Work-Life Balance Has Never Been This Easy! | Aaron Amuchastegui (Podcast 323)

We wanted to turn our company into a cult. And I really want the organization to understand that to really grow quickly, you had to be slightly more than a business, slightly less than a religion. You had to be in that zone of a cult. Are you finding it increasingly challenging to strike that perfect balance between your work and personal life, especially in the era of remote work? In this episode, I share tips on various critical subjects, from the delicate art of harmonizing work and family life to the transformative force of a vivid vision for business growth. During this conversation, you'll learn strategies for maintaining work life balance, crafting a powerful vision for your company's future, and understanding the can youn Imagine Wall concept, a key to igniting employee driven innovation. By the end of this episode, you'll be armed with invaluable knowledge on proven strategies for achieving that elusive work life balance, even in the realm of remote work. Harnessing the potent magic of vivid vision to rally your team and supercharge business growth. Fostering a culture of innovation through the intriguing can you imagine wall staying relentlessly positive and focused no matter the challenges that come your way? Expert tips for strategic hiring and retooling your business for unprecedented success. Take these insights, apply them in your daily life and watch your communication and business skills flourish.

Cameron, how's it going man? Where are you at today?

Aaron, thanks very much for having me on. And by the way, if we're people are watching right now or seeing any clips from this later as well, I am sitting in my bed. I am in Scottsdale, Arizona under this quarantine right now. I'm also in recovery from my hip replacement. I got my hip replaced 10 days ago. So that's why I'm actually working from bed today. But I do have, you know, proper outfit on and I'm engaged. So if you see the pillow behind me, that's why.

Dude, that's a great like zoom etiquette even just to start with, right? Like, so Cameron is sitting in bed post knee replacement, but he's dressed up, he's like ready for the interview. We've seen so many jokes lately of people like entering their zoom call, like not showering, showing up for work. Cameron, so you're, you're stuck in Scottsdale. You're, you know, you're kind of, you're 10 days in from recovery. And it seems like lately a bunch of people have been reaching out to you on social media, you know, asking you what to do right now. Like you, you lead leaders, you've got, you run the CEO alliance. There's so many different things that you help and people are asking you, like how to lead. What should we do for your business? What's the biggest question people are asking this week?

They're starting to ask questions around sales and marketing and how do we do sales and marketing? When our prospects nervous or scared, is it wrong to be out doing sales and marketing? But they're starting to think towards that. The last two weeks, there was an awful lot of questions related to damage control and risk mitigation and expenses. And this on do I lay off or do I furlough or do I pay people? What do we do? And then there was also a lot of the fear stuff. So I actually even coach a CEO with a hundred employees over in Milan, Italy. So they're in the geo hotspot for coronavirus in Italy right now. I've been talking to him a lot over the last month and just gotten the insights from them too that I've been sharing with clients.

Wow. The coaching someone in the center of Milan and yeah, that's. It kind of sounds like that's the evolution people have. Like, beginning of last week, we kind of got into. Into that damage control panic mode of like, what if we lose a bunch of subscribers? What if we lose a bunch of customers? You know, what do we have? So we kind of looked at our costs and said, all right, what would we have to cut? What do we have to do if we have to sustain for six months?

Well, and this was a discussion I had with the CEO recently. She had 65 employees and she was talking about all of her cost cutting. And I said, what revenue ideas have you come up with? She goes, oh, we have any time for that? I'm like, so what marketing have you been doing in the last 10 days? Okay, I haven't had time for that. I'm like, so wait, you're worried your business is going to shrink because of this and you're finding all the areas to cut. If that's all you focus on, your business will shrink. You've never gone two weeks without doing sales and marketing and business developments in your history. Why would you stop now? But people tend to get so panicked and restricted that they don't even notice they're taking their eye off that revenue ball. And then the second discussion I had this week with a client, he's got about 85 employees based in near Detroit. We were talking and he said that his average. The average business in his industry will shrink by 30% this year. So he was putting in plans in place to you know, be able to manage through that 30% contraction. And I said, well, you know, where are you on the body mass index against Americans? He goes, I'm in the top 1% on health. I'm like, how about in terms of wealth? He goes, I'm totally in the top 1% on wealth. I said, and how about your business? How does it do against all the other businesses in your industry? He goes, definitely top 5%, top 10%. So if you're in the top 1 to 10% on everything, why are you preparing to be average on the way your business operates this year? Why don't you plan to be? Because to be minus 30 on average, that means some have to be minus 50, some have to be minus 70, some have to go bankrupt, some have to be minus 10, some probably have to be plus 30. Choose to be in that group that goes plus 30. But if he goes, he goes, let us start talking about it. We then spent almost 90 minutes that's talking about how to do acquisitions during this time right now, how to actually drive sales and marketing with this team, how to grow salespeople skills. It was mind blowing. And now he's got his entire leadership team focused on growing this year while everybody else is slow.

