The Home Service Expert Podcast - Building A $100M Legacy In Entrepreneurship And Life

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

Cameron is a natural-born entrepreneur, with two multi-million companies under his belt at the early age of 35. His accomplishments include engineering 1-800-GOT-JUNK?’s spectacular growth from $2 Million to $106 Million in revenue and 3100 employees, all in under six years. In this episode, we talked about delegation, systems, and processes...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Well, hello there, home service experts. I have a great guest on today. His name is Cameron

Harreld. Cameron was an entrepreneur from day one. At age 21, he had 14 employees. By 35, he'd helped build his first of 200 million dollar companies. By age 42, Cameron engineered 1-800-GOT-JUNK and he had them grow from 2 million to 106 million in revenue and over 3,100 employees. And he did it in just six years. He's landed over 5,200 media placements in that six years, including coverage on Oprah. Cameron is a top rated international speaker and has spoke in 26 countries. Literally, guys, I got to tell you, this guy knows his stuff like nobody's business. You're going to want to tune into this. Me and Cameron hit it off right away. So we kind of just jumped right into this. So I hope you guys enjoy this podcast.

I write a book. I'm just thinking about each several occurrences and I'm just getting ideas every moment. Yeah. So my process in writing a book has changed over the years. The first one that I wrote, Double Double, what I did was I created a mind map and just jotted down ideas and those ideas became chapters. And I created a kind of table of contents for the book of all of the areas that I wanted to codify and show people basically how I built 1-800-GOT-JUNK, but how we built all the companies I've been building over the years, giving them effectively the cheat sheets to grow their company. So once I had the table of contents for the book, then I just kind of roughed all the points I wanted to cover in each chapter. I then walked around my house and I digitally recorded myself talking about each of the sections.

So I just talked and I had all that content recorded and then transcribed. Once it was transcribed, then I copied and pasted. So I didn't sit down and type at all. I talked at all. And by talking at all, I was able to get it out of my head much faster. Then it went't sit down and type at all. I talked at all. And by talking at all, I was able to get it out of my head much faster. Then it went through a number of rounds of editing. You know, my second book, Meeting Suck, I actually partnered with a company called Book in a Box. And I'm now an investor and an advisor to Book in a Box. And they actually record you and do

interviews with you and pull the content out of your head. So they took really the same process that I'd used seven years ago for Double Double, and they're now building an entire business to help people write their own books. And in fact, if any listener wants an introduction, if they send me an email, I can fast track them and just kind of get them a bit of a white glove service if they email me. But Book in a Box will do roughly about 12 to 16 hours of interviews with you over the phone and ask you a lot of questions and digitally record all of your answers and content. They then edit it. They pull it all together. You read it and go through each of the sections with them. They do all the design and

press and get it all sitting right up on Amazon and they deal with the pictures and everything. So that was a really amazing way to get my next books out the door. Yeah, that's a really good idea. I actually, before we got on the call, one of my guys interviewing me, that we put articles together and it's all my content. I edit it, but it makes a lot of sense because when people are asking you questions, the best content comes out. So you started off, you said you had a good upbringing. Your dad taught you all about business. I think you told me your brother and your sister both have their own business. Tell me a little bit about what that's like, because I don't think there's anything more important than family.

And I think a lot of the people here care more about family than business. Tell me a little bit about that upbringing and what really taught you that stuff. Sure. And I actually did a TED talk about it that is on the main TED.com website. And the lessons that my dad really taught us at very early ages was that basically having a job was a bad idea. You're always trading time for money and that there's no leverage. And he got us to do a lot of little business ventures and then showed us the lessons that we learned while doing that. If I was selling license plate protectors door-to-door, he talked about handling objections and negotiating price and trying to upsell them from one or two to four license plate protectors. How to keep track of where the prospects might be interested and go back and talk to them again, or how to keep track of which houses weren't answering the door so I could go back and knock on their door again.

Just basic sales is what I learned. And then he had me collecting golf balls out of the ponds of the golf course and separating them into three different price ranges. I could sell the more expensive ones for more money. I probably had 16 different little business ventures by the time I was 15 years old. And I talked about all of them in my TED Talks. And those lessons really carried on to today. And then he tried to groom us with the basic skills that you need to be entrepreneurial. I think you're either born as an entrepreneur or you're not, but you can also learn the entrepreneurial skills.

