The Home Service Expert Podcast - Why 2 Employees Beat 6 (The $400K Hiring Math)

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

🎟️ Join us at Freedom 2026 → https://mellomedia.s.gy/promo2-freedom2026   Cameron Herold is back for round two — the man who scaled 1-800-GOT-JUNK from $2M to $106M in six years breaks down why two A-players beat six average hires, the exact matrix Jack Welch used to decide who stays, and the profit math that tells you whether you should even own a home service business. If you're stuck between $3M and $10M, this one's for you.   🕐 TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Cold Open 0:02:26 Idea Capture 0:08:30 Vivid Vision 0:11:19 The HVAC Trap 0:19:19 Red KPIs Only 0:25:14 Expansion Warning 0:31:05 Interview Training Gap 0:40:37 Jack Welch Matrix 0:48:51 A-Player Math 0:52:12 The Doubt Rule 1:01:51 Entrepreneur Reality 1:13:54 Profit Over Revenue 1:17:28 P&L Basics 1:26:15 Call Center Rule 1:44:44 Books And Contact   🎟️ Freedom 2026 → https://mellomedia.s.gy/promo2-freedom2026   TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/officialtommymello

I was over in Dubai. I was speaking at a big mind valley event. I was standing talking to this guy, six foot seven. I played pro beach volleyball. And I said, if I got six guys from my team, and he starts laughing, and he goes, dude, we'd beat you every single game. I'm like, wait, so two guys would beat six. He goes, every game. So I realized that if you have two A players, you pay them 200 grand each, that's two people for 400,000. Or you have six B, C players. I'm paying six people 100 grand each, the two A. A's at 400 would destroy the six Bs or Cs at 600. All right.

Listen, guys, this is part two. Everyone was excited about Cameron Herald, which I'm a big fan of. I work with him on a regular basis. He spoke in my last event. He just knows business, and he knows really top-down business, but it's really bottom-up business. He has wrote a lot of books. He's known for growth and scaling.

Works really well with CEOs and COOs. And what I talk about will probably jump into this is I'm a visionary, then we've got the integrator. C.O. Alliance is the number one global peer community for second in command leaders, founded by Cameron in 2016. It provides high-level leadership, training, and support for COOs, VPs, VPs of Operations, GMs, and presidents who run company-wide operations. I can talk on and on about Cameron, but why don't you just introduce yourself? I'm sure everyone's heard of you, but it's always good to get a refresher. Wow. All right. Introduce myself. Cameron, entrepreneur, C-O. I've built a bunch of companies. I've been paid to speak now in 30 countries. I've been paid to speak on every continent, which is really random. Built a bunch of different businesses. I had my first real company when I was 20 years old. I had 12 full-time employees, grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. The fourth company that I built was 1-800 got junk. The first one I was involved with was a group called College Pro Painters. which not a lot of people know of,

but was probably the best training ground and where I learned the most about leadership was building college pro. Every year we had to go out and recruit, hire and train 800 university students to be franchisees. And then in six weeks, they had to go out and recruit hire and train

8,000 students to paint houses. So imagine in six months hiring 9,000 people. I did that four years in a row. So, yeah, that was some of my bio, I guess. You know, we could dive into a lot of the stuff we left off on. But, you know, I want to just start by talking about a vivid vision. And we talk about this all the time. My bracelet says ruthlessly prioritize.

I've got ADHD, every symptom you could think of. I got ideas coming out of the yin-yang. And we're not ready for all my ideas. And Jeff Bezos talks about this. I just did that with my finger just remind me to say it. Yeah, so we're not ready. We're trying to build a company that can handle all my ideas. They all go in the Asana board.

I want to be heard. You know, we worked a little bit with Dan Martel. Dan Martel loves you, by the way. And he said, you know, the worst thing, Tommy, is when you don't feel heard. He goes, you'll wake up in the middle of the night. You'll say, what happened to that idea I had two weeks ago? Where's that at? When are we doing it?

What's the priority level and your team? So he had a meeting with my complete executive team and said, this is just who Tommy is. Doesn't mean he doesn't, they'll take no gracefully, but it needs to be heard. It can't just be shoveled off the board. But let's talk a little bit about. Let me speak to that. Yeah, because that's separate from vivid vision. You said the Bezos thing, and then we hyperlink really, really quickly.

So what Bezos said in a meeting or an interview one time was I have so many ideas that I have the ability to kill my company by pushing too many ideas out onto the floor too quickly, and I have to slow myself down. Right. And I think what Dan is saying and what you're saying, I agree more with, which is we need to get our ideas heard. And then we need someone to capture our ideas and take care of them for us and not necessarily start them all right. away. So when I was the COO at 1-800-Got junk, what I would always say to Brian was, I love that idea. Let me ask you a few questions so I can understand it a little bit more, and then we can decide when to start it. Yeah. So then I would ask him the who, what, one, where, why, and how. I'd ask him a little bit about the R-O-Y. He was expecting what completed look like. We might even go

for a walk and talk and grab a coffee so I could understand the idea. And then I would say, okay, based on what I now know, let's start it right away, meaning which of these 12 other projects might it bump? Or I love that idea. Let's start it maybe next month, but I got it. Or now that I understand that idea, we just mutually decided to kill it. Right. But at least I got the ideas out of your brain, which is so full and overflowing. And I kept, kind of kept track of it. Because entrepreneurs want to know that we're either going to take care of their idea or that we understand their idea or that we've got it somewhere that we can look at it later. Right. That's what's important to me. I mean, parking, we'll talk about that later, but it's been impossible. It's not a

priority yet, but it should be. And there's just a lot of politics now within the company, because there's, you know, there's a lot to do with fleet and insurance. And there's every reason why we shouldn't. But that's when I do it. Let's talk about that for a second. So every idea has an R.O.I or should have an R.O.I. Calculator attached to it. Because as an entrepreneur and as a person, And we can always say, oh, parking. Parketing is parking and marketing at the same time. So it's parking your vehicles in high traffic areas. And yes, that should happen.

But vis-a-vis everything else that we're working on or related to all the other ideas that you've got, what's the ROI of that idea versus how much people, how much time and how much money is it going to cost us to make that idea happen? And then what's it going to generate? Will it generate revenue? Will it generate profit? Will it make our customers happier? Will it make my employers happier or employees happier? And based on that, do I do it or not?

Or do I do it later? Because, yeah, yes, it should happen, but you've got 50 other ideas too. Now, there's several hundred in Asana. And there'll be a thousand by that. But that's how I prioritize them is based on that ROI and based on the people input, timing, input, and money input. Well, yeah, that makes sense. But how do you say, take in our guys to a baseball game?

What's the ROI? It's very hard to extract. Yes, they're not going to turn over as quickly. they'll probably stay on board longer. They'll be happier. But there's certain things that are really hard to extract an ROI on. Okay. So taking the guys to a baseball game is going to make them happier.

I would then look at our employee net promoter score to know where are we today on our happiness for our employees. Right. I know what my customer net promoter score is. What's my employee net promoter score? If I'm over positive 80%, I'm going to dial back all of the baseball games I'm taking people to because I don't need happier employees. So years ago, I was coaching a company. They were ranked as the number two company to work for on Glassdoor in the United States. I coached them for four years, coached six of them.

And their employee net promoter score was positive 86%. And we were talking about some of the stuff that all the perks they were giving their employees. And I said, you know what, you're trying to actually grow your gross margin, trying to grow your EBITDA because you're getting ready to sell. Why don't we get rid of some of the perks? and let's dial back the employee net promoter score from positive 85 or 86 to positive 75. You'll still be one of the best companies in the world to work for, but you'll be a lot more profitable. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

And I think you talk a lot about the sign of a great company, which you set out a blind survey and they come back to you is what I stay working here, what I advise somebody. Net promoter score is what I promote this company to a friend. Yeah. And, you know, 80% are better as they are a promoter of the company. Yeah. And 20% are detractors. Or sorry, then you take your nines and tens, those are your promoters, subtract the ones through six.

Those are your detractors. And you end up a result of somewhere between negative 100% and positive 100%. Our goal is a company to have our customers at greater than positive 50, which is considered world class. I like positive 80. Our goal with our employees is greater than positive 50, which is considered world class. positive 80, right? Because I don't want to be like, I want to be best of best.

Yeah. I love that. I'll ship back because I go very quickly because I got so many questions. The vivid vision. You know, people, I think that's one of the most profound, just the concept. You name the book exactly. It's so smart to name the book exactly what it is. And so talk to me about the principles of a vivid vision.

The idea with a vivid vision, let me explain what it is. and then where I got the idea. The idea of a vivid vision is an entrepreneur clarifying in a four or five page written description what their company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future so that everyone around you can see what you can see. It's kind of like getting the internal movie that you can see

playing so that everyone else can follow along with you. They can create what you can create. So I learned this concept 30 years ago from an Olympic coach. He was working with high performance sports athletes. and he said that they used visualization in sport so that they could perform their sport completely on instinct. He said, in the business world, if you could do the same thing, you'd win.

So an example of that is a home builder, right? A contractor, if you're building a home right now, you're building a ginormous, incredible, it's beautiful. You showed me some of the blueprints a month ago. Now, you know what you're building, but if you went to the contractor and said, here's a bunch of money,

build me my dream home, it wouldn't look anything like what you wanted. Right. Because he can't read your mind. He doesn't know what a dream home means. Even if you gave him a couple of pictures, that wouldn't be enough. So you had to do a lot of work explaining your vision to the contractor. So he understands your vision.

Right. The contractor then creates blueprints and elevation drawings and schematics and plans to show you your vision. You sign off on his plan. He signs off on your vision. And then he then takes your vision and the plan. and goes to hire a bunch of sub-trades and people to make your dream come true. Now, what's really cool is you've got hundreds of employees or dozens of employees building your dream home. You've never talked to any of them.

No. And how can they read your mind? It's because you use the vivid vision concept to get a contractor to create the plans. So in the business world, you craft a four or five-page written description of your company. Your leadership team and your C-O create the blueprints and the plans. plans to make your visions come true. They then hire a bunch of employees to work the plan, right? Plan your work and work your plan.

And then all of a sudden your company evolves. Yeah, for sure. In theory. You know, exactly. You know what's funny? I just did a live. I was walking out of an interview because I do A Secrets of the Trades every month. Not a huge mailing list, but I enjoy doing it.

And it's all my words. It's just the writers put it in a better context. And it's so much, it's so funny how people are like, man, if I just had Tommy's pay structure, if I just knew Tommy's marketing, if I just knew his onboarding process. And I'm like, that's not the answer. I'm like, I had a guy, a guy calling me the other day. He's just a million dollar HVAC guy. And I was like, a million dollars. I'm like, I know single salesman doing 10 million. Yeah. I think you got a sales and pricing problem. But I said, the most important thing is get your CRM set up that it spits out exact, exact exact KPIs. You're booking. rate, your cancellation rate, your capacity. I'm like, that's the foundation of knowing your numbers. But I don't know, I can't tell you, this is like hundreds of people a week ask me for something. What's the silver bullet? Yeah, what's the silver bullet?

What's the magic? It's a whole bunch of secrets. It's a whole bunch of systems. It's a whole bunch of tools. I said to my son this morning, he's 23 running his own business. I said, you got to be good to be lucky and lucky to be good. In business, there isn't one secret. There isn't one formula.

There isn't one right answer. there's a whole bunch of right answers to a whole bunch of problems. But it is similar to building a home. This is the best analogy I've ever encountered for how to scale a business. When you build a home, you start with a foundation. Right. And you can go visit your home being built for months. And it's so boring because it's just foundation.

It's the foundation. It's like, when do I get to put in the wolf stove and the movie theater room and the gun range and the bowling alley, whatever you're building in your cool home, right? Like, when do I get to put all this cool stuff in? That comes way later. Right. It's foundation, foundation. foundation, foundation, foundation.

