The “CEO Whisperer” Cameron Herold On How to Grow a $100 Million Business Using Simple Marketing Strategies

In this week’s episode of the Garlic Marketing Show, we have an amazing talk with Cameron Herold, the marketing genius behind 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and countless other 9-figure business. His marketing strategies are so sound and effective that even monarchs trust him with their PR. 

Cameron started his entrepreneurial journey at just 21 with only 14 employees. Since then, he’s been at the helm leading teams of upwards 3,000 people. This guy knows how to turn a modest business into a monolith. And he doesn’t keep all this knowledge to himself. Cameron has authored five books about business marketing and operations, one of which is the international best-seller “Double Double.” He also founded the COO Alliance in 2016 as a hub for second-in-commands to talk shop and trade tips.

Listen to the full Garlic Marketing Show episode with Cameron to learn more about growing your business into a $100 million beast to be reckoned with.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why you should be calling journalists daily to get “free PR”
  • Qualities you need to look for in a chief operating officer
  • The crucial importance of not dreaming too big
  • Huge mistakes businesses make when marketing their products
  • Tactics any business owner can use to drive up traffic

Connect with Cameron:

Links & Resources


Full Episode Transcript:

 

IAN GARLIC:

Welcome to the Garlic Marketing Show. I’ve got a very, very special guest today. I always say that. I say it a lot cause I get a lot of great guests, but today’s guests took 1-800-GOT-JUNK from $2 million to $106 million in revenue in, what was it, six years?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Six years, yeah.

 

IAN GARLIC:

You’ve written some amazing books. Books I love that are actionable. One thing I love about the books and we’ll talk about that too is that they’re from someone who actually did it, so they’re not theory books, they’re not research books — someone did these things. But before I introduce and get going with Cameron Herold, let’s get a little message from our sponsor StoryCrews:

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Awesome. Back to our guest. 

Cameron Herold, thank you so much for being on the show. Love your stuff. It’s awesome. I’m super excited to talk to you.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Thank you. I’m actually going to check out StoryCrews when we’re done as well. It sounds awesome.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Yeah, we’ve got a lot going on there. So let’s talk about you’ve written a bunch of books, but tell me if you know in your history is out there. You became an entrepreneur by 21. You had 14 employees by 35. You had $200 million companies. You took 1-800-GOT-JUNK from $2 million to $106 million. We can go into that, all of it, and at the end we’re going to talk about leveraging PR, but what do you think was… if you were a… I mean that’s a lot of tools, but what’s the one characteristic that really drove you through all of that success?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

That’s a really interesting question. I think it was that I kind of… I don’t know if you can see this but there’s a fly trying to get out the window. I’ve always seen entrepreneurs like flies trying to get out a window and they’re going to try harder and try harder and try harder and I remember watching them as a little kid going “but there’s a door it’s right here. It’s open if you just turning out the door you’re free,” and I’d watch them and then they were dead the next day on the window ledge. I think the one characteristic for me has always been I look for those shortcuts. I look for the cheat sheets. I look for that path of least resistance. And then I’ve always believed that momentum creates momentum.

So for me, it’s the minimum viable everything, not minimum viable product. It’s minimum viable everything because the faster I just get stuff out the door that momentum creates more momentum.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Yeah, you know it’s fine. We have a t-shirt. I’m not wearing it today, but it’s version done is better than version none.

And I think that’s absolutely critical. I see that as one of the big mistakes and working with a lot of companies over the years, I think that’s a big one and the other one too is vision. I think your book Vivid Vision is fantastic and I’d like to talk about why you feel vision is important to someone’s marketing.

Is it important to their marketing? And why do you feel people are scared of making their vision because it seems obvious but I don’t see a lot of people do it. I ask people all the time — 10 years of asking people — no one’s ever produced a vivid vision document.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

I guess about 12 years ago, I started on this bit of a manic rampage of trying to get companies to understand that that one sentence vision statement was never enough to completely aligned all of your employees see the rest of the picture. Most entrepreneurs or most CEOs have got a vision in their mind of what their company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years out, but they don’t share it with anyone and then they wonder why they’re always trying to herd cats, why they’re always trying to align people, why they’re always trying to hold people accountable.

Well, it’s mostly because no one can see what they can see and if they could get everyone to see what the entrepreneur could see they would all drive in that same direction. So the Vivid Vision became a four or five page written document describing your company in all aspects three years in the future and that four or five page document describes not how you’re going to do it, but what the company looks like December 31st three years out.