And he really worked hard at teaching us the entrepreneurial skills that we needed. Yeah. You know, I had somebody tell me the other day I was ADHD and I said, I think I have the ability to focus in and listen very intensively. But the gal that I know told me that that's not a diss. That's not something that's wrong with you. She goes, the fact that you can do 12 things and get them all accomplished makes you amazing. She's like, but if you're not interested, you're not there. She's like, your head could be in another spot. And tell me a little bit about what that means to you, because a lot of times we're diagnosed with something and it's not really a bad thing. Tell me what you think about that. No, I've talked about that publicly for about 11 years. And almost every speaking event,

I talked that bipolar disorder has been nicknamed as the CEO disease, so manic depression. Most entrepreneurs are ADD. In fact, I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder. And many entrepreneurs are on the spectrum for Tourette's, which includes thinking out loud. So according to the medical community of the school system, we're disasters. But we're not supposed to be like teachers. We're not supposed to be like doctors. And they're not supposed to be like us. So they've looked at us and said that we're different and we don't fit in and we should. The reality is we're not supposed

to fit in. We're the outliers. We're the 3% that people should be working for. They shouldn't be trying to make us like everyone else. So what they've called the disorders are actually our superpowers. The fact that I've got ADD means I can see what's happening with the market, the economy, trends. I know what's happening with my customers, my suppliers, my family. I can see what's going on around me and I don't get so bogged down in the details. And because I don't get bogged down in the details, in fact, I get bored with the details, I delegate those. And the more that I can delegate and outsource, the faster I can get stuff off my plate, which allows me to grow my company. But if you're an engineer or a doctor, you can't delegate that stuff. You need to be so hyper-focused. So we've actually been messed up in the school system by

people telling us that there's something wrong with us for so long. I just got goosebumps. That was probably the most well-said statement I've ever heard in my life. And it makes me feel good, actually, because I don't think I have anything wrong, but I definitely think I'm different. And I think that most people need to learn to embrace the things that are different about them. And one thing I want to ask you, because I've been going through this a lot myself, and I love this since we're getting deep. I find it hard to turn off a switch. And the switch is, you know, it's going on all the time in my head. I'm trying to move forward. I'm writing things down. I've got 10 journals. They're all for different companies and different

things. And I got to tell you, my relationships, sometimes I take them for granted. And sometimes I don't spend the time. like if I got to take a phone call with a few hundred employees of all the different businesses I take it and it's hard to balance there's a book I have here called off balance on purpose and I saw it's by Dan Thurman and I've actually watched him at a convention but tell me a little bit about how you maintain your relationships and what that understanding needs to look like, because that's all we have in this world, man, is the people we love. And we're not trying to hurt anybody. Tell me how you manage it all.

Well, part of it is by being aware that there's no way that we can keep perfectly in balance all of the time. And again, I talk about this in Double Double as well. But I think we have these five apps. So we have friends, family, fitness, finance, and faith. And we need to be a little bit kind of focused on maybe two of those per quarter or two of those per month and let the others slide a little bit. But you need to communicate to your other groups that you're letting it slide for a little bit. Like this quarter, I'm very focused on finance. I'm very focused on family. You know, next quarter,

I'll probably be more focused on family and fitness. And then the quarter after that, I might be more focused on finance and fitness. So the reality is if you're trying to be all things to all people, you can't. But part of it is just being open and communicating that and also being a little bit self-aware. I think the second part is that entrepreneurs

need to remember you can only sit on one toilet at a time. And if you try to sit on more than one toilet, it gets kind of messy. So when you're running multiple companies, the key is to get the teams in place to be running those for you and make sure that the teams have clear visions, clear business plans, clear roles and responsibilities, clear metrics and KPIs so that they can operate. But if you're trying to operate a lot of businesses yourself,

that's when mistakes start to happen because you just have too many things on the go at the same time. So, you know, I have a lot of businesses and I think that what you're doing is you're juggling. And until you sit down and start an organizational chart, until you define what success and failure is. Until you tell people what's black and white. What is doing a great job and how are you going to be able to communicate with me? You're going to fail. And the biggest thing missing in most workers' lives is not knowing if they're doing a good job or not.

