Cameron Herold | The CEO Whisperer Speaks: Clarity, Culture, and Conscious Growth

October of 2000, I walked into 1-800-got- junk. You know, I've been working with Brian for a few weeks and he came in one morning and he was all excited that he'd been out the night before with our head of marketing knocking down signs of our competitors with a hockey stick. One of them was driving and one was sitting on the windowsill of the passenger seat and they were knocking down street signs that our competitors put up. I'm like, first off, if I ever hear you talk about that again, I'm leaving. Secondly, you don't beat our competitors by hurting their marketing. We beat our competitors by out marketing them. So now what I want you to do is drive around the city and look for their signs, leave them up, and every time we see one of their signs, put five of them around. I want to do what we call search and destroy. And we're going to cut off their marketing with the geometry of this whole destroy marketing.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mol and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently?

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But feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds, but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This Heart Mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind All Access, Membership and Community. A space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live with greater clarity and purpose with over 1000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs. You'll learn from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to to every summit and course we've ever produced. A treasure trove of Wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing. Plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and start your journey today. What if scaling your business wasn't about working harder, but thinking more vividly. In this episode, I sit down with the one and only Cameron Herrel, founder of the COO alliance and the strategic mind behind the explosive growth of companies like 1-800-got-JUNK. He's not just a CEO whisperer, as he's been called. He's a visionary who believes your business needs a three year future. You can feel Cameron takes us on a deeply insightful journey through the power of vision, the delegation and aligned leadership. We explore the essence of what it means to build, not just scale, a company where people thrive and results speak for themselves. Whether you're a solopreneur breaking the six figure mark or a leader aiming to grow from 10 million to 30 million, there's gold in this conversation. Let's dive in. My name is Dr. Fleetmall, your co host for this session, and I'm thrilled to be here today with Cameron Herold. Welcome, Cameron.

Hey, Fleet. Thanks very much for having me. I appreciate this.

I want to jump in and talk about your books, Vivid Vision and Double Double, and both of which cover the idea of the vivid vision and really talk about the importance of that. But I wonder if you could give me just a really thumbnail sketch. I know it's hard to do in just a minute or two of your kind of a little bit of your origin story because I know you played a major role in scaling We Got Junk. And I think everybody's seen the We Got Junk Trucks franchise somewhere in their town or city. And I know you played a major role in scaling that. So I. How did you go from a successful second in command scaling big companies to being the consultant and coach and teacher you are today?

Sure. Yeah. And actually the brand was called 1-800-GOTJUNK. And we actually took a very fragmented industry, professionalized it, cleaned it up. I was the COO of that company. My best friend Brian was the CEO. And I helped them go from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in six years, from 2 million to 106 million in revenue. That was the fourth company that I'd built. So I also was a behind the scenes as a second command for a private currency company. I was the VP of corporate development for another brand that became Gerber Auto Collision in the United States. And Boyd Autobody in Canada is the largest collision repair chain in the world. And I'd opened up the west coast of the United States for a group called College Pro Painters back in the late 90s and early 90s, sorry. In late 80s, in fact, got known for hiring Kimbal Musk. Back in 1993, Elon's younger brother worked for me and his cousin Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity. So it was this kind of track record at having coached all these entrepreneurs 30 years ago, building for brands. When I left 1-800-got junk 17 years ago now, I started getting asked to do speaking events all over the world, and people that started using my systems and content started to really scale, getting ranked as best companies to work for. And I guess there was somehow this little magic dusk. Somebody said, how come everything you touch turned to gold? And I laughed and I said, I only touch gold. So I think that's the cheat sheet that I have is that I only work with really great companies. I don't work with any bad ones.

So I just really want to let our audience know that, because what you're going to be sharing with us today is not business school theory. This is real world experience. So coming back to your books Vivid Vision and Double Vision, which have guided really countless leaders in setting a clear roadmap for their growth, what is a Vivid Vision and why is it critical to successfully scaling a business?

Sure. So the concept of the Vivid vision is one that I learned from an Olympic coach. Back in 1998, I was at a lunch that was run for a bunch of entrepreneurs in Vancouver, Canada. We were part of a group called the Entrepreneurs Organization. Back in the day, it was Yeo, and 120 of us got invited to the lunch and only 16 of us showed up. And this Olympic coach was a sports psychologist, talked about how athletes used visualization in their sport to become the best in the planet. And he said, if we could ever take visualization and bring it into the business world, we'd be able to succeed. So we've talked a lot about different businesses that were good at visualization. You know, creative agencies, marketing agencies. And we came up with the idea of home builders who would talk to the homeowner and get the vision of what the homeowner wanted. The contractor would create the blueprints or the plans to build that home, and then they would hand the vision and the blueprints to the employees, and the employees could build a home without ever talking to the homeowner. We thought, wow, imagine if the employees in a company could build a company without the CEO having to be there every day to tell people what to do and hold them accountable and manage them. Imagine the vision could align. So I worked on a vision for the private currency company that we built out and took public. Brian was building One out for his company called the Rubbish Boys, and we saw it being successful in our businesses. When I then joined Brian as his COO for what was now called 1-800-GOT junk, he had just taken 12 years to get to 2 million in revenue. He handed me his 2003, what I now call that vivid Vision document. He used to call it a painted picture. And he handed it to me and I was so clear on what he wanted to build that I gave him the plan of how to make it happen. And he's like, I don't know how to do any of this stuff. And I'm like, no, I do, because I've already built two other franchise companies, so I can actually make it come true. You just stay focused on where we're going and let me focus on the execution and operations and culture and kind of building it all out. So we then saw it really come to scale and then from there again. I've been coaching CEOs in now in 29 countries. I've coached well over a few hundred entrepreneurs. And all the way up to the CEO of Sprint, Marcelo Claret and his COO. I coached them for 18 months. I worked with the royal family that owns the country of Qatar and worked with them around vision and core values and core purpose. So anytime I've worked with these brands, it starts with that vision. Almost like a picture on the front of the jigsaw puzzle. We have no idea what we're going to build unless we can see that picture. So that was the genesis of where it came from. The vivid vision becomes a four or five page description, a written document that describes what the company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future. Almost as if you were walking around your company and you described what you saw. The people can then figure out how to make that come true.

