From $1M to $100M w/ the CEO Whisperer

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Welcome to the I Am Charles Schwartz Show. In this episode, we're diving deep into the world of exponential business growth with Cameron Harreld, the mastermind behind some of the most explosive company expansions in recent history.

With a track record of scaling businesses from millions to hundreds of millions in revenue, Cameron has unlocked the secret to turning entrepreneurial dreams into empire-building realities.

From coaching Kimball Musk to scaling 1-800, got junk from 2 million to 106 million in just six years. Cameron's journey is a blueprint for business acceleration.
He's navigated economic downturns, technological revolutions, and emerged as a beacon of strategic innovation, all while maintaining a laser focus on leadership development and company culture. In this conversation, Cameron unveils his playbook for business domination.
He reveals why most entrepreneurs are stuck in the hustle trap and how shifting your focus from doing to leading can catapult your company to new heights. You'll discover why your company culture is your ultimate competitive advantage and how crafting a vivid vision can align your entire organization for unprecedented growth.
So if you're ready to transform your business from a struggling startup to a scaling success story, grab your notepad and prepare to revolutionize your approach to entrepreneurship. Cameron's insights are practical, paradigm shifting, and packed with actionable strategies that could redefine your business trajectory.
The show starts now. Welcome to the I Am Charles Schwartz Show, where we don't just discuss success, we show you how to create it.
On every episode, we uncover the strategies and tactics that turn everyday entrepreneurs into unstoppable powerhouses in their businesses and their lives. Whether your goal is to transform your life or hit that elusive seven, eight, or nine figure mark, we've got the blueprint to get you there.
The show starts now. All right, welcome back to the show.
This is one of those that I'm just unbelievably excited about. We have people who have gone in and scaled, you know, seven figures, maybe eight, but this is someone who's done this for nine-figure organizations.
I can't tell you how excited I am to have you on the show. Welcome to the show.
Charles, thanks so much. I appreciate this.
For the audience that don't know who you are, and I know there's a bunch of stories that we want to get into. We were talking about before we got on camera.
Let's get the audience caught up. Who are you? What are you doing? Let's get them all caught up on this.
Wow. Who am I? I'm a Canadian.
They'll catch that probably in the first 12 sentences because they'll hit me with some like out or about or a or something I'll say. So I'm Canadian.
I was groomed as an entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur.
Both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs and they raised my brother, my sister, and myself to all be entrepreneurs. We've all been running our own companies for between 20 and 25 years.
When I was 20 years old, I had my first 12 employees in a company that I started. I was running a house painting business.
I was painting six simultaneous homes at the same time throughout the summer. So I learned basically how to run a business at quite a young age, like a real serious business.
Since then, I had opened the West Coast of the United States for the largest house painting company in the world. It was called College Pro Painters.
Back in 1993, I recruited, hired, and trained Kimball Musk, who's Elon's younger brother. I was a reference for Elon and Kimball in their first round of fundraising in January of 1995 for Zip2.
So that was way before Tesla, way before PayPal. That was the first time I met Elon was in 95.
Their cousin, Peter Rive, who built SolarCity, was also an employee of mine that I trained and coached him. By 1993, I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs.
And that was when business coaching was just starting. The International Federation of Coaches and Coach U started in 1993.
And over the four years prior, I'd already coached 120 real companies. So I've been in the business coaching space since before it was littered with business coaches.
From there, I opened up a chain of collision repair shops. A family friend called me up.
He had seven auto body shops and asked me if I'd come on as a partner and open up the franchise business for them. We took it to 65 locations in four years.
It's now called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States. It's called Boyd Auto Body in Canada.
It's about a $2 billion revenue, legit largest collision repair chain in the world. I left there in 1998 and I was hired as the president of a private currency company.
We built that company up and sold it two years later for 64 million to a US public company. We were doing what Bitcoin is doing today, but we did it 25 years ago.
We had 30,000 companies in the US and Canada buying and selling using a digital currency that we created that was backed by nothing other than their promise to accept it within our economy. we had Starwood Hotels, Avis Rent-A-Car, Budget Rent-A-Car, Bose Stereo, Hard Rock Cafe, the Olympics, all using our digital currency instead of the US dollar.
So that was 24 years ago now, which is insane. And then I joined my best friend, Brian, who had started up a company called The Rubbish Boys.
And he asked me if I'd come on and start coaching him. He'd just converted the name over and i joined brian as the 14th employee at a company called 1-800-got-junk he'd taken 11 years to get to 2 million in revenue and then i came on as the chief operating officer and six and a half years later we were at 106 million in revenue so 11 years to go from zero to two million six and a half to go from two million to 106 million.
And I was the chief operating officer during that growth. Left there 17 years ago.
And since then, I've published six books. I've been paid to speak in 29 countries and on every single continent, including getting paid to speak in Antarctica three years ago.
I had no desire to be a business author or writer. And then I started up an online course called Invest in Your Leaders.
It's being used all over the world. And I also started a mastermind community called the COO Alliance, which is a large community globally of second and commands.
So that's kind of some of the background, I guess. So basically you've done absolutely a lot.
And it's, you know. Yeah, I'm slow.
I'm also a dad. I'm a father.
I'm a father of two boys, 21 and 23, husband, happily married, and my wife and I are global nomads. We sold everything three years ago.
We've been traveling around the world for three years. You were talking about that, kind of your flex.