No feedback. Tell me a little bit about, because, you know, we could talk about this till we're blue in the face, and a lot of book writers and successful people, they take it for granted that they've been able to do this because they really don't know what they're doing when they're doing it. When you start a business, tell me how to get started. Tell me how to implement it,

and tell me how to make sure it keeps happening. Well, so let's talk about the feedback part that you asked on first. So someone asked me about annual reviews. And I said, annual reviews are useless. I want you to think about your family for a second. If you have a child, so have you got kids? I don't have any kids, but I have probably 20 of them here at the office. Okay. Well, I want you to think about a family that has children. Would you do an annual review with a child? Of course not. What would you do? If a child did something wrong, would you wait till the end of the quarter to review? No, you would tell them immediately they did something wrong. You would tell them what

they needed to improve and you would show them how to work on it. And you wouldn't berate them. You wouldn't be mean to them. You would just point it out and then you would show them how to work on it. And you wouldn't berate them. You wouldn't be mean to them. You would just point it out and then you would show them how to do better. If a child did something well, you'd praise the heck out of them and you'd do it immediately. That's all you need to do with your employees. Praise them often

and show them critically what they need to work on. But remember to kind of balance it out. If you're constantly pointing out the stuff to your kids that they need to work on, you're going to kind of tear apart their energy and their confidence. But if you work with your kids to show them all the stuff they're doing well, they're going to grow from that as well. Yeah, 100%. I think the reason people do annual reviews, in my mind, is more about giving raises

and not having an expectation that I'm going to give you a raise every week or every month. There's nothing wrong if somebody is progressing faster than others to give them raises unexpectedly. But I think that people in general are habit forming people. And by having a structure around when I'm going to review you gives them an opportunity to give a raise in an expected amount of what they should give at certain times. But I agree with you wholeheartedly that if you can't communicate with your people except for an annual review or a quarterly review, then you're making a mistake. It's become way too corporate. And I always hate that word. If you're coaching your employees daily, if you're coaching them every minute, if you're kind of praising them and showing them stuff to work on ongoing,

they're well aware whether they're due a raise or not. So tell me about, you know, you've ran a lot of companies, you've done some amazing things. stuff to work on ongoing, they're well aware whether they're due a raise or not. So tell me about, you know, you've ran a lot of companies, you've done some amazing things. You know, sometimes people, I just was talking about this earlier, we're writing an article about it, but I don't think money's everything. I think money's a vehicle. I think they're fun tickets. They're the ability to do what you want when you want. So money's, I love money. Don't get me wrong. That's the real deal. I love money. I love what money could give me. I love taking my friends to a baseball game. I love flying my mom to Hawaii or whatever it might be. But tell me a little bit about what else drives people and how do you figure out those drivers?

Yeah, for me, it's time. For me, time is the important currency right now. It's interesting, I was talking to friends at dinner the other night, and we were saying that in your early days, you know, in your teens and your twenties, you'll spend a lot of time to save money. You know, you'll ride a bus to save five bucks. You'll walk somewhere to save $3.

You will clean your own toilet and clean your own house to save 15 bucks. So you'll spend a lot of time to save money. And then as you become more and more successful, you'll start to spend money to get your time back. You'll start to spend money to get as much time as you can. So I think time is really the currency. And that was something that my dad showed me at a very early age, that being an entrepreneur, you control your own time. And I think where a lot of entrepreneurs go sideways is they spend all night and all weekend working on their business, quote unquote, trying to catch up. And the reality is you'll never catch up because as you get your list done, you're going to add

to a new list. You're going to set bigger goals. So the reality is we need to stop working overtime. We need to stop working at night. We need to stop working weekends and start having a life. And we need to add to our life with friends and family and relationships. Because if we don't, we're going to end up getting blindsided. We'll build successful businesses. And all of a sudden, our relationships will cash in and check out. Yeah, I feel like I'll be 100% forward here on this. I don't like to talk about it.

