How He Scaled 1-800-GOT-JUNK from $2M to $100M in 6 Years

0:00If the rate of change outside your business is greater than inside, you're going out of business. The easiest way for people to double their revenue and double their profit and and really double their free time is to have clarity around vision, have the foundational building blocks in place inside of your organization, and make sure that you get the right people on the bus, as Jim Collins says, working on the right thing.
Today's podcast is going to be extremely special. I can't I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am. I just wrapped it up. And if you're looking to grow your revenue, your profits, or get more clear on what you want right now, you need to stop what you're doing and listen to today's podcast. Our guest goes through the five stories you need in your business and how you can leverage PR to get more revenue and get more business right now, which we all need. Walks through how you're thinking about your business possibly incorrectly and that's causing problems. How do you figure out the exact vision for what you want? How do you double your profits in the next 3 years? There is so much goodness in here. I myself was a student here and took so many notes. I read this

1:03guy's books years ago and had a huge impact on my life. Without further ado, I want to jump right in to my conversation with the one and only Cameron Herold. Cameron Herold, welcome to the Be Wealthy podcast.
Hey Brad, thanks very much for having me. Really appreciate your time.
Uh it is um you know it's They always say, you know, like I when you read those books, you never imagine that years later I'll be here talking to you. So it's such an honor. And I'm coming to this as a student, right? As a student of your work and a student of business. And so I'm here to ask you a bunch of questions. I want to go back to the beginning.
Okay.
and I did some research, Cameron. So if you see me looking down, it's cuz I got pages I got I have so much research here on you. I bet I'm going to ask you some questions you haven't had before, hopefully. But a lot of it's going to be, you know, down the line. But I want to go to what made Cameron Cameron. So you grew up in northern Canada,
Yeah.
had severe ADD,
Yeah.
and and your dad had this message to you around building a company versus a job. Tell kind of tell us about just tell us

2:07about that.
Yeah, sure. A couple parts there, too. Um ADD and ADHD are related but slightly different. The ADD is attention deficit disorder. ADHD is attention deficit hyperactive disorder. The people that have the H are the ones that can't sit still and are always going. The ADD is somebody whose just brain is going 100 miles an hour and sees everything, which is where I fall. I was quite comfortable with sitting by myself and thinking, but my brain was firing in so many different directions at a young age that it was very hard for me to concentrate and focus in school. Plus, I was extraordinarily bored in school cuz I realized at a very young age that it didn't matter. And as early as when I was 7 years old, I had my first little entrepreneurial venture. Um in fact, I did a talk that ended up on the main homepage of the TED website. If you go to ted.com, I did a talk back in 2010 around raising kids to be entrepreneurs. And it was how I was groomed to be an entrepreneur by my dad and both sets of grandparents who all ran companies. So, we really grew up in a family where

3:10having a job was a bad idea. It was shown to be a bad idea. My dad took me to a golf course when I was about 15 years old. I remember this so clearly. We went out and played golf on a Wednesday at about 12:00. And he showed me all the people coming in to play golf at around 12:00 in the middle of the week. You know, that's Bruce McCulla, he owns a car dealership. And that's Ted Co, he owns an accounting firm. And that's um Jim Wilkinson, he owns the clothing store. And all of these people coming in were all the owners of businesses. And we played our game of golf and we're, you know, 5:00 5:00 sitting on the balcony overlooking the We had a 19th hole, which was the betting hole. So, we were sitting overlooking the 19th hole and and he was showing me all the people coming in to play golf at 5:00. You know, because the the sun didn't set until like 10:00 and they were going to try to get nine or 18 holes in, but that guy works for Bruce McCauley and that girl works at this company and she's a teacher. And he said, "You know what the difference is between all the people coming in to play golf now and the ones who came in in the middle of the day?" And I said, "Yeah, the ones who come in now are employees. The ones

4:12who come in in the middle of the day own their own business." And he said, "Do you know why that matters?" And I said, "No." He said, "When you run your own business, you can do what you want, when you want, and you can play golf as much as you want." And I was like, "Okay, that makes sense." So, anchoring for me wasn't make money, it was to have an amazing life. It was to do what I wanted. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs today have gone on tilt with thinking that business is about making money and they end up getting very frustrated because there's a long part of the business journey. It takes a long time to get to the night before you become that overnight success. But, because he showed me that it was about having that better life all the time, I've had an incredible life as an entrepreneur. And because I was so focused on taking time off and having a better life, it forced me to delegate and grow people and stay focused and now the money has come even faster. But, he kind of showed me the lesson in the right direction. So, yeah, we were groomed. My brother, my sister, and myself have all run our own companies for 20 to 25 years.

5:15
Wow, what what was your dad's back I mean, that that's just incredible insight, right, to be showing kids an anchor on control your schedule, control your time. And my dad What was his background?
My dad was very ADHD, um bipolar as well as I am, and uh he went to university for dentistry, kind of but also played football for the university and then I don't know, I think he graduated, but he um right away got a job in sales and then from sales, up you know, hated the company he was working for and then started his own uh gas station first and then automotive supply place so he did the classic you know back in the 60s go for a university education but then never worked in dentistry thank god he would have been a horrible dentist. He had no patience and but he was smart right but he he realized that his smarts could be channeled in another way and he was also a four handicap golfer when he was 16 so I think he realized that if he could play a lot more golf he wasn't going to get to play a lot of golf as a

6:17dentist but he could you know being in sales and then running his own business. But then both of my grandparents were entrepreneurs. My one grandfather became the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company called Searle Pharmaceuticals and then my other grandfather ran a hunting and fishing resort for 20 years and retired at 52. He retired probably in my guess if I did the math about 1972 or 73 he retired and he day traded stocks out of the newspaper and died at 96 so he was 44 years retired so I got really good early lessons that you know being an entrepreneur would pay off but I also saw the hard work you know I watched my dad come home from every vacation and go straight to one of the offices to check on something. I watched my dad at nights you know sitting in the living room when we were watching TV and he'd be sitting working. But he was also at every game every sport every practice he was at every family dinner he dragged us around on the golf course to caddy and to meet his friends and so he was a very great role model as an entrepreneur. I'm

7:20talking past tense because both my parents have since passed away. My dad died three years ago my mom 20 years ago.
All right if you've been watching the show for any period of time you know I run a a high-end mastermind for entrepreneurs that are looking to create a different outcome and create more freedom in their life as it relates to their wealth and their money and that's what I want to offer you a risk free opportunity to come check it out. We have two seats available at our upcoming mastermind. You can book a call with my team over at bewealthy.com. Navigate to the mastermind section and book a call. We would love to have you at the event and check it out and see what it's all about.
It um those lessons, right? I mean it's just it's so So you're I mean it's generations and generations of entrepreneurs on your side and it
And yeah, and you know what I didn't touch on there is one of the lessons that I think a lot of parents mess mess up. My father recognized in me that I was very entrepreneurial at a young age. But he didn't try to turn my entrepreneurial ventures into summer-long businesses. He didn't try to you know, we didn't have the internet, but in today's day and age it like it