I think that is such huge thing for any of our listeners out there right now. And it was, it was the same trap that I fell into. So for the first few days last week it was like that. And I think Wednesday I woke up and said, okay, I've done the damage control, now I know I can survive. But how about thrive? Like, let's start reaching out to our people proactively. We did a webinar on Friday and there was hundreds of people that stayed on for two hours. And it was like, wow, that was the best webinar we've ever done. At a time when people have questions, they need answers, they need us more than ever.

But I think if you're out there proactively at any business, but for the most part, most business and services still need to go on. If you had a big market three weeks ago, you certainly still have one today. But if you don't keep keep going on the sales and marketing, you're not going to know that you're there or retooling your business right now. It's a great time to retool. It's a great time to work on all your sops and, and systemize everything in process street. It's a great time to clean house, clean your warehouses, clean your offices, clean your desks. Clean your filing systems, delete old files. Like, imagine if you just spent two weeks where you never time to do all this deep cleaning. Imagine you spent one to two weeks deep cleaning. Send employees into the office, one or two a day to just clean their space out. Or how about training our people? You know, we often have the excuse, oh, I don't have time to train my people. Well, now you have time. So imagine if you train them on interviewing, train them effective meetings, train them on email management, train them on time management, et cetera. If you could really work on skill development right now, you can come out of this strong too.

Yeah. Investing so much on, on like that skill development and then really taking advantage of the time. Like, I don't know what the number is for the amount of commuting time that people are saving right now. So we're not in the car. You know, even though people have to get used to working from home and like communicating remotely and working from remotely, there's an opportunity for things to become more productive, right?

Oh, yeah. I think this is going to be. There's. There's going to be a couple of huge quantum shifts that come out of this space. The first is I think all of the companies are always against telecommuting, always against working from home, pretty quickly figuring out that it actually can work. So it's really going to open up for every company, for the most part, the ability to have remote teams, remote employees, fractional employees, offshore employees. That changes the global landscape of employment. It also changes the global landscape of commercial office, leasing office space. But I think we're going to see companies that have never, ever, ever considered it strongly starting to have that as part of their culture or their DNA going forward.

Yeah, you know, I've had businesses that everyone worked remotely. I've had businesses that we all worked in an office, and I've never had the hybrid. And coming out of this more recently was realizing, like, there's pros and cons to both. Like, when all of us are face to face and we have that energy and we're excited, like working on things together, it can grow things. But when we're working remotely, we can work more efficiently. There's less distraction. We can, you know, focus on different projects. And I think when we come back into this, my teams are going to be a hybrid of a couple days a week at the office, couple of days a week at home. I think everybody's going to appreciate that as we get through there. One big thing, like, you are like the king of culture, right? Yeah, Every. Every time I'd gone to the workshops with you, it's been about building culture. Building that company where everybody wants to be on the bus. Right. And we toured a bunch of cool offices in Scottsdale and saw that step. What do you think happens with culture in this time? You know, when people are working remotely, you can't have the fun stuff on the office walls to build culture the same way. Do you have any ideas or tips.

For guy this build culture? Interesting timing. So I just got off a coaching call coaching a client in Detroit. He's got about 100 employees. He runs a manufacturing shop and I was talking to him about culture. While they're basically in shutdown, he's fully paying all of his employees for three months, full salaries, paying them all, decided to make good on it, and he's blown their minds. While they are gone, he's redoing the internal office space. So he's got it all being repainte painted and redecaled and all freshened up so they come back to a cool space. Great time to do that. Second thing is we talked about what could he be sending them twice a week that would help make their lives better? So he's already taken care of the financial side, but what about health? Could he send them meal plans once or twice a week? Could he buy them all, you know, crock bar cookbooks and send them out to all of his people? Could he send videos of cooking stuff? Could he send out activities to do with kids, activities to do with your spouse, activities to do with your friend while remote? Like could he start creating some fun content to share with these? His employees wouldn't expect that at all. And then we also talked about when they come back to work, what's one activity we can put in place that's new, that's never been done before, that the employees will have fun at and can engage in kind of getting some fresh air and some activity. So if you think about Detroit, what are some of the sports that Detroit might be known for?

Yeah, I'm from West coast and now, and now Texas, so I'm not the right answer for that.