But me and my girlfriend, we've been dating for two years. It's the first girl I've ever lived with. She and I just moving out. We're going to do a reset. But she told me, you work all the time. You put this as a priority over me. You don't have any goals for us. You have more businesses. She goes, when are you going to be happy? When are you going to be content? And I said, you know, I told her this. I said, I need to let money work for me. And I said, that's going to take some time up front. I said, I've seen so many people 60, 70 years old trying to hustle to make ends meet. And I said, I know that it's forward.

I know that it's going to take today. And I said, when money works for me, Einstein said the strongest force in the world is called compound interest. And when it works for you, it gives you ultimate freedom and you can have your time back. have excuses, right? We say, well, I got to spend time with family and I had to do this and I had to buy this boat and I bought this vacation house because of my family and they dig a rut. And I don't know the balance though, man. I got to tell you, I'm juggling. This is what I wanted to hear. I wanted to tell you that. And I want to hear your thoughts. Yeah, you are struggling. And I know you're struggling because you're trying to rationalize in your head why it's okay to still keep building companies. But in your heart, what you're kind of saying is I'm sad and I'm scared and I don't have the relationships or the time that I want. So what a lot of entrepreneurs do, and I've seen this so many times,

is they keep doubling down. They keep reinvesting more money in their businesses and growing their business and putting more money in the business and growing their business and spending more time in their business and growing their business to the expense of their health and to the expense of their relationships instead of doing both. And what you want to do, you're in control because it's your game. You're essentially creating your own board game called Monopoly. But this is Tommy's version of Monopoly. So every time Tommy passes go, Tommy collects $2,000. Everyone else gets $200. Every time Tommy crashes around Park Place, he collects it. Nobody else gets it. And Tommy always gets out of jail free because it's his game.

But the reality is if you don't create those rules for yourself, you end up kind of playing a game that's no fun. And I think that might be where you and a lot of our listeners are. They're working hard, working hard, busy being busy. And they're trying to catch up. But the reality is they're trying to get to the horizon and the horizon keeps moving. And if you're only going to be happy when you get there, you never will get there because you're going to set new goals. So what you need to do is set personal goals, set physical fitness goals, read books for fun, you know, do less and build more quality of your life you know all work and no play makes us

boring right i had somebody years ago say if you have to remain interested to remain interesting and if the only thing we have to talk about is yet another business book or some business that we're growing that's all we have to talk about at thanksgiving or a party all of a sudden we become very isolated and yes it's good that we love what we do. I'm not saying to not love what you do and to not build great companies. But what I am saying is create your own level of constraints. And because Parkinson's law says

that work expands to spill the face that we give it, the more that we work, the more that we're going to keep working. And that's not the goal. The goal is to build companies to spin off cash for ourselves. So find ways to do that. Maybe grow a little bit slower, but spin off more for ourselves. So find ways to do that. Maybe grow a little bit

slower, but spin off more cash and more free time. You know, don't do any personal chores, have everything taken care of for you, but have free time in your day and every night to be able to have a life. Yeah. And I agree with that wholeheartedly. I mean, do what you love. If you love mowing the lawn, mow the lawn. You know, the other day I pulled out some gear. I fixed a toilet because I became so content for people doing stuff for me. And man, I used to fix garage doors every day. I've got more tools than you can imagine. I change my oil. I do this stuff. But then I became this guy that delegates everything. I delegate to the point of no return. And I go, man, I don't even look at some of my email.

I don't even open my own mail. And I pride myself on that. But sometimes, you know, at what point in your mind does it become like, where is the bleach in this house? I mean, at what point? No, I think you probably got the personal stuff down. Now, the next part is, is how do we actually constrain ourselves in the business? So we're only working 20 to 40 hours a week instead of working seven days a week and seven nights a week, right?

How do we go and enjoy? And part of it is the guilt that we feel guilt, but time, right? I stopped work at five o'clock every day, period. Like you couldn't get a phone call with me on a Saturday or Sunday if you tried. My assistant won't let it happen. So tell me a little bit about that, because I think we're a lot alike in a lot of ways. And I think most of the listeners, you know, they own a business. And I really will tell you that I enjoy business.