So most people I think are afraid to do it because they’re either afraid of how they’re going to do it and instead they think they have to be the one to figure out how but it’s like the homeowner who’s building a house. I don’t know how to do electrical. I don’t know how to do plumbing. I don’t know how to do drywall. I don’t know how to build walls and put in the foundation. I’m not worried about the how. I’m worried about describing what my home looks like so the contractor can find people that know how to make my vision come true. I think most people are afraid to describe it because they’re thinking about how instead of thinking about who.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s fantastic. The book is called Vivid Vision. We’ll put the link in the show notes. I think it’s an important book for everyone. If you’re working with any marketer, I think seeing the vision is fantastic, but it’s also something you use to sell to your clients too, right? I went to COO Alliance and boom right there on the homepage your Vivid Vision. 

How is that your tool in marketing? How do you use that marketing?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

It’s been a huge… so in fact, I just launched the 2022 Vivid Vision that I just put on to the home page this week to replace the old 2019 Vivid Vision that I wrote three years ago. So we’re now on the next three-year push to grow the world’s largest network of second-in-commands.

And now my suppliers can see what I’m building. My marketers can see what I’m building. My social media team. My operations people. My members can see it. Potential members can see it. My accountant understands what we’re building. Everyone can see what I can see and all of a sudden they start making introductions.

I met someone the other day — Jason Campbell — at a genius network event with Joe Polish. Jason introduced me to one of his friends who is a perfect member of the COO Alliance and the reason he knew that was he’d read the Vivid Vision. So he introduced his friend to the Vivid Vision. He joined and that’s now paid for itself.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Have you seen anyone implement the Vivid Vision that it didn’t work and why?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Not really. If it doesn’t work, it’s because you don’t execute on it. You don’t focus on it. It’d be like saying have you ever seen a homeowner design a dream home that they couldn’t build. Well, yeah, because they built one that was outside of the money they had or they built one that was like didn’t have the proper zoning.

You can’t dream too big. If you’ve never built a company before, don’t describe a vivid vision for a $100 million business that your first go-round. It’s probably not going to happen. I think there might be some people who are, but I don’t work with that group. My audience is really the 10 employees to 1,000 employees companies.

So they already have a proof of concept. I think if it doesn’t work, it’s probably people that are trying to swing at something they have no business swinging at.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s interesting to me because I agree with you and I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Because you see this in the whole entrepreneur world and you see everyone saying just dream bigger, dream bigger, dream bigger. But does that always serve you?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

No, it doesn’t always serve you and a lot of entrepreneurs should go back and get a job. They’re never meant to be an entrepreneur in the first place. I completely disagree that people should drop out and start their own company. If you’re not entrepreneurial, the world only needs three percent of the population to be entrepreneurs.

We need 97 percent of the people to have jobs. I think dreaming big… it’s kind of like an athlete. If you’re 13 years old, don’t think that you’re going to be in the Olympics when you’re 16. Maybe set a goal to be in your state championships or your national championships before you go for like the worlds.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s great advice.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Maybe kind of think about it logically. Think about some of the “hows” to start framing it and bringing back into reality.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Yeah. I even could become a victim of it where you know early on dream too big for a company and they made me make the wrong small decisions and I think that’s critical to a company but also one other thing I love about double-double which you know, and you obviously have done this and you’ve grown businesses and grown businesses, is the need for an operations person. Someone that’s your operations person. There’s a lot of seven-figure companies, eight-figure companies, especially now with e-commerce and people growing even, you know, a ten-figure company and still really don’t have a true operations person.

How do you go about when you’re a smaller company finding that person that can help execute your Vivid Vision when you don’t have necessarily the budget to do it?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

You actually asked the right question. Most people ask “how do we find the right COO?” That’s not the right question. The right question is how do we find the right operations person because it can be an operations person, it can be a director of operations, it can be an operations manager, it could be a VP of operations or it could be a COO. But the bigger your title you give someone equates to how much pay they want and what kind of responsibility they think we have so be very careful with giving it over-inflated titles too early.

The first thing you need to do when you’re hiring an operations person is if you don’t have an executive assistant, you are one. So hire an EA before you hire an operations person, you’ll probably free up 50% of what’s on your plate or thirty percent of what’s on your plate to allow you to get back and focus on the critical few things to really scale your business and then you can afford to hire an operations person so that would be step one.

