Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Allison has been doing just that for the last 15 years, and she’s proven that it’s possible to create unforgettable art and run a portrait business that supports your family and your dreams. All it takes is a little rework. Episodes will include interviews with experts from in and outside of the photo industry, mini-workshops and behind-the-scenes secrets that Allison uses in her portrait studio every single day. She will challenge your thinking and inspire your confidence to create a profitable, sustainable portrait business you love through continually refining and reworking your business. Let’s do the rework.
Allison Tyler Jones: Hi friends, and welcome back to The ReWork. What does pest control have to do with portrait photography? Well, more than you might think. My guest today is Cameron Bawden, a serial entrepreneur who started with one pest control truck and a big vision and has since built, scaled, and sold multiple service businesses, including Green Mango Pest Control, Coconut Cleaning, and Agave Auto Glass. He’s also the co-host of The Premium Mindset podcast and also a very recent ATJ client. You know that I love to look at other industries for inspiration for our own, and in today’s conversation, we are going to pull out those lessons that matter to you as a portrait photographer, how to build your business without burning out, what it takes to build a premium brand, how to lead a team, even if that team is just one assistant or a bookkeeper.
Allison Tyler Jones: How to figure out whether you can afford to hire somebody. There’s actually a formula that Cameron shares with us and the biggest mistakes that he sees service providers make in their businesses. So though you might think that pest control has nothing to do with portrait photography, I know that you’re going to get a ton of inspiration and actionable takeaways from our conversation today with Cameron Bawden. Let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay. Well, I am so excited to have a new guest on The ReWork podcast today. This is Mr. Cameron Bawden. Many of our listeners are not going to know who he is, but he is a wunderkind of epic proportions. Entrepreneur, has built and sold several service businesses, and he’s also a brand new ATJ photo client. And so we got to chatting when we did his family session and Cameron’s here to share his wisdom about entrepreneurship service businesses with our ReWork listeners. So welcome, Cameron. I’m so happy to have you here today.
Cameron Bawden: Thank you so much. It’s a privilege to be on your show.
Allison Tyler Jones: Thank you. Okay, so tell our listeners, give us a little bio about what you started as a kid, as a three-year-old, as an entrepreneur or whatever. Give us the rundown on where you started and what you’ve done.
Cameron Bawden: Yeah, so I was actually born in Price, Utah, but we lived here or we moved here when I was two years old, and so I wish I could claim born and raised in Arizona, but I can’t. But I love Arizona. I’ve lived here forever. I will live here forever. It just feels like home when I go out of town and come back. It’s like there’s something about the streets. There’s something about how clean it is and just that feel that I love. And so my parents got divorced at a really young age, and I share that because it was really difficult for me, but I feel like it really molded into who I wanted to become and what I wanted to be.
Cameron Bawden: I’m a very visual learner. I have three older sisters, one older brother, and I always joke with them, I always thank them because they made all the mistakes. And I wasn’t this perfect little boy, but it was like, man, my sisters are going out and they’re doing things that my parents didn’t love, and they would get things taken away like the car or they would get privileges taken away. And so I was like, “I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do that.”
Allison Tyler Jones: You could observe and learn from their mistakes, yeah.
Cameron Bawden: And what I found, and the reason I share that is because when I started my business, I’ve never worked for anyone else in my entire life. And it’s like, that’s cool, but also I feel like I missed out because I’m a visual learner, I missed the opportunity to copy what other people did. But why mentorship is so important to me is because I had a lot of great people in my life that I was able to, just like my brothers and sisters, duplicate like, “Hey, I like this I’m going to do that. I don’t like this, I’m not going to do that.” And so I was like most kids, I guess I feel like my whole life was planned for me, especially in the LDS community. It’s like you go to school, you play sports, you get your Arrow of Light, you get your Eagle Scout. My dad did real estate, and so I wanted to be a real estate agent. That was the goal, because my dad did it by air. He would show people large parcels of land in the helicopter.
Cameron Bawden: And I saw him making money and it was like, “Wow, he’s making good money, he’s doing real estate, and he’s flying helicopters. I want to do that.” And so in high school I went and got all my aviation licenses. I have my single engine, my multi-engine, my instrument and helicopter. And then when I got back from my mission for my church for two years, I served in Canada, Edmonton. I got home in 2009, which in 2009 if you had no money was the worst time to get into real estate. And so my dad looked at me and was like, “Hey, I don’t really have anything for you. Good luck.” And a lot of return missionaries get recruited to do door-to-door sales, and I was no different. And so my buddy, I’ll never forget it, Dusty Williams who became my business partner later on said, “Hey, come watch how I recruit kids.”
