Cameron Herold, known as the CEO whisperer, built two $100M+ businesses by age 35. He later went on to take $1,800 junk from $2,000,000 in revenue to $106,000,000 in revenue, 14 employees to over 3,100 employees. If you are in a leadership position, buckle up, get your notebook. Cameron Herold reveals: Proven strategies for scaling businesses in any economy. Insights into building operational efficiency and strong leadership. How to navigate the challenges of stagflation. Here's why you need to listen: Companies with effective scaling strategies see a 30% revenue increase. Strong leadership boosts employee engagement by 48%. Financial literacy reduces business risks by 25%. Interested in mastering sales? Check out Ryan's new sales course, "Master of the Close" at https://www.masteroftheclose.com Takeaways: Say no to unnecessary expenses. Focus on strategy and efficiency. Use AI and global hiring for an edge. Sound Bites: • A leader has to say no more often than they say yes • Businesses have to recognize tough times and operate accordingly • None of this shit matters...We're just meat on a stick 🔗 Connect and Discover Cameron Herold: Website: www.cameronherold.com Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction 03:15 - Cutting Waste: A Business and Political Necessity 08:48 - Budgeting Lessons from Business Leaders 10:00 - Reassessing Growth and Resource Management 15:01 - Employee Happiness Drives Business Success 18:07 - Parenting and Leadership Analogies 21:47 - Startup Burnout: Personal Experience 22:39 - Entrepreneurs Need Balance, Not Overwork 25:40 - Work Smarter, Not Harder 28:51 - Overworked Insurance Agency Leaders' Dilemma 35:20 - Automation Disrupts Jobs and Economy 36:01 - Global Tariffs and Economic Challenges 39:25 - "Embrace AI for Business Growth" 44:43 - "Prioritize Local Economic Investment" 46:21 - Eliminate Waste Before Tax Hikes 50:14 - Debt Management and Economic Strategy 52:02 - Investing in Stable Companies 📌 𝗙𝗢𝗟𝗟𝗢𝗪 𝗠𝗘 𝗢𝗡: Website: https://go.ryanhanley.com/ Course Page: https://masteroftheclose.com/ Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ryan-hanley-show/id1480262657 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5AZFuTiQsgS9hMQDDdtlOr?si=98432b7806534486 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley
Chapter 1: What is the secret to building a $100M business?
Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Cameron Herald. Cameron built two $100 million plus businesses by age 35 and later went on to drive 1,800 junk from 2 million in revenue to over 106 million in revenue. He now is known as the CEO Whisperer and runs the COO Alliance, helping some of the biggest names
in tech and in business, create massive growth, create cultures that are self-fulfilling. You are going to absolutely love this conversation, I promise. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today, we are joined by Cameron Harreld. Cameron, by the age of 35, had already built two $100-plus million businesses. He later went on to take 1-800-JUNK.com
From $2 million in revenue to $106 million in revenue, 14 employees to over 3,100 employees, he is known as the CEO whisperer. If you are in a leadership position, if you're an entrepreneur, a founder, if you love business, buckle up, get your notebook. You are going to absolutely love this episode. Let's get on to Cameron Herald.
Chapter 2: How can businesses cut waste effectively?
in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.
Cameron, dude, appreciate you taking the time, man. I'm glad we finally got a chance to hook up. I'm so excited to have this conversation.
Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. Looking forward to it.
Yeah. So dude, as it would happen, like two hours before we recorded, you put this video out on Instagram and it's where I want to start, right? Like breakdown, breakdown Doge and, and what is happening and, and kind of just let's, let's start to go there.
I want to start with Doge because I'm so intrigued by this, but there are, if you're a, if you're just a business guy or gal and you're trying to run your business and you occasionally pop your head up into the conversation and there is almost no way to dissect what's really happening, what's truth, what's not. So let's start there and help people.
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Chapter 3: What budgeting lessons can entrepreneurs learn?
Okay, so there's a couple of interesting points here. One is, you know, I've been following Trump since probably 1989 as a business person and a negotiator and, you know, the way he operates and works with the press. I think I first read The Art of the Deal back in 1988 or 89. And then secondly is Elon. I've known Elon since 1995. Elon Musk's younger brother worked for me in 1993.
I was a reference for Elon and Kimball in their first round of funding for Zip2 in January of 95. So I've known him as a business person before, you know, most people on the planet knew that he existed. And it's just because his brother worked for me at College Pro Painters and his cousin, Peter Rife, who built SolarCity.
So I'm particularly interested in what Trump is doing right now on the business side of politics. And look, I'm not necessarily a fan of him as a person. I'm Canadian. I'm a little less glossy. I'm a little more augie shucks. I'm You know, Canadians, we apologize before we can even hit on a girl. Like, sorry, I think you're beautiful. So I don't like the ego behind a lot of Trump. I never did.
I don't like the gold faucets. I don't like the fancy ostentatious. Put all that stuff aside. He's doing something that absolutely needs to be done in politics and it needs to be done in every business. And there's a lot of waste. And I think a lot of business people miss how much waste there is inside of our company.
So when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I was the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, took them from 14 people to 3,100 employees in six years. We had at the leadership team a financial review meeting every three months, and the leadership team reviewed the general ledger, which is every expense
on the P and L. So we looked at every expense in entertainment, every expense in travel, every, we looked at all the credit card bills. And as a team, we discussed stuff that kind of jumped out at us. We looked at software licenses 24 years ago.