So this vivid vision, it's a narrative document that not only includes the numbers, but what the culture will look and feel like, what your customer base will look and feel like. Really? It's a real. Like your former partner used the term painted picture. It is a painted picture and narrative of what that company's going to look and feel and be like in three years.

Yeah. And the reason I changed the terminology from the painted picture, because I'm the one who really got that. Well known in my first book, Double. Double. That's what I called it and was speaking all over the world on it, was people thought it was like a vision board, the concept that John Ashraf popularized in the movie the Secret. So they thought it was a bunch of pictures. But the problem with a vision board is that's really good for one person. But a picture says a thousand words. You know, if I showed you the picture of my room that I'm sitting in right now, you might think that it's all about the picture of the COO alliance. What I wanted to show you is the stairways and the white walls. So my picture might only illustrate the white walls, whereas you thought it was the picture hanging on the wall was important. Right. So a written document is impossible to misunderstand because it's all written in that description. So you're going to talk about what sales looks like and feels like, what operations is like, what it engineering customers, what your customers are writing about you on board, what the media is reporting about you, how you work with your partners. And again, you don't say how it comes true because you don't know you're describing it in the finished state. And then the team can figure out one or two projects to make every sentence come true. And then you just build that vivid vision kind of you reverse engineer it. So you plan your work and work your plan.

So I'd like to talk just a little bit about operationalizing that. And you kind of began to describe that just there. You know, in the early stage of entrepreneurship, a solopreneur or an entrepreneur with a small team may not have a coo. You know, they may be wearing three or four hats. So how do they begin really operationalizing this and then build a team that can make that vivid vision happen and begin to make that transition into a true CEO role?

So the first part is when the CEO or entrepreneur is very clear on what they're building, they can start to figure out the core components to build first. Much like building your home, you have to build the foundation. Then you have to put in the walls, then you put in the electrical and the plumbing. You don't hang the cabinets and paint the place and then pour the foundation later. Right. There's an order of operations in building it. So the entrepreneur has to build their company in that. Right. Methodology. It starts with vision, with understanding core values, who your customer is. It starts with hiring one or two core people. And the first person that almost anybody should hire is a fractional or a part time executive assistant. Right. If you don't have an assistant, you are one. And you need to get all that admin work off your plate to free you up to work on the things that you're either really good at or that really feed you with energy or that are at least worth the amount of money that you're doing. But there's no way that an entrepreneur should be doing $5 an hour or $10 an hour tasks that can be offshored. So it's starting with hiring those people. And then the first few key early hires tend to be the jack of all trades, master of none. The people that are really good at handling projects, they're really good at saying, yeah, I'll figure that out, yes, I'll grab that, sure, I'll try to work with this technology. You don't want the full time experts because you can't really afford them. The second layer though, and where we are really nicely set up now in the kind of mid-2020s, is we have access to technology and to a global workforce of fractional people that can work from their laptop from anywhere in the world for five hours a week, 10 hours a month, just on exactly what you need them to be. Twenty years ago, we had to hire a full time person. They had to come to an office and they had to work on. We had to find stuff for them to do. Now you don't have to do that. So the early stage entrepreneur, you can hire some fractional freelance experts to work in little chunks for you. And then the last part of this is I always try to work on revenue generating ideas first and build the better product second. Because there's not a single problem that exists that writing a check can't solve. So if you generate more revenue, you generate more gross margin, you can use that money to buy your way into better success as you scale. That would be some of the early starting points.

Another way I've heard that said is there isn't a problem that sales can't solve. So let's say the entrepreneur sort of has proof of concept, they have some momentum. And now it really is about scaling the business. Whether it's growing it from six figures to seven or seven to eight or beyond, their role begins to change. And that can be a tough transition to make. And I think a lot of CEOs may falter or even fail because they don't make that transition.