I want to get into it before I forget it. Let's talk about this flex that you and your wife are up to right now.
It's really interesting. I want to go back to when I was 16 to kind of explain the flex.
I mean, we've all seen it on Facebook and on, you know, Instagram. I think the first was probably Tai Lopez.
Like here I am with my Ferrari or my Lambo in my garage. Right.
And then Tai's by the way, genius. Like he's literally world-class at analytics of data and marketing, you know, but then it's now become like everybody in their Lambo.
And then here I am in my private jet. It's like, fuck, who cares? Like at the end of the day, when you die, none of this shit matters.
So when I was 16, my dad took me to our, our golf course in Canada. And we were members of this private club.
It was actually the first mastermind community that I really remember being in other than scouting. Um, he, he, he put us into this private club to meet all of the other successful people in our city.
But we were at the golf course one day at 12 o'clock to go golfing on a Wednesday. And he started showing me all the people walking in to play golf.
And it was like, that's Bruce McCullough. He owns a car dealership and that's Tom Ford.
And he owns, you know, this accounting company and that's Carol. She owns a law firm.
And he was explaining all the people walking in who, who all these people were. And every single one of them was an entrepreneur.
And he didn't say anything else other than that. And we went out and played our 18 holes of golf.
And we came back and we were sitting on the balcony and I'm eating my typical fries and gravy and my cherry Coke and my dad's having a burger. And, and he, he starts showing me all the people coming into the golf course at five o'clock on a Wednesday, you know, and this is like, you know, sunsets around 10 o'clock in June and he's showing me all the people coming into the golf course at five o'clock on a Wednesday.
And this is like, sunsets around 10 o'clock in June. And he's showing me all the people coming in at 5 p.m.
And he's like, he works for a car dealership. He works for an accounting firm.
He's a teacher. He's a minor.
And he said, do you know the difference between everybody showing up to play golf now and everybody that came up 12 o'clock? And I said, everybody that came to play golf at 12 o'clock owns their own business. And my dad said, the number one reason you want to be an entrepreneur is so you can do what you want, when you want, without anybody having to give you permission.
And he said, and if you focus on all the free time and all the fun and all the stuff that makes life worth living, all the money will follow. So that began my entrepreneurial journey of realizing that One quick example, even that summer, all of my friends were caddying and they were spending four and a half hours hauling golf bags around the golf course and getting paid virtually a fixed wage.
What I would do is go and park myself at the bottom of the 13th hill on the 13th hole, there was this hill and I'd put a lawn chair there under an umbrella and I would run bags up and down the hill and collect tips. And I was making four times what my friends were making because I was kind of running my own business and I did it when I wanted to.
So it just began that entrepreneurial journey. So I joke about it now saying that my Lambo flex is that my wife and I have been to 54 countries in the last three years with no real reason to stop.
And I think that's what it's really about. Honestly, being able to have control of that time, because one of the things everyone hunts after, as someone who's already made it into those eight, nine figure environments and done these massive scales, is you'll find out that the most important thing you have that you'll never make more of is time.
I spent eight years in the hospice watching people die. It's all about time.
And most people don't know how to scale the way you have, or you've even remotely seen it. They've read about it.
You're someone who's done it. What are some of the things that as people get into this, as you're talking to other chief operating officers, when you're sitting with the COO saying, Hey, we want to emulate what you've done.
There's some important things. What are the massive mistakes they've done? And then what are the simple pivots they can do? So I think back to Jim Collins in the book, Good to Great, one of his concepts was about the flywheel, right? It was becoming that monomaniac with a mission.
And if you just found one thing that if you kept putting all of your focus on that one thing, it would create the momentum and the momentum would create momentum and that momentum would create growth. I think so often entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial companies, leadership team members, they're very distracted.
And now we're more distracted than ever since 2007 with the advent of social media. We're just bombarded with things and opportunities and stuff we could be doing.
But it's not necessarily going to propel the organization. So I'll tell the story back to 1-800-GOT-JUNK, even though it's a 20-year-old story now.
In the first two or three weeks I was there, I said to Brian, there's three things we have to do. The number one is we have to raise our prices by about 40%.
And everybody in the company, the other 13 people thought I was crazy. They're like, we're going to go bankrupt.
I'm like, we're going bankrupt anyway. Brian's not making money, franchisesisees aren't making money, guys in the trucks.
Nobody's making money. So we're going to charge more so that we can afford to actually scale like we want to.
So being that premium price product, focusing on, do I understand the P&L and budgeting and cashflow? If you don't focus on the numbers, none of this stuff matters. No great marketing, nothing matters.
So focus around numbers and profitability. Second was we had to build slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion.
I wanted to get into that zone of a cult. And if we could get that culture where our super happy employees were super engaged and were really having fun and they were really focused and really felt valued and really felt loved, they would take care of our customers.
Most companies focus on revenue and profitability and customer success. I focused on employee engagement, like the employee net promoter score first, knowing that everything else would come from that.
So we built a cult so much so that we actually had tours of our office in Vancouver, Canada, virtually every Friday for four years, we'd have 20 to 35 business people on a Friday coming at 1030 for a 90 minute tour of our company. And that was because we were getting so much press about our culture.
And that helped us with growth. It helped us with recruiting.
It helped us with retention. It helped us with engagement.
We got press from it. And that led to number three was we had no money for marketing.