So there's so much waste that they're cutting right now that I think both the left and the right have to look at that and go, yeah, it's pretty hard to argue. 95% of that waste is really waste. You know, we don't need a new embassy in South Sudan. And I think there's a good lesson in there for entrepreneurs is to be very ruthless and to inspect what you expect.
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Chapter 4: How does employee happiness drive business success?
And I think it's very hard for an entrepreneur to go out to their company and keep saying, oh, we need to get more revenue. The only reason you need to get more revenue is to pay for all the stupid expenses that you don't really need in your company. And in government to say we need more taxes. No, we don't need any more taxes. In fact, if we operated properly.
If we operated efficiently, we could probably reduce the taxes. So one of the big reasons why I exited Canada 10 years ago and then left the U.S. four years ago, I'm now a resident of Dubai. My company is based in Dubai. It's because the royal family that owns the country doesn't allow for any waste, right? They don't allow for the frivolous spending.
And I think there's something that's really good that's happening there. A rambling answer.
Chapter 5: What can parenting teach us about leadership?
No, I know it's a perfect answer. I, and I, where I get frustrated is that's why I live in New York state born and raised here. You know, my early years could be 44 in a couple of days. As I said, early days were George Pataki. It was very much the empire state still at that time. Right. It was.
you come to this state regardless of where you are, and everyone discounts upstate, which is where I live, but the entire state had this mentality of regardless of where you sit, whether it's New York City, Buffalo, Albany, this is a place where people work and grow and things happen, and it has been kind of cannibalized by, I'm not going to say Democrats, there's plenty of Democrats that I like, I'm going to say more of a leftist mentality that
that I think has become pervasive. And our current governor, Hochul, said something about Doge that I found very intriguing, which was, I'm going to paraphrase because I don't have the exact words, but the essence of her argument was, You are going to pay for these things either way, which was these programs like you're paying them through taxes or getting the money from you a different way.
Chapter 6: How can entrepreneurs avoid burnout?
You're still paying. Right. So, like, these cuts are meaningless because we're still we still have to have the programs. And I think where people get misunderstand is that. You don't need the programs, right? Like it's this constant idea that we need to spend more and have our fingers in more things.
And I'm interested from a business perspective, how do we marry if we're in a state like New York, right? So if you're in Texas or you're in South Carolina, different setup.
But let me, yeah, let me speak to that. So I, and, and I have a lot of ties to New York state. My grandmother was from peak skill. I used to go down to Cornell at Ithaca all the time. My school that I was at was in Ottawa, you know, lived across the border from Buffalo. So a lot of ties into New York state.
Again, I'm going to go back to college pro painters, which was the first business that I helped build and scale. It's where I hired Kimball and, and his Peter or cousin, Peter, the founder of college pro painters said a leader has to say no. more often than they say yes. And it's very difficult to say no.
It's very difficult when we're trying to be inclusive, we're trying to let people's ideas matter, but I think good companies have learned the skill of being able to say no because we can't afford it, no because it's not attached to our strategy, no because it's not aligned with our core values, no because it's not aligned with our current cash flow, and we're good at handling conflict.
government has said yes to everything. They've said yes because it's easier to say yes, they don't piss anyone off. It's easier to say yes because they don't have to pay the bills. It's easier to say yes because somebody else is constantly giving them more money. It's easier to say yes because they buy themselves votes.
It's easier to say yes, and the top 2% are only making $300,000 a year or more, which means 98% of the people basically are kind of middle class or lower class. So it's easy for 98% of people to say tax the rich. There's not more money to get. In a business, you can't say, well, just go get more revenue. It's really hard to get revenue.
So business people and homeowners, if you're a normal homeowner, you can't say, well, let's just go borrow more money. The bank won't loan to you, right? So you have to live within your means. So I've taught my kids to save 50% of all the money they ever make when they're living at home has to get invested. When they move out, 20% of all the money they have to make has to get invested.
I'm teaching them that mentality. Teaching them as a business, right? Take a portion of your money, invest in growth. Take a portion of your money, invest in savings. Take a portion of your money and decide where to spend it. Use zero-based budgeting. So if a business operated the way government does, we'd be bankrupt every single year.
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Chapter 7: What is the role of automation in the economy?
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.
Chapter 8: How can we embrace AI for business growth?
Yeah. I've seen, it feels to me like many business owners have allowed their feelings on a topic to drive decisions versus the facts. And this is a term that's been popularized. You bring the receipts, right? And I look at the philosophies of certain individuals. This comes a lot out of the political class, but it is very much, I think, kind of soaked into the business class as well, is
we start managing on our feelings of, I don't wanna be seen as this, or I don't wanna hurt these people's feelings, or God forbid you let someone go, and we've lost this end game of, at the end of the day, we have to make a profit. No one has a job if we're not making a profit you know, at some point here.
So how do you, if you say you're a leader and, you know, you've maybe fallen prey to some of the influence of the last 10 years of say the, the more emotion driven decision-making or, or kind of woke philosophy, how do we turn that course? If you find yourself in that place and you want to get back, how do you make that transition?
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
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