Scale to $100M w/ the CEO Whisperer - Cameron Herold

23:47If we fix that system, it'll never happen again, right? Why is a customer unhappy? Let's fix the customer. No, let's fix the system so that no customer becomes unhappy. Right. And I think it's that systems thinking. And that's kind of like the fly. You know, what's what's that? That's just the way I think of things. And it's very different than most people think. People want to just fix that one problem. They don't want to make systems that are automated to get them out of it. You've mentioned. I have to think that way. I have to think that way because my ADD is so bad. I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder clinically diagnosed.

24:20My ex-wife said if I was paying attention during testing, it would have been 18 for 18. So I counter my ADD with a lot of OCD systems. I put these little systems in place to ensure that I don't screw up because I'm never paying attention or I'm always on go. Simple example of this. I'm in Kelowna, British Columbia, where Dan Martell, a really close friend of mine, lives. We've been friends for like 13 years. He runs a Tuesday morning hike up this mountain that's kind of right behind me. and I always know that if I'm meeting them at 6.30 in the morning, I have to be out the house at 6. I'm probably going to forget my water bottle.

24:52So what I do the night before is I put my clothes out for the hike and then I put my water bottle and key beside the door. So I can't get out the door without grabbing my water bottle and the key. Without that little system, I have to rely on me. And a human isn't as reliable as the system is. Correct. You're doing, just attaching your key to the water bottle, also really affected. One of the things I do is whenever I go somewhere and I have leftovers at the friend's house. Actually, yeah, just attach it to it. What I do when I go to people's houses and I don't want to forget the leftovers, I'll take my car key and I'll put it in the fridge or I'll put it in the bag with the food.

25:28My brother puts a car key in the freezer at anyone's home when he goes because he'll always know it's in their freezer, right? So if he's using modern day remotes, the modern fobs, it'll stop working. I learned this lesson the hard way. It freezes the battery and I'm sitting at the car going, Damn it, it doesn't open. So yeah, certain systems. I'll ask my brother if he's, yeah, I'll ask him if he's changed that system to now. Yeah, I usually put my keys in my shoe. So if I'm leaving someone's house, I know my keys are in the shoe. But those are examples that as companies, we need to teach the leadership team to think that way.

25:59See, a leader's core job is to grow people. Most entrepreneurs are so frozen in doing and in doing and busy and I have a to-do list and they forget that their to-do list doesn't have their name on it. If Bob is the entrepreneur, Bob can delegate everything on his to-do list and Bob can spend more time being strategic, thinking, inspecting what he expects, looking for the missing systems, looking for the broken systems, growing people's confidence, growing their skills. That's what we need to do more of as leaders. So we need to remember that most managers, especially first-time, second-time managers, have never been exposed to this kind of thinking.

26:36And all we're doing is teaching them how to use ClickUp or how to use Asana. Forget that. That stuff comes later. Teach them how to think and how to be leaders and then your company scales. Yeah, I think it's so contrary to what everyone's taught because everyone goes through school and they just grind it through and they push through and they regurgitate information instead of systematizing it. And it's just so unbelievably toxic. You've been mentored by some really big, powerful people. You've had people underneath your command that are really, you know, have gone on and done amazing things.

27:05You were 20 years ahead of Bitcoin when you were doing that. But what were some of the lessons outside of what you've gone over that you're like, that blew my mind? Kind of those light switch moments where you're like, okay, I get it. I've got 17 of the 1880Ds. When I saw this one, how I functionally did things. So I'll give you, there's a part A and a part B. So if I go back to College Pro Painters, and I need to kind of illustrate this so that people understand the size. College Pro went on to become the largest residential house painting company on the planet. So amazingly, I was on the leadership team of the largest house painting company in the world.

27:38the largest collision repair chain in the world and the largest junk removal company in the world, all from very early stages and actually the largest private currency in the world at the time. So, so college pro though, back in the eighties, every year had to go out and recruit, hire and train 800 franchisees and they were all university students. Okay. So imagine recruiting, hiring and training in four months, 800 students and training them how to run a business. And then in four weeks, in one month, those 800 franchisees had to go out and recruit, hire and train 8 ,000 university students to paint houses.