So we decided to go after free public relations, free PR, which is one of the six books I wrote. And we decided to start reaching out to, there were no podcasts back then, but we reached out to magazine writers and TV show hosts.
We were on Oprah, major newspapers. We landed 5,200 stories about the company within six years prior to Facebook even launching.
So we had nowhere to even amplify the press, but we were able to generate all this momentum and all this focus and all this free coverage that led to the credibility that once we had marketing dollars, we could take over the market. So it was focusing on those critical few things.
I love that you pointed out that if you're going to build a culture, you have to understand it starts with the first four letters, which is cult. And you need to build the cult in your org.
What are some of the practical step-by-steps? Because we've heard it a thousand times, but getting it directly from someone who's done it, what are the things where we can do it? Okay. So there's a few things.
One is you have to get rid of the assholes, right? You have to get rid of the cultural cancers that are inside that are putting the wrong energy into the cult. So we actually trained all of our franchisees in the movie, the secret.
We made them watch it twice. We've made our franchisees watch it twice.
We cannot come out and say, Hey, it's a little cheesy. It's a little bit materialistic, but understand quantum mechanics and energy.
And if we can bring in more of this positive energy, the like attracting like that momentum will, will be created. So that was one, or I guess to get rid of the cultural cancers, understand quantum mechanics.
We started to brand everything, right? We had like the names on our rooms were branded. In fact, I was in a client that I coached here 12 years ago in his office in Kelowna, British Columbia the other day, and he was showing me all his boardrooms and they all had names, but there were no names on the glass windows.
I'm like, say, put the names up, like brand these things so that people remember it. And they're reminded of it.
Like, and then create acronyms, right? Create these. So any of the little sayings and the acronyms and the phrases, they become part of the vernacular, part of the way that we do it.
We used to call it the 1-800-GOT-JUNK-WAY. And every time you brand something, it's kind of like the insiders have secrets and other people don't know what you're talking about.
So those branding of things, like if I say the 10 commandments, people want to go, Oh, what are the 10 commandments? Right. Even if you're in another religion, you kind of want to what's inside that religion.
Well, that's cult. Um, and then it was all around like making sure that we stirred the Kool-Aid, you know, that we didn't focus on results all the time.
We didn't focus on metrics all the time. We focused on keeping people happy, keeping people engaged, keeping people having fun.
I think those would probably be some of the keys. Culture is not about the perks.
It's not the free massages and the free lunches. Those are perks.
The other thing that really drives culture, there's three. One is an alignment with a vivid vision, right? I call it that four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like in the future.
One of my bestselling books ever is called Vivid Vision. And it's how a CEO describes what their company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future so that everyone in the company, employees, suppliers, shareholders, accountants, lawyers, they can all see what you can see and And they're all going in that same direction.
So it's alignment with a vivid vision. Second is alignment with core values.
Again, that's firing the people that don't live the core values, recruiting and hiring people that already live the core values. You know, they asked Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? He said, we hire happy people, right? So hire people that already live your core values, and then you don't have to train anybody on them.
They're already showing up that way. So it's that obsession about core values, the alignment with core values.
The four or the third is the BHAG, that big, hairy, audacious goal, right? The crush Adidas or democratize the world's information or democratize air travel or put a computer on every desktop. My BHAG is for Vivid Visions to replace vision statements worldwide so that culture is permeated when you have an obsession with that long 20-year stretch.
And then the fourth is the core purpose, right? What's the Simon Sinek kind of why we exist as an organization? Everybody knows Simon Sinek and his book, Start With Why. What they don't know is Simon used to sleep on my couch.
Simon actually worked at 1-800-GOT-JUNK in our marketing group for about a year, helping us as a consultant. He was on our board of advisors for a year, five years before he wrote the book, Start With Why.
So we understood this idea with core purpose and how to have it permeate through the organization. My core purpose today is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen.
It's why I say yes to your show and why I said no to two other podcasts yesterday and today was they're not aligned with entrepreneurs. One was very kind of corporate.
One was like government agency stuff. I'm like, yeah, not worth my time.
But for me, it's a full body F yes, when it's anything to do with helping entrepreneurs. So that's where culture permeates is an obsession and alignment with that kind of a stuff.
So, and all that is tremendous. And I hope everybody's taking notes.
One of the things that, that goes in as entrepreneurs is this idea that it's for lack of a better term, it's hustle porn. It's the idea that I'm going to get up at four o'clock in the morning.
I'm going to work out nine times. I'm going to have 15 meetings.
Oh, wait, it's 10 o'clock. I need to work out 75 times more.
You're clearly at a different place. And you've clearly always been at the different place.
Even if it's watching your friends on the golf course, do one thing while you're running bags up. How do you teach entrepreneurs or especially COOs to say, listen, there is a balance here.
There is a more effective way to execute. How do you get into their head and how do you get them to pivot? One of my biggest curses or things that hurt me in the world and in business was I was kind of emotionally abused by the school system for 18 years.
From kindergarten until the end of university, I was told to sit still and pay attention and try harder. And if I only focused harder, if I only worked harder, I could be as good as everybody else.
And intuitively I knew I'm not wired this way. I don't get it.
It's boring. None of this shit matters.
I had a business and I'm only in grade six. Like this didn't make any sense to me.
So I kind of started to ignore the work hard mantra, the Protestant work ethic.

