(FORTUNE Magazine) – Check out this list: an eight-foot-long stuffed swordfish, 13 large porcelain Buddhas, two boxes of dried pig's ears, a ship's compass, a Bill Clinton mask, and a prosthetic leg. No, this is not an inventory of Michael Jackson's most prized belongings. Rather, those are just a few of the items that a new company called 1-800-Got-Junk? has hauled away.

Got-Junk is the brainchild of Brian Scudamore, a 33-year-old Canadian business savant who failed to earn a high school diploma and then talked his way into college only to drop out. His Vancouver company is one of the fastest-growing franchisers in North America, with 74 territories at last count--most of them in the U.S. This year alone it has added 40. Got-Junk is profitable, says Scudamore, and will post $12.6 million in revenue in 2003. "I'm pretty geeked about it," says Jeff Lazar, 29, who just launched the Detroit franchise. "This is like joining McDonald's in 1955."

And even a little like Microsoft in 1975. Rarely does one encounter a business that's as much a blend of old economy and new economy as Got-Junk. The firm's core competency--hauling away old clothing and shabby furniture--is downright Dickensian. But Got-Junk is also relentlessly modern, relying heavily on infotech and exhibiting the kind of corporate-culture tics one tends to associate with bleeding-edge startups. For his part, Scudamore claims to possess preternatural visualization skills, allowing him to see the future of his empire flicker before his eyes like a movie. "I think in pictures," he says. "It's a very strange thing."

Got-Junk has carved out a promising niche--the sweet spot between trash cans and those big green bins dropped off by companies such as Waste Management. Say someone has an entire basement piled high with musty paperbacks, eight-track tapes, and dead appliances. A Got-Junk team will clear the basement and even sweep up afterward. The company's trucks hold 15 cubic yards, equal to about half a bin, and the cost to fill a truck is around $400, including the fees for dropping the stuff at the dump, which vary from municipality to municipality. The company's average load is $238, meaning most jobs fill roughly half a truck. It also gets its share of small jobs: A dishwasher would cost roughly $75.

While Got-Junk's niche is solid, it is also one that has already been visualized by thousands of independent operators. Open up the yellow pages in any city, and there are scores of ads of the man-with-truck-will-haul-junk variety. But Scudamore is working to build a professional chain that can dominate this vast and fragmented market. "We're stepping it up," says Scudamore. "Nobody has ever built a brand in this industry." The typical indie operator drives a beat-up pickup with a hand-painted sign and shows up late in a sweaty T-shirt. Got-Junk franchisees drive late-model Ford F-450s, Nissan UD 1400s, or Isuzu NPR trucks, always in blue and white. The trucks all have identical dump boxes, manufactured to spec. Franchisees are required to wash the trucks once a day. Scudamore pulled the plug on a Calgary franchisee who drove a muddy truck with a peeling 1-800-GOT-JUNK? decal. "Do you ever see a dirty FedEx truck?" he asks, still visibly galled. "I mean, do you ever?"

The franchisees--in contrast to their indie competitors--also wear uniforms: navy slacks, royal-blue golf shirt with logo (tucked in), baseball cap, and belt and boots, which must match. Because the uniforms must be clean at all times, many franchisees bring along extra ones in case they get dirty on a job.

A uniformed guy in a freshly scrubbed truck hauling junk--that's what customers see. But a high-tech backbone runs beneath the operation. Scudamore had the foresight to snap up a toll-free number (1-800-GOT-JUNK?) that has descriptive powers to rival 1-800-FLOWERS. Roughly 1,500 calls a day flow into a phone center in Vancouver. There service reps make use of a proprietary computer program called JunkNet, which the company spent $500,000 to develop.

JunkNet makes it possible for a Vancouver service rep to book a job anywhere a franchise exists by simply entering a customer's zip code and asking a few questions. To view a given day's slate of jobs, franchisees simply open up JunkNet. If a new job comes in during the workday, the program automatically sends an alert (all the franchisees have web-enabled cellphones). Because JunkNet can crunch a slew of variables, it is also a formidable administrative tool. For example, a franchisee can use it to calculate revenue per month, the size of the average haul, or which neighborhoods are producing the most jobs.

There's also a green element to Got-Junk's business, though more by happenstance than by design. Dropping items at a recycling center tends to be free, while city dumps charge a fee. Sometimes recycling centers will even pay for certain items, such as scrap metal. Thus, franchisees have an incentive to make environmentally friendly choices--it brings down their operating costs. According to Scudamore, 40% of the stuff Got-Junk collects winds up getting recycled. Then there's the odd piece of trash that turns out to be treasure. Those are viewed as spot bonuses. One franchisee was asked to dispose of some antique rifles and wound up selling them on eBay for $120 each.

