Brian is the Founder & CEO of O2E Brands: Home of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and other exceptional home service brands. He is also author of the #1 bestselling book WTF?! Willing To Fail and a new one BYOB: Build Your Own Business, Be Your Own Boss.
Brian joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about the mistakes every entrepreneur should make and much more.
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1-800-GOT-JUNK?: The Mistakes Every Leader Should Make With Brian Scudamore, Founder
Welcome to the show. Our quote for this episode is from Jonathan Swift: “Vision is the art of seeing that which is invisible to others.” Our guest is a true visionary entrepreneur, Brian Scudamore. Brian is the founder and CEO of O2E Brands, home of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and other exceptional home services brands. He’s also the author of the number one bestselling book, WTF?! (Willing to Fail), and a new one, BYOB: Build Your Own Business, Be Your Own Boss.
Brian Scudamore, welcome back to the show.
Always a pleasure.
Brian’s Backstory & The Founding of His Businesses
There are a lot of achievements in life that are meaningful. You’re joining the three-timer club on the show. I’d encourage people to check out your first two appearances. That’s episode 44 and 191. To sum it up quickly for our audience who haven’t heard those and don’t like homework, give us a quick intro on you and your backstory.
I built three companies after 36 years. I’m a high school dropout. I talked my way into college. I dropped out of college because I had started a business in junk removal. I loved my business and the learning that came from it so much that I said, “I think I’m quitting school, and I’m going to do this full-time.” I learned much more about business by running one versus studying in school. I started what was called The Rubbish Boys at the time. Ten years after building this junk removal business in Vancouver, where I started, we became 1-800-GOT-JUNK? with a plan to be all over North America.
We’re now in Canada, the United States, and Australia, and then we started two other home service brands two decades later. We started WOW 1 DAY PAINTING, where we paint people’s homes in a day, and Shack Shine, where we wash windows and gutters, power wash, and even install people’s Christmas lights. It’s a home service empire that we’re building, all about making it easy for the customer. Making it easy is at our core. We love branding, and we love people.
This Christmas light thing is a serious new business. I watch people. It’s like the Clark Griswold package. I watch some of the stuff that people get installed. It’s thousands of dollars of stuff. It’s no joke these days.
It’s a great business, and we do holiday lighting. Whether it’s Diwali, it doesn’t matter. It’s a big business for us. I believe we are teetering on, and almost there, the largest Christmas light installer in the country. We’re having fun. It’s a bright festive business that accounts for about 1/3 of the revenue of Shack Shine. It’s brought us a lot of great people who want to be franchise owners.
Do you provide the lights in the packages, or do you just do the installation for what people have?
We provide custom-cut packages, so if someone says, “I want a Griswold package.”
You call it the Griswold package. Have you named it that or not?
We actually have the Griswold Award. The franchise partner who’s done the biggest job every year gets the Griswold Award, which is pretty special.
It’s all about people. Find the right ones and treat them well. It only takes one to go sideways.
For those of you who are too young to know what we’re talking about, Christmas Vacation is one of the most iconic movies of all time. It is a must-see. You’re a good person to ask this question. I had people on a couple of years ago. I’d be like, “It’s been the pandemic. What’s different?” Now, people, a couple of years ago, were like, “It’s been a total evaporation of capital and high-growth business thing.”
The Shift Towards Sustainable Growth Over Rapid, Unprofitable Expansion
You’ve been doing this sustainable thing for a long time. You work with a lot of companies, but there’s a pretty big change from the ZIRP or the zero interest growth plan, growth at all costs, and a focus more on sustainability and profit. I’m not sure for a lot of people, that’s a switch that’s easily flipped. I think we’ve been teaching this stuff in school. People grow up under a certain plan. Talk about what you’ve seen and how it’s impacted either your business or the businesses that you see. I think it’s generally a positive move, but it’s been a big shift.
It’s interesting. I’ve never raised money. I have always said I would never take the company public. I’ve always tried to do this organically. It took me eight years to get to $1 million in revenue with 1-800-GOT-JUNK?. Eight years is a long time, but then it started to accelerate. We franchised, and things picked up over time. We do $1 million before 11:00 AM. The momentum that comes from that and what I’m trying to get to is that slow and steady wins the race. I think there are a lot of people who have said, “We want to raise capital. We want to go big or go home. We’re going to make up for profitability at some point decades down the road.”
