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

How 1-800-GOT-JUNK is using its intranet to clean up in the rubbish-removal business.

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

Launched as a summer business by a college student in the pre-lnternet 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.

1-80GGOT-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."WeVe a dot-corn that turns trash into cash "he says.

Herold attributes the company's rapid development and quick growth to its early recognition that it could exploit Web technology to make its junkremoval 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 1-80OGOT-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 longterm 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.

The 1-800-GOT-JUNK desk jockeys aren't the only ones with cool tools, Herold notes. Drivers can access JunkNet via PDAs or cell phones to retrieve client information such as where the junk is located and payment option selected. He says this eliminates the need for a customer to deal with the junk removal team at all while it is on-site.

Azbel describes the process: From 1800gotjunk.com, a customer books a job. From the public Web site, the order moves to the JunkNet database, which determines the route based on ZIP code of removal site and schedules the pickup. Using a Wireless Application Protocol-enabled device, a driver obtains client information. When arriving on site, the 1-800-GOT-JUNK team knows exactly where to go, what to remove, and how the customer should be billed.

That sure beats the old way of getting rid of outdated gear, says one repeat corporate customer. "In the past, we had to haul it ourselves in our own vehicles. The last time we did that, it took most of a day We made three trips to the recycling center," says the customer, an IT staffer at a utility company in Detroit who asked not to be named.

"We found 1-800-GOT-JUNK to be reasonably priced, fast, courteous, clean and very easy to deal with - our company pays [within 30 days of receiving an invoice], and not all companies accept that," she says.

Pricing is based on volume and the type of junk being removed. On average, a full truckload costs $430.

With endorsements such as this one, 1-800-GOT-JUNK might just succeed in its goal to increase its corporate business from 25% of sales today to 50% by 2006. Online booking is key to accomplishing that goal because it should help attract national accounts, Herald notes.

Today, only about 10% of jobs get booked online. Herald would like to see that figure at 25% by the end of 2006, and is working with Google on search engine optimization and keywords to help make that growth happen.