Booming business in junk
Guerrilla marketing aids 1-800-Got-Junk franchise
Judy and Rich Briggs are building a fortune out of junk. Or to be more precise, removing junk.
The husband and wife team bought the 1-800-Got-Junk franchise rights to much of Central Mass. and Metrowest in July, 2003. In that brief time, they have scored big, quickly turning a profit and growing revenue from $449,000 in 2004 to $727,000 in 2005. This year they expect to hit the $1 million mark.
Canadian teenage entrepreneur Brian Scudamore founded Vancouver-based 1-800-Got-Junk (originally called The Rubbish Boys) in 1989 with the dream of making it the Fed-Ex of junk removal: Clean trucks, clean-cut friendly drivers and timely service.The company grew quickly – from a single franchise with $1 million revenues in 1999 to 214 franchises and $66.6 million in revenue last year.
The Briggs’ growth has mirrored the company’s. Starting with a single employee and truck in 2003, they grew to six trucks and 23 employees in less than three years.
From their Ashland office, those trucks service an area with 1.25 million people, a territory stretching east from Worcester to Boston and north to N.H.
They market themselves as anti-garbagemen, says Judy Briggs. "What image comes to your mind when you think of junk removal: A man with dirty jeans, ripped shirt, beat-up old pickup truck, scruffy beard and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth," she says. "We are clean-cut, uniformed and punctual. And people seem to respond to that."
Unlike many garbagemen, 1-800-Got-Junk will remove items from inside houses, eliminating the need to drag junk to the curb, says Rich Briggs, who is also a full-time police officer in Ashland.
About 65 percent of the materials they collect are recycled or donated, says Judy, much of it to groups like local churches or Big Brothers Big Sisters. The rest goes to transfer stations.
Rich attributes the rapid growth to guerilla marketing techniques. From the trucks themselves – which function like moving billboards that chug along Route 9 – to the "blue wig wave", where drivers park the truck in sight of a busy intersection, climb on top of it wearing blue wigs and wave to traffic.
The franchise model works well for their business, the owners say. In exchange for 7 percent of their revenue, 1-800-Got-Junk pays for a 24-hour call center that does all of their scheduling through a custom computer system. Called Junknet, those same systems also track profitability, how customers heard about them, which areas most of their business came from and other metrics.
Down the road, the pair plan to hire a full-time operations manager and open a satellite office in the Leominster area.
Kenneth J. St. Onge can be reached at kstonge@wbjournal.com
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