Episode #782 - Turning Hiring Mistakes Into Leadership Lessons with Cameron Herold

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Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Yeah, and the great thing about being in a rapidly growing situation is you learn lessons very fast. You don't have the choice, you've got to learn fast. But a lot of times those lessons that you learn then under the crucible of fire and reality stay with you your entire life. What do you retain about? Because all big companies have, you know, the attrition of employee turnover. You know, just like if you have 30,000 employees with, you know, a big part of, of expansion is first of all, you've got to replace the ones that you're going to lose through attrition and then you've got to over recruit and train past that point. And so what did you learn early on about that, that you, you know, that you guys did right about getting them, sorting them, training them that say a lot of companies never get right?

Well, one was that we were really ruthless around training our management team on how to actually do a job interview, how to review a resume, what behavioral traits to look for, what skills to look for, what scorecard to measure people against, how to run a first interview, how to balance the ability to sell and to ask questions in the right balance in a first and second situation, how to do group interviews, how to actually use reference checks. So we really trained people ruthlessly on how to run a process and interview with strong predictability. And that was something, again, I learned very early on. The second thing we learned was, you know, there was that old adage that you hire for hire for attitude, train for skill. I said, bullshit. Like, that doesn't work. You have to hire for attitude and skill set. You have to hire for the culture fit and the proven skill set. So we became very good at deploying on that. We also became really good at the retrospective or the debrief on any time anything didn't work out. So I remember this one guy that I hired years ago at College Pro Painters and my VP that I reported to said, you know, this kid's not going to work out. I won't use his name. And I was like, no, I can get him there. I can coach him there. And he goes, dude, he's an alien. Like, I can tell you right now, he's an alien. He won't be able to lead his people, he won't be able to lead his banker. He Won't be able to lead and sell customers. He won't be able to close anything. And I'm like, I can train him. Well, my boss was right. You can't take someone who's the wrong culture fit and give them skills. They have to have both. So I was able to debrief with myself and say, what went wrong? Like, what did I miss? What did I. How was I tricking myself? How did I get lazy in the hiring? And I think every time we mishired someone, I blamed myself. Whereas often entrepreneurs will say, oh, I'm glad that person's gone. They were useless anyway. I'm like, dude, you hired them, right? I always blamed myself.

You were excited about this guy a week ago, you know, who ruined it.

So what did you miss in the recruiting? What did you miss in the training? What did you miss in the onboarding? What did you miss in the culture? So I'm very strong at examining my contribution to the problem and not blaming external environments. And I think that's always helped me in business and certainly on the people side.

Well, one of the things about growing is you're continue to improve and make things better. And that allows you create some capacity for doing things quicker, faster, better, more efficient. And how much of that process of recruiting them, you know, doing that interview, then the steps you went through, how much of that was already there before you got there? And you just learned it and became a great practitioner of it. How much of it did you refine and develop yourself at College Pro?

It was there. That was where I was trained again. They were up because they were hiring 8,800 people. But at Boyd Autobody and Gerber, I brought in all the systems. At uBarter.com, i brought in all the systems. At 1-800-got junk. I brought in all the systems. When I joined Brian at 1-800-got junk. I was employee number 14. You know, he'd sold 12 franchises, but he had no idea how to coach them, train them, market them, like. So I built out the organization to then have it. Have it scale. We doubled the size of the company every year for six years. We went from 2 million to 106 million in six years. Gave up no equity, and we had no debt. It was by deploying all these systems around leadership. I actually teach it in my course, Invest in your Leaders. It's an online course, but yeah, I brought those systems in, trained people, certified people to make sure that they could actually execute one of my big strengths. Because I was really bad in school. I was horrible in high school and horrible in university, so I dumbed the systems down. So for me, every system can be written on a post it note. And if I can't, like I could write an interviewing system on a post it note which allows people to understand it and to practice it and to deploy it and to learn from it. Right. I don't over complicate things and that's probably a skill set that I learned in the franchising world is the system has to work for the worst franchisee in the worst market with the worst employees under the worst conditions for the brand to still be good. Like McDonald's delivers that same Big Mac by that pimply faced kid in the middle of nowhere on a crappy middle, you know, February day and it still tastes like it. If Ray Kroc was making it right, even though I don't eat Big Macs. But that's the way I see every business is it can be simplified.

I think we've all heard the thing of, you know, get it down to one page. Every proposal, every idea, get it to one page. But you've took it down to one post it note.