Cameron Bawden: You go recruit people in the off season in the winter and you try and get them to sign up to come out and knock doors in the summertime. And what a lot of college students do is they try and make enough money between May and August before the next school year starts so that they don’t have to work during the school year so they can focus on their studies. After a couple months of working with Dusty kind of recruiting, I wasn’t getting paid anything, but I was just kind of observing. I was like, “Man, I feel like we can do it better.” And so we started Green Mango in 2010, and-
Allison Tyler Jones: And that’s pest control?
Cameron Bawden: And that’s pest control. Before that, I did car washes just because I was like, “Man, I got to make money. I got to do something.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, just hustle.
Cameron Bawden: But I figured that I don’t want to wash cars in the Arizona summer for too long. And what’s funny is I sold that business for 10 grand, bought Liz her wedding ring and then started Green Mango the next month after that. It was just this crazy journey where we started with one truck and we just recently exited one of the largest pest control companies in Arizona and just, I pinch myself every day, because it was just such a blessing to go on that journey of 14 years. And in the middle we started five other service companies, which we can get into, but it was just this crazy roller coaster this past 14, 15 years in my entrepreneurial journey.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that. Well, obviously you’re a smart kid because those of us who are parents and have kids your age know that not all children look at their siblings and learn from them. So congratulations on that. From a mom I would say, “Good job. Good job, youngest child.”
Cameron Bawden: And you know my mom.
Allison Tyler Jones: I do. I know and love your mom very much and your older sister. So some of the things that I wanted to talk about today, because this podcast is geared specifically to, it’s a very niche, to portrait photographers. So we are in the service industry, but we also are a little bit manufacturing and we’re also a little bit retail, so we’re kind of like a hybrid, and obviously it’s service, but it’s also very creative. So you’ve scaled multiple service business. In your opinion, what is non-negotiable for growth, but is not going to burn out the owner? Because that’s one of the things that I see a lot is that solopreneur, they get in, they’re so busy making the donuts that they can’t offload anything and they just are doing everything and they’re just burnt to a crisp. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Cameron Bawden: Yeah, for sure. I call them sacred rhythms, and so when you start a business, what’s cool and what differentiates people from having that are actually successful and the ones that aren’t are the ones that stick to their sacred rhythms. And so when you first started, when I first started, it was like, “Hey, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z. That’s different than everyone else.” You go into it very ambitious saying, “This is what we’re going to do.” And most people will do that for a year, year and a half, and then they realize, “Wow, there’s a reason why most companies aren’t putting down 20 gallons of product on the home.” Because that was one of our things. “Hey, we’re going to put down more product than anyone else. We’re going to be the first company that guarantees scorpion control.” Well, about a year, year and a half in two years in, we were looking around and we’re like, “Man, we’re not making any money. What’s the problem? Oh, we’re putting down four times the product than anyone else.”
Cameron Bawden: And that was a really pivotal point for us because we could have said, “Hey, we’re going to go and be like everyone else.” Which was buy a backpack sprayer and put down three to five gallons on the home or continue to do what we did and figure it out, whether that’s increasing our pricing, whether that’s through better efficiency with routing, you name it. We stuck to our guns and said, “Hey, we are going to be Arizona’s premium service. We are going guarantee scorpion control.” At the time when we said that, no one else was doing that. There’s a few companies that have jumped on board now, but it was very unique for us. We’re going to have flat block trucks. We’re going to put 22 inch rims on the truck. We’re going to actually put money into our service vehicles who are going to outfit our technicians and Nike Dri-FIT. We’re going to make sure that we have a grooming and a dress standard.
Cameron Bawden: Because at the time, the industry was like the nasty Burns guy showing up in a Chester van leaving an oil stain on your driveway. Literally, that’s what we were up against. And so it’s so funny to see now, it’s humor. People would make fun of us like, “What are you doing putting 22 inch custom rims on your service vehicles? Why? And you’re going to go spend five grand on a paint job? You just need to put a little logo on it.” Now, when you look around, especially in Arizona, everyone’s going flashy tires. So I feel like we’ve created a huge movement, but we stuck to our sacred rhythms. And because of that, that’s what differentiated ourselves, and that’s why our referrals, and I share this stat on almost every single podcast, no matter how much money we spent on radio, billboard, Google, we’re talking about 250, $300,000 contracts, our referrals would outperform those other categories almost two to one. So we brought-
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, so can you say that sentence one more time? Because I need everybody, pause your treadmill and listen to what you just said. Say it again.