Scudamore founded the company in 1989, and he remembers his eureka moment clearly. It was three days before his 19th birthday, and he was at a McDonald's drive-thru awaiting a cheeseburger. Ahead of him was a beat-up old pickup truck, piled high with tires and twisted bicycle frames. The hand-painted sign read MARK'S HAULING. Just like that, one of Scudamore's vivid movies started to play in his brainpan. He didn't envision a chain--not just then--but instead pictured himself hauling junk to help pay his way through the University of British Columbia.

The very next day Scudamore spent $700 for a dilapidated pickup truck. In a time-tested gambit to make his business appear larger than it actually was, he named it the Rubbish Boys, even though there was only one rubbish boy. At first this was merely a summer job, netting him $1,700 in 1989. But soon he began taking more and more jobs during the school year. When his pager kept going off continually and disturbing his classmates (this was before vibrate mode), he knew it was time to drop out of college. "I was learning more about business running one than studying the subject," says Scudamore.

He tossed the name Rubbish Boys in 1998, and these days Got-Junk's headquarters are in an industrial space--raw brick, exposed pipes--along the Vancouver waterfront. No one has an office; everyone works out of cubes with low pony walls; Scudamore's dog, Grizzly, ambles about; and periodically people glide by on Razor scooters. It gives one the unmistakable impression of having wandered into the offices of a tech startup, not a junk hauler. As it happens, the space's former tenant was a dot-com that went bankrupt. Got-Junk snapped up the defunct company's office furniture for 10 cents on the dollar and supplemented it with various mismatched pieces salvaged during jobs.

One of the most conspicuous features of Got-Junk's offices--the first thing one sees upon entering--is the "Vision Wall." It contains the fruits of Scudamore's brainstorms. According to the wall, Got-Junk will have 250 franchises and $100 million in systemwide revenues by the end of 2006. "Can you imagine?" implores a legend on the wall.

Cameron Herold, 38, is Got-Junk's VP for operations, and he's a buddy of Scudamore's going way back. He buys into his boss's vision, but he also feels too earthbound and left-brained to make forays into the future. To compensate, Herold often pours a little rosemary oil onto a hot plate. Inhaling the vapors, he says, frees his mind so that he can more convincingly envision Got-Junk in the years ahead.

Together, the two old pals have done a number of visualization sessions, with Herold organically altered and Scudamore using his God-given talent. During one such session they drew up Got-Junk's future org chart, circa 2006. It contains positions that don't currently exist at the company: director of training, compliance manager, director of strategic alliances. Periodically members of Got-Junk's executive team wander through the offices of Genome Sciences Centre, the tenant occupying the space above them. Their purpose: to visualize a future when Got-Junk has expanded sufficiently that it can annex Genome Science's 10,000 square feet. "I'm already up there," says Herold.

Aspiring junk barons on visualization jags, some under the influence of rosemary oil--it's an amusing image. But it's also worth noting that visualization techniques are used to good effect by everyone from Olympic athletes to people battling serious illnesses. So why not trash kings? Scudamore claims he wrote on the Vision Wall in 1998 that he would be in North America's top 30 metro areas by the end of 2003. He is in 28 now and needs to collect only Pittsburgh and Milwaukee by year-end to make good on his vision. He also says he predicted in 2000 that he would be a guest on Oprah. That happened this past April. He has since upped the ante, visualizing appearances on Letterman and Leno by 2006. "It may sound weird," says Scudamore, "but this is a way to kind of picture and speak things into existence."

The plan for Got-Junk going forward: growth and more growth. There are no reliable numbers on the potential size of Got-Junk's market. But according to Scudamore, in a metro area where his company might have five trucks, his competitors are likely to have 95. From this he extrapolates that he has penetrated about 5% of the large metro markets. He has not even entered many second-tier markets, such as Charlotte or Las Vegas.

Yet more than anything, Scudamore pines for a worthy competitor. That may sound strange, but he appears to be in earnest. A strong competitor, he feels, would help professionalize the industry. It would also set up a clash of rival brands that would help raise awareness that this particular niche exists. "Where would McDonald's be without Burger King?" he asks. "When people ask me about competition, I say, 'Bring it on!' I'll make sure we're always on top. But our growth would be amazing if we could find someone to give us a run."