Cameron Herold and the IT head at 1-800-GOT-JUNK locked the founder-CEO out of his laptop before vacation to force him to actually disconnect. The business ran fine without him. It's a story about why leaders need to step back and trust their teams.
Dude, we got it. And we're not going to phone you if the company's on fire because you won't be able to do anything. You're on vacation. We'll call the fire department. Have a good week.
One of the things that I've realized is you look at all the things we've got to do and how busy my schedule is for a month. And the funny thing is, you go out of town, something happens. God forbid it's a bad thing, like, like a death in the family. But let's just say you leave and you, you're going to make a week out of this. You go back and you're like, wait a minute, the world didn't fall apart.
It didn't stop at all. Everything kind of worked itself out. So we did this at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Brian, the CEO and founder, was getting ready to go off on his His real first probably vacation around 2004 since I started with him in 2000. The head of IT and I decided that we were going to make Brian unplug for 7 days. So Roman, the head of IT, grabbed Brian literally as he's getting ready to go out the door and he said, I need your laptop for a second. I need to change something related to, you know, Junknet, our internal system. So he basically lied right to Brian's face. Brian opened the laptop, Roman changed the password, handed the laptop back to Brian, and he goes, you may as well leave this here right now because I've changed your password. And Brian's like, what? And he goes, Dude, we got it. And we're not going to phone you if the company's on fire because you won't be able to do anything. You're on vacation. We'll call the fire department. Have a good week. Wow. And Brian walked out the door, a little bit of nervousness, but left his laptop on the table and took his first real vacation.
