Brian had $700 and Few Prospects. But One Big Idea (And One Ginormous Mistake) Changed Everything

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Brian Scudamore was 19 years old and needed beer money.

He was sitting in a McDonald's drive-thru in Vancouver in 1989 when he saw it - a beat-up pickup truck with plywood sides and hand-lettered words on the door: “Mark's Hauling.”

From such little things big dreams are made. 

But for starters, he had $700 in savings, and now, an idea.

 The $700 Bet

Brian spent it all on a used Ford F-100, printed some fliers, and named his business “The Rubbish Boys.” Tagline: "We'll stash your trash in a flash."

He patrolled neighborhoods, knocked on doors, and hauled away whatever the city wouldn't take. First-year profit: $1,700. Enough for tuition.

So he kept going.

Year after year, Brian built the business up - more trucks, more jobs, more revenue. By 1994, five years in, he had 11 employees and something that looked, from the outside, like a real company.

But not from the inside.

From the inside, it was a mess.

11 People, Zero Vision

His employees complained constantly - about the hours, the pay, the workload, the weather. The culture was corrosive. The business had plateaued and he could not figure out why.

And then he saw the flaw in the plan: He had built the right thing the wrong way.

So he called a meeting.

And he fired all 11 of them. At once.

"It wasn't their fault," he said later. "It was mine. I hadn't given them a vision. I hadn't told them what we were building or why it mattered."

You cannot ask people to build something you haven't described.

 A Bigger Vision

 Brian sat down and wrote what he called a “Painted Picture” - not a mission statement, not a business plan, but a vivid, detailed description of exactly what the company would look and feel like in five years.

• Shiny trucks

• Uniformed drivers

• The friendliest brand in the business.

The FedEx of junk removal!

1-800-GOT-JUNK

He shared it with every person he hired. Now they knew where they were headed. Now Brian knew too. Together, they all built toward it.

Then he came up with a new name: 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

The number was owned by the Idaho Transportation Department. He called them, explained what he was building, and asked for it . . . and they gave it to him for free.

He was off to the races. He franchised the trucks. He scaled the business. He built the brand.

That $700 pickup truck that started in a McDonald's drive-thru is now a $700 million empire - and Brian Scudamore still owns every bit of it. 

He went looking for beer money. He discovered a business school lesson nobody teaches: To create a great business you have to have a vision for what it is, and then enroll people in that vision. 

The Takeaway

Two breakthroughs, one story.

The first is obvious: you do not need much to start. $700 and a crazy idea is plenty. Most entrepreneurs wait for the right moment, the right amount, the right plan - and they wait forever. Brian waited in a drive-thru line and drove off with a business.

The second breakthrough is harder: Hustle alone does not build a great company. Brian fired 11 people the day he figured that out.

Maybe that is not what you need to do, but you do have to answer the question every person on your team is quietly asking: Where are we going? Why?

Steal This Strategy

📚 Book: The Small Business Bible by Steve Strauss. Everything you need to start, run, and grow a business - from the guy who wrote the book on it. Literally. 

📚 Book: The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. The classic on why most small businesses fail - and how working ON your business instead of IN it changes everything. Brian Scudamore lived this book before Gerber wrote it.

 📖 Read: How I Daydreamed My Way to a $200M Business - Brian Scudamore (Forbes). Scudamore explains the Painted Picture in his own words.

 📅 Meet: Want Me to Create and/or Write Your Newsletter For You? Book a free discovery call with me.

About Steve

Steve Strauss is the best-selling author of The Small Business Bible (and 17 other books), Inc.’s small business columnist, a lawyer (non-practicing), and an entrepreneur. He sold his last venture, TheSelfEmployed.com to Mark Cuban & Zen Business. Need a ghostwriter or a newsletter for your business? Contact Steve!