How to Make Your Meetings NOT Suck! With Cameron Herold

Alright. Welcome to Dream Think Do. I've got a little word association for you. I'm going to say a word and I want you to note, be aware of what words come to mind immediately. Are you ready? The word is meetings. Okay. How are you doing? What words come to mind? Is it dread? Is it nasty? Is it barf? Seriously, what comes to mind when you hear the word meetings? I mean, it's so sad but it's a necessary tool of modern business, the meeting, but why does it cause us so much angst, why does it cause us to run and hide? It doesn't have to be that way. Meetings do not have to suck. In fact, my guest is here to help. We're talking with Cameron Herold and he's written a book called Meetings Suck: Turning One of the Most Loathed Elements in Business Into One of the Most Valuable. Cameron is a guy who can speak to this. He's the mastermind behind hundreds of companies' exponential growth. He was entrepreneur basically from day one at 21. At 21, he already had 14 employees. At 35, he had built 200 million dollar companies, his first 2. He's gone on to do more. At age 42 Cameron helped engineer 1-800-GOT-JUNK's spectacular growth from 2 million to 106 million in revenue and he did that in just 6 years. Listen To The Podcast: Mitch: Lots of tools, lots of leadership tools, effectiveness tools in his bag, but one subject that I really want to tap into, especially when I saw this book was how do we make our meetings not suck. Let's get to this. Cameron, welcome to Dream Think Do. Cameron: Hey, Mitch. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Mitch: Absolutely. I got to ask, I mean, I love this and we could spend so much time on so many of your other successes and I mean, I know you've had them and I know you got a number of other books out there, but why decide to write a book on meetings? Cameron: It's interesting. One of my clients, who is a YPO member, Young Presidents Organization, he's from Tampa, Florida, his company's called BlueGrace Logistics. I started coaching him when he had about 60 employees of the last 4 years and now, it's about 700 employees. I was talking to him about a year ago and he was complaining about his meetings. He was saying, "You know, our meetings really suck. Can we start getting some coaching on our meetings?" I went, "Well, wait a second. Meetings don't suck." He goes, "No. Ours really suck." I'm like, "Okay." Mitch: No, you got to understand, ours really suck, yeah. Cameron: I said, "Have you had any training or has your management team had any training about how to run meetings?" He said, "No. I don't think anybody's ever been trained on how to run them." I said, "Okay. Have any of your employees actually had any training on how to show up and attend or participate in meetings?" He goes, "No. Nobody's ever been trained on how to show up in them." I said, "Well, the problem isn't that meetings suck. The problem is that your team sucks at running them and your team sucks at attending them." I said, "It's not any different than little league baseball." Mitch: Yeah. Cameron: You would present our kid of as an eight-year-old to little league baseball without showing him how to hold the bat and how to hold the glove and how to catch a ball. We'd at least give him the basics- Mitch: Yeah. Cameron: If you don't give him the basics, they'd come back from the first day at little league and go, "Baseball sucks." Well, baseball doesn't suck at all but my kid sucks at baseball. Mitch: Right. Cameron: I decided to codify, in a very simple format, so that every employee at every company, for $15 would know how to show up at meetings, participate in them and how to run them. That was the Genesis of the book, Meetings Suck, was my client, Bobby Harris at BlueGrace Logistics. Amazingly, they just raised $255 million last year from Warburg Pincus to continually scale their growth. Mitch: That doesn't suck. That doesn't suck at all. Cameron: It does suck.