8:23really frustrated watching the mom or the dad that buys their kid the beautiful lemonade stand on Amazon and stands out at the edge of the driveway waving cars in so their kid sells lemonade. The kid's not learning anything. In in reality, mom should go run her own business or dad should go do his own thing, but my dad would let me fail. He'd let me go out and stand at the edge of the street with a crappy little sign and no customers and I'd come in frustrated and he would coach me and then raise my confidence in my skills and send me back out to try it again and then it would improve and I'd come back in we'd talk about it and he'd send me back out. But in that coaching moments, he allowed me to to learn from failure and learn from success and learn from doing it. And if I was bored after doing it for two days, that's cool. He didn't need it to be a a month-long endeavor. He recognized that I would learn. But I I could rattle off right now close to 15 different entrepreneurial ventures that I had by the time that I was 18 years old. Some of them lasted the entire summer,

9:25but all of them have very defined lessons and I could literally tell you one venture and what the lessons were that I still use to this day.
Pick I would love to hear about two or three of them. Tell me Tell me give us two or three of those ventures and those lessons cuz I think that's so I think it's so valuable Cameron because you said something so powerful there. I think today parents are scared to let their kids fail.
Well, and even as a even as adults we need to take bits and pieces of our business and learn from those, right? There's an iterative process in being an entrepreneur and if we don't self-examine and examine our contribution to the problem, it's easy to blame everybody else for failure, but you can examine the problem and examine the opportunities and grow from that. So, I'll give you a couple that come off really quickly. My first little business venture, I was 7 years old. My mom came into my bedroom and she said, "What are you doing?" And I was phoning dry cleaners. I'd taken the long phone with a 50-ft extension cord into my bedroom. I was lying on the floor of my bedroom with the yellow pages open and I was phoning all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg, Canada and I was asking

10:28them how much they would pay me for coat hangers. Back in the day you could take coat hangers in and they would pay you a recycling fee, typically one or two cents. And I was talking to one of the dry cleaners and I was determined to get three cents. Just two cents didn't seem like enough for me. Two cents you could buy like a full double bubble but you probably buy five double bubbles back in that day, but I just wanted to to negotiate for more and finally he said, "No, I can't do three." And I said, "How about two and a half?" And he laughed and he said, "How old are you?" I said, "I'm Devon. How about two and a half cents?" And he said, "Fine, I'll give you two and a half cents." And I learned that you can keep pushing. You can keep you can keep put In fact, last night I went to buy a brand new pair of ski boots. I went and bought this brand new pair of Technica ski boots and when I got to the cashier, I said to the cashier as a joke, I said, "Can I get a 15% discount?" And he laughed and he goes, "No, but I'll give you 10." Like who who asks for discounts buying ski boots at the number one ski boot store at like in the middle of winter,

11:31right? I just have that entrepreneurial hustle and negotiation that I learned as a 7-year-old. So, that's a lesson is you never, ever lose that negotiation, that's the the bootstrapping, that entrepreneurial hustle. My second one that I had was um I was doing comic I call it comic book arbitrage. So, we lived in a very blue-collar, lower-middle-class area, and I would go through all the neighborhoods door-to-door asking all the kids if I could buy their old comic books. And I would typically pay them 2 cents a comic or uh maybe 5 cents for a comic. And this is back in the day when kids had stacks of comics in their homes. But then I took all the comics together and when my family would go to our summer cottage, we would drive 3 hours to our family cottage, it happened to be in a very rich area. It was where my grandparents had bought this um we call it the Hamptons North in Canada. And it's kind of a just a beautiful cottage area, but there were the kids that were there had more money. So, I sold the comics to them for 10 cents a comic.

12:33And I was paying 2 cents a comic. Well, one of the days I was on the beach and I was kind of bragging to the one of the kids about how much money that I was making. And they didn't like it, and one of the kids kind of got into a little fight with me and kind of beat me up. And I realized that you never reveal where your manufacturer is, you never talk about how cheap you're buying your product, you don't brag about the what you're selling it for versus your cost of acquisition, right? You don't brag about your gross margins. You kind of keep those cards a little bit closer to your chest. As long as the customer's getting really good value, they don't care that they paid $50 to make the ski boots that I paid $800 for minus my 10% discount. Um you know, that they what they care about is that they got value for their money. But that was a really good lesson for me is to never reveal your manufacturing source and never talk about your gross margins publicly, and don't brag about your margins, make sure that you brag about the value the customer is getting. You know, again, I I've got probably 15 other lessons that came just from those little ventures, but all of those are

13:35very true lessons that would still hold today in any company.
I mean, it it's just it it's so good. It's the perfect transition to where I wanted to go next. I mean, by 18 years old, I'm sorry, by 20
20.
you had a house painting franchise with 12 employees. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to imagine someone at 20, you know, having that many employees. I mean, that that's just wild to think about. So, how did you get in there and tell us about that business? How did you get started in the house painting franchise business?
Yeah, I was in Ottawa, Canada going to university. Um I was trying to get into business. I didn't have the grades to get into business, so I was doing what what I called the shadow business program. I took as many of the business courses as they would let me take, and then I took a lot of the law courses that started to apply to business. And in second year, I was walking through the university commons building, like the main hub where the kids all hung out between classes, and I saw a flyer on the ground and I went to pick up the flyer to throw it in the garbage just as like a normal citizen might do, right? I don't know why I did it, but and then as I was going to throw it out,

14:37I saw on the flyer it said, "Earn $10,000 and run your own business." Well, that was 1986. Actually, it was December of 1985. And I I went, "Whoa, $10,000 in 1985, that was probably like making $50,000 today." You know, and as a university student, if you can make 50 grand in 4 months, And in Canada, where tuition back then was only two grand a year, I was going to be making five times my annual tuition cost. It was like, Bob's your uncle, I'll I'll take a look. So, I went off to a seminar and and learned what the opportunity was. And I was excited about it, but I was nervous, so I didn't apply. And a couple weeks later, I got a phone call and one of their campus reps said, "Hey, we got your name at the seminar. You never put a resume in, why don't you just apply? And I said, well, I'm not sure. I might do a tree planting job again. He goes, why don't you just apply for the experience of having a job interview? I was like, yeah, I'll do that. Anyway, when I put the application in for the job interview and I went for the job interview, they were so good at

15:40identifying the right kinds of franchisees that they sold me on the program and I never saw the sales pitch. Now I understand what they did. It's called the reverse sell. And they do a very challenging interview process to get qualified candidates to sell themselves and to sell the company on why to hire us. And they were just really, really good at the interview process. So I was awarded or offered a franchise. Um they sent me the franchise agreement to look at. I remember calling my dad completely freaked out. It was a 67-page franchise agreement that I had to sign as a 20-year-old. And my dad said there's never a better time in your life to go bankrupt. You know, if you go bankrupt at 20, you've got nothing to lose. You've got no kids, you've got no family, you've got no wife who's going to be pissed off at you. You can take a shot at it and you know that we're going to be here to support you and help you and and cheer you on. And he goes, I believe in you. Why don't you give it a try? So I I bought a franchise and um the way that they did the franchise in those days was you didn't have to pay the