I enjoy creating systems. I enjoy delegating. I enjoy creating systems. I enjoy delegating. I enjoy everything. And what I found about myself in the last few years is I might be sitting there. I might be with family. But the ultimate thing is slowing down and appreciating it and having patience and actually being out to dinner and not eating to eat and get done with it. You know, and this next year, I'm going to go to Europe for a couple of months and just start to enjoy the time. I think they call it siestas where they take three hours off in the middle of the day to go just mingle with friends. And I have a hard time with that because it's not about business. It's about accomplishing something.

If I'm going to eat, I'm going to get done with it. If I'm going to drink a soda, I'm going to finish it. And I've not lived in the moment. I'm so busy living in the future. And I think that happens to a lot of people. And I'd love to know your take on that. Well, I was guilty of it for a long time and still am that, you know, my mind is always racing, but part of it is, is trying to control that. So don't leave business books around the house, you know, put them in one room, but don't have them scattered in seven rooms. So you're not getting distracted by seeing one. Check your iPhone at the front door.

Don't have it sitting beside your bed. Get an alarm clock. Turn off your notification and put the Do Not Disturb on. So while you're driving your car, your phone's not able to be used. Don't take your phone into restaurants with you. So while you're sitting having dinner with your girlfriend or your friends, you don't have any distractions. Just set your goals in the morning for what you're going to work on during the day and do those things, but then put it away and realize that you're never going to get caught up. I think part of it is just remembering that we're never going to get caught up, that life is about having other interests, right?

What are our other hobbies? That is amazing. And I think this hits home for a lot of people because I can't imagine my life, you know. What it does tell you though is what's going on on your phone that you have to be there that you can't delegate. I mean, ultimately look at your phone and say,

man, if I miss this call, well, who else do you have in charge? And that's where I go back to the organizational chart is you got to have people that are in charge and you got to have people that are following them and they know the hierarchy. I mean, Jesus Christ had 12 disciples. He didn't do it all. He had 12 people do it. So I think it's seven. I think what the studies have shown is you should have seven direct reports. And if you have over seven, you're probably not going to be optimizing your time. But I'm just amazed at the fact that you've been able to shut it off because, you know, I feel like.

Well, I had to learn it, though, but I didn't wake up in the morning and have complete balance over everything in my life. Like I've had to work really hard at this. I've had to set, you know, I use an app called commit to three that I set my daily top three business goals with another business person, Joe Polish. He sets his daily goals with me. Then I have a personal accountability partner that I set my personal daily goals with and former Ironman triathlete. He sets his goals with me. And then I have a daily habit list of habits that I try to do to slow me down and stay present and be mindful and not get wrapped up in it at all. So I set goals for myself monthly with how many times I'm going to run and how many miles I'm going to run and how many sessions of yoga I'm going to do and how many times I'm going to play golf or ski.

And like this month, I've already skied twice. I'm playing golf tomorrow. I'm going for a run as soon as I get off the call with you before I go to the airport. I went to yoga last night, but I have to force myself. Otherwise, I would just be busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy doing email and catching up and working. That doesn't scale. And I'm 52 years old now, and I've got kids. I've got four kids, and I'm on my second marriage. And my first marriage broke for the right reasons where my ex and I get along great, but I don't want my second marriage to end the same way.

So I want to be a healthier, happier husband and I want to be a healthier, happier partner. And I want to have good friend relationships that aren't just about work. You know, I want to be able to disconnect and talk about life and passion and what people are into and their hobbies. Because the reality is when someone sits down and talks to us about what they do for work, we tune out. If someone talks to you about their job, you tune out. So why is it that we think our businesses are so exciting to other people? They're not. We just forget that.

Well, I think what is it, Dale Carnegie, how to win friends and influence people. If you understand the psychology behind people, you understand that I learned from a coach a long time ago that you have two ears and one mouth. And if you could approach life in that manner, whether it's kids, nieces, nephews, wives, mentors, whatever it might be. But, you know, we tend to always want to be heard. And I think that's a great book. It's a classic. I've studied under Joe Polish.

He still has this place over on rural in the 60. He's got Dean. What is it? Dean grass. I always have. Yeah. The a hundred K group. And I got Dan Kennedy's book.

