Living The Red Life - Mastering Team Growth with Guest: Cameron Herald

Starting point is 00:00:00 The first big one is if you don't have an assistant, you are one. Yeah. For anyone out there in that 1 to 10 to 20 employee zone, if you don't have an executive assistant, you're working on all these minimum wage jobs that drive you crazy and you suck at. Like if I owned your company and found out I was paying you 100 grand or 200 grand a year as a five person company, and you're doing $ an hour tasks i'd lose my my name's rudy moore host of living the red life podcast and i'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week if you're ready to start living the red life ditch the blue pill

Starting point is 00:00:36 take the red pill join me in wonderland and change your life guys welcome back another episode of living the red life with one of my close friends, someone I've known for a very long time, someone that supported me through all my growth, Cameron. Welcome to the show. And everybody says good friends, but you stayed in my home with your girlfriend. I don't know, you guys still together? Now wife. Yeah, now wife. Yeah, there you go. So yeah, you guys, you guys stayed in my home, gosh, five years ago, probably. So yeah. Yeah, it's not not not just an internet person I'm Facebook friends with. Yes, exactly.

Starting point is 00:01:09 And I mean, we were just discussing offline. You've known me kind of through my growth trajectory. And I've, you know, always looked up to you and someone that kind of helps me. And I always go to and listen to whenever it comes to the operations, the team side, all of those things. So it's a pleasure to have you on here today and helping all of my audience and viewers and listeners on how to grow amazing teams, people, and why that's really one of the big secrets to growing a business. So it would be good maybe just for those who don't know you to get a bit of your background for two minutes. Sure. Yeah, I was groomed as an entrepreneur.

Starting point is 00:01:46 I grew up in an entrepreneurial family where my dad ran his own company, as did both sets of grandparents. My brother and sister and I have all run our own companies for about the last 15 to 25 years. And then I also got involved with three companies as the second in command and helped grow those to very large businesses. One went on to become the largest house painting company in the world. It was called College Pro Painters. Another went on to become the largest collision

Starting point is 00:02:09 repair chain in the world called Gerber Auto Collision in the US and Boyd Auto Body in Canada. And then the third was called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And I got involved with them as the 14th employee as their chief operating officer. And I grew them to 3,100 employees, went from 2 million to 106 million in revenue in six years. And then I left that to 3,100 employees, went from 2 million to 106 million in revenue in six years. And then I left that company 17 years ago now, which feels like only recently, but it was forever ago. And I started working with companies all over the world. I've coached companies in 28 countries. I've been paid to speak on every continent, including Antarctica, and I've written six books. And then a couple of years, I guess,

Starting point is 00:02:45 six years ago now, I launched an organization called the COO Alliance, and then recently launched one called the Opspot, which is an online mastermind community for people in operations roles. Yeah, and I mean, it's kind of cool, because you, you know, are in this internet marketing, social media kind of mastermind world, but no one really talks about the people side so much, right? We're all here at these events talking about marketing, sales, marketing, promo, social, and then, and that's, you know, and that's great, right? To like 20, 30, 40 staff. And then as we were saying offline, now, you know, we float around that hundred staff mark. And for me, I spend more time on the people because I can't get the initiatives across the

Starting point is 00:03:26 line efficiently, right? The marketing is easy compared to the people to carry it through. So talk about that for a minute. Why is it so important? But so most people in our space, they just don't understand it. It's not even just in your space, Rudy. It's in every company. I was sitting, this was eight years ago, I was sitting at the CEO of Sprint's office. I was coaching Marcelo Claret, who was the CEO of Sprint. And I was sitting in his office, just he and I, and he turned to me and he goes, when are people no longer going to be a problem? I'm like, you're the 80th largest company in the United States. People will always be the problem. So what's hard is that companies have to evolve as they scale, very similar to us as humans. So as an example, how old are you?