16:42franchise fee, you had to pay a very high royalty. So as long as you could afford to to get the money to buy a van and or buy some equipment. And you would usually buy the equipment from a a prior franchisee. So I bought a bunch of equipment from a franchisee in Ottawa, drove it 5 hours to Sudbury, and I paid the franchisee over the course of the summer. So he kind of gave it to me on consignment. And um my dad loaned me $1,900 to buy a shitty 1979 Ford Econoline van and that was the that was the starting point. And I was so scared of failing that I followed every every system in the manual. It was about a 300-page operating manual. And I think what I learned was I could be very smart as an entrepreneur, but there's also systems that exist and if I just follow the best systems, the predictability of success is going to be very high. So, I ended up making about $16,000 in profit that summer and it was like it was like a drug addict with a bowl of cocaine. I was all in. I

17:44was like headfirst. I'm like, this this is awesome because, you know, my my friends were making $2,000 that summer and I was taking girls on dates to the nicest restaurants in Ottawa, you know, as a 22 20 20-year-old um and still had cash in the bank. So, I did that for 3 years as a franchisee and then I went and joined the head office and worked as a general manager recruiting, hiring, and training franchisees. And by the time I was 28 years old, I'd hired and trained 120 entrepreneurs and I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs by 1993. Uh one of which was Kimbal Musk, Elon's younger brother, was a franchisee that I hired and trained. And then I also coached his cousin, Peter Rive, who went on to build SolarCity. They were both two franchisees that I recruited, trained, and then coached um over the course of the summer. So, that was what I call my my real-world MBA. But a big lesson I take from that is if you're going to read books by thought leaders, or you're going to get coached by

18:45thought leaders, or you're going to join a mastermind and be around other thought leaders, don't argue. Just take the best system My dad calls it R&D, rip off and duplicate. Take the best systems and run with those until you've got enough momentum and then you can start kind of recreating or reinventing the wheel.
Yeah, I think entrepreneurs, to your point, I think they want to put their own spin on it too early. Right? To your point, follow the manual, find the people that have already proven the model. Then once you're having success, insert your own level of creativity or some expertise, but but not in the very beginning. Follow the system. Someone's already been and done exactly what we want to do somewhere. Um and I want to go to the Elon Elon's brother here in a minute. I want to go there, but it it's such a great point you made right there. I just want to anchor that in.
Yeah, and what's really interesting is that most franchise companies, anyone who's franchising their business, they tend to look for the wrong people to be franchisees. Entrepreneurs are horrible franchisees because they try to reinvent all the

19:49systems. Lawyers are bad franchisees, engineers are bad franchisees, and pilots are bad franchisees. Engineers are always trying to examine and recreate the system. MBAs and accountants are always trying to recreate a system where they're playing business person behind their spreadsheets, and they're not aware they're doing it. And pilots are so follow the exact system that if there isn't one, they panic. So, you need someone who is what we call the interdependent. They're dependent enough on a system if it it exists, they'll follow it. They're not going to try to recreate it like an entrepreneur. And if there's not a system, they're entrepreneurial enough that they'll come up with something. And then what I also learned that if I could really trust, kind of like as a kid, once we get out of the house and we become 20, 25, 30, we realize our parents were actually pretty smart. Most of us had parents that were trying their best. That when you learn that, then there's an acceptance there. Well, a franchisee, if you want to be successful, the acceptance is as soon as the franchisor knows a better way,

20:52they're going to let you know. And if a better way trickles up to them, they're going to let you know cuz they want you to do well cuz then you validate better, you do more in revenue, they make more royalties. Like, they're not going to keep the best secrets of system. Right? And they're certainly not trying to screw you up cuz they don't do well unless you do well. So I I learned that at a very young age was just to follow the best and and R&D.
Uh it's so So So you then you you start coaching I mean really you're coaching and helping these new you know as a general man helping franchises you're recruiting them into the business and then helping coaching them. Where do you go from there to building these two hundred million dollar companies by age 35?
Let me give you a sense of scale for College Pro Painters too to kind of anchor this point. College Pro became the largest residential house painting company on the planet. So every year between September and the end of December we had to go out and recruit hire and train or sorry recruit and and hire 800 franchisees. And then from January until the end of February we would train those 800 franchisees to run a business.

21:55And then we would help them hire 8,000 university students to be painters. So in that in that period of two months we're training 800 franchisees we're hiring 8,000 students to paint houses and training them to paint. And then we would do 64 million dollars in house painting between May 1st and August 31st. And August 31st 8,800 quit kids would quit and go back to school. We would get rip-roaring drunk wake up September 2nd and we would do it again. So I became kind of operationally world-class at executing that model and understanding these very entrepreneurial best of breed systems. That's what I try to codify in you know my Invest in Your Leaders course or my books or my masterminds that kind of stuff. And I were how I went from there to to building the the bigger companies I left College Pro Painters in October of uh or September of 1994. And one of my family friends was starting an auto body chain collision repair chain and he had seven locations and he really wanted to franchise that

22:59business. I didn't know anything about auto body but I definitely knew how to franchise. So I joined Terry the company in Canada was called Boyd Autobody and Glass. We scaled that up to 65 locations took the company public. I set up the buying programs the the branding programs the marketing um franchise training. I did a bunch of acquisitions for the company where we acquired auto body shops and they became corporate locations. And then after we took the company public the first acquisition was called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States and Boyd and now Gerber Auto Collision is now the largest collision repair chain in the world. It's about a two billion dollar company publicly traded. So I was on the team of that for four years. I left right after we took the company public and I was hired to be the president of a private currency company. So we did kind of like what Bitcoin is doing today. We did it from 98 to 2000. We had 30,000 companies buying and selling using our digital currency instead of the US dollar. We had Bose stereo Hard Rock Cafe Avis Rent a Car. Um Starwood Hotels all using a digital currency backed by nothing. We

24:03were issuing the currency and then trading it. Um when we sold that company at the height of the internet boom. But we weren't able to get out until uh there was a closing window that we had to wait three or four months. So the 64 million that we sold or 60 million we sold the company for was about three million after the Nasdaq had crashed by 78%. So effectively what we built we lost everything. And then my best friend was um had built up a company called the Rubbish Boys in Canada. And he was just approaching two million in revenue it had taken him 11 years to get there and he asked me if I would coach him. I said I would coach him but there's no way I would ever work for him. And six and a half years later we built 1-800-Got-Junk from the two million to 106 million and I had been the COO for that entire time. So that those were kind of the companies that I built post College Pro.
So you get into I want to go to Got Junk. So you get there you're the 14th employee. Is that right?
Yeah. Yeah, there were six
Okay. six people in the call center, six vice presidents, Brian as CEO, and then I came in as the second-in-command.