No BS about direct marketing right in front of me. I mean, I read this stuff all day and last night, believe it or not, I bumped into a guy that used to work for Joe. He was his neighbor's son when he lived in Tempe. And it was so funny that you bring him up because I think Joe, he started in the cleaning business

and he formed a lot of relationships and learned his passion. But you're 52 and you're by no means old, but you've done this. One thing I will say is i really believe that you have enough money and free time now to do what you want but i think a lot of the people on the call say that's good and great to go golfing and get out and go to hawaii and go to yoga and do that stuff and i agree with that wholeheartedly like you need to make time but if you could go back

when you thought gas prices were too high, you were only putting 10 bucks of gas in the car because you didn't have the time or money. And it sounds like to me, maybe you, I don't know if you've been there or not. It sounds like you had a great upbringing. No, I've been there. Like again, like I was on welfare when I was 26 years old, I was broke and I was on welfare. I had two months of welfare checks in Toronto, Canada, living in a friend's basement apartment. And I mean, I've totally been there. I've scraped through and I've had tough years in the last five years where all of a sudden life got out of control. But I'm not talking about spending money. Going for a run doesn't cost anyone any money. It's 40 minutes of my day where

I'm going to go for a run. I'll come back and I'll shower. Like people have time for that. People have time to read a book for fun. People have time to go for a run, I'll come back and I'll shower. Like people have time for that. People have time to read a book for fun. People have time to go for a walk with their child. There's no such thing as you don't have time. And I agree with you wholeheartedly. I hate when people say, I just don't have the time. I'm like, you have the time to sit on your ass and eat chips and watch your three favorite shows at night.

You have time no matter what. Anybody that says I don't have the time, unfortunately, and I know I'm being a dick about it, but they're lying to themselves. And you might say I'm doing work the whole time. I'd go back to the 80-20 rule and write down everything you do for a week, and I'll show you. I'll circle the things. These are the only two things that mattered in the day. The rest of it was bullshit. And I'd love to hear your take on what is your strategy? Because honestly, it doesn't come from nowhere. I mean,

there's a process and most of the people listening, if you're like me, I'm instant gratification, man. If I go on a diet, I'm going to learn how to lose 10 pounds in two days. But well, that's the dopamine. We're addicted to that dopamine rush, which is why work becomes a drug for us is because we like the feeling. I'm going for dinner with my wife tonight and I will not bring my phone into the restaurant because I've had the feeling of sitting with people where they pull out their phone for some reason and I don't feel that they're attached or attracted to me. And I don't want her to ever feel that with me, that she's second. So if I have an idea, I can write it down on a piece of paper. The idea will be fine, but my relationships are what I need to hold on to, right? When I'm sitting with my kids, I had a child, one of my kids years ago, he's probably a year old.

He kind of reached up and pushed the phone out of my face so that I would look at him. That was a horrifying lesson. So how many of those lessons do we need before we realize that that's what's important? And those things don't cost money or you don't have to be uber successful to put your phone away to have a relationship with yourself or your kids. I think if we start with that, if we start with that vivid vision for what we want our personal lives to be like, what we want our relationships to be like, what we want our relationship with ourselves to be like, and how we want our fitness. If we start with that and build our business around it, we'll be successful. But in the absence of that, people just work hard and they wake up in the morning checking email

and they come up with excuses. So I'm in this boat, okay? Let's just say I'm the average guy out there. Obviously, man, it's too much, man. I can't do that. You start here. So tell me, if I'm that guy and I'm out there, I'm working 24 seven, man, I'm going, if I don't do it, it's not going to get done right. And I got this mentality. How do I

pump the brakes and like step by step, let's go through this. What do I do to really let it go? Right. How do I let it go? Because so many people believe that if they're not doing it if it's not in their control then it won't be done right and number two is how do i just let it go how do i not bring my phone and tell me how do you get started and i know you went into it a little bit but i just would like to know for the listeners out there and myself is where does it start what starts with this begin with the end in mind you know this is the classic stephen covey right if you don't know where you're going any road will take you there it's a wonderland so what i talk to is create a vivid vision for your life first pretend that you're three years

