123JUNK – A flawed business

As a fast growth company, 123JUNK has a lot to celebrate! As a team, each week we share new accomplishments, new reasons to pat ourselves on the back, new things to be proud of. Perhaps most importantly, each week we create lots of new ecstatic (and junk free) 123JUNK cheerleaders! Our journey continues to be full of excitement and positivity, and we’re grateful for every last moment of it!

Of course, this is a business and not everything sounds like something that’s written in a fairy tale. We’ve made plenty of mistakes. Like that time we backed over Mrs. Kesslers azaleas; somehow the truck missed the center of the driveway by about 4 feet! We can’t forget Mrs. Reingolds wooden stairwell; I didn’t realize a bookcase could cause that much damage! Not to mention Mr. Grillo’s white carpets; two of our men tracked so much mud into his home that you would think a parade marched right through the living room! It hurts to think about the time when we removed over a dozen items we weren’t supposed to take from a client’s garage. That one wasn’t pretty! By the way, if anybody knows a fail proof way to explain that one to a client, please let me know.

Perhaps the most infamous screw up in company history was in our 2nd year. NBC 4 followed us around for a day to do a piece on “Going Green.” Toward the end of the segment as the camera panned the room, one of my former employees decided to dump the remainder of 409 cleaning product down the kitchen drain at the exact moment the camera focused in on him. Again, this was a segment on GOING GREEN! Simply stunning! Of course, we didn’t realize this had happened until after the segment aired and by then, there was nothing we could do. In case you’re wondering, the employee is no longer with us.

My point of this entry isn’t to point out all of our flaws — we have far too many and these blogs are meant to be short and sweet. My purpose is to admit that we are imperfect. We make mistakes. We make lots of mistakes! I’d be wary of any company that claims they don’t. But without mistakes, there’s no motivation for improvement. Every time something occurs that doesn’t fully support one of our core values, we pick it apart and we revise our systems and processes to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. When we cause damage to a client’s home, we fix it. If a client has an experience with us that is anything less than incredible, we do everything in our power to rectify the situation so that they are thrilled with the final outcome. Few things make me happier than turning a dissatisfied client into a diehard 123JUNK fan!

As I write this entry, I realize that we have many mistakes ahead of us! Although we don’t wish for them necessarily, we don’t fear them, because we know we’ll ultimately be better because of them.