Yeah, one of the transition points is starting to delegate everything except genius. Right? So you're starting to hire people that are better than you, that you can delegate some of those core roles to so you can work on the stuff you're really good at and feeds you with energy. The next hurdle that happens to a lot of entrepreneurs is they've kind of delegated everything and now they have a team of people that are doing all the stuff that are reporting to them. And the entrepreneurs wonder what they're supposed to do. So they often try to break stuff or they do what I call seagull management. They kind of swoop into an area, they shit all over everybody and they fly away. None of that is really helpful. So the CEO needs to reinvent their role where they stay focused on vision, they stay focused on culture, and they inspect what they expect. They do skip level meetings. They understand that their role is to grow people and develop people, to be thinking strategically, to be meeting with partners, to plug themselves into a number of different mastermind communities. I know that you and I are both members of different masterminds, and I believe that everybody should be in at least two, because I think it's like ideas having sex. You'll take an idea from the Genius Network and an idea from Strategic Coach and those two ideas have an idea, baby, and that's what you're looking for. But everybody should be in kind of a trade type of a group. Like if it's a. If you run a marketing agency, you should be at lots of events with other marketing agency owners. And then you should also be at one where there's no marketing agency owners or just other business people so that you can see your business from a different perspective.

Well, I think you shared kind of the secret of making that transition there because often the. The CEO, the solopreneur, the one who's, you know, built somewhat of a team, they started off being really good at product creation or really good at providing a service or just a really great salesperson. They were really good at the stuff they now need to replace, and they don't have any experience doing this other stuff you're talking about. So that idea of getting into a mastermind, and it has been. It has really been a huge value add for me. My experience with it, you start rubbing shoulders with other CEOs and other entrepreneurs and you start learning, what do entrepreneurs do at that next level? You get to experience it directly.

Oh, totally. I've attended 10 different mastermind events in 2024.

Wow.

I can name them. You know, I was in multiple other mastermind communities over the last 25 years. I started in the first one back at the Entrepreneurs organization in 1995. So 30 years ago is when I got involved in the first mastermind. So my kind of MBA is my mentor board of advisors. Are all these people that I've met from all over the world that I can tap into. You know, two of my friends, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy wrote a book called who not how and they actually and I in multiple masterminds with both of them. They identified that in the old days we had to be the smartest person in the room. Right? You had to know how to solve every problem because there was no way to connect with all these other experts nor know who they are. Now it's about understanding. Well, there's a person somewhere who's probably online or in a freelance group or on a social platform that can solve this problem. I have to know where they are, how to connect to them and then see if they can help me figure it out. So entrepreneur skills no longer have to be the smartest person in the room. We have to know how to connect with all these people. And it's really interesting watching Gen Z right now. The kids who grew up playing multi person playing video games are very used to solving problems with lots of other people over headsets and video and chatting and collaborating and problem solving. And that's actually the way business is being done today. Whereas you know, 30 years ago you were the one person playing the video game by yourself. Maybe you'd talk to your friend at school and then you'd go back and try it out. That way of learning has accelerated things.

It's really interesting to see that somehow serendipitously young people are being prepared for these roles or maybe it's somehow been co created that way.

Remember when you and I were growing up that we had to learn how to type? We had to take typing class to learn and we had to learn the letters on the keyboard. I remember when My son was 4 years old, I said to his mom, we have to teach him how to type. And I went into his bedroom and he was typing on the computer. I said, how did you learn how to type? He said well it's right here. I'm like well how did you learn where the letters are? He said well they're right there. Like I'm like wow. Like a 4 year old was typing as fast as I could type with that. So yeah, they adapt and learn these new skills and our job is to now learn from them. As much as think that we have the wisdom right often we have, we don't really have 30 years experience. We've got five years experience six times in a row.

Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, some of the challenges. As we begin to scale, cash flow can become a real issue. Profit really gets squeezed. You start building your team. And suddenly you got a much bigger cost structure. And what you thought you had, you know, this really profitable business that was almost like printing money. And suddenly, you know, you're looking for profit. So operational efficiency becomes really important. Managing cash flow, all these kind of things. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit.

You know, I talk about cash being like oxygen, right? Cash is the entrepreneurial, and every business is oxygen. Brian and I almost bankrupted 1-800-got junk when we were $100 million in revenue and we were earning big profitability because we didn't understand cash flow. So I remember when I was about four years old, my dad threw a penny in the swimming pool and I kind of ran down or dove down to get the penny, and I came up gasping for air. He's like, you're not going to die. You were down three feet. You know, you're okay. And then I go scuba diving for the first time and I run out of oxygen at 80ft. Well, I'm not going to die, but I got pretty sick. But if I go scuba diving and I run out of air at 140ft, I will die. So the way that you run a one person company changes when you get to 3 to 10 to 30, to 100 to 300, right? Or a million to 3 million to 10 million to 30 to 100 million. Your cash flow statement becomes critical. When you're a small company, if you need some money, you borrow some money from your bank account. You don't pay yourself, you don't submit expenses for a few months. Maybe you max out a couple of credit cards, all good, you make it up and you figure it out. And a month, a couple of months later, you pay yourself back. That doesn't work when you're a $20 million company anymore. You can't not pay just yourself to meet payroll. You know, you can't just max out a couple of credit cards. We actually had no credit line and no loans. And we went to a bank after spending $5 million of our cash on renovations and an office move, some new technology, some bonuses, some taxes, we spent all this cash and we thought, let's just go to the bank and get a credit line. That we, number two company in Canada, worked for six consecutive years of 100% revenue growth. 106 million revenue. They're like, no, we can't loan your money. We're like, why? They're like, because you don't know how to run a business. We're like, yeah, we do. They said, no, you would have come to us last year when you had 5 million in the bank. But the fact that you're $100 million business with no credit line means you don't understand cash flow management. Brian had to borrow $420,000 from his mom that night to meet payroll. We had to fire 22 people the following week. We had to call all of our suppliers and tell them they weren't being paid for 60 to 90 days until we could turn the company around. And we had our new CFO generating cash flow statements on a daily basis and at times twice a day. So companies need to hire a fractional CFO to, to come in and help them actually understand how to run the business financially when they're small. A controller and a director of finance sometimes don't have those right skills. Nor does the entrepreneur often know what skills are even needed. But getting a fractional CFO to come in and help you with some of those systems around cash is really critical and a big opportunity for smaller companies.