Cameron Bawden: So no matter how much money we spent on Google or radio, which radio was one of our highest performing for a very long time, it was a $300,000 radio contract. If we brought in 10 new accounts on the radio, we’d do 20 new accounts through customer referrals. And that’s simply because we truly were different and we stuck to our guns. And so when you talk about the burnout, people get a year and a half in two years in years in, and they’re like, “We’re going to start cutting corners. We’re going to start being like everyone else.” And then you become like everyone else.
Cameron Bawden: And that’s why most companies just kind of stay flatlined and don’t really have that bell curve that we all want as entrepreneurs and business owners is because they fall into how everyone does things. The people that actually stick to their guns, because when people start a business, they have great ideas. Most people that come into business aren’t saying, “I’m going to be like everyone else and be successful.” They have an idea of how they’re going to be different, do different, better customer service. But what I find with business owners is what I’m saying is they all fall back into, “Oh, I’m going to go to five gallons.” Or, “Oh, I’m going to do the $50 photo shoot.” Or whatever it is. And that’s the problem why people get burnt out.
Allison Tyler Jones: So I have questions. So obviously you wanted, there’s form and then there’s substance. So you wanted both. You wanted substance, so you’re putting down more product than anybody else. For those of our listeners that aren’t in Arizona, which is most of our listeners are not in Arizona, the scorpion thing is a really big deal, and it’s actually incredibly hard to do pest control with scorpions. Very, very hard. So most people won’t guarantee it. So that was a big, you’re setting a really high bar for your business, which requires a lot more chemical, whatever. And then you also have this form, which is like you want to have the branding, you want to have the cool trucks. So to me, what that’s doing is if I’m hiring Green Mango to do my pest control, I’ve got a cool truck out in front of my house so people know that I’ve got the cool pest control guys. Which may or may not be worth something to somebody, but for those that it is worth something, they’re willing to pay for it.
Cameron Bawden: Yeah, no, we played heavily into understanding what I consider the super consumer. So who is your target audience? Well, for us, the guys weren’t calling in, it was the moms. It was the moms between 25 and 40 years old. And so what do they want? We created this keeping up with the Joneses mentality of that, “Hey, would you want this nasty…” And I keep saying Burns because that was our biggest competition at the time, but name whoever with the crappy service truck coming, or would you want a custom flat black truck showing up and taking care of your pest control?
Cameron Bawden: And then with social, and we can talk about influencer marketing, all that, which was huge, is like now, it’s honestly what you’ve created in your business and why I was, it’s almost like a flex saying, “Oh, I went and did pictures with Allison Tyler Jones because you’ve created that. That’s what we did with pest control is that, “Hey, as dumb as it sounds, I have the best pest control company. We use Green Mango.” There’s a lot of pride around that because of all the little things that we did with the service, with the technicians, with the uniforms, with our marketing online, and then our influence presence, it created this whole ecosystem of like, “Wow, this is what cool people do.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and I think as a mom, it’s true, especially if you’re home and you’re in a house with some guy, that’s a vulnerable position to be in. The fact that they might’ve showered within the last 24 hours is a positive thing.
Cameron Bawden: That’s a positive.
Allison Tyler Jones: That could be a plus. So what are some of the other things that you did that differentiated you? So you put down more product, you had these great trucks, everybody was dressed nice, professional. Anything else that you added to the service?
Cameron Bawden: Yeah, so we are huge on customer expectations. And so what we would do is we would require, we had initial techs that we required them to sit down with the customer, and it lasted between 10 and 15 minutes where they’d go through what we considered our welcome packet. So within the welcome packet, we would re-go over our scope of service that explained everything that we did because in pest control, there’s over 10,000 competitors just in Arizona. And again, during the summertime, these huge door knocking companies come in, they knock on your door and they try and switch over our accounts. Well, if they go to the door and say, “Hey, Green Mango sucks. They don’t power spray, they don’t do the fence line, they don’t do this. Switch over. We do this.” We get a lot of customers taken.
