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- [00:00]
A
I was over in Dubai, I was speaking at a big mindvalley event. I was standing talking to this guy, 6 foot 7, I played pro beach volleyball. I said if I got six guys from my team and he starts laughing and he goes dude, we beat you every single game. I'm like wait, so two guys would beat six? He goes every game. So I realized that if you have two A players, you pay them 200 grand each. That's two people for 400,000. Or you have six B C players. I'm paying six people 100 grand each. The two A's at 400 would destroy the six bees or C's at 600.
- [00:34]
B
All right, listen guys, this is part two. Everyone was excited about Cameron Herald, which I'm a big fan of. I work with him on a regular basis. He spoke at my last event. He just knows business and he knows really top down business but it's really bottom up business. He is wrote a lot of books. He's known for growth and scaling, works really well with CEOs and COOs. And what I talk about we'll probably jump into this is I'm a visionary. Then we've got the Integrator CEO alliance is the number one global peer community for second in command leaders. Founded by Cameron in 2016, it provides high level leadership training and support for CEOs, VPs of operations, GMs and presidents who run company wide operations. I could talk on and on about Cameron, but why don't you just introduce yourself? I'm sure everyone's heard of you but it's always good to get a refresher.
- [01:27]
A
Wow. All right, introduce myself, Cameron Entrepreneur coo. I've built a bunch of companies. I've been paid to speak now in 30 countries. I've been paid to speak on every continent, which is really random. Built a bunch of different businesses. I had my first real company when I was 20 years old. I had 12 full time employees. Grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. The fourth company that I built was 1-800-got junk. The first one I was involved with was a group called College Pro Painters which not a lot of people know of but was probably the best training ground and where I learned the most about leadership was building College Pro. Every year we had to go out and recruit, hire and train 800 university students to be franchisees and then in six weeks they had to go out and recruit, hire and train 8,000 students to paint houses. So imagine in six months hiring 9,000 people. And I did that four years in a row. So yeah, that was some of my bio, I guess.
- [02:27]
B
You know, we could dive into a lot of the stuff we left off on. But, you know, I want us to just start by talking about a vivid vision. And we talk about this all the time. My bracelet says ruthlessly prioritize. I've got adhd, every symptom you could think of. I got ideas coming out of the yin yang, and we're not ready for all my ideas. And Jeff Bezos talks about this.
- [02:46]
A
Bingo. I just did that with my finger. Just to remind me to say it.
- [02:49]
B
Yeah. So we're not ready. We're trying to build a company that can handle all my ideas. They all go in the Asana board. I want to be heard. You know, we worked a little bit with Dan Martell. Dan Martell loves you, by the way.
- [03:00]
A
And mutual.
- [03:01]
B
He said, you know the worst thing, Tommy, is when you don't feel heard. He goes, you'll wake up in the middle of the night, you'll say, what happened to that idea I had two weeks ago? Where's that at? When are we doing it? What's the priority level? And your team? So he had a meeting with my complete executive team and said, this is just who Tommy is. Doesn't mean he doesn't. They'll take no gracefully. But it needs to be heard. It can't just be shoveled off the board. But let's talk a little bit about.
- [03:25]
A
Let me speak to that.
- [03:26]
B
Yeah.
- [03:26]
A
Because that's separate from vivid vision. You said the Bezos thing, and then we hyperlinked really, really quickly. So what Bezos said in a meeting or in an interview one time was, I have so many ideas that I have the ability to kill my company by pushing too many ideas out onto the floor too quickly, and I have to slow myself down. And I think what Dan is saying and what you're saying, I agree more with, which is we need to get our ideas heard, and then we need someone to capture our ideas and take care of them for us and not necessarily start them all right away. So when I was the COO at 1-800-got junk, what I would always say to Brian was, I love that idea. Let me ask you a few questions so I can understand it a little bit more, and then we can decide when to start it. Yeah. So then I would ask him the who, what, when, where, why, and how. I'd ask him a little bit about the ROI he was expecting, what completed looked like. We might even go for a walk and talk and go grab a coffee. So I Could understand the idea. And then I would say, okay, based on what I now know, let's start it right away. Meaning which of these 12 other projects might it bump or I love that idea, let's start it maybe next month. But I got it. Or now that I understand that idea, we just mutually decided to kill it. But at least I got the ideas out of your brain, which is so full and overflowing. And I kind of kept track of it because entrepreneurs want to know that we're either going to take care of their idea or that we understand their idea or that we've got it somewhere that we can look at it later.
- [04:51]
B
Right. That's what's important to me. I mean, parking, we'll talk about that later. But it's been impossible. It's not a priority yet, but it should be. And there's just a lot of politics now within the company because there's, you know, there's a lot to do with fleet and insurance and there's every reason why we shouldn't. But that's when I do it.
- [05:09]
A
Let's talk about that for a second. So every idea has an ROI or should have an ROI calculator attached to it. Because as an entrepreneur and as a person, we can always say, oh, parking. Parking is parking and marketing at the same time. So it's parking your vehicles in high traffic areas. And yes, that should happen. But vis a vis everything else that we're working on or related to all the other ideas that you've got, what's the ROI of that idea versus how much people, how much time and how much money is it going to cost us to make that idea happen? And then what's it going to generate? Will it generate revenue? Will it generate profit? Will it make our customers happy, happier? Will it make my employers happier or employees happier? And based on that, do I do it or not or do I do it later? Because yeah, yes, it should happen. But you've got 50 other ideas too now.
- [06:00]
B
There's several hundred in Asana and there'll be a thousand by then.
- [06:03]
A
But that's how I prioritize them is based on that ROI and based on the people input, time input and money input.
- [06:08]
B
Well, yeah, that makes sense. But how do you say taking our guys to a baseball game, what's the roi? It's very hard to extract. Yes, they're not going to turn over as quickly. They're probably stay on board longer, they'll be happier. But there's certain things that are really hard to extract an ROI on Okay,
- [06:24]
A
so taking the guys to a baseball game is going to make them happier. I would then look at our employee net promoter score to know where are we today on our happiness for our employees? I know what my customer net promoter score is. What's my employee net promoter score? If I'm over positive 80%, I'm going to dial back all of the baseball games I'm taking people to because I don't need happier employees. So years ago, I was coaching a company. They were ranked as the number two company to work for on Glassdoor in the United States. I coached them for four years, coached six of them, and their employee net promoter score was positive 86%. And we were talking about some of the stuff there, all the perks they were giving their employees. And I said, you know what? You're trying to actually grow your gross margin, trying to grow your EBITDA because you're getting ready to sell. Why don't we get rid of some of the perks and let's dial back the employee net promoter score from positive 85 or 86 to positive 75. You'll still be one of the best companies in the world to work for, but you'll be a lot more profitable.
- [07:24]
B
I agree with that wholeheartedly. And I think you talk a lot about the sign of a great company, which you send out a blind survey and they come back to you is what I stay working here. What I advise somebody net promoter scores, would I promote this company to a friend and, you know, 80% or better, as they are a promoter of the company.
- [07:44]
A
Yeah. And 20% are detractors or. Sorry. Then you take. You take your nines and tens, those are your promoters. Subtract the ones through six, those are your detractors. And you end up with a result of somewhere between negative 100% and positive 100%. Our goal as a company is to have our customers at greater than positive 50, which is considered world class. I like positive 80. Our goal with our employees is greater than positive 50, which is considered World Class. I like positive 80. Cause I don't want to be like. I want to be best of best.
- [08:13]
B
Yeah, no, I love that. I'll shift back because I go very quickly because I got so many questions. The vivid vision, you know, people, I think that's one of the most profound. Just the concept. You named the book. Exactly. It's so smart to name the book exactly what it is. And so talk to me about the principles of a vivid vision.
- [08:36]
A
The idea with a vivid vision. Let me explain what it is. And then where I got the idea, the idea of a vivid vision is an entrepreneur clarifying in a four or five page written description what their company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future so that everyone around you can see what you can see. It's kind of like getting the internal movie that you can see playing so that everyone else can follow along with you. They can create what you can create. So I Learned this concept 30 years ago from an Olympic coach. He was working with high performance sports athletes and he, he said that they used visualization in sport so that they could perform their sport completely on instinct. He said in the business world, if you could do the same thing, you'd win. So an example of that is a home builder, a contractor. If you're building a home right now, you're building a ginormous. Incredible. It's beautiful. You showed me some of the blueprints a month ago. Now you know what you're building. But if you went to the contractor and said, here's a bunch of money, build me my dream home, it wouldn't look anything like what you wanted. Because he can't read your mind. He doesn't know what a dream home means. Even if you gave him a couple of pictures, that wouldn't be enough. So you had to do a lot of work explaining your vision to the contractor so he understands your vision. The contractor then creates blueprints and elevation drawings and schematics and plans to show you your vision. You sign off on his plan, he signs off on your vision, and then he then takes your vision and the plan and goes to hire a bunch of sub trades and people to make your dream come true. Now what's really cool is you've got hundreds of employees or dozens of employees building your dream home. You've never talked to any of them?
- [10:20]
B
No.
- [10:21]
A
And how can they read your mind? It's because you use the vivid vision concept to get a contractor to create the plans. So in the business world, you craft a four or five page written description of your company, your leadership team and your COO create the blueprints and the plans to make your visions come true. They then hire a bunch of employees to work the plan, right, Plan your work and work your plan. And then all of a sudden your company evolves.
- [10:50]
B
Yeah, for sure. In theory.
- [10:54]
A
Exactly.
- [10:54]
B
You know, it's funny, I just did a live. I was walking out of an interview because I do a secrets of the trades every month. Not a huge mailing list, but I enjoy doing it. And it's all my words. It's just the writers put it in a better context. And it's so much. It's so funny how people are like, man, if I just had Tommy's pay structure, if I just knew Tommy's marketing, if I just knew his onboarding process. And I'm like, that's not the answer. I'm like, I had a guy, a guy call me the other day. He's just a million dollar H vac guy. And I was like, a million dollars. I'm like, I know. Single salesman doing 10 million. Yeah, you got a sales and pricing problem. But I said, the most important thing is get your CRM set up that it spits out exact, exact, exact KPIs, your booking rate, your cancellation rate, your capacity. I'm like, that's the foundation of knowing your numbers. But I don't know. I can't tell you. This is like hundreds of people a week. Ask me or something.
- [11:48]
A
What's the silver bullet?
- [11:49]
B
Yeah, what's the silver bullet? What's the magic?
- [11:51]
A
It's a whole bunch of secrets. It's a whole bunch of systems. It's a whole bunch of tools. I said to my son this morning, he's 23, running his own business. I said, you got to be good to be lucky and lucky to be good in business. There isn't one secret. There isn't one formula. There isn't one right answer. There's a whole bunch of right answers to a whole bunch of problems. But it is similar to building a home. This is the best analogy I've ever encountered for how to scale a business. When you build a home, you start with a foundation, right? And you can go visit your home being built for months. And it's so boring because it's just foundation. It's the foundation. It's like, when do I get to put in the wolf stove and the movie theater room and the gun range and the bowling alley, Whatever you're building in your cool home, right? Like, when do I get to put all this cool stuff in that comes way later, right? It's foundation, foundation, foundation, foundation. So even those marketing metrics are completely irrelevant if you have the wrong people and the wrong vision and the wrong culture. So let me talk to you about the foundational parts of your business. The first start is that vivid vision. It's what are we building? If you have all the metrics and you're measuring stuff but no vision, it's irrelevant. So you start with a vivid vision, and then you go with the Kind of corners. And those are your core values. I have an obsession with core values. Living core values, Firing people who don't break the core or who break the core values, only hiring people who already live those core values. An obsession with core purposes. Saying no to everything. That's a distraction except why we exist, why we're showing up in the space that we're in. You can sell windows. You know that 30 years ago, I met with this guy, Philip Orsino. He was the founder of a company called Premdor. And I said, you're doing $2 billion a year in revenue, not market cap. $2 billion a year in sales, selling doors. Why don't you sell Windows? Similar manufacturing, similar customer. He goes, you know what, Cameron? He goes, we're selling $7 billion a year right now indoors in seven countries. I think we'll expand to 14 countries before I add a product. Holy shit. Talk about focus, right? So you got vision, you got core values, you got core purpose, then you have your bhag, and then you got to get all the right people and get rid of the wrong people. So. So I think the right answers for your company are starting with that stuff. And no entrepreneur wants to go there. They're like, yeah, yeah, I know that, but give me the silver bullet. Yeah, yeah, but if I park my trucks in the right area, right? No, that won't work either. If you don't have vision, if you
- [14:26]
B
don't have core values, you're not wraps.
- [14:27]
A
Correct.
- [14:27]
B
I mean, if your truck sucks, it's going to detract people.
- [14:31]
A
But your wraps are correct because they're aligned with a vision, they're aligned with a brand, they're aligned with core values, they're aligned with a culture.
- [14:38]
B
That's the key. Like, if you park a crappy old truck that had stenciling on it that said we're the cheapest.
- [14:45]
A
Right.
- [14:45]
B
That would not magnify your brand. Yeah, it would actually detract.
- [14:49]
A
When I started at 1-800-got junk as their CEO, I went out in the trucks for a half a day. I came back at lunch, and I was getting changed into my street clothes. And Brian, who is the founder, who had spent 12 years building the company, said, what are you doing? So I'm done. Because we're done.
- [15:04]
B
What?
- [15:05]
A
I go, I'm done hauling junk. He goes, you've only done a half a day. I said, I get it. That's not what we do. We pick stuff up, we put it in truck, we get rid of it. I got it. I don't need to do that for 10 weeks to learn that that's part of the business. What we do is we engage with customers. We're about a brand promise. We're about our quality focus areas. We're about our core values. We're about building a cult. We got to raise our prices 40% because you're all going bankrupt. I don't need to learn how to haul junk better.