So even those marketing metrics are completely irrelevant if you have the wrong people and the wrong vision and the wrong culture. So let me talk to you about the foundational parts of your business. The first start is that vivid vision. It's what are we building? If you have all the metrics and you're measuring stuff but no vision, it's irrelevant. So you start with a vivid vision. And then you go with the kind of corners.

and those are your core values, right? I've been obsession with core values, living core values, firing people who don't break the core or who break the core values, only hiring people who already live those core values, an obsession with core purpose, saying no to everything that's a distraction except why we exist, why we're showing up in the space that we're in.

You can sell windows. You know that 30 years ago I met with this guy, Philip Orsino, he was the founder of a company called Premdor. And I said, a year in revenue, not market cap, $2 billion a year in sales, selling doors. Why don't you sell windows? Similar manufacturing, similar customer. He goes, you know what, Cameron?

He goes, we're selling $7 billion a year right now indoors in seven countries. I think we'll expand to 14 countries before I add a product. Holy shit. Talk about focus, right? So you got vision, you got core values, you got core purpose. Then you have your B-Hag. And then you've got to get all the right people. and get rid of the wrong people.

So I think the right answers for your company are starting with that stuff. And no entrepreneur wants to go there. They're like, yeah, yeah, I know that. But give me the silver bullet. Yeah, yeah, but if I parked my trucks in the right area, right, right, right, if you don't have vision, if you don't have core values. I mean, if your truck sucks, it's going to detract people. But your wraps are correct because they're aligned with a vision, they're aligned with a brand,

they're aligned with core values, they're aligned with a culture. That's the key. Like, if you parked a crappy old truck that had stenciling on it that said, we're the cheapest. Right. That would not magnify your brand. Yeah. It would actually detract.

When I started at 180, got junk as their CEO. I went out in the trucks for a half a day. I came back at lunch and I was getting changed into my street clothes. And Brian, who was the founder, who had spent 12 years building the company, said, what are you doing? So I'm done. He was, done what?

I go, I'm done hauling junk. He was, you've only done a half a day. I said, I get it. That's not what we do. We pick stuff up, we put it in truck, we get rid of it. I got it. I don't need to do that for 10 weeks to learn that that's part of the business. What we do is we engage with customers.

We're about a brand promise. We're about our quality focus areas. We're about our core values. We're about building a cult. We've got to raise our prices 40% because you're all going bankrupt. I don't need to learn how to haul junk better. I love that word, build a cult. Well, that's culture.

That's derivative of the route. Yeah. Well, it's something we try to focus on. You have to build a little more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. You have to get into the zone of a cult. Yeah. You guys are doing that here. You know, we've got 60 students next door, 75 coming in next month.

We've got a total of 700 people, technicians and installers. That means we're hiring more than 10% of the workforce a month. There's a lot of things that could go wrong. Yeah. And what we do is eight weeks. and that eight weeks is kind of a trial that we want to pull people out. And so when somebody asks you about the secret, it isn't the metrics. It's about the people.

It's about the people. And don't let them distract us from that. And then it's about the right people. Well, we're going to talk about that. But what do you think is more important? This is a really good question. What's more important, the right people, the right system? Because I believe you could take a C player with the right attitude and turn them into an A player.

Before both of those, it's vision. Because if I have a really good system going in the wrong direction, we're fucked. It's no, by no. If I have the best employees we could ever get in Scottsdale, Phoenix going in the wrong direction, we're fucked. So vision, that vivid vision is the most singular important piece in the company. Right. Because if you get all the right people in your company going the wrong way, what was the point? Well, here's what I get all the time.

I get a lot of questions. And then, yes, I believe it's about systems. People don't fail. Systems fail. Michael Gerber from the E-Mith Revisited, right? That was a critical lesson for us 30 years ago and starting when it hitter got junk was understanding that if something goes wrong, it's not a person's fault. I had a mentor who's being groomed as the second in command at Starbucks. And Howard Bihar called my mentor, Greg, who was the second command there.

And he said, Greg, why is the letter B on the sign at 50th in Wallingford in Seattle not working? Imagine they have 11,535 stores at the time. Greg goes, I don't care. Howard goes, what do you mean you don't care? Why is the letter B not on? He goes, Howard, that's the wrong question. The question we need to ask is what system was broken or what system was missing or what system can we put in place to ensure that every letter on every sign at all of our locations are always working. That's a question I'll look at.

That's a genius question. Right? It's a system. It's going back to the floor. It's going back to first principles. So every entrepreneur needs to ask, not why did Bob fuck up? Wait, why did you hire Bob? How did you train Bob?

What system was broken that allowed Bob to? to make that mistake. Bob didn't make a mistake. Bob wouldn't even be here had it not been for you or us hiring him or training him or onboarding him or coaching him or maybe we gave Bob so many balls that of course he was going to drop some balls. So don't point your finger at a person, point your finger at a system. So every day at 180 or got junk, we would have a daily huddle and we would finish our seven minute daily huddle with this one question. What missing systems do we see? People be like, So again, it was a problem. We would then identify the missing system for that problem.

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7563 and we'll get you in. Do it tonight. I don't want you to miss this. You know, it's interesting. It's every morning I get a text message of every major KPI. Booking rate, cancellation rate, conversion rate, average ticket, turnover rate. Very important KPI. What's that?

I got to stop on that. What kind of car? Well, you don't drive your car. You have a driver now. When you drove a car, what kind of car did you drive? I have a TRX. Okay. And in your TRX, did you have a dashboard on your car?

I did. And I do. And what metric did you look at most often on the dashboard? The speed. Bingo. And it was really big and right in front of you, right? And then in the bottom right-hand corner, there was another metric that would light up once in a model and go, hey, buddy, fill me up with gas. Yeah.

The other metrics were kind of irrelevant. Unless you got an old car, then you're looking at the heat. Correct. There might be a couple others, right? The heat, the battery. Yeah. But you don't need to look at every metric every day. Your email that you get every day should only show you the metrics that are outside of the bounds that you've set for them.

Why do you need to know every single day that the gas is full? So if your metric is green, I don't want to see it. You should only be seeing the metrics that are yellow or red on a daily basis. I mean, I could digest this in less than a minute. But here's what I... But imagine if you do it in 20 seconds. Yes, and that's lean, the whole deal of lean manufacturing, Kaisan, and trying to get a little bit faster. Why do we want our leadership team to keep seeing the metrics that are green every day?

I want them to only see the stuff that is highlighted. or maybe it's super green. Maybe there's too much profit, meaning we should go spend faster. But I don't want to just keep seeing the same metric saying you're good, you're good, you're good. No, I feel like my best analogy is I'm on Mars now. I'm not involved at all in day to day. I'm involved heavily in marketing and recruiting.

You know what it does is it allows me to see what went well. Where's the shiny day, the beautiful waterfalls? What didn't go well? So I give a lot of attaboys. Like, dude, you're killing it. I'm proud of you. Then that makes sense. That's why a leader should know about the good metrics is to praise, is to do the out of boys, is to say great job.

And then the volcanoes and the tornadoes. I'm like, what happened here? And sometimes it's a budgeting problem, which our FP&A team is amazing, what they do. There's six of them. But we're crushing budget. And sometimes I love crushing budget. And sometimes I'm like, why are we crushing budget? And it's a budgeting exercise.

But, you know. Yeah, you're right. There's gold there. Yeah. Yeah. I will say this. I want you to answer this question. So yes, and.

Yes, you should see them and you should know what to do when you're seeing them. A lot of people will just see the good stuff that they won't do anything. At least you're doing the out of boys or you're examining why are we doing so well, too. I think that makes sense. I send out 20 messages a day via video. Every birthday, every anniversary. And I'm working on handwritten cards. So I want the wives to see it.

Video's so good, too, though, because they'll share the video with the wives. Yeah, no. And there's sincere videos. And then also, I'm able to do groups. We built the software. I want to show it to, but I could literally say, Michigan had a record day. And I could send it to every guy in Michigan with a flick of a button. It's awesome.

I say, you guys are killing it. I'm getting wristbands made for July. Howard Bihar did that at Starbucks, eh? What's that? Every single Friday, when Howard Bihar, they had 11,535 stores. I know this because my mentor is being groomed as a CEO there. So Howard, every Friday would sit down for two hours with a stack of thank you cards and a spreadsheet. It would be like store number 17006.

Frappuccino record. Hey, store number 1706, congrats on the Frappuccino record in Seattle. Great job, Howard. Yep. Kelly, four years. Kelly, thanks for your four years of service. Love you, Howard.

Every Friday for two hours. He didn't know who to praise. He couldn't interpret all that data and decide it was a system given to him. Yeah. But when you're the CEO of a company that big and you're spending 5% of your week praising and saying thank you,

every entrepreneur out there is not doing even close to that. You are. You're doing more. more. It's just good. That's why you're successful. I'm just getting started. But that's why you're successful, not necessarily the metrics that we measure on the marketing

stuff. It's because you're deeply caring about the right people. You hire the right people and then you're caring about them. I mean, I talk to these guys. You know the number one question I get is, what's next? What do you got for me? What do I do with the money? Where do I invest?

They're asking the best questions. By the way, I love that they're asking about investing. I think most companies that do a 401k matching are missing the point. Just simply matching 401K is stupid. Teach your employees how to invest. Teach them about dollar cost averaging. Teach them about compound growth. Get them excited.

That's where we actually should be giving our time. Because most kids, most adults, parents never taught them that. No, and that's why in my dream manager program, we got a full-time dream manager. I'm hiring a second one. First of all, we teach- One of my favorite books of all time, Anthony Kelly. And just pay off the highest interest rate first. Here's what you should live off of, profit first.

You've heard of that book by Michael McCulloch. So he wrote a new book and were the first two pages of it. Cool. Because I said, I want this for employees. I understand profit first for businesses. Yeah, they need to understand for their home, their personal cash flow. Well, literally take your paycheck, take out what you want to save, and then the leftovers should be what you could spend.

And the leftovers is what you should donate to the church to. This whole like 10% off the top tithing before you take care of your kids. For me, I go to church and I grew up Christian, Catholic, but like I feel bad for the kids, the families that are like donating their 10% and they don't have enough to like take care of their kids. I think that's spending problems. That's the case. That was the same with this country. You know, here's what I get all the time.

I want to be like you, Tommy. And by the way, I take that really to heart, but they go, I want to expand. I want to diversify my products at which I don't do at all. And I'm like, well, I hope you own a lot of market share. You got to be doing 20, 30 million in your market. And you got to be above 15% to the bottom. And they're like, no, but like, we want to expand quicker. And I'm like, do you know, do you not know how difficult?

You're going to be Robin Peter. You're going to be saying your best guys to this other market. This is, you're not ready to expand. I wish I could have talked to my younger self and said, don't expand that quickly. Do you know why you expanded quickly from my perspective? You were devouring learning. You were so hungry to learn. You've been devouring books and podcasts and, is that true?

Yeah. And I think that a lot of these people that want to grow quickly aren't willing to put in the work. Years ago, I had a client of mine. I was coaching this guy named Adam Daly. And Adam was sixth in the U.S. Olympic trials and running middle distance. So his best time at a 10K was 28 minutes and 46 seconds. That's ridiculous. I said he was lying.

And he goes, no, I was sixth in the U.S. Olympic trials. I'm like, hey, I want to run faster. How do I run faster? He goes, run more. I'm like, no, no, I want some techniques. Is it midfoot running? Is it like, I'm more cadence? Do I need to go?

Speed work? He goes, no, Cameron, run more. If somebody really wants to grow a business, grow yourself. Like truly, and I'm not saying like, you know, Grant Cardone, like go into debt and borrow money. None of that shit. Read a book. Listen to podcasts. Like, listen to courses.

Take courses. Get all the free stuff that's online and available for free. Stop spending all the time surfing social media and watching all the crap on TV and wasting all the time grow more. You want to have muscles like you do? Go to the gym more. You know, that's really, I got so many questions, but you say there's three problems with CEOs. And the second one with CEOs grow themselves instead of their managers and their leaders. And what I noticed is when I started bringing people to seminars and inviting them on my stages, on my team,

and actually, I put three books on Luke's desk already this week. And I know he doesn't read them all. Luke's my C-O-O. Quick sidebar. Give them the chapter of the book to read. Because sometimes it was like, oh, that one chapter was amazing. We didn't necessarily mean the whole book. You know what?