Cameron Bawden: If we educate our customers and say, “Hey, we’re Arizona’s finest premium service. We do the fence line, the yard, the perimeter of the house, we do more product.” And we educate them on what we do, when that door knocker comes to the door and says, “Hey, they don’t do this.” They can literally fight and advocate for us. I laugh because I have so many companies that come here and say, “If we knock on a Green Mango customer’s door, we just turn around. They are impossible to switch over.”
Cameron Bawden: And a lot of that, it’s not one thing that does it, but it’s all the little things we set out at the beginning saying, “Hey, this is how we’re going to be different. We’re going to spend 20 bucks on the welcome packet and print them for every single person.” And so the welcome packet went over the service, it went over their contract because we didn’t want people frustrated with us. Manage their expectations. I love what you do in your consultation, “Hey, this is how much, this is the ballpark of what it’s going to be. Are you good moving forward? If not, let’s save both of our time.”
Allison Tyler Jones: Sure.
Cameron Bawden: So we’d go over the contract, we’d go over the service, and then what was really cool is we’d have our referral card and we would pay girls, we had three girls when I sold, their whole job was with a Sharpie, right on the referral card, the customer’s name. We didn’t have it printed. We didn’t have sticky notes. It’s literally handwritten referral card. And we would encourage our customers to say, “Look, every person that you refer…” And we would explain our referral program to them and then answer any questions. And so that was a huge part of, again, of what we did. And then of course, we did the little things like texting the customer before we arrived. We would do a lot of training with our customer service representatives. How do you greet them? How do you carry on a conversation while you’re looking up data in the system, whether they’re asking about their bill or their next service? How do you close? What experience are you giving them? We are really heavy on that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, so just layers, basically just layer upon layer, which is a lot of money. So when you hit that point where you realize, “Shoot, we’re doing all this stuff, we’re now making no money.” Instead of saying, “We’re going to go and do what everybody else is doing, we’re doubling down on matte black and 22 inch rims.” But at some point there had to be a price increase, fair?
Cameron Bawden: Yeah, for sure.
Allison Tyler Jones: And so what did that look like? How did you do that without losing all your clients or freaking out?
Cameron Bawden: So we actually didn’t do the price increase until nine years in, and I didn’t make money at Green Mango until six years in. And so what’s funny about that is as soon as I started to delegate year five and start to give people bonuses for owning their department is when I actually started making money. With us doing all these little things that were considered premium, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was we were running inefficiently in so many other areas. One of the ways that you get in trouble in service companies is your route density. So how many stops are you putting on a route and then your pay? So when I hired a branch manager and a tech manager and field managers and had them own that, people were able to see issues in their own departments and we’re able to fix it. Now with inflation and everything else, nine years in, it was coming to a point where it’s like, “Man, we’re still only charging 65 bucks to a lot of these OG customers when the rates are now $85.”
Cameron Bawden: I remember going to my buddy who actually owns another huge pest control company. His name’s Mike. He’s an amazing guy, and I just like, “Dude, I’m so nervous.” I don’t remember the exact amount of customers, but it was like seven or 8,000 customers that were on OG pricing. Luckily, we increased our prices every single year. We were smart enough to keep up with that. But again, with pest control, what’s cool is you sign people up on a year contract and they don’t cancel. They just keep going.
Allison Tyler Jones: Got it.
Cameron Bawden: And so we’d have customers five, six, seven years with us, because we were doing a great job, but they were at their old pricing and we literally probably weren’t even making money on them. So I go to my buddy and I’m like, “Hey, man, how do I do this?” And he just walked me through it. I’ve actually created a playbook on price increases that we can share with your listeners if you want. But what’s cool is when we sent out the letter, we lost $174,000. But what’s great is I made 950,000 because of the price increase. Less than 1% of customers canceled. And I was just like, “Whoa.” One, people don’t care about the little price increase, they expect it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. If they’re going to pay 65, they’ll pay 85.
Cameron Bawden: Especially over a year period. We’re talking about a couple more bucks a month. It’s-
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s nothing.
Cameron Bawden: But that’s the thing, you stress about it, but it’s really not a huge issue. And so if it’s done right, and that’s why I created a playbook around it to showcase, “Hey, when’s the right time? How do you go about it? What’s the letter state? How do you word the pricing?” Because my buddy walked me through it. So after that, we increased our prices every single year, and I don’t think we ever got over 3% cancellation rate, and it was just a testament to who we were as a service company and the value that we brought to customers where they just wouldn’t flinch.
