Conversation between Sunny Verma and Cameron Herold (recorded Feb 20, 2019) exploring leadership and entrepreneurship. Herold describes mixed nature of leadership (innate traits + learned skills), contrasts leadership styles (quiet/Level 5 vs charismatic like Jobs/Welch), discusses franchisee vs employee leadership (‘sell them, don’t tell them’), and gives practical advice (apprenticeships at strong culture companies). He also recounts scaling 1-800-GOT-JUNK: joined Oct 2000 with 14 head-office staff; after 6.5 years the system had ~330 franchisees, ~3,100 employees, operating in 330 cities, 46 states, 9 provinces, and 4 countries.
Questions this video answers
Joined October 2000; 14 people at the head office (including call center).
After 6.5 years the system had ~330 franchisees and ~3,100 employees system-wide, operating in 330 cities, 46 states, 9 provinces, and 4 countries.
Chapters
So Cameron, I was just opening up about how we kind of know each other. Long story short, Cameron was the seat. Can I tell the story? Yeah. Cameron is. Was the former CEO of 1-800-God Junk. His last day with the company was my first day. So kind of two ships crossing in the night. And we stayed in contact since then. Somebody that I, you know, confide in gives me good feedback on things as I'm trying to grow my business in the way that he's been known to grow businesses. I wanted to. There was a lot of things that I could have asked you about when Jordan and I were sitting down, being like, what should the theme of our conversation with Cameron be? We chose leadership because, remind me, I don't want to misquote stats. When you joined the company, they were at how many employees? And then what did it scale to over how long a period of time?
Yeah, When I joined In October of 2000, there were 14 people at the head office, including the call center. And when I left and there were 12 franchisees. And then when I left six and a half years later, we had 330 franchisees and we had around 3100 employees system wide. We ended up operating in 330 cities, 46 states, nine provinces, and four countries when I left.
So anybody that's, you know, this message and my time with Cameron isn't just for entrepreneurs. It's anybody that's working within a team, leading a team. And before I get into my first question, it's going to be a loaded one and we're going to pick it apart and kind of work backwards from there. Cameron, I've yet to receive the new book, yet I've placed my orders, but I looked around my office and I found two of them. There was the Miracle Morning, but then there's this one. This is the Viv Vision 1. Truth be told, this one's actually my favorite. Not to discredit the other ones, but there's a quote on the back of it from Simon Sinek and it says, Walt Disney had Roy Disney, Herb Kelleher had Roland King, and every entrepreneur with dreams of making it big has Cameron Herald. So not bad, right? You got a picture of her looking pretty presidential. So I got a couple questions asked me before, so I'm going to dive into those later. If anybody has any questions for Cameron, let me know. I got somebody writing them down. We'll get to them. Every Monday night, I'm interviewing people that are interesting, have a good story to tell that I feel people can learn from. And none other than Cameron Herald is with me today. My first question, Cameron, on leadership. Are people born leaders or do those skill sets develop over time?
I think it's a little bit of both. I was actually asked a very similar question this morning. Someone asked me if entrepreneurs are born or bred. And I kind of covered that in a Talk that's on Ted.com, i did a talk, one of the very first TedX talks, but it's on the main TED website. And I said it's kind of like thing one and thing two. I think that in leadership you have core traits, behavioral traits that you are either born with or you get very, very early on that put you in that leadership, you know, mindset or in those traits. But you just start exhibiting as a child. You can see kids in very young age, like in kindergarten, in grade one, that are leading other kids in the classroom. Right. But then there's traits that you develop as leaders. A lot of the introspection, a lot of the emotional intelligence traits I think are traits that you groom over time. And you can learn how to be a better leader. But I think you have some core traits and you can learn how to really amplify them.
Different individuals have different methods of leading. There's the silent leader, you know, you see in sports sometimes. But then there's the vocal A type personality leaders. Is one better than the other?
I don't think they're better. I mean, Jim Collins in his book Good to Great kind of talked about that Level 5 leadership idea with a personal humility and the drive to win. That's one leader. And then you have that kind of the cult of leadership style leader. Right. The Jack Welch, the Steve Jobs. I think they both lead. People can lead either from their own work, their own efforts, lead by example, or they can lead by being cheerleaders, they can lead by being coaches. It just depends on that person's innate style. The part of leading is how do you get results through others. My focus on me being a great leader is always trying to grow people. I've always felt the more that I grow people, the more the company will grow. So I'm always trying to give skills and give kind of the cheat sheets and trying to help people in the roles. And I've always felt if I can remove obstacles and help people do better in their jobs, that's what will scale the company. So I'm less of a cheerleading rah rah coach and more of a growing people coach comes from somebody you know.
It is from Sunny Verma so unnnyvtv, how does leadership style change when dealing with franchisees versus employees, if at all?
It does. So franchisees are tough because you can't fire them. You're kind of locked into a relationship. So my mantra and I learned this when we built Boyd Auto Body and Gerber Auto Collision, which was prior to 1-800-got- junk, was sell them, don't tell them. And my partner and the CEO of the company, Terry Smith, used to say, sell them, don't tell them. And it was all around, how do we convince our franchisees? How do we get them to buy in? How do we get them aligned versus holding them accountable or telling them to do something? With employees, you can always default to telling them, but then again, it doesn't work as well as selling them as well. So I think it probably aligns that you can do the same thing, but with franchisees you can never tell them what to do.
If one is thinking about entrepreneurship and going off leaving their company, where should they go to learn about how to build their first build their team and make their first few hires? Like, not like where should they recruit from, but where should they go to find kind of the methodologies or frameworks to follow?
Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking to someone the other day about this and I said if I was a student, I would not go to college. I would actually go find five really strong culture companies, offer myself out to work for them at minimum wage or whatever they could afford to pay me. And I would work there for four one year stints at four different companies. I would graduate from that four years with no debt and some incredible experience, connections. And I have had just as much fun partying with all the younger people at all those companies as I would have at college. So where I would go to learn is from a little bit of the experience. And the reality is like these days of apprenticing, you know, apprenticing used to be the way you learned everything. I don't know why we've forgotten that. That's a huge option out there. Awesome, Karen, thanks.