Well, so you might not. So hockey is what Detroit, Detroit people are known for. Hockey. Right. Detroit Red Wing, one of the original six hockey teams. They've got baseball and football like everybody else, but they're one of the true hardcore NHL cities. Right. The Motor City. So we talked about just go get two road hockey nets and ten road hockey sticks. Imagine if you create a little road hockey league within your company where One game was played every day of the week and the teams are made up of a mishmash of some manufacturing people, some finance people, some salespeople and some marketing people. Become a team. So you forced him to start hanging out and getting to know each other, so he's going to do something like that. And I think it's just looking for ways to connect with your employees and know that they matter. Making sure they know that they matter is going to be more important than ever. And making sure that we're aware that, you know, they have extended family that they're worried about. Right. They've got a mom or a dad who's 79 years old that they might be worried about, or they've got a cousin who's, you know, immunocompromised they might be worried about, et cetera.

There. I mean, there was really so much to unpack right there. Right. Like, part of company culture and building is taking people from those different departments and having them work together towards something that they normally wouldn't, adding some fun back into the workplace, especially when we're going to be coming back after a time of this concern and things like that. You know, one of the things that I've seen you perform on stage before, maybe in a group, is kind of. It's that triangle of needs, right? Like a people's basic needs. And at the top, I think, is first, they need safety, right? They need shelter, they need to know where they're going to live, they knew where they're going to eat. And it's like he's attacking that first. And leaders. We have the opportunity right now, with people around us, whether it's family, friends, employees, you know, to make sure that they feel safe. Like how we lead during this time, they created a totally different culture.

And the other thing our employees are looking for more than ever right now in culture is the followers want to follow and it's time for leaders to lead. They want leaders who are connected with reality, so we can't be so oblivious to the fact that we're in a crisis. But they need to have positive and some momentum and some forward motion to go after. So it's kind of like being empathetic to where we are. It's like, we're not going to talk about it all the time. We get it, there's a pandemic, we're in it, we got it. And let's put that aside for the week. We'll talk about it like we know we're there, but to talk about it all the time is pointless. Well, now let's talk about growing our company, taking care of our people, growing ourselves, growing our systems. Where are we headed? Cutting expenses? Acquisitions. When your competition is drowning, stick a hose in their mouth. But that's where we need to be focusing on, was the go forward plan. But it needs to be done by a leader who is calm, focused, energetic, and still connecting with reality, but not obsessed with talking about it all the time.

That's super good advice for everybody out there right now, right? It's.

No, it's kind of like just. Just for a second, I think about my mom when she was dying. She was. Was terminally ill with cancer for six years. She didn't want to keep talking about the fact she was dying. We all knew she was dying, and she felt like. So to ask her how she's feeling after chemo and radiation. She want to talk about that. She want to talk about what we were into, what we were doing. It was fun. And where we were going and what our plans were going to be and memories of our past lives. Don't want to talk about all that other shit. Totally.

It's. You're right. It's all over the news. It's all over everything. It becomes all part of family conversations and everything that's there. But, yeah, by now, everyone, it's kind of like originally that. That triangle is like, hey, people need, you know, shelter, safety, food. And then they get to start adding in these different things with the pandemic like this. At first it's like, all right, protect yourself. Put your oxygen mask on first. Make sure you can grow. But then don't take the ball off the prize. Let's still talk about the fun, exciting stuff. What are the shifts that we can do out of this and how can we. Like, what's the fun stuff? What's the good news going on in the world? It's kind of like whatever you focus on, you know, grows. Whatever. Yeah, whatever.

Where you focus, where your focus goes, energy flows. And that's. That's something that I actually learned even going through my hip replacement surgery was. I was told by the doctor I also had to get some dental stuff done. And they said, don't get that dental work done right now because your body will be trying to heal two spots and it won't know what to do. I'm like, wow, interesting. Like, your body intuitively knows heal the damaged spot. So that my focus is sending all this energy down to my hip. But if I had two focal points in my body that Needed work. The body gets all confused and goes into shock.

So the 1, 800 got junk. You know, one of the big things that you did the. You took it from 2 million to like 100 million. As the CEO there, they were actually at my house a few hours ago. So out here in Austin, there they've been my go to for the quick little thing. A great example of like a franchise that grows, that has that around there. You know, when it comes to like, businesses that you've built and grown, is there like one or two big things you learned with those with the big companies that you think everybody should strive for?

Oh, for sure.

And.

And by the end, we took it to 106 million just because I don't want to shortcut myself that last six. Are there some things that I've learned, John? Do you want to go failure learned lessons or just.