- [15:32]
B
I love that word. Build a cult.
- [15:34]
A
Well, that's culture. That's derivative of the root.
- [15:36]
B
Yeah, well, it's something we try to focus on.
- [15:38]
A
You have to build a little more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. You have to get into the zone of a cult. Yeah, you guys are doing that here.
- [15:46]
B
You know, we've got 60 students next door, 75 coming in next month. We've got a total of 700 people, technicians and installers. That means we're hiring more than 10% of the workforce a month. There's a lot of things that could go wrong.
- [16:00]
A
Yeah.
- [16:01]
B
And what we do is eight weeks. And that eight weeks is kind of a trial that we want to pull people out.
- [16:06]
A
And so when somebody asks you about the secret, it isn't the metrics. It's about the people.
- [16:12]
B
It's about the people. And I'll tell you this.
- [16:15]
A
And don't let them distract us from that. And then it's about the right people.
- [16:19]
B
Well, we're going to talk about that. But what do you think's more important? This is a really good question. What's more important? The right people, the right system. Because I believe you could take a C player with the right attitude and
- [16:31]
A
turn them into an A player before both of those. It's vision.
- [16:34]
B
Right.
- [16:34]
A
Because if I have a really good system going in the wrong direction, we're.
- [16:37]
B
It's no bueno.
- [16:38]
A
If I have. If I have the best employees we could ever get in Scottsdale, Phoenix, going in the wrong direction. We're so vision. That vivid vision is the most singular, important piece in the company.
- [16:49]
B
Right.
- [16:49]
A
Because if you get all the right people in your company going the wrong way, what was the point?
- [16:53]
B
Well, here's what I get all the time. I get a lot of questions, and
- [16:56]
A
then, yes, I believe it's about systems. People don't fail. Systems fail. Michael Gerber from the E. Myth revisited. Right.
- [17:02]
B
Yep.
- [17:02]
A
That was a critical.
- [17:03]
B
I think I have that.
- [17:04]
A
That was a critical lesson for us 30 years ago in starting 1,800 got junk was understanding that if something goes wrong, it's not a person's fault. I had a mentor who was being groomed as the second in command at Starbucks. And Howard Behar called my mentor Greg. He was the second in command there. And he said, greg, why is the letter B on the sign at 50th and Wallingford in Seattle not working? Imagine they have 11,535 stores at the time. Greg goes, I don't care. Howard goes, what do you mean you don't care? Why is the letter B not on? He goes, howard, that's the wrong question. The question we need to ask is what system was broken or what system was missing? Or what system can we put in place to ensure that every letter on every sign at all of our locations are always working? That's a question I'll look at.
- [17:47]
B
That's a genius question, right?
- [17:51]
A
It's going back to first principles. So every entrepreneur needs to ask not why did Bob fuck up? Wait, why did you hire Bob? How did you train Rob? What system was broken that allowed Bob to make that mistake? Bob didn't make a mistake. Bob wouldn't even be here had it not been for you or us hiring him or training him or onboarding him or coaching him. Or maybe we gave Bob so many balls that of course he was going to drop some balls. So don't point your finger at a person, point your finger at a system. So every day at 1-800-got junk. We would have a daily huddle and we would finish our 7 minute daily huddle with this one question. What missing systems do? We see people be like, oh, so it was, again, it was a problem. We would then identify the missing system for that problem.
- [18:36]
B
Hey, guys, I just want to let you know that the 250 off freedom ends tomorrow. Tomorrow night it's gone. So the prices go back to full price. That's up to 250 bucks off every tier for America's 250th birthday. If you've been waiting for a sign, this is the sign. October 26th through the 28th at Mandalay Bay. The best operators in business under one roof. Go claim your seat right now@freedom event.com or call or text us at 602-581-7563 and we'll get you in. Do it tonight. I don't want you to miss this. You know what's interesting is every morning I get a text message of every major KPI. Booking rate, cancellation rate, conversion rate, average ticket turnover rate. Very important. KPIs. What's that?
- [19:19]
A
I got to stop on that. What kind of, well, you don't drive your car.
- [19:23]
B
You have a driver.
- [19:23]
A
Now, when you drove a car, what kind of car did you drive?
- [19:26]
B
I have a trx.
- [19:27]
A
Okay. And in your trx, did you have a dashboard on your car?
- [19:30]
B
I did.
- [19:31]
A
And what metric did you look at most often on the dashboard?
- [19:35]
B
The speed.
- [19:36]
A
Bingo. And it was really big and right in front of you.
- [19:38]
B
Right, Right.
- [19:38]
A
And then in the bottom right hand corner, there was another metric that would light up once in a while and go, hey, buddy, fill me up with gas.
- [19:43]
B
Yep.
- [19:44]
A
The other metrics were kind of irrelevant,
- [19:46]
B
unless you got an old car. Then you're looking at the heat.
- [19:48]
A
Correct. There might be a couple others. Right. The heat battery. But you don't need to look at every metric every day. Your email that you get every day should only show you the metrics that are outside of the bounds that you've set for them. Why do you need to know every single day that the gas is full? Well, if your metric is green, I don't want to see it. You should only be seeing the metrics that are yellow or red on a daily basis.
- [20:11]
B
I mean, I could digest this in less than a minute, but here's what I.
- [20:15]
A
But imagine if you could do it in 20 seconds.
- [20:18]
B
Yes. And that's lean. The whole deal of lean manufacturing Kaizen and trying to get a little bit faster.
- [20:23]
A
Why do we want our leadership team to keep seeing the metrics that are green every day? I want them to only see the stuff that is highlighted. Or maybe it's super green. Maybe there's too much profit, meaning we should go spend faster. But I don't want to just keep seeing the same metric saying, you're good, you're good, you're good.
- [20:38]
B
No, I feel like my best analogy is I'm on Mars now. I'm not involved at all in Day to Day. I'm involved heavily in marketing and recruiting. But you know what it does is it allows me to see what went well. Where's the shiny day? The beautiful what didn't go well. So I give a lot of Atta Boys like, dude, you're killing it.
- [20:58]
A
Then that makes sense. That's why you want to. That's why a leader should know about the good metrics is to praise is to do the Atta boys is to say, great job.
- [21:06]
B
And then the volcanoes and the tornadoes. I'm like, what happened here? And sometimes it's a budgeting problem, which our FP and A team is amazing what they do. There's six of them, but we're Crushing budget. And sometimes I love crushing budget. And sometimes I'm like, why are we crushing budget? And it's a budgeting exercise.
- [21:25]
A
But, you know, you're right. There's gold there. Yeah, Yeah.
- [21:28]
B
I will say this. I want you to answer this question, but you.
- [21:31]
A
So, yes and yes. You should see them, and you should know what to do when you're seeing them. A lot of people will just see the good stuff. They won't do anything. At least you're doing the Atta Boys. Or you're examining why are we doing so well, too. I think that makes sense.
- [21:43]
B
I send out 20 messages a day via via video. Every birthday, every anniversary, and I'm working on handwritten cards. So I want the wives.
- [21:53]
A
Video's so good, too, though, because they'll share the video with the wives.
- [21:56]
B
Yeah, no, we. And they're sincere videos. And then also, I'm able to do groups. We built a software. I want to show it to you, but I could literally say, Michigan had a record day, and I could send it to every guy in Michigan with a flick of a button.
- [22:07]
A
It's awesome.
- [22:08]
B
I say, you guys are killing it. I'm getting wristbands made for Howard.
- [22:10]
A
Bihar did that at Starbucks. Eh?
- [22:12]
B
What's that?
- [22:12]
A
Every single Friday when Howard Behar, they had 11,535 stores. I know this because my mentor is being groomed as a COO there. So Howard, every Friday would sit down for two hours with a stack of thank you cards and a spreadsheet. It'd be like, store number 1706, Frappuccino Record. Hey, store number 1706. Congrats on the Frappuccino record in Seattle. Great job, Howard.
- [22:35]
B
Yep.
- [22:35]
A
Kelly. Four years. Kelly, thanks for your four years of service. Love you, Howard. Every Friday for two hours. He didn't know who to praise. He couldn't interpret all that data and decide it was a system given to him. But when you're the CEO of a company that big and you're spending 5% of your week praising and saying thank you, every entrepreneur out there is not doing even close to that. You are. You're doing more. It's just good. That's why you're successful.
- [23:01]
B
I'm just getting started.
- [23:02]
A
But that's why you're successful. Not necessarily the metrics that we measure on the marketing stuff. It's because you're deeply caring about the right people. You hire the right people, and then you're caring about them.
- [23:13]
B
I mean, I talk to these guys. You know the number one question I get Is what's next? What do you got for me? What do I do with the money? Where do I invest? They're asking the best questions, by the way.
- [23:24]
A
I love that they're asking about investing. I think most companies that do a 401 matching are missing the point. Just simply matching 401 is stupid. Teach your employees how to invest. Teach them about dollar cost averaging. Teach them about compound growth, get them excited. That's where we actually should be giving our time. Because most kids, most adults, parents never taught them that.
- [23:48]
B
No. And that's why in my dream manager program we got a full time dream Manager. I'm hiring a second one. Is first of all, one of my
- [23:54]
A
favorite books of all time.
- [23:55]
B
Such a good Kelly and just pay off the highest interest rate first. Here's what you should live off of a profit first. You've heard of that book by Michael McCallish.
- [24:05]
A
Michael McCallage.
- [24:06]
B
So he wrote a new book and we're the first two pages of it. Because I said, I want this for employees. I understand profit first for businesses.
- [24:13]
A
Yeah. They need to understand for their home, their personal cash flow.
- [24:16]
B
Well, literally. Take your paycheck, take out what you want to save, and then the leftover should be what you could spend and
- [24:23]
A
the leftovers is what you should donate to the church too. This whole like 10% off the top tithing before you take care of your kids. For me, I go to church and I grew up Christian, Catholic. But like, I feel bad for the kids. The families that are like donating their 10% and they don't have enough to like take care of their kids.
- [24:40]
B
They got spending problems.
- [24:41]
A
That's why that was a sidetrack country.
- [24:43]
B
You know, here's what I get all the time. I want to be like you, Tommy. And by the way, I take that really to heart. But they go, I want to expand, I want to diversify my product set, which I don't do at all. And I'm like, well, I hope you own a lot of market share. You got to be doing 20, 30 million in your market and you got to be above 15% to the bottom. And they're like, no, but we want to expand quicker. And I'm like, do you not know how difficult you're going to be, Rob and Peter? You're going to be sending your best guys to this other market. You're not ready to expand. I wish I could have talked to my younger self and said, don't expand that quickly.
- [25:18]
A
Do you know why you expanded quickly? From my perspective, you were devouring Learning. You were so hungry to learn. You've been devouring books and podcasts, and is that true?
- [25:30]
B
Yeah.
- [25:31]
A
And I think that. I think that a lot of these people that want to grow quickly aren't willing to put in the work. Years ago, I had a client of mine, I was coaching this guy named Adam Daley, and Adam was sixth in the US Olympic trials running middle distance. So his best time at a 10k was 28 minutes and 46 seconds. That's ridiculous. I said he was lying. And he goes, no, I was sixth in the US Olympic Trials. I'm like, hey, I want to run faster. How do I run faster? He goes, run more. I'm like, no, I want some techniques. Is it midfoot running? Is it more cadence? Do I need to go speed work? He goes, no, Cameron, run more. If somebody really wants to grow a business, grow yourself. Like, truly. And I'm not saying, like, you know, Grant Cardone, like, go into debt and borrow money. None of that shit. Read a book, listen to podcasts, looking like. Listen to courses, take courses. Get all the free stuff that's online and available for free. Stop spending all the time surfing social media and watching all the crap on TV and wasting all the time. Grow more. You want to have muscles like Tom like you do, go to the gym more.
- [26:33]
B
You know, that's a really. I got so many questions, but you say there's three problems with CEOs, and the second one was, CEOs grow themselves instead of their managers and their leaders. And what I noticed is when I started bringing people to seminars and inviting them on my stages, on my team, and actually, I put three books on Luke's desk already this week, and I know he doesn't read them all. Luke's my coo.
- [26:54]
A
Quick sidebar. Give him the chapter of the book to read. Because sometimes it was like, oh, that one chapter was amazing. We didn't necessarily mean the whole book.
- [27:01]
B
You know what? That's really smart. That's really smart. Because I think it could be overwhelming, right?
- [27:06]
A
Like the 50 shades of gray. Just read those two pages.
- [27:08]
B
Because those are. Yeah, that's. And most books should have been like, pamphlet. Yeah, pamphlet. So, but. But you know when I really said, come to these things, get my excitement, walk out of. Because when I walk back in at whether I read a book, listen to a podcast, was on a podcast, went to an event, I'd come back and they'd be like, oh, shit, Tommy just went to another event.
- [27:29]
A
Yeah, but when they're going, they bring
- [27:31]
B
back that energy and that excitement. And now we huddle. We say what is important that we
- [27:35]
A
just learned from this. We did the same at 1-800-got junk. The best example I've ever seen of it was a former client of mine who had no budget cap on training of his employees. So what he meant by that was, and he was building about an $80 million business, anytime one of his employees wanted to go to a conference, he said, yes, as long as you come back and teach us something you learned. He never tied it to a metric. He never tied it to the role. If somebo came in and said, I want to go to Tony Robbins, Cool, go. I'll pay for it. Cover your own hotel. I will pay for you to go. He would pay their flight and their fee, and he never tied it back to anything because he knew that people that were hungry to learn would stay. They would attract other great people who are hungry to learn, and they would grow the company Smart. Crazy, right? It was amazing.