That's really smart. That's really smart. Because I think it could be overwhelming. Like the 50 Shades of Gray. Just read those two pages because those are hot. And most books should have been like pamphlet. Yeah, pamphlet. But, you know, when I really said, come to these things, get my excitement,

because when I walk back in at whether I read a book, listen to a podcast, was on a podcast, went to an event. I'd come back and they'd be like, oh, shit, Tommy just went to another event. Yeah, but when they're going, when they're going, they bring back that energy and that excitement and now we huddle. They say, what is important that we just learned for us? We did the same at 180, got junk. The best example I've ever seen about was a former client in mine who had no budget cap

on training of his employees. So what he meant why that was, and he was building about an $80 million business. Anytime one of his employees wanted to go to a conference, he said, yes. as long as you come back and teach us something you learned. He never tied it to a metric. He never tied it to their role. If somebody came in and said, I want to go to Tony Robbins,

cool, go, I'll pay for it. Cover your own hotel. I will pay for you to go. He would pay their flight and their fee. Their entrance. And he never tied it back to anything because he knew that people that were hungry to learn would stay.

They would attract other great people who were hungry to learn and they would grow the company. Smart. Crazy, right? It was amazing. You know, we're getting ready. I'm sure you've talked to Luke about this, but to invest, and this is a little earlier to bring this up, but your program that gives you maybe the bronze that everybody, I think it's six or seven.

Oh, invest in your leaders. Invest in the leaders. We're having like 40 people. I don't know the number exactly. Go through it. And they're all going to go through it. We're all going to do it together. We're all going to have it.

And then I think you're going to come at the end and maybe a Q&A or something. Yeah, let me explain how the program works. So it's called invest in your leaders. It's the 12 core management and leadership skills that anyone managing people needs to be good at. It's the stuff that I was trained in at college pro painters when we hire those 8,800 people every year. It's the stuff I trained Kimball Musk, Elon's brother in, in 1993. It's the reason why Zip 2 got funded was those 12 skills. When Kimball and Elon Musk started Zip 2 before PayPal, all of that money that they raised was based on the 12 skills that I taught in that course.

No hyperbole. So the skills are things like situational leadership, interviewing, running effective meetings, managing conflict, delegation, time management, project management, coaching, running one-on-ones. It's kind of the 12-core functioning skills. What you guys are doing is going to pay $350 per person to have them go through that training, lifetime access,

and they'll get pretty good at the content. They won't be like PhD teachers of it, but good enough. So I always say for every skill, whether it's, you know, running, you could be a bronze, silver, or gold at running. Whether it's time management, you could be bronze, silver, gold at time management. You know, Dan Martel wrote the book, Buy Back Your Time, he's probably a gold at time management. You don't need to be a gold at everything, but you at least need to know that it exists, and then you need to be pretty good at it, which is bronze or really, really good at it at silver.

When you're at gold, you could teach other people and certify other people in those skills. what I do with invest in your leaders is at least get everybody to bronze or silver. Right. And it's so important. Our people are, they're begging us for leadership. The problem I have, and the reason I appreciate your program, is you pick the wrong person for the wrong person. You know, out of every consultant, one out of four I've said,

maybe we would say it was good. You know what I mean? You're excellent at what you do. And everybody kind of, you know, a lot of them want their core, like whether it's purchasing. They want to know a lot more. Right. They learn about what they do, but they don't learn necessarily about how to do it. They need to know the skills still. That's like the thing we're going to get really good at.

Here's what's really scary. Think about you for a second. How many people have you hired in your career? Thousands. No, no. You personally, that you said yes, hire that. Oh, about 100. Okay. So you've interviewed and hired about 100 people. How much training have you had on doing interviews? Not a lot. Have you been certified in interviewing? No.

Have you had personal trainers in the gym? Yes, I have a personal trainer. You have one today. Yeah. You've never had a trainer on interviewing? No. Well, I've gotten coach in the past. See how you're stumbling through it even?

Like, it's crazy. And there's people out there that have had not even as much as you've had, which was kind of limited to, right? I've probably had, without hyperbole, without exaggerating, about 80 to 90 hours of training on doing interviews, which means role plays, practicing, being filmed, self-criticking, self-evaluating. filling out forms, reading books, watching videos, watching other people, getting people to critique me. To the point that I'm like, I don't want to do any more training on interviewing. I got it. And I'm still not Jeff Smart who wrote the book, who or Brad Smart, who wrote top grading. Yeah.

You know what? And I'd been to their seminars as well. I had you interview somebody on our team. Remember that when we had first started? Was I interviewing somebody? Somebody who might have been higher. I forgot the position. But I was like, why do you run it by?

You know what it was? It was Mani in the call center. And he's like, dude, this is his fifth interview. I was like, let a camera just take a shot at it. And he's been absolutely phenomenal. Yeah. And this is, so my point is, we don't have to be the best at something, but we need to be better at it. So people come in and complain about employees, well, you hired them.

And most people have never had any training at doing it. People complain about meetings all the time, but they've never been trained in how to run highly effective meetings. I will tell you, I used to try to sell people on the company. and talk 80% of the time, knowing like, this is what we're doing and try to convince them to work for us. They're already there. And you're also scaring the A players away.

Yeah, it was garbage. Any A player that shows up, the more that you talk, the faster they walk. I say the 80, 20, you shouldn't be talking more than 20% of the time. Because you need to grill them first to know if your time is worth it to spend telling them on why they should be here.

100%. And an A player wants to sell you and also is excited to share what they know, Oh, yeah. So, no, yeah. The more they talk, the faster they walk. I, um, we do a pretty darn good job.

I think, I think Sophie is absolutely phenomenal, but I still think we got to do better. Like, I walk in our training center, and I do a three and a half hour orientation. And if a guy's got sunglasses on when the founder comes in, I'm just super annoyed.

We're inside. You know what I mean? T-shirts as well. They're all dress code. We've gotten too far with, with whole like people showing up wearing t-shirts. I mean, look, you're not Mark Zuckerberg. So don't wear the T-shirt and the gray sweatshirt to your job interview.

First date, dress code. I don't expect you to show up with a shirt and tie, right? That's kind of silly. Like, IBM banned the tie night or 30 years ago. But at least if you wouldn't wear it on the first date, don't wear it to work. So first date dress code. The second one is there's got to be that level of like, I'm showing up for my first day on the job.

So that means show up a little bit early. Show up prepared. Show up with questions. show up excited, have read my vivid vision, really know what you're in here for? 100%. And the more we brand, the better people that come to us. It's amazing how that works. Like A1 is, we have other brands under A1. And Sophie's like, we just don't get the same people interviewing. But we don't get the same candidate level. And it's a lot harder when we don't have a strong brand in that market. When we also want to push some people away too. Like, I actually want some people to read a job posting,

though there's no way I'd want to work there. That sounds too high stress for me. That sounds like I have to live core values. That seems like I got to really show up and deliver results. That's too much. Great. Go work for the post office. I only want the true A players coming here. I only want the people that know this is going to be the hardest thing you've ever done. And you'll be thrilled doing it. But this is going to be the hardest thing you've ever done. Yeah. Well, I've got a guy out of Texas. His name's Cody. And I mean, it is not easy to work for him. But if he loves you, he'll die for you. Bingo. And that's why you even smiled thinking about Cody. That's an A player. Oh, he's a go. That guy bleeds core value.

If you were to rattle off your company's core values, which I already know that you know, most people's core values aren't core values because you don't even know them. But you love Cody so much that you could even explain why he lives all the five core values you've already got. He is such an amazing guy, but they don't make them like this guy. He works 14-hour days. His dad owned the company. We bought the company. They're investors.

They do actually make them. Just not as many out there. There's not as many A's, but they are there. So Cody knows other A's because Cody doesn't have friends who are seeing. He's breeding A's. Correct. I mean, I just did an interview with one of his guys. His guy's first month got out of the Navy.

He's 26 years old. His first month at $190,000 in garage rosters, that's unheard of. Where did Cody grow up? Houston. He did it in the big city? Yeah. Okay. But I'm telling you, his dad started the company in like 1977.

And his dad's the hardest worker we'll ever meet. And Cody and his brother, Ryan, are like, just, they just like to work. Yeah. Cody's got eight kids. His brother has five. how they still work 14-100 days. There's a core values God squad for them, right? Their church or faith-based families?

100% faith-based. So there was a, do you remember the bombings that happened over in India about 15 years ago? The guys went in and started shooting people up and bombing the Taj and the Burge. I didn't know that now. So it was horrific. About 70 or 80 people died. The Taj Hotel Group would be like the Four Seasons or the Fairmont Hotel Group of India. They interviewed the CEO and they said,

none of your employees left the hotel. While all the shooting was happening and all the bombing was happening, none of your employees left the hotel. He said, no, we can't leave until our last guest leaves. He said, it's our obligation and we have to take care of them. And somebody said, where do you find people like that? Where do you find, or how do you coach people to live those core values? He goes, you can't coach people to live core values.

They either live them or they don't. And no one has those core values that we need if they're coming out of Bombay and New Delhi. they only come from the small towns and villages because they haven't been corrupted they haven't grown up in that big city they haven't lost touch with you know what really matters like grandma's kind of core values

so he said we hire from the small towns you know and I'll tell you this too is ethnicity matters you look at some of our A plus players I'll tell you they are whether they came from Iraq they came from India like some of the people

they come here and they're like wait a minute happy to be here they're so happy And another thing is they walk up to a house or like, I mean, our top guy, one of them. Like I did role play with him in front of 85 people and the everyone watching hundreds of people. And I said, go ahead and like go over Springs with me. And so he did. And I go, you know, that's just, that's too much.

And he goes, why? And he just stood there. And the way he looked at me and the way he did it, he goes, you want it fixed right? why? And I just was like, it was like a master class because he didn't explain, he didn't stutter, he just made eye contact, one word. And they said,

you know, I said, well, it's just more than I wanted to spend today. Why? Yeah, and it was like, I loved it because he's like, and he'll say something to customers too. Anybody from India, the Middle East, they can sell, man. Oh, and he goes, their whole world is selling. He'll look at somebody and he'll say,

do you not like me or do you not like the price? That's it. And it's like, he'll narrow it down. And it's, it's amazing what he does. I've been to 80 countries now. I've traveled. I've been to all seven continents. I love haggling just for sport.

Yeah. I can't. I can't win. They're so good. Yeah. They're just so good. It's fun. You know, when I get chased through the mall with the girl putting lotion on,

and they don't take no. And it's like, all right, I'll buy your $20 lotion. It's like, I want to hire them for like an event. Then you get upsold into something else too. Oh, yeah. They're very good. I mean, those are the people I want for events that are like, pay them great. You ever go to an event and you see people just sitting there like,

hey, yeah, we sell garage doors, yeah, we do windows? Then you get the people that are like, so what do you do? You live around here? Do you know anything about insulation? And they'll just ask you off the wall questions, get to know you, make them like you. And then all of a sudden you're like, yeah, come on do a demo. I like you. This should terrify you, by the way, if you're watching or listening,

if you have those kinds of people working for you and you don't have them handcuffed to your company, guys like me come and take them. So not only do I like notice those people at conferences or events or other companies or in my day to day who are amazing, I try to poach them. Yeah. Not just even for me, but I've even sent someone to you. Didn't I have an Uber driver that I referred to you and Luke and said, hire this guy? Yeah.

Right? Like when I have an Uber driver and then I'm reaching out to a friend or a client that I'm coaching saying, hire this Uber driver, your employees are not safe because the best companies will come and take them from you. Full stop. Yeah, no, this is a fun conversation. I really think you spent a lot of time on stage talking about what would Jack Welch do.

And it's results versus values. It was a matrix. Yeah. Can you kind of walk through that? Yeah, I was speaking an event in South Carolina. It was the Southeastern Regional for YPO, and there were 13 YPO chapters. And I was speaking to them.

