Cameron Herold
Appearances
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So why would I hire someone who knows how to do it versus someone that has done it? I would rather hire an Olympian who broke a world record, who won an Olympic gold, who competed in all events versus someone who knows how to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
No, it's very similar in terms of my formula. And my formula is the street smart entrepreneurial kid. That's the way I was groomed, right? And so the focal point that I grew, how I grew 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It's how we grew Gerber Auto Collision. It's how I did the private currency. It's how I've coached people for the last 17 years. I give them the same three-step formula roughly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Number one is you have to charge more of a premium price, right? So I raised the prices at 1-800-GOT-JUNK by 40% within the first month of being there because no one was making money. Brian wasn't, the company wasn't, franchisees weren't, the guys in the trucks weren't. So we became the Starbucks of junk removal or the FedEx of junk removal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
We just charged more so we could deliver on our promises. That was number one. Number two was we had to make the company into a little bit more than a business, a little bit less than a religion. We had to get into this zone of a cult. So we made all the, put all the cultural systems in place and that's not the free perks, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Culture was alignment with a vivid vision, alignment with core purpose, alignment with a BHAG. It was having the right people systems in place and firing the jerks and the toxic underperformers. So I really work with a lot around companies around culture and And then third was leveraging free press, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I actually wrote one of my six books was around called free PR and it's how we landed 5,200 individual unique stories before social media existed. We were on Oprah. If you look up me in the physical magazines of Forbes, entrepreneur, American airlines, like I've been in the actual real magazines. So it's how do you leverage free publicity?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
That's probably my formula is, is, is kind of doing that, that course, but it's all around culture.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, one is it's just easier to deliver on your promises when you charge more. And I was talking to somebody in Dubai last week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I was in Dubai, I was speaking to a group of 2,500 people, a big conference called Mindvalley. I was the opening keynote. And I was off the stage chatting with somebody who is much taller than me. I'm six foot four. He was about six, seven. And I'm like, what's your favorite sport? And he's like, volleyball. I'm like, okay, cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So if you, and he plays professional volleyball, professional beach volleyball player. I'm like, if you and one of your buddies played against me and five of my friends, and I played at the college level, kind of social, but high school competitive. I'm like, if me and five of my friends played against you and one of your buddies, you'd kill us. He goes, every day. We would destroy you every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I'm like, okay, so if I paid two people $200,000 a year each, or I got six people $100,000 a year each, now I got 600,000 versus 400,000. The two people would destroy the six. You hire the best people, you pay the best people, you buy the best talent, you'll destroy a bunch of B's and C's. So I need to charge more of a premium price to hire the best people, but I don't need more people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I need the jack of all trades, master of none early stage. I need to be able to pay more or charge more with clients so I can deliver on my promises. Because if I charge more, then I can show up better. I can have a better website. I can service them better. I also believe in really blowing my employees away, having really good, happy employees. because they will take care of my customers.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So if I have really happy employees that have done this before, then I have really happy customers, which means I can charge more. It becomes a bit of a circular loop.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
That's just stupid. No, let me, let me touch on that. Go ahead. I don't think that to build a great company, you need to be innovative. My R and D stands for rip off and duplicate. I go out and find what the best companies are doing. And I just do that. I don't think I've ever been innovative. I think I've spotted the trends and I've spotted the system.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I don't have to create companies have spent millions of dollars figuring everything out. I'll just do what they're doing. You know, McDonald's, would you like fries with that? That's an upsell, right? Going and copying the best landing pages and the best sales letters. That's just so no, I don't think you have to be innovative.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
In fact, I think the days of innovation were when you had to hire all the smart people. Because there was no access to all the best and all the best information is on the online right now for free. Ask Chad GPT to create stuff for you and it will. So I don't think, I think innovation was a 1980s, 1990s, 1970s thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I think now it's about being ability to problem solve, ability to collaborate, ability to find the people who can do stuff for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, it's interesting. And my two boys are probably a little older than your kids. Mine are 21 and 23. So I'm still at that same stage of trying to, you know, my legacy project, right? Raising our kids and helping them get out the door as successful adults. I was raised as an entrepreneur. My father was an entrepreneur. Both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I'm looking for people first that are able to adapt, that are able to problem solve, that are self-driven learners, that are able to collaborate, that are problem solvers. And those are the people that I want in the company because again, 20 years ago, you hired a person, they did a job and they did the same job for five years. Now the job is iterating and changing every three to six months.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I need a person that can adapt that quickly. I need a person that can realize that if the rate of change outside their business is greater than the rate of insurance or business, they're out of business, right? I need somebody who can adapt or die. I need somebody that realizes that all the information that they knew yesterday is going to be outdated in six months.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So they need to be not looking for their boss to give them the PDP. They're always growing and learning. I want people that are able to go, who knows this information and can help me, right? It's kind of like the multiplayer gamer who can collaborate with people all over the world and they've never even met. I'm looking for that more.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