- [28:23]
B
We're getting ready. I'm sure you've talked to Luke about this, but to invest, and this is a little early to bring this up, but your program that give you maybe the bronze that everybody. I think it's six or seven.
- [28:34]
A
Oh, the Invest in your leaders.
- [28:36]
B
Invest in the leaders. And we're having like 40 people. I don't know the number exactly. Go through it, and they're all going to go through it. We're all going to do it together. We're all going to have. And then I think you're going to come at the end and maybe a Q and A or something.
- [28:47]
A
Yeah. Let me explain how the program works. So it's called invest in your leaders. It's the 12 core management and leadership skills that anyone managing people needs to be good at. It's the stuff that I was trained in at College Pro Painters. When we hire those 8,800 people every year, it's the stuff I trained Kimbal Musk, Elon's brother in. In 1993. It's the reason why Zip2 got funded was those 12 skills. When Kimbal and Elon Musk started Zip2 before PayPal, all of that money that they raised was based on the 12 skills that I taught in that course. No hyperbole. So the skills are things like situational leadership, interviewing, running effective meetings, managing conflict delegation, time management, project management, Coach coaching, running one on ones. It's kind of the 12 core functioning skills. What you guys are doing is going to pay $350 per person to have them go through that training, lifetime access. And they'll get pretty good at the content. They won't be like PhD teachers of it, but good enough. So I always say for every skill, whether it's running, you could be a bronze, silver, or gold at running. Whether it's time management, you could be bronze, silver, gold. At time management. Dan Martell wrote the book Buy Back youk Time. He's probably a gold at. You don't need to be a gold at everything, but you at least need to know that it exists. And then you need to be pretty good at it, which is bronze or really, really good at silver. When you're at gold, you could teach other people and certify other people in those skills. What I do with invest in your leaders is at least get everybody to bronze or silver, right?
- [30:21]
B
And it's so important. Our people are. They're begging us for leadership. The problem I have, and the reason I appreciate your program is you pick the wrong person for the wrong person. You know, out of every consultant, one out of four I've said maybe would say was good. You know what I mean? You're excellent at what you do. And everybody kind of, you know, a lot of them want their core, like whether it's purchasing, they want to know a lot more.
- [30:47]
A
Right. They learn about what they do.
- [30:48]
B
Right.
- [30:49]
A
But they don't learn necessarily about how
- [30:50]
B
they need to know the skills. Still, that, the, the, that's like the, the thing we're going to get really,
- [30:54]
A
you know what's really. Here's what's really scary. Think about you for a second. How many people have you hired in your career?
- [31:00]
B
Thousands.
- [31:01]
A
No, no, you personally. That you said. Yes. Hire that.
- [31:04]
B
Oh, 100. About 100.
- [31:05]
A
Okay, so you've interviewed and hired about 100 people. How much training have you had on doing interviews?
- [31:11]
B
Not a lot.
- [31:12]
A
Have you been certified in interviewing?
- [31:14]
B
No.
- [31:14]
A
Have you had personal trainers in the gym?
- [31:17]
B
Yes, I have a personal trainer.
- [31:18]
A
You have one today. You've never had a trainer on interviewing?
- [31:21]
B
No. Well, I've gotten coach in the past.
- [31:25]
A
See how you're stumbling through it even. It's crazy. And there's people out there that have had not even as much as you've had, which was kind of limited too, right. I've probably had, without hyperbole, without exaggerating, about 80 to 90 hours of training on doing interviews, which means role plays, practicing, being filmed, self critiquing, self evaluations, filling out forms, reading books, watching videos, watching other people, getting people to critique me to the point that I'm like I don't want to do any more training on interviewing. I got it. And I'm still not Jeff Smart, who wrote the book, who. Or Brad Smart who wrote Top Grading.
- [32:02]
B
Yeah, you know what? I had interviews and I've been with
- [32:05]
A
their seminars as well.
- [32:06]
B
I had you interview somebody on our team. Remember that when we had first started,
- [32:11]
A
was I interviewing somebody?
- [32:13]
B
Somebody might have been a hire. I forgot the position, but I was like, why don't you run it by. You know who it was? It was Manny in the call center. And he's like, dude, this is his fifth interview. I was like, let Cameron just take a shot at it. And he's been awesomely phenomenal.
- [32:26]
A
Yeah, he's a wrestler. And this is so my point is we don't have to be the best at something, but we need to be better at it. So people that come in and complain about employees, well, you hired them. And most people have never had any training at doing it. People complain about meetings all the time, but they've never been trained on how to run highly effective meetings.
- [32:42]
B
I will tell you, I used to try to sell people on the company and talk 80% of the time knowing like this is what we're doing and try to convince them to work for us. They're already there.
- [32:53]
A
And you're also scaring the A players away. Yeah, it was any A player that shows up. The more that you talk, the faster they walk.
- [33:01]
B
I, I say the 80 20. You shouldn't be talking more than 20%
- [33:03]
A
of the time because you need to grill them first to know if your time is worth it to spend telling them on why they should be here. 100 and an A player wants to sell you and also is excited to share what they know.
- [33:17]
B
Oh yeah.
- [33:18]
A
So no.
- [33:18]
B
Yeah.
- [33:19]
A
The more they talk, the faster they walk.
- [33:21]
B
I, we do a pretty darn good job, I think. I think Sophie is absolutely phenomenal. But I still think we got to do better. Like I walk in our training center and I do a three and a half hour orientation and if a guy's got sunglasses on when the founder comes in, I'm just super annoyed we're inside. You know what I mean?
- [33:40]
A
T shirts as well, they're all dress code. We've gotten too far with whole people showing up wearing T shirts. I mean, look, you're not Mark Zuckerberg. So don't wear the T shirt and the gray sweatshirt to your job interview first date dress code. I don't expect you to show up with a shirt and tie.
- [33:54]
B
Right.
- [33:54]
A
That's kind of silly. IBM banned the tie night or 30 years ago. But at least if you wouldn't wear it on a first date, don't wear it to work. So first date dress code. The second one is there's gotta be that level of like, I'm showing up for my first day on the job. So that means show up a little bit early, show up prepared, show up with questions, show up excited, have read my vivid vision, really know what you're in here for 100%.
- [34:19]
B
And the more we brand, the better people that come to us. It's amazing how that works. Like, A1 is we have other brands under A1. And Sophie's like, we just don't get the same people interviewing, but we don't get the same candidate level. And it's a lot harder when we don't have a strong brand in that
- [34:33]
A
market, when we also want to push some people away too. Like, I actually want some people to read a job post and go, there's no way I'd want to work there. That sounds too high stress for me. That sounds like I have to live core values. That seems like I got to really show up and deliver results. That's too much. Great. Go work for the post office. I only want the true A players coming here. I only want the people that know this is going to be the hardest thing you've ever done. And you'll be thrilled doing it, but this is gonna be the hardest thing you've ever done.
- [34:59]
B
Yeah. Well, I've got a guy out of Texas. His name's Cody. And I mean, it is not easy to work for him, but if he loves you, he'll die for you.
- [35:06]
A
Bingo. And that's why you even smiled thinking about Cody. That's an A player. Oh, he's that guy bleeds core values. If you were to rattle off your company's core values, which I already know that you know most people's core values aren't core values because you don't even know them. But you love Cody so much that you could even explain why he lives of the five core values you've already got.
- [35:25]
B
He is such an amazing guy, but they don't make him like this guy. He works 14 hour days. His dad owned the company. We bought the company. They're investors in the.
- [35:33]
A
They do actually make them. Just not as many out there. There's a lot. There's not as many A's, but they are there. So Cody knows other A's because Cody doesn't have friends who are C's.
- [35:43]
B
He's breeding. A's.
- [35:44]
A
Correct.
- [35:44]
B
I mean, I just. In the interview with guys, his. His guy, his first month got out of the Navy. He's 26 years old. His first month at $190,000 and garage doors. That's unheard of.
- [35:56]
A
Where did Cody grow up?
- [35:58]
B
Houston.
- [35:58]
A
He did? In big city.
- [35:59]
B
Yeah.
- [36:00]
A
Okay.
- [36:00]
B
But I'm telling you, his dad started the company in like 1977, and his dad's the hardest worker you'll ever meet. And Cody and his brother Ryan are like, just. They just like to work.
- [36:09]
A
Yeah.
- [36:10]
B
Cody's got eight kids, his brother has five. And somehow they still work 14 hour days.
- [36:15]
A
There's a core values God squad for them. Right. They're church or faith based families.
- [36:20]
B
100% faith based.
- [36:21]
A
So there was a. Do you remember the bomb that happened over in India about 15 years ago? That guys went in and started shooting people up and bombing the Taj and the Burj?
- [36:30]
B
I didn't know that.
- [36:31]
A
No. So it was horrific. About 70 or 80 people died. The Taj hotel group would be like the Four Seasons or the Fairmont Hotel group of India. They interviewed the CEO and they said, none of your employees left the hotel while all the shooting was happening and all the bombing was happening. None of your employees left the hotel. He said, no, we can't leave until our last guest leaves. He said, it's our. It's our obligation and we have to take care of them. And somebody said, where do you find people like that? Where do you find or how do you coach people to live those core values? He goes, you can't coach people to live core values. They either live them or they don't. And no one has those core values that we need. If they're coming out of Bombay and New Delhi, they only come from the small towns and villages because they haven't been corrupted. They haven't grown up in that big city. They haven't lost touch with, you know, what really matters, like grandma's kind of core values. So he said, we hire from the small towns, you know, And I'll tell
- [37:25]
B
you this too, is ethnicity matters. You look at some of our A plus players, I'll tell you they are. Whether they came from Iraq, they came from India. Like some of the people, they come here and they're like, wait a minute.
- [37:39]
A
Happy to be here.
- [37:39]
B
They're so happy. And another thing is they walk up to a house and like, I mean, our top guy, one of them, like, I. I did role play with him in front of 85 people and the. Everyone Watching hundreds of people. And I said, go ahead and, like, go over springs with me. And so he did. And I go, you know, that's just. That's too much. And he goes, why? And he just stood there. And the way he looked at me and the way he did it, he goes, you want it fixed, right?
- [38:13]
A
Why?
- [38:14]
B
And I just was like. It was like a master class. Because he didn't explain. He didn't stutter. He just made eye contact. One word, and they said, you know, I said, well, it's just more than I wanted to spend today.
- [38:25]
A
Why?
- [38:26]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And it was like. I loved it. Because he's like. And he'll say something to customers.
- [38:32]
A
Anybody from India and the Middle east, they can sell, man.
- [38:35]
B
Oh. And he goes, the whole world is selling. He'll look at somebody and he'll say, do you not like me or do you not like the price? That's it. And it's like, he'll narrow it down. And it's. It's. It's amazing what he does.
- [38:47]
A
So I've been. I've been to 80 countries now. I've traveled. I've been to all seven continents. I love haggling just for sport.
- [38:53]
B
Yeah.
- [38:54]
A
I can't.
- [38:54]
B
I can't.
- [38:55]
A
I can't win. They're so good. Yeah, they're just so good.
- [38:58]
B
It's. It's fun. You know when I get chased through the mall with the girl putting lotion on, and they don't take no. And it's like, all right, I'll buy your $20 lotion. It's like, I want to hire them for, like, an event.
- [39:07]
A
Upsold into something else, too.
- [39:08]
B
Oh, yeah, they're very. I mean, those are the people I want for events that are like, pay them. Great. Pay them. You ever go to an event and you see people just sitting there like, hey, yeah, we sell garage doors. Yeah, we do windows. Then you get the people that are like, so what do you do? Do you live around here? Do you know anything about insulation? And they'll just ask you off the wall questions, get to know you, make them like you. And then all of a sudden you're like, yeah, come out and do a demo. I like you.
- [39:33]
A
This should terrify you, by the way.
- [39:34]
B
If you're.
- [39:34]
A
If you're watching or listening, if you have those kinds of people working for you and you don't have them handcuffed to your company, guys like me come and take them. So not only do I, like, notice those people at conferences or events or other companies or in My day to day who are amazing. I try to poach them.
- [39:51]
B
Yeah.
- [39:51]
A
Not just even for me, but all. Like, I've even sent someone to you. Didn't I have an Uber driver that I referred to you and Luke and said, hire this guy. Yeah, right. Like when. When I have an Uber driver and then I'm reaching out to a friend or a client that I'm coaching, saying, hire this Uber driver. Your employees are not safe because the best companies will come and take them from you, full stop.
- [40:14]
B
Yeah. No, this is a fun conversation. I wanted to get. I really think you spent a lot of time on stage talking about what would Jack Welch do? And it's results versus values. It was a matrix. Can you kind of walk through that?