28:11So in a five month period, we had to recruit, hire and train 8 ,800 people. For the first three years, I was a franchisee. Okay. So I'm like in my milk, but I'm being trained and groomed on a lot of these systems for the next four years. I was on the senior leadership team recruiting, hiring and training. And I was in the top 30 people of the 8 ,800 person company for four years. so there's not a lot of companies on the planet that recruit hire and train 8 000 9 000 people a year there's not just not the military did that i was like how many people process through the military in five months so google google does like the paypals do but like that's it's very rare so when you're in the top 30 people you're getting trained on leadership systems and leadership skills that most people don't have access to so i was uh if i go back next to you i was 24 and I was being trained.

29:00And I mean like consultants coming in, watching videotapes on VHS, reading books, round table, role practicing, being coached, people watching me do the stuff in the field. And I was being trained on about 12 core skills. They're actually the skills that I put into my invest in your leaders course. It's called investinyourleaders.com. But I was trained on the one I'll talk about was situational leadership. I'll talk about that in a sec. I was trained in situational leadership, coaching, delegation, project management, time management, interviewing, one-on-one coaching, running effective meetings, classroom training, written communication, which would now be similar to email management, Slack.

29:39So when you get a lot of the skill development on hardcore leadership skills at a very young age, that leaves a real imprint around me that my job isn't to do work. My job is to grow people. So at a very young age, at 24 years old, I had 25 franchisees. Then at one point, 32 franchisees reporting to me. I was responsible for 320 people just in my part of that little microcosm. But I was getting groomed in all these leadership skills. So situational leadership is the one skill that I think most people have never even been exposed to. It's the skill that the book The One Minute Manager is based on by Ken Hersey and Paul Blanchard.

30:22that was written, or Ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Hersey, it was written 40 years ago. The One Minute Manager is still used by all the best companies on the planet, by Google's, by PayPal's, by all of them. It teaches a leader to adapt their style of leadership on a project by project basis, even for the same human. So let's say as an example, I was training you on running a podcast. I probably wouldn't talk to you much about the podcast. I might talk to you the amplification of the podcast, or I might talk to you more about finding guests and getting PR firms to find you guests. I might talk to you about the stuff that you're not really thinking about, or I might talk to you more on like stuff that's not even related to your podcast, leading your team or coaching your team or having a bigger vision for your podcast.

31:03Because I understand that on some parts of your podcast, you have a lot of skill and a lot of confidence, but on other areas, you might either have no skill or some skill or lower confidence. So learning how to assess on a project by project basis based on the two things, skill and confidence, where a person sits and which of the four leadership styles to use makes me a very highly effective leader, which allows me to grow people and grow hyper growth companies. 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we were 100 % revenue growth six consecutive years in a row without giving up any equity and having no debt, and we ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for.

31:40That only happens because of the ability to attract people, retain people, and grow people, not by doing work. So I think that for me is a skill that I probably took for granted and really only recognized post 1-800-GOT-JUNK how powerful that was. When I started coaching really seasoned leaders of companies, they'd never even heard of this before. They were just in the default mode of coaching someone. And then the second part is, it's amazing to me how often people go to work every day without having the basic skills to do their job. I'll give you a couple examples. Almost everyone listening has interviewed and hired people.

32:20And to a person, they've probably had no training on interviewing and hiring somebody. Yeah, they might have done it a hundred times, but maybe they've done it wrong all hundred times. Maybe they've read a book. That's not training. It's reading a book. Training is watching information, reading information, working with the coach on it, practicing it, getting critiqued on it, role-playing, kind of stepping back and observing, looking at what you can do better, and then going through that training again. That's training, right? and you think about the best athletes in the world, they get training in their sport.

32:49Why aren't leaders not getting trained on how to run meetings? Why are they not getting trained on how to delegate projects? Why are they not getting trained on how to effectively manage projects in time? The shit that they do every day and no one's ever given them the skills. That's the stuff that I now go, wow, that's where the hyper growth comes from. So you do a lot of this training through either your books or your courses, your, your one-on-one of your private clients, what are some of the things that, and how long do these, do you normally see radical changing in these orgs? Cause obviously you've got to pivot the COOs, which is, isn't the usually, it's usually in the very first module that I can put them through that they go, holy shit, I get it.

33:30All this other stuff. I have no skill development. So I was coaching a CEO of a very, very effective company, 200 employees. And I asked him like, how much training have you had on interviewing people? And he goes, none, but I've hired a hundred. And I'm like, maybe you've done it wrong every time. He goes, he goes, okay, teach me. He's like, okay, teach me, give me something. Right. So I started giving him some ideas and he's like, fuck, I don't even know what you're talking about. So all of a sudden I created the gap where it was almost like I, he fell off the bicycle and he goes, okay, teach me how to, or he fell off the skateboard.