Allison Tyler Jones: I love that. That’s good. Now, I think there’s just some direct comparisons to our industry. Obviously we’re not working, I mean, most of us are not working at that kind of volume. We’re not having that many clients. We’re in a very high touch, low volume kind of thing. But I love the idea of that efficiency, getting those efficiencies down. So how were you balancing efficiency, but also keeping that personal touch where it needed to be? Did you feel like that was a tension that you had to deal with?
Cameron Bawden: Yeah, yeah. So I lived by the rule of seven, and so with every seven employees that I had, I created a manager over that person, and then there was a manager over those people. So at the end we had, I think we had over 105 or 110 techs. And so for every seven people, there was a direct field manager over those people, and they had all the KPIs, “Hey, this is how you train them.” We had a welcome script for when they knock on the front door. Most companies just knock on the door, “Hey, I’m here to do your service.” It’s like, “No, you were very specific on what to say, refer to the notes, all the little things.” And it was the field manager’s job to make sure that we were keeping that same quality as if Cameron was coming to spray your house.
Cameron Bawden: And that’s the challenge that I see entrepreneurs as they scale is they lose that little touch because they don’t train their people on, they don’t take the time to train their people, period. And so I always tell people, “Hey, if you are going to hire your little boy or your little girl, what would the training process look like?” And the reason why I say family is because they’re going to care about your kid a lot more than they care about a stranger coming in. They’re going to give them the podcast to listen to. They’re going to encourage them to take the coworker out to dinner. They’re going to have them read through whatever book you have. Even to a point, I was sitting down with my partner, Evan, at my carpet cleaning business the other day, and I asked him the same question. I said, we were talking about the sales meeting, and I asked him, I said, “Where did the achievers sit? Have you seen any correlation, the people that have a 450 job average versus the people that have a $200 job average?”
Cameron Bawden: And he sat there and he thought for a second, he said, “You know what’s crazy is all the high achievers sit in the front right and all the low achievers sit in the back.” And so I said, okay, “If your son started, would you have him sit in the front or would you just tell him, ‘Sit wherever you want.’?” And he’s like, “I would for sure have him sit in the front.” And said, “Why aren’t we doing that? At least require that for the first six months of all new employees.” And so you start to pick up on patterns of things that you did, because we’re not that special. We’re just driven and we have a couple bolts loose as entrepreneurs. Business owners, something’s wrong with us.
Allison Tyler Jones: We don’t want to work for other people.
Cameron Bawden: But it’s like we’re not the best. We’re not the best at each category. So if you can bring someone in and teach them how you did or how you learned to be whoever you are, the best salesman, the best technician, the best photographer, whatever it is that got you there, take the 20 hours, the 50 hours to write the training process, put them through that, and now you just bought back your time. And that’s what, at the end, I got really, really great at that is buying back my time. We were just talking about my driver. It’s like I only drive nine hours a week right now, but I hired a personal driver to drive me for those nine hours because even as I’m quote, unquote, “retired”, I’m still trying to buy back my time because I want to leverage those nine hours that I’m driving every single week.
Cameron Bawden: And so as you do that as business owners, and then you talk about the incentive pay and not just capping people. If you just cap people at an hourly or a salary wage and not give them any bonuses, why should they show up? Why should they do a little bit extra? People don’t just come to work anymore and it sucks, and you can sit there and fight it if you want, but it’s like people want an additional care or bonus in order to go above and beyond.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, agreed. One of the things I love what you’re saying is for our listeners that might be solopreneurs or maybe they’re have one or two employees, or maybe they’re thinking about hiring their first employees. And even if you stay a solopreneur, it’s just codifying the things that work. Once something has worked really well, let’s keep doing that. I think as creatives, as entrepreneurs, we get bored easily. And so we want to just change things all the time. And so there’s some things that you should change, but a lot of times we’re just changing things just to change things when, hey, if it works, if you got a good response from that sales technique or that wording the script or whatever, let’s codify that, put it in a Google Doc. And then when you have a new employee, you can just run them through that.