And I was sitting in the green room backstage talking to Jeff Eimelt, who was the successor to Jack Welch. Jack was the CEO and chairman of General Electric, and then Jeff was his successor. And I said to Jeff, what's a system that Jack used that you still use in GE today? And he drew a diagram on a piece of paper. And the diagram was a four-box matrix. So on the up and down y-axis was results, and you grade your people on how good they are at getting their stuff done.

Zero at the bottom and 10 at the top. So somewhere between zero and 10 on results. and then across the bottom axis was core values or culture fit. And you rate them there somewhere on low core values, low culture fit, to very high a 10 out of 10. So if someone is below five on results and below five on core values, you fire them, right? You get them out of your company.

If somebody is like a positive nine on results and a nine on core values, like a Luke Martin who works with you, you handcuff them. You make sure that there's no way they would ever quit, even if they got offered more money to go somewhere else, right? And this has happened. Employees who will get offered more money to go somewhere else and they won't go is because we've got them locked into the company

and we know they have our best interest at heart. That's a true A player, and that's someone in the top right-hand corner. If they're in the bottom right quadrant where they're really, really good core values, really amazing people, but they're not getting the results, often we try to coach them and we try to train them. That's the wrong place to start.

What I try to do is put them in the right side. seat first. That's what Jack would do. He would say, you know what, this is the right person, like a Cody, but maybe he shouldn't be in finance. Maybe he should be in operations. Or maybe he shouldn't be in operations. He should be in PR. If you put the right person in the right seat, you don't need to do any training whatsoever. They excel, right? It's like in hockey, don't take a goalie and try to make him a defenseman. Put the goalie in goal. Put the defenseman in defense and you win. And then on the top left hand corner with the super high results, people, but they're jerks or they're toxic,

you got to fire those people too. So basically anybody on the left side, you have to fire. You know what's interesting is Luke's kind of an anomaly. He could handle more direct reports and he could actually handle more than most anybody I've ever seen. And I think he thinks it comes easy,

but it's so hard for other people. I think the people he has on his team, they do a great job. He tends to add things because he knows they're capable and they just can't handle what he could handle. His workload he could handle probably three times what most people could handle, and he's very efficient. He texts me this morning at 3.45 a.m. I mean, he's up and at him.

He goes to about a seven. I mean, he's just, I got in his car the other day. He's got Alex Formosia on blast. He didn't know he was driving me home, but he's obviously always learning. Yeah. And his car is probably pristinely clean because there's no clutter. It's a clean car. I mean, and it's a, it's a, what the hell, Elon Musk?

Tesla? Tesla. I've never owned a Tesla. He's like, dude, it's so easy to drive. He loves it. I mean, they own nice cars. I had the fastest car they ever made in 2016, a P90D, and I got stopped for speeding here in Scottsdale. And the cops said, why are you speeding? I'm like, I was trying to avoid somebody. He goes, no one speeds up to try to avoid somebody. They hit the brakes. He goes, do you like your car? I'm like, yeah, he goes, slow down. I'm not going to give you a ticket. That's a cool cop.

So fast. No, those are cool. I'm going to probably get one. I just... They're great. So, let's go through the three problems that CEOs have. You put them down and I'll go through the first one. They don't know the core leadership skills people need.

Okay. If you're thinking about your people and you want to grow them, we don't really know what to grow them in. Right. We don't know how to... It's like the first time I went to a gym. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't know how to use the machines. I didn't know what weights to use.

I didn't know what reps were. I didn't know. I didn't know. So most leaders, if you've never built training companies, don't know what to train people in. So I'll give you the shortcut. You need to train people on what's called situational leadership, which is the ability to adapt your leadership style

on a project-by-project basis. You need to coach people on coaching so they know how to coach other people. You need to coach them on training people, so they know how to train them on certain skills. You need to coach them on running one-on-one meetings. You need to coach them on running all meetings, whether it's financials, reviews, daily huddles, you know, whatever, whatever meetings, meetings with clients. You need to coach them on time management, priority management, on interviewing, on communication, on handling conflict. Those would be kind of the executive functioning skills.

I agree. You know, what are your thoughts on IQ versus EQ? Because I've noticed that a lot of people that are super smart, they don't know how to talk to people. never will. They don't know how they make other people feel. They're condescending. And you could have the conversations, but they don't want to change. I just had a speaker present to our CEO alliance, and her content was incredible. I speak quickly. I'm in about 118 words a minute. Clinton and Obama were 96 words a minute. She was like 150. She didn't have the EQ to notice herself and dial it back and then be able to deliver value. Yeah, I think EQ is really important. You have to, you have

You have to be able to absorb yourself. And you have to be able to blame yourself a little bit too, right? It's so easy to blame somebody, but there's three fingers pointing back at you. Yeah. When you point a finger, I think it's a balance. You can't hire an idiot who knows they're an idiot. I'm like, you know. Yeah, it's obviously, it's hard at certain parts of the company.

I mean, you know, the finance department is that they're numbered in just, the FP&A team. But they do really well. They need EQ as well, though. Yeah, we've got a great team. I mean, what I find. I found myself is I could critique every single person on the team and I could critique myself even more. But the fact is we've got chemistry. We've made it through a lot together.

People always ask, could you rebuild this company? I'm like, the camaraderie is hard to find. It's years. You can't go hire a team in a year. I mean, do you know why you get along with people? It's because they all live the same core values that you do. Yeah. What's really weird, and people miss this, is you're not trying to hire people like you.

like my IT team, our IT team at One-A-Henger got junk, nine or ten of them, they were all Russian. I didn't have a lot in common with them. So I didn't really like hang with them, but man, they lived our core values. So there was a lot of respect between each other. So you're not trying to hire people like you. You're trying to hire people that live your core values are obsessed with your B-Hag. They're obsessed with your vivid vision. They're obsessed with your core purpose.

But you don't want everybody to be similar. You don't want everyone to have the same behavioral traits as you. right there's not a single salesperson like cody would never make it through an hr person screening process because hr people would hate cody because cody doesn't follow rules he doesn't follow procedures he doesn't follow procedures but not him right he but but but salespeople would never make it through an hr screening process but they can all live the same core values HR people and salespeople can at least all live the same core values yeah the next one with CEOs grow themselves and the set of their managers and leaders.

We discussed that, but you could talk about that. It's kind of an obvious. It's like the analogy I use is a duck. If a duck has one really strong wing and one weak wing, it flies in a circle. So what would be the point

of just training the quarterback on a football team and not training everybody else? You need to train everybody on the team so that everybody can work together. Everyone collaborate. Everyone gets stronger. And you can also probably operate

your company with less people. If you truly train people, you'll get a lot more results through those people. You could probably get rid of your bottom 20%. I want you to be very descriptive here. Bring us back to the time and place,

because this is one of probably the deepest lessons you were able to teach me in Luke. Addition by subtraction or addition by subtraction or do not hire is your volleyball. Oh, the volleyball analogy in Australia. Yeah, it was Dubai. I was over in Dubai. I was speaking at a big Mind Valley event.

I just came off a stage of 2,500 people. I did the opening keynote, Stephen Bartlett, from Dyer of his CEO, did the closing keynote. And I was standing talking to this guy, six foot seven. I said, what do you do for fun? He's like, I play volleyball. I'm like, do you still play? He goes, yeah, I play pro beach volleyball.

I'm like, isn't pro two on two? And he goes, yeah. I said, you know, when I was in college, I played some volleyball, and I was on my high school team, I said, if I got six guys from my team and he starts laughing, I didn't even have a chance to answer to finish the question. He goes, dude, we'd beat you every single game. I'm like, wait, so two guys would beat six. He goes every game.

So I realize that if you have two A players, like two people that are really good quality, really good culture, really good skills, they've done it before. You like each other. You can finish each other's sentences. You pay them 200 grand each. That's two people for 400,000. Or you have six B, C players who they work hard. You got to manage them. You got to align them lots.

You're always trying to herd cats. They're okay. You know, they do their solid 9 to 5. I'm paying six people 100 grand each. the two A's at 400 would destroy the six Bs or C's at 600. So A players are free. And the only time you have a real A player is if you absolutely know it, meaning you were taking notes in the interview.

That's an A player. When you're not taking notes, they're not A's, which is okay. A players are race horses, B players are workhorses, the C players go to the glue factory. So at A1 Garage, you got 600 employees? There's 1,400 now. 1400, cheapers, creepers. Okay, out of your 1,400 employees,

my guess is you have 140 true A's, maybe 200. And you've probably got a solid 1,000 B players, and you probably have 50 C players. Get rid of the C's. You don't even have to replace them. There's nothing wrong with 1,000 solid B players. They grind it out. They do the work.

They don't drive anybody crazy. They don't piss anybody off. They live the core values. Solid. I get really upset sometimes me and Luke go back and forth on this because I'm not a quick person to fire. But, you know, this is good tension within the company is ultimately I'm responsible for marketing. Yeah. We've got a CMO.

He's amazing. We've got a VP of marketing. And, you know, our CFO tends to be like, and marketing, he's from England. Marketing missed again. And I'm like, well, let's look at operations. Let's look at cancellation, right? Let's get capacity planning. But most importantly, let's look at what the new guys, the guys six months and under are doing.

And I got them more of the Jack Welch, but I'm more of like instead of every year, every three months. But Luke's like, you know, these guys need time. And I'm like, it's very tough for me. It's very tough. And, you know, they're running lower quality leads, but not all leads. So we're getting into lead scoring right now because I want to know for a fact. And I don't think he's right or I'm right. I think it's somewhere in the middle.

but I have a low tolerance for people that don't come up on time dressed right, clean truck, drive safe. Those are easy, but operational excellence, like the stuff I'm looking at is their conversion rate, their average ticket, their turnover rate. And I can see potential in a lot of people. But then there's just people for three months. They haven't moved.

They haven't made a phone call. They don't show up to practice. You've got to make the cuts. Like they have to be mandatory practice. They don't want to do it. They need to get cut. Here's some data, some thoughts around this.

Number one is when you have doubt, you have no doubt. So when your gut saying, yeah, that's not going to work out, make the cut. The second part is, why are we spending so much time managing, coaching, helping, leading, giving support to our C players? You need to do it more to A players. That's what I do.

Right. A players will double before a C player will come up to a B player. But you know what we do with our A's? We just let them do their job because we're so busy spending time with our Cs. A hundred percent. Luke can manage a lot of people, but does he give his grain to, his best horses. If Luke is spending time managing his C's, thinking about his C's, worrying about his C's, what if he spent time with the A's?

110%. What if we put, like I told you about the invest in your leaders training course 12 months ago. You know what? Yeah. No, it interests me. It's on the top of the list. I mean, we're doing it. I think he's been in content with you. But my point is if more companies would spend their time with their A players, it would make it easy. I spend all the time with the A players. By the way, it makes my day better. It would make it make it. It makes me better. It makes it easier to get rid of your C's? You know, I once met a billionaire, this is a decade ago. And he said I never had to fire anybody.

Back when a billion dollars was a real... It was a real number. And I said, what do you mean you never fired anybody? Wow. He goes, Tommy, he goes, it's impossible to jump through the hoops. Then I make C players jump through. So they don't even get to come work for them. He goes, they will not jump through.

He goes, they quit. He goes, because they got to show up at this time. They got to get this training. This guy that my girlfriend introduced me, at the time and this dude had three private jets. I don't even, his name was Todd something, but we met at a Starbucks, and he took the time just for a quick minute with me. This was before I had any money or anything.

Cool. And I was like, it was just really interesting that he said, I never fired anybody. Because they quit. He goes, I run them through, like they are going, I make it very, very challenging. Yeah, challenging to get in the door and then challenging to stay. Challenging to stay because if you're not performing, you're going to run through, you're going to do ride-alongs, you're going to do this, you're going to do this, you're going to do this, But at a certain point, you're like, dude, you're either going to get better quickly or you're going to leave.

Yep. And you know what you're walking somewhere and you'll see a bunch of mallard ducks? All the mallard ducks hang out with other mallard ducks. All the A players only want to hang out with A players. But not a lot of A players are going to work for a company if they know it's filled with Cs. 100%. You just don't want to go there. All the top guys fly across the country to go ride with another guy.

