O2E Brands

O2E stands for Ordinary to Exceptional: the company takes ordinary home services and turns them into exceptional experiences. O2E Brands first began in 1989 when Brian Scudamore invested $700 in an old pickup truck to start a junk removal business. Today, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has 160 franchises across North America and Australia and recorded over $400 million in system-wide revenue in 2020. This brand also led Scudamore to two new brands, WOW 1 DAY PAINTING and Shack Shine.

Based in Vancouver, Canada, O2E Brands centralizes business technology resources for its global franchises, including online booking engines and call centers, field service management, marketing, and accounting services. As the world’s largest junk removal service and operator of two other brands, leveraging a scalable WebOps platform is paramount to the brands’ continued success. 

Challenge: Image at Risk

Image

The WebOps team is dedicated to enabling high conversion rates and user satisfaction, requiring the continual analysis of user behavior and optimizing the funnels that drive visitors to the scheduling websites. But with the legacy web platform, the team spent its time in firefighting mode to keep the site running. With little time to optimize a failing platform, the team left a lot of customer value on the table.  

The small team supported 10 sites and ran each as a separate instance in the public cloud. These instances depended on the web team’s active involvement to resolve daily service interruptions and frequent downtime. The team also had to keep Drupal CMS up to date, even though their Drupal version was reaching end of life and the legacy host required time-consuming manual application of core Drupal updates. 

Previously, our website hosting was managed internally on a legacy platform. Our team’s capacity was being taken up by managing incidents and outages. The instability was putting our brand image at risk."

- Lisa Matthews, Scrum Master at O2E Brands

Approach: From Uncertainty to Stability

The web team needed to make a major change and began researching new platforms. A couple of team members had positive experiences with Pantheon and added it to their shortlist. Pantheon provided 100% of the team’s must-have requirements as well as expert Drupal support, industry leadership, and ease of use. The Diamond Tier 24-hour guaranteed support was another big draw. 

Migrating Drupal sites from the legacy host went very smoothly. Ed Alvarez, Senior Drupal Developer at O2E Brands, said, “Migrating all of our sites was a large undertaking, and we didn’t want to do it completely in-house. We had a really good experience with Pantheon’s migrations team. The process ran much smoother and was much less stressful than we expected, and the support was amazing.” 

Pantheon immediately improved reliability by delivering 99.99% uptime and improved efficiency with automated deployment and workflows. Pantheon also greatly improved security. The dashboard presents security issues at a glance, so the team can efficiently resolve any problems. The platform automates security certificate renewals to minimize security vulnerabilities and automates backups to keep data safe against loss or corruption. 

The team also benefited from Pantheon’s integrated content delivery network, Global CDN, powered by Fastly. O2E Brands used the Cloudflare CDN on its previous platform, but having to manage a separate configuration themselves cost the team time and resources. 

Advanced Global CDN with its web application firewall optimized for Drupal, which performs a deep inspection on each data packet, made it simple to reduce the security risk to the CMS and boost uptime and performance, plus it freed up much of the full-time employees’ valuable time. 

Before Pantheon, we spent days with our IT operations team securing our cloud site against attacks. Advanced Global CDN provides a robust out-of-the-box firewall protecting us from most attacks. We haven't had a single breach since implementing Advanced Global CDN with WAF."

- Ed Alvarez, Senior Drupal Developer at O2E Brands

Pantheon also supports Drupal core updates and sub-versioning features, which lets the team quickly and securely deploy CMS updates into the production environment. 

Results: Innovate for Increased Revenue

Efficient monthly core updates produce exceptional time savings of 80% — over doing manual updates on the legacy system, and creating a sandbox to test new code used to take at least half a day. With Pantheon, it takes only 5 minutes. That’s a 98% time savings. Pantheon also supports the rapid innovation that drives brand expansion. 

For example, during cold months, Shack Shine’s house detailing services see declines in sales. The marketing team wanted to quickly roll out a new Christmas light installation offering workflow to boost revenue. In the past, creating sites and new service scheduling would have taken weeks. With Pantheon, the web team used Multidev to fulfill Marketing’s request quickly, and the Christmas light installation services went live in time for the holiday season. The web team easily kept up its regular maintenance and development schedule while creating the new major offering feature. 

Ed Alvarez said, “Multidev lets us easily create sandboxes to stage new features and show them to our internal clients. Once they approve the new features, we easily merge them into our main code, and the client has the new features they want.” 

Uptime also improved to above 99.99%, virtually eliminating downtime incidents since migrating from the legacy site to Pantheon. The change improved O2E Brands’ image and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each quarter. 

Advanced Global CDN with WAF improved security, minimized risk, and saved time. Global CDN freed up hours of admin time and saved significant money over the previous expensive CDN account. Automated Backups provided additional security and peace of mind. 

Before Pantheon, we had a lot of management overhead. Pantheon enabled us to upgrade to a world-class WebOps platform. It wasn’t only a matter of leaving an unstable platform and inefficient process but also modernizing our whole approach. It was a win for our WebOps team, O2E Brands stakeholders, and our customers."

- Ed Alvarez, Senior Drupal Developer at O2E Brands