25:06
So, I kind of want to I want to break that down cuz I mean I I think that a lot of our listeners are at that probably 2 million in revenue range, right? A lot of them. And they'd love to get to 100 million.
Yeah.
So, you know, kind of
He gave us the framework the other night before.

Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, yeah, we're missing the part where, you know, it was those two decades or whatever before, you know, like getting getting there, but with that talent, right? You come in there What was this What were some of the the launch pads that took you guys, you know, through that? I guess through those lessons of growth from 2 million to 100 million.
Sure, there were four or five that were really defined inflection points that allowed us to scale that up. The first was me being very clear on the vision that Brian had for what the company would look like, act like, and feel like in the future. So, 2 years prior to me joining Brian, he and I went to a a lunch for the Entrepreneurs' Organization. And there was a high-performance sports psychologist that talked to us about vision and crafting a document to describe what your company looked like. So, Brian had described what he called his painted

26:07picture, and what I now call a vivid vision document. And when he handed me this two-page document that described 1-800-Got-Junk at December 31st, 2003, being in the top 30 metros in North America, you know, he described the brand and the culture. I was like, I totally know how to do this. He goes, I have no idea how to do this. And he really didn't know how to scale it. He knew what it would look like, but he'd never built a franchise company. He'd just sold his 12th franchise, but they had no operating manual, no franchise training program, no franchise marketing program, no marketing budget, no coaching program for franchisees, no real strong franchise sales process. So, I came in and helped him scale and put the systems in place to make his vision come true. Um we did get to the 30 metros. We have to the top 30 Everything that was on his vivid vision, we could literally highlight every sentence in green. So, it was because I knew how to do that, the first 3 years of me being there were very easy for me. Right? When we got to about 16, 30 million in revenue is when it started to get into

27:10the challenging stage, but that was the first starting point was being clear on his vision and him knowing that he could trust me and that I had the skills. He'd already seen me build two other companies. He was my best man at my wedding 3 months before I started to work with him. So, we were best friends, the trust was high, we knew each other's skills, and he let me just do what I needed to do, and then he stayed focused on finance and IT when I scaled out every other part of the business.
Was the the key to the first part of that was it just using your skills of recruiting the right franchisees following the right system?
It was It was It was recruiting the right franchisees, training them in a method methodical methodical way, having a very scalable system that they could that the worst franchisee could execute on, having a really good marketing budget and a PR plan. Like, it was putting all the right pieces in place. And again, he didn't know how to do it and didn't know what needed to get done, but he was amazing at the finance and IT side of the business, which is what I sucked at. And because the trust was so high, he just

28:12let me operate on what needed to happen. I need that him and we just stayed in sync. So, it was the clarity on vision and him being clear on my plans and knowing that we could both each execute is what allowed us to to scale. That was the part one.
Okay. Take Take us to part two.
Yeah, part two was and I did this about 6 weeks after being there is I said the company is going bankrupt. You're going but you you're not making any money, the franchisees aren't making money, the people in the call center being paid minimum wage, guys in the trucks are being paid minimum wage. This model sucks. We have to raise our prices and I want to raise our prices 40%.
So you're Wait, I want to pause though. You're So you're at You got it to 16 million, ish? Is that where we're at now?
No, no, this is No, this is 6 weeks later after starting. We're still 60 We're still We're We're at 2 million in revenue and I'm like, "Dude, nobody's making money. This whole thing sucks. Like you're walking to work, you're driving your parents' old car your grandparents' old car. Like this the office looks like with rips in the carpeting. It was No one's going to We can't scale a broken model. You can't If we double the size of the business,

29:15we're just going to lose money even faster." So I said, "We need to raise our prices 40%." So I took the full truck. We used to charge $318 to $338 per full load. I raised that to $458 to $478 per full load overnight. And all of the the franchisees and the employees thought I was crazy. And they're all saying, "We're going to go bankrupt." I'm like, "You're going bankrupt anyway. We're at least going to try to go back like We're at least going to try to be profitable." Because we had the gross margin, we could pay people more, we could deliver what we promised, we had better branding, better marketing, people felt good about it. We scaled and we made sure that the whole industry knew we'd raised our prices, so they started to as well. We basically had a very confused industry with nobody actually understanding how to scale a company. Because we raised our prices, Brian then created this kind of a a direction or a mantra that we were going to be the FedEx of junk removal or the Starbucks of junk removal, right? We're going to be the premium price, the best brand, the leader in the space, but

30:18we would charge a lot more than, you know, back in those days paying $4.50 for a latte was crazy. It was 25 years ago. So we just decided to be the $4.50 latte junk removal service. So that really helped us to be successful. The third thing that I said was we need to build a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. And we have to get into the zone of a cult. College Pro had been a cult. Our private currency business was very culty. But because it was culty, we attracted people to work with us. We attracted brands to to work with us. We attracted better partners. The media would write about us. So, we really wanted to create that company culture so that I could get more out of the right people. Um so, we started putting systems in place to become very culty. And 1-800-GOT-JUNK ended up getting on Oprah. We ended up being ranked as the number two company in all of Canada to work for, twice ranked number one to work for in British Columbia. We were a cult. And the only other companies that anyone wanted to

31:20work for in Vancouver were Lululemon cuz the head office of Lululemon was here and the Vancouver Olympics that was being preset from like 2003-4 is when the VANOC started to work on their 2010. Um yeah, that was our whole our whole thing was was become a cult. And then so, after we had that cult and the higher price and the the lock-in on vision and and the model, the next thing that I did was to really obsess around the fact that we had no marketing budget. And again, these are early days. These are early foundational first 6 months plans. We had no money for marketing. We had no money for flyers or radio ads or like none of that. We we literally had zero budget. And our franchisees didn't have any money. They just bought these locations and were barely at break even or they they certainly hadn't covered their old salary they used to make in tech.
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So, I had landed a lot of free press for all the businesses I built. You know, been on radio, TV, and magazines, newspapers. Brian had had done a bit as well. So, I started spending about 5% of my week, about 2 hours a week, phoning the media, and Brian would leverage his contacts in phoning the media, and we started to generate press about the company. And this was prior to Facebook, right? Facebook didn't launch until the month I was leaving the company 6 and 1/2 years later. So, we had nowhere to share the press other than we knew that people would see it, they would listen to it, and we'd have that third-party credibility of the media telling telling a story. Um this was back when we believed what the media said, right? We didn't think that there was any And I And one of my books, by the way, one of my seven books is called Free PR. But, that free press that we started to land is what got the flywheel to go. And there's five core stories that we focused on that every listener could We can talk about this in

33:24a bit if you want. Every listener of yours could get the same five stories. We just got the same five stories a thousand times each. You know, in lots of markets, lots of outlets, but we landed 5,200 individual unique stories about the company in 6 years. We ended up building an in-house PR team of seven people. And that began the flywheel. Um and once we ended up getting big enough, then we could put the strong marketing budget and plan and calendar in place. Um but so, we kind of grew into that. And then the last of the five was I obsessed about growing people. I really had to grow the skills and the confidence and the connections of everybody in our organization, whether it was franchisees, leadership team, or people managing people. I had a a bunch of content that's now in my It's It's actually the entire Invest in Your Leaders Training Program. It's investinyourleaders.com. It's the 12 core modules that I trained everyone inside of And then I also certified everybody on those skills so that we could get