- [40:26]
A
Yeah. I was speaking at an event in South Carolina. It was the southeastern regional for YPO and there were 13 YPO chapters. And I was speaking to them. And I was sitting in the green room backstage talking to Jeff Imelt, who was the successor to Jack Welch. Jack was the CEO and chairman of General Electric, and then Jeff was his successor. And I said to Jeff, what's a system that Jack used that you still use in GE today? And he drew a diagram on a piece of paper. And the diagram was a four box matrix. So on the up and down Y axis was results. And you grade your people on how good they are at getting their stuff done. 0 at the bottom and 10 at the top. So somewhere between 0 and 10 on results and then across the bottom axis was core values or culture fit. And you rate them there somewhere on low core values, low culture fit, to very high, a 10 out of 10. If someone is below 5 on results and below 5 on core values, you fire them. You get them out of your company. If somebody is a positive 9 on results and a 9 on core values, like a Luke Martin who works with you, you handcuff them. You make sure that there's no way they would ever quit even if they got offered more money to go somewhere else. And this has happened. Employees who will get offered more money to go somewhere else, and they won't go, it's because we've got them locked into the company and we know they have our best interests at heart. That's a true A player, and that's someone in the top right hand corner. If they're in the bottom right quadrant where they're really, really good core values, really amazing people, but they're not getting the results. Often we try to coach them and we try to train them. That's the wrong Place to start. What I try to do is put them in the right seat first. That's what Jack would do. He would say, you know what? This is the right person. Like a Cody. But maybe he shouldn't be in finance. Maybe he should be in operations. Or maybe he shouldn't be in operations, he should be in pr. If you put the right person in the right seat, you don't need to do any training whatsoever. They excel. Right. It's like in hockey. Don't take a goalie and try to make him a defenseman. Put the goalie in goal, put the defenseman in defense and you win. And then on the top left hand corner with the super high result, people, but they're jerks or they're toxic. You got to fire those people, too. So basically, anybody on the left side, you have to fire.
- [42:42]
B
You know what's interesting is Luke's kind of an anomaly. He could handle more direct reports and he could actually handle more than most anybody I've ever seen. And I think he thinks it comes easy, but it's so hard for other people. I think the people he has on his team that do a great job, he tends to add things because he knows they're capable and he just can't handle what he could handle. His workload he could handle probably three times what most people could handle. And he's very efficient. He. He texts me this morning at 3:45am I mean, he's up and at him. He goes to bed at 7. I mean, he's just. I walked. I got in his car the other day. He's got Alex Hermosi on blast. He didn't know he was driving me home. But he's obviously always learning.
- [43:20]
A
Yeah.
- [43:20]
B
And.
- [43:21]
A
And his car is probably pristinely clean because there's no clutter.
- [43:24]
B
It's a clean car. I mean, and it's a. It's a. What the hell? Elon Musk.
- [43:31]
A
Tesla. Tesla.
- [43:34]
B
I've never owned a Tesla. He's like, dude, it's so easy to drive. He loves it. And I mean, they own nice cars.
- [43:40]
A
I had the fastest car they ever made in 2016 or a P90D. And I got stopped for speeding here in Scottsdale. And the cop said, why are you speeding? I'm like, I was trying to avoid somebody. He goes, no one speeds up to try to avoid somebody. They hit the brakes. He goes, do you like your car? I'm like, yeah. He goes, slow down. I'm not going to give you a ticket.
- [43:58]
B
That's a cool car.
- [43:59]
A
So fast.
- [44:01]
B
No, those are cool. I'm going to probably get one. I just. They're great. So let's go through the three problems that CEOs have. You put them down and I'll go through the first one. They don't know the core leadership skills people need.
- [44:16]
A
Okay. If you're thinking about your people and you want to grow them, we don't really know what to grow them in.
- [44:23]
B
Right.
- [44:23]
A
We don't know how to. It's like the first time I went to a gym, I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't know how to use the machines. I didn't know what weights to use. I didn't know what reps were or sets were. I didn't know. I didn't know. So most leaders, if you've never built training companies, don't know what to train people in. So I'll give you the shortcut. You need to train people on what's called situational leadership, which is the ability to adapt your leadership style on a project by project basis. You need to coach people on coaching so they know how to coach other people. You need to coach them on training people so they know how to train them on certain skills. You need to coach them on running one on one meetings. You need to coach them on running all meetings, whether it's financials, reviews, daily huddles, whatever meetings, meetings with clients. You need to coach them on time management, priority management, on interviewing, on communication, on handling conflict. Those would be kind of the executive functioning skills.
- [45:17]
B
I agree. What are your thoughts on IQ versus eq? Because I've noticed that a lot of people that are super smart, they don't know how to talk to people and they never will. They don't know how they make other people feel. They're condescending and you can have the conversations, but they don't want to change.
- [45:35]
A
I just had a speaker present to our CO alliance and her content was incredible. I speak quickly. I'm at about 118 words a minute. Clinton and Obama were 96 words a minute. She was like 150. She didn't have the EQ to notice herself and dial it back and then be able to deliver value. Yeah, I think EQ is really important. You have to be able to observe yourself and you have to be able to blame yourself a little bit too. Right. It's so easy to blame somebody, but there's three fingers pointing back at you when you point a finger. I think it's a balance. You can't hire an idiot who Knows they're an idiot.
- [46:11]
B
Obviously, it's hard at certain parts of the company. I mean, I mean, you know, the finance department is their number ninjas, the FP and A team. But they do really well.
- [46:22]
A
EQ as well, though.
- [46:24]
B
We got a great team. I mean, what I found myself is I could critique every single person on the team and I could critique myself even more. But the fact is, we've got chemistry. We've made it through a lot together. People always ask, could you rebuild this company? And I'm like, the camaraderie is hard to find. It's years.
- [46:40]
A
Yeah, it's years.
- [46:40]
B
You can't go hire a team in a year.
- [46:42]
A
I mean, do you know why you get along with people? It's because they all live the same core values that you do. What's really weird and people miss this is you're not trying to hire people like you. Like my IT team. Our IT team at 1-800-got junk. Nine or 10 of them. They were all Russian. I didn't have a lot in common with them, so I didn't really hang with them. But, man, they lived our core values. So there was a lot of respect between each other. So you're not trying to hire people like you. You're trying to hire people that live your core values are obsessed with your bhag. They're obsessed with your vivid vision. They're obsessed with your core purpose. But you don't want everybody to be similar. You don't want everyone to have the same behavioral traits as you. There's not a single salesperson like Cody would never make it through an HR person screening process.
- [47:30]
B
Oh, no, he sucks.
- [47:31]
A
Because HR people would hate Cody because Cody doesn't follow rules. He doesn't follow procedures. He wants people to follow procedures, but not him. Him. Right, but salespeople would never make it through an HR screening process. But they can all live the same core values. HR people and salespeople can at least all live the same core values.
- [47:51]
B
The Next one was CEOs grow themselves instead of their managers and leaders. We discussed that, but you could talk about that.
- [47:57]
A
It's kind of an obvious. It's like the analogy I use is a duck. If a duck has one really strong wing and one weak wing, it flies in a circle. So what would be the point of just training the quarterback on a football team and not training everybody else? You need to train everybody on the team so that everybody can work together. Everyone collaborate, everyone gets stronger. And you can also probably operate your company with less people if you truly train people. You'll get a lot more results through those people. You could probably get rid of your bottom 20%.
- [48:26]
B
I want you to be very descriptive here. Bring us back to the time and place, because this is one of probably the deepest lessons you were able to teach me in Luke. Addition by subtraction or addition by subtraction or do not hire is your volleyball lesson.
- [48:41]
A
Oh, the volleyball analogy in Australia. Yeah, it was Dubai. In Dubai, I was over in Dubai. I was speaking at a big Mindvalley event. I just came off a stage of 2,500 people. I did the opening keynote. Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO did the closing keynote. And I was standing, talking to this guy, six foot seven. I said, what do you do for fun? He's like, I play volleyball. I'm like, do you still play? He goes, yeah, I play pro beach volleyball. I'm like, isn't pro two on two? And he goes, yeah. I said, you know, when I was in college, I played some volleyball and I was on my high school team. I said, if I got six guys from my team. And he starts laughing. I didn't even have a chance to answer to finish the question. He goes, dude, we beat you every single game. I'm like, wait, so two guys would beat six? He goes, every game. So I realized that if you have two A players, like two people that are really good quality, really good culture, really good skills, they've done it before. You like each other. You can finish each other's sentences. You pay them 200 grand each, that's two people for 400,000. Or you have six B C players who they work hard. You got to manage them, you got to align them lots. You're always trying to herd cats. They're okay. You know, they do their solid nine to five. I'm paying six people 100 grand each. The two A's at 400 would destroy the six B's or C's at 600. So A players are free. And the only time you have a real A player is if you absolutely know it. Meaning you were taking notes in the interview. That's an A player. When you're not taking notes, they're not A's, which is okay. A players are racehorses. B players are workhorses. The C players go to the glue factory. So at a one garage, you've got 600 employees.
- [50:21]
B
There's 1400 now.
- [50:22]
A
1400 cheapers creepers. Okay, out of your 1400 employees, my guess is you have 140. True as maybe 200 and you've probably got a solid thousand B players. And you probably have 50 C players. Get rid of the Cs. You don't even have to replace them. There's nothing wrong with a thousand solid B players. They grind it out. They do the work. They don't drive anybody crazy. They don't piss anybody off. They live the core values solid.
- [50:51]
B
I get really upset sometimes. Me and Luke go back and forth on this because I'm not a quick person to fire. But, you know, this is good. Tension within the company is ultimately, I'm responsible for marketing. Yep, we've got a cmo. He's amazing. We've got a VP of marketing. And, you know, our CFO tends to be like. And marketing. He's from England, Marketing mist again. And like, I'm like, well, let's look at operations. Let's look at cancellation rate. Let's get capacity planning. But most importantly, hey, let's look at what the new guys, the guys six months and under are doing. And I got them more of the Jack Welch, but I'm more of like, instead of every year, every three months. But Luke's like, you know, these guys need time. And I'm like, it's very tough for me. It's very tough. And, you know, they're running lower quality leads, but not all leads. So we're getting into lead scoring right now because I want to know for a fact, and I don't think he's right or I'm right. I think it's somewhere in the middle. But I have a low tolerance for people that don't come up on time, dressed right, clean, truck drive safe. Those are easy. But operational excellence, like, the stuff I'm looking at is their conversion rate, their average ticket, their turnover rate. And I could see potential in a lot of people. But then there's just people for three months. They haven't moved, they haven't made a phone call, they don't show up to practice.
- [52:06]
A
You gotta make the cuts.
- [52:07]
B
Like, they have to be mandatory practice. They don't want to do it, they need to get cut.
- [52:10]
A
Here's some data or some thoughts around this. Number one is when you have doubt, you have no doubt. So when your gut's saying, yeah, that's not going to work out, make the cuts. The second part is, why are we spending so much time managing coaching, helping, leading, giving support to our C players?
- [52:32]
B
You can give it more to A players than I do, right? A players will double correct. Before a C player will come up to a B player.
- [52:38]
A
But you know what we do with our A's? We just let them do their job because we're so busy spending time with our Cs.
- [52:43]
B
100%.
- [52:43]
A
Luke can manage a lot of people, but does he give his grain to his best horses? If Luke is spending time managing his Cs, thinking about his Cs, worrying about his Cs, what if he spent time with the A's?
- [52:56]
B
110%.
- [52:57]
A
What if we put, like I told you about the invest in your leaders training course 12 months ago.
- [53:03]
B
You know what? Yeah. No, trust me, it's. It's on the top of the list. I mean, we're doing it. I, I think he's been in contact.
- [53:08]
A
But my, My point is, if, if more companies would spend their time with, with their A players, it would make it easy.
- [53:14]
B
I spend all the time with the A players. By the way, it makes your Cs.
- [53:17]
A
It would make it easier to get rid of your Cs.
- [53:20]
B
You know, I once met a billionaire, this is a decade ago, and he said, I never had to fire anybody
- [53:25]
A
back when a billion dollars was a real.
- [53:27]
B
It was a real number. And I said, what do you mean you never fired anybody? He goes, tommy. He goes, it's impossible to jump through the hoops. Then I make C players jump through. He goes, they don't even get to
- [53:38]
A
come work for them.
- [53:39]
B
He goes, they will not jump through. He goes, they quit. He goes, because they got to show up at this time. They got to get this training. This guy that my girlfriend introduced me at the time. And this dude had three private jets. I don't even. His name was Todd something, but we met at a Starbucks and he took the time just for a quick minute with me. This is before I had any money or anything cool. And I was like, it was just really interesting that he said, I never fired anybody because they quit. He goes, I run them through like they are going. I make it very, very challenging.
- [54:09]
A
Yeah, challenging to get in the door and then challenging to stay.
- [54:12]
B
Challenging to stay. Because if you're not, you're going to run through, you're going to do ride alongs, you're going to do this, you're going to do this, you're going to do this. But at a certain point, you're like, dude, you're either going to get better quickly or you're going to leave.
- [54:22]
A
Yep. And certain, you know when you're walking somewhere and you'll see a bunch of mallard ducks, all the mallard ducks hang out with other mallard Ducks. All the A players only want to hang out with A players. But not a lot of A players are going to work for a company if they know it's filled with Cs 100%. They just don't want to go there.
- [54:38]
B
All the top guys fly across the country to go ride with another guy. They're calling each other every day. They're looking at the leaderboard going, man, I'm number three. I need to be number one.
- [54:47]
A
Love that.
- [54:48]
B
They call me up and they're like, dude, what can I do to pick up an extra shift?
- [54:50]
A
I gotta go.
- [54:51]
B
I mean, I get text messages, 20 a day, and then I screenshot them and send them out to all the techs.
- [54:56]
A
I used to tell franchisees something like that, that when you go to a conference with all the franchisees from your brand, don't talk to the negative franchisees. Go talk to the positive ones. Go talk to the happy ones, talk to the top performers. Why would you go hang out with the cultural cancers? And that's where grandma was right. That one bad apple spoils the whole bunch of that cultural cancer. Even if it's an employee or a branch manager, whatever destroys everything. I had a CEO I was coaching one time. He owned a chain of 16 dental offices. And he said, oh, that's just my receptionist. I said, just your receptionist? That's your Director of First Impressions. That's the first person that every employee sees every morning. Last employee everybody sees on the way out the door. First person every customer sees. Last person. That's one of your most important roles. Director of First Impressions. Not just a receptionist.
