 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

It is a residential and commercial junk removal service. So we go into people’s homes or we go into their offices and business and they pay us to haul old stuff away. Old furniture, old renovation debris, old junk. About 60% of it ends up getting recycled or reused and 4% goes off to landfill.

Anyone can do that. How do you build the barriers to entry in that business early on?

We really focused on building a great brand with fantastic people and a phenomenal PR strategy. So we worked really closely with the media to get them telling the story of what we were building. We had fantastic franchisees globally, phenomenal people internally, and we would tell everyone including our competitors what we were building. We just never told them how.

Wouldn’t it be easy enough to figure out how?

Yeah, but they could never get our people. There are 17,000 independents and the biggest competitor is operating in five cities and we’re operating in 330.

What was one of the most important things you did to take the small business to a global business?

We really learnt all the best practices and the best systems that we could from other companies on the planet that had done great things before us, and we essentially ripped off and duplicated. And I don’t mean that we stole them, but instead of trying to figure out what to do or hire a bunch of really brilliant people to figure out how to grow our company, we just went out and looked at all the companies that had already grown before us, and we did what they did in all the different key areas that we were trying to grow.

Tell us how you did that? Did you read? Did you personally seek introductions, go and meet with them? How did you do that?

We did everything, we read everything we could. We were voracious readers. We plugged into entrepreneurial networks, we attended conferences.

Every time we read a magazine or a newspaper or saw a TV show about an entrepreneur that struck a chord with us, we would pick up the phone and call them and say can we have five minutes with you and ask you some questions. And they would always say yes. We would go and visit the great companies. We did everything we could just to try to sponge ideas off the absolute best on the planet.

What was some of the key things you kept hearing from them?

What we would do was we would search out a specific best practice for an area of the business that we were working on. So I’ll give you an example of the first one.

We were looking at how to really vision out the business and explain to everyone what we were doing, and to do that we actually turned to an Olympic coach. We worked with an Olympic ski coach actually, a mind coach for athletes, and we worked with this coach and he taught us how to create a mental image in our mind and then take that image out of our minds and write it down on paper in what we call our painted picture.

I actually worked with a client in Australia, a company in Sydney called RedBalloon and helped Naomi Simson craft a painted picture for her business RedBalloon, which she now shares with all of her employees and clients, and I think she even has a copy of it up on her website.

So once you have that vivid mental image and you can share it with everyone, all of your employees, your suppliers, your customers, everyone is crystal clear on what you’re building.

What is that image? Is that your value proposition?

The painted picture is really the vision of what your company looks and feels like three years out. So it’s describing everything that your company looks like. It’s describing your customer interactions, your employees, your office space. It’s essentially as if you went into the future three years out, took a video camera and videoed everything you could see in your business, came back to today and wrote down everything you saw in the video. Without explaining how you’re going to do it, it’s just explaining what the future looks like.