We grew up in a family where we were told having a job was a bad idea, having a job was a bad deal and that running your own business, you could actually have as much free time as you wanted to have a great life. And it was never about the money. It was always about having a free time and the money would always follow. So really, that's all we've ever done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I need this. That's very much a Gen X and baby boomer mindset. And even the first half of the cohort of Gen Y is that I want to do what I was hired to do. The younger part of Gen Y and Gen Z is realize that what they were hired to do will be very different in six months, which is partially why they're moving so quickly. A baby boomer joined a company and they were there for five to 25 years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Gen X joined a company and they were there for three to 10 years. Gen Y joined and they were there for one to seven years. Now they're looking to join for six months to a year and a half. When my oldest son was 16, which was seven years ago, got his first job at a grocery store, Six months later, I said, hey, you should start getting ready to quit and looking for another job. He's like, why?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I just got here. I'm like, no, it's time for you to hop. You're going to gain more experience by moving around. You're going to get paid more by moving around. So I was coaching him to quit six months after he got hired.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Right. Whereas, but someone who is my age, it was more about get in the company and then get promoted to the next job in the company, get promoted to the next job. That's not the mindset of this, this new cohort.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
That was, that was a very kind of formational turning point for my son. Who's 21. The one who's running his own business, just ran his own, a sub four hour marathon for four months ago. I took him at 16 years old to an annual genius network event. One of Joe Polish's events and,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And Connor being in the room with these 350 entrepreneurs who are all adults for four days, that fundamentally changed him. And I think he just saw something different in himself and he got inspired. And I think more people, adults as well, need to remember that they need to get themselves into these other rooms, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You pay to pay to be around these other people or volunteer to be at these other groups. And you don't have to go to the super expensive ones to start. Just go to any of them, right? Go surround yourself with these other smart people and yeah, get off your device, go connect with other humans.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I mean, I've been the second in command for a couple of different companies, but I've been running my own business for 17 years. And then when I was 20 years old, I had 12 full-time employees in my first company already. So really, that was my journey. And then my brother and my sister and myself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Wow. I think there's a couple of groups there. I mean, I'm not, my wife and I sold everything three and a half years ago to travel around the world. We've been nomads. We've been in 56 countries together. You know, we we've literally been seeking, you know, seeking, I'm in Sydney, Australia right now. I was in Dubai last week. So we're, we're probably outside of the normal comfort zone.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, and I'm definitely a financial outlier now too, because I'm actually based legally in a tax free zone, right? My company is now based in Dubai. I'm a resident of Dubai and I don't pay tax on worldwide income as a Canadian. So I'm definitely a financial outlier there. And that's all legal. That's legal above board. Yeah. No capital gains tax, no dividend tax, no personal income tax.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
It's pretty sweet. Are we, I don't know. That's a really interesting question. I think we're probably the first generation in four generations that is starting to pick up and move. You grew up where your parents were raised and your grandparents were raised, but your great-great-grandparents moved from somewhere. Mine came from Ireland and from Scotland.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Where did your family come in from to North America?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Okay. So they came from Budapest. Yeah. So they came from Budapest, but then you moved, but your parents, your parents were raised in Detroit and stayed in Detroit, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Okay. Well, you're kind of more of the unusual. Our age group is the first group, and then Gen Y now are starting to move everywhere, and Gen Z. But for the most part, three generations were really growing where they were planted. Most Americans...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And most Americans' parents and most Americans' grandparents have always lived in the same state that their great, great grandparents moved from Europe or Asia or wherever to. I think now with the advent of the internet, with Wi-Fi, with laptops, and then with COVID, People are literally just saying, I don't want to live here anymore.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I want to move to Lake Tahoe or I want to move to Napa or I want to move to Florida. I want to move to Dubai or I want to move to Portugal or Bali or, you know, Austin, Texas. People are definitely unplugging and moving, which isn't the normal kind of comfort grow where you're planted. And I think it's really exciting for the youth these days to decide where they want to be.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I did. I went to university. And while I was in university, I was on the university ski team for two years. I was the president of the first fraternity ever in the city of Ottawa. And I was running my own business from second year university. So in second, third and fourth year, I was running my own company with 12 to 16 employees for that full three year period.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And be more intentional.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Amazing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I have a friend of mine, Adam and Jessica Daly from San Diego took their three kids under eight years old and did 12 months around the world. And each of them had a carry on suitcase.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And your kids will learn. Students will learn more from traveling the world and living globally than they ever will from being in a university or high school education.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