34:27results through people. And it was training people on the stuff that today, everybody who's listening, I can guarantee you have had almost zero training on any of those 12 skills. So they believe business is difficult. Business is very simple if you have the the core skills to do it. Most people work on their industry stuff, but they don't work on the leadership skills to scale. So that would be the why we got successful, I think.
And so were there any other break points? So that was the I mean is there any other break points in there that happened? I mean it was it was just so good the lessons there. I mean I was I was writing a note I mean I've got a bunch of those here.
I think those were really the core five. You know other other than that it was recruiting great people. Um but that's one of the modules is how do you recruit, interview, and train people. Um it's really understanding our avatar. We had a lot of clarity on who would make great franchisees because I'd already built two franchise companies, right? Boyd Autobody and College Pro. Um it was having a really good brand. Brian was really good at at creating a cool brand and negotiating to get a great and our our brand was our phone number, right? Back in the day that you

35:30actually wanted to make a phone call, 1-800-Got-Junk was a pretty good call to action. So nowadays, I think they do about 40% of the revenue are people booking on a website, which is harder for them cuz their brand is their phone number. So they want to move people away from that onto the website. I don't think there was much more other than that.
It's so I mean there's so many lessons you could distill in there and I want to kind of break those down. I want to go to Vivid Vision first cuz that's where you started. Um and then was that your first book? I didn't do that. That isn't in my research. Was that your
No. That was my third. My first book My first book was Double Double. Um funny story I was I was working with a company back in the day uh around 2009 called uh grasshopper.com. They were a virtual voicemail business and their CEO asked me if I would write their in-house PR manual so they could start landing press about grasshopper.com similar to what we'd done at College Pro and 1-800-Got-Junk etc. And I was like "I don't want to write your manual." He goes, "I'll pay you five grand to write my PR manual." I said, "I'll have it to you in a week."

36:33So, he paid me five grand, I wrote this PR manual, and that became the PR chapter for the book Double Double. So, because I had one chapter written, I said, "You know what? I can actually write a chapter for all the core things that people need to be good at." Vivid Vision was chapter one, and people was chapter two, and then culture and meeting rhythms, and I just kind of documented how I would scale companies and how other companies could do it as well. What I liked about the book Good to Great was Jim gave us the concepts, but he didn't teach us how to do any of the things. He didn't teach us how to put a flywheel in place. He didn't teach us how to leverage a BHAG. He didn't teach us how to get the right people on the bus. So, my book is kind of how to go from zero to good, and and I think his book is how to go from good to great.
Yeah, I I That's your point. You anchored us so well. I love his book, but I feel like I'm at 50,000 ft.
Correct.
And then when the plane lands, I don't know what to do, right? I feel like
Great is perfect for a leadership team that has already scaled companies, but it's really it's not the right book for

37:35entrepreneurial companies that don't really know how to do any of this yet.
So, so Cameron, where I want to go is I want to take your book Vivid Vision,
Yeah.
and for our listeners and viewers, if they're starting out and they're like, "I get it. I I I really actually I think most entrepreneurs know kind of where they want to be. They've got a framework for that." How do they go about just getting what's in their head out of their head and into a document to inspire their teams? How How do we implement the Vivid Vision?
Let me start with an analogy that everybody listening will understand. If you're building a home, or you are doing a kitchen renovation, and you're the homeowner, you are really the CEO of that project. You're the one that has the vision for what your dream home is going to look like. You're the one that has the vision for what this new kitchen is going to look like, how you're going to entertain, what the lighting will be like, what the cabinets look like, what you want your flooring, the cool, you know, appliances. What kind of meals you serve, but your contractor is the one that knows how to make that come through. I could hire the best contractor in the city of Vancouver or Boston or LA or

38:38Scottsdale and say, "Here's 2 million bucks, build me my dream home." I come back in a year and go, "What the hell have you built?" Well, they built a dream home, but it doesn't look like what I wanted cuz I never communicated what was in my brain to them. So, the vivid vision is the process for the entrepreneur to describe their company 3 years in the future, to describe leadership, describe marketing, describe operations, describe IT, describe finance, describe your use of dashboards and metrics, describe your meeting rhythms, describe your company culture, your office environment, describe what the media is writing about you, how your partners integrate with you, what your employees are writing on online. And if you can describe this finished state like the homeowner describes the finished home, your team can figure out how to make that come through. So, the homeowner describes their home or the kitchen to the contractor, the contractor asks lots of questions, they look through photos, and then finally the contractor goes, "I get it. Let me

39:40go away for a couple weeks and I'll come back and give you the blueprints or the plans to make your vision come true." The homeowner signs off on the blueprints, contractor signs off on the vision, and then they hand the vision and the blueprints to the employees who can build the dream home without ever talking to the homeowner. So, when I did all the builds that I've done for my homes, I don't know how to do electrical. I don't know how to do plumbing. I can barely swing a hammer. But I know what I want it to look like, I know the budget that I have, and I can find a really good person who can make that come true. So, the vivid vision is a four or five-page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years in the future, written in such a way that your team can figure out how to make every sentence come true. And then, much like building a home, you put the foundation in place, then you put in the walls, then you do the electrical and the plumbing, right? You don't start day one by putting in your beautiful Sub-Zero fridge and your Wolf stove.

40:43You have to do all the foundational parts first. So, that's That's what the vivid vision does is it aligns people. It gives them the finished state to work towards, and allows them to come up with the plans that the entrepreneur signs off on to say, "Okay, I know that now you know what needs to do." That which is what Brian and I did. He's like, "Oh, those are all the things that need to happen? I get it." Now, let's do it.
That is such I love I love the analogy cuz I think that I I think that entrepreneurs can nail the first part, which is they know what they want.
Correct.
Uh in their head.
Know what you need in your minds.
But no one can read their mind and and and they think they get stuck on the how. They start going, "Well, how am I going to Well, no, spend more. It's a visioning exercise, right? There's We're not doing the how yet. The how's going to come later. That's going to come with your team or an expert or someone we hire and recruit to the business."
Yeah. It's why we've got it It's why as the homeowner, I've never worried about how they're going to do the electrical. Dude, I would burn my house down if I even gave anybody advice in doing electrical. I just say I want this kind of lighting.

41:46You figure out how to do it. Right?
Yeah. It The analogy I use is people start building they've got this little bitty foundation they start building stories of the building. They build the first story, the second story, and then you know it's about eight stories not realizing that the foundation was built for a one-story building and the whole thing collapses and burns to the ground.
Correct.
If we know that we're going to build an eight-story building, the foundation, i.e. the vivid vision, is where we got to We got to nail that. Because then we know how big to make the foundation and how to reinforce it and and I just think it's so so it's so critical. What are the mistakes people make when nailing this? What are Where do they go wrong like when our audience starts this? Where are they going to go wrong with the vivid vision?
The real area they're going wrong is they try to put the plan into the vision itself. All right, so they try to give all of the step-by-steps. The secondary they go wrong is they try to have too many empirical numbers so that it becomes a lot of measuring points. And then third is they lean out too far and they almost fall over and they start describing their company 10 years out. That's that's not at all what this is.