Let's start with that? Yeah, the failure lessons are the big ones.

Let me tell you the three things just so I don't forget them. The three big things that we did to make sure that we scaled the company. So when I came in, we had 14 employees at the head office. We were doing about 2 million in sales. And I focused the company around three core things. Number one was to drastically raise our prices by about 40%. We went from $338 for a full truck to $438 a full truck overnight. And I said, look, we're not making any money and our franchisees aren't making any money, so let's raise our prices. And if people don't use us, well, we're no worse off because we're not making any money anyway. We can't deliver a great service like we want to and have a great brand like we want to. And I'll make money if we don't charge enough. So we have to be the Starbucks of junk removal or the FedEx of junk removal. We have to raise prices. And Brian, the CEO, pushed back a little bit, but was smart enough to just trust me on this one. And we went for it. And it was huge for us because it gave us all that extra margin to run with. And sure enough, all of our competitors started to raise their prices as well. And we set a whole new bar for the industry that was actually profitable. Second thing was we wanted to turn our company into a cult. And I really want the organization to understand that to really grow quickly, you had to be slightly more than a business, slightly less than a religion. You had to be in that zone of a cult. And it was because we'd always need more great people. More great people. More great people. The culture is what was going to allow us to bring those people into the organization quickly. And then thirdly, it was PR and it was how much free press coverage could we get about our company? Because the more press coverage that we got, anytime our competitor was ever mentioned, we would be mentioned with them and our customers and our suppliers and our potential employees would believe everything they read in the media much more than they would believe what we told them to be true. So those were really the three core pillars that we built the organization off of. We ended up landing 5,200 stories about our company in the media over a six year period. We went on to become the number two company in all of Canada to work for. And our pricing is probably another 10 or 15, 20% higher than it was when I left after building it for six years. So we're in that zone of world class brand. They're at about 450 million in revenue now. I've been gone for 13 years, so there's still scaling on the failure side. We almost lost the company at one point. At one point we had been growing so quickly. Opened up in Australia, opened up in the UK, opened 13 corporate locations, paid $600,000 in bonuses, spent $800,000 on a reno, about a million dollars in taxes that were owed. We sucked a whole bunch of cash out of our bank accounts to pay cash for it all. Thinking you just so you do when you're a company. We didn't understand how to run a big company, but we've become one. You know, we had 3,000 employees system wide. We had 250 people at the head office. And our, our finance, our head of finance, Hendra was very quiet, very amiable, very analytical and he would never push us. If he did push us, it would be like this. Cameron and Brian, I think you guys should be careful. I think you might be going, are you sure we're going to be okay? We're like, yeah, we got this, okay. And he'd kind of walk away. So we never really, even if he got angry, it was like, I think we should be careful. We should be more careful. You get two dominant, expressive guys. We steamrolled over top of that until the point that Ryan had to borrow $420,000 from his mom one day to meet payroll two days later and we almost lost the company. We were getting daily pro forma cash flow statements updated every single day. And we had to literally turn the corner on this Behemoth. So that was a big mistake that we made. Another one that I learned was just keeping things on my plate for too long. There was a lot of tasks that I was quite capable of doing, but I didn't love to do a lot of tasks that I was able to get done, but I wasn't delegating to other people fast enough. And sometimes my best work at something I sucked at was terrible versus somebody else's, you know, okay effort, but they were really, really good at it. Getting stuff off my plate and into the hands of other people. Momentum creates momentum. But as a, as an early stage entrepreneur and where I had been trained at college pro painters, a lot of it was around the radical kind of individualism and really, I can do it, I can crank it, I can do it, I crank it out. But that doesn't scale. So that was another big lesson to learn early on.

You know, you talked about growing the company and the, and not being ready to be a behemoth. And I, even though it happened to me on a much smaller scale back in like 2011, 2012, I wasn't, I had no idea what was going to happen. At first it was like, when you start a business, like you want to grow it, people don't always have that vision to like what they're going to do later or they don't know their why. And so then you get all this money and you're not ready. What can people do to prepare to be that big company? Is it vision stuff? Is it have the right accountant, like, like what could have happened differently to be more ready?