And what I decided to do is find the cheat sheets.

I decided to work smart.

I decided to kind of hack the system from a very young age.

I realized that the teacher would tell me what was going to be on the test if I would

merely ask them, what should I study on?

What should I focus?

I could find prior tasks.

I could find the actual copy of the test in his office when he was out at lunch. Like I did lots of stuff to figure out the system.
Um, but what I didn't do was be the fly trying to bang my head on the window all day. You know, we've all seen the fly trying to get out the window and they're going to work hard.
They're going to keep banging their head on the window. They're going to work hard.
They end up dead on the windowsill. I didn't want to work that hard because I was too busy doing other things.
And I also realized there was a door that if I just turned and went out the door, I was free. So I always looked for the shortcut.
I always looked for the cheat sheet. And I think that was what made me so successful in franchising was I developed systems that were easily usable by kind of the worst franchisee in the worst market, in the worst weather, and they could actually system so i would dumb down the system so that everybody and that's how i see my business too so i think while so many businesses are as you put it like that working hard and doing everything and grinding it out and getting up early i'm like pause think be strategic what's going to drive that flywheel what can I leverage? Even while you and I are doing this interview right now, I have a second camera that's here that films in 1080p that's getting me B-roll coverage from the left side.
So my team can actually take your content, strip it so that I can have answers and I can actually use this on my YouTube channel. that gets stripped and placed into my social media.
I never do one thing for the purpose of one thing. So I say yes to being on your show, but I don't say yes to being on just your show.
I say yes, because, oh, I can get 17 different things from this. It can be pulled into blog content, stripped images.
So I think strategically about working on the critical few things. And then how can I get leverage off those few things? And I think most people are so busy working hard that they miss all of those extra opportunities.
You talked about, you know, the Protestant way of doing things, you know, work really, really hard. And there's this, and it talks about the idea of a syphilis, which is a passcode that they would use in culture.
And there's certain syphilis that work, these passcodes. And the minute you said systems, all of a sudden I was like, oh, thank God he gets it.
I've always talked about this for years. Systems will set you free and people don't understand the difference between a system and a process.
They're vastly, vastly different things. When people are going for, and they've lived in a culture where they've taught them, you're not supposed to hack the system.
The idea that you need to know how to walk on water versus let's find where the rocks are so you can jump to jump. What are some of the things now where as you get people to understand, yeah, working hard is not going to get me there.
I'm never going to get there by working hard. How are the ways that I can hack the system? What are the tools that you've started to use? You know, because everyone heard of OPM and OPT, other people's time and other people's money, we get that.
But what are the things that you can use on a practical level where someone's like, Hey, I've been, I've been into hustle porn for so long. I've just been a grinder.
I'm burning out. How can I start hacking weight? What are some of the tools you use on a daily basis? Well, and I know some people are watching and some are listening.
The people that are listening can't see me sitting here laughing to myself. The reason I'm laughing is when you said you have to hop from rock to rock.
i flashed back to a year ago my wife and i were in iceland on this crazy eight hour hike and we were way off in the middle of nowhere we were hiking across a glacial stream i mean it was glacial that you could see the glacier and then we were hiking and it was like 12 feet across and we couldn't get our shoes wet so we had to take our shoes off and hike across 12 feet barefoot and we were going stone to to stone. And I was like, this is so effing cold.
I was dying. I'm like, sometimes you really got to focus on that system, man, because you missed that system and you're dead.
So again, for me, it was about the cheat sheets. I would look to simplify the system.
I learned it when I was 20. I bought a franchise at 20 years old of a house painting company called College Pro Painters, where I was awarded a franchise.
And they handed me a 330-page operations manual. Realized that the systems that they put in there were for my benefit.
They weren't forcing me to do anything. And yes, if I followed those systems, I'd do more revenue and they'd make more money.
But if I did more revenue, I'd make more profit. And I was so scared of failing that I just memorized the system and I did what they did.
And then I recognized something that I now called interdependence, that I'm dependent enough that if a system exists, I'll follow up, but I'm independent enough. I'm entrepreneurial enough that if there's no system, I'll figure one out quickly and I'll run with it.
I try to document, I was coaching a CEO about this the other day on his company. It's about a $50 million company.
I was working with their team on developing some, some systems. And I said, if you can't document a system on a post-it note, like a simple, like two inch by two inch post-it note, you're not thinking clearly enough, right? You don't need like to, to, to process map this thing on a whiteboard for six days,

like just knock it out so that the, the newest employee, who's the least trained employee in

the hardest day that they're having at the worst, you know, period of their life can follow a

system. And then how can we actually create systems that can remove people from the process?

I'll give an example of this speeding in, in virtually everywhere in the world

is a terrible system. They have speed limit signs.
They have police with cameras. They've got

Thank you. speeding in in virtually everywhere in the world is a terrible system they have speed limit signs they have police with cameras they've got like fucking notifications on our cars beeping that we're going too quickly and then you go to a golf course you get in a golf cart and you know what you try to do when you go into the into the parking lot the car all of a sudden stops and goes like really really slow through the parking lot because it's got little rfid chip and chip and says, Hey, if you're in this zone, you can only go this fast.
The perfect system for saving lives on highways and saving car accidents and saving speeding and getting all the police off the road is put an RFID chip in every car. So the car, when it hits a certain speed zone can only go X speed period.
It's not complicated. Nobody wants to have the, but everyone wants to rely on people, right? So Michael Gerber, when he wrote the email, said people don't fail, systems fail.
I always look for the broken system and the missing system. And I'll give you one last story on this.
We as leaders often try to blame a person. Like, why did they do that wrong? Why did they miss this? Why did they screw that up? Or why is this broken? One of my mentors, and I mean, a serious mentor who was doing a one hour call with me every month for about two years.
And then every quarter, a full day in person, I would either go to their office or he would come to my office. He was being groomed as the COO at Starbucks.
This was back in 2004. So I'm effectively being groomed by the COO at Starbucks or incoming COO.
And he told me a story how when Howard Behar, who was, I think, the second CEO, after Howard Schultz, Howard Behar came in as CEO. And Howard Behar called Greg one day and said, Greg, why is the letter B on the sign at 50th or 45th in Wallingford in Seattle? Why is the letter B on that sign not working? And Greg said, I don't care.
And Howard goes,

what do you mean you don't care? Greg said, that's not the leadership question we should be asking. He said, the system question we need to ask is what system is missing that would ensure

that every letter on every sign at all of our locations is always working? He said, that's a

question I'll dig into, but I don't care why one sign has one letter out. And I think that's how

we need to approach problems in a company is what system is missing. Now we call it like the first

Thank you. He said, that's a question I'll dig into, but I don't care why one sign has one letter out.
And I think that's how we need to approach problems in a company is what system is missing.

Now we call it like the first principles, right? Like what system is missing or broken?

If we fix that system, it'll never happen again, right?

Why is a customer unhappy?

Let's fix the customer.

No, let's fix the system so that no customer becomes unhappy.

Right.