At what stage would you say that needs to happen? I'm kind of at that place myself and I'm reading by a fractional CFO and learning what I can from her. But at what stage do you think that's necessary?

Sure, I talk about the ones and the threes a lot. Where a company changes when it goes from one employee to three, from three to 10, 10 to 30, 30 to 100 to 300. We can talk about that in a second. This stage is when you go from 3 million to 10 million. When you're a company going from 3 million in revenue to 10 million in revenue is when you need a fractional CFO to give you the proper budgets, the proper cash flow. To look at your financials on a quarterly basis and pick holes in them for you to help you optimize, to help you go through your general ledger, the stuff that nobody knows how to do. Once you get to 10 million in revenue, you've probably got a proper VP of Finance as you're scaling to 30 million. But it's usually that 3 million to 10 million zone that is the death trap for the oxygen starved entrepreneur.

That's extremely helpful. So how about operational efficiency and to as you grow so your profit isn't getting squeezed out by inefficiencies.

And yeah, I didn't realize when I launched my online training, I launched an online training course that I've got thousands and thousands of companies going through. It's called Invest in your leaders. And I didn't realize that when I launched it that the reason for it was actually going to help companies on their operational efficiency. I thought all I was doing was helping them to grow the skill sets of their people. What happens when you're a company in the 3 employee to 10 and 10 employee to 30 zone is that your managers have never really run companies before. They're the jack of all trades, master of nones, they're director level. So they don't necessarily know how to say no. They don't necessarily how to get more done with less people faster. They don't necessarily think about optimization and automation and AI now. And their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people. So when you go in this trap from 10 to 30 and 30 to 100, you often get all this bloat. Once you get to a hundred employees, you tend to start hiring your first leadership team and they can start firing 30% of the company. That's not really necessary. I heard an interesting number the other day, and this is kind of scary, but 50% of a company's output is produced by the square root of their number of employees. So I'll explain that to you, that if you've got 100 employees, the square root of 100 is 10. So 10 times 10 is 100. So 50% of a company's output is produced by 10% of the hundred people. That's scary to think about. If you've got 20 employees, the square root of your number there would be four and a half. Right? So four and a half people producing 50% of your output. A lot of the early stage managers don't know how to fire people. They don't know how to say no. They don't know how to say not now. And often the entrepreneur isn't good at saying no either. So somebody will come to them and say, oh, we need to hire XYZ. Oh, how much is it going to cost? 80 grand. Oh crap. Okay, go do it. They make a one minute decision on an $80,000 expense. If a marketing manager went to that same entrepreneur and said, I want to do a marketing campaign for 80 grand, they'd have to sit down for an hour and a half and pitch them. They'd have to show them the plan and the budget and the numbers and what the ROI was going to be like. But because the entrepreneurs often think the solution really is more people, we end up with all of this kind of operational debt. And that's an early stage company problem. It also magnifies again when you go from three hundred to a thousand, when you Start becoming very corporate when there's politics and silos and that kind of starts to happen again.

Well, that points to something else. When you're going from 1 to 3, 3 to 10, 10 to 30, pretty early on, the people that got you to one point aren't necessarily the people that are going to take you to the next level. I wonder if you could talk, because that could be a pain process for a founder, a CEO to have people that have really helped you get to one place and you suddenly realize they're not the people that are going to take you to the next level.