34:04He's that everything he knew wasn't necessarily the best way. You know, it's like, I didn't know until I was 50 years old that when you hold, when you're going to bat, you pull up your elbow, the back elbow kind of comes up. I didn't know. Nobody had ever taught me that before. You're Canadian. Meanwhile, there's base. Right, yeah, thank you. You're American, so you know this, right? I'm American, I get it. I was a pitcher, I played my ball. I didn't know this. Yeah, you get it, it's okay. I'm 50 years old and I didn't know this. Like, this is irresponsible of me to teach my kids how to swing a bat when I don't know how to fucking swing the bat.

34:34I don't even have to hold the bat, let alone swing the bat. But then why are entrepreneurs keep saying that business is difficult? Business isn't difficult. What happens is we would never send our kid off to Little League Baseball without teaching them the basics. You wouldn't send your kid off because Johnny would come home from baseball. He'd go, Daddy, baseball sucks. He's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. Yes. And then all entrepreneurs come back and go, business is difficult. No, you're difficult because you're not because you suck at it. You're not learning this core skills and you keep repeating it.

35:03And then the last part of this is the baby boomers in Gen X that go, oh, I have 30 years experience. No, you have five years experience six times in a row. Yeah. Or you have all this experience, which you think is expertise and experience is not expertise. It's totally different. And they don't fucking get it. And that's why the best baseball players on the planet today still have coaches. They have mindset coaches. They have swing coaches. They've got fitness coaches. They have nutrition coaches. if entrepreneurs and their, and by the way, every entrepreneur that gets skill training for themselves, they have a coach for themselves, they're in a mastermind for themselves.

35:38That's great. What will really scale your company is get coaching and get your key employees into courses and growing them and getting into masterminds. If you grow your team, that's what scales your company. Growing yourself is like a one times one return. You grow the seven people on your leadership team, now you're getting a 700%. It's just incremental growth. So when you have a team, and there's a lot of things when you go into organizations, obviously getting rid of the CEO as quickly as you can, getting that ego out of the room. But when you come into this environment and you have this high-end team of radically different personalities, if you haven't hired effectively in the first place, and you have these very different personalities that aren't unified under one command, how do you unify them?

36:18How do you get these individuals who are like, hey, marketing's useless, but branding matters. IT is useless, but how do you unify them? relatively quickly. Two parts. Unfortunately, I can't use the baseball analogy here because it doesn't stand up as well as a football analogy. So do you ever watch any U.S. football? I do, regrettably. Okay. So the only reason I even say U.S. football is because I've been in 54 countries and for the rest of the world, football is soccer. So in U.S. football or American football, we have, let's say we have like the Dallas Cowboys, right? We have the offensive team, we have the defensive team, we have the special teams and we have the Dallas Cowboys.

36:52So let's say that you have the, you know, the wide receiver, right? The wide receiver. What's the most important team for the wide receiver? Offense. He's the offensive team, right? Yeah. He's offense. Yeah. Offense. That's the, that's the wrong answer. You just said, yeah, three, you said, yeah, three times. Let me give you, let me give you, let me give you the reality is the defense getting the ball back. So I would say collectively, all of them are the most important team. They have to work as a unified structure how about the most important team is the dallas cowboys yeah and see what you're saying is well of course but every leadership reaction was to go over here bingo so if you're now the head of marketing and i say what's your most important team what does the head of marketing say normally they say marketing marketing yeah head of finance finance my no the company you're running.

37:43So when I was the COO at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, my most important team wasn't operations or the call center or PR or sales that I ran. My most important team was the leadership team at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. That was my first team. And we called it our first team. To the outside world, we called it our leadership team. But the seven members on the leadership team, we called it our first team. Our second team was the functional area that we ran. So the head of finance knew that his first team was the leadership team and the head of finance knew, even though we had eight people on it, the second most important team was finance.

38:15When everyone's showing up with a company in mind, the vision for the company in mind, the core values in mind, the debate is for the good of the company in mind. That's where real kind of scale happens. And that's where everybody pulls together. I think that's number one. There was a second part. Repeat the, can you repeat the question? We're talking about how there's, you know, there's a culture that isn't unified against each other. How do you get them unified with each other? So that, so number one is remembering that your first team is your first team. You're right. That's the unification.