from now december 31st three years from today and you're looking at what your life looks and feels like write down everything about you write down down your fitness level. Write down your eating habits. Write down about your relationships. Talk about what your days are like. Talk about what your nights are like. Talk about what your weekends are like. Talk about what you're learning and how you're feeling and describe yourself in that future state three years from now and describe it in as much detail as you can. Do the same thing for your business. Describe your company three years in the future. Describe marketing. for your business. Describe your company three years in the future. Describe marketing, describe IT, describe operations. Write down what the customer's

saying about you. Then draft it. And I cover this in The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs and also in Double Double. I've got chapters on this concept of the vivid vision. But do a vivid vision for your life and your business. That future state is where you start. And then you can create a plan to make each of those come true. The plan is then your list of three-year, two-year, and one-year projects to make that division come true. And then you build the projects out in the order that make the most sense, similar to building a house. You don't put the cabinets in and put in a wolf stove on day one. You build the foundation, and then you put up the walls, and then you put in the electrical and the

plumbing. You build your life that same way. You build your businesses the same way. Too often as entrepreneurs, we get attracted to the big shiny object or the cool stuff and we miss the point. So you begin with the end in mind. You describe your future. Then you create a set of goals and values that you work towards and you create a plan to make them come true. But most people won't do that. Most people will wake up tomorrow or today and they're going to get sucked back into email and they'll be busy being busy and

they'll tell their friends are really busy being busy and they'll work nights. But that's how you do it. Well, I love that. And I think that in my book, I talk a lot about doing that with employees because, you know, I don't think employees, if they don't buy into your company, if they don't buy into you, you know, I had a guy tell me the other day, he goes, dude, the reason everybody loves you and they follow you is because you take risks that nobody else would take. And you're a leader. And I said, well, tell me a little bit about you, Russ. And he starts talking to me and I don't do it enough, but I want to align myself with my employees and tell them that they're taken care of. And if you don't have employees that buy in.

So I set goals for my employees. If one of them wants to go hunting every three months, I say, well, in order to do that, how much money is that trip going to cost? Well, OK, let's talk about this. So you need to make 20 grand to cover every quarter and take your family and have a good time. What does that mean that you need to do in three months and one month and one week and today? What does that mean you need to do today? And I feel like a lot of people don't know if they're doing good. They don't have anything to say.

It's not black and white. It's this gray area. You know, even my call center manager, who's amazing, he says, Tommy, I'm not going to count the calls against us if they're not the decision maker, like if it's the daughter calling or the grandpa or whatever. And I'm not going to counter it. They're calling for a part. And I said, so that's great to me.

And he goes, well, what do you mean that I can't book that call if it's a part call? They just want to go to go order it online. I said, it's your job to educate them. If we have this gray area, then I'll never have true metrics. And it's not going to look bad upon you. We just need to know because I book a lot of those calls. So, you know, what does that mean to you? I mean, you've worked around so many companies. When you share the copy of your vivid vision with your employees, your customers, and your suppliers, when they can read a four-page document or a five-page document that describes your company three years in the future, they'll either buy in and be excited about helping you build it or they'll leave, which is exactly what you want. But in the absence of that, we're always trying to get them to buy in because we're trying to get them to read our minds. So the best companies that truly, and this is why 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for.

We weren't just a normal company. We were a cult. We had 248 people at the head office, 3,100 system-wide operating in four countries. But every single employee knew the four-page document describing where we were going. So they woke up in the morning understanding why their work was important and what they were doing and why they could be excited about doing their job because they saw which sentences of the vivid vision that they were helping to make come true. And then those sentences were part of making the BHAG and the core purpose happen.