The Amazons of the world have done it, but it’s so rare. Building a sustainable business with sustainable people, processes, and systems is nothing new to me. While the markets have changed and capital has dried up for many, I have always looked at our business and cheerled the belief that we’ve got to build this slowly but surely. We tell our franchise partners the same thing when they do less revenue in the first year than they had set goals for. This isn’t a one-year deal. This is a long-term, decade-long partnership. At least, play the long game. That’s what’s worked for us.
I want to double-click on two things you said there, because Amazon comes up a lot, as does Facebook. I had written a Friday Forward not referencing this, but it was on this notion of people celebrating exceptions. Amazon gets a decade to be on, but you get one company every decade, a decade to be unprofitable, and then being that. This is like LeBron James skipping college and going to the NBA. It’s not that frequent. You point to LeBron James, but what we don’t see is the other thousand kids who quit school and didn’t finish, and then we’re struggling for it. I do think we tend to celebrate a few of these exceptional companies, like we do these athletes, which are not repeatable events.
Everyone wants a hero. Everyone wants that hero’s journey, and look at the Michael Jordans, LeBron James, and the Jeff Bezos of the world. We want something to go, “What is the ultimate? Who is the person that’s gone the biggest? I want to be next,” or “I want to be at least half as big.” Half as big as Amazon is a very rare play. The way I look at it is about doing things slowly. Verne Harnish, a mentor to both of us through EO, has always said, “Grow where you’re planted.”
I’ve stayed in home services. I’ve stayed in franchising. The first ten years, when I built the business and I was over $1 million in revenue, all of my entrepreneur friends in the entrepreneur organization had bigger businesses, but I was playing the long game, and it wasn’t about tomorrow. It was way down the road. I think it’s okay to idolize some of our heroes. Use them for inspiration.
The Importance Of Resourcefulness & Creativity Over Overspending
There’s another thing, like in your company, and I’ve heard similar stories about Honest Tea and Stonyfield. Having limited resources forces you to figure out product-market fit and marketing. Sometimes, having a lot of money, you can obscure this for a long time. One of the interesting things about this is the delivery services. We’ve had DoorDash and a couple that were super successful, but a ton of bankruptcies, too.
The problem I saw was that the price was part of the product-market fit. During COVID, when you got a 10% off on free delivery, order everything. After COVID, should I go get the groceries, or is it a 40% markup? By the way, at 10%, they don’t have a viable business, but at 40%, they don’t have customers interested. How did you think about it early on? We’ve taught businesses over this ZIRP period to grow and then figure out product-market fit. I think that’s bad advice.
I would agree with you. Back to the slow and steady wins the race, overspending is not a strategy. I don’t know about you, but when I grew up, I remember hearing from my parents, “Just because you have checks in your checkbook does not mean you have money in your account.” As a kid, a 19-year-old, I bounced a couple of checks. I didn’t get that, but as an entrepreneur, when you start to grow and expand, you realize it’s risky to take on debt. It’s risky to take on equity. There’s a cost. You give away ownership to the point that eventually you build it, and then you go, “I’ve got such a tiny bit of the pie left. I’m now squeezed out.”
We’ve seen that happen in countless circumstances. For me, build it with a conscious strategy to manage the capital you have, and be forced to think about a more efficient, effective way. If I had taken my million-dollar business, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, and said, “In the next couple of years, I’m going to be a $100 million business, and I can raise money to do so,” I know that would have killed our business because we would not have watched every dollar. We would not have done some creative things.
People need to believe in the mission and the cause, want to be part of it, and feel motivated to contribute.
We stopped counting at 6,000 media hits. Those are big ones from Oprah and Ellen to The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. We stopped counting, but that was a free strategy for us to build the business. Had we raised money, we would have dumped it all into mass media from the beginning, and I don’t think we would have had the same growth trajectory.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions. Your marketing has been driven by having to be creative and having to find ways to get noticed without being able to outspend people.