Starting point is 00:04:09 32 now. Okay. So when you were two years old, you were Rudy. When you were 12, you were Rudy. When you were 22, you were Rudy. And when you're 32, you're Rudy. But you're a very different version of the same human. You couldn't have run your company as a two-year-old.

Starting point is 00:04:23 You would have been horrible running it as a 12-year-old. And you probably would have screwed it your company as a two-year-old. You would have been horrible running it as a 12-year-old and you probably would have screwed it all up as a 22-year-old. So you've had to evolve and iterate as a person. Well, the companies change and I see them changing at every one and every three. So when you have one employee, when it's just you and you get three employees, you now got a couple of people you can divide and conquer. When you get to 10 people, you usually have someone managing some people for you. you get to 30 people you probably have four or five people managing everyone and you're managing four or five people when you go from 30 people to 100 people you now have your first leadership team at 30 you've got a management team but they're all

Starting point is 00:05:00 rookies they've really never done it before they're trying their best they're working their hardest often you've promoted them to their level of incompetency or their ceiling of complexity. When you get to 100, you're now bringing people in from the outside and then the politics start to come in and it gets a little tougher and then you go from the 100 to 300. So there's some iteration points that happen in a company. And just listening to all that because it's kind of of you don't know, you know, we haven't connected as much in the last year or two because you've been busy traveling the world and stuff and living the life.

Starting point is 00:05:31 But that's basically our story, right? And it's, you know, one of the things I say to my C-suite, we reflected a lot this last year. One of our biggest mistakes is that we, you know, recruit people from we try and promote from within and then it backfires because then they're not good enough. Then you can't demote them. Right. And then it ruins the relationship. So that was one of the biggest lessons probably in the last two, three years I've noticed just because they're, you know, a great supervisor and designer doesn't mean they can handle the politics of a team of 10 and hiring and firing and discipline and the ops within that department. Yeah. So the only way that a company can actually promote from within is if they are ahead of the curve on growing the skill sets of

Starting point is 00:06:17 the people. So what tends to happen, let's say that you have a manager of, well, in your case, it would be a marketing manager, but that would be a bad example. Let's say you've got an operations manager or a customer service manager or a sales manager. If they're managing the business and you're a $3 million company, they can probably still do it when you're a $6 million. They can probably do it as a $12 million, but it's almost impossible that they can still do their role as a $24 million company because after three doubles,'s almost eight nine times bigger it's just really really different so what tends to happen is you have to start growing the skill set around areas like situational leadership

Starting point is 00:06:56 coaching delegation running meetings hiring onboarding and training of people um handling conflict messaging all of the kind of soft, we call them the soft skills of leadership that you bring someone in from the outside, they're really good at all that, but they don't know the company. So then you have a cultural shift. So ideally, what you want to do is grow the people before you need them to be competent in those roles, which means identifying emerging leaders early, and usually starting a year to 18 months before you need them to have the skills and start growing their skill sets and capacity so that when they get there, they're good at it. Almost like as a kid,

Starting point is 00:07:36 you know, when we're being groomed by our mom and dad to kick us out of the house when we're in our 20s, they teach us how to do laundry when we're 12. They teach us how to clean the house. They teach us how to do yard work and how to shop for groceries and make eggs. So when we move out of the house, we're competent as a young adult. That's kind of what we need to do with our emerging leaders. But what tends to happen is we go,

Starting point is 00:07:58 let's promote Sally. She's been really good. And then, oh, Sally's struggling. Well, of course she's struggling because it's all completely new. Yeah, yeah. And I think the Sally's struggling. Well, of course, she's struggling because it's all completely new. Yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing that is interesting to me is you talk about the entrepreneur growing, right? And how they're constantly changing. I found to that, like me, and

Starting point is 00:08:17 maybe my C suite that are more experienced, we grow, we've grown a lot faster and matured a lot faster than maybe some of the staff. So I kind of noticed, you know, that famous saying, he who gets you there, you know, he who got you here won't get you there kind of thing. And it's not all the staff. It's kind of like you kind of see it, right? It's like starts to have spotlights on people.