And I learned that from an early stage mentor. He said if you can't write it on a post it note, you're not thinking clearly enough. And I think, I don't remember who it was, like Winston Churchill or somebody. He said that if I, I'm sorry about my, my letter being one page. If I spent more time on it, it would have been shorter. You know, I can't remember who the quote should be attributed to, but I attribute that to me because I needed the cheat sheets, I need the shortcuts. I feel like most entrepreneurs are like a fly trying to bang their head on the window and they're going to keep trying harder till they get out the window. But I'm like, wait, there's a door, there's a shortcut. You know, my dad taught me when I was 16 that my R and D should stand for rip off and duplicate. That all of the best companies have figured out the best systems just do what they're doing. So like when I read a business book, I just do it. Like when I read Good to Great, I do all of it. I don't read it and go, oh, that's interesting, I'll read the next book. No, like if I'm going to spend the time reading, I may as well do everything Jim Collins tells me because he's pretty freaking smart. Now. Is it perfect? I don't know, but it's better than this kid can figure out.

Now, when you move forward with that, and let's just say the second company you installed the systems and all of that, you're continuing to refine these things, I would imagine, as you go along.

Yeah, because you refine them based on the industry that you're in, based on the environment that you're in. You know, like, I've worked with companies now in 28 countries. I was coaching a monarchy in the Middle east, in the country of Qatar, you have to adapt the system. When I'm teaching companies in India, you adapt the system. When I'm working with a company in California or New York, you have to adapt the system.

Are there parallels? Do you find, because you've got unique vantage point from these exposures, are you finding parallels in the situations people are in when they bring you, you know, they bring you in for some ideas, some counsel, some advice? Are there similar things or, you know, some parallels to how it's screwed up or how it's gummed up? You know what I found, Cameron? Most of the time growth in my business, most of the time growth stalled out, was bottlenecks. You know, you had, you created a bottleneck here. And until you fix that, you know, there's no. It's going to shut the rest. It's going to limit everything else. So it's like, look where the stopping point is and fix that and, you know, continue to evolve like that. But now are you seeing any kind of, you know, looking back?

I learned this from my dad. My dad was an entrepreneur with a small company, about 15 employees. But his employees were with him for like 20 years, 25 years. And he hired all of the misfits. And they would describe themselves as the misfits. They were the first nations, you know, native Indian who couldn't get a job and they were on welfare. My dad would hire them on a government grant program and care about them, and they take the disabled person and he'd care about them. He took all these people off these government grant programs, but he cared about them. Like, he really, really cared about them as a human. Cared about their home life, cared about their relationships with their parents, their relationships with their kids, their relationships with themselves. And when he cared about them so much, they ended up going through brick walls for him. And he was a roller coaster entrepreneur. Like, he was, you know, up and down to be stressed at times, but because they knew he really cared about them. And I see so many companies don't get that, you know, they're focused on their marketing or they're focused on the customer, they're focused on their product or whatever. It's about the employees first. If your most important metric in your company is your employee net promoter score, how happy are your employees? Your employees will go through brick walls for you to build to take care of the customer. But if you're so focused on the customer being happy, your employees feel like they're burned out, they feel like they're not being taken care of. Everything I do is try to obsess about the employee being happy and then I know that they'll work harder to fix all the problems. I'll get more productivity, I'll get more ideas. The other thing I've noticed is that I don't think very many companies spend enough time on the soft skills of business. Right. Again, it's the stuff that's in my invest in your leaders course, but stuff around situational leadership, around coaching, delegation, managing conflict, one on one coaching meetings. Managing meetings. Like all the executive functioning skills that normal leaders of big companies tend to be good at. But when you're in the small to mid sized companies like the five person, up to 500 person companies, most people aren't good at that, you know. I asked the CEO the other day, have you ever been trained on interviewing? He goes, no, but I've done about 100 interviews. I said, yeah, maybe you've done them all wrong. It dawned on him that he's never been trained on anything. He's just been trying his best. And I think that's something that I've noticed with lots of companies is they don't have the base, they understand their industry. They might be very strong at marketing or very strong at auto body, or very strong at house painting, but they're not necessarily strong at running a business.

When did you start teaching outside of the companies you were involved in passing on all of this information?

It was 1995. I was running Boyd Auto Body, which is now Gerber Auto collision, in the US 96. And I was asked to speak at an industry conference and to do a panel. And it was around, I don't remember what the panel was about. It was something around leadership. And I said, okay, because I'd always done public speaking as a kid, I was comfortable doing public speaking. So I did that panel and when I came off the stage, I had five or six other owners came up and they wanted more information from me. And I was like, wow, that was. I'm just this kid. Like I'm, I don't know, I'm trying to figure this thing out for myself still, but that started me going. And then when we were building, 1, 800, got junk a few years later and started getting some press. You know, we were on Oprah and we were getting written up in all the, you know, the actual physical magazines like Forbes and Fortune and Ink. We were in the actual magazines, the newspapers, the press started to talk about how good our culture was, and people wanted to know how we built this company culture. We were the number two company in all of Canada to work for. So I was being asked to start speaking on stages there, and then that just kind of blew the doors open.