I'd say two things. The first one is vision really, really, truly having a strong vision of where you're going and what your company looks like in the future so you know what you're building and what you're working towards. Secondly would be some pro formas and some budgets or plans that you're working towards making that vision come true. And third would be probably working really, really closely at extending your, your network of mentors, of people that you can plug into, of coaches, of mastermind groups to join, of peer groups that you can be in, of other CEOs. The more that you can realize that you don't have to know how to do everything. You just have to know the people who know how to do those things so that you can either ask them questions, get mentored or outsourced to them, or hire them. I think that's a huge lesson for people to think about in the early days. So know where you're going focused on the plans to get there and build those masterminds and the coaching relationships and the network of individuals you can turn to. One of the biggest things I learned at gobundance was I've got a half a dozen to a dozen amazing guys that I really like spending time with that know a lot about real estate. I own nothing.

Yeah, entrepreneurship can be such a lonely thing, right? Especially at the beginning. When I was early on in it, I hadn't met other entrepreneurs, I didn't know other guys. I didn't know other guys that were successful like this. The only people I could talk to were other like parents in line at my kids school. And so it was really difficult to get those answers. And when I first started getting exposed to masterminds and business coaches and being able to reach out to guys like you about like, hey Mike, this guy's asking for a raise. I don't want to lose him, but I can't afford like what, what do I do here?

It's one of the reasons why I've always hated that whole adage that, you know, learning from failure is good. I'm like, no, learning from failure is really expensive. If someone else has already learned from failure, why don't we learn from it before we fail? Yeah, why do I want to fail? To learn stuff that's a terrible model.

And learn from someone else's failure. You know, the. And right now we're, you know, as we look at the, you know, kind of the time that we're in, I try to look back into 2001, 2002 and 2008, 2009, for us to try to relook at failure from back then, you know, at what happens and maybe help people focus on what's out there. So whatever industry people are in, I think you can look at what's in the past. If your business wasn't around in like 01 when things change or in 0809 when things change, like find people that have and study them and reach out to them. You know, I've got a call after this. So I'm reaching out to a guy in the industry on our foreclosure listing company. I'm wondering what's going to happen to our subscriptions during this time. So I'm like, I'm going to reach out to the guy that has more subscriptions subscribers of his software than anybody else. And he went through this in 2008, 2009, like I gotta ask him what happened.

So simple, right? It's amazing how we tend. It's partially because we are conditioned in the school system that we have. We. We had to learn something. We had to learn it, we had to study it. We'd be good at ourselves. We had to work really hard at it. That's not actually what scales to company. So you have to be a little bit lazier and a little bit more connecting into other people. It needs to get done, but not by us. It's funny you mentioned in 2008, 2009, chapter 11 of my book Double Double, and it was. It was named Chapter 11 on purpose is how to Grow and It's Slow. And it's all of my best tips that I took out of the 2008, 2009 crisis on how to grow your company during an economic downturn. And people are slacking back to that chapter today because it's been, you know, 11 years since we've really had one of those.

Dude, that's such a. I'm going to pull that back out. I've got your book. I've got the book Double Double pulling out chapter 11 and reread that. I will end up rereading that because it's time. Sometimes we even forget our own tips, right? Like, I need to go back and look at old emails from back then to be like, what was I. What was the plan then? What do I need?

It was funny. I was talking to one of my clients and he goes, what tips for have you got on how to Grow when it's Slow right now? And I started laughing. I went, wow, I totally forgot about it. But that's the name of one of my chapters of my books, how to Grow When It's Slow. Let me just grab the chapter. I forgotten that I'd written a chapter on it. It's in a book. It's been published for 10 years.

Even. My wife and I have a book, the Five Hour School Week.

And it's.

And it's about parenting and the ups and downs of that. And we have to remind ourselves to read it periodically because we wrote it when we were like in the honeymoon phase of, like, how to get through all this stuff. And sometimes on tough days, we're like, no, we wrote a whole thing about this. Let's go back and review that. Even though it's just been a few.

Years, that'd be a great book to make sure you get some PR right now so that we can get people reading that book in terms of how to educate their kids.

She is. My wife's page is blowing up right now. Like that is because of what's going on. Everybody is resharing it. They're like, well, what do we do now? And it's, it's all about the work life balance of how do you work from home and teach your kids from home. You talked about vision and you know, Vivid Vision is a big Cameron Herald thing. I've done it with all my different businesses. In a nutshell, it's really going deep and writing out kind of what your vision for your company is in three years and five years. Like, Elon Musk is great at it. You know, when you get to read some of his visions from years ago and what he's done with Tesla. You guys did it at 1-800-got junk. And I think that was the company where you guys had actually put it on the wall. And one of the things on there was like, get on a Starbucks cup. Yeah, Vivid Vision and how that came to fruition.