No, it's impossible. Let's even put that part aside because certainly you're going to learn from that. You're going to learn empathy. You're going to learn creativity. You're going to learn about history and geography and art and entertainment and food and fashion. You're going to connect with different mindsets, just even the news. I remember I was on a boat up in Portugal this summer.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
We went up to the North Pole with 180 entrepreneurs for 10 days.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
and someone was talking about the election and i kind of put my hand up as a joke and i went 193 countries which one are we talking about and he goes oh god you're right because there were like 60 countries worth of people on this boat and we and this person was like a very american-centric kind of mindset and all of a sudden he realized yeah you're you know what we could be talking about the uk election or the one in indonesia like you become very global yeah which is kind of cool yeah
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And then you see the benefits of North America, but you see the downsides, right? You see the benefits of Canada, but you see the downsides.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I was in Cairo in 1991, and then I was there two years ago, and it's just turned upside down. It's terrible now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I know Steve very well. Yes, I've spoken at one of his distillery events. He and I were in the Genius Network together. We spent a day in a maximum level four state penitentiary prison system together.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I was at the one that he went to for the first time eight years ago. Yeah, it's great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I didn't go to as many of my classes as I should have. And I realized pretty early on that I You know, back in those days, a degree mattered. If I was that age today, I wouldn't go. I really wouldn't go to university today. I would opt out. I would maybe apprentice with a few companies, but I would be out running my own business now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
No, no, this is great. And this is interesting, and it's actually tied to innovation. The idea of the Vivid Vision was not my idea. It was sitting and meeting with an Olympic coach back in 1998, who was a high performance sports psychologist. And he talked about how athletes used visualization in their events to perform at the highest level.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And he said, if we could take that same concept and bring it into the business world, then we would win. So the idea of the Vivid Vision is this. It's leaning out into the future. Let's say that you lean out three years from now, no more than three years. So you lean out to December 31st, 2027, and you describe everything about your business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You describe what your business looks like, acts like, and feels like three years from now. Or you do one for your personal life. You describe yourself as a human and what you as a human are showing up like three years from now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So if you were describing your company's vivid vision, you might describe how operations acts and sales and marketing, how your company interacts with customers and suppliers, what your employees are writing about you online, what the media is writing about you and covering you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You describe your office environment and your meeting rhythms almost like you're walking around your company writing down what you see. Then you take all of those rough notes and you kind of craft the first draft, like a Word document draft, and you pop it into ChatGPT and polish it. And then you can get a designer to add some design elements to it so it looks and feels like your brand.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Basically, it takes all the ideas that the entrepreneur has for their company, and it lets everyone read and see what the entrepreneur can see. It gets us all on the same page.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
If I'm writing one for myself, which I've done, I write what I am as a dad and a friend and a husband, a lover, what I do for fun, where I travel, what my vacations are like, what my hobbies are like, how I interact with fitness and health and diet. And I describe all of those things without knowing how I make them come true.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And I wouldn't have the patience to sit in a classroom for four years. And I really struggle right now. My 21 year old son is already running his own company. He's making $6,000 a week profit running his own business. He's in fourth year university. doing an intern exchange in Singapore. And he, he even kind of looks at me going, dad, why am I doing this? I'm like, you know, you're so close.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
If you were building a home, you know what you want your home to look like, but you don't have the skills to do the electrical and the plumbing and the design and put in the cabinets. But you can describe the finished state and then you can get a contractor to come up with the plans to make your dreams come true. So the vivid visions is the dream.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And then you get the team and the people around you to come up with the plans to make it come true.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, and what's interesting is when I share my vivid vision for my company or for myself, or even the one that my wife and I have written for our marriage, when we share that with more people, when we share it online, when we share it on our websites, when we share it from speaking event stages, the more people that can see what we're trying to make happen, the more they end up trying to help us make one or two of those sentences come true.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
know i had a friend recently and they said to me hey i was reading your vivid vision that says you like to golf and go hiking so instead of going