They're calling each other every day. They're looking at the leaderboard going, man, I'm number three. I need to be number one. Love that. They call me up and they're like, dude, what can I do to pick up an extra shift? I love that. I mean, I get text messages 20 a day.

And then I screenshot them and send them out to all the texts. I used to tell franchisees something like that that when you go to a conference with all the franchisees from your brand, don't talk to the negative franchisees. Go talk to the positive ones. Go talk to the happy ones. Talk to the top performers. Why would you go hang out with the cultural cancers? And that's where grandma was right that one bad apple spoils the whole bunch.

That cultural cancer, even if it's an employee, or a branch manager, whatever, destroys everything. I had a CEO I was coaching one time. He owned a chain of 16 dental offices. And he said, oh, that's just my receptionist. I said, just your receptionist. That's your director of first impressions. That's the first person that every employee sees every morning.

Last employee everybody sees on the way out the door. First person every customer sees. Last person, like, that's one of your most important roles. Director of first impressions, not just a receptionist. I love that title. You know, I always do this to an orientation. I go, guys, talk to the optimistic guys, finding a way to win that are asking for help. I go, I had two managers.

They talked every day, super optimistic, beating their scores. They were just coming up with answers, coming up with solutions. My cousin, Stephen, another guy out of Dallas. These guys were the worst guys. They call every day. Totally. They call each other and bitch about everything. They tell this company has the issues, this is messed up, this is wrong.

cancer. They needed to get out of the company and their family. One of them was family. It impacted me one time. I came back from traveling around the world. I was 26 years old. I got a job in sales. And I had run my own business for two years prior, college pro. And I decided to do a job in sales. I was really didn't know where to go and what my direction was going to be. And I was keen. I was excited. I was doing software sales in like 1991. It was like tech. It was fucking exciting. And there was this guy in our room. I don't remember what his name was. I can still picture him. And he was just, He was a bit of a loser. He was just negative about everything. He wasn't hitting his quota,

wasn't doing well with sales. And every day he would just play Tetris and complain. And after about three weeks, you know what I started doing? Playing Tetris. It's so sad. I got sucked into it. This other woman that worked with us

was like super keen as well. And I kept trying to migrate over to spend time with her because she was keen and was selling lots. She got sucked into it as well. Over a period of about four or five months, all four of us in the sales team got sucked into this negative vortex.

Had they gotten rid of that bad apple, the three of us probably would have still excelled. Are you familiar with Andy Elliott? No. Andy Elliott, the guy that's, you got to have a six-pack. He's all over the internet.

He's out here and found hills. But he's a- I'm a dad bod, but I'm 60 now. Yeah. He's a cool dude, good friend of mine. And his guy started making a ton of money.

In sales, he had no limit. And I talked to one of, like, the top guys. under Alia Group. And, you know, these guys are making a million dollars. I mean, they're just killing it, right? They're selling training, sales training.

And they're just smiling, dialing. They're putting out all the social media. I mean, he's very good at what he does. And, I mean, he gave out a cell phone number, but it eventually became like everyone had a cell phone number. You text it on social media. And now he's got another number. I mean, every time I talk to me, he's got a new number because eventually it's

from bars. And he said, you know what we had to do, Tommy, is every morning we had to do 30 minutes of thankfulness of what we've got. And we had to start changing the culture because everybody's like, oh, man, that guy's making $1.8 million. Like, I don't make enough. And there was just this attitude of like, I'm not making it. And like, wait, when we found you, you were making $75,000. Yeah, yeah.

And there's just like the comparison and the jealousy. And so they started to have to do affirmations and just really thankfulness. thankfulness and what I didn't have what I had. And he goes, that took six months to really turn it around. Exactly. And that's a CEO who is very observant to what was happening with culture. Culture is that. It's not the free massages and the free lunches.

Yeah. Right? You can give free massages and free lunches to people all day long, and your culture will get worse if you don't fix the core. 110 percent, you know, I think about this all the time, that that's my job. It's not loose job. Well, your job is to be the chief energizing officer. Culture is a part of that. It's why I believe that a CEO should have no more than four or five direct reports

because you also have culture, your board of advisors and legal strategy. Those are four direct reports right there. But culture, the whole idea of the employee net promoters score, the feeling, the buzz, the vibration, that's so critically part of the CEO's purview. I got a lot of work to do. I'm horrible with names. And I hate saying that out loud because it doesn't make it any better. I wish I could say, I best with names, but I'm just not.

My wife is the best with names. It's crazy. My fiance, Brie is just a wizard. She's like, oh, like, I can just be like, it's almost like I got a mild case of dementia because, like, I can remember everything. I don't remember movies. I can remember quotes. I can remember. But when it comes to names, and it's not because they're not important.

No. I just got to do like username seven times, say it out loud, associated with an actor. I'm so bad with it. I was at your home for dinner. You and Bree and your friend. Aaron. Aaron. I thought it was Alan. See? Yeah.

There was only one other person. I had left that night and I wanted to reconnect with him. I couldn't remember his name. You reconnected me. I still can't. Like, we got to be about it something. Yeah, I'll take it. You know, the third one. I'm worse at it than you are.

Maybe. You know, we'll see. You're giving up. So small and medium-sized companies don't have training departments. Yeah. When you grow a company and you get to a certain size over, usually it's over two or 300 people. your HR department starts to build out

an internal learning and development department. You have an LMS, you've got training videos, you've got training sheets, you've got role playing. You guys do. You have a coaching room. Yeah. But when you were less than 200 people,

you didn't have that. You had Bob who would train some people on the fly. Right. So what happens is when you're in a small to mid-sized company, you don't have the resources and the expertise to help you scale. So your job is to plug stuff in that will help people scale. This isn't a pitch for my course, but there's lots of courses online.

Put your people into them because you're not going to build yours. So stop saying we're going to build something when you're not. Don't give a whole book to somebody. Say read chapter six of that book. Or here's a video watched between minute 13 and minute 21 of that video, right? That's enough to get people started on training. But don't keep saying that you're going to build it internally because you won't. It's going to cripple you.

You know, when it comes to A players, I want to go back for a second. I was thinking, how many owners that decided to start their own company? are just not A players. I did this post and I said, most people shouldn't be business owners. They don't even know. Like, you're going to fail. I mean, the odds are against you, right?

We know that the odds are against you, especially going over a million dollars the chance to make it a take. Well, here's the math that you want, what you're asking. There's 14 million companies in the United States. Of the 14 million, 7 million is average. That's the middle.

That means there's 7 million entrepreneurs in the United States that are below. average. There's 7 million that are above average, but being above average kind of sucks. Like, imagine if your doctor said to you, your health is like the average American. Fuck that. I don't want to be the average American. The average American's OPE's.

American is European, maybe. Right? Well, but, like, so I want to be in the, I want to benchmark above that. So really what you're saying is to be a really good entrepreneur, you have to be in the top 10%. Okay. So now if you're, 1.4 million.

That's 1.4 million that are in the top 10%. You're not in the top 10. You're in the top 1%. probably in the top 0.5 of the 1%. You benchmark against the best of the best. Your health is against the best of the best. Your wealth is against the best of the best. Most entrepreneurs are saying they want to be like Tommy

are trying to go from zero to great. I think most entrepreneurs try to go from zero to good and then go from good to great and then go from like how the best get better. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I don't think entrepreneurship. I think there's a really,

there's a fallacy. out there because if I'm a technician, you know what I think. Yeah, they pay for some overhead. They pay for the CRM. They got some CSRs and dispatchers. But they go, you know, the parts cost a buck. I sell out for $10. That's $9.

Yeah. Let's say two of that goes to operations. That makes 70% net. Yeah. So I met this entrepreneur, cool dude from Australia. And one day, I mean, he wasn't making a lot of money at the time. He took out 30 pennies. And he had his team, he's like, how much do you think I make out of every dollar?

And when he took back two, I mean, the company wasn't doing very well, 2%. but they were just shocked. And that's why I have open book management. So I learned this. I was 20 years old. I was running my house painting business. I had 12 employees. Five of them moved from Ottawa, Canada to Sudbury,

which was six hours away to work for me for the summer. And I was about six weeks into my summer, and my friends hated me. And I was telling my dad at dinner, he goes, why do they hate you? He goes, they think I'm rich. He goes, you're not making money yet. I said, I know that, but they don't know that.

He goes, well, why don't they know that? I said, well, all they see is the revenue for all the jobs. So we've painted 30 houses and all they see is how much money I'm getting paid for the houses but they don't know all my expenses. He goes, show them. I'm like, how would I do that?

He goes, open your accounting, your open book management, and show them your accounting. So I had my 12 employees over for dinner that night. I ordered pizza and beer, which I couldn't afford because I wasn't making money yet. And I showed them my accounting. I showed them royalty, paint, soft supplies, gas,

workers comp, liability insurance, my accounting, my bookkeeping, my pager bill. I showed them my marketing costs, my flyer drop costs. I showed them my customer service. They were fucking terrified that we were going bankrupt.

In 30 minutes, they hadn't even finished the pizza and they went from you're rich and we don't like you to we're going bankrupt or we can have a job next week. Literally changed everything. Most people should not be entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship got too trendy with the rise of the Facebook and Instagram starting 2007. Prior to 2007, 2007, no one wanted to be an entrepreneur. Yeah. Social media. Here I am in my jet. Here I am, Bora, Bora. Here I am with all my cool life, right? That's going to go viral like it did with me because the fact is the first five years, I didn't have any money. And we won't tell people the truth yet. You're not going to tell people in the moment of how hard it is until you've

solved the problem because it hurts our business. So entrepreneurs won't say in the crisis of meaning, in the valley of death, when our employee is stealing, when we had to fire our best friend, and we have no money to pay bills, when our wife is screaming at us because we haven't paid ourselves for four months, when we just hired somebody and we're not sure if we can meet payroll,

we don't talk about it in the moment. We'll talk about it two years later when it's solved. But no one really shares that raw truth, so then everybody watching thinks that, oh, being an entrepreneur is incredible. No, it's really freaking hard. It takes a long time to get to the night before you become the overnight success. people look at 1-800-gog junk and go, wow, 900 million.

I want to build a company like that. It took Brian 12 years to go from zero to 2 million. I joined, we got from 2 million to 106 million in six years. Then it's taken 19 years to go from 100 million to 900 million. And you think you're going to do it in four years? He took him 30. You know, what's interesting about that is Jeff Bezos was talking to Warren Buffett. And he goes, why don't more people follow your strategy?

You know, he goes, because it's a get rich slow scheme. Right. He goes, nobody wants to get rich slow. And I always tell people, imagine what you could do in 10 years. Why do you always say next year I want to do this? And I'm very patient, but when I get the ball rolling momentum, it's amazing. I talked to a large, large, large PE company recently. And I told them about our company and I go, you know, it's a lot easier to get to a hundred million dollar EBITA to get to a billion dollar EBITA.

He goes, no, it's not. He goes, you got all the systems. He goes, you'll go to a billion dollars of EBIT. faster than you did get to, I mean, and really in the last five years. Yeah, it's harder to go from zero to a million than from a million to a billion. Yeah. Yeah. And he goes, dude, you got the systems.

He goes, now it's scalable. Now it's attack. And that's where I'm at right now. And you have the people. Again, having all the right systems, it's vision, people, and systems. Well, the systems, I've always said this. The systems dictate the people you're going to get. And the vision deck takes the people you're going to get.

Yes. Because if they see what you're building. They'll join you. Correct. I want to pivot real quick because people always ask me this to like, what's my next hire? How do I get my integrator? And I'm like, do you have an EA that's good? I'm like, are you still doing minimum wage tasks?

And I don't pay it. My EA makes more than most employees do. By far, but I'm probably, I would need four EA's. She's just, I can pay $4,000 or pay her. So what was your thought on that? I heard this quote years ago from a friend of mine, Jack Daley, who's one of the best in the world at sales. If you've never brought Jack into your company, by the way, to do sales training, you should.

