Talkin' trash: One outfit's story of e-commerce

How 1-800-GOT-JUNK is using its intranet

Imagine a corporate warehouse full of dilapidated office furniture, antiquated workstations and box after box of '70s era marketing collateral. Or, perhaps, your neighbor's garage - long-outgrown bikes, a rusty old barbecue grill, towering stacks of yellowed newspapers.

These images might scream more of "Sanford & Son" than modern-day e-business, and that's exactly what they represent to a tech-savvy company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK .

Launched as a summer business by a college student in the pre-Internet days of 1989 - Brian Scudamore had $700, a used pickup and gumption - 1-800-GOT-JUNK has used technology to evolve into North America's largest junk-removal company. As of this month, 325 spiffy 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks, from 148 franchise locations, hauled away corporate and household rubbish in 38 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces. In the U.S., the company serves 48 of the top 50 metropolitan areas by population, says Cameron Herold, who joined the operation in 2000 as COO. In fact, he says, 1-800-GOT-JUNK is the only junk-removal company in North America operating in more than three cities.

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Imagine a corporate warehouse full of dilapidated office furniture, antiquated workstations and box after box of '70s era marketing collateral. Or, perhaps, your neighbor's garage - long-outgrown bikes, a rusty old barbecue grill, towering stacks of yellowed newspapers.

These images might scream more of "Sanford & Son" than modern-day e-business, and that's exactly what they represent to a tech-savvy company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK .

Launched as a summer business by a college student in the pre-Internet days of 1989 - Brian Scudamore had $700, a used pickup and gumption - 1-800-GOT-JUNK has used technology to evolve into North America's largest junk-removal company. As of this month, 325 spiffy 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks, from 148 franchise locations, hauled away corporate and household rubbish in 38 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces. In the U.S., the company serves 48 of the top 50 metropolitan areas by population, says Cameron Herold, who joined the operation in 2000 as COO. In fact, he says, 1-800-GOT-JUNK is the only junk-removal company in North America operating in more than three cities.

1-800-GOT-JUNK closed 2004 with $38.6 million in sales, more than double the $15.7 million in revenue it reported for 2003. The company expects to do $75 million in sales this year, Herold says, for a 95% growth. "We're a dot-com that turns trash into cash," he says.

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Herold attributes the company's rapid development and quick growth to its early recognition that it could exploit Web technology to make its junk-removal operation more efficient. In 1997, with the goal of making life easier for its franchisees, 1-800-GOT-JUNK created an intranet, called JunkNet. "We didn't want franchisees to have to worry about the administrative details that bog down business owners," Herold says.

For franchisees, as well as 1-800-GOT-JUNK employees, JunkNet serves as a contact manager, a job scheduler, a dispatch engine, a CRM tool and more. "JunkNet today is our central backbone," Herold says, noting that a half-dozen in-house developers have fully customized JunkNet for the business.

Behind the scenes, the JunkNet infrastructure comprises Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 Web servers, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise database servers and Windows Server 2003, says Roman Azbel, vice president of IT for 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Developers use Microsoft's .Net Framework 1.1, a recent changeover from the older, and less scalable and sophisticated Active Server Pages technology, he adds.

1-800-GOT-JUNK prides itself on taking technology to the next level. Using the Task function in Microsoft Outlook, for example, Azbel and his developers have managed to encapsulate each of the company's long-term strategic goals in one online project plan, Herold says. "We looked at Outlook, and looked at our business, and asked, 'How can we get rid of paper and know what everybody is working on, and link priorities?' Now we can look three years out, assigning due dates, to project plan every single aspect of the business," he says.