- [55:44]
B
I love that title. You know, I always do this during orientation. I go, guys, talk to the optimistic guys. Finding a way to win that are asking for help. I go. I had two managers. They talked every day. Super optimistic, beating their scores. They were just coming up with answers, coming up with solutions. My cousin Steven and another guy out of Dallas. These guys were the worst guys. They call every day.
- [56:06]
A
Totally.
- [56:07]
B
They call each other and bitch about everything. They tell, this company has issues. This is messed up. This is wrong. Cancer. They needed to get out of the company and their family. One of them was family.
- [56:18]
A
It impacted me. One time I came back from traveling around the world. I was 26 years old. I got a job in sales and I'd run my own business for two years prior. College pro. And I decided to do a job in sales. I really didn't know where to go and what my direction was going to be. And I was keen, I was excited. I Was doing software sales in 1991. It was like tech. It was fucking exciting. And there was this guy in our room. I don't remember what his name was. I can still picture him. And he was just. He was a bit of a loser. He was just negative about everything. He wasn't hitting his quota, wasn't doing well with sales. And every day he would just play Tetris and complain. And after about three weeks, you know what I started doing? Playing Tetris?
- [56:57]
B
Yeah, complaining.
- [56:58]
A
It was so sad. I got sucked into it. This other woman that worked with us was super keen as well. And I kept trying to migrate over to spend time with her because she was keen and was selling of lots thoughts. She got sucked into it as well. Over a period of about four or five months, all four of us in the sales team got sucked into this negative vortex. Had they gotten rid of that bad apple, the three of us probably would have still excelled.
- [57:21]
B
Are you familiar with Andy Elliot?
- [57:23]
A
No.
- [57:23]
B
Andy Elliott, the guy that's. You got to have a six pack. He's all over the Internet. He's out here in Fountain Hills. But he's. He's all, I have a dad bod,
- [57:30]
A
but I'm 60 now.
- [57:31]
B
Yeah, he's a cool dude. Good friend of mine and his guy started making a ton of money in sales. He had no limit. And I talked to one of, like, the top guys under Elliot group, and, you know, these guys are making a million dollars. I mean, they're just killing it, right? They're selling training, sales training, and they're just smiling and dialing. They're putting out all the social media. I mean, he's very good at what he does. And, I mean, he gave out a cell phone number, but it eventually became like everyone had a cell phone number. You text it on social media, and now he's got another number. I mean, every time I talk to him, he's got a new number because eventually it's just bombards. And he said, you know, we had to do Tommy is every morning, we had to do 30 minutes of thankfulness of what we've got. And we had to start changing the culture because everybody's like, oh, man, that guy's making 1.8 million. Like, I don't make enough. And there was just this attitude of, like, I'm not making. And like, wait, when we found you, you were making 75,000.
- [58:32]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [58:33]
B
And this is like the comparison and the jealousy y. And so they started to have to do affirmations and where your focus goes thankfulness and what I didn't have, what I had. And he goes, that took six months to really turn it around.
- [58:46]
A
Exactly. And that's. That's a CEO who is very observant to what was happening with culture. Culture is that it's not the free massages and the free lunches.
- [58:54]
B
Yeah, right.
- [58:55]
A
You can give free massages and free lunches to people all day long, and your culture will get worse if you
- [58:59]
B
don't fix the core 110%. You know, I think about this all the time. That that's my job. It's not Luke's job.
- [59:05]
A
Well, your job is to be the chief energizing officer. Culture is a part of that. It's why I believe that a CEO should have no more than four or five direct reports. Because you also have culture, your board of advisors and legal strategy. Those are four direct reports right there. But culture, the whole idea of the employee net promoter score, the feeling, the buzz, the vibration, that's so critically part of the CEO's purview.
- [59:32]
B
I got a lot of work to do. I'm horrible with names, and I hate saying that out loud because it doesn't make it any better. I wish I could say I'm best with names, but I'm just not.
- [59:41]
A
My wife is the best with names.
- [59:42]
B
It's crazy. My fiance, Bri, is just a wizard. She's like, oh, I could just be like. It's almost like I got a mild case of dementia because I can remember everything. I can remember movies, I can remember quotes. I can remember. But when it comes to names, and it's not because they're not important.
- [59:57]
A
No.
- [59:58]
B
I just got to do like, username, seven times. Say it out loud. Associate it with an actor.
- [60:02]
A
I'm so bad with it. I was at your home for dinner. You and Bri and your friend Aaron. Aaron? I thought it was Alan. See?
- [60:09]
B
Yeah.
- [60:09]
A
There was only one other person I had left that night, and I wanted to reconnect with him. I couldn't remember his name. You reconnect me. I still care. Like, we got to be bad at something.
- [60:17]
B
Yeah. I'll take it. You know the third one?
- [60:20]
A
I'm worse at it than you are.
- [60:21]
B
Maybe. You know, we'll see.
- [60:24]
A
You're giving.
- [60:25]
B
So small and medium sized companies don't have training departments.
- [60:29]
A
Yeah. When you grow a company and you get to a certain size over, usually it's over two or three hundred people, your HR department starts to build out an internal learning and development department. You have an lms, you've got training Videos, you've got training sheets, you've got role playing. You guys, do you have a coaching room, but when you were less than 200 people, you didn't have that. You had Bob who would train some people on the fly, right? So what happens is when you're in a small to mid sized company, you don't have the resources and the expertise to help you scale. So your job is to plug stuff in that will help people scale. This isn't a pitch for my course, but there's lots of courses online. Put your people into them because you're not going to build yours. So stop saying we're going to build something when you're not. Don't give a whole book to somebody, say, read chapter six of that book. Or here's a video watched between minute 13 and minute 21 of that video, right? That's enough to get people started on training. But don't keep saying that you're going to build it internally because you won't. It's going to cripple you.
- [61:28]
B
You know, when it comes to a players, I want to go back for a second. I was thinking how many owners that decided to start their own company are just not a players. I did this post and I said most people shouldn't be business owners. They don't even know like you're going to fail. I mean, the odds are against you, right? We know that the odds are against you, especially going over a million dollars, the chance to make it a day.
- [61:49]
A
Well, here's, here's the math that you want. What you're asking. There's 14 million companies in the United States. Of the 14 million, 7 million is average. That's the middle. That means there's 7 million entrepreneurs in the United States that are below average. There's 7 million that are above average. But being above average kind of sucks. Imagine if your doctor said to you, your health is like the average American.
- [62:15]
B
Fuck that.
- [62:15]
A
I don't want to be the average American. The average American's own average European maybe. So I want to benchmark above that. So really what you're saying is to be a really good entrepreneur, you have to be in the top 10%. Okay, 1.4 million. That's 1.4 million that are in the top 10%. You're not in the top 10, you're in the top 1%. Probably in the top 0.5 of the 1%. Right? You benchmark against the best of the best. Your health is against the best of the best. Your wealth is against the best of the best. Most entrepreneurs are saying they want to be like, Tommy, are trying to go from zero to great. I think most entrepreneurs try to go from zero to good and then go from good to great and then go from like, how the best get better.
- [62:57]
B
Yeah, well, that's the thing. I don't think entrepreneurship. I think there's a really, there's a fallacy out there. Because if I'm a technician, you know what I think?
- [63:07]
A
Yeah.
- [63:08]
B
They pay for some overhead. They pay for the CRM, they got some CSRs and dispatches.
- [63:11]
A
I have no idea.
- [63:12]
B
But they go, you know, the parts cost a buck, I sell it for 10. That's $9.
- [63:15]
A
Yeah.
- [63:15]
B
Let's say 2 of that goes to operations. That makes 70% net.
- [63:19]
A
Yeah.
- [63:20]
B
So I met this entrepreneur, cool dude from Australia, and one day, I mean, he wasn't making a lot of money at the time, he took out 30 pennies. And he had his team, he's like, how much do you think I make off of every dollar? And when he took back two, I mean, the company wasn't doing very well. 2%, but they were just shocked. And that's why I have open book management.
- [63:38]
A
So I learned this. I was 20 years old. I was running my house painting business. I had 12 employees. Five of them moved from Ottawa, Canada, to Sudbury, which was six hours away, to work for me for summer. And I was about six weeks into my summer and my friends hated me. And I was telling my dad at dinner, he goes, why do they hate you? He goes, they think I'm rich. He goes, you're not making money yet. I said, I know that, but they don't know that. He goes, well, why don't they know that? I said, well, all they see is the revenue for all the jobs. So we've painted 30 houses and all they see is how much money I'm getting paid for the houses. But they don't know all my expenses. He goes, show them. I'm like, how would I do that? And he goes, open your accounting, your open book management, and show them your accounting. So I had my 12 employees over for dinner that night. I ordered pizza and beer, which I couldn't afford because I wasn't making money yet. And I showed them my accounting. I showed them royalty paint, soft supplies, gas workers comp, liability insurance, my accounting, my bookkeeping, my pager bill. I showed them my marketing costs, my flyer drop costs. I showed them my customer service, showed them my. They were fucking terrified that we were going bankrupt in 30 minutes over the. They hadn't Even finished the pizza. And they went from you're rich and we don't like you to we're going bankrupt. Are we gonna have a job next week? Literally changed everything. Most people should not be entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship got too trendy with the rise of the Facebook and Instagram starting 2007. Prior to 2007, no one wanted to be an entrepreneur. Yeah, social media. Here I am in my jet. Here I am Bora Bora. Here I am with all life, right?
- [65:11]
B
That's gonna go viral like it did with me. Because the fact is, the first five years, I didn't have any money.
- [65:18]
A
And we won't tell people the truth yet. You're not going to tell people in the moment of how hard it is until you've solved the problem, because it hurts our business. So entrepreneurs won't say, in the crisis of meaning, in the valley of death, when our employees stealing, when we had to fire our best friend, when we have no money to pay bills, when our wife is screaming at us because we haven't paid ourselves for four months, when we just hired somebody and we're not sure if we can meet payroll. We don't talk about it in the moment. We'll talk about it two years later when it's solved. But no one really shares that raw truth. So then everybody watching thinks that, oh, being an entrepreneur is incredible. No, it's really freaking hard. It takes a long time to get to the night before you become the overnight success. People look at 1-800-got-JUNK and go, Wow, 900 million. I want to build a company like that. It took Brian 12 years to go from 0 to 2 million. I joined. We got from 2 million to 106 million in six years. Then it's taken 19 years to go from 100 million to 900 million. And you think you're going to do it in four years? He took him 30.
- [66:18]
B
You know what's interesting about that?
- [66:20]
A
32.
- [66:21]
B
Jeff Bezos was talking to Warren Buffett, and he goes, why don't more people follow your strategy? He goes, because it's a get rich slow scheme, right? He goes, nobody wants to get rich slow. And I always tell people, imagine what you could do in 10 years. Why do you always say, next year? I want to do that, this. And I'm very patient. But when I get the ball rolling, momentum, it's amazing. I talked to a large, large, large PE company recently, and I told him about our company. And I go, you know, it's a lot easier to get to $100 million. EBITDA to get to a billion dollar EBITDA. He goes, no, it's not, because you got all the systems. He goes, you'll go to a billion dollars of EBITDA faster than you did get to. I mean, and really, in the last five years.
- [67:01]
A
Yeah, it's harder to go from zero to a million than from a million to a dollars. Billion. Billion.
- [67:04]
B
Yeah, yeah. And he goes, dude, you got the systems. He goes, now it's scalable. Now it's attack. And that's where I'm at.
- [67:11]
A
Well, and you have the people again, having all the right systems. It's, it's vision, people and systems.
- [67:18]
B
Well, the systems. I've always said this. The systems dictate the people you're going to get.
- [67:22]
A
And so. And the vision dictates the people you're going to get. Yes, because if they see what you're building, they'll join those people. Correct.
- [67:30]
B
I want to pivot real quick because people always ask me this. They're like, what's my next hire? How do I get my integrator? And I'm like, do you have an ea? That's good. I'm like, are you still doing minimum wage tasks? And I don't pay. My EA makes more than most employees do by far. But I'm probably. I would need four EAs. She's just. I could pay 450,000 or pay her. So.
- [67:52]
A
So I heard, I heard this quote, I heard this quote years ago from a friend of mine, Jack Daly, who's one of the. The best in the world at sales. If you've never brought Jack into your company, by the way, to do sales training, you should. He is.
- [68:02]
B
What's his name? Jack.
- [68:03]
A
Jack Daly. World class. We got to get him on your podcast too. World class. Unbelievable. One of the highest rated speakers in history for eo. Anyway, Jack said, if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. And that burned into my brain so dearly. Any entrepreneur out there who is working hard and doing work that's minimum wage job is really hurting themselves. So the example I give is, if I was on your board or if I was your private equity firm, if I owned part of your company and I found out we were paying you 100 grand a year or 200 grand a year or $500,000 a year to be CEO, why are you doing $12 an hour work? I would lose my mind. And if you're the entrepreneur, why are you doing minimum wage work? Why are you paying yourself to do minimum wage work?
- [68:47]
B
I'll tell you why? I'll tell you why.
- [68:50]
A
Sometimes it's because it's the only area of life they get satisfaction from and it's the only area they get a dopamine rush from is being because they don't like their spouse, they don't like their kids, they don't like. They have no hobbies.
- [68:59]
B
No. I think the real Dan actually talks about it in the camcorder method of, you know, the first time when Ashley started wrong hotel, I was on a window seat. I only said aisles. I'm like, it doesn't have a gym, it doesn't have a restaurant. You know, why did you respond to that email that way? That's. You don't respond that way to that. And so. But literally I didn't do my job job. And it's a big trust. It's a lot of trust. And you know what? You're going to take two steps backwards. There's going to be a lot of training, but then it sets you up for freedom.