What's his name, Jack? Jack Daily. World-class. We had to get him on your podcast, too. World-class. Unbelievable. One of the highest-rated speakers in history for EO. Anyway, Jack said, if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one.

And that burned into my brain so dearly. Any entrepreneur out there who is working hard and doing work that's minimum wage jobs is really hurting themselves. So the example I give is if I was on your board or if I was your private equity firm, if I owned part of your company and I found out we were paying you

$100 grand a year or $200,000 a year to be CEO, why are you doing $12 an hour work? Like I would literally, I would lose my mind. And if you're the entrepreneur, why are you doing minimum wage work? Why are you paying yourself to do minimum wage work? I'll tell you why.

Sometimes it's because it's the only area of life they get satisfaction from and it's the only area they get a dopamine rush from as being busy because they don't like their spouse. They don't like their kids. They don't like their, they have no hobbies. No, I think the real, and Dan actually talks about it in the camcorder method of, you know, the first time when Ashley started, wrong hotel, I was on a window seat.

I only sit aisles. I'm like, it doesn't have a gym. It doesn't have a restaurant. You know, why did you respond to that email that way? That's, you don't respond that way to that. And so, but literally, I didn't do my job. And it's a big trust. It's a lot of trust.

And you know what? You're going to take two steps backwards. There's going to be a lot of training, but then it sets you up for freedom. Well, and this goes back to my course, invest in your leaders. If you don't know how to run classroom training and run coaching sessions and do one-on-one coaching, you can't grow people. I definitely don't do a great job. The Camp Quarter of Method is part of that. I'm very good at communicating with her.

I know sometimes she comes in and I'm like, been a day. And she's like, oh, are you okay? But she comes to my office now. She's like, you ready for 35 pushups? Like, literally, like, she knows. If I tell her what I want, she does a good job. Even though I'm like, she's like, come on. I'll do 10 with you and you got to do all of them.

She'll count me down. And she's like, okay, earlier, 30 minutes on the treadmill. It's on your calendar. Really? Yeah. So, like, we got this rhythm down. She knows what's important to me, what my goals are, getting married. She's got all this stuff dialed.

And she's like, this is, but that's what the next level is. and I'm not a big believer. I know you are. That's how important it is to have somebody across my office. That's how important for someone to come in. That's how I'm still a paper guy, which is wrong. And it frees you up to do the stuff that you're supposed to do. I was briefed by your team.

This is the second time I've been on your podcast and were friends. I used to coach you guys. They said, you're going to get there. You'll be sitting down. Everything will be ready and talk right in right at the start. I got here. The slate was ready. My name was on it.

There was water sitting here. One of your EA's came up and handed me my coffee that I asked. Everything was dialed. then boom, right at the start, you walk in the door. Because you've delegated everything except genius. You're hiring people to do stuff that they love to do. Like a lot of EAs really want to give us a better life, right? They want to take the stuff off of our plate.

It feeds them. It fills them. They love doing it. And they want to, like the only three things I do now, I coach people. I do speaking events and I do media interviews. Yeah, you've done a great job of building a great life of what you enjoy doing. And, you know, I had Mark Winters. You're familiar with Mark Winters.

Gino Wickman. Yeah, they did rocket fuel. And then he wrote Visionary recently. Oh, cool. And moral of the story is, he said, you know, Tommy, you'd be surprised on an integrator, C.O. Your right hand. He's like, they don't need to be on stages. They appreciate the satisfaction, but they live.

And you know what's funny? As Luke always says, my job is to make Tommy's dreams come true. And to make you look good. His job is to shine a spotlight on you and make your vivid vision come true. And then our job as the CEO, your job as CEO, is internally to make sure people understand why Luke has to make the tough decisions, why he has to play the hard out sometimes. Yeah, the C-O of 1-800-Got junk, Eric Church, has probably been on a stage twice in his 16 years being C-O. He doesn't want. Now, when I was there, I was a different style C-O, but Eric doesn't want any of that.

He wants to give Brian, so Brian's on Dragon's Den and Shark Tank and, you know, doing the whole. the press thing. And that's where I want to double down. I just was shooting commercials earlier. And it's not a vanity move. It's like the founder's story. When I founded this company, I made sure the job was done right.

And some founders don't do that and they're not good at it. Tobias Lucke from Shopify is one of them. So he has an outward facing COO, Harley Finkelstein. But then you take somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the only one who talks to the media, the only one who talks to the press. He's very outward facing CEO. no one knew his CEO

Cheryl Sandberg until about the year she was leaving. She was there 15 years as his second in command. She came in when he was 21 as the adult in the room and was there beside him

as his second in command. No one needed to know her name. She didn't need anyone to know her name. And she had no desire to ever go off and become a CEO either. Have you ever coached anybody and you've said to them

business that might not be for you? Wow, I've ever coached, No, but mostly because I only coach companies that have already gotten their company to a proof of concept and now they want to scale. So I've never coached, that's not true. When I was very young and was at college pro painters, I had a couple people that I shut down before they started. You know, would you ever coach somebody still on a truck? No, because they're still too early for me. So I only work with companies that are about 5 to 50 million in revenue and want to go to 50 to 500 million.

I don't coach that early. It's interesting because a lot of people get stuck. suck at five million. And this is one of the questions. They're in the death zone. You know, what would you tell somebody if someone listening runs a $5 million company? Now, here's the interesting thing that no one talks about. I'm giving some really good advice. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, I just want to, I want to clarify because I don't like this question because I don't give a shit if you're doing $100 million if you're doing 1%. We don't talk enough about profit. Correct. Revenue's vanity, profit is sanity. And I've been spitting that out for the last 10 years. My sister joined what's now called

EO. It used to be called YEO, which was the young entrepreneurs organization. She used to call it YBEO, the young broke entrepreneurs organization. She goes, who cares they're all doing two million, five million of revenue? None of them make any money. She had a safety deposit box at her bank filled with cash. She was making so much money. It was obscene. Yeah. Yeah. So I, the only two organizations I've ever seen that do this properly are Go Abundance and Tiger 21. Where to be in that mastermind, you have to put your financial statements down on the table and pass them around. You have to put your investment banking statements down. What is the other one for Tiger 21 and GoBundance?

I went to a GoBundance event 10 years ago in Whistler and these 100 CEOs were all passing around documents. I'm like, what are you guys doing? They go, our financials. I'm like, you're literally reading financials. Yeah, yeah, and our investment accounts. There were no posers in the room. And we need entrepreneurs to stop talking about these.

Oh, I did a million dollar launch. Yeah, but you had 50% in affiliate fees, 15% customer service fees, 5% returns, 4.5% credit card and stripe fees. You had 10% or 15% was spent on marketing. You took $50,000 off that million dollar launch and you spent six months doing it. Yeah. Why did Jeff Walker even be allowed to run that whole program on the product launch formula? Because you're doing a million dollar launches and you're still living on ramen noodles.

Yep. now I know Jeff Walker actually Joe I do too good guy He's in like Denver I believe He was supposed to come on the podcast I lost track of him He was a speaker at our CEO lines And I was like look

I love the whole product launch formula As long as it also can be done and make money You gotta be profitable Correct By the way my criteria with Brian When I came in at 18000 got junk Was I can't coach you anymore Unless we raise our prices 40%

Because you're not making money The franchisees aren't making money The guys in the calls center Are making money The guys in the trucks aren't making money If we can't make money with all of us making money, including our franchisees, I don't want to help you scale this. When I was at college pro painters, I was a franchisee. My first summer, I made $11,000.

That was 40 years ago. That was 1986. I made $23,000 in 87. I made $34,000 in 1986. I made a total of $70,000 profit in the 80s. That was like making a half a million to a million dollars a year today in buying power. Yeah. I had paid my college tuition was $1,100 a year.

So I paid my college tuition in the first summer times four. I bought a house when I graduated. I had no debt when I graduated. Profit was something I learned very early on. And the first thing I tell people is if you're not at 15% or more, you need to get smaller. You need to trim the fat and work on the marketing source that are working. But Ellen Rohr, you're familiar with Ellen Roar?

Yes. She's great. She was my coach in like 2018. She's solid. She's got me financial quick checks. She's good at finance. Okay. And she said, I want you to read my book, where did the money go?

Because that was me. She was 17 and a half million. At the end of the year, my CPA calls me up and says, you owe 300 grand. I'm like, I don't even have that in my account. Right. How is that possible? Right. And it's because most entrepreneurs think it's all about sales and marketing, but they

don't understand the basic P&L, like revenue minus cost of goods sold is your gross margin, minus all of your overhead is your net profit. Then you also have to pay your taxes. But then you have cash flow. Like that money isn't just sitting in your bank because you're buying stuff and investing in the future. If you don't understand the basic P&L and cash flow and budgeting of your business, don't start a business. Or learn that or get someone to help you learn that. They need help with that.

And I tell you, that was a missing piece. Once I got the right controller and CFO in place and I actually had the answers. And it was the key here is it was correct. It was audited. It wasn't BS. Yeah. It wasn't what a simple bookkeeper put together. Most small businesses, medium-sized businesses, home service, home improvement,

they've got their aunt doing the books, and it's okay. It'll pass a sniff test, but it's not right. And it'll get you to about a million, but it won't necessarily help you scale. And you can go bankrupt with growth, right? Just because you're bigger, the cash needs are a lot more as well, right? When you're small, if you need money, you just max out a credit card. You borrow money from your dad. When you're mid-sized, you've maxed at your credit card, you borrowed from money.

Where do you go now? The bank, the bank won't necessarily loan to you. you get strapped, then you got to take a hard money loan, then you get even bigger. Like, I have a friend of mine who just went bankrupt, shut down his business, closed down events, literally burned every single bridge he ever had because he didn't tell people he was scared and didn't know what he was doing. I don't think he cognizantly tried to screw everybody. I think he just built a business that was too big and he didn't understand cash alone and

budgeting and then all of a sudden he'd borrowed too many from too much from too many and he was gone. And we always think, we're going to. to get there. We're going to get there. We've got to make it through the storm. Hope isn't a strategy. You know, the economy's doing pretty darn well. The stock market's up. I'd say buyer sentiment's a little bit down. But here's what's crazy. I had my buddy coming to town the other day. And he works with the wizard of ads. Roy Williams. Roy Williams. Yeah. Austin, Texas. He goes, dude, I set five days records in a row. He goes, everybody in Columbus is asking me,

how are you staying busy? He goes, Tommy, I need to hire 15 more people. And everyone says it's a bad economy. Who is he? I think I just talked to him. Yeah, Aaron Gaynor. Oh, my guy. I just talked to him. Yeah. Yeah. Same guy we were talking about. Yeah. Yeah, I was like, you got to work with Roy Williams. That's extraordinary. He gets to work directly with him. It's amazing. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's amazing. I like Roy Williams. And, you know, I kind of get to see it. And they spend a lot of money on radio. Yeah. A lot. And you, you always said TV's a waste of time. Now, now TV is the digital yellow pages. Yeah. Right. Because the, the people that have money aren't watching TV ads. They're online. So, so that's why I would say move away from. from television and put your money into digital, put it into outdoor, put into radio. I agree. I want to talk real quick about your sister, about a quick story. And we'll start wrapping on with a few more questions. But, you know, she's obviously an A type person.

She'd give everybody a hug and she'd say, I'm not leaving here without a written testimonial. Yeah. I was like, God, how do you know about my sister? My sister's running an incredible company. She has about 300,000 people playing co-ed intramural sports in her leagues. Wow. She runs an unbelievable culture business. If you ever interview anybody over Zoom, you should do an interview.

Where does she live? Toronto, Canada. She is that strong. She's been running her company for 30 years, built it from scratch. She's done eight or nine acquisitions now. So when Christie was starting in business, she learned at College Pro Painters as well. She was running a franchise for College Pro Painters. She would show up at a job site doing an estimate to try to land the house.

And she would say to the customer, when I leave, after we've painted your home and it looks incredible, I'm not leaving until I have three things. I want a check, I want a letter of reference, and I want a hug. She would kind of giggle and they would laugh and they go, what do you mean a hug? She goes, I want you to be so happy with your paint job that you're going to give me a check, a letter of reference, and a hug. And they went, okay. Of course she was signing everybody up.