42:48This is a three-year-out vision that doesn't explain how and it gives your team enough description of every aspect of the company that they can see what you can see so they can figure out how to make that come true. And then it allows them to say no to certain things or not now to certain things and allows them to see what the very foundational sentences are first, right?
All right, so so I think that all of our listeners can go immediately do that. They need to go first buy your book, follow the exercise and do not get into all of the how, build your vivid vision. Now I want to roll into double double.
Okay.
You know, we're in you know, we're early 2026 as we're as we're launching this as we're filming this podcast and I think there's more uncertainty and confusion about life and business right now than there's probably ever been, right? Things are moving faster than ever in my opinion. You know, the analogy I used the other day Cameron, I said I I think business is moving five to 10 times faster than it was pre-COVID right now. Just the speed of business

43:52and information it's just radically it's radically and we've got to get more clear on isn't it? Not block out the noise and get a lot more clear on how we're building our own business and and let the noise be the noise.
Yeah, it's all signal versus noise issue that we're hearing about in the last 12 months. Yeah, I I I think that information is coming at us faster. I think the opportunity to leverage certain AI tools is allowing things to happen faster, but I still feel like business is growing at about the same pace it's always been growing. I think that people are definitely more nervous and I think we're going to see layoffs and we're going to see change, but no one's out there taking their $5 million company and going to 50 when they used to go from five to seven, right? That's just not That's just that part's not happening yet. Um, but the opportunity to get more done with less people faster is there. Right now, if your company feels like AI is not going to help you scale, you're the problem.

44:56AI is not the problem, you're the problem, right? Because anyone who understands AI can look at every single company and find out how to get more done with less people faster. And a lot of companies right now that are sitting back that are like, "Yeah, it's not going to change my business." If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And there's a lot of companies out there that aren't seeing that the rate of change hasn't quite happened yet, but it's coming at a pace that you will become the Blockbuster of your space if you're not careful.
So, so we message heard, right? I mean, I love the way you said that. If this rate of change outside your business, right, is greater than inside, you're going out of business. And it's it's the best way I've heard it described where we're at today.
But I don't I don't think it's happening yet. Like, I don't think that I don't think because I don't want companies to go, "Well, if it's happening so quick, why isn't it happening to mine?" It's probably cuz you're not embracing that and you're not you're not looking for a

45:58way to leverage that stuff yet.
So, talk us through double double. We're sitting at 2 million in revenue. We're We're on this podcast. We're listening to Cameron. We're like, all right. I get it. I got my vision now. I've got it nailed. Now, I want to implement double double. Walk us through the How do How do we make sure we nail this doubling our profits in 3 years?
It's by focusing on the critical few things versus the important many. The easiest way for people to double their revenue and double their profit and and really double their free time in 3 years or less is to have clarity around vision, have the foundational building blocks in place inside of your organization, and make sure that you get the right people on the bus, as Jim Collins says, working on the right things. Cuz if you have all the right people working really, really hard going in the wrong direction, you're screwed. All right, if you have all the right people working on important stuff going in all different directions, you're screwed. So, it is about understanding how to recruit, interview, hire, and train, and onboard the right

47:01people, having all those people aligned in that one direction, and then getting rid of all of the C players. I was doing a speaking event at a conference. They They hired me to come and speak to a 2,500 person entrepreneur event in Dubai last year. Uh It's a year ago today. And um it was called Mindvalley. And I came off the stage and I was talking to a guy who's 6'7". I'm 6'4". And I said, "What do you do for fun?" He goes, "I play volleyball." And I'm like, "Do you compete?" He goes, "Yeah, I play pro volleyball." I'm like, "Holy So, is it like two on two beach volleyball?" He goes, "Yeah." I said, "I played in college and in high school, like high school team and then college for fun." If we had me and five of my best friends, and I didn't even have a chance to finish the question, and he started laughing. He said, "I would beat you every game." And what I realized was if you take two true A players, maybe $200,000 each, and put them against six C players at maybe a hundred thousand dollars each, the two A's will destroy the six C's every game.

48:03So now I've got six C's that cost me six hundred thousand, two A's that cost me four hundred thousand. If I have less people that are really, really, really good, the business is simpler and we get more done. And I think so often companies hire C's, and at best they think their B's are really stronger than they truly are. You'll know an A player when you find one, and most companies don't have a culture to even attract one, let alone do they have A players.
It It is um, you know, when I talk to entrepreneurs, I spend my day, you know, in a mastermind, I have private clients, and I would tell you what you just said about people, uh I see it all the time. Or people are looking, how do I get the person for the least amount of money? And I'm the other way. An A player typically, in my opinion, I love your take, costs 30% more 30% more, and I believe creates a 200 to 500% return.
Right. Yeah, A players A players are free.
And they become free in that.
Right. And you know the cost There's actually some data around the cost of having the wrong person. When you have a toxic employee or an underperformer or a cultural cancer, a person that isn't

49:06isn't the right fit, it's costing you 15 times their annual comp. So you could be paying somebody 50,000 a year, if they're the wrong person, it's costing you 750,000. Because of missed opportunities, because of time you're wasting. God, these companies that spend time coaching their bottom performers, but they're ignoring their A players, that's a huge problem. If you spent your time growing your A players and you didn't have C's to waste time with, they would you'd go to the moon. And that's all we did at 1-800-Got-Junk was hired more and more and more of really good A's or really solid B's. I think your A players are racehorses, B players are the solid workhorses, and the C players go to the glue factory.
How do you So if I'm sitting here watching this and I go, I Cameron, I I think I know I I the A's. That's out I mean, they're standouts. We know who they are. Uh I got a good handle on my B's.
And do we, right? A players are never looking for a job. A players are not on Craigslist or Indeed or industry job boards. A players have a job for a great

50:10company and you have to entice them to come and work for you. A players are already working somewhere else and if you don't create a company culture that's magnetic, you'll never even get them to apply, let alone do you know where they are. So, I I use executive search firms to help me poach the A players. And I think you're right about they they they are about 30% more than market. Um and they don't want to work with C players. There's not an A player out there that wants to come and work with a company with a couple jerks in it. Life's too short for them.
It is um Well, talk to me about some of those early systems you think those folks need to put in place, you know, in Double Double. What are some of those systems that maybe we're just overlooking or aren't clear?
Well, so the I want all first The vivid vision for sure is one and I see every business like a jigsaw puzzle. That the vivid vision is like the picture on the front of the box of the jigsaw puzzle. And then the four corners, the four systems that you need to build foundationally from are core values and making sure that you have very very deeply understood, very ingrained, easy to understand four or five core values