Starting point is 00:08:41 They were great when we were at 2 million, but now we're going to be at, you know, we're at 20 million. They're not so great, right, as a department head or a head of tech or whatever, whatever it is. So that's been fascinating, too. We identified a number that a mid-level manager can only take a company through two doubles in revenue. And Ben Horowitz, who wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things, said you can only take them through one triple. So there's a kind of defined phase that you really have to be very cognizant of as a company. Yeah. And when, you know, generally we almost double every year so that it becomes like every two or three years, right? It becomes this pattern. And what, so what would you say, you know,

Starting point is 00:09:17 for entrepreneurs listening, they're trying to build their first team of 10, right? They're going to a million, a couple of couple of million you know a lot of the people i work with it's them trying to do a bit of everything they bring in a couple of vas a couple of people on upwork how do they do it the right way with all of your years of experience the first thing is that in the early stage in the first 10 people you need to hire a bunch of people that are really good at doing lots of things but don't have deep domain expertise at one thing don't try to hire an expert because they probably don't have enough to do yet but you need people that can manage others can manage freelancers can manage projects can deliver

Starting point is 00:09:54 they're really comfortable with bobbing and weaving and kind of changing directions because as entrepreneurs we tend to change directions very quickly in the early days they have to be good at managing ambiguity they have to be good at managing ambiguity. They have to be good at managing kind of short timelines. And then you also have to teach the leadership team, your first couple of managers, to be very good at delegation. What tends to happen is that Parkinson's loss is that work expands to fill the space that we give it. So when we delegate projects to people, if we don't give them a small amount of time and a small amount of money, they're going to end up spending longer and spend more money than we anticipated they would. So there's a real kind of an art to it. It's actually one of the 12 modules in my Invest in Your Leaders course is delegations because nobody ever really learns it. Yeah, we

Starting point is 00:10:39 had to train our team leaders on that note to assign you know rough timelines per project and then actually build a system weekly where they're auditing the productivity of their team because we you know I told you offline we went to like 110 120 people but then the product we weren't because we were growing fast and we needed people working but then we just weren't getting any more done because we didn't have the team leaders manage you know in the right c-suite at the time or department heads at least at the time uh managing those people so then now we've kind of gone okay we got to redo this we went back a little thinned out and we still get as much done now with like 30 less staff so you can do the maths on that. Most of these were us w two in

Starting point is 00:11:25 office people. And now we're rebuilding the department heads and C suite. So we can kind of hopefully go to that next phase. Well, there's two, there's two big lessons in there. One is that every early stage managers solution to every problem tends to be hire more people. And it's almost never the solution to the problem but they're they're really not good at saying no yet they're not good at trying to get more done with less people faster they're usually not good at automation or optimization of processes yet so they tend to throw bodies and that only works if you're in india right where you can hire 40 people for the cost of one person in florida so and i'm not making light of it i actually have clients that

Starting point is 00:12:04 were in india and we just solve the problems differently over there, we literally throw bodies at problems. So the second part of that is that we need to teach people how to delegate with a smaller timeline. And instead of telling an employee, I think it will only take you an hour, what we need to say is I only want you to spend an hour. Very different, right? If someone was coming here to clean my home and I said it'll only take you an hour to clean it, they'd be like, oh no, it's going to take all day. But if I said I have friends coming in an hour, clean it in an hour, they'd be done and it would be pretty damn good in an hour, right? But it's just a subtle difference in the wording and we need to teach our management team how to do that better.

Starting point is 00:12:45 The same with spending money, right? You could order a, if I said, hey, Rudy and I are getting together for dinner, can you organize dinner for us? My assistant might organize the best steak dinner with amazing wines and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, wait, I don't drink anymore. Rudy's going to the gym right afterwards. We just wanted some healthy bowl that we could sit and kind of eat in my living room and then get going. But I didn't delegate it properly, right. So the onus is on the receiver. If you're delegating to people, it's your responsibility to learn how to delegate.