I had learned years ago. I had read one of Howard Schultz‘s books. They did not start spending on mass media until they were $1 billion in revenue. When they did, they started with a $10 million ad budget. They were still very small as a percentage of their revenue, and their business was built. Al Ries talks about this in a book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. He said, if you build out your business slowly through its own means through guerrilla marketing and being creative, you don’t start spending real money on advertising until you’ve gotten to a certain level. Starbucks waited until $1 billion. We waited until about $150 million before we started going into mass media. Now, it’s a huge part of our budget.
The Five Mistakes Every Entrepreneur Should Make
You’re on my TV every week. It’s amazing. Talk about getting a good deal from your spokesperson. You’ve answered this question before. Every episode, I ask guests for a mistake they made and what they learned from it. I probably could put together a whole list of those insights. I was drawn to a post you made on LinkedIn about the five mistakes every entrepreneur should make. Those were using money as a motivator, hiring the wrong people, trying to control everything, focusing on beating the competition, and ignoring your gut. I am five for five on those. Let’s walk through these.
Mistake #1: Money As A Motivator
Let’s start with the first one, money as a motivator. How common is this? What’s the learning from this failure?
It ties into a lot of what we’ve already talked about. People get motivated by the dollar signs and the big growth plans of I want to be the next Amazon, but they don’t necessarily look at what the customer wants. What is the need? How do I find and attract the right people? How do I make the decisions that matter most versus paying attention to that top-line growth number of dollars? If people overspend, if people don’t make the right decisions, if money is the sole motivator for getting rich, I don’t think someone builds a sustainable long-term business.
Money can be a very short-term motivator, and then you realize the mistakes you make when that is your sole focus versus the long-term viability of what my customers want, how I make this business easy, and how I stand out creatively as a brand. I think it’s pulling yourself out, being the tallest tree in the forest, looking around, and saying, “The money will come.” At least that’s my experience. When I look at my three businesses and how we’ve grown them, the money has always come. First, our formula is to take care of our people, and they will take care of the customer. Take care of the customer, and they will take care of the growth, the revenue, the profits, and the opportunity of building a brand.
You’re talking about whether the company can support that. I think there’s a separate thing. Arthur Brooks, the esteemed professor of happiness at HBS, which always sounds funny. There’s another aspect to this, which is why? Why is that? What are you? Is it your dad’s approval you didn’t have? Is it that teacher who told you wouldn’t? Some people are carrying some real personal and emotional baggage. He talks about self-objectification and asking yourself. It’s an interesting exercise for achievement-oriented people to ask themselves why 4 or 5 times, and you might get to some uncomfortable truths.
What is money there for? As you said, it might be to satisfy your praise from your father that you didn’t get and you were always yearning for, or whatever it might be. A lot of people want it, and like Albert Brooks talking about happiness, they think that’s their answer. “When I have this giant yacht, I’m going to be happy.” I got to spend some time with Shaquille O’Neal, who is an amazing entrepreneur. I said, “Do you still have your boat?” It was called Free Throw because he was such a bad free-thrower. He’s like, “The best day of my life was selling that thing. It did nothing to make me happy.” This is a massive yacht.
You and I have been around a lot of entrepreneurs with successful exits. I think we were also in a session where people talked about this at an event years ago. For people outside of this, it might seem like the world’s smallest violin, but it’s more proof that a lot of these people who had incredible exits, freedom, and life-changing wealth are not happy, even to the point of unhappiness and depression, because there was stuff missing behind that. People are like, “That’s crazy,” but if you’ve seen all of these people and you’ve been around these people and heard these stories enough, you do start to believe that it’s not going to make you happy on its own.
You’re right. You and I have been around it a lot. I know a lot of friends and a lot of close friends who have made a lot of money on their exits. Like you said, stupid wealth, game-changing, life-changing decisions. It’s not that they’re not happy. In many ways, these people are miserable because they lost a baby of sorts that they were doing a great job building, and they think they cashed out at the right time because it was going to be life-changing. The life-changing happiness they were getting was actually from running the business and being a part of that growth story, and they miss it.