Cameron Bawden: So I’ve worked with a lot of creators like you, and they’re very difficult. I understand them. It’s like the people that are listening to this, you need to go find your person that’s organized and they’re worth whatever. And so you said like a solopreneur. If you’re the guy that’s listening or girl that’s listening right now and you don’t have any employees and you just feel like you’re drowning, you probably need someone like me who is very organized and can see the bigger vision. That’s Dusty, my business partner was the creative, so creative. I’m not that person. I’m really not. But the reason why we complimented each other so well is because I’m a systems and processes guy. And so he’d have these great ideas and they’d be like, “Hey, we need to hire this person to do that.” Or, “We need to free up your time so you’re not stuck doing this.” And so what’s really cool is even when you’re a solopreneur, you’re doing something that you hate doing. Truthfully, you didn’t start the business thinking that, I’m going to do payroll or I’m going to do-
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, I want to be in QuickBooks.
Cameron Bawden: I’m going to do the appointment scheduling or whatever it is in your guys’ world that you hate. I’ve created a little formula around it. So you basically take your salary, you divide it by 50, because that’s most weeks that people work with holidays and all that. You divide that by 40, which is the 40 hour working days. So let’s just say you make $100,000 a year and you’re saying, “Okay, there’s this task that I do that is…” I don’t know, let’s take appointment scheduling or what’s something that you guys do?
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s a good one. That’s a good one. Scheduling clients.
Cameron Bawden: So you’re worth like 50 bucks an hour if you spend, what does it take to go hire a appointment scheduler? Is that two grand a month? Is that three grand a month? What do you think that is?
Allison Tyler Jones: I would say probably for most people in our business, maybe 20, 25 an hour, something like that.
Cameron Bawden: So if you’re spending more than 15 hours a week on that task, you can afford to go hire that appointment setter and buy back 15 hours of your time. And so my thing is that a very safe formula is if it’s the 50% rule. If you’re spending 50%, so if the salary’s three grand and you’re spending 1,500 bucks of your time on that, then you need to go hire that person. And that’s what I’ve always lived by. Because as business owners, we have to wear the hat. You got to wear the hat, and then it’s like, “Okay, there’s enough money coming in, when do I hand it off?” You hand it off when you’re allocating 50% of your salary to that position because once you buy back that 15 hours or 10 hours, whatever it might be, you are talented enough to go two, 3X that in revenue for your business.
Cameron Bawden: Now if you go sit on the couch and you hang out and you don’t do anything, you just wasted money. But that’s why I hired the driver. I’m basically retired now, it sounds so funny. I don’t need a driver, I really don’t. But when I look at what is my time allocation, how much am I making a year? And I divide it by 50, I divide it by 40 hours, and I look at how much time, even if I bought back three hours of the nine hours, it’s almost worth three times the price that I’m paying my driver. So all I know how to do is be effective for three of those nine hours and I’m winning and I have the luxury of everything else. And so that’s the mistake that a lot of people make as entrepreneurs that are just starting out, is they, I know this because it was me, I was literally a technician for six years on the truck. I was such an idiot. I sprayed houses for six years.
Allison Tyler Jones: Really?
Cameron Bawden: I wish someone would’ve taught me this formula, and I could have handed it off because it’s like I wasted so much time.
Allison Tyler Jones: But people are so scared to do it, and they’ll hire somebody and it’s not a fit. And so then they just retreat back into it, and then it reinforces the idea that nobody else can do what I do. And it’s like-
Cameron Bawden: That’s the playbook. That’s why I was asking you the questions yesterday, because your staff is absolutely phenomenal. And I don’t think they just became that, I think it was because you were very intentional with how you train them. That’s the problem. People hire people and they spend an hour training them. I started this consulting business and I’ve had to get out all the things out of my head. And so I’ve created all these playbooks around how to create a customer success roadmap, how to create an employee roadmap. And so I have all these things, which I’ll just give them to free for your listeners, but these are all the little things that if you take the time and you’re intentional with how to onboard that person with a success roadmap, I referred to it from my Ironman. So when I trained for an Ironman four or five years ago, I was looking around again, I was looking at my brother, no offense to my brother and my dad, I love them, but they started to have the dad bod, like a little stomach. And I was starting to have that.
Cameron Bawden: I’m like, “I don’t want that. That’s not what I want.” So I went to my trainer and said, “Hey, I want to do an Ironman because I feel like if I do an Ironman, I’ll get skinny.” He said, “Okay, Cameron, the Ironman is in nine months. What do you want?” And I said, “What do you mean what I want? Well, do you just want to finish or do you want to finish in a certain amount of time? What’s your goals?” I said, “Well, I want to run at a 7:05 pace. I want to bike it, I can’t remember that pace.” I’m like, “And I just want to finish the swim. I’m not a swimmer.”