51:15that are short phrases, not single words. Core values that you're willing to fire people if they break them, that you hire people who already live them, that you celebrate them, that if I quiz somebody like This drives me bonkers. If I if I ask a an entrepreneur, do you have core values? Oh, yeah, for sure we do. What are they? Well, let me just look. if you have to look them up, they're not core values, right? They're either core values or they're not. So, that's that's the first corner. The second corner of the jigsaw puzzle is core purpose. Companies need to truly understand why they exist. Right? The reason everything that I do is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams come true. The reason I said yes to be on your podcast is I helped a helped a set of entrepreneurs make their visions come true. If you were a government agency or a nonprofit or if it was just a bunch of marketers, I would have said no to the podcast cuz it's not tied to my core purpose. My books help entrepreneurs, my COO Alliance, my investing leaders training, everything helps entrepreneurs

52:17make their visions come true. So, companies need clarity around their core purpose. You know, Apple's core purpose is to create insanely great products that challenge the status quo and will change the human race. That's their core purpose. And then the third the third corner is the BHAG, that big hairy audacious goal. It's that 20-year or 30-year March that you're driving towards. It's colonize Mars or it's putting a computer on every desk or it's Nike saying in 1972 that their BHAG was to crush Adidas. Right? It's that a lot Mine is that Vivid Visions replace vision statements worldwide. That's my big hairy audacious goal. And then the fourth corner of the jigsaw puzzle that is foundational is a one-year plan that you're working towards that makes your three-year Vivid Vision come true. There's no point in having a three-year plan. By the time you get 6 12 months in, everything's changed anyway, but you definitely need to work your plan, your work, and work your plan. Right? Reverse

53:20engineer your goals, put the plan in place, and then ensure that people have the skills, the confidence, and connections to do their part of the plan.
Uh uh you've got one of these concepts that comes right up Double Double regarding like navigating that entrepreneur roller coaster.
Yeah. Chapter
You know, cuz I think that Um and what I'll tell you, you know, in my life, I used to be this leader where when things were great, I'm breaking champagne bottles. This is Brett 15 years ago. It's like, "Boo!" And then when things were crappy, you know, I might take one of the I want to take the champagne bottle and throw it across the room, right? And I realized as a leader, no one wants to follow that guy.
Correct.
No one wants to follow the leader that's that's highs are high and lows are low. What are some of the thoughts you have around How do we navigate that entrepreneurial roller coaster?
Well, they're okay with following us if they understand that we understand our roller coaster. They're okay with following the bipolar entrepreneur if we understand when we're at our low and we take time away from the business. We try to de-stress or decompress. We join a mastermind or we

54:23get coaching. We take a look at our health. But if we merely react instead of respond, if we're not taking care of the racehorse, then they don't want to work with that. But they will follow a bipolar leader like a Steve Jobs, like an Elon, they'll follow us through brick wall as long as we know we're introspective enough in our own journey. I I have a I think my ex-spouse Every spouse of an entrepreneur is effectively strapped to us as we're on the roller coaster ride. Our spouse will stay with us through our highs and lows, provided that they know we're taking care of ourselves. But if we're turning to drugs or alcohol or sex or we're crawling under our duvet or we're not, you know, we're we're screaming and yelling at the kids, at some point they're going to say enough is enough. But if they if they see us struggling and not going to work for a couple days and they know that we're decompressing and going to a workout and talking to a coach and talking to a therapist and taking some time away, they'll they'll empathize with us through that

55:25entrepreneurial journey. This is just so good. It's so good what you said. I want to go back cuz I wrote a note here. You mentioned there's five um five stories that every entrepreneur has to get free press. Now then to move for our to our wrap up here. You've been so generous with your time, but what are those five stories we need to we need to master?
Well, I'll I'll speak to your business and then anybody who's listening, every single person can tell what I call the genesis story. That's how you started. Right? It's the genesis of your business. So, it's quitting your shitty job and starting the company. It's seeing a problem that you want to solve and creating a company around that. It's spotting an opportunity that you want to leverage and creating a company around that. It's the starting point and the growth and the the lessons from that journey. So, we all have that that story. It's why I started the COO Alliance and talking to a couple of my clients and pulling them together and creating a mastermind for them in an industry that didn't have one. There's hundreds of groups for entrepreneurs. I wanted a group for the second in command, the COO, because I'd been one

56:28and there wasn't a place for me. That's the genesis of the COO Alliance. And then every every entrepreneur has the the hero's journey story. Right? It's the overcoming adversity. In fact, every movie pretty much ever made is the hero's journey. It's you fall in love with somebody, they struggle, and they have the trials and tribulations, the lessons from the edge, they almost cross and burn, they almost go bankrupt, they almost lose their marriage, and then they they learn the lessons and they come out the other side and it's like the little engine that could. I think I can, I think I can, and we want to cheer them on and get them to success. So, the hero's journey is those stories. It's how I almost bankrupted the 1-800-Got-Junk company at 60 million, or how we almost bankrupted the COO Alliance, or how I woke up one morning and realized I owed $420,000 more in tax for the COO Alliance than I thought I did, and how I recovered from that in 6 weeks. Right? It's understanding that the struggles and the downs are real, but what are the lessons that others can pull from that that either inspire them

57:29or educate. So, that's the hero's journey story. The third story that we all have is the culture story. All right, it's creating a world-class company culture. It's It's why do people want to work for you? How can I get employees aligned and inspired that work for me from five different countries? Um how do I create a company culture where everybody's over Zoom and and And if you don't have a really good company culture, you'd better get one because if you don't have one, someone's going to poach your good employees, people like me, and I do it for fun. So, you need that you need to work at being in that top 5 to 10% of companies in your city and in your industry. So, there's a story around that. The fourth one is your tech angle. So, it's how you're leveraging AI, it's how you're leveraging a tech stack, it's how you're using tools to automate and optimize and to empower people inside of your organization. It's how you're getting Gen Z to teach the baby boomers that work for you how tech can actually leverage, right? There's lots of these tech angles that you can tell. And then the last story is it's your

58:32customer journey. And it's talking about how your product or service helped a customer in a specific market, right? It's how we decluttered their home or how my coaching helped turn around or grow a company. I can or how the CEO Alliance took the second in command for a great brand and gave them the connections and the confidence and the skills to actually scale up a business to help the entrepreneur. And I can tell that same story in every single market that I'm in. So, those are five core angles that anybody can tell, and I don't even know any of your clients' companies, but they could all tell those stories today.
And to your point, today it's easier to tell that story. There's so many mediums online to take each of those five stories and get better of telling the story about our business. I mean, I could Just as you were writing, I could think of I every every business has those stories. They already have them baked in.
And then once you have those stories, so let's say that you get five a stories about your company, I see all those whether it's five podcasts you're on or five blogs that you're written up in or e-zines or magazines, whatever. Five press stories

