![]() "We were on the front page of the newspaper the next day," he says. He told them how he'd eschewed getting a summer job and bootstrapped his own junk-hauling business. "I called the Vancouver Province, our largest newspaper," Scudamore says. His girlfriend at the time suggested he drum up more clients by pitching the story of his successful side-hustle to the press. Two years after starting The Rubbish Boys, Scudamore was back in Vancouver after transferring from Concordia University to the University of British Columbia, where he was studying business. However, while Scudamore was able to quickly break even on his initial $1,000 investment, he also realized he'd need to charge more in order to turn a profit and eventually start hiring employees to grow the business. "I decided to go in at the low end because I was the new competitor and we charged 80 bucks." ![]() "They were anywhere from between $80 and $120 a truckload," he says of his competitors at the time. "Īside from bringing in his own clients, one of the earliest business lessons Scudamore had to learn on the fly was how to effectively price his services.Īt first, Scudamore looked to the classifieds section of the newspaper to see how much his competitors were charging customers, so he could follow suit. "I had phone calls the first day I ran my ads and I had three jobs the first day. "It was just, 'The Rubbish Boys will stash your trash in a flash,' was the slogan," Scudamore says. That provided the impetus for Scudamore to start his own side-hustle, and he managed to attract his earliest clients by placing classified ads in local newspapers that touted, "essentially, a guy with a truck willing to haul junk." Scudamore says his parents "thought I was crazy to not finish high school." In fact, his father - a liver transplant surgeon in Vancouver - was so disappointed in Scudamore for dropping out of high school that he told his son he would have to pay his own way through college. Still, most of his friends were headed for college and Scudamore didn't want to be left out. "I was often skipping classes, and then I fell very far behind," he says. Scudamore says he was a " troublemaker" in high school, who dropped out with just an algebra class remaining. The parent company also now includes house-painting company WOW 1 Day Painting and home-detailing business Shack Shine, which Scudamore founded in 20, respectively. The company operates junk-removal franchises in roughly 160 locations in the U.S., Canada and Australia under the umbrella of Scudamore's O2E Brands, which he says is "a half-a-billion-dollar business" in Canadian dollars - or about $368 million in U.S. Since then, The Rubbish Boys grew up to become 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, a $300 million business that's the main part of a bigger family of brands launched by Scudamore. And in his first year in business, Scudamore says he made a profit of about $1,700, which he used to cover his college tuition. Within the first "couple of weeks," Scudamore says he was able to break even. ![]() "I spent $700 on an old Ford F-100 and the rest on fliers and business cards," Scudamore says. Within a week, Scudamore had put his entire life-savings - about $1,000 - into starting his own junk-hauling service, which he initially called The Rubbish Boys (even though the business was then a one-man operation - "I wanted it to sound bigger," he says.) "I can do that," Scudamore thought, he tells CNBC Make It. ![]()
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