Step two is looking to get anything off your plate that’s not your highest ROI. You know as an entrepreneur, we only have three inputs. We have people, we have time, and we have money. So what is the highest return on those three investments you’re making in your business. If you’re the only person what’s the highest ROI on you for 8 hours a day or what’s the highest ROI on your one hour today or one hour this afternoon and what’s the highest ROI on the dollars you’re spending? Most entrepreneurs don’t think about that. They get distracted by the big shiny object instead of thinking what’s the leverage they’re going to get off of it.

And then I try to get momentum. So momentum creates momentum and if that momentum is throwing off gross margin, it allows you to start hiring people and using that gross margin to get the minimum wage jobs off your plate.

 

IAN GARLIC:

It’s great advice.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

And then lastly I would say is stop doing some stuff, you know, we often try to automate or outsource or delegate things that we don’t even really need to continue doing in the first place. Like why can’t we just stop?

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s interesting. How do you decide what to stop?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Take a look at your ROI. Take a look at whether it really needs to be done in the first place. You know, if you’re doing stuff you have a very low ROI for just cut it. It’s your company. Nobody says you have to do these things.

 

IAN GARLIC:

So now I want to talk about the PR because you took and leveraged PR at 5,200 stories for one business before there was Facebook and I want to talk about that. But you know now you’ve seen you were in 1-800-got-junk, which I love that story, which you talk about a lot throughout all your writing, but also your other businesses and now with consulting you’re working with big huge companies and you’ve got the COO Alliance. What do you see as the big mistakes that businesses are making in marketing right now because I feel like you have to test and there’s a lot of things to try but I want know what are the mistakes you see them doing in marketing?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

I think the biggest mistakes companies are doing is they’re trying to market a product or a service that sucks. They should fix the underlying core product or service they have so that it’s actually a good product or a good service that people want and will pay money for, but if you have a bunch of great marketing and advertising selling a product that sucks, you’re just going to spin off more negative word-of-mouth, like just going to go bankrupt faster.

So I think most companies don’t fix their underlying core product nor do they go out and look at the market to see if the market really wants what they’re trying to build.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s interesting. It’s simple, right? 

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

I was talking to someone the other day and I said what happened with your business, why wasn’t it successful? And he goes, we spent millions of dollars trying to market it only to find out no one really wanted what we were selling them. I could use good selling in the first place.

 

IAN GARLIC:

It’s funny because there’s a lot of people doing that. There’s a lot of people. I actually talk to someone who is starting their business, so I got all my branding done. I’ve got all this done. I’ve got all this done. Like, have you sold anything yet? No. You don’t need to have anything to go out and sell something and test out if someone wants it.

When it comes to improving your product and improving your marketing in tandem, what were some of the techniques that you all used?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Listening to the customer when finding out what they’re excited about and why they bought you and then turning your marketing and your messaging toward that is number one. Number two, though, is really trying to find out exactly who your target buyer really is. Not necessarily who’s buying you now.

So as an example, this is a really interesting one for marketers, when I first joined 1-800-GOT-JUNK they had a guy who was running marketing with no marketing experience. And he said that our number one postal code or zip code in Vancouver happened to be where our office was and he said that we should profile those people who lived in that zip code and then market to all those same demographics in every city that we were in.

I said possibly. I said my theory is the reason that is a code is our busiest is people see our trucks everyday driving to and from the office. We parked trucks in that area all the time. So I checked with our 12 franchisees and sure enough the number one ZIP code in all 12 markets was where the house or the office was for the franchisee.

It wasn’t that all of the right demographic people happen to be living where our offices was. It was the people saw our truck. So we reframed all of our marketing and we found out where the right demographic people would be. We started putting our trucks there. We started marketing to them in that zip code and all of a sudden within six weeks those zip codes became our busiest.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s genius.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Well, it’s kind of just common sense. Right? Where are you? Where are your buyers? When you go duck hunting, if you want to shoot a certain kind of duck, you go to where those ducks go. You don’t hide in the bushes and hope they come by. Where do those ducks go?

Where are my customers going to be? So for me is an example with my COO Alliance I launched something called the Second-in-Command podcast. So I only interview the COOs or the second-in-commands for companies. I pushed that out, targeted on LinkedIn and on Facebook to COOs and to entrepreneurs running companies $10 million or greater.

That’s my demographic. Now sure, I have other people hear it and see it but they’re not necessarily the ones I’m targeting. I know who my target client is. I know where they hang out. Now why am I not on Instagram and Snapchat? Because my prospects aren’t on Instagram and Snapchat.