And I think it's that systems thinking, and that's kind of like the fly, you know, what's, what's that, that's just the way I think of things. And it's very different than most people think.
People want to just fix that one problem. They don't want to make systems that are automated to get them out of it.
You've mentioned, I have to think that way. I have to think that way.
Cause my ADD is so bad. I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder clinically diagnosed.
My exwife said if i was paying attention during testing it would have been 18 for 18. so i counter my i guess good i i counter my add with a lot of ocd systems i put these little systems in place to ensure that i don't screw up because i'm not never paying attention or i'm always on go simple example of this i'm in colonna british columbia where dan martell a really close friend of mine.
We've been friends for like 13 years. He runs a Tuesday morning hike up this mountain that's kind of right behind me.
And I always know that if I'm meeting them at 630 in the morning, I have to be out the house at six. I'm probably going to forget my water bottle.
So what I do the night before is I put my clothes out for the hike and then I put my water bottle and key beside the door. So I can't get out the door without grabbing my water bottle and the key without that little system.
I have to rely on me and a human isn't as reliable as the system is. Correct.
You're doing just attaching your key to the water bottle also really effective. One of the things I do is whenever I go somewhere and I have left over the house, actually, yeah, just attach it.
What I do when I go to people's houses and I don't want to forget the leftovers, I'll take my car key and I'll put it in the fridge or I'll put it in the bag with the food. My brother puts a car key in the freezer at anyone's home when he goes, because he'll always know it's in their freezer, right? So if he's using modern day remotes, the modern fobs, it'll stop working.
I learned this lesson the hard way. It freezes the battery and I'm sitting at the car going, damn it, it doesn't open.
So yeah, I'll ask my brother if he's, yeah, I'll ask him if he's changed that system to now. Yeah.
I usually put my keys in my shoe. So if I'm leaving someone's house, I know my keys are in the shoe.
But those are examples that as companies, we need to teach the leadership team to think that way. See, a leader's core job is to grow people.
Most entrepreneurs are so frozen in doing and in doing and busy, and they have a to-do list, and they forget that their to-do list doesn't have their name on it, right? If Bob is the entrepreneur, Bob can delegate everything on his to-do list, and Bob can spend more time being strategic, thinking, inspecting what he

expects, looking for the missing systems, looking for the broken systems, growing people's confidence, growing their skills. That's what we need to do more of as leaders.
So we need to remember that most managers, especially first-time, second-time managers, have never been exposed to this kind of thinking. And all we're doing is teaching them how to use ClickUp or how to use like Asana.
Forget that. That stuff comes later.
Teach them how to think and how to be leaders and then your company scales. Yeah.
I think it's so contrary to what everyone's taught because everyone goes through school and they just grind it through and they push through and they regurgitate information instead of systematizing it. And it's just so unbelievably toxic.
You've been mentored by some of the, some really big powerful people. You've had people underneath your command that are really, you know, have gone on and done amazing things.
You were 20 years ahead of Bitcoin when you were doing that. Where, what were some of the lessons outside of what you've gone over that you're like, that blew my mind.
Kind of those light switch moments where you're like, okay, I get it. I've got 17 of the 1880 D's.
When I saw this one, how I functionally did things. So I'll give you, there's a part A and a part B.
So if I go back to College Pro Painters, and I need to kind of illustrate this so that people understand the size, College Pro went on to become the largest residential house painting company on the planet. So amazingly, I was on the leadership team of the largest house painting company in the world, the largest collision repair chain in the world, and the largest junk removal company in the world, all from very early stages.
And actually the largest private currency in the world at the time. So College Pro, though, back in the 80s, every year had to go out and recruit, hire, and train 800 franchisees, and they were all university students.
So imagine recruiting, hiring, and training in four months, 800 students, and training them how to run a business. And then in four weeks, in one month, those 800 franchisees had to go out and recruit, hire and train 8,000 university students to paint houses.
So in a five month period, we had to recruit, hire and train 8,800 people. For the first three years, I was a franchisee.
Okay. So I'm like in my milk, but I'm being trained and groomed on a lot of these systems.
For the next four years, I was on the senior leadership team recruiting, hiring, and training. And I was in the top 30 people of the 8,800 person company for four years.
So there's not a lot of companies on the planet that recruit, hire, and train 8,000, 9,000 people a year. There's not, just not.
The military did that.

I was like, how many people process through the military in five months?

Google does, like the PayPals do, but like that's, it's very rare.

So when you're in the top 30 people, you're getting trained on leadership systems and

leadership skills that most people don't have access to.

So I was, if I go back, I was 24 and I was being trained.