Sure. So you're actually bringing up two tools that are kind of intertwined. The first one, the Vivid Vision, is the four or five page written document that describes your company three years from today. So it's almost as if you hopped into a time machine. You traveled out to December 31, three years from now, and you walked around your company. What's it look like, what's it act like, what's the energy like? What's the culture like? What's the office environment look and feel like? How are people working remotely? What technology tools are you using? What's sales like, what's marketing like, what's operation? You describe every aspect of your company as if you're standing in that future state looking at it. You're not quite sure how it happened, but you know what it looks like. Then you get it all, you know, rewritten by a copywriter who makes it pop off the page. You get some design elements added to it so it really looks great. Like your brand. That's what aligns all of your customers, suppliers, employees and potential employees so that everyone's locked and loaded on that three year vision and driving towards that. That's the first tool. The second one is what we called our can you imagine Wall. And that was when we walked into the front office of 1-800- got a junk on the wall right in front of me was you walk in that door was this big blank wall. And Brian wanted to rip people out of the past and pull them into the future. So we thought, what a better way than to find out what they can imagine our company looking like in the future. And we asked our employees, what could they imagine? One that I put up was, can you imagine 100 franchise partners? Which was insane. When we put it up, we only had 20. And then Brian wanted something big. Like something really big. I'm like, how about our logo on the side of the space shuttle? It's like, that's insane. That's. How would that. Like we could sponsor a junk hauling out of space. He's like, that'll never happen. I'm like, what do you got? He goes, tabbo. Could you imagine being on Oprah? I'm like, that's ridiculous. We've got 23 employees. And then he described what the episode on Oprah would sound like, what it would look like, and how it would all lay out. I'm like, that sounds really good. Let's do it. So we put that on the wall. We ended up with 40 different things that we could imagine happening. Being on Starbucks cups, having our company as a Harvard Business School case study went on and on and on as to the things we imagined. And we put them up on the wall with the person who imagined them's name on the wall. And as they came true, month after month, things started coming true. We put like a big completed red logo over top of them so that you can see that that one had been kind of checked off as done. And it was a really fun way to get the team, the employees, to come up with some ideas. You know, the Harvard Business School one is funny. We had a guy coming in for a tour of our company one day. We did tours at our office every Friday with about 30 to 35 business people every Friday for a few years. And on one day, one of the tours, this guy walked in, he goes, on your can you imagine wall? It says, you know, being a Harvard Business School case study. He goes, is that serious? And we went, yeah. He goes, I know the guy at Harvard that makes that happen. Would you guys like an introduction? Six months later, we were approved. And for a period of about six or seven years, every Harvard MBA student studied money. Thunder. Gotcha.

I didn't even really realize that the Imagine wall was an employee created thing, that it was a team created thing that you guys got everybody in on it. Like, hey, what could you imagine?

Everybody. Not everybody, but they had to submit their ideas. And if they were good ones that weren't completely harebrained, we'd put them up there.

So most of them, a lot of them came true. You guys would now throw, like, cool images for the check boxes. You had the oprah thing did you get on the Starbucks cup?

We did get on the Starbucks cup. We were cup number 70 worldwide. I think it was seven, either 5 million or 7 million cups for free. It was a quote from Brian. So what was on the wall said, 1-800-got-JUNK being featured on Starbucks cups. They had a series at that time called the Way I See it. And they had quotes from famous people on the cups and be like, yo, yo Ma Chalice, you know, or Daniel Ramsey, Chef. But it would never name their brands or their restaurants. They were going to have a quote from Brian. As entrepreneur, it was all about like, you are what you can't let go of. Like, it's time to declutter your life or something crazy that we made up. And they said, it'll say, Brian Scudamore, entrepreneur. We said, no, no, it has to say Brian Scudamore, 1-800-got junk. We sent them a photo of our can you imagine wall. We were the first brand to have its name on a Starbucks top anywhere in the world. Yeah.

You guys are able to say, look, we've had this dream forever. It's on our wall. Like, you can't leave the 1-800-got jun like here.

Well, there's a fun side story to that. So the girl who came up with the idea of having our name on Starbucks cups was Andrea Baxter. She spearheaded the whole thing, made it happen. How did it on the wall when all of a sudden there was a block off and getting the name up? I had a personal connection to Howard schultz Because about 10 years later, even more than that, 1994, I was dating Howard Schultz's kid's nanny when I was living in Seattle. So I used to have to go into their Hallman Wave. And my mentor was being groomed as the COO at Starbucks. So he sent my mentor a note. He got got Howard Schultz to sign off personally on the name beyond the Starbucks cups. And that was the way it happened.