Mistake #2: Hiring The Wrong People
I’ve seen that movie. The next one I resonate with because I had a story version of this at our company, hiring the wrong people. We joked. That wasn’t even a presentation. Everyone has their name tag at our company. I said, “Everyone, give me the name of the person that you hired that was such a disaster that now you take hiring seriously after that.” I think we all have one. Is that what you’re talking about there?
I would start with two stories here. The first time I got it wrong, it was the whole company. Nine bad apples out of eleven people. When I say bad apples, it’s not that they were horrible people, but they weren’t the right fit for me. They didn’t have a glass-half-full mentality. They were pessimists, and they complained, so I fired my entire company of eleven people five years in. I said, “I’m going to start again.” Those two, I wasn’t sure if they were toxic and poisoned by the other nine. I got rid of everybody. That was on me, though.
Not once did I ever say I’m so mad at all these people. I was mad at myself because I didn’t understand who the right people were and how to find them. Once I did, that made all the difference in the world. Years later, I learned at the extremes when I got rid of one person, I had a president in my company who was the wrong fit for me, wrong fit for the vision, culture, and where we were going. People internally thought this person was good, but I could see this was not going to get us to our goals.
We were starting to go different directions, and we were several days away from bankruptcy because of some bad financial decisions that we’d made together. Getting that person out at a larger company of $100 million was so big that it reminded me again that it’s all about people. Find the right people and treat them right. All it takes is one to go sideways.
Everyone has a place. I think there’s a lot of discussion about good or bad people. I think there’s a fit. My always thing is universities in the US. You’ve got a small liberal arts school in the woods, and then you’ve got a big city school. They both could be great schools, but different value propositions and different people that they’re targeting, who would be happy there. It works because they self-identify. The large city school is not trying to pretend to be a small urban school. I think sometimes, we create this problem because we’re trying to appeal to everyone when we should be trying to figure out the 1% or 2% of people who align with our company’s mission, values, and industry, and figure out how to find those people.
Fit is okay. It doesn’t mean that someone is a bad person, but they’re the wrong fit. When you can find a company that is ideal for you or a leader, a partner, that’s ideal for you, when I found Erik Church, who’s our president of O2E Brands, many years ago, absolute magic every day since.
I want to proactively address, I think this probably got a little better in the last couple of years, but the word fit came under attack a couple of years ago under the inclusion umbrella. I don’t think anyone I know means that as carbon copy or the same people, but like in a marriage, you have to have a couple of things that everyone agrees on. People are like, “It’s an ad, not a fit.” I get the semantics, but I agree and I disagree. We do not want carbon copies, but there are some things that, if you don’t agree with, it’s not going to be a good choice for you.
If you walked through my business right now, we’re in the office, and there are 834 people between the two offices that we have. Someone would say, “Look at the diversity of culture, gender, opinions, and attitudes.” There’s this level of, we want people who will challenge us. We want people who aren’t just like us, but will bring something to the team. One thing everybody notices is there’s a magic about the place, and it fits. It works. Something that everyone here has in common is that they’re driven by our values. They’re driven by our customer proposition of making it easy. Everything we do, whether it’s technology, junk removal, or any of our processes, we want to make it easy. That’s what brings us together, and that’s one of the big, “Do you fit?”
The example I used in my book on values was from different contexts. If you have, pick anything, a Bible study group on Sundays, you might have friends who are atheists, but you probably don’t want a very vocal atheist at your Sunday morning religious study group questioning one of the core tenets of why you’re there. I think that’s true in any relationship, so that we’re inclusive, but also there’s got to be some core reasons why we’re all here and want to do whatever this mission for this group is.
People have to believe in the mission and the cause, want to be a part of it, and want to contribute. The value side, our values are passion, integrity, professionalism, and empathy. We won’t hire someone who’s incredibly smart and gifted at their craft if they don’t have passion that shows up each and every day at work. Fit is okay. I would agree with you that there’s a lot of pushback at times. This place is incredibly diverse in every way, and we’re proud of that, but the fit is something we’re not prepared to be diverse on.