It's funny, you and I were chatting before we went live and you mentioned that you're in a mastermind or friends with Jeff Walker from the product launch formula. I was sitting beside Jeff Walker and I was watching a speaker, Clayton Mask, who built infusionsoft. And I spoke with Clay at lunch that day and he and I both agreed on this number. A mid level manager, like an early stage manager in a company, a director, junior VP ish can usually only stay in that role as the head of that area through two doubles of revenue of the size of the company before it's too hard to stay in the third double. So let's say your company does 2 million in revenue today and you're the director of marketing. You can probably be the director again at 4 million. You can probably be the director again at 8 million. By the time it gets to 16, it's too substantially different than it was when you came in as director at 2 million. Ben Horowitz, who wrote the Hard Thing about Hard Things, said that a person can only go through one triple. So that'd be from 2 million to 6, but it's too hard to go from 6 to 18. Right. So that tends to be. The death zone is after two doubles. When I was the COO at 1-800-got junk, we went through six doubles in the size of the company over six and a half years. We went from 2 million, we doubled six consecutive times. I was the last of the six leadership team members to get replaced. The reason I was able to go so long was I'd already built two other franchise companies before, so it kind of gave me a head start. And Brian was my best friend and the best man at my wedding before I even started working for him. So we had this huge amount of trust and relationship. So I think that gave me a bit of a, maybe a buffer by about a year or so. But I probably should have left the company when we were at 50 million. It got operationally very complicated for me by the time we got to a hundred. The key is keep growing the skills of your people at the rate that your company is scaling. Right. Again, my invest in your leaders course covers things like situational leadership, interviewing, running effective meetings, coaching, one on one coaching sessions, delegation, time management, project management, the core executive functioning skills that people need to not only be trained in, but they need to be certified in those skills. And if you can train them in those skills and grow them, you're giving them a chance to stay. But if you expect that in the 1970s, if you joined a company, the company didn't grow that quickly. The business climate, even if it grew, the business climate didn't change. God, we only got introduced to ChatGPT two years ago and the stuff that it's doing right now is blowing our mind. And we're just getting started. So companies are changing so quickly, the skill sets need to change too. There's a quote that I heard years ago that if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And I think that we need to be mindful of that with our executives. We have to keep investing in them and growing their skills or the company will outgrow them.

So you're pointing something really critical. Investing in our people so they can grow with the company. And when we need different people or we need to move people or we need to, you know, we're not doing somebody a service by keeping them in the wrong seat. You know, to use John Collins idea of getting the right people on the bus and the right seats on the bus, if we're reluctant to transition to get the right people in the right seat, we're really not doing them a service in the long run.

You know, and it's interesting, I have not seen a company yet in all of my years at advising and coaching companies globally. I can't think of a single company that I've seen or really worked with that works hard enough at finding the wrong people and getting them out of the company fast enough. We talk about recruiting and interviewing and selection and onboarding and training and rights. Like, but we never talk about how do we identify the underperformers, how do we identify the cultural cancers, how do we top grade faster, how do we actually have those tough. And how do we top grade? Like it would be our mom leaving. Like, how do we top grade with some empathy and care, you know, just because they don't fit in our company anymore? Doesn't mean you kick them to the curb, but you can have really strong outplacement or you can grow them to a point and go, you know what? You're so good. You should go somewhere else for five years and. And maybe come back or just go somewhere else anyway, because we're not going to be able to keep promoting you. You've outgrown us. It's kind of like, I love my two kids. They're 21 and 23. I would love to have them around all the time, but my job is to kick them out of the house so they can become successful adults and, you know, go on in their life. And sometimes we have to do that with our employees, too.

So you were speaking about leadership. Let's go there. So as a company grows, even in your early stages as a founder, CEO, you're transitioning from being a doer to a leader. You have to transition from being a doer to a leader, and then you have to be able to leaders. Right? So. And you can't do that if you don't understand how to lead yourself. So if you could talk a little bit about embracing leadership and learning leadership, how do you learn it? Where do you learn it?

Yeah. I was taught a mantra back in 1986 at a company called College Pro Painters. That's where I really learned. I call it my real world mba. I opened up the west coast of the United States for College Pro Painters. I hired Kimbal Musk at College Pro Painters in 1993. College Pro is written up in Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson, because I was a reference for them in their first round of funding for Zip2. The mantra that I was given was, a leader's core job is to grow people. I think it might have been Tom Peters who might have said that in search of excellence is the leader's core job is to grow people. So if that's our job, how do we grow them? Well, we grow them around situational leadership. We grow them around coaching. We give them the soft skills of leadership, time management, project management. So I package them all up in my invest in your leaders course. What I did at 1-800-got-Junk is I first showed all the management team that they didn't know the skills. So one by one, I would give them a pretest and they'd fail the test. They're like, whoa, I don't know this. Like, here's a test around delegation and they'd fail. It was gamed to show them that they didn't know this stuff. And then I would teach them the skills around delegation. I'd let them practice delegation. I would give them some exercises to try out in their area around delegation. We'd come back and talk about it again. We'd watch some videos about delegation. They would do a post test around delegation and they'd be like, oh, I learned this stuff. And then six weeks later, I would make them do a different post test to see if they retained it. So I'd kind of set the gap, teach it, practice it, role model it, try it out, use it in the job, retain it, prove that they retained it. And then I would actually certify them at using that skill and training someone else in the skill. If they were able to use it, demonstrate that they could use it and they were able to train someone, then I certified them at gold in that skill. So I tried to create a viral training program inside of the organization with the 12 core skills that I put into my invest in your leaders course. That's kind of the mindset I have. That tends to be what GE does, you know, with their Six Sigma and their lean training tends to be what Starbucks does with their training at McDonald's University. There's a lot of these train the trainer and viral training programs that if a new chief financial officer comes into McDonald's, the Frontline Burger guy can teach them how to run a store.

