Good story. Good find. They're right...why didn't I think of that?!?!

 

Nice find.

I didn't get exactly how the business works, do they treat the junk they pick up or do they just take it to the dumper?

I'm guessing they charge a certain ammount to pick up the junk and are able to dispose of it for less right?

 

My mom used them a few weeks ago to clean out her garage. She said they did a great job and even swept the garage floor when they were done.

 

I remember while brainstorming franchises and business ideas last year and I thought about a junk business, then I thought, "Hey! I wonder if anybody has thought to franchise this idea!? I'd better check..." then cursing to myself after seeing it's already been done and captured so much of the market.

One of my favorite stories too PHX.

I like how he says it took them eight years to get to $1 million in sales, and now they do $1 million every two days. The Law of Exponenetial Growth!

$100 million in revenues, I wonder what he pays himself out of that Also, I wonder what the company is valued at, if someone wanted to buy it and valued it at three times the annual revenues, that'd be $300 million!

 

Another thing this story emphasizes is that you don't necessarily need a lot of startup capital to start a highly-profitable franchise either. He started with $1000 and an old truck. One needs to always be on the lookout for franchise ideas that could be highly profitable, but are cheap to start (cheap to get the initial unit going).

 

You know, considering he has around 300 franchises, I wonder just how much of the market he has actually captured...? Like how much of the country each franchise location works? Might be room for a competitor

 

Well now someone just kick me in the nuts, apparently someone else just thought of this ahead of me! Check this out: http://www.1800junkusa.com/ This is a new, award-winning junk-haul franchise. They are small right now, but apparently have been getting rave reviews and they say if 1-800-GOT-JUNK is the McDonald's or Coke of this industry, they intend to be the Burger King or Pepsi.

Lesson Learned: WHEN OPPORTUNITY DRIVES DOWN YOUR STREET, YOU NEED TO MOVE YOUR REAR TO JUMP ON IT!

Hmm....there's only two major softdrink companies (Coke and Pepsi), but for fast-food, there's McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's; I remember watching a documentary that said when Wendy's was started, many doubted there was enough room left in the market for a third major hamburger franchise.

Maybe there is for junk?? Question to ponder. They also show the importance of marketing and customer service!

 

Just goes to show you what looking at a problem through a different lense and taking action will get you.

Thanks, MJ

 

The company is doing 150 mill in revenue and growing fast but it's worth 75 million? What am I missing?

 

I have never met Brian, but I know one of his former gotjunk partners, Cameron. They were (and still are) absolute masters of PR. I never really understood the benefit of a PR campaign until Cameron explained it. It is very cheap advertising. They have a great story to tell.

 

Bobby, why not pass on that wealth of info and write a post about how Cameron explained it. i know i would love to hear about PR and how they do it from the insiders.

 

I will do my best to paraphrase it but I highly doubt I will do Cameron any justice. He said they wrote out a couple of stories about their business. In the beginning it was start up type stories like "how I did it" kind of thing. As they grew and sold a new franchise and launched in a new market, they would always make a huge deal for the franchise opening by throwing a huge party and call every newspaper, tv and radio station in town to tell them about it. They also made a big deal to make sure the logo and trucks were in view. Everyone would wear a tshirt and a hat and sometimes they did wacky things like huge foam hats with the logo on it. As most local media is always in need of content and stories, they would always get someone from media to show. then they would always write some type of press release story before and after the opening and personally call media people and ask them if they needed any content. their content was always already written and prepared and usually they had multiple versions of the story. this is basically the gist.