59:35about you. Pretend that each story is just like a log. If I'm on five podcasts, I've now got five logs sitting in a pile. It's pointless. It really doesn't do much. So, if you got a bunch of logs, what do you want to do with those logs? You want to light them on fire. Well, when we were kids, when you and I were 13 years old and we got a bunch of logs and we lit them on fire, what did we like to do then?
Well, I I want to go have I mean, I want to either have marshmallows and s'mores for one, right? Or put it out? Is that where you're going?
No, I want to pour gas on the fire. Yeah. I would have to say I want to make a thing, right? So, here's what you do with your press. You've got your earned media. You have your owned media and you have your paid media. It's the convergence of those three things that I call the digital trifecta that I talk about in the book Free PR. So, when you get a bunch of press coverage, that's really good. But, you have to put them on your media page of your website. You have to put them on your press page of your website. You have to share them

1:00:37on Facebook and share them on LinkedIn and share them with your email list. Right? So, that's taking your earned media and converging it with your owned media. But, if I can share I can share this podcast, which I will when you send me the link, I'll share this, the YouTube video, I'll share it three times a year on Facebook and three times on LinkedIn. I'll email it out to my list once a quarter. I take all the press I've got and I send one email with all the press links. So, I'll share it and I'll share it multiple times on a multiple places. So, I'm amplifying the message. But, then what I also do is I pour gas on the fire. I take the episodes that are doing well and I boost those and I drive traffic to those and I push this episode in front of more and more of my prospects so that they actually will see the message even more. I'll make sure that when I have a potential client who's on the fence, I send them five podcasts to listen to. I'm like, don't listen to me. Just watch me on the press and if you like this, then join. If you don't like it, no harm, no foul. So, that's that's what I do with the

1:01:39with the press is I I light gas onto my fire.
It's so good. So, Cameron, we're wrapping up here. There's just so much I want to I could make this a 5-hour episode. Right? As we're wrapping up here, if you want to leave one piece of advice to our listeners for 2026, they want to massively grow their business. Everything you've done from the Got Junk to the home painting franchise to all of that, if you were to give them one piece advice to grow their income and change the game in 2026, what would it be?
It's that none of what we just talked about matters. The death rate is still 100%. We're all going to die. And that as leaders, we have to care more about our people as humans than we care about the company. If we care about our employees and our customers and our suppliers' dreams, their insecurities, their fears, we care more about their bucket list. If we care more about the humanity and the struggle that they're going through on a day-to-day basis than anybody else, they'll go through brick walls for you to build your company.

1:02:41I have employees from the 1-800-GOT-JUNK days. I left 19 years ago. People that I even had to fire at some point that would still consider me one of their friends cuz they know I care about them at times more than their mom and dad ever even did. So, that's the big lesson that I always try to carry. I even got a tattoo for it. It's the Ram Dass quote. It's in Hindi, but this is walking each other home as a reminder that we are just walking each other home. So, that's the big lesson that I have.
That is I filmed the whole episode. So, one of the most impactful exercises I ever did in my life was uh didn't love the way the instructor did it, but basically calculate how many days you have left on this earth under the most optimal scenario possible, right? If you live to the 90
That Dan Sullivan?
Uh it wasn't Dan. It was like it was a no-name instructor. He just left you in the dark place at the end. Like I've got like me, I have 16,245 days left and he's like, "Oh, well, good luck." I was like, "Oh, that sucks." So, I've changed the exercise on figuring out the people in your life that matter and how do you change the math? Well, I mean cuz we've all had days that we

1:03:43
But but my my lesson is even deeper than all the people that matter. Mine is that every single person that we encounter today and tomorrow and this month and this year, they matter. As humans. It like the the girl working at the cashier is struggling with something. The doorman is struggling with something. Your Uber driver is struggling with something. Start giving a about the people that we connect with as humans. And if we do that with our employees cuz if we're just caring about the people that matter in our lives, we forget about the 42 employees of ours that are just doing work hard. But if you really care about them and their humanity and what they're struggling with it's amazing what what they'll do for you for the company. When you just slow down and reconnect with people as people.
All right, if you've been listening to a show for a bit, you've likely heard that I run a wealth building mastermind largely around some of the same concepts and content that we talk about here on the podcast. We have an upcoming mastermind. We've got two seats left for it. If you want to come shadow our mastermind, take a look at what it's

1:04:45like, get an actual feel for what it feels like to be with a tribe of people that are on the same journey as you, we've got a completely risk-free way to do so. Just go to bewealthy.com, [singing] navigate over to our mastermind, and book a call with one of my team members to learn more about our mastermind and you can how you can come completely risk-free and check it out.
I absolutely love that. I got I got three questions or or handful of questions I ask every guest. a kind of rapid-fire, Cameron. First one being If if there was three books that most impacted your life, what would they be?
Good to Great, for sure. Uh because I get it. Jim Collins, I mean it is just really really profound. I think Insanely Simple um about Apple around the the simplicity systems that are used inside of Apple. It's not the Steve Jobs story, it's the systems that they use to care about simplicity. Simplicity of thought, simplicity of action, simplicity of of branding and marketing messaging. They're very very translatable into any size company. And then the last is the book Endurance about um Ernest

1:05:48Shackleton. It's written by Alfred Lansing and it's Shackleton's voyage to the Antarctic when his ship crashed and they had to survive living on ice flows and living off seal meat for almost 2 years taking a rowboat or a a lifeboat across 700 miles of some of the worst water in the world climbing over a mountain range that's only been summited twice ever since and they got to safety and every single man survived this 2-year journey after the boat had sunk. That book Endurance is got a ton of It's just a great true story, but the leadership lessons that come out of that are are very profound.
Uh I um I had not read uh I've heard the story of Endurance. I'm going to go read I'm going to I'm going to absolutely read it. It was
Fantastic. Best book I've ever written by or read by far.
Wow, okay. Best purchase under $200 that's most improved your life in the last couple years.
Best purchase under $200 that has improved my life. Might be It might be this tattoo of um the Ram Dass quote as just a as a daily

1:06:53reminder. Um I didn't have tattoos until a few years ago. I've got five now. Um I think that would be the best purchase cuz it's a a real solid daily reminder to me of what really matters.
I uh I I that's so and I love that quote, so beautiful. The last one which is you get 60 seconds to talk to your 18-year-old self. What do you say?
I would say go back and read the 67 lessons that I wrote in chapter 17 in my book Double Double which were letters to my younger self.
Okay.
I wrote I wrote down every strong lesson. Those are all there. I guess I would also say ask her out. I was very insecure and very nervous as an 18-year-old. And uh there were a lot of pretty girls that I wanted to date that I should have I should have taken a swing at that I didn't have that didn't have that confidence back in the day. But now I've got a good one, so I'm okay.
Cameron, I absolutely love it. You're a complete treasure. We're going to link to all of your books in our show notes.

1:07:55Everyone needs to go get the books. Cameron, it's I I got to tell you as a student of your work and a huge fan, I'm beyond grateful that you're here. My name's Brett Tanner. That's Cameron Herold. This was the Be Wealthy podcast. Go out there and be wealthy.
Thanks, Brett.