- [69:30]
A
Well, this goes back to my course. Invest in your leaders. If you don't know how to run classroom training and run coaching sessions and do one on one coaching, you can't grow people.
- [69:39]
B
I definitely don't quite.
- [69:40]
A
The Cambridge method's part of that.
- [69:42]
B
I'm, I'm very good at communicating with her. I know sometimes she comes in and I'm like, been a day. And she's like, oh, are you okay? But she comes in my office now, she's like, you ready for 35 push ups? Like literally, like she knows if I tell her what I want, she does a good job. Even though I'm like, she's like, come on, I'll do them. I'll do 10 with you and you gotta do all of em. She'll count me down. And like she's like, okay, earlier, 30 minutes on the treadmill. It's on your calendar.
- [70:10]
A
Really?
- [70:11]
B
Yeah. So like we got this rhythm down. She knows what's important to me, what my goals are. Getting married. She's got all this stuff dialed and she's like, this is. But that's what the next level is. And I'm not a big believer. I know you are. That's how important it is to have somebody across my office. Yeah, that's how important for someone to come in. That's how I'm still a paper guy.
- [70:32]
A
Well, it frees you up to do the stuff that you're supposed to do. I was briefed by your team. This is the second time I've been on your Podcast and we're friends. I used to coach you guys. They said, you're gonna get there, you'll be sitting down, everything will be ready, and Tommy will run, walk right in. Right at the start. I got here, the slate was ready, my name was on it, There was water sitting here. One of your EAs came up and handed me my coffee that I asked. Everything was dialed, and boom, right at the start, you walk in the door. Because you've delegated everything except genius. You're hiring people to do stuff that they love to do. Like, a lot of EAs really want to give us a better life. They want to take the stuff off of our plate. It feeds them, it fills them. They love doing it, and they want to. Like, the only three things I do now, I coach people. I do speaking events, and I do media interviews.
- [71:16]
B
Yeah, you've done a great job of building a great life of what you enjoy doing. And, you know, I had Mark Winters. You're familiar with Mark Winters.
- [71:24]
A
Gino Wickman's part. Yeah, they did Rocket Fuel, and then
- [71:27]
B
he wrote Visionary recently.
- [71:28]
A
Oh, cool.
- [71:29]
B
And moral of the story is he said, you know, Tommy, you'd be surprised on an integrator CEO, your right hand, he's like, they don't need to be on stages. They appreciate the satisfaction, but they live. And you know what's funny is Luke always says, my job is to make
- [71:49]
A
Tommy's dreams come true and to make you look good. His job is to shine a spotlight on you and make your vivid vision come true. And then our job as the CEO. Your job as CEO is internally to make sure people understand why Luke has to make the tough decisions, why he has to play the hard ass sometimes. Yeah, the COO of 1-800-got junk. Eric Charles Church has probably been on a stage twice in his 16 years being COO. He doesn't want. Now, when I was there, I was a different style coo, but Eric doesn't want any of that. He wants to give Brian. So Brian's on Dragon's Den and Shark Tank and doing the whole the press thing.
- [72:22]
B
And that's where I want to double down. I just was shooting commercials earlier, and look, it's not a vanity move. It's like the founder's story. When I founded this company, I made sure the job was done right.
- [72:34]
A
And some founders don't do that, and they're not good at it. Tobias Luque from Shopify is one of them. So he has an outward facing coo, Harley Finkelstein. But then you take somebody Like a Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the only one who talks to the media, the only one who talks to the press. He's very outward facing CEO. No one knew his coo, Sheryl Sandberg, until about the year she was leaving. She was there 15 years as his second in command. She came in when he was 21 as the adult in the room and was there beside him as his second in command. No one needed to know her name. She didn't need anyone to know her name. And she had no desire to ever go off and become a CEO either.
- [73:13]
B
Have you ever coached anybody and you've said to them, business might not be for you?
- [73:20]
A
Wow, Have I ever? No. But mostly because I only coach companies that have already gotten their company to a proof of concept and now they want to scale. So I've never coached. That's not true. When I was very young and was at college Pro Painters, I had a couple people that I shut down before they started, you know.
- [73:36]
B
Would you ever coach somebody still on a truck?
- [73:39]
A
No, because they're still too early for me. So I only work with companies that are about 5 to 50 million in revenue and want to go to 50 to 500 million. I don't coach that early.
- [73:49]
B
It's interesting because a lot of people get stuck at 5 million and this is one of the questions.
- [73:54]
A
They're in the death zone.
- [73:56]
B
You know, what would you tell somebody if someone listening runs a $5 million company? Now, here's the interesting thing that no one.
- [74:04]
A
I'm giving some really good advice. Yeah, go ahead.
- [74:06]
B
Well, I just want to. I want to clarify because I don't like this question because I don't give a If you're doing 100 million, if you're doing 1%. We don't talk enough about profit.
- [74:15]
A
Correct. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity.
- [74:17]
B
And I've been bidding that out for the last 10 years.
- [74:19]
A
My sister joined what's now called EO. It used to be called. Yeah. Which was the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. She used to call it ybeo, the Young Broke Entrepreneurs Organization. She goes, who cares? They're all doing 2 million, 5 million in revenue. None of them make any money. She had a safety deposit box at her bank filled with cash. She was making so much money, it was obscene. The only two organizations I've ever seen that do this properly are GoBundance and Tiger21. Where to be in that mastermind, you have to put your financial statements down on the table and pass them around. You have to put your investment banking statements down.
- [74:54]
B
What is the other one I know.
- [74:56]
A
And GoBundance. I went to a GoBundance event 10 years ago in Whistler, and these 100 CEOs were all passing around documents to each other. I'm like, what are you guys doing? They go, our financials. I'm like, you're literally reading financials. Yeah. And our investment accounts. There were no posers in the room. And we need entrepreneurs to stop talking about these. Oh, I did a million dollar launch. Yeah, but you had 50% in affiliate fees, 15% customer service fees, 5% returns, 4.5% credit card and stripe fees. You had 10% or 15% was spent on marketing. You took $50,000 off that million dollar launch and you spent six months doing it.
- [75:36]
B
Yeah.
- [75:36]
A
Why did Jeff Walker even be allowed to run that whole program of the product launch formula? Because you're doing million dollar launches and you're still living on ramen noodles.
- [75:45]
B
Yep. Now I know Jeff Walker.
- [75:47]
A
Actually, Joe, I do too. Good guy.
- [75:48]
B
Introduced me. But he's in, like, Denver. I believe he was supposed to come on the podcast. I lost track of him.
- [75:53]
A
He was a speaker at RCO alliance and like, look, I love the whole product launch formula. As long as it also can be done and make money.
- [75:59]
B
You got to be profitable.
- [76:00]
A
Correct. And by the way, my criteria with Brian when I came in at 1-800-GET-JUNK was, I can't coach you anymore unless we raise our prices 40% because you're not making money. The franchisees aren't making money. The guys in the call center aren't making money. The guys in the trucks aren't making money. If we can't make money with all of us making money, including our franchisees, I don't want to help you scale this. When I was at college Pro Painters, I was a franchisee. My first summer, I made $11,000. That was 40 years ago. That was 1986. I made $23,000. In 87, I made $34,000. In 1986, I made a total of $70,000 profit. In the 80s, that was like making a half a million to a million dollars a year today in buying power, My college tuition was $1,100 a year. So I paid my college tuition in the first summer times four. I bought a house when I graduated. I had no debt when I graduated. Profit was something I learned very early on.
- [76:58]
B
And the first thing I tell people is if you're not at 15% or more, you need to re examine your business. You need to be smaller, you need to trim the fat. And work on the marketing sources that are working. But Alan Rohr, you're familiar with Ellen Rohr? Yes, she's great. She was my coach in like 2018. She's solid. She's got me financial, quick checks, she's good at finance. And she said, I want you to read my book, where did the money Go? Because that was me. It was 17 and a half million. At the end of the year, my CPA calls me up and says, you owe 300 grand. I'm like, I don't even have that in my account. How is that possible?
- [77:29]
A
And it's because most entrepreneurs think it's all about sales and marketing, but they don't understand the basic P and L. Like revenue minus cost of goods sold is your gross margin, minus all of your overhead is your net profit. Then you also have to pay your taxes, but then you have cash flow. That money isn't just sitting in your bank because you're buying stuff and investing in the future. If you don't understand the basic P and L and cash flow and budgeting of your business, don't start a business or learn that or get someone to help you learn that.
- [77:54]
B
They need help with that. And I tell you, that was the missing piece. Once I got the right controller and CFO in place and I actually had the answers. And it was the key here is it was correct, it was audited, it wasn't bs, it wasn't what a simple bookkeeper put together. Most small businesses, medium sized businesses, home service, home improvement, improvement. They've got their aunt doing the books. And it's okay, it'll pass a sniff test, but it's not right.
- [78:20]
A
And it'll get you to about a million, but it won't necessarily help you scale. And you can go bankrupt with growth. Right, just because you're bigger. The cash needs are a lot more as well. Right. When you're small, if you need money, you just max out a credit card. You borrow money from your dad when you're mid sized, you've maxed out your credit card, borrowed from money. Where do you go now? The bank. The bank won't necessarily loan to you. So then you get strapped, then you gotta take a hard money loan, then you get even bigger. I have a friend of mine who just went bankrupt, shut down his business, closed down events, literally burned every single bridge he ever had because he didn't tell people he was scared and didn't know what he was doing. I don't think he cognizantly tried to screw everybody. I think he just built a business that was too big and he didn't understand cash flow and budgeting. And then all of a sudden, he'd borrowed too many from too or too much from too many, and he was gone.
- [79:09]
B
And we always think, we're going to get there, we're going to get there. We've got to make it through the storm.
- [79:14]
A
Hope isn't a strategy.
- [79:16]
B
You know, the economy's doing pretty darn well. The stock market's up. I'd say buyer sentiment's a little bit down. But here's what's crazy. I had my buddy coming to town the other day and he's. He works with the wizard of ads, Roy Williams.
- [79:25]
A
Roy Williams, Yeah. And Austin, Texas.
- [79:27]
B
He goes, dude, I set five days records in a row. He goes, everybody in Columbus is asking me, how are you staying busy? He goes, tommy, I need to hire 15 more people. And everyone says it's a bad economy.
- [79:39]
A
I think I just talked to him.
- [79:40]
B
Yeah. Aaron Gaynor.
- [79:41]
A
Oh, my God. I just talked to him.
- [79:42]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [79:42]
A
Crazy.
- [79:42]
B
Yeah. Same guy we were talking about.
- [79:44]
A
Yeah, Yeah. I was like, you got to work with Roy Williams. That's extraordinary.
- [79:47]
B
He gets to work directly with him.
- [79:48]
A
It's amazing. Yeah, I know, it's. Yeah, it's amazing.
- [79:50]
B
I like Roy Williams and, you know, I kind of get to see it. And they spend a lot of money on radio.
- [79:56]
A
A lot.
- [79:57]
B
And you, you've always said TV's a
- [79:58]
A
waste of time now, now TV is the digital yellow pages.
- [80:02]
B
Yeah.
- [80:02]
A
Right. Because the people that have money aren't watching TV ads, they're online. So. So that's why I would say move away from television and put your money into digital, put it into outdoor, put into rad.
- [80:15]
B
I agree. I want to talk real quick about your sister, about a quick story and we'll start wrapping up with a few more questions. But, you know, she's obviously an A type person. She'd give everybody a hug and she'd say, I'm not leaving here without a written testimonial.
- [80:28]
A
Yeah. I was like, God, how do you know about my sister? My sister's running an incredible company. She has about 300,000 people playing co ed intramural sports in her leagues.
- [80:37]
B
Wow.
- [80:37]
A
She runs an unbelievable culture business. If you ever interview anybody, like over zoom, you should do an interview. She likes Live Toronto, Canada. She is that strong. She's been running her company for 30 years. Built it from scratch. She's done eight or nine acquisitions now. So when Christy was starting in business, she learned at college pro Painters as well. She was running a franchise for college pro painters. She would show up at a job site doing an estimate to try to land the house and she would say to the customer, when I leave after we've painted your home and it looks incredible, I'm not leaving until I have three things. I want a check, I want a letter of reference, and I want a hug. She would kind of giggle and they would laugh and they go, what do you mean a hug? She goes, I want you to be so happy with your paint job that you're going to give me a check, a letter of reference and a hug. And they went, okay. Of course she was signing everybody up. She also then had a binder that had a letter of reference and a before and after photo of every single house that she painted. Now in the first couple of weeks, there weren't that many. Many. After a bunch of weeks, there were a lot. And then she landed everybody she ever talked to, everybody she was talking to was signing up with her. So she raised her prices, she kept raising her prices. But her client binder had over a hundred letters of reference and before and after photos, she was making more money than God.
- [81:55]
B
I think it's so powerful. And it's one of those things where I'm like, luke, we got to do this. But those are some of the things that I'll take as a pet project project. And I'm like, I could do this very quickly.
- [82:05]
A
You know where you can do pet projects really quickly is with company owned locations and do a test project. Now if you've got a lot of company on locations, you always have a prototype store. That's where you're allowed to.
- [82:16]
B
I mean, we're not a franchise.
- [82:17]
A
No, I know. So that's what I mean.
- [82:18]
B
So.
- [82:19]
A
But if you're a franchise, you can have a company on locations. If you're all company owned locations, like Starbucks or like a One Garage, you still need a prototype.
- [82:26]
B
So you need to do it in a market.