She also then had a binder that had a letter of reference and a before and after photo of every single house that she painted. Now, in the first couple of weeks, there weren't that many. After a bunch of weeks, there were a lot. and then she landed everybody she ever talked to. Everybody she was talking to was signing up with her, so she raised her prices. She kept raising her prices, but her client binder had over 100 letters of reference and before and after photos. She was making more money than God. I think it's so powerful, and it's one of those things where I'm like, Luke, we got to do this.

But those are some of the things that I'll take as a pet project. And I'm like, I could do this very quickly. You know what you can do pet projects really quickly is with company-owned location. and do a test project. Now, if you've got a lot of company on locations, you always have a prototype store. That's where you're allowed as CEO. I mean, we're not a franchise.

No, I know. So that's what I mean. But if you're a franchise, you can have a company on locations. If you're all company on locations, like Starbucks or like A1 garage, you still need a prototype store. We need to do it in a market.

You need, well, you need a store or a market or somewhere where you can test stuff. Maybe it's a couple zip codes in your market. Where you get to do, it's called skunkork. You get to go out and just like try shit out and see what works. We always do. We try it.

We try it out. We make sure we just ended our training program of our traveling trainers. Yeah. There was four of them. We gave it a year. We changed it. We tried it. We do it.

And that's another thing, Cameron, is most people will die on the sword. They literally, like, if a market's not making it and it's hard, we close Portland. It was not a big deal. We said we're going to give it one last try. Yeah. And we did. Steve Jobs cut 80. percent of his product line when he came back into Apple.

80% of the products he cut. Most people won't do that. They won't take the pivot. They won't get rid of that line that's not making money. I asked people, I went to this company in Chicago, massive company, garage stores. By the way, that ties back into the revenue and profit. You've got revenue from selling some stuff, but if there's not enough gross margin in there, all you have is the pain in the ass factor.

Sorry, go ahead. Well, no, you're, you're, this guy's selling parts, right? So he's doing distribution. he's doing commercial he's doing residential and he's doing new construction and I mean he's doing everything he's doing storefront

he's doing rolling steel he's doing docks levelers and I go man this is impressive and he's super proud but there's shit everywhere we got to go to five different buildings there was nobody in his I was like I go where's all the profit coming from

what department he goes I don't know he goes all I know is this is how much money we're making and he goes it works. And he goes, why wouldn't I sell parts for all the parts I go into? And I go, just because you could, doesn't mean you should. I didn't say anything to him because I was a guest and I'm not there to criticize. But I just, every question, it just, there was no clarity. You have a better

filter than I do. I can't help myself because I see it as my money. I see everybody wasting stuff as my money. I see so often entrepreneurs are like flies banging their head on the window and then they're going to keep working harder until they get through the window. And they all end up dead on the window still. I just want to go do the door right here. Yeah. I can't help myself, but to sit down with that guy and go, look, you've got this one product that you've got eight people and all this effort and all this energy going into it. And by the way, all of your unhappy customers are with that product too. So you're wasting money. Like, you could kill that whole thing off and get rid of six people and life gets so simple. But that's, you know, as an entrepreneur

in me, I had two full-time mechanics, two hoists. I started my own rap shop because I was like, we're buying all the trucks. And man, all that stuff. And Luke's been talking a lot about getting back in the inventory. I'm like, no. Do you know where a good example that is? What is this? It's a telephone. It's an iPhone. It's an iPhone. iPhone. Okay. Who makes iPhones? Somewhere in China. Bingo. Not Apple. Yeah. Apple designs them. Apple markets them and Apple sells them. And they outsourced

the stuff that they're not good at and somebody else's world class at. Just because your business is about selling iPhones doesn't mean you have to make them. Just because your business is about selling garage doors and installing. doesn't mean you have to warehouse them. Well, that's the point is... Just because you're selling a product doesn't mean you have to sell it if it's not profitable. Well, we don't have vendor-managed inventory in this industry yet, but the point is, is like, dude, we spend $70 million a year on parts and doors.

They're willing to jump over backwards, but willing to open up weekends for us. I'm like, why do we put a full-time person in there that they pay and we just reimbursed? Because we want to get it in and out. But there's other things you will do in-house. Like, at Oneeithner got junk, they hired Roy Williams to run their radio ads. But the call center, they run in-house. Do you know why they run it in-house? We could outsource the call center.

Yeah. Because the call center was our first point of contact with every single customer, and we knew that we had to be best-of-breed at that. Do not outsource your call center. Right. I mean, a lot of people are like, have you heard about, you know, what they're doing in the Philippines? I'm like, dude, they speak almost perfect English. And I'm like, dude, I've tried.

Yeah. I've tried Mexico. I've tried other places. That is the dumbest decision. You save a dollar. But outsource your wraps your raps. Yes. We outsource the wraps and the guy does it a fantastic job. Exactly. I mean, there's certain things that you think, obviously, vertical integration is important eventually.

Can be. The right move at the right time. Yeah, eventually. When you've hit it, when you've hit a level in your market that you've hit saturation and now you can't buy more, you can't build more, you can't open greenfield more, sure, then vertical integration. But I'd go buy it. I'd go buy the best in class. I would too. I would not go starting out. And then I would redo it and rebuild it or build the symmetry of. of it. Yeah. And there's a lot of advantages. What didn't we talk about that I should have asked you? What's on your mind lately? You know what's on my mind and I know it's actually on yours too is stuff about hobbies and life and family. So I saw an interview around six months ago and it was Tony Robbins being interviewed by Alex Hormosey. And Alex put the video up and then killed it. And I think he killed it because Tony kind of out alphaed him. And it was kind of sad. I thought Tony was a little bit rude and a little bit too much. And he kind of got Alex on the fact. Alex had said something to the effect of, I've kind of lost my passion and my purpose, and I'm not having as much fun running the business anymore. And Tony said, well, you don't have kids,

and you don't really have any hobbies. Oh, he's pregnant. They're pregnant. And now they're pregnant. And I think that's going to be a big shift for Alex and Leland now. They went to an event of mine 10 years ago. Their CEO was one of the first members of the CEO alliance. I think now that he's going to have a child coming,

it's going to be a quantum shift for him and his business will do even better because he'll start to develop something else besides just being the best of running a business. It doesn't have any direct reports. I talked to him the other day. He called me. Nobody doesn't have a lot of hobbies either. And you and I have talked about that as like, you'd F work.

Like, what do you love to do? What you love to do when you were at 12? So think about Dan Martel for a second. We're both friends. He lives. I've been friends with Dan for probably 16 years now. I've known Dan since before they had kids for a long, long time. We were in a couple of masterminds together.

We've traveled together. I went heli-skiing with him this January. Dan heli skiskees. He does snowboating, snowboating, or snowboating. biking. He does jet skiing. He does wakeboarding. He goes hiking. He traveled around the world last year with his wife and kids. He's into fitness. What else is he into? He's into cars. He's got a lot of hobbies. And he's obsessed about growing his business. Yeah. But business is not his hobby. His hobbies are his hobbies. Business might be a passion. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to get some balance back

in their lives again because at the end of the day, the only metric that I'm completely convinced I know for sure is true is the death rate is still 100%. Yeah. Well, for every other metric is variable. For at least the next 10 years. Yeah. Truth. You know, so Alex called me the other day.

This was a couple weeks ago and he said, hey, dude, I just want to apologize. He goes, I know we're supposed to do a podcast four years ago. The person introduced you as a scumbag and I hate him and I associated you with him. won't go into who it was. But he's like, can you just, can we kick it for an hour and just bullshit over Zoom? He's great. And he's asked, he goes, one third of my people that come in are home service. He goes, I just got a lot of questions for you.

You could ask me anything. He was very transparent with me. School's killing it. His school thing. Huge. I love school. And, you know, I was like, does he own that or own part of it? I'm pretty sure he owns it.

It's such a good platform. And he goes, what did he tell me? He goes, he says, he's, He said something along the lines of, you know, all the things that I do all over social media. He goes, there's a lot of things that come out of it. He goes, I get a lot of clientele and whatnot. But he goes, I got access. Everyone takes my phone calls.

They answer now. He goes, but Tommy, he goes, we're shutting down 20 fraud accounts. So much, I got my lawyers all over the place. Just a really interesting guy. And look, I give him a lot of credit because he's maintained the same personality as T-shirt. you know, he's who he is, and I like that. And he's, and the other thing. But he's, but he's on tilt.

He needs to get some hobbies. Yeah, 100%. He needs to have his kids. And that'll build a better human and a happier human. Elon is on tilt. Elon's very strange how much, I mean, the dude is like. I first met him 27 or 37, 37 years ago. I met him in 1997, so whatever that is.

And then I was a reference for them in 95, then I formally met him in 97. Oh, 20, yeah, no, 29. Yeah. He's on tilt. He's not happy. So you don't have to be unhappy to build a successful business. Richard Branson is happy. Dan Martel is happy. You've got hobbies and passions. I'm happy. I mean, I just interviewed the number one guy that teaches, of course, at Yale or Harvard, Harvard. Unhappiness. And he said happiness. Tommy, literally, he's like breathing techniques. He's like all that stuff. I just did a fire around with. him on my cold plunge sauna red light and he's like but here's a thing he's like happiness is is a choice yeah and for most people i mean i do believe like that that there's really just chemical imbalances but i'm just like look i love i really do enjoy my life i got a lot going on right now i got a lot of things to be excited for but i'm like man i'm like man i am living like i would who would trade their places i i can't really think of a whole lot of people

that wouldn't trade place with me because it's not a fake happiness. You know, once you're famous, like really famous, I wouldn't want to be Tom Cruise. Like, I'm peeing at a urinal and a guy wants to get a picture of me. Like, I don't know if I want that. Yeah. I'll talk a little bit about happiness. My dad said years ago that happiness and life is not about getting all the best cards.

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well. And there is an example of a person who grew up on the story. street who crushed it in life, a person with no arms and no legs who crushed it in life, a person with, you know, a disease that crushed it in life, people can choose to be unhappy or they can choose to be happy, right? I have a friend of mine in Vancouver, Canada, David Ash, who won a massive award for the entrepreneur's organization. He was the social enterprise winner of the, he sold this company for over $100 million, 15 or 20 years ago. And then bought a bunch of properties in Vancouver and donated them to the city as a place to get single

moms and drug addicts off the street so that they could restart their lives. And I said, Dave, what was your reason for doing that? And he goes, you don't know my backstory. I'm like, no, I just know you built this huge company and sold it for $100 million in like 98. God, 30 years ago, crazy. That was a lot of money in $98, $100 million, a lot of money. And I said, well, what's your backstory? He said, my mom was a heroin addict. And my grandmother was a heroin addict and a prostitute. His mom was prostrate as well. He said, I didn't know my dad. I don't even know if my mom knows my dad. And I didn't go to school until grade four because we lived on the street. And I want to take people off the street. Now, if somebody like that can, like not going to school until grade four,

it's like, shut the fuck up, right, with all your excuses and why your area is different, your business is different, you're back. Happiness is a choice, success is a choice. Learning is a choice. Most people won't put in the work. The ones who do will be successful. I love it. You know, real quick, I just want to point something out because I had to do some quick math. I think of life in doubles. And the rule of seven says it 10% my money will double.

That's a pretty safe bet. Yeah. $100 million doubles in seven years to $200, 14 years to $400. 21 years to $800. 28 years, it becomes $1.6 billion. And that's just letting, that's not it. That's not very aggressive, 10%. I mean, S&P's better than that.

I looked at the buildings that he donated in in Vancouver to the city and what he's worth. Yeah. And that's that's like, I mean, I just talked to a buddy who sold this company three years ago. He goes, dude, I pretty much put all the money into SpaceX. He bought it for $12 a share. SpaceX? SpaceX. It came out at 135, 165.

Yeah. Now it's over 200. I have six allocations in SpaceX. My initial allocation was February 2024. I got another one in March, 2024. See, that's, that's killing it. And those are going to be a lot more. But I also have two in Anthropic and I have two in open-A-I.

