The Incompetent CEO: Why Your Employees Can’t Execute Your Vision

Imagine if your mom handed you the jigsaw puzzle when you're 12 years old and all of the pieces of the puzzle were red, like a 5,000-piece puzzle with red pieces. You'd have no idea where to start. That's like running a company today. Your employees need to have a vision for what you're building, and the vision is not a one-sentence statement. It's not a mission statement. I'm going to talk to you about the most important concept you need inside of your company, and it's called the Vivid Vision. The concept is like If you're the entrepreneur in the room, I'm going to list 11 traits of entrepreneurs. As soon as you hear 5 traits that describe you, I'd like you to stand up. So here are the 5 traits. Are you often filled with energy? Does your mind get flooded with ideas? Are you driven? Are you restless? Are you unable to keep still? That's 5. Okay, we're at 5 out of 5 with 70% of the room. Are you often working on little sleep? Do you get euphoric? Do you get easily irritated by minor obstacles? Do you burn out periodically? Do you act out sexually? There's a couple people standing up on their chairs. And do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision? So take a look around the room right now because you all stood up to the traits of bipolar disorder. I'm not making fun of bipolar. My oldest son was clinically diagnosed with bipolar. They since removed the designation, but he spent some time in the psych ward in Vancouver with a hypomanic episode. I have 11 of the 11 traits of bipolar disorder. Most entrepreneurs are very far off to the end of the spectrum on bipolar. By the way, you can't be on the spectrum or off the spectrum. The spectrum is a spectrum. So you're all on the spectrum, either at one end or the other. But most entrepreneurs are very bipolar. If you said yes to 9, 10, or 11 of the traits, you would probably be clinically diagnosed as bipolar and often medicated for it. I also have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder. My wife was saying if I was paying attention during the testing, it would have been 18 for 18. Entrepreneurs are hardwired differently, and we need to understand how to actually leverage some of that. I joined 1-800-GOT-JUNK as employee number 14. When I walked into the head office, there were only 14 employees. I was number 14. Brian had just sold his 12th location. And when I left 6 and a half years later, there were 3,100 employees system-wide. We went from $2 million to $106 million in revenue. We were very profitable. We'd landed 5,200 stories in the media about us, including being on Oprah. We ranked as the number 2 company in Canada to work for, twice ranked number 1 in BC to work for. Who's here has heard of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Put your hands up. Okay. If I was doing this presentation 20 years ago, none of you would have known the company. I started in the home services industry in 1986. This is a photo of me with the very first CollegePro yellow vehicle in Canada. So CollegePro, what a lot of people don't know, was the largest residential house painting company on the planet. Every year at the head office, we had to go out and recruit, hire, and train 800 university students to be franchisees. And then in 6 weeks, those 800 franchisees who were all between 19 and 23 years old had to go out and recruit, hire, and train 8,000 students to paint houses. And then from May 1st till August 31st, in 4 months, 17 weeks, we did $64 million of house painting. September 1st, 8,800 kids quit and went back to school. The 60 of us at the head office got drunk. We got really fucking drunk. Then we would wake up September 2nd and we would do it again. So imagine having to hire and train and build a company with 8,800 new people every year. And I was in the top 30 people of that organization globally, as was Igor at one point as well. So we came from the same background, the same DNA. These are the systems that I used to scale 1-800-GOT-JUNK. These are the systems that I've used to help Tommy Mello with A1 Garage Doors, with Nurse Next Door, all the companies globally that I've coached are these systems I learned back in the college pro days. I highly recommend you all get the book Vivid Vision or the book Double Double. And chapter 1 of Double Double covers the Vivid Vision concept. It is the starting point of what really helped Brian and I scale 1-800-GOT-JUNK. If you haven't already signed up for my online training where I cover the 12 essential leadership skills for anyone who manages people, go check out investinyourleaders.com/ch. Close to 5,000 leaders are already going through my content. Brian and I learned the concept 2 years before I joined him. 120 entrepreneurs in Vancouver were invited to a lunch with a high-performance sports psychologist. About 20 of us went, part of the Entrepreneurs Organization, or EO, and we learned this concept together. I was building an auto body chain which is now called Boyd Auto Body. It's called Gerber in the United States. I was a partner in Boyd. It's now the largest collision repair chain on the planet. So you can kind of see the theme here. These systems help scale large, well-known brands. The starting point is like a jigsaw puzzle. Imagine if your mom handed you the jigsaw puzzle when you're 12 years old and all of the pieces of the puzzle were red, like a 5,000-piece puzzle with red pieces. You'd have no idea where to start. That's like running a company today. Your employees need to have a vision for what you're building, and the vision is not a one-sentence statement. It's not a mission statement. I'm going to talk to you about the most important concept you need inside of your company, and it's called the Vivid Vision. The concept is like looking into a crystal ball, and I know that sounds a little bit woo-woo, but just play with me on this one. Every single high-performance athlete, every Olympian uses visualization in this sport, whether it's the high jumper standing off to the back of the track with their eyes closed, picturing themselves going up over the bar Or the gymnast who walks around the floor and pauses at each spot on the floor and pictures herself doing part of her routine. Or the downhill skier at the top of the mountain with his eyes closed, kind of skiing the actual course and picturing themselves. They use visualization so that when they're in the moment of performing, they can perform completely on instinct. Now, you're lucky coming out of the kind of home services space, because in this presentation in 1998, where we learned the concept of vision, we had to come up with one industry that used visualization every day. And the one that we came up with was home builders. Who is the CEO of a new home being built? The homeowner, right? The homeowner is the CEO. Now, if the homeowner is the CEO of getting their home built, how many of those CEOs have any skill at building the home? Fucking none. Not a single homeowner knows how to build the home, right? So you have an incompetent CEO hiring a second in command who is the general contractor. Now the key is for the general contractor to understand the vision of what they want built, and for the CEO to say, I have confidence that you can now make my vision come true. You could hand $2 million to the contractor and say, build me my dream home, and leave for a year and come back and you go, what did you build me? Because it doesn't look like what I wanted. So the contractor has to get inside of the mind of the owner. The problem that we have with entrepreneurs, with all of us in the room or outside, is that our employees can't read our mind. You have an idea of what you want your meetings to be like. You have an idea of what you want your customer service experience to be like. You have an idea of what you want the job sites to be like. You have an idea of what you want your dashboards to look like and your culture, but they can't read your freaking mind. So how do we get them to understand what we're building. The vivid vision becomes a 4 or 5-page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years in the future so that your employees can reverse engineer that 5-page document and figure out a way to make every sentence come true. That's what you're going to start with in scaling your company. When I joined Brian in October of 2000, he handed me what he called his painted picture, which was his vivid vision. I read it and I said, oh, I totally know how to do this. He goes, good, because I have no idea. But I'd already built Boyd Auto Body. I'd already built College Pro Painters. I knew how to scale a franchise company. I just needed to know his vision so that I could put the plans and the systems in place to make his vision come true. But if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. I was speaking with one of your members, Brad Gordon, this morning, and I was asking him what's the vision of where he wants to take his company. If I know what his vision is, I could help him get there. But if I don't know where his vision is, I could take him in a completely different direction. Make sense? The same as you could have the smartest employees in the room, but if they don't know where you want to go, they could all be going in the wrong direction, which is why they're driving you crazy.