And I mean like consultants coming in, watching videotapes on VHS, reading books, round table, role practicing, being coached, um, people watching me do the stuff in my, in, in the field. And I was being trained on about 12 core skills.
They're actually the skills that I put into my invest in your leaders course. It's called invest in your leaders.com.
But I was trained on the one I'll talk about was situational leadership. I'll talk about that in a sec.
I was trained in situational leadership, coaching, delegation, project management, time management, interviewing, one-on-one coaching, running effective meetings, classroom training, written communication, which would now be similar to like email management, Slack. So when you get a lot of the skill development on hardcore leadership skills at a very young age, that leaves a real imprint around me that my job isn't to do work.
My job is to grow people. So at a very young age, at 24 years old, I had 25 franchisees.
Then at one point 32 franchisees reporting to me, I was responsible for 320 people just in my part of that little microcosm. But I was getting groomed in all these leadership skills.
So situational leadership is the one skill that I think most people have never even been exposed to. It's the, it's the skill that the book, the one minute manager is based on by Ken Hersey and Bob, Paul Blanchard that was written or Ken, Ken Blanchard and Dr.
Paul Hersey. It was written 40 years ago.
The one minute manager is still used by all the best companies on the planet, by Googles, by PayPal's, by all of them. It teaches a leader to adapt their style of leadership on a project by project basis, even for the same human.
So let's say as an example, I was training you on running a podcast. I probably wouldn't talk to you much about the podcast.
I might talk to you about the amplification of the podcast, or I might talk to you more about finding guests and getting PR firms to find you guests. I might talk to you about the stuff that you're not really thinking about, or I might talk to you more on like stuff that's not even related to your podcast, leading your team or coaching your team or having a bigger vision for your podcast.
Because I understand that on some parts of your podcast, you have a lot of skill and a lot of confidence, but on other areas, you might either have no skill or some skill or lower confidence. So learning how to assess on a project by project basis, based on the two things, skill and confidence, where a person sits and which of the four leadership styles to use makes me a very highly effective leader, which allows me to grow people and grow hyper growth companies, right? 1-800-GOT Junk.
We were a hundred percent revenue growth, six consecutive years in a row without giving up any equity and having no debt. And we ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for that only happens because of the ability to attract people, retain people and grow people, not by doing work.
So I think that for me is a skill that I probably took for granted and really only recognized post 1-800-GOT-JUNK how powerful that was. When I started coaching really seasoned leaders of companies, they'd never even heard of this before.
They were just in the default mode of coaching someone. And then the second part is, the second part is, it's amazing to me how often people go to work every day without having the basic skills to do their job.
I'll give you a couple of examples. Almost everyone listening has interviewed and hired people.
And to a person, they've probably had no training on interviewing and hiring somebody. Yeah, they might've done it a hundred times, but maybe they've done it wrong all hundred times.
Maybe they've read a book. That's not training.
It's reading a book. Training is watching information, reading information, working with the coach on it, practicing it, getting critiqued on it, role-playing, kind of stepping back and observing, looking at what you can do better, and then going through that training again, that's training,

right? And you think about the best athletes in the world, they get training in their sport.

Why aren't leaders not getting trained on how to run meetings? Why are they not getting trained

on how to delegate projects? Why are they not getting trained on how to effectively manage

projects in time? The shit that they do every day and no one's ever given them the skills. That's the stuff that I now go, wow, that's where the hyper growth comes from.
So you do a lot of this training through either your books or your courses, your one-on-one or your private clients. What are some of the things that, and how long do these, do you normally see radical changing in these orgs? Because obviously you've got to pivot to COOs, isn't the it's usually it's usually in the very first module that i can put them through that they go holy shit i get it all this other stuff i have no skill development so i i was coaching a ceo a very very effective company 200 employees and i asked him like how much training have you had on interviewing people? And he goes, none, but I've hired a hundred.
And I'm like, maybe you've done it wrong every time. He goes, he goes, okay, teach me.
He's like, okay, teach me, give me something. Right.
So I started giving him some ideas and he's like, fuck, I don't even know what you're talking about. So all of a sudden I created the gap where it was almost like I, he fell off the bicycle and he goes, okay, teach me how to, or he fell off the skateboard.
He's like, teach me how to ride the skateboard. He realized that everything he knew wasn't necessarily the best way.
You know, it's like, I didn't know until I was 50 years old that when you hold, when you're going to bat, you pull up your elbow, the back elbow kind of comes up. I didn't know.
Nobody had ever taught me that before. Meanwhile, there's base.
Right. Yeah.
Thank you. You're American.
I'm American. I get it.
I was a pitcher. I played my ball.
I didn't know that. I'm 50 years old and I didn't know this.
Like this is irresponsible of me to teach my kids how to swing a bat when I don't know how to fucking swing the bat. I don't even know how to hold the bat, let alone swing the bat.
But then why are entrepreneurs keep saying that business is difficult?

Business isn't difficult.

What happens is we would never send our kid off

to Little League Baseball

without teaching them the basics.

You wouldn't send your kid off

because Johnny would come home from baseball.

He'd go, daddy, baseball sucks.

You're like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball.

And then all entrepreneurs come back

and go, business is difficult.

No, you're difficult

because you suck at it.

You're not learning this core skills and you keep repeating it. And then the last part of this is the baby boomers and gen X that go, Oh, I have 30 years experience.
No, you have five years experience six times in a row. Yeah.
Or you have all this experience, which you think is expertise and experience is not expertise. It's totally different and correct.
Don't fucking get it. And that's why the best baseball players on the planet today still have coaches.
They have mindset coaches. They have swing coaches.
They've got fitness coaches. They have nutrition coaches.
If entrepreneurs and their, and by the way, every entrepreneur that gets skill training for themselves, they have a coach for themselves, they're in a mastermind for themselves. That's great.
What will really scale your company is get coaching and get your key employees into courses and growing them and getting into masterminds. If you grow your team, that's what scales your company.
Growing yourself is like a one times one return. You grow the seven people on your leadership team.
Now you're getting a 700%. It's just incremental growth.
So when you have a team and there's a lot of things when you go into organizations, obviously getting rid of the CEO as quickly as you can, getting that ego out of the room.

But when you come into this environment and you have this high-end team of

radically different personalities, if you haven't hired effectively in the first place,

and you have these very different personalities that aren't unified under one command,

how do you unify them?

How do you get these individuals who are like, hey, marketing's useless, but branding matters. Or IT is useless, but how do you unify them relatively quickly? Two parts.
Unfortunately, I can't use the baseball analogy here because it doesn't stand up as well as a football analogy. So do you ever watch any US football? I do, regrettably.
Okay. So, and the only reason I even say US football is because I've been in 54 countries and for the rest of the world, football, soccer.

So in U S football or American football, we have, let's say we have like the Dallas Cowboys, right?

We have the, the offensive team.

We have the defensive team and we have the special teams and we have the Dallas Cowboys.

So let's say that you have the, you know, the wide receiver, right?

The wide receiver.

What's the most important team for the wide receiver?

Offense.

He's the offensive team, right?

Yeah.

He's offense.

Yeah.