Allison Tyler Jones: I want to not drown.
Cameron Bawden: Yeah. So what’s crazy is I trained for nine months and every single day he broke down exactly how much miles I needed to run at the pace I needed to run the workout that I needed to do in the gym, the bike rides, I needed to do the swimming, how often I needed to get a massage. Literally everything he laid out for me. And then every Saturday we did a mock triathlon where we go through a mini, we do the swimming, biking, and the running. And then on race day, I never forget, I called him, I said, his name’s Terrence. “Terrence, you’ll never believe what happened. Not only did I hit my goals, but I exceeded them.” And he’s like, “I know. I gave you a bulletproof plan and you stuck to it, of course you smashed it.”
Cameron Bawden: And I think about that a lot because it’s like, how often do people go into a business and the owner or the manager sits with them for three days and then says, “Good luck.” And that’s the problem. You need to break down, how do you become Alison Tyler Jones? How do you become Cameron Bawden? There’s a way they might not like it, but there’s a way. So if you create that for them and then you have mock trials like, “Here’s where you should be after month one, here’s where you should be after month three, month six, month nine.” That’s when you start to have success with employees and when you can delegate it, and then it’s like, you don’t have to stress about it.
Allison Tyler Jones: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s a lot more than I’ve done.
Cameron Bawden: You’re like, “Too much.” You’re like, “TMI.”
Allison Tyler Jones: No, no, it’s good. It’s awesome. And I think that’s more than when you and I were talking about this yesterday. I said I hire for personality because you can’t train that and for motivation. But it’s true, you do have to live it, breathe it like it’s an ethos. This is how we do it. There is a way that it is done and everything, for us I call it the brand filter. We have a brand and everything we do goes through that filter. So if we return a text and it sounds like this before we send it, is that sound like us? Is it slightly funny, kind of snarky, but yeah, with love? It’s wrapped in, love is at the heart of it. So is it that?
Allison Tyler Jones: But you’re right, so often we hire, especially your first hire, you think, “Okay, I’m just going to hire somebody that’s exactly like me.” And that’s not who you need. You already have one of you. You need somebody who’s not like you. I need a you. Stacey’s like you. She’s very systems, and my husband’s like you, he’s very systems oriented, very process oriented. And I’m like, the more the visionary, I’m more like, “Okay, here are the ideas.” But I think it’s easy when you are the creative to discount that you think, “Oh, that’s boring.” But you have to have that. You have to have somebody like that.
Cameron Bawden: Yeah, I don’t know how else to stress that. If people get one thing out of this podcast, it’s that. It’s just know thyself. Be honest with where you’re weak. As human beings, we’re so amazing. When our back’s up against the wall, we do some amazing things. And so if you’re scared to hire that person, go through what we’re talking about, go through the customer success plan, make sure they have all the tools, bring them on, and then go pay for them three times over and just watch how easy your life becomes and what a blessing Stacey and Chelsea are to you. I can just see it. They make you. And again, I’m sure you could be successful doing it by yourself, but how crazy would your life be and how different would that experience be? And so at some point you did it and you figured it out, and that’s what’s cool.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, it is amazing how it does. It’s almost like a magical, I loved your formula because it is almost like a magical thing. Once you have that freed up, you’re not doing whatever it is, say that it’s scheduling, the constant back and forth with the clients or whatever, then it’s like, “Oh, you know what? We could do a marketing thing. We could do this email.” It just frees your mind up to be, you’re not bogged down in QuickBooks doing your bookkeeping or doing your sales tax or whatever. You should not be doing that stuff. So I love that. Thank you for sharing. We’ll link in the show notes to the resources that you were talking about, but I love all of this. So the last thing I wanted to ask you was just now that you’ve done, is it three businesses that you’ve started and sold or probably more than that?
Cameron Bawden: It’s been six.
Allison Tyler Jones: Six, okay. Well, the car wash.
Cameron Bawden: Well, I don’t count that one, yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: Pest control.
Cameron Bawden: So we had Green Mango, which was pest control.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay.