Starting point is 00:13:13 So you get back what you're expecting. Yeah. And we've practiced a lot of that more recently where we I've come in and been a little more structured. And we kind of have this motto now where it's like a figure it out. Because when you first start doing this, they look at you white faced like a ghost, like, how's that possible to, you know, do the mastermind dinner for 100 people at this price? Or, you know, because the first restaurant they ring says it's not possible, right? And then normal people go, oh, really, it's not possible. I'm like, ring 20 more and then tell me if it's still not possible. So it's interesting, because as entrepreneurs, I think we are so innovative and we make things happen and we figure it out. And we assume wrongly that sometimes other people that we delegate to do that.

Starting point is 00:13:56 So I think for the beginner entrepreneur, it's building those parameters of those systems. Right. That when that as they're building the team, it doesn't get too messy, like we kind of experienced. So we're kind of, like I said, going backwards and building those parameters now. So what about, we talked about the one to 10, what about, you know, a lot of my clients and fans and members are a million going to 5 million, and then maybe going to that 20, 30 staff level. What would you say for those people? It's all about communication. It's about collaboration. It's about alignment. It's about making sure that people are working on the right projects and that they're communicating well so that everyone knows what they're working on. Give you a really interesting example. This is years ago, we had our operations department working on a very key project for our franchisees

Starting point is 00:14:44 and they almost got it to completion and they needed finance to integrate some of the projects so that the swipe card technology could work. And finance came back and said, we can't even look at it for the next four months. And they weren't exaggerating. They were integrating a brand new CRM, a brand new accounting system. There was no way they could touch this project because it was about 50 hours of work or 100 hours of work for them, which would have ballooned. But because operations never told finance it was coming, it wasn't finance's fault. They didn't have the communication

Starting point is 00:15:14 for everybody to know what everybody was working on. And that's something you really need when you're in that 30 plus employee zone is the skills to be able to communicate and collaborate and get alignment so that everybody knows the projects that everyone's working on and what business areas might need a little bit of your time yeah and then i also think that finance and marketing sorry it and marketing should only ever schedule 60 of their work week to allow for the rest of the company to screw things up and keep saying to marketing hey can you just make this prettier? Hey, can you just tie this in? Like, we end up needing an IT of the same way, we end up needing more of their time. So if they're fully scheduled, they're not, they're not going to be able to

Starting point is 00:15:53 handle any of that additional work. Yeah, I love that. It's funny, we're actually thinking now this year, we might build two teams for marketing tech, right? Because we've seen this where, especially because we have all these, we do a lot of celebrity partnerships now my own brands you know doing a million a month or so probably go to two million a month soon this year so it's like I kind of want like the team that work on the pre-built projects and the maintenance and then you have this like more quick moving team that can be hey this celebrity one is going to speak at a blah, blah, blah event and we want to opt in funnel for tomorrow, right? Because we're constantly

Starting point is 00:16:29 battling this zigzag. So it's just, yeah, it's interesting you say that because I really do see that true, especially it depends how bad you are as an entrepreneur, right? I think that dictates it because we're usually, at least me'm pretty innovative and creative and you know it's not even necessarily bad it can also be how fast your growth is there's something called fast growth and then you're experiencing what's more hyper growth fast growth tends to be 25 to 50 a year hyper growth tends to be 100 more we did six consecutive years of 100 growth so you can't even blame the company when the company is changing that quickly. It's just hard to actually be able to plan or be that strategic. So what happens in product development and in software, there's a group that builds the current version. So let's say they're building version 14 of the iPhone or version 15, whatever we're on, there's another

Starting point is 00:17:20 team that's working on version 16. And when version 15 launches, most of those people go to start working on version 17. Some of the people stay and work on the bugs on version 15, while the version 16 team does the rollout. So they leapfrog over each other, and they kind of leave a few behind to work on their work. And I think we need to bring some of that into the rest of the business areas in hyper growth. Yeah, I think it's I'm going to probably test it this year. So I'll see how it goes and maybe hit you up for some feedback. But what about I would love to know now, we talked about earlier, most entrepreneurs, they're so focused on socials and marketing, not the people team part. So I would love just, you know, we've talked