Well, you in part answer my question because, you know, how do you scale that and how do you find the time to do it? So this viral approach, this training to trainer approach, certification approach, but even still, for an entrepreneur, you know, this part of your job, it's not getting new leads, it's not closing deals, it's not getting the product out the door. It's something you have to do with a little longer term payoff. Yeah, but if you're not willing to make the investment, you're digging your own grave, I would assume.

Yeah. I see so many entrepreneurial companies, like a fly is trying to get out the window. They're going to keep working hard and keep banging their head on the window and they end up dead on the windowsill. This becomes your job. Your job is to get good at developing people. It is to get good at growing people. I remember sitting in Marcelo Claret's office. Marcelo was the CEO of Sprint. He'd actually built and sold his first company for over a billion dollars to Softbank. And then Masa, the chairman of Softbank, appointed Marcelo as the CEO of Sprint. I was sitting in his office in Kansas City. We were talking about his team top grading his employees. And he turned to me, he's like, when are people not going to be the problem anymore? And I started laughing. I said, you're the 82nd largest company in the United States. People are always the problem. Our job is to continually get better at growing people. And you can't automate that. You can't put a software tool in place for that. We have to get better at learning situational leadership. We have to get better at coaching. We have to get better at praise. We have to be better at helping to develop them and growing their confidence. I remember Howard Behar used to, who was the CEO at Starbucks for a while, used to spend two hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes and praise notes to people in stores. Like, he spent 5% of his week handwriting notes. There's not an entrepreneur at 5 million in revenue who's watching right now that spends five hours a week, you know, handwriting notes, or two hours a week, I'm sorry, handwriting notes. So it's learning those systems and tools. I remember when I was 16, my dad, who was an entrepreneur, both of my grandfathers were entrepreneurs. My dad sat me down and he said, I want to tell you something about being in business. You'll never be smart enough to figure this out on your own. He said, your R D should stand for rip off and duplicate. Go find the best systems that the best people are doing and put those in place. I go find the best tools that they're using and put those in place. So all the stuff I learned at College Pro, all the stuff I learned at Boyd Auto Body and Gerber Auto Collision, all the stuff I learned at Ubart or 1-800-got junk. I packaged that stuff up and those become my books. Those become my coaching. Those become my, you know, my invest in your leaders course. I have CEOs paying me $4,000 for an hour of coaching. And then I have an invest in your leaders course for 500, for forever. You know, which do you want? Right? But that's where entrepreneurs have to spend the time on that. They've got to join mastermind communities. They have to be a part of these online communities to learn. This is not taking time away from your business. This is the classic work on the business instead of in the business. Entrepreneurs don't have to be good at doing all of this. They have to know that these skills exist and bring them back to their company and tell their team, learn this stuff. Right? I now know that situational leadership is a Skill. We all have to learn this. They don't have to be good at teaching it. They just have to know it exists.

That's helpful. And I love that R and D should be rip off and duplicate. I mean, people have called that modeling. Tony Robbins and others say success leaves clues. You know, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And things are changing so fast anyway.

Well, and I was never the smart kid. I wasn't able to go to a smart business school. Right. I was the one who had to figure out the cheat sheets and the shortcuts. I was the one who saw that people were going to study really hard, but I'd end up dead on the windowsill. I was like, oh, the cheat sheets over here I can have a TA that can show me all of the last five years exams. I'll just study those.

So let's talk again about scaling. I suspect a lot of people in our audience are going to be in that three employees to ten employees, maybe six figures to a million to a million five. Or maybe in the moving from a million to three million and ten to thirty employees and so forth. But a lot of our ends will be in that area. And you can be sitting there going, you know, you're growing and maybe you've even grown very quickly. And then you're looking at the horizon, well, how am I going to keep growing like this and how am I going to. Because I can't just keep doing more of X. I'm starting to run into operational efficiencies. I can't scale. I've got to, you know, I just don't see where the growth's going to come from. Where is the profit going to come from? So I wonder if you can simplify that process for a CEO, founder and maybe his, his second in command figuring out that, that track, that future track to continued profitable growth.

