Cameron Herold argues companies grow faster by obsessing over one or two core priorities instead of spreading effort thin. Redirect Health focused solely on Google reviews and accumulated 3,000 five-star ratings. 1-800-GOT-JUNK spent years on PR and people development, generating 5,200 press stories and sustained growth.
Questions this video answers
About 3,000 five-star Google reviews.
About 5,200 individual unique stories.
Eight years.
He says "something like 70 or 80%" of the world's low-earth satellites are Starlink.
Chapters
True growth in an organization does not come from doing more. Let me explain that. Growth does not come from doing more. It comes from working on the critical few things versus the important many. Remember back in grade school, you heard that saying that momentum creates momentum. It's not more that creates momentum. It's momentum that creates momentum. So what does that mean? Well, Jim Collins in his book Good to Great talked about the concept of the flywheel. So the flywheel is a in used in the manufacturing business. It's actually a physical object in every manufacturing plant as part of the big manufacturing machinery. The flywheel is a huge, massive, heavy metal disc. And that metal disc, as it turns, starts to turn some of the engines. Well, our job in a manufacturing company and in your business is to get that flywheel to turn faster and faster. So here's how it works. It's by figuring out what are the one or two core things in your business that if you put all of your energy behind them, that flywheel will start to turn. Maybe you push on it for a day and it turns once. You push on it for another day, it turns twice. You push on it for another full day, it turns four times. Push on it for another day, it turns eight times, and the momentum starts to turn in your favor. Right. The more energy that you put into it, you're pushing on something that's already going quickly. It'd be like pushing a car. As it's already starting to roll, it will start to roll faster and faster. So your job inside of the company as a COO or as a leader or even as an entrepreneur, is to find the one or two core things that if you focus on, if you push on them, that momentum will create momentum. Right. So real growth is not by working on lots of things. It's by finding the one or two things to push really hard until the momentum spins in your favor. Very much like launching a satellite. It takes a lot of energy to get that satellite up into orbit, and then it just goes around forever for free. Right. I think Elon Musk now with Starlink, has got something like 70 or 80% of the world's low earth satellites are starlinks. There's a lot of effort to get them there, but once they're there, they pay dividends forever. So your job is to figure out what are the satellites to focus on that you can push up into orbit. I'll give you a couple examples from clients that I've worked with in the past and how they're paying dividends for them today. And how? It's not about doing lots of stuff, it's about working on those core critical few things. One example that comes to mind is Redirect Health. So Redirect Health was one of the very first COO alliance members. They came to the very first COO alliance event we ever had. Their coo, Guy Berry, is still a member eight years later of the CEO alliance. Back in the early days, they had almost no Google reviews for Redirect Health. Well, if you look up Redirect Health right now, Redirect Health, you'll see something like 3,000 five star Google reviews. But they worked very hard in the early days, finding a way to get every client as they walked out the door to go and leave a Google review, knowing that if they have 3,000 five star Google reviews, none of their potential clients are going anywhere else. So it took a lot of effort on that one thing, but now that one thing pays dividends for year after year after year. Back in the 1-800-GET junk days, I decided that we had to raise our prices, turn our company into a cult, and generate free press because PR would actually grow the business because we didn't have any money for marketing. So we started landing articles in the media. We landed a Bloomberg article that got us into 43 newspapers. We landed an Associated Press article that got us into 170 newspapers over six years. We ended up landing 5,200 individual unique stories. About 1, 800 got junk because we focused on the critical few things. And one of those few things was getting lots of press. The other minor thing that I worked on that I was obsessed about for six years was growing the skills of my people. So I just kept giving them more skills. I kept certifying them in skills. I kept giving them more and more leadership skills, knowing that if I grew the skills of my people, they could do more. So it wasn't by doing more, it was by doing less and focusing on those critical few things that true growth comes.