But in the absence of that, yeah, you have to hold people accountable and manage them and try to align them all the time. This is the tool. This is what I codified finally, this vivid vision that only the best companies now in the world are using it. It's being used in 28 countries around the world, but everyone else is trying to use the one sentence mission statement. That doesn't work. It's not enough. People can't read your mind. And the entrepreneur always has a clear vision of where they're going, but they haven't shared it with anyone else. Same thing with a partnership and a couple that are dating or a couple that are married. Have you shared your vision of what your future looks like with your spouse? And do they want the same vision? Are you locked and loaded and building it

together? Or are you on completely different pages of what your relationship is going to look like? If you're on different pages, it's never going to work. So let me ask you this, because I say the same thing. If you start treating your relationships like a business, set goals. But obviously, when you have kids, your goals are to raise them correctly, make sure they have values, make sure that you're motivating them, make sure that they're eager like you were, make sure that they understand. Kids change the picture. But if you're just in a relationship and first and foremost, I think that a lot of people are in a relationship because of their kids and they say, we're going to do it for the kids. But I think that that spouse, whether it's,

you know, you're a woman and you want that husband support or vice versa. How do you bring that back? Because you said you got a divorce. Obviously, it happened for a reason. And now you're in a great relationship. You're not going to bring your phone into the restaurant. My first marriage I knew on the wedding day, it was wrong. And then and I was getting married because my mom was dying and I held on to someone. So that's why that one didn't work because it wasn't supposed to work. That's why we can get along now and raise kids jointly because we realized that it wasn't anything that had gone wrong.

It wasn't supposed to be there. And I'm not saying you're wrong. Listen, at the end of the day, I'm not here ridiculing. I'm just saying you're a human being, right? I'm not. I think what happens is the reason people grow apart is because they're not working to grow together. If you work on a vivid vision together, you're not growing apart. If you do shared vision boards together, you're not growing apart. If you go away on retreats and talk or they're talking in cursory, then yeah, you're going to grow apart because each of you have a vision in your own mind that you aren't necessarily merging with the other person. That's deep stuff, man. And you know,

we don't really go into this too much in the home service expert, the podcast, because we talk to people about business, but it's refreshing to talk about this stuff because I think that this might be one of the most powerful episodes out there because we don't have balance and there's no way to create balance, but you got to take a step back. You got to create a vision.

And I love that process, the vivid vision. And what I'd love to do is, that book's coming out in January. I'll get you back on it. Give us something we didn't talk about. Give us some pointers that I didn't ask maybe the right questions the whole time. Tell me a little bit about something you want to share, and what I'll do is, if we could get together, I'll read your book. We'll talk a lot more in depth about The Vivid Vision, because I think that's amazing, and talk about, you know, you

got Double Double, read that, Meeting Suck, read that's amazing. And talk about, you know, you got double, double read that meeting suck, read that. I haven't read the miracle morning and I'm looking forward to the vivid vision. So. The miracle morning for entrepreneurs, the miracle morning for entrepreneurs. Cause he also wrote one called the miracle morning,

which is just for the average human, but ours is specific for the entrepreneurial community. Let me give you one thing to work on or for everyone to think about. And then, you know, we can do it. Episode two, for sure. We got lots to cover. So the thing I would like everyone to remember is none of us are getting out of this alive. This is just what we do to make money. This is just what we do to fill time,

but we're all going to die and we're just walking each other home. And I think we have to enjoy the journey a little bit more and not take ourselves so seriously and have fun along the way. Because at the end of the day, like we don't live forever, like every single one of us. So I think we got to have fun and hold hands,

be a good person and, you know, enjoy the journey. I love that. Well, Cameron, I need to have you back on. I don't feel like this is enough time. I never do. Obviously I got my own things to work through, but I learned a lot. I appreciate your time and I appreciate what you do because I don't talk to a lot of entrepreneurs that I'm not going to say you figured it out because I don't think you'd ever say that.

But you did figure out a lot of stuff and life lessons. And I love the story about your kid and seeing that phone. And you taught me a lot. So for that, I appreciate it. And I definitely want to get you back on. And thanks for taking the time of the day to be on here. Thanks, Tommy. Appreciate it, man.

I'm looking forward to getting out for lunch with you as well. All right. Thanks, Cameron. I'll touch base with you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. This was the Home Service Expert podcast.

Now listen, for the first time ever, I'm going to give away a step-by-step guide that reveals the hiring process I've used to grow my company to over 200 employees in over 10 states. If you want to scale your business with the best employees, which I know all of us want, then you need to go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash giveaway. That's homeserviceexpert.com forward slash giveaway and get your free copy right now.