Cameron Herold
speaker
284 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Cameron Herold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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We can't keep printing money. It's no different than a business can't go out and say, well, I'll just raise another million dollars in revenue. It's hard to get that revenue. You can't just go out and borrow money from the bank because you got to pay that money back. So I think we're going to go through a period of tough times.
And I think businesses have to recognize that and have to operate that way. One of the things business people have to do is teach their management team how to say no. And most early stage managers, first time, second time managers, their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people. That's really never the solution to the problem. It's being able to look at the budget and saying,
wait, what does this idea do? Does it make our employees happier? Does it make our customers happier? Does it drive more gross margin? Does it drive more revenue? Is it making our vivid vision come true? If it's not, why are we doing it, right? Or why are we doing it now? And I think that's where government has gotten so lazy is they just say yes to everything.
They're spending all this money that isn't even theirs. And then they're printing more money to pay it all back. And most humans don't even understand the difference between a debt and a deficit, right? The interest right now on our debt takes up about 40% of the revenue. If you were a homeowner, that means let's say you're paid $100,000 a year.
$40,000 a year is just to pay your interest on your credit cards. And then you got to live on this, you'd all be bankrupt. So we need to recognize that these costs that they're cutting in government are very good. And I think we need to go look at our businesses in a very similar way, right? What are the critical few expenses we need? What are the critical few employees that we need?
Most of our companies can produce 50% of the output with the square root of our number of employees. If you're running with 100 employees, it's really 10 people are producing 50% of your output. Or even the Pareto principle of 20% of your people, so let's say 20 employees out of 100 are producing 80% of your output. You can look at that other 80% and go, Why are we even doing it?
Do we need to do this work? Are we just busy being busy? Are we, are we busy doing work that isn't producing any gross margin? Right. And I think that's the stuff that I've always been really kind of maniacal about.
There's a couple of parts to that. The first off is it doesn't even have to be the woke kind of part bringing into the business world. It can also just be a desire of an entrepreneur to build a great company, right? I want to build a nice place. I want my employees to be happy. I want to live our core values. I want to do good in the environment. That's not woke.
That's just being a good human being running a good business. So let's say like we built the number two company in all of Canada to work for. 1-800-GOT-JUNK ranked as number two in the entire country. Out of 1.4 million companies, we ranked number two. So we were just, it wasn't woke. It was just, we were a really good place to work. Now in doing that,
It's hard to say no to employees because you don't want to hurt their feelings. You don't want to be an autocratic dictatorial leader. So the lessons that I learned was to be able to say no because of these things. I can say to my child who's like when my kids were seven and five, no, you can't have cookies right now because we're eating dinner in 20 minutes.
After we eat dinner, you can have one cookie, right? No, you can't have seven cookies because you'll end up fat and obese, and then you'll end up with diabetes, and you're like, because we're going to be a healthy family. So when you attach a no to core values or no to a core purpose or no to your vivid vision or no to your strategy or no to your budget, people understand.
But if you haven't grown the skills of your employees, right? One of the core skills in my Invest in Your Leaders online training program is managing conflict. If you haven't trained your managers in saying no, they end up saying yes because they feel like they have to be nice to people.
Being firm but fair is better than being nice and having to fire people two years later because you've built a company with a lot of waste. That's number one. Number two, you talked about the facts and feelings. I love Google's mentality here and
You know, in the last 25 years, I guess 30, because they started around 1997, one of the top companies ever built, Google, has a very famous mantra inside of their meetings. And it says, I don't care what you think, or I don't care what you feel, show me what the data says. And I think that's really interesting is people that come in with, oh, I think we should do this. Cool.
But show me what the data says. Why do you think? What's the ROI going to be of that decision? So I always go back to everything that we want to do as a company. Will it make our employees happier? Will it make our customers happier? Will it increase gross margin? Will it drive revenue? Will it make our vivid vision come true?
In that order, by the way, I always build everything with, will it make my employees happier? More than profit, more than revenue, everything else.
If I have really happy employees, because they don't have to work with the jerks, they don't have to deal with waste, they get to work on important shit, they get to work with people that are producing results, they get to work with people that are living core values. If I get to work with those critical few people, they're going to take care of my customers.
And if my customers are being taken care of by really happy people, my customers will pay more. So what I ended up doing is by obsessing about my employee net promoter score, it drives my customer net promoter score, which allows me to charge more and everybody makes more.
Totally. So I've always said that I want to flip the org chart upside down, right? Turn it upside down. So the CEOs at the bottom supporting the VPs who are supporting the managers, who are supporting the frontline staff, who are supporting the customers, like an inverted pyramid. Everyone can see the vivid vision of where we're going.
The customers, suppliers, partners, employees can all see where we're going. And then you build your company inside your core values and your core purpose, right? Then it's very easy to be in service because my job as a leader, I was asked by Fortune Magazine in 2003 in the actual physical print magazine, how do you hold employees accountable? I said, I don't. I hire accountable people.
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