All right. right? The wide receiver.
What's the most important team for the wide receiver? Offense. He's the offensive team, right? Yeah.
He's offense. Yeah.
Offense. That's the, that's the wrong answer.
You just said, yeah, three, you said, yeah, three times. Let me give you, let me give you, let me give you another perspective.
The reality is the defense get them the ball back. So I would say collectively, all of them are the most important team.
They have to work as a unified structure. about the most important team is the dallas cowboys yeah see what you're saying is well of course but every leadership reaction was to go over here bingo so if you're now the head of marketing and i say what's your most important team what does the head of marketing say normally they say marketing marketing yeah head of finance finance my no the company you're running so when i was the coo at 1-800-GOT-JUNK my most important team wasn't operations or the call center or pr or sales that i really like my most important team was the leadership team at 1-800-GOT-JUNK that was my first team and we called it our first team to the outside world we called it our leadership team but the seven members on the leadership team we called it our first team to the outside world.
We called it our leadership team, but the seven members on the leadership team, we called it our first team. Our second team was the functional area that we ran.
So the head of finance knew that his first team was the leadership team and the head of finance knew, even though we had eight people on it, the second most important team was finance. When everyone's showing up with a company in mind, the vision for the company in mind, the core values in mind, the debate is for the good of the company in mind.
That's where real kind of scale happens. And that's where everybody pulls together.
I think that's number one. There was a second part.
Repeat the, can you repeat the question? We're talking about how there's, you know, there's a culture that isn't unified against each other. How do you get them unified with each other? So that, so number one is remembering that your first team is your first team.
You're right. That's the unification.
The second part is by practicing gratitude and praise across functional areas when every, and it's kind of like when the offense is going back out onto the field, what are they doing? They're high five in the defense. They're slapping the defense on the ass.
They're telling each other what they just, Hey, this guy beat you. Keep an eye open for that next time.
That's because they recognize that my job is to praise and show gratitude and celebrate the other teams that are all on the same team. When you build that system into your company, massive growth happens.
And then the cult, that flywheel, right? Really starts to steamroll. To give you a baseball example in the future, New York Yankees, they don't put the names in the back of their shirts in the old days they refuse to put the names on the back of the shirts because like we only have one name and that's we're a yankee period we don't put our individual names on the back of the shirt so the yankees have had that in that culture my family's from new england so i can't sit there and praise the yankees too much because they'll find me and they'll shoot me in the face with a bazooka.
Love that. That's the pivot.
That's the pivot there. I love that.

When the Toronto Maple Leafs, the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, his cottage was

next door or a few doors down from my family cottage.

He took the names off the jerseys one year to sell more programs.

I like the Yankees version better.

The Yankees is a lot better than the Toronto.

God bless him.

Oh, geez.

Well, here's part two.

Part two was they told Harold Ballard, you have to put the names on the jerseys. So you know what he did on the blue jerseys next year? He put the names on in the same color blue as the jersey.
And then, so then in year two, they said, no, it has to be in the opposing colors. Like, dude, the guy was a character, man.
God bless him. God bless him.
I like the, but the Yankees is culture. Yeah.
Yankees all culture. all culture.
It's always been, they were the last people to let people have facial hair. They really dug in really hard.
They only wear jewelry on. It was amazing.
Love it. When people are going through this and they want to start getting this level of training for the people who don't have access to you, who don't have access to some of the things that you have and don't have the ability to give to the team and want to be able to take the first step and say, hey, we're heading towards some changes economically.
No matter what happens, whoever sits in the White House or anything else, we're heading just because the economy's breathing in and breathing out. What are some of the tools and resources that they can track down to start implementing? The first big one is you're not running a freaking country.
You're running a business that's small in a microcosm in a city. Stop worrying about the global economy, the global financial crisis.
Get, get away from your desk, get away from the news, get away from social media, start doing some sales, start doing some marketing, start taking care of your employees, start taking care of your customers. Business will grow.
You're not running a trillion dollar company. You're not like, you don't have to worry about the global financial crisis.
So stop creating your own doom loop, right? In every single economy, good and bad. Like it's why in these last couple of tough years, when so many companies were struggling, the top seven were crushing it.
Guess which companies I've been buying stock in for almost 15 to 20 years, the top seven. I've been buying stock in Amazon every two to three months since 2003.
Nice. Why wouldn't I? It's not going anywhere.
So focus on the critical few things and stop worrying about all the noise and all the distraction because none of that stuff matters. Tom Peters, when he wrote in search of excellence back in the eighties said that to be truly successful, you have to be a monomaniac with a mission.
So that's that true soul focus, right? That's where, where the real growth is going to come from. And I think really good entrepreneurs can slow it down, take a breath, hold their team together and say, you know what? We're not marketing to the whole world.
Like if I ran a restaurant, I got enough people like within view of this camera on my phone that I can market. I'll just market to them and I would be successful.
I don't need to worry about what's happening in San Francisco or Chicago or, you know, Israel right now. Who cares? No, I agree.
I can care as a human and out of curiosity, but it doesn't impact my business. It doesn't affect your first team at this moment.
So when you're doing this, what are some of the books?

You've rented a bunch of your material.

What are books that someone can grab a hold of?

And because everyone, when I'm always reached out to you when they do this,

they're like, hey, I want some tools.

I want some strategies.

And I'm like, hunt systems, not strategies.

But I still want to feed the audience and give them the one that you want.

I'll give two books that are not mine.

One is called Insanely Simple.

It's the 10 core simplicity systems that Apple and Steve Jobs use to scale Apple.

I don't know. not mine.
One is called insanely simple. It's the 10 core simplicity systems that Apple and Steve Jobs use to scale Apple that are absolutely applicable to a 10 person, 50 person, 500

person company, super applicable. They're very, very easy to understand.
And you can take those

concepts and bring them into your company. So insanely simple would be number one.