It's really kind of magic, right? Like company visions and goals. And when you focus on it, it's just we talked about it with like the knee and everything else, like, what we focus on grows. And so again, that big reminder for right now, like, we're. This podcast is getting released, like, right after we interview it. Because the reason I want to talk to Cameron is because the world, so many people in the world right now think it's broken, right? And it's. And we're. And we're going to, if nothing else, today, we're going to really challenge everybody to Say, focus on what's going to work. Focus on the big visions. Don't come back on your goals now. Don't sell your goals short. Like, take this time to focus on what's good. Three weeks ago, I did a detailed, vivid vision for one of my new companies and I did my three year plan and what our podcasts would look like and what all of our brands would look like and what our real estate services would look like. And the end, we were just getting ready to make that image and then all of a sudden the world gets put on hold and I'm looking at that going, do I change my vision? What do you think to people that are like, do I change everything right now?

Well, it depends. I mean if you're, if you're in the World Trade center and a plane hits your building and you're, you know, Cantor Fitzgerald, or if the mortgage crisis hits and the mortgage industry is shot for a year, or if you're forced to shut down, yeah, you're, you might have to change. I think where we are right now is so unprecedented that it's less about our business model or vision necessarily needing to change as to more like we're in about a two month, month, let's figure some shit out stage. I think it's, it's time to work on the business, on the people, on the systems, on the sales, marketing so you can come out of the gate strong because we know that we will eventually be allowed back and then it should be, it should be not business as usual, but you should be for the most part selling your same products and services again. So I wouldn't necessarily force a pivot. I think what I would do is look for any of the things that we can do to have us working on the business instead of in the business.

Don't pivot. Grow your brand, whatever brand you had right now will be around a little bit with a few exceptions. And, and maybe some new businesses that are created, like some of the biggest businesses are created out of times.

I don't focus on that stuff. Right. Don't focus on the stuff that's going to die. I mean, our stuff always dies. We're going to die. Like, let's focus on, on what happened when we get through this and how we're going to come out of it stronger.

Yeah, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about some of the positives that will come out of this and you know, you look at like so many fewer car accidents that have happened recently and like, and like pollution and all sorts of, you know, stories around the world. You think of any other. And we talked about them a little. Can you think of any other positives that you think might come out of this other than people changing their business habits?

Well, one for sure is the way businesses can grow. There's definitely been a tone towards empathy. I think there's a lot more empathy going along. A lot more of saying hi to strangers than there used to be. I've just noticed that even my girlfriend will take me out for a walk at night and throw me in a wheelchair walking around the block because my hip is recovering from the hip replacement. And just talking to people and saying hi to people you wouldn't normally be waving to. I think there's a little bit more maybe humanity that's coming back in. There's certainly a lot more people understanding where certain parts of the world are that they didn't know before because they get so myopic and focusing on their own world, their own country, they don't notice stuff outside of it. That's going to be a change, I guess there's going to be a clean house where companies are getting good at ripping off the band aid and making decisions quickly and swiftly. That's a good skill to have that they've all now benefited from making those tough decisions, confronting the brutal facts. That's probably a skill that will stay with people.

When you say empathy, that actually that, that part just gives me chills, right. Because really I'm at the grocery store and I'm thanking the people for still being there. I'm thanking the Amazon driver for still delivering. You know, any place that is kind of still open, half working, I'm seeing innovation. There's this sit down Mexican food restaurant that I went driving by the other night and they have this makeshift drive through set up. So they've got this drive thru sign set up. You can order five of the menu, the menu items and people are just running it out to different cars. And they've got cones set up in like a normal parking lot. You're seeing this innovation. Then every, they're like, thank you for coming. And you're like, thank you for being here. And then the walks. I hope that the people in our neighborhood continue to go for walks in the evening because it wasn't something that happened before. Everyone's doing it now.

We, we've seen a family recently that we've never at once seen them out walking and they've been out every single night but for walking out too. So that's a great thing. Yeah. So I think there is going to be some stuff that's going to come out of it, I guess going to be a long, painful, harsh, hard road. I think it's going to be possibly harder than many. I thought it was going to be myself included, but I think in many ways that there's going to be some good stuff come out of it.

You know, for the people that are really putting their foot on the gas right now and they're like, hey, this is a big opportunity and we see it and we're primed for this, that need to go hire new talent. Like, I think there's. Who knows right now there's a whole bunch of government intervention that's saying, hey, keep people employed, we'll pay for them. But I also think that there's going to be a lot of shifting of that. I think people are going to take this as a time to retool. Maybe there's going to be some good employees that are let go and shifted. How do you think people should go about trying to hire right now? I mean, is it the same. Same as. As your. As your recommendation for how people always hire and do you think there's going to be a big shift of. Of roles and jobs right now?