Mistake #3: Trying To Control Everything
This next one, trying to control everything. I think every founder or CEO has had their burnout moment or their part in their business when they’re close to this, but I think what a lot of them fail to understand is that they want to delegate. What I’ve seen as a common pattern of delegation is that I get so overwhelmed that I hire some people. I tell them to go do some stuff. They come back. They don’t do it how I want them to, and I go, “This is why I can’t trust anyone.” A delegation is more work up front and requires more. What’s your experience and strategies around how to stop controlling and delegate in a way that helps you and helps the people you’re trying to empower?
In the earlier days as a young leader, and it took me a long time to get decent at this, I didn’t understand what delegation was and how to do it. I learned that there’s delegation and then there’s abdication. Abdicating is saying, “Robert, can you go take care of this?” Off you go, you figure it out, I don’t follow up, I don’t ever ask you how it went, and I don’t check in. Delegation is, “I’ve got this thing that we’re working on together. Here are some parameters. Figure out how you’re going to do it. If you have any questions, come back and chat with me. I’ll follow up with you in a week to see how it all went and see if I can support.”
You’ve always got to pay attention—but don’t get obsessed with the competition.
Yes, it can take more work, but when you’re scaling a company and you need hundreds of people to do those things, it’s creating a system to figure out how to delegate. It’s also important for me as a CEO and a founder that I want our people to grow, and they grow by taking responsibility and opportunity. Sometimes, it is easier for me to just do it myself, the old adage. However, that’s not a long-term sustainable strategy.
My quote is, “Success in delegation is when it’s done 85% how you want it without you having to do it.” I think that last 15%, it’s never going to be how we do it or how we like it. I also think that crimps other people’s individuality, and you’ve got to give them some ability to do it how they want to do it.
We had a fellow, Tyler, who came in as a PR intern or a young hire. He’d never pitched press in his life. I taught him what I knew. I said, “You go build on this.” The guy got us on The Oprah Winfrey Show after working on that with other things for fourteen months. I wouldn’t have had the ability to follow through for fourteen months to make that happen. He did way better than I did. He went bigger than I ever could have. I am pleasantly surprised at the number of times when I think no one can do this as well as I can, when I relinquish control and empower someone else. They often do it much better.
Mistake #4: Focusing On Beating Your Competition
Here’s the playbook, and make it better, not dogmatically follow it. This one is more interesting. I think probably one has more varied opinions on focusing on beating the competition. There’s some middle ground here. What you control is more important than what you don’t, but there are some people who’ve put their heads down and haven’t paid attention to what’s going on in their industry or competitors. They wake up one morning, and AI has destroyed their business or something like that. How do you think about this balance?
I think you’ve always got to pay attention, but don’t get obsessed with the competition. My obsession was a guy, Mike, who used to be a good friend in my business five years in. We used to sit down, have beers at the end of the day, and talk about strategy and growth. He was a business student. He ended up going into competition against me and literally told me over the phone and asked me if I was sitting down. He was starting the next day. He had his truck and the signs, and off he went.
I was like, “How could Mike do this to me?” I was obsessed, and we figured out how to block them from doing business, how to make their lives more difficult, versus getting out and marketing our own business. The way I look at the competition is nobody is going to worry about your business except you. Your competition isn’t worrying about your business. You’re worrying about their business, and you’re taking yourself away from yours.
You’re late to your customers and aren’t following up with them.
You’re feeling stressed. Your blood is boiling. I started obsessing about, “What am I going to learn from them? What are they doing better than I? What is the lesson here that will allow me to continue to grow my business, keep my eye on the ball, and grow faster and better by paying attention to what they’re doing better?” That became the game changer because then I stopped caring. As a company, we’re not one to get out there, take other companies’ signs down, and slash the tires on their trucks. There are people out there who get that level of obsession and want to stop their competitor. It doesn’t work.
Is Mike still around?
Mike is still around. He’s in the liquor business now. He couldn’t make his business work. He gave up, and that’s okay.
Mistake #5: Ignoring Your Gut
That’s a good end to that story. The last one, and I’m sure you have some stories here. I think this is a question of maybe how, but ignoring your gut. I’m sure you’ve read Blink by Gladwell about how the gut is more like a processing of all your learnings and gives you the answer in this weird feeling. What are a couple of times when you ignored your gut and it came back to regret it?
AI should give us more time for heart-to-heart connections—freeing us from tasks we don’t love so we can show up where humans truly matter.