Starting point is 00:18:05 about people a lot, but also ops and systems, right? Like what are some of the biggest just general tips to as we come towards the end of today, that if you're a young on like you could have taught me 10 years ago, the first big one is if you don't have an assistant, you are one. Yeah. For anyone out there in that one to 10 to 20 employee zone, if you don't have an executive assistant, you're working on all these minimum wage jobs that drive you crazy and you suck at. Like if I owned your company and found out I was paying you a hundred grand or 200 grand a year as a five person company, and you're doing $20 an hour tasks, I'd lose my shit. So you really have to get a lot of the admin and that frees you up to be strategic, to work on your team, to work on alignment, to grow people

Starting point is 00:18:51 and to work on parts of the business that really fuel you and you're really good at. So that would be a key starting point. The second would probably be to really focus on growing the skill sets of people because as your company scales, the skills of your people have to scale. It's why I called my course, Invest in Your Leaders. You have to find your emerging leaders and invest in their skill sets so that as the company continues to grow, they can continue to actually give great results.

Starting point is 00:19:18 Because if the company is two times bigger, their skills have to be two times better. Yeah, I love that. What about for a lot of the beginners, and systems most of them don't know what that is don't know how to do it and then they don't hire a COO or a head of arts or whatever right for a long time so how does an entrepreneur and you know people join my mastermind for marketing but half what we talk about is hiring off systems you know,

Starting point is 00:19:45 HR, legal, all these random things. How do they start to learn and figure that stuff out? Start in the earliest stages of hiring people who are really good at managing projects, really good at time management, and really good at integrations with automation like Zapier, right? Or that they're really good at actually leveraging the tech stack to be able to automate processes. You need to find people that are kind of the jack of all trades, master of none, but they're good at getting shit done. That's early stage operations.

Starting point is 00:20:16 That's what will really help your company scale. Great. And then last question. Well, second but last question. We've talked a lot about teams, operations, systems, but you've, you know, you've had an amazing career, amazing journey. You now have an amazing life as a nomad as well. What are some life lessons for people that are trying to, you know, balance this entrepreneurial thing, business thing and money thing? And also, you know, looking at your life how you've built that that freedom as well i think the big one is none of this shit actually matters sure okay this is just what we do to make

Starting point is 00:20:51 money and if we don't have fun along the way at the end of the day we do die yes you know and so that's the first one is that and i was very unlucky i didn't experience death until i was 35 so i was three years older than you when my mom died and she was the first person I ever knew who passed away. And I wish that I'd been much younger to have appreciated how fragile life is to realize that it isn't just about work. That's number one. The second is to remember that every single person that works for us or with us as a supplier, an employee, a full-time contractor, whatever, they're all struggling with something today. Every single one of them with a personal issue, a health issue, a medical issue, a money issue,

Starting point is 00:21:36 a family issue, everybody is struggling with this human condition. And if we can show up as a leader really giving a shit about our people, as much as we care about our business and our brand and revenue and our goals and our metrics, if we actually care about them more than anybody else cares about as much of a system, not to systematize it, but time to reflect and support on that. Because I think we get so caught up in the work, work, go, go, go. Right. So we do as much as we can to dive into the individual. Like when we do our quarterly retreats, we don't just do goal setting for the company and all the revenues and stuff and ideas. We actually have a section on their life. What's their goal? What's their, you know, it's the little things like that.