The first part is to not worry about stuff that is so far out there that it's just too far out to worry about. Right. Control the controllables. I remember when my first son was born and I was like, oh my gosh, what's it going to be like when he's a teenager? And then I reminded myself he's only one. By the time he's, you know, when he's 12, all my friends will have a bunch of 12 year olds and we'll talk about, I won't worry about teenage years until he's 12. I'm not even going to worry about what he's like going to school in first year until he's four. Right? So you can climb up the stairway in the total dark by just touching one stair at a time. So the answers that you need to run a $30 million company will be all around you. When you're a $25 million company, when you're going from 1 to 3, worry about going from 1 to 3. It's almost like everybody who just keeps reading business books is doing themselves a disservice. They're reading books just in case they need that information. What I think they should be doing is reading business books and devouring podcasts and attending masterminds just in time. Read something that helps you work on what you're working on this quarter. If you're hiring three people this quarter, read everything you can about hiring and interviewing. But there's no reason for you to read about interviewing and hiring if you're not going to hire anybody for the next two years or year. So turn your training to very much just in time training instead of just in case training. That's number one. Number two is to remember that you don't have to anymore be the smartest person in the room. You have to know a bunch of the smart people. So invest in mastermind communities, invest in online groups, get into online forums and online groups on Facebook and on LinkedIn, surround yourself with lots of smart people and be okay with being vulnerable and saying, hey, does anybody know how to do this? Like, if you go on my Facebook feed, you'll see me asking questions probably weekly about things I asked one the other day, hey, does anybody know how to really grow a podcast audience? I have 50,000 people every week listening to my podcast, and I'm asking how to grow a podcast still. Like, I'm always trying to learn and develop and grow. So I think it's a little bit of that, right? The growth will come. Remember that. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. And then the last thing is, none of this stuff really matters. We're all going to die. Like, just, you know, chill out and relax and enjoy the journey a little bit, because we're all going to end up as a kebab. We're just going to be meat on a stick at some point. So let's just not take ourselves so seriously, right?

I think one of the dangers as we're trying to grow our companies is we can get into the shiny ball syndrome. You know, there's this gadget, there's that marketing trick, there's this tactic, there's that. That and we're focused in, we're so inundated with all that today. And then also just a tendency because we're thinkers, right? We got a million ideas to overcomplicate things. So I wonder if you could talk about just, you know, I mean I, I like that just in time strategy you were talking about. I think that's partially the same answer to this question. But how do we keep it simple and keep that laser focus on our company, our product, our customers, our growth?

Wow, okay. You just hit on a couple of parts there. One is around simplicity and one is focusing on our product and our customers and our growth. I want to start with that one first. I'll go back to the simplicity one. Second. October of 2000, I walked into 1 800, got junk. You know, I've been working with Brian for a few weeks and he came in one morning and he was all excited that he'd been out the night before with our head of marketing knocking down signs of our competitors with a hockey stick. One of them was driving and one was sitting on the windowsill of the passenger seat and they were knocking down street signs that our competitors put up. I'm like, first off, if I ever hear you talk about that again, I'm leaving. Secondly, you don't beat our competitors by hurting their marketing. We beat our competitors by out marketing them. So now what I want you to do is drive around the city and look for their signs, leave them up. And every time we see one of their signs, put five of them around. I want to do what we call search and destroy. And we're going to cut off their marketing with the geometry of this whole destroy marketing. And I said, if I ever hear you come in the morning talking about them ripping off our yellow page ads or ripping off our flyers or following our pricing, I will walk out the door and you're screwed because I'm the only one who knows how to grow a franchise. So Brian's like, I won't. I'll never talk about them again. He never did. The company was called Trash Busters. They ended up becoming what was called rid of it. But Trash Busters, we used to call them trash bastards. So Trash Busters, he never spoke of them again that day. They were actually operating in seven cities and Brian was operating in 12. Six and a half years later we were operating in 330 cities. They were operating in two. They're out of business today and he's 850 million in system wide sales. Because he stayed focused on his vision, his strategy, his plan, and he ignored what the customers are doing. It's one of the reasons why you can push your vivid vision out about where your company's going because they're not going to be able to execute like you can execute. Right. The second part of that is to really obsess about one core metric and one core metric more than all others. And that's employee net promoter score. How happy are your employees? If your employees are happy, they're going to take care of your customers. If your employees are happy, they'll jump through brick walls for you. If your employees are happy, they're going to work harder, they're going to be more productive, they'll say yes. And if they do all that, your customers are going to be happy. Your customers will be taken care of. But if you obsess about the customer, your employees are going to feel overworked and under loved. And if you've got really happy employees and really happy customers, you can charge whatever you want. We were a premium priced product. There were thousands of companies out there and still are today that can do junk removal for far less than we can at college. Pro painters. We were 30% more expensive than every pro who had 30 years experience painting houses. And we had a day or two days. But because we focused on us and we cared about our employees, that, you know, that's our starting point around the simplicity. I believe that every system in a company should be able to be written down on a post it note. If you can't write it down on a post it note, you're not thinking clearly enough and you're over complicating things. I was not the mba. I wasn't able to go to the business schools. But I could clearly come up with a short little idea that the worst employee in the worst market, in the worst weather, on the worst day, having the worst time at home, could actually execute that system pretty darn well. That simplicity creates momentum and momentum creates momentum.

What is it other than compensation that keeps our employees keeps that net promoter score really high?

Well, and it's interesting, compensation is the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So you need to make sure that your base pay is at about the 80th percentile of the bell curve. It needs to be pretty darn good. Not the best, but they need to feel safe and secure. They need to feel liked and cared for. They need to feel like their boss cares about them, that their team cares about them. They have friends at work. They need to feel like they're being developed that their work matters, that they have meaning, which is driving towards that vivid vision. They need to have that self actualization like they're growing in their career and what they're doing matters. And the company has core values. So it's kind of driving every one of the levels of Maslow hierarchy needs. That's what I focus on. I do think that North Americans kind of suck it as employers because we don't give anywhere near enough vacation time to our employees. And I think that we're coming around to that more. But Europeans, Asians, five to six weeks is normal for everybody, even in their first year. And I think every company should give every employee five weeks paid vacation, including their sick time. Make it a use it or lose it policy and help them to stay happy and to have hobbies and have a bucket list and spend time with their friends and family. If we as employers care more about our employees personal lives and their dreams and their families than anybody else does, they'll go through brick walls for us to build the company. It's not about pay.