- [82:27]
A
You need, you need. Well, you need a store or a market or somewhere where you can test stuff. Maybe it's a couple zip codes in your market where you get to do. It's called Skunkworks. You get to go out and just like try shit out and see what we always do.
- [82:38]
B
Now we try it, we try it out, we make sure. We just ended our training program of our traveling trainers. Yeah, there was four of them. We gave it a year, we changed it, we tried it, we do it. And that's another thing, Cameron, is most people will Die. Eye on the sword. They literally like, if a market's not making it and it's hard. We closed Portland. It was not a big deal. We said, we're gonna give it one last try.
- [83:06]
A
Yeah.
- [83:06]
B
And we did.
- [83:07]
A
Steve Jobs cut 80% of his product line when he came back into Apple. 80% of the products he cut.
- [83:13]
B
Most people won't do that. They won't take the pivot, they won't get rid of that line. That's not making money. I asked people, I went to this company in Chicago, massive company garage doors,
- [83:21]
A
and that's by the way, that that ties back into the revenue and profit. You've got revenue from selling some stuff, but if there's not enough gross margin in there, all you have is the pain in the ass factor. Sorry, go ahead.
- [83:31]
B
Well, no, this guy's selling parts, right? So he's doing distribution, he's doing commercial, he's doing residential, and he's doing new construction. And I mean, he's doing everything. He's doing storefront, he's doing rolling steel, he's doing docs levelers. And I go, man, this is impressive. And he's super proud, but there's everywhere. We got to go to five different buildings. There was nobody in his. Like, I was like, I go, where's all the profit coming from? What department?
- [84:01]
A
Right?
- [84:01]
B
He goes, I don't know.
- [84:03]
A
He goes, yeah.
- [84:04]
B
All I know is this is how much money we're making. And he goes, it works. And he goes, why wouldn't I sell parts for all the parts? I go into it, I go, just because you could doesn't mean you should, right? I didn't say anything to him because I was a guest and I'm not there to criticized, but I just, every question just. There was no clarity.
- [84:19]
A
You have a better filter than I do. I can't help myself because I see it as my money. I see everybody wasting stuff as my money. I see so often entrepreneurs are like flies banging their head on the window and then they're going to keep working harder till they get through the window and they all end up dead on the windowsill. I just want to go do, there's a door right here. I can't help myself but to sit down with that guy and go, look, you've got this one product that you've got got eight people and all this effort and all this energy going into it. And by the way, all of your unhappy customers are with that product too. So you're wasting money. Like you could kill that whole thing off. And get rid of six people and life gets so simple.
- [84:54]
B
But that's, you know, as an entrepreneur in me, I had two full time mechanics, two hoists. I started my own rap shop because I was like, we're buying all the trucks and man, all that stuff. And Luke's been talking a lot about getting back into inventory. I'm like, no.
- [85:06]
A
Do you know where a good example of that is? Is what is this?
- [85:09]
B
It's a telephone. It's a cell phone.
- [85:11]
A
It's an iPhone.
- [85:12]
B
IPhone.
- [85:12]
A
Okay, who makes iPhones somewhere in China? Bingo. Not apple. Apple designs them, Apple markets them, and apple sells them and they outsourced the stuff that they're not good at and somebody else is world class at. Just because your business is about selling iPhones doesn't mean you have to make them. Just because your business is about selling garage doors installing doesn't mean you have to warehouse them.
- [85:36]
B
Well, that's the point is just because
- [85:38]
A
you're selling a product doesn't mean you have to sell it if it's not profitable.
- [85:41]
B
Well, we don't have vendor managed inventory in this industry yet. But the point is, is like, dude, we spend $70 million a year on parts and doors. They're willing to jump over backwards, willing to open up weekends for us. I'm like, why don't we put a full time person in there that they pay and we just reimburse because we want to get in and out.
- [85:58]
A
There's other things you will do in house. Like at 1-800-got junk. They hired Roy Williams to run the radio ads. Ads. But the call center they run in house. Do you know why they run it in house? We could outsource the call center.
- [86:09]
B
Yeah.
- [86:10]
A
Because the call center was our first point of contact with every single customer. And we knew that we had to be best of breed at that.
- [86:16]
B
Do not outsource your call center.
- [86:17]
A
Right.
- [86:17]
B
I mean a lot of people are like, have you heard about, you know, what they're doing in the Philippines? I'm like, dude, they're like, they speak almost perfect English. And I'm like, dude, I've tried, I've tried Mexico. I've tried other places. That is the dumbest decision to save a dollar.
- [86:33]
A
But outsource your wraps.
- [86:35]
B
Yes, we outsource the wraps and the guy does a fantastic job.
- [86:38]
A
Exactly.
- [86:39]
B
I mean there's certain things that you think, obviously vertical integration is important. Eventually can be the right move at the right time.
- [86:46]
A
Yeah, eventually. When you've hit a level in your market that you've hit saturation and now you can't buy more, you can't build more, you can't open Greenfield more. Sure, then vertical integration.
- [86:55]
B
But I had to go buy buy it. I'd go buy the best in class.
- [86:58]
A
I would too.
- [86:59]
B
I would not go start it up
- [87:00]
A
and then I would redo it and rebuild it or build a symmetry of it.
- [87:05]
B
And there's a lot of advantages. What didn't we talk about that I should have asked you what's on your mind lately?
- [87:11]
A
You know what's on my mind, and I know it's actually on yours too, is stuff about hobbies and life and family. So I saw an interview around six months ago and it was Tony Robbins being interviewed by Alex Hormozi. And Alex put the video up and then killed it. And I think he killed it because Tony kind of out alpha ed him and it was kind of sa. Tony was a little bit rude and a little bit too much. And he kind of got Alex on the fact. Alex had said something to the effect of, I've kind of lost my passion and my purpose and I'm not having as much fun running the business anymore. And Tony said, well, you don't have kids and you don't really have any hobbies.
- [87:41]
B
He's pregnant.
- [87:42]
A
They're pregnant, and now they're pregnant. And I think that's going to be a big shift for Alex and Layla. Now. They went to an event of mine 10 years ago. Their COO was one of the first members of the CO Alliance. I think now that he's going to have a child coming, it's going to be a quantum shift for him and his business will do even better because he'll start to develop something else besides just being the best of running a business.
- [88:04]
B
He doesn't have any direct reports. I talked to him the other day. He called me.
- [88:07]
A
No, but he doesn't have a lot of hobbies either.
- [88:10]
B
You and I have talked about that as like, dude f work. What do you love to do? What'd you love to do when you were 12?
- [88:15]
A
So think about Dan Martell for a second. We're both friends.
- [88:18]
B
He lives.
- [88:18]
A
I've been friends with dan for probably 16 years now. I've known Dan since before they had kids for a long, long time. We were in a couple masterminds together. We've traveled together. I went heli skiing with Dan. Helly skis. He does snow biting snowboating or snow biking. He does jet skiing. He does wakeboarding, he goes hiking. He traveled around the world last year with his Wife and kids. He's into fitness. What else is he into? He's into cars. He's got a lot of hobbies, and he's obsessed about growing his business, but business is not his hobby. His hobbies are his hobby. Business might be a passion, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to get some balance back in their lives again, because at the end of the day, the only metric that I'm completely convinced I know for sure is true is the death rate is still 100%.
- [89:08]
B
Yeah.
- [89:09]
A
Well, for every other metric is very low.
- [89:11]
B
At least the next 10 years.
- [89:12]
A
Yeah. Truths.
- [89:14]
B
So Alex called me the other day. This was a couple weeks ago, and he said, hey, dude, I just want to apologize. He goes, I know we're supposed to do a podcast four years ago. The person that introduced you as a scumbag, and I hate him, and I associated you with him won't go into who it was, but he's like, can you just. Can we kick it for an hour and just bullshit over zoom?
- [89:34]
A
He's great.
- [89:35]
B
And he's asking. He goes, one third of my people that come in are home service. Because I just got a lot of questions for you. You could ask me anything. He was very transparent with me.
- [89:44]
A
School's killing it.
- [89:45]
B
His school.
- [89:45]
A
Huge love I school.
- [89:46]
B
And. And, you know, I was like, does
- [89:48]
A
he own that or own part of it?
- [89:51]
B
I'm pretty sure he owns it.
- [89:53]
A
It's such a good platform.
- [89:54]
B
And he goes, what did he tell me? He goes, he said something along the lines of, you know, all the things that I do all over social media. He goes, there's a lot of things that come out of it. He goes, I get a lot of clientele and whatnot, but he goes, I got access. Everyone takes my phone calls. They answer now. He goes, but, Tommy, he goes, we're shutting down 20 fraud accounts so much, I got my lawyers all over the place. Just a really interesting guy. And look, I give him a lot of credit because he's maintained the same personality as T Shirt, you know, he's who he is, and I like that. And he's. He. And the other thing.
- [90:30]
A
But he's. But he's on tilt. He needs to get some hobbies.
- [90:34]
B
Yeah, 100%.
- [90:35]
A
He needs to have his kids, and that'll build a better human and a happier human. Elon is on tilt.
- [90:42]
B
Elon's very strange. How much? I mean, the dude is.
- [90:45]
A
I first met him 27 or 30. 37 years ago. I met him in 1997, so whatever that is. And then I was a reference for them in 95. Then I formally met him in 97.
- [90:55]
B
Yeah. 29.
- [90:55]
A
Yeah. He's on tilt. He's not happy. So you don't have to be unhappy to build a successful business. Richard Branson is happy. Dan Martell is happy. You've got hobbies and passions.
- [91:08]
B
I'm happy happy. I mean, I just interviewed the. The number one guy that teaches a course at Yale or Harvard. Harvard on happiness. And he said, happiness, Tommy, literally, he's like, breathing techniques. He's like, all that stuff. We just. I just did a fire round with him on my cold plunge, sauna, red light. And he's like. But here's the thing. He's like, happiness is. Is a choice.
- [91:33]
A
Yep.
- [91:33]
B
And for most people, I mean, I do believe, like, that there's really just chemical imbalances. But I'm just like, look, I love. I really do enjoy my life. I got a lot going on right now. I got a lot of things to be excited for. But I'm like, man, I'm like, man, I am living like I would. Who would trade their places? I can't really think of a whole lot of people that wouldn't trade place with me. Because it's not a fake happiness. You know, once you're famous, like, really famous, I wouldn't want to be Tom Cruise. Like, I'm peeing at a urinal and a guy wants to get a picture of me. I don't know if I want that.
- [92:06]
A
I'll talk a little bit about happiness. My dad said years ago that happiness and life is not about getting all the best cards. Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand. Well. And there is an example of a person who grew up on the street who crushed it in life, a person with no arms and no legs, who crushed it in life, A person with a disease that crushed it in life. People can choose to be unhappy or they can choose to be happy. I have a friend of mine in Vancouver, Canada, David Ash, who won a massive award for the Entrepreneurs Organization. He was the social enterprise winner. He sold this company for over 100 million 15 or 20 years ago and then bought a bunch of properties in Vancouver and donated them to the city as a place to get single moms and drug addicts off the street so that they could restart their lives. And I said, dave, what was your reason for doing that? And he goes, you don't know my backstory? I'm like, no, I just know you built this huge company and sold it for 100 million in, like, 98. God, 30 years ago. Crazy. That was a lot of money in 98,100 million. A lot of money. And I said, well, what's your backstory? He said, my mom was a heroin addict and my grandmother was a heroin addict and a prostitute. His mom was a prostitute as well. He said, I didn't know my dad. I don't even know if my mom knows my dad. And I didn't go to school until grade four because we lived on the street. And I want to take people off the street now. If somebody like that can not going to school till grade four. It's like, shut the fuck up with all your excuses and why. Your area is different, your business is different, your back. Happiness is a choice. Success is a choice. Learning is a choice. Most people won't put in the work. The ones who do will be successful.
- [93:57]
B
I love it. You know, real quick, I just want to point something out because I had to do some quick math. I think of life in doubles and the rule of seven says at 10%, my money will double. That's a pretty safe bet.
- [94:06]
A
Yeah.
- [94:07]
B
100 million doubles in seven years to 214 years, to 421 years, to 828 years, it becomes $1.1.6 billion billion dollars. And that's just letting. That's. That's not it. That's not very aggressive. 10%. I mean, that's. He's better than that.
- [94:25]
A
If I looked at the buildings that he donated in Vancouver to the city and what he's worth. Yeah.
- [94:30]
B
And that's. That's like. I mean, I just talked to a buddy who sold this company three years ago. He goes, dude, I pretty much put all the money into SpaceX. He bought it for $12 a share.
- [94:41]
A
SpaceX. SpaceX came out at 135. 165. Yeah.
- [94:44]
B
Now it's over 200.
- [94:45]
A
I have six allocations in SpaceX. My initial allocation was February 2024. I got another one in March 2024.
- [94:51]
B
See, that's killing it. And those are. Those are going to be a lot more.
- [94:54]
A
But I also have two in anthropic and I have two in OpenAI. My anthropic ones are going to be big.
- [94:58]
B
You know what? This, this is what I've been talking to my invest investment committees about is like, I want to find those. I want them. And I got access through Goldman and Merrill lynch and some of these other places. So. Last thing I want to say that about this happiness instructor is I talked. I talked to him about Dan Thurman. Off balance on purpose. Purpose. And I go, everybody wants their balance. Like they want a balanced life. And I go, that's. You got seasons of life. But I said. He goes, tommy, you know, in a perfect world, I wrote down my life of what I wanted it to look like in three years. And he goes, Tommy, it was 168 hours in a week. He goes, to live the life that I wanted in three years, I would need 300 hours in a week. He goes, because I got kids, I'm super proud of my kids. He goes, so I built. And this is going to sound really bad. He said, said. But I said, I built a life that was good enough because there's so much. Yes. I would be praying every day, making sure I'm building a house in heaven. I'd be working out. I'd be a 7 body fat doing.