It’s often a conversation. This is where it gets tricky because if you look at the delegation, letting go of control, sometimes you give control to someone, and you don’t have a good feeling about the person or who they are. Maybe you brought in the wrong person. You don’t trust them. Something is nagging at you and telling you that something is not right. It’s happened over and over. I’m reminded that sometimes, I don’t want to be a person to say to my team, “I told you so,” but I do want to be a person that when I’ve got a strong feeling, even if I can’t articulate why, to trust that gut and say, “Maybe we need to ask some more questions and have a conversation.” I’m trying to think of a story off the top of my head.
Let me ask you a question because you’re very visionary. We talked a lot about that. I have found this to be true for myself and a lot of entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of stuff we do horribly, but we tend to see around corners well. That tends to be our thing. I see a problem around this corner. I’m starting to see it, and the team doesn’t see it because you’re not near the corner yet. Have you seen some things that fall under that from a gut standpoint?
I think that is me trying to learn to ask questions of my team. Why am I feeling like we might be making a decision here that isn’t going to pay off? What am I missing here? Help me understand, give me some more context, and they’ll ask me, “What do you need? What data and story do you need me to tell you to convince you?” It starts a conversation. If I can think of my gut, we had a business called You Move Me, which was a moving business.
I believed no matter what that we could build this business, but I had a gut feeling that my president’s heart wasn’t in that space. I’m like, “How are we going to continue to build it if we’ve got four brands and this isn’t one that he’s loving?” My gut told me something was wrong, and we had a good conversation around it. It turns out in pointed questions that he wasn’t excited about it. He saw something that I didn’t see. When we were able to elevate that, I realized we talked about the two-in-a-box leadership model of you’ve got a visionary, as you mentioned, which is me, and then the executor, the implementer. I learned that the tie goes to the implementer if you disagree. We talked about it, and we respectfully disagreed. I said, “The tie goes to you if you don’t believe.”
Because they’re the one that has to live with it and make it happen.
Also, execute. I’m like, “Great,” so we got out, and it was one of the best things we ever did because we understood that when you have your junk all the way, you feel that sense of relief. When you have your house painted, it’s like, “Look at the transformation.” When you have your shack shined, you’re like, “I can see through the windows again.” They’re happy businesses. When you move, no matter what, at the end of the move, you’re always stressed. You’re fighting with your partner or your spouse. It’s awful. It wasn’t a happy business. We got rid of the unhappy business, and that’s our filter now from here on out.
The Importance Of Human Connection
You love hearing stories. I heard you share a story recently about a man named Frank, who’s the security guard who opens the doors at the TED conference. He had built all these awesome relationships over the years, and then he gave a talk at the most recent TED conference. Talk to me about this.
How the story goes is that the big TED conference was in Vancouver, with 1,500 people. They’ve all got pretty decent businesses, stories, and lives. This guy, Frank, who’s a security guard, opens the doors every morning, opens the doors every afternoon, says good morning or goodbye, whatever the time of day is, and has a smile on his face, a big, humongous smile. I remembered him the second I met him. He looks at your name tag and calls you by name, “Welcome back, Brian.” You feel heard and seen.
Chris Anderson, who runs TED, brought him up on stage and said, “I want to take a minute here. I’ve heard since 2014, since this gentleman has been working security at the front door, that he makes a massive difference in this world.” We’ve been talking about mattering in one of the previous sessions. He’s like, “Here’s somebody who takes his job seriously and matters, albeit that he’s a security guard.”
He brings him up on stage. One hundred percent of the room, all 1,500 people, stood up and gave him a standing ovation and a round of applause. I was there for 89 speakers for the whole week. No one else, except Frank, got a 100% standing ovation, not even close. People are very selective about what they give in terms of standing O’s, but he got one.
His big idea, which was never even a TED Talk, was to show up in the world with a big heart. He did that, and it landed on people. Everyone could relate that while there’s AI, robotics, solving diseases and famine, and environmental challenges, Frank’s big idea of having a heart and showing up with love and respect and making people smile was a big one. At the end of the story, I went up to take a photo of him. I said, “I want to do a LinkedIn post to recognize the beauty inside of you. You take your job seriously, and it matters.” He goes, “I believe that smiles and hugs make the world go around, and that’s my job.”