My anthropic ones are going to be big. You know what? This is what I've been talking to my investment committees about is like, I want to find those. I want them. And I got access through Goldman and Earl Lynch and some of these other places. So last thing I want to say about this happiness instructor is I talked to about Dan Thurman off balance on purpose. And I go, everybody wants their balance. Like they want to balance life.

And I go, that's bullshit. You got seasons of life. But I said, he goes, Tommy. you know, in a perfect world, I wrote down my life of what I wanted to look like in three years. And he goes, Tommy, he was 160 hours in a week.

He goes, to live the life that I wanted in three years, I would need 300 hours in a week. He goes, because I got kids, I'm super proud of my kids. He goes, so I built, and this is going to sound really bad, he said, but I said, I built the life that was good enough. Because there's so much, yes,

I would be praying every day, making sure I'm building a house in heaven. I'd be working out, I'd be a seven-body fat. You know, doing breath, I'd be doing all of it. I'd be going and writing books. Yeah. And he goes, but he goes, it sounds really bad.

It just sounds almost negative that it's a good enough life. But that's what I had to build. So here's my analogy. Picture kind of a circle, like a big huge disc, like something like this table, but a lot bigger with an elephant standing on it. It would be kind of going like this, right? Wobbly, trying to keep its balance. That's our life.

And our life is understanding the key point. on the circle and how can we get some of them a little bit better, but going like this. So my key points are things like my fitness, my faith, my finances, my friends, my family, right? Fun. Fun. And then future self. Those are my six. Okay. So now think about, okay, so for your fun, where would you rate yourself on a scale of one to 10 for fun? And every month or two, give ourselves a rating and then pick a couple areas this month to work more on. So right now I'm deep the finance stuff. I'm really working hard on the business stuff. But in two weeks, my wife and I head off to Europe again, we go back into the fun side. We go back into the family side or the,

right, we're doing work on sexuality. Like, so we're doing stuff, bucket list stuff. But this, this week, I'm not doing any bucket list stuff. So I just try to stay cognizant of those six to eight areas of my life and then always be working on a couple of them and let the other one slide a little bit. But I'm not going to let my fitness slide for eight, 10 months, right? I course correct. You know, I got a question. You're a mentor to your kids, to a lot of business owners. And I have mentors too.

And you're married. And I think what do they say? Men are from ours of women love the penis. Women are from penis. Might have to scratch it out. Or keep it. You know, the thing is about women is they just want to be heard. Yeah.

And you can't give them the answers, even though you're like, I got the fucking answer. Yeah. Like this is, you cut that bitch off and you tell her no more. You know what I mean? They'll be telling me a story, Bree. And, you know, my mom, my aunt, my grandma, it's like, and I sit there in the room with women. And I'm like, do we have anything to be happy about? And men are more like, did you see the hockey game let's go play?

Like, I know what it's like because I was a little boy with the family of women. Yeah. So, and you're a mentor. You've got advice. Yeah. You've been through a lot. You've got a lot of life experience. So how do you deal?

With your wife, she's a bit younger. Mine's 15, almost 16 years younger. Yeah, mine's 20. I was at an event two weeks ago called Rhythmia. I did a seven-day ayahuasca journey down in Costa Rica, working with Shaman, 60 people on the property. And on the last night, one of the women was losing it, not even on ayahuasca, the night after ayahuasca.

She had a bit of a psychotic meltdown in a good way. We were there to really go deep, and she was going. and the rest of the people in the room we were doing a meditation in a breathwork session were kind of freaked out by it and one of the guys went over Brad and sat in front of her

and he goes, can we go outside? I just want to hear you and she stopped and kind of went yeah. He goes, I just want to hear you. Let's go outside.

And she goes, okay. And he walked outside with her and he goes, can I hug you first? And he hugged her. And she just collapsed. And then she talked through everything that she was kind of ranting about in this breathwork session.

And when she finished talking, she goes, no one's ever really heard me before. He goes, I just wanted to hear you. I was like, dude, how did you know how to do that? He said, I learned it from a marriage coach. I've been trying it with my wife. Wow. It's really fucking hard, man. It is hard.

It's hard. But it's equally hard for them when they ask us a question, like, how is your day? And we go, it was good. It's hard for them to go, what's he hiding or what's he not saying or what's really there? not. We're just, so our job as men is to learn how to speak women and how to learn women, and our job is to remember that they're still trying to learn us too. That's pretty profound. It's true, right? And at the end of the day, we're all just walking each other home.

None of this shit really matters. Yeah. It's also the same with some of our employees. They're still trying to learn how to speak Tommy. And Tommy's trying to learn how to speak Luke or Fred or Cody or whatever. Yeah, we did a personality test one day. and Brian Davenport was like the odd man out and this matrix he was like the only one

and he the instructor it was the predictive index and he goes Tommy he goes you are he overlapped my personality with this he goes we're identical like identical and he goes so I can speak to you about this right he goes Brian you work your ass

off for a month you work your ass off and I mean you go to war you're putting in 14 hour days you walk into Tommy's office, you show him, you want to show him an hour because you work so hard at this. Tommy's got five minutes for you. And he says, great job. Or he says, great job. I don't care.

Yeah. And he goes, now, Tommy, you need to give him 15, 20 minutes. Brian, you need to learn that you guys are opposites. So Tommy, you got to come here to meet him and you got to come here to understand Tommy. So he has to come in and speak faster in an executive summary bullet points. And you have to be able to say anything else you want to share? And by the way, I need to stay off my mind. my cell phone and not distracted and actually say this is great.

I find myself in Brian's office this morning. Do you know what the biggest gift you can give Luke? Because Luke is probably a very high fact finder. He likes to ask a lot of questions to start projects. The biggest gift you can give him is to say, any other questions on that? Yeah. On that great idea that you have that you've been thinking about for a week or a month. Oh, he knows out of poke holes and things.

I think his job is the professional poke holes in things. Correct. You guys have learned how to, you've learned that men are from Mars, women, or from Venus with each You've learned how to speak CEO, and he's learned how to speak CEO. It's a critical skill. Well, he's been very patient with me. He's been giving me a lot of compliments. I mean, we've been in a lot of meetings, and I try to make sure to people to understand

how much he's grown. And he's committed to- You're shining a spotlight on each other. Well, look, I'm not doing it for any other reason, but it's the truth. You know what a good hack is for things like predictive index or disc or Colby or any of the personality profiles? Take yours and just say, here's my predictive index profile. write it in and then take somebody else on your team say here's their predictive index profile

throw in a clod put it into clod and say give me a one pager put it in grade six english give me like teach me how to work better together how to collaborate where we're going to drive each other and it's like give me a one pager on how we can help each other but do it as like again do it as a one pageer in grade six english it's so good you know what i'm going to do i'm going to get which one do you like the most by the way you can do that with your wife oh god here's breese personality Here's my personality profile. Teach me how to be a better husband and wife. Here's...

So what's the best one out of all of them? They're different. There's no best. You learn something different from all of them. From Colby, you learn how someone starts or initiates projects. The love languages, you learn how they need to be praised. They're very different.

Do you know you can actually map love languages at work as well? There's color. Right, there's colors. Yeah, there's five languages in the workplace. Right, exactly. Well, you can take that test for free if you buy the book. Yeah, I've, I've probably done about 12 or 13 different personality profiles.

And every year I used to get my executive team to do another one. And then we would pay a consultant to come in and do what Claude can now do. Take a look at my profile and their profile and teach me how to work better. Take a look at my profile and their profile. Teach me how to learn. That's really, really smart. I got a lot of notes. Probably too many notes.

But it's, I love doing these podcasts because, man, we could jam out for five hours. And it's interesting. And I respect you a lot. So that makes it much better because I work with you. Thank you. You know, I get on some of the people and I'll tell you, like, I enjoy most of them. But some of the time I'm like, dude, what the fuck? It's like, it's like dragging out things.

And it's like, sometimes it's bad advice. And I'm like, I don't agree with that. But, you know, this is a podcast you live and learn and not everything I need to agree with. But, man, what I love that you do is you've got a story for everything. And stories are like the basis of human beings. It's like I was in. They're also the basis for gray hair. Yeah.

You're a world traveler. You know, it's hard because we got two dogs. We got Huckleberry and Finn. And I'll tell you. There's lots of people that travel with their dogs. Oh, no, no. And trust me, it's easier to find private now. But, you know, we're talking about our honeymoon.

And it's going to be two weeks. We're talking about this four seasons where you fly to different cities and it's an adventure. And all I can think about today, because she wants to talk about it tonight. And this just sounds really bad because I don't have any kids yet, but those are my kids. You should see. They're almost like, you've met them, but they're almost like humans. There are also people who will come and take care of your dogs for a couple of weeks at your home. There's professional. Oh, I've got great people. I mean, Ashley, that's part of her job description.

Oh, cool. So listen, Cam, you've written a lot of books. You want to just run through the books you've written real quick so people know. Yeah, double, double, vivid vision, meeting suck. Yeah, double, vivid vision, meeting suck, free PR. I co-authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs with Hal Elrod. And then I wrote The Second in Command, which is probably my best book of all time. and then the last one I co-authored with my assistant, Meredith Kubah, has been with me for 10 years. We co-authored Grandma's Business Secrets. And it's all of the grandmother. Can that come out?

Yeah, it came out in January. It's all of the little sayings that Grandma said that we know to be true and how do you apply them to business. I'll give you a couple examples. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Right? If it's not broke, don't fix it. A baker's dozen. Like, how do you apply a baker's, do you know what a baker's dozen is?

No. So a baker's dozen was back in the, the 40s, 50s, 60s, you'd go to the baker to buy 12 croissants and you'd come home and you'd take, and you'd like, that's weird. There's 13. The baker, the nice baker always put an extra one in to wow the customer. That was a baker's dozen. So how do you wow your customers at A1 garage? You give them a little extra. What's the, what's the free prize inside? What's the little extra? Well, Robert Cudini talks about this. Correct. So that's, give him like a buyer's guy. Give him a price. Something. So that's a grandmother is.

is the free prize inside. So we took 60 sayings that we know to be true. And then we wrote a one pager on how do we actually apply that to business. That's cool. Yeah. We close this out. Business isn't difficult. We make it difficult.

It is. The core principles, if you just stick to them and just, we may get complicated. Like, I'll give you an example. I just walked in the Luke's office before this meeting. And I said,

look, I'm going to go talk to every realtor. I want to take this on personally because I know all the major realtors. We're just going to do it in Phoenix. The ones that matter that I have a huge social. media. The designers, I know all the designers, I know all the architects. I'm just going to tell them your next 10 doors. We're going to do it at cost. I love this. At cost, that includes our labor fee. Love this. But you're going to, we're going to have A1 driving up. I'm going to do an interview with you. And he goes, let's do it, dude. We did that with all the home makeover shows on television. Yeah. When TV was a big thing, we were on all the home makeover shows. And we would donate free junk removal as long as they would show our trucks in the in the episodes. Yeah. It's powerful. Close us out, brother. I mean, how do people get a hold of you?

How do people get in that leadership class? Yeah, go check out, invest in your leaders.com. That's where all those skills are. It's only $350 a person. I was telling a CEO one day, he said, well, if I invest in my people and they quit. Yeah, what happens if you don't invest in them and they stay, right? There's a cost of that. Go to Cameron Herald.com.

It's H-E-R-O-L-D. It's got links for my course, my books, my speaking, podcast. It's all there. Cool. Finally, just close us out whatever is on your mind of. Maybe we didn't talk about it. It's that none of this shit matters. Death rates 100%.

Let's enjoy the journey. Enjoy it. That's exactly what the happiness guy said. He said, just enjoy it. You got to enjoy it. Everyone thinks, man, if I got this, if I get this many followers, if I get this, then I'll be happy. I think as well, let's make sure that we help our people enjoy it too. Yeah.

Like that dream manager, because their lives are tough too. And if we care about them more than we care about our business goals, they'll go through brick walls to build the company. Very powerful. I appreciate you being in here. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Great seeing you.

Thanks.