38:42The second part is by practicing gratitude and praise across functional areas when every, and it's kind of like when the offense is going back out onto the field, what are they doing? They're high five in the defense. They're slapping the defense on the ass. They're telling each other what they just, Hey, this guy beat you. Keep an eye open for that next time. That's because they recognize that my job is to praise and show gratitude and celebrate the other teams that are all on the same team. When you build that system into your company, massive growth happens. And then the cult, that flywheel, right, really starts to steamroll.

39:17To give you a baseball example in the future, New York Yankees, they don't put the names on the back of their shirts. In the old days, they refused to put the names on the back of the shirts because we only have one name and that's we're a Yankee, period. We don't put our individual names on the back of the shirt. So the Yankees had that in that culture. My family's from New England, so I can't sit there and praise the Yankees too much because they'll find me and they'll shoot me in the face with a bazooka. That's the pivot. That's the pivot there. When the Toronto Maple Leafs, the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, his cottage was next door or a few doors down from my family cottage.

39:46He took the names off the jerseys one year to sell more programs. I like the Yankees version better. The Yankees is a lot better than the Toronto. God bless them. well here's part two part two was they told harold ballard you have to put the names on the jerseys so you know what he did on the blue jerseys next year he put the names on in the same color blue as the jersey and then the so then in year two they said no it has to be in the opposing colors like dude the guy was a character man god bless him god bless i like the light but the yankees is culture yeah yankees all culture it's always been you know they were the last people to let people have facial hair.

40:24They really dug in really hard. They only wear jewelry on. It was amazing. Love it. When people are going through this and they want to start getting this level of training for the people who don't have access to you, who don't have access to some of the things that you have and don't have the ability to give to the team and want to be able to take the first step and say, hey, we're heading towards some changes economically. No matter what happens, whoever takes, who sits in the White House or anything else, we're heading some, just because the economy's breathing in and breathing out. What are some of the tools and resources that they can track down to start implementing?

40:56The first big one is, is you're not running a freaking country. You're running a business that's small in a microcosm in a city. Stop worrying about the global economy, the global financial crisis. Get, get away from your desk, get away from the news, get away from social media, start doing some sales, start doing some marketing, start taking care of your employees, start taking care of your customers. Business will grow. You're not running a trillion dollar company. You're not like, you don't have to worry about the global financial crisis. So stop creating your own doom loop, right? In every single economy, good and bad.

41:28Like it's why in these last couple of tough years, when so many companies were struggling, the top seven were crushing it. Guess which companies I've been buying stock in for almost 15 to 20 years. The top seven I've been buying stock in Amazon every two to three months since 2003. Nice. Why wouldn't I, it's not going anywhere. So, so focus on the critical few things and stop worrying about all the noise and all the distraction because none of that stuff matters. Tom Peters, when he wrote in search of excellence back in the eighties said that to be truly successful, you have to be a monomaniac with a mission.

42:01So that's that true soul focus, right? That's where, where the real growth is going to come from. And I think really good entrepreneurs can slow it down, take a breath, pull their team together and say, you know what? We're not marketing to the whole world. Like if I ran a restaurant, I got enough people like within view of this camera on my phone that I can market. I'll just market to them and I would be successful. I don't need to worry about what's happening in San Francisco or Chicago or, you know, Israel right now. Who cares? No, I agree. What are some of the - I can care as a human and out of curiosity, but it doesn't impact my business.

42:35It doesn't affect your first team at this moment. So when you're doing this, what are some of the books? You've mentioned a bunch of your material. What are books that someone can grab a hold of? And because everyone, when I'm always reached out to when they do this, they're like, hey, I want some tools. I want some strategies. And I'm like, hunt systems, not strategies, but I still want to feed the audience and give them what you want. I'll give two books that are not mine. One is called Insanely Simple. It's the 10 core simplicity systems that Apple and Steve Jobs use to scale Apple that are absolutely applicable to a 10 person, 50 person, 500 person company, super applicable.

43:11They're very, very easy to understand. And you can take those concepts and bring them into your company. So insanely simple would be number one. The second, and I think it's because it's very, very tied to a time period that we're in right now is called the hard thing about hard things, but Ben Horowitz, and it's about operating as a wartime CEO versus a peacetime CEO. They don't mean it in the physical, like actual military war. They'd be like, how do you run a business when there's an economic crisis, when you're in a period of stagflation, you're in this crazy chain of political, like, how do you run in that when you need to be super focused and leaders need to lead and you can't like get all fluffy with consensus?