I think. Well, I guess I would certainly be more open to hiring a remote. Right. Hire the best talent for the best compensation plan. Like the people that work best with your company and your culture, regardless of where they live. You know, there always has to be. And this is one of the reasons why I keep bringing up training your people. It's scary to me how many companies have managers and employees that do job interviews that have never been trained on how to do an interview interview. That makes no sense to me. You know, you would never send your kid off to little league baseball without knowing how to throw a ball and hold the bat and catch a ball. Why would you let your employees run a job interview without knowing how to do them? So I would be training all my employees on job interviews. I'd be training them all on running meetings I'd be having. So anyway, on the interviewing side, I think it's more of a retooling opportunity than anything. Most companies won't change the way they do stuff.

I love the tip though about just now that we're going to be reopen and kind of re shown that people can work remotely. Like there would be times before that we wouldn't look at somebody that's getting hired for from far away right now because it's like, no, we're trying to build that culture, we're trying to get it close. Now that everyone's used to that, it's like finding the best talent for the right thing. You've always been a thing of that. Like teach people how to have meetings, teach people how to interview. Like, the people that do the interviews have only been interviewed a couple times in their life or they don't know the systems with that. Which of your books is the best one for learning how to interview? I know Meeting Suck is the best one for learning how to do a meeting. Do you have one that talks about for interviewing?

I would say there's a couple of chapters in Double Double that are really focused on it. The giveaway away all the tools that I've used for years on how to interview, recruit and hire. I would also read a book called who by Jeff Smart that is really quite good as well. It took all the content from top grading and distilled it down and simplified it in recruitment.

Do you think right now people are going to, you know, still have the opportunity to use social media? I think some of the tools we talked about in the past was saying, hey, find me this person and I'll pay you a finder's fee and I'll. I'll help you with that. Like, I just want to find the best out there. Have you seen a lot of that right now?

I think there's going to be a lot more of the freelance recruiters happening for us now. I think you're going to find that people are adapting and there'll be a lot more freelancers in the gig economy. I'm starting to use them just for the CEO alliance to get some recruiters to go out and find me members of the CEO alliance and then paying them a bounty. It's basically a recruiting role. I think that role will become sharper people to get more adept at it. And then we also probably see some of the percentage rates we have to pay drop because they'll realize that they don't need 25%. If they're working from home and they get two or three great clients a year, they can do it on 12. So we'll probably find that the recruiting cost using freelancers drops a half of what we're currently paying.

Some of those big things as people make the shifts. You know, I can't thank you enough for giving us so much time that you've given us, especially, you know, hip recovery time and things like that. The COO alliance is the big thing that you've been growing Right now the I know you've, you've got so many books. That's why I'm asking you, you which book And I think you have a new one that just came out. But the CO alliance is your big focus. If people are looking for that group for their coo, is there like an entry place to find you see about what you videos, things like that?

Yeah, for sure. And by the way, I think the best two books for your niche are going to be the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs which is quite strong. I co authored that with Hal Elrod. Hal Elrod and then Free PR is another one on how to generate free publicity which is great for anyone in the real estate industry as well. And then yeah, my COO alliance you need a minimum rate, minimum revenue criteria of 5 million in revenue. We like to have about 30 employees or plus and we've got members from five countries. Just go to the cooalliance.com and all the information is there, there and just.

Go find Cameron on social media too. I mean the first time we ever really started chatting was I, I had a question about an employee and I just said hey like I'm struggling with this problem, I don't want to lose the employee. What can I do it? And he had a million different ideas of how to do compensation or bonuses or different things to make sure we retained them. I listened to them, they listened to us. So social media you can find Cameron Herald. The timing of the Hal's podcast was actually re released least today as you and I are recording this because we have an old interview with him on here and I thought this would be a great time for people to re listen to the Miracle Morning.

Amazing.

I mean Cameron's book the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs that he wrote with Hal Free PR like this is if we had more time we'd probably dive way into that. But right now it seems like free pr, there's a gazillion opportunities for that, especially in the world that we live in and can focus on the positive stuff that's out there. Cameron, thanks for coming on and providing so much value like you always do.

Thanks buddy. See ya. Only the paranoid survive. So there's a little bit of that that I think is good. The fear that will keep you focused, but the fear should keep you focused but not paralyze you because we have to let our natural energy out. So if we show up every day scared and nervous and restricted, we're sending out this nervous energy into our company. So we have to come in as the chief energizing Officer.