Starting point is 00:22:29 And I work well when I have structure. Like if I just say I'm gonna do it, I get lost in the day to day. So we have weekly and biweekly structure for building those things out in the company because yeah, it's easy to get caught up and forget about that, right? Especially because as an entrepreneur,

Starting point is 00:22:45 I mean, you just like get on with it, but then you realize not everyone can do that. Well, let me, and I'll give you the last one. Your wife's name is Amanda, right? Yeah. How often do you tell Amanda that you love her? Once a quarter, once every couple of weeks? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:00 I mean, less, more than once a quarter. Yeah, probably. It's probably multiple times a day, right? Yeah, maybe mean, more than once a quarter. Yeah, probably. It's probably multiple times a day, right? Yeah, maybe once a day because I'm out all day, but at night, yeah. Over text messages, over email, at night. We tell our spouse we love them so frequently. As entrepreneurs, most entrepreneurs suck at showing that level of appreciation for our employees and what happens is we keep showing our employees another goal another project more growth where we're screwing

Starting point is 00:23:30 up fix this fix that move faster grow this and we think oh they know i love them but if we ever said oh amanda knows i love her i'll tell her next quarter that i appreciate her dude she'd be gone at that first argument that we have. It's because we keep putting all those deposits and love bombing our spouse that we can work through the hard times. As entrepreneurs, we need to love bomb our employees with gratitude, with praise, with thanks,

Starting point is 00:23:57 with celebrating the core values, with truly appreciating everything so that we can load them up with more and more and more of the growth. And one of the best examples I ever saw, and I'll leave with this, is one of the CEOs of Starbucks. His name was Howard Behar. Howard would spend two hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes to stores

Starting point is 00:24:19 and employees every Friday. That was 5% of his normal work week. And this is the CEO of one of the biggest companies. But I was being mentored as by the COO at Starbucks for a year and a half. And I got to meet Howard and watch the system. And I recognized how powerful it is when they just actually give a shit and say, thank you. Yeah, I read that. I think that was in one of the books, right? And I actually started that myself I my old assistant in Tampa is there now so I got out of it but every Friday I would write it not to all

Starting point is 00:24:49 the shops or anything like that but to just a few of the rock stars for that week and tell them why they were rock star and what they'd done and so I love little things like that because for me I have to systematize it like that or I get too lost in the day-to-day so yeah that's awesome so so last question then I think like I said at the start what's fascinating to me is no one really teaches this there's a million Facebook ad experts social media gurus webinars blah blah blah but you're the really only person I know in this industry that has the programs the support the team

Starting point is 00:25:23 the whole mastermind so can you just for a minute before we wrap up, where do people find you and what are you doing there for people listening that are getting into those bigger team numbers and need this help? Yeah, a couple of places. So I launched a course called Invest in Your Leaders, and they should all definitely check that out. It's all the 12 core leadership skills that any manager, director, anybody emerging to manage people should be going through. And it's really priced effectively. The second is I started a mastermind community called The Ops Spot. And it's an online mastermind community for anybody that works in operations roles. And then third is the COO Alliance. And that's an exclusive community for second in commands. You need to do at least 5 million

Starting point is 00:26:03 or greater in revenue just to qualify. So that's a great community. They can find everything at CameronHerald.com. Yeah, the first one, I actually, I think it was a year or two ago, I messaged you about it, but I had my, two of my heads of ops go through it. And I think I actually need to send some new people back for it. Super beneficial. And it's, you know, anyone listening is like my marketing course or it's like a curriculum University style and you know

Starting point is 00:26:29 better than an MBA I think this will be better than anything you could take on the systems are people side so love that and it's an easy way that people can start kind of diving in and learning a lot so Cameron super appreciate you being on and appreciate your kind of mentorship guidance and experience that you're sharing here. It's super powerful. And as everyone listening, as you grow and get into more and more of these problems, you'll realize how powerful it is. Just hopefully you'll apply it ahead of time instead of like most of the stupid entrepreneurs that make all the mistakes and then go, oh, damn it, we should have listened the first time.

Starting point is 00:27:03 I'm very guilty of that. So guys you cameron thank you awesome to see you again keep living the red life everyone i'll see you soon take care you

Living The Red Life - Mastering Team Growth with Guest: Cameron Herald

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