- [95:54]
A
Doing breath work.
- [95:55]
B
I'd be doing all of it. I'd be going and writing books. And he goes, but he goes, it sounds really bad. It just sounds almost negative that it's a good enough life, but that's what I had to build.
- [96:05]
A
So here's my analogy. Picture kind of a circle, like a big huge disc, like something like this table, but a lot bigger with an elephant standing on it. It'd be kind of going like this, right? Wobbly, trying to keep its balance. That's our life. And our life is understanding the key points on the circle and how can we get some of them a little bit better, but going like this. So my key points are things like my fitness, my faith, my finances, my friends, family, fun, fun, and then future self.
- [96:38]
B
Those are the six.
- [96:39]
A
Okay, so now think about. Okay, so for your fun, where would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 for fun? And every month or two, give ourself a rating and then pick a couple areas this month to work more on. So right now I'm deep on the finance stuff. I'm really working hard on the business stuff. But in two weeks, my wife and I head off to Europe again. We go back into the fun side. We go back into the family side or the right. We're doing some work on sexuality, so we're doing stuff. Bucket list stuff. But this, this week I'm not doing any bucket list stuff. So I just try to stay cognizant of those six to eight areas of my life and then always be working on a couple of them and let the other one slide a little bit. But I'm not going to let my fitness slide for. For eight, ten Months, Right? I course correct.
- [97:24]
B
You know, I got a question. You're a mentor.
- [97:28]
A
Yeah.
- [97:29]
B
To your kids, to a lot of business owners.
- [97:32]
A
And I have mentors too.
- [97:33]
B
And you're married. And I think, what do they say? Men are from Mars and women love the penis. Women are from penis. Might have to scratch that up.
- [97:43]
A
Or keep it.
- [97:44]
B
You know, the thing is about women is they just want to be heard. And you can't give them the answers. Even though you're like, I got the fucking answer. Like this. You cut that bitch off and you tell her no more. You know what I mean? Or the. They'll be telling me a story, Bri. And you know, my mom, my aunt, my grandma, it's like. And I sit there in the room with women and I'm like, do we have anything to be happy about? And men are more like, did you see the hockey game? Let's go play. Like, I know what it's like because I was a little boy with a family of women. And you're a mentor. You've got advice. You've been through a lot. You've got a lot of life experience. So how do you deal with your wife? She's a bit younger. Mine's 15. It's almost 16 years younger.
- [98:23]
A
Yeah, mine's 20. I was at an event two weeks ago called Rythmia. I did a seven day ayahuasca journey down in Costa Rica, working with Shaman. 60 people on the property. And on the last night, one of the women was losing it. Not even on ayahuasca. The night after ayahuasca, she had a bit of a psychotic meltdown. In a good way. We were there to really go deep. And she was going. And the rest of the people in the room, we were doing a meditation, a breathwork session, were kind of freaked out by it. And one of the guys went over Brad and sat in front of her and he goes, can we go outside? I just want to hear you. And she stopped and kind of went, yeah. He goes, I just want to hear you. Let's go outside. And she goes, okay. And he walked outside with her and he goes, can I hug you first? And he hugged her and she just collapsed. And then she talked through everything that she was kind of ranting about in this breathwork session. And when she finished talking, she goes, no one's ever really heard me before. He goes, I just wanted to hear you. I was like, dude, how did you know how to do that? He said, I learned it from a marriage coach. I've been trying it with my wife.
- [99:30]
B
Wow.
- [99:30]
A
It's really fucking hard, man.
- [99:32]
B
It is hard.
- [99:33]
A
It's hard. But it's equally hard for them when they ask us a question like, how was your day? And we go, it was good. It's hard for them to go, what's he hiding? Or what's he not saying? Or what's really there? Not. We're just so our job as men is to learn how to speak women and how to learn women and job is to remember that they're still trying to learn us too.
- [99:54]
B
That's pretty profound.
- [99:55]
A
It's true. Right? And at the end of the day, we're all just walking each other home. None of this shit really matters.
- [100:00]
B
Yeah.
- [100:01]
A
It's also the same with some of our employees. They're still understand, they're trying to learn how to speak Tommy, and Tommy's trying to learn how to speak Luke or Fred or Cody or whatever.
- [100:10]
B
Yeah, we did a personality test one day and Brian Davenport was like the odd man. Now on this matrix, he was like the only one and he the instructor. It was the predictive index.
- [100:24]
A
Index. Yeah.
- [100:25]
B
And he goes, Tommy, he goes, you are. He overlapped my personality with this. He goes, we're identical. Like identical. And he goes, so I could speak to you about this, right? He goes, brian, you work your ass off for a month. You work your ass off and I mean, you go to war, you're putting in 14 hour days. You walk into Tommy's office, you show him, you want to show him an hour. Because you work so hard at this. Tommy's got five minutes for you. And he says, great job.
- [100:51]
A
Or he says, great job, I don't care.
- [100:53]
B
Yeah. And he goes, now, Tommy, you need to give him 15, 20 minutes. Brian, you need to learn that you guys are opposites. So Tommy, you got to come here to meet him and you got to come here to understand.
- [101:05]
A
So he has to come in and speak faster in an executive summary. Bullet point points, and you have to be able to say anything else you want to share.
- [101:10]
B
And by the way, I need to stay off my cell phone and not distract it and actually say, this is great. I found myself in Brian's office this morning.
- [101:17]
A
Do you know what the biggest gift you can give Luke? Because Luke is probably a very high fact finder. He likes to ask a lot of questions to start projects. The biggest gift you can give him is to say. Any other questions on that? Yeah, on that great idea that you have that you've been thinking about for a week or a month.
- [101:33]
B
Oh, he knows how to poke holes and things. I think his job Poke holes in things.
- [101:38]
A
You guys have learned how to. You've learned that men are from Mars, women are from Venus with each other. You've learned how to speak COO and he's learned how to speak CEO. It's a critical skill.
- [101:46]
B
Well, he's been very patient with me. He's been giving me a lot of compliments. I mean, we've been in a lot of meetings, and I try to make sure to people to understand that how much he's grown and he's committed to
- [101:58]
A
shining a spotlight on each other.
- [101:59]
B
It's. Well, look, I'm not doing it for any other reason, but it's the truth.
- [102:02]
A
You know what a good hack is for thinking things like predictive index or disc or Colby or any of the personality profiles. Take yours and just say, here's my predictive index profile. Write it in. And then take somebody else on your team. Say, here's their predictive index profile.
- [102:16]
B
Throw it in Claude.
- [102:16]
A
Put it into Claude and say, give me a one pager. Put it in grade six English. Give me, like, teach me how to work better together, how to collaborate where we're driving each other nuts. Like, give me a one pager on how we can help each other, but do it as, like a. Do again. Do it as a one pager in grade six English.
- [102:30]
B
English.
- [102:31]
A
It's so good.
- [102:32]
B
You know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to get. Which one do you like the most, by the way?
- [102:37]
A
You can do that with your wife.
- [102:38]
B
Oh, God.
- [102:39]
A
Here's Bree's personality profile. Here's my personality profile. Teach me how to be a better husband and wife.
- [102:45]
B
Here's so what, what, what? What's the best one out of all of them?
- [102:49]
A
They're different. There's no best. You learn something different from all of them. From Colby, you learn how someone starts or initiates projects. The love languages, you learn how they need to be praised. They're very different. You can actually map love languages at work as well.
- [103:05]
B
There's color, right? There's colors. There's five languages in the workplace, right?
- [103:09]
A
Exactly.
- [103:10]
B
You can take that test for free if you buy the book.
- [103:12]
A
Yeah, I've done a different. I've probably done about 12 or 13 different personality profiles. And every year, I used to get my executive team to do another one, and then we would pay a consultant to come in and do what Claude can now do do. Take a look at my profile on their profile and teach me how to work better. Take a look at My profile and their profit teach me how to learn
- [103:29]
B
how to really, really smart. I got a lot of notes, probably too many notes, but it's. I love doing these podcasts because, man, we could jam out for five hours and it's interesting and I respect you a lot. So that makes it much better because I work with you.
- [103:42]
A
Thank you.
- [103:42]
B
You know, I get on some people and I'll tell you, like, I enjoy most of them, but some of the time I'm like, dude, what the. It's like, it's like dragging out things and the like, sometimes it's bad advice. And I'm like, I don't agree with that. But, you know, this is a podcast. You live and learn and not. Not everything I need to agree with. But man, you. What I love that you do is you've got a story for everything. And stories are like the basis of Hume. Human beings is like.
- [104:07]
A
I was also the basis for gray hair.
- [104:09]
B
Yeah, well, you're a world travel.
- [104:11]
A
Hair comes from.
- [104:12]
B
You know, it's. It's hard because we got two dogs. We got Huckleberry and Finn and, and I.
- [104:16]
A
There's lots of people that travel with their dogs.
- [104:17]
B
I don't know and trust me, me, it's easier to find private now. But, you know, we're talking about our honeymoon and it's going to be two weeks. We're talking about this four seasons where you fly to different cities and it's an adventure. And all I can think about today because she wants to talk about it tonight. And this just sounds really bad because I don't have any kids yet, but those are my kids. You should see, they're almost like you've met them, but they're almost like humans.
- [104:37]
A
There are also people who will come and take care of your dogs for a couple weeks at your home. There's professional.
- [104:41]
B
Oh, I've got great people. I mean, Ashley. That's part of her job description.
- [104:45]
A
Oh, cool.
- [104:46]
B
So listen, Cam, you've written a lot of books. You want to just run through the books you've written real quick so people know.
- [104:52]
A
Yeah, double double seven books Meeting suck. Yeah, double double vivid vision Meetings suck. Free pr. I co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs with Hal Elrod. And then I wrote the Second in Command, which is probably my best book of all time. And then the last one I co authored with my assistant, Meredith Kuba, who's been with me for 10 years. We co authored, authored Grandma's Business Secrets and it's all of the grandmother.
- [105:15]
B
Did that come out?
- [105:16]
A
Yeah, it came out in January. It's all of the little sayings that grandma said that we know to be true. And how do you apply them to business? And I'll give you a couple examples. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Right. If it's not broke, don't fix it. A baker's dozen. How do you apply a baker? Do you know what a baker's dozen is?
- [105:34]
B
No.
- [105:34]
A
So a baker's dozen was back in the 40s, 50s, 60s. You'd go to the baker to buy. Buy 12 croissants and you'd come home and you'd take. And you'd be like, that's weird. There's 13. The baker, the nice baker always put an extra one in to wow the customer. That was a baker's dozen. So how do you wow your customers at A1 Garage?
- [105:54]
B
Give them a little extra.
- [105:56]
A
What's the free prize inside? What's the little extra?
- [105:58]
B
Roberti talks about this.
- [106:00]
A
Correct.
- [106:01]
B
Give them like a buyer's guide. Give him a price something.
- [106:04]
A
So that's a grand grandmotherism is the free prize inside. So we took 60 sayings that we know to be true and then we wrote a one pager on how do we actually apply that to business?
- [106:14]
B
That's cool.
- [106:15]
A
Yeah. Business isn't difficult. We make it difficult.
- [106:19]
B
It is the core principles, if you just stick to them and just we make it complicated. Like I'll give you an example. I just walked into Luke's office before this meeting and I said, look, I'm going to go talk to every realtor. I want to take this on personally because I know all the major realtors. We're just going to do it in 15 Phoenix. The ones that matter that have a huge social media. The designers. I know all the designers. I know all the architects. I'm just going to tell them your next 10 doors. We're going to do it.
- [106:42]
A
Cost. I love this.
- [106:43]
B
At cost. That includes our labor fee.
- [106:46]
A
Love this.
- [106:46]
B
But you're going to. We're going to have a one driving up. I'm going to do an interview with you. And he goes, let's do it, dude.
- [106:52]
A
We did that with all the home makeover shows on television.
- [106:55]
B
Yeah.
- [106:56]
A
When all. When TV was a big thing, we were on all the home makeover shows and we would donate free junk removed removal as long as they would show our trucks in the episodes.
- [107:04]
B
Yeah, it's powerful. Close us out, brother. I mean, how do people get ahold of you? How do people get in that leadership class?
- [107:12]
A
Yeah. Go check out investinyourleaders.com. that's where all those skills are. It's only 350 bucks a person. I was telling a CEO one day, he said, well, if I invest in my people and they quit. Yeah.
- [107:22]
B
What happens if they stay?
- [107:23]
A
What happens if you don't invest in them and they stay? Right. There's a cost of that. Go to cameronherrold.com It's H E R O L D. It's got links for more. My course, my books, my speaking podcast. It's all there. Cool.
- [107:34]
B
Finally. Just close out whatever's on your mind that we didn't talk about.
- [107:37]
A
It's that none of this shit matters. Death rate's 100%. Let's enjoy the journey.
- [107:40]
B
Enjoy it. That's exactly what the happiness guy said. He said, just enjoy. You got to enjoy it. Everyone thinks, man, if I got this, if I get this many followers, if I get this, then I'll be happy.
- [107:51]
A
I think, as well, let's make sure that we help our people enjoy it too. Like that dream manager, because their lives are tough, too. And if we care about them more than we care about our business goals, they'll go through brick walls to build the company.
- [108:05]
B
Very powerful. I appreciate you being in here.
- [108:07]
A
Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Great seeing you.
- [108:09]
B
Thank. You.