The second, and I think it's because it's very, very tied to a time period that we're in right

now is called the hard thing about hard things, but Ben Horowitz, and it's about operating as a wartime CEO versus a peacetime CEO. They don't mean it in the physical, like actual military war.
They mean like, how do you run a business when there's an economic crisis, when you're in a period of stagflation, you're in this crazy change of political, like how do you run in that when you need to be super focused and leaders need to lead and you can't like get all fluffy with consensus. I would read that book right now too.
And two last questions. One, where do you think overall, because you've tapped into different things, where we're going? And then I'll get to the next question after that.
Where are we going? Where we're going economically. Where do you, what do you see the next four to five years? Where do you see things going? I've been calling stagflation for three years.
So I've been calling the hyperinflation and recession for three years. And it's finally proven out to be right.
I was, I was off by, cause I called it in 2019, 20, because when we started to print money for COVID, we delayed it, but we're in a period of stagflation, which is what would happen in 1974. I've run businesses through three economic downturns.
Like I was running a company in 08, 09. I was running a company in 2000, 2001 when the NASDAQ fell by 78%.
And I was running another one back in 1990, 91 when we had the big meltdown. So I'm used to this.
I think where we're going is a period of stagflation for another 16 months, which is kind of till the end of 2025. Inflation still, even though the government's going to stop telling us it's inflation, like they used to say that 2% or greater was too much.
Now they're thinking that 3% is a good threshold. They're basically allowing.
So I think we're going to be a period of inflation where people are going to need more. Everything's going to cost more.
Um, I'm not Trump fan or not a Trump fan. It doesn't matter to me either way, but if Trump comes in power, watch what happens.
Stuff is going to get more expensive because he's going to become more U.S. protection.
U.S. protection makes everything more expensive.
Buying out of China, buying out of all these other countries is going to help us get cheaper goods and cheaper services. So stuff is going to get more expensive either way.
And then I think we're going to have this period of inflation. And I think we have a period of inflation where consumers are basically tapped out.
They're starting to live off credit cards. They're not going to Topgolf anymore.
They're not going to movies anymore. We're seeing a switch from wine to beer.
We're seeing Amazon sales off. Like we're seeing stuff where the consumers aren't buying and that's going to start hitting the business.
And then we're going to have the real estate impact um you know where all these commercial real estates and banks so i think we're going to have a period of recession and inflation for a period of another 16 months um where do i go outside of that i don't i don't even care past that really like yeah 16 months yeah i'm not worried about when i all so for me for me it's like debt is good until it's bad right don't over leverage this anybody who's under 35 the big lesson for you is these interest rates today are normal sorry but like six and a half percent when i got a mortgage in 2000 for six and a half percent for five years i was doing my happy dance i was thrilled man yeah because i i remember getting canada savings bonds in 1982 at 18 and three quarters percent so i remember when seven eight percent was like an okay business loan so i got news for you like we were in this very very very from from 19 sorry 2009 till 2022 that 13 period, we had artificially low in interest rates. Absolutely.
So anybody who's 35, they don't know anything different. They think that's normal.
That's not normal. It's not.
So I think, I think we're going to get used. Yeah.
Correct. So we're going to get used to this as being normal again.
It's not the new normal. It's the real normal.
It's the way it should have been because that level of interest rates that low had never happened in economic history ever. Right.
And it probably won't happen again. And it's birth rate.
It's geopolitical. This part is birth rates.
That amount of money left the market. It is what it is.
Lots of free money. So I think we're sitting in a period now where inflation is normal.
We're going to have this kind of like period where we start to digest that inflation. It's like the snake swallowing the frog.
At some point you've digested it. We'll digest that printing of money.
It'll become the new normal interest rates will feel normal again. And we'll get back to business.
I think that's what's coming in 2026 is we're just used to this as the norm. Gotcha.
If people want to track you down, if people want to find you and get more information and learn more about you, and you talked about having the camera before for your social media, how do people find you? How do they get ahold of you? What's their next step? Yeah. So the main website they can find all of my products and services at is CameronHerald.com and it's H-E-R-O-L-D.
So CameronHerald.com. All of my six books are available on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.
I have a podcast called the Second in Command Podcast they can check out. We're in the top hundred on Apple Apple business podcasts.
And then I have a course called invest in your leaders. And that has all the core leadership skills that I've trained everybody in all the way back to Kimball Musk 30 years ago.
Beautiful. All right.
I really appreciate it. I think there's some insights and some things that even pivoted the way I looked at it, especially what team I'm on.
Thank you for that. I appreciate you.
You're welcome. Charles, you're very welcome.
You just witnessed Cameron. I always speak quickly, but six shots of espresso.
I'm wired today. And for those of you who aren't watching this or actually listening to this, go watch this.
His background is absolutely stunning. And his Lambo Flex is amazing up there in British Columbia.
I've just added it to my list. So I've got some flights coming up.
All right. Thank you so much.
All right. Thanks, Charles.
And that wraps up our exhilarating conversation with Cameron Harreld. We hope you found his insights on scaling businesses and leadership as transformative as we did.
A heartfelt thank you to Cameron for sharing his incredible journey and practical strategies with us today. His approach to business growth, team development, and creating a cult-like company culture is truly game-changing.
To our listeners, your dedication to scaling your businesses and becoming better leaders inspires us to continue bringing you this high-caliber content. If you're eager to implement the strategies we discussed, we've prepared a comprehensive workbook for you.
This resource distills the key points from our conversation, including Cameron's techniques for developing a vivid vision, implementing situational leadership, and creating systems that allow your business to scale exponentially. You can access this guide at podcast.iamcharlesschwartz.com.
Remember, as Cameron emphasized, the key to massive growth isn't working harder, but working smarter and focusing on the critical few things that truly drive your business forward. Thank you for tuning in, and here's to your business scaling to new heights.
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