Cameron Herold raised prices 40% across 12 locations in one week to fix an unprofitable business model. He built a magnetic company culture and systematically pitched media outlets for free coverage. These three moves, he says, can turn around a struggling business in a year.
Chapters
I'll give you the 3 things that I came in and did with the organization in the first year that really propelled the growth. The first one was I came in with Brian and I said, no one's making money. You're not making money. The franchisees aren't making money. The guys in the trucks aren't making money. We're paying the call center minimum wage. This whole model kind of sucks. So we're going to need to increase our prices. And we raised our prices by 40% across the board in a single week. Every one of the 12 locations raised their prices by by 40%. Number 2 was I said, if we're going to have this great growth, we have to attract people. We have to attract customers, attract suppliers, attract franchisees, and attract great employees. And to do that, we have to be a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. We have to get into this zone of a cult. We have to build a company culture that is so magnetic that we pull people towards us. So we created a cult-like work environment, and there's systems that we can put in place to do that. And then number 3 was we had no money for marketing, but we understood how to go to the press and get the media to talk about us, whether it was newspaper, magazines, you know, bloggers, radio, TV, Oprah. So we put systems in place to phone the media and tell them about the future or the vivid vision of our organization and get them to write about us.