Why were you speaking so much as a kid?

One of my skills that my dad wanted us to learn as an entrepreneur was the ability to problem solve and think on your feet and lead others. And one of the ways to do that was to have the confidence to stand in front of others. If you're going to be going on a sales call, you got to be able to be confident to walk into a room. If you're going to be, you know, running a sales team meeting, you got to be confident and have the good energy. I remember recording radio ads for my dad when I was in grade two or grade three. I was going into the radio station and recording ads that played on the radio. Those were just skills that he wanted us to have as a kid.

At some point, you decided, I'm going to write a book. And you wrote. I guess the first one was double. Double.

I didn't know. I never wanted to be an author. I was terrible in English in school. It was one of my worst subjects. I got like a. I think 62% each time I took English classes. But a speaker's bureau that was booking me to do speaking events said they could get me a higher speaking fee if I had a book. And I think at the time, I was charging like 3 or $5,000 for an event. And I said, well, what could you get me? And they said, we could get you 10 grand. I'm like, you can get me 10 grand for speaking event. I'll write a book. So anyway, I worked really hard and I got the book done. And sure enough, my speaking fee went to 10 and then to 15 very quickly. And I also learned from Jeffrey, what's his name? He was the CMO of Xerox, Jeffrey Hazlett. And Jeffrey and I were at a speaking event, and he'd given out a copy of all of his books to everybody in the audience. And I was like, did they pay you for all your books? He goes, no. I'm like, here I am trying to sell 10 books from the front of the stage and putting 200 bucks in my jeans and thinking I'm a hustler. I'm like, you gave everybody in the audience a copy of your book? He goes, yeah, it's like $2 per book. There's a hundred people. It cost me 200 bucks. It's a marketing tool. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I get it. And so for the last 10 years, every time I speak to an audience, I find a way to make sure that everyone in the audience gets a book. Either I sell them to them or they buy them. But the book became a marketing vehicle for me in terms of building my brand and sharing the ideas and getting higher speaking fees. So I'm now 40,000 is my normal in person event now, and my normal Zoom events are 15,000.

How did you get involved into professionally speaking? You know, you. You're invited. How does that domino to where now you're a professional speaker because, you know, you're a busy guy at that time of your life.

So it started at 1-800-got- junk is when I started charging for events. And it was because there was so much demand for me to share how we were scaling this company. I'm like, if I can charge and you can pay me, I may as well do that. So that was the entrepreneurial hustle, right? You. My dad taught us to spot an opportunity and charge for that, or try to find an opportunity and make money off of it. So that's where it started. And then one of the guys who worked for me, Christopher Bennett, came up to me one day, and he said, I think we can get a speaker's bureau to represent you. I'm like, why would they want to represent me? And he goes, because they get 25% of all your money. I'm like, oh, they're a full commission salesperson. Yeah, introduce me. He introduced me. And the CEO of the speakers bureau came to see me speak in Toronto, and I'm a very good speaker. Like, I'm actually very good keynote speaker. I deliver really good content, and even over Zoom, I do good content. Anyway, this guy, David Lavin, who runs one of the biggest speakers bureaus in the world, saw me present and signed me that night. That was my first bureau. And then it was again the books and the brands, and. And then I was. Remember, I left 1-800-got junk in May of 2007. So almost 17 years ago and that was right when the Facebook was launching. So when Facebook was starting, I was now going off on my journey post 1-800-got junk and I was telling people about the speaking events that I was doing. I was just sharing photos of me doing speaking events and that got more demand and it kind of built from there. So the books, social media, the bureaus, and then I guess delivering good speaking events.

Plus, you obviously love the environment. The fact that you continue to go to so many of these things, it's obviously in your blood.

My core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. It's what I've always loved to do. In fact, Simon Sinek, who was on our board four years before he wrote his book, Start with why, was at my home one night for dinner and we were talking about what my purpose, why I do what I do. And he helped me understand that I've always wanted to help entrepreneurs. I liked helping them at college, Pro painters. I liked helping them as franchisees. I liked helping the ones that were in my EO forum. I liked helping them when I was on stages. It just fires me up and I think it's because I was the kid in school who was struggling and no one helped me. No one gave me the cheat sheets. Nobody gave me the shortcuts. They told me to work harder and study more. So I worked harder and study more and I failed. And I don't want entrepreneurs to do that when the cheat sheets exist. So that's probably where it came from.

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