I think that's such a. I've read your books and I've read this philosophy and it's really, it's who I want to be as a. Especially around this vacation issue. All the other thing, I think we're doing everything else a vacation issue for North America. It's a big leap, right?

You know, and once you do it though, here's why it works. If you give five weeks vacation to every employee, including their sick time, no one will quit. So your training cost drops, your retention goes up, your happiness goes up, their productivity goes up because they're recharged, they're not showing up sick and getting everybody else sick. Your recruiting cost goes down because everybody wants to work for you. The press will write about you. You'll become one of the best places to work and you'll get press coverage. It just pays off, right? The key is to teach your employees how to use the time effectively. So what I like to do is take two weeks off in the summer because nobody wants to be there working anyway. Take one week off around Christmas and New Year's because everything slows down and grinds to a halt. And then the government already gives us a whole bunch of statutory holidays. These three day weekends turn them into four day weekends, you know, turn 10 three day weekends into four day weekends. And now everybody's got some really good recharge time. Now the key is put systems in place to make sure you got your butt covered when you're not here, right? And make sure that you actually get all your work done. But because they're going away all the time and taking vacation off, they're not on social media, they're not fried, they're not burned out. They're actually getting their work done because they're so excited. Brian at 1-800-got junk this summer. He called me at the end of May. He said, you know, we still do five weeks vacation. I said, yeah. He goes, I'm giving everybody Friday afternoons off. I'm like, what? He goes, I just told them, Friday at 12 o', clock, everybody globally shut down and go home. Because nobody wants to work in the summer. After one o' clock on a Friday, I'm like, dude, it's no wonder you're one of the best companies on the planet to work for.

So you've written a book about meeting called Meetings Suck. Yeah, so that's an evocative title. So let's talk about meetings.

You know, meetings don't suck. We suck at running meetings. And it's kind of like if we were to send our kid off to little league baseball and not teach him how to hold the bat and toss the ball and catch the ball, Johnny would come home from baseball and say, daddy, baseball sucks. Like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. So we don't set them up for that failure. The reason most of us are frustrated with meetings is nobody knows how to run a meeting. Nobody starts meeting on time, nobody stops them on time. I actually stop all my meetings five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time so I can go down the hall, talk to my assistant, get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, and start every meeting and every phone call exactly on time. I have a rule that says no agenda, no attenda. Right? If I don't know what we're covering and in what order we're covering and how many minutes on each item don't come. I teach employees to say, you know what, I looked at the agenda, I looked at the purpose and outcome. I don't think I need to be at it. I'd rather stay focused on my core work. That's a badge of honor to opt out of a meeting because we know that you're actually saying, I'm not needed in this thing. So the book Meeting Suck teaches you how to run effective meetings and all the different types of meetings that every high growth company needs. Your annual planning meeting, your quarterly meetings, your financial meetings, your L10 meeting, your daily huddles, your coaching meetings. It teaches you how to actually run all of those. And then it also teaches employees how to show up and participate at them too.

So let me hit you with the last question. How do CEOs grow their companies without getting burned out?

One is to remember that none of this stuff really matters, right? At the end of the day, we're all going to end up as a kebab. I heard that recently. I thought it was so funny. We're going to just be a meat on a stick. So don't take ourselves so effing seriously. Let's have fun along the journey. Number two is to remember that you're never gonna catch up. So you're not allowed to work nights anymore. You have to shut it down at 5, 30, 6 o' clock every day. And you're allowed one night per quarter to actually catch up on work. And you're not allowed to work Saturdays or Sundays. You're allowed one half weekend day per month to actually catch up on something. That's it. Get a hobby. Get a life. Reconnect with your friends. Reconnect with your spouse. Write a personal vivid vision. Write a vivid vision with your spouse. Write bucket lists with your kids. But this to do list is never going to get caught up on because you're going to grow more, you're going to acquire more, you're going to set more goals. And that last part is your to do list does not have your name on it. Your to do list does not say Fleet's to do list. My to do list does not say Cameron's to do list. It means we can delegate everything on our to do list to other people and we can grow their confidence in their skills and their connections so they can do more and teach them to have a life too and then just enjoy the journey.

Thank you so much. Cameron Herold. This been incredibly illuminating and there's so much actionable wisdom and advice here where people find out more about your work and the services and books and everything you continue to offer.

Yeah, everything is@cameronherold.com, it's H E R O L D. So CameronHerReld.com all of my books are on Amazon, Audible, itunes, I've got a great YouTube channel, my second command podcast, my invest in your leaders course. It's all on the Cameron Herald website.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it. Anytime. Thanks Faith.

Take care. Thank you for joining me on the radical responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you. Take care.

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