 

IAN GARLIC:

It’s so funny you say that because I built a video agency and now I coach other video agencies and consult with them and I’m in a group and they’re like, well, you know, Gary Vee says that we need to be using TikTok and they’re like what’s The TikTok strategy? I’m like, well are your clients or your clients’ clients on TikTok?

They’re like no. Their strategy is not to be there and it’s that straightforward, but I still think you know understanding where your clients are is important, but you made us an important leap with the truck thing. And I feel like when I heard you say that’s like one of your shortcuts, kind of, it’s like it seems obvious when you say it now, but I don’t think back then it would have been as obvious.

So how do you go about finding those shortcuts and identifying them?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Which shortcut? Where to park trucks?

 

IAN GARLIC:

I mean that to me was a shortcut, right? Because you were going to go do all this demographic research on that person and go test it out. And you’re like, well the shortcut is where the trucks were and you saw that but it seems like you have this vision for shortcuts like you’ve mentioned.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Yeah. I just see the patterns, so my attention deficit is very very high — I have 17 of the 18 signs of Attention Deficit Disorder, which is actually a superpower for an entrepreneur. Because my attention is so dispersed, I see everything and I noticed the patterns because I’m kind of running through my day. I pick up everything around me. I just happened to see those patterns. I happen to notice things and they stick with me, but I don’t get so preoccupied with them until I need to.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Interesting.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

The school system and the medical community think I’m a disaster. I’m ADD and I’m bipolar and I’m on the spectrum for dyscalculia, which is a dyslexic disorder. So they think I should be medicated, but that would be awful for me. I’ve just learned how to leverage my disorders.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s so funny you say that because I was writing something the other day about that and how the disorders for a lot of people can be leveraged and are actually tools and it just depends on which direction you go. And if you look at the stats… the from Malcolm Gladwell where it’s like 50% CEOs are dyslexic. I think it’s an important thing.

When did you realize that and how did you realize that you were leveraging that?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

I knew at a very young age that I was stupid according to the school system. I was told to pay attention, sit still, try to memorize stuff, and as hard as I studied I always got 62 percent. I always realized it was kind of pointless to learn all this stupid stuff. I wanted to learn about other things. I just studied those on my own. So I knew at a pretty young age that it was pointless.

And then I also realized that I tend to do really well at things that weren’t in the system. Like I was making all this money selling stuff all the time. None of my friends were. I was envious that they were having more fun than I maybe was having as a kid, but I knew in my head I was smart. I knew in my head I was successful but I was being told every day by the teachers that I was stupid or a C-minus student. I was starving for praise and attention and I started to get that from doing speaking events as a kid. I would do public speaking contests or be in plays or sell stuff to get recognized and to get praised for doing well.

So I got my praise and my dopamine rush in spite of the fact that I felt like I was systematically beat up for 16 years going from kindergarten through university.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s… yeah. I mean… that’s a whole other podcast. You mentioned your speaking and I saw that a lot of people mention that you’re one of the best speakers they’ve ever seen. How important has speaking been to your business and how have you developed that side of your business?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

I’ve always been a speaker. I told someone the other day — it’s the day to do a speaking event — how should they speak? And I said well, how old were you when you started speaking? He goes, one. I said you’re 44, right? Yeah. I said you’ve been speaking for 43 years. He goes, okay. So just stand on stage and talk about how you normally talk and if you talk about how you normally talk, your voice and your tone and your inflection resonate to people. You have a natural energy and you have a natural connection.

And if you just tell stories about what you’ve learned and what you’ve done, where you failed, where you succeeded. Try to help people. They’ll all learn and they’ll benefit from it. But if you pontificate at them, you’re trying to teach them and you’re reading from slides, you’ll fail. So for me, I’ve always just spoken about sharing to help people. I fed off that energy and giving that energy back.

I’ve also always seen the speaking audience as potential customers, so I just talk about what I’ve done and let them know where they can get some of that stuff so they can benefit from it on their own. That just becomes my funnel.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Good enough, easy enough. And speaking of getting from your customers. Let’s talk a little bit about your PR tips. You have a book, obviously, Free PR on Amazon and don’t forget all these links to this podcast, COO Alliance, they’ll all be in the show notes if you’re listening on your iPad. Just click on the image. Go over, you’ll get all the links.

But Cameron tell me about your how you leverage PR especially before social media.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

So one of the things we learned about free PR, in fact the first journalist who ever wrote about me was a guy named Tom Hewlett — wrote about me in 1986. And he just added me last week on LinkedIn and I’ve just flipped when I saw his name. I sent him a note like “whoa that’s so crazy.”