Did he get an actual speech, did he come up, was it impromptu, or did he plan for it?
It was impromptu that Chris Anderson noticed that he had shown up in the world this way and wanted to bring him in. Since 2014, 11 years, he had never even been into the actual TED arena. He was brought up on stage, a thank you from Chris. He didn’t give a talk, but Chris talked about why Frank’s job mattered, how Frank shows up with a heart, and that he didn’t need to say anything.
I’ve had a few stories lately. I told a recent guest, so I won’t tell it again because it’d be similar to Jessica, the bus driver at where we ski, and everything she did. I don’t even know who the last bus driver was. I had another story, you could see when people enjoy what they’re doing, or they make the most out of whatever they’re doing, both the impact they have on others and the more enjoyment that they take out of it, versus the people who look miserable to be there. I think in a world of increasing AI, we’re going to be craving these human experiences more, and some of these connections.
The big idea that came out of TED for me, their theme for 2025, was humanity re-imagined. What is our role as humans? So much talk about AI as you can imagine, but the big idea for me that I took home was that AI will make space for us to have more time to show up where humans matter, more time for those heart-to-heart connections with people, and that AI should, through robots and so on, take some of the tasks away that we don’t like doing, but bring the personal connection time to a whole greater level. I think that matters.
For all, not yelling and screaming at each other. That has opened the door, but if we don’t change the temperature, then we’re not going to take advantage of that.
If I go back to mattering, it isn’t just showing up with a smiley happy attitude and loving what you’re doing. I think it goes even further than that to go, “Does my job as Jessica, the bus driver, as Frank, the doorman, matter? How does it matter?” Frank’s job is to make people smile in the morning so they can start off their day at TED with the right frame of mind for learning. That matters. Imagine if everybody in the world, from our leaders, politicians, you name it, could connect with what my place is on this planet as a person doing mattering work, if they understood how they mattered and connected with that, I think the world would be a much greater place.
You can make that matter. My kids both go to school in the South, and I’ve generally seen people much friendlier and embracing of their roles and feel like, again, they can make a difference in whatever they’re doing. Last question. You’ve been featured on the show, Dragons’ Den, which, for our American readers or elsewhere, is like Shark Tank in Canada. As an investor evaluating founders, are you a horse or a jockey guy? What’s your “I get excited about something” versus “It’s an instant no-go for me?” Are you betting on the idea, or are you betting purely on the person?
I’m betting on the person. I went to people when I was pitching them on I need some mentoring and advice, and how do I franchise 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, and most of the experts said, “This can’t be done. You can’t do it.” I don’t mind someone coming up with a crazy wacky idea, but they have to believe that they can and will do it no matter what. What I looked for on Dragons’ Den was people with passion, people with a spark in their eye for their idea, and that nothing was going to get in their way.
Brian, how can people learn more about you, your work, and your books, other than turning on their television? Just so you know, Brian is the guy waving at the junk, and it’s disappearing, if you’ve seen him on TV.
They can learn more about me. Get online, go to the internet, whether it’s ChatGPT or Google, type my name, and see where it takes you. My whole why in this world is inspiring entrepreneurship, and that’s what I love to do. Even getting some time with my buddy, Robert, and old friends and being able to chat on your show is fun because we get to explore stories together of what makes the world tick, and I love what I do. Thanks again for the opportunity.
Thank you for sharing with us, and we’ll be sure to include links to everything you talked about.
Important Links
- O2E Brands
- 1-800-GOT-JUNK?
- WTF?! (Willing to Fail)
- BYOB: Build Your Own Business, Be Your Own Boss
- Brian Scudamore’s Website
- Brian Scudamore on Why Everybody Can Be A Visionary
- Brian Scudamore on How To Be Your Own Boss – Elevate Podcast
- WOW 1 DAY PAINTING
- Shack Shine
- Verne Harnish on LinkedIn
- Howard Schultz on LinkedIn
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
- Arthur Brooks’ Website
- Erik Church on LinkedIn
- Blink
- You Move Me