Cameron Bawden: We had Black Hat Security, which was your home automation and security. Pineapple Pools, which was service. Agave was windshields. Coconut was carpet cleaning. And then actually I did solar for a while, for a couple years there, Phoenix Power.
Allison Tyler Jones: So you did lots of different things.
Cameron Bawden: I just love pain, man. It wasn’t the smart… I look back, that was the dumbest financial decision ever, but the best decision I made because I learned so much during that process.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, and you’ve learned literally processes and systems, I mean, which is amazing. So as we head out into the sunset together on this, what advice would you have for our listeners, so portrait photographers? I think most of the people that listen to this podcast, they want to be premium, they want to be lux, they want to serve at the highest level. But what do you feel like as you’ve watched all these businesses are kind of the biggest mistakes or maybe a big one, and that you feel like they could do to make their business better? I know that’s a really broad question.
Cameron Bawden: I think what’s cool is it’s not hard to stand out as a business. It really isn’t. Everyone is doing the same thing. Everyone has crappy service. Everyone is just, again, doing the same thing. There’s some stat out there that if you can do 50 pushups as a male, you’re in the top one percentile. How embarrassing is that? Most guys should be able to do 50 pushups. You know what I mean? And so again, if you’re the business owner and you’re listening to this and you’ve been in business for three years or four years or two years, go back to your journal or go back into the memory bank of, “Hey, when I first started this, what did I say I was going to do that was going to be different?”
Cameron Bawden: And figure out a way to keep doing that because that’s what’s going to make you special and that’s what’s going to make you stand out. When I think about Allison Tyler Jones, it’s the little things. It’s the personality from your team when you show up. Probably took you guys five minutes to print our name on the parking spot. To me, that’s it. And there’s so many more things, but it’s like when I think about you, it’s like, “Man, she just did it right.” So how hard is that? Go find a great receptionist and a great whatever title Chelsea has. What’s her title again?
Allison Tyler Jones: Client coordinator.
Cameron Bawden: Like, go find a great client coordinator and create an amazing experience. People appreciate that. When a kid looks at you in the eyes and shakes your hand and says, “Nice to meet you, my name’s Banks.” That’s different. Most kids don’t shake your hands, they’re avoiding eye contact. And so you’re telling me the only thing that my kid needs to do in order to stand out to you as a human being is look at you in the eyes and shake your hand? Business is no different. And so I teach my kids to do that because it’s like, “Hey, this is what’s going to make you stand out.” And so again-
Allison Tyler Jones: So true.
Cameron Bawden: I love what you’re doing. I love who you are. You’re practicing what you’re preaching. And so take the risk though. I’m a huge ready, fire, aim guy. You don’t have to know all the things. Just go do it. Put your back up against the wall and some great things will happen.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s so true. We get in our head so much and think about, I think as creatives, probably this is true. You were saying that people like us are your worst clients, is because we’re very creative in thinking of all the ways it’s not going to work. But that ready, fire, aim is so true. I think it’s so true. I love that. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today and love the nuggets. I think there’s so many good things that you brought out that we can take and use in our businesses. So thank you for being here. I appreciate you.
Cameron Bawden: Oh, no, thank you. I’m so glad we got to finally meet. I’ve heard about you for the past few years, but I was like, “Man, she’s going to create an experience.” And so we finally got to come do it, and it was absolutely phenomenal.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s going to be awesome.
Cameron Bawden: Do you do shop tours? Do you do a tour? That sounds funny, but-
Allison Tyler Jones: What do you mean?
Cameron Bawden: You should open, I don’t know how open, obviously you have a podcast and you’re sharing all your tricks, but some of my favorite things, my buddy Tommy does a shop tour and he allows people to come in and just be a fly on the wall and he shows him everything. And so it’s like, I don’t know. I think it’d be cool for people to be able to experience other photographers experience what you do from start to finish. I think people could get a lot of benefit from that if you’re willing to share.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, no, we do. I’ve got a MindShift membership that we do like a couple of lives a month, and they get to see all of that. Yeah. So yeah, for sure. Because yeah, I think the thing that’s cool is I think it’s so true, to just watch somebody do it. Not that you’re going to do it exactly how they do it, but that you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s cool. I could do something like that.”
Cameron Bawden: Yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: For sure, yeah.
Cameron Bawden: Well, thank you so much.
Allison Tyler Jones: All right, thank you. I appreciate you.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Alison at dotherework.com and on Instagram at do.the.rework.