One of the things I learned about journalists years ago was every single morning every journalist wakes up and thinks what the heck am I going to write about today? And they all need a story idea. They need something to write about so you’re not asking them to write about you. You’re doing them a favor and helping them come up with a story idea for something that they need to come up with today anyway. So you’re handing them a story and helping them craft something for their audience. So that was the first thing.

The second thing was to remember that every news outlet is different based on the audience or the demographic that reads or listens to or watches their media outlet. So you have to kind of position your story a little bit differently for that target audience. If I’m talking to your audience, what I understand is most of them are smaller or newer entrepreneurs, maybe 1 to 20 employees, is the target. We might have some corporate, but that’s the zone.

If I’m talking to a real estate audience of single-person companies, I have to position my content differently or for corporate audience very differently. When I’m being interviewed by Forbes Magazine I communicate with different sound bites than I would for Entrepreneur Magazine or Ink Magazine.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Interesting. Do you plan those sound bites out?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

I try to think about strategically where am I going with my sales in my marketing and how can I have PR as part of that kind of three-sided wedge that I’m trying to drive open a market. How do I leverage that? If I’m doing it to help an audience or to serve an audience or educate an audience, but it always ties in with my sales and marketing I’m doing as well.

 

IAN GARLIC:

And at what point would you start doing… like if you were starting a company today at what point would you start doing PR? Immediately?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

I guess it depends on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. If you’re going to conferences and going to trade shows that’s a great opportunity to have the trade media cover you if you’ve got a small local presence. Good opportunity to get some of the small local press to cover you. But I guess it depends on your product or your service. I guess when you’re like  a 10 to 20 person company for sure PR should be part of your marketing strategy.

 

IAN GARLIC:

How did you go about doing that? I know you tell everyone about the company, but how did you go about with that outreach? Was it just a simple outreach? Were you using Help A Reporter Out or those tools?

CAMERON HEROLD:

It’s funny you mention Haro — Help A Reporter Out — Peter Shankman, the founder of Haro, wrote the foreword for our book Free PR. I’ve known Peter for years. So no we picked up the phone. Well, everyone else was emailing and I give all the step-by-step directions on how to land publicity in the book Free PR.

So if they buy the hard copy, they’ll be scribbling notes throughout it. We would pick up the phone and phone the journalists. You think about today, how many times has your phone rang. Twice? You’ve probably gotten 50 emails already? So the reality is you’ve got a 50/50 shot of getting through to somebody on their phone and you have a 1 in 50 shot of getting through to them over email.

So what I do is I phoned them and I say hey do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you. They usually say yes, if they say no then I say well, can I call you tomorrow or Friday? And they’re pretty much going to say yes to a phone call. Just two minutes to learn about a story they might want to write about his better than having to read through another hundred email pitches.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s such a great piece of advice and and it’s funny how scared people are to pick up the phone these days. I feel like in marketing it’s the thing that people are scared to do, it’s probably the thing that you should be doing the most of it.

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

It’s probably because marketers should not be doing PR. Sales people should be doing PR. Hire someone who likes to cold-call, can handle rejection as good as picking up the phone. Conveying energy, telling a story, asking questions and listening. You hire a salesperson to sell your stories. A marketing person, if they get a rejection, runs away. A salesperson is like wow, I know how to answer the phone. I’ll call them on Thursday when they’re not as busy.

 

IAN GARLIC:

That’s great. That’s such a ninja tip. So speaking the ninja tips. We spoke about PR and you’ve given such amazing advice, but I still think like the operations, COO person is a difficult, difficult thing for people to do and I think the vision is important.

Do you have any last minute tips on picking out that person and training that person in your company?

 

CAMERON HEROLD:

Yeah. It’s really looking for someone that you implicitly trust. Someone that you would give your passwords to and keys to your bank account on day one. So really really making sure you interview thoroughly. Do the threat of reference checks.

Second thing is hire someone who’s really really good at the stuff you hate and doesn’t want to do the stuff that you love so that you can truly kind of divide and conquer and have a true yin and yang approach to the two of you.

 

IAN GARLIC:

Beautiful. That’s great advice. Well, Cameron, thank you so much for being on the show. Check out Vivid Vision. We talked about Free PR. We talked about Double Double. We talked about COO Alliance and your Second-in-Command podcast. Amazing resources and from someone who’s really done it which I love. Thank you again for being on the show. I really appreciate it. 

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