43:43I would read that book right now too. And two last questions. One, where do you think overall, because you've tapped into different things, where we're going? And then I'll get to the next question after that. Where are we going? Where are we going economically? Where do you, what do you see the next four to five years? Where do you see things going? I've been calling stagflation for three years. So I've been calling the hyperinflation and recession for three years. And it's finally proven out to be right. I was off by, because I called it 2019-20, because when we started to print money for COVID, we delayed it.

44:11But we're in a period of stagflation, which is what happened in 1974. I've run businesses through three economic downturns. I was running a company in 08-09. I was running a company in 2000-2001, when the NASDAQ fell by 78%. And I was running another one back in 1991, when we had the big meltdown. So I'm used to this. I think where we're going is a period of stagflation for another 16 months, which is kind of till the end of 2025. Inflation still, even though the government's going to stop telling us it's inflation, like they used to say that 2 % or greater was too much. Now they're thinking that 3 % is a good threshold.

44:49They're basically allowing. So I think we're going to be a period of inflation where people are going to need more. Everything's going to cost more. I'm not Trump fan or not a Trump fan. doesn't matter to me either way. But if Trump comes in power, watch what happens. Stuff is going to get more expensive because he's going to become more U.S. protection. U.S. protection makes everything more expensive. Buying out of China, buying out of all these other countries is going to help us get cheaper goods and cheaper services. So stuff is going to get more expensive either way. And then I think we're going to have this period of inflation.

45:21And I think we have a period of inflation where consumers are basically tapped out. They're starting to live off credit cards. They're not going to Topgolf anymore. They're not going to movies anymore. We're seeing a switch from wine to beer. Um, we're seeing Amazon sales off. Like we're seeing stuff where the consumers aren't buying and that's going to start hitting the business. And then we're going to have the commercial real estate impact. Um, you know, where all these commercial real estates and banks. So I think we're going to have a period of recession and inflation for a period of another 16 months.

45:50Um, where do I go outside of that? I don't, I don't, I don't even care past that really like yeah 16 months yeah i'm not worried about when i all so for me for me it's like debt is good until it's bad right don't over leverage this anybody who's under 35 the big lesson for you is these interest rates today are normal sorry but like six and a half percent when i got a mortgage in 2000 for six and a half percent for five years i was doing my happy dance I was a little old man. Yeah. Cause I re I remember getting Canada savings bonds in 1982 at 18 and three quarters percent. So I remember when seven, eight percent was like an okay business loan.

46:30So I got news for you. Like we were in this very, very, very from, from 19, sorry, 2009 till 2022, that 13 year period, we had artificially low in, um, interest rates. So anybody who's 35, they don't know anything different. They think that's normal. That's not normal. It's not. So So I think we're going to get used to this as being normal again. It's not the new normal. It's the real normal. It's the way it should have been because that level of interest rates that low had never happened in economic history ever. Right. And it probably won't happen again. And it's birth rate. It's geopolitical this part.

47:06It's birth rate. That amount of money left the market. It is what it is. Lots of free money. So I think we're sitting in a period now where inflation is normal. We're going to have this kind of like period where we start to digest that inflation. It's like the snake swallowing the frog. at some point you've digested it. We'll digest that printing of money. It'll become the new normal. Interest rates will feel normal again and we'll get back to business. I think that's what's coming in 2026 is we're just used to this as the norm. Gotcha. If people want to track you down, if people want to find you and get more information and learn more about you and you talked about having the camera before for your social media, how do people find you?

47:41How do they get ahold of you? What's their next step? Yeah, so the main website they can find all of my products and services that is CameronHerald.com and it's H-E-R-O-L-D. So CameronHerald.com. All of my six books are available on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. I have a podcast called the Second in Command Podcast they can check out. We're in the top hundred on Apple Business Podcasts. And then I have a course called Invest in Your Leaders. And that has all the core leadership skills that I've trained everybody in all the way back to Kimball Musk 30 years ago. Beautiful. All right. I really appreciate it.

48:11I think there's some insights and some things that even pivoted the way I looked at it, especially what team I'm on. Thank you for that. I appreciate you. You're welcome. Charles, you're very welcome. You just witnessed Cameron. I always speak quickly, but six shots of espresso. I'm wired today. And for those of you who aren't watching this, who are actually listening to this, go watch this. His background is absolutely stunning. And his Lambo Flex is amazing up there in British Columbia. I've just added it to my list. So I've got some flights coming up. All right. Thank you so much. All right.

48:41Thanks, Charles. At the end of the day, business isn't about having the perfect theory or the most sophisticated strategy deck. It's about building systems that work when you're not there, creating cultures that drive results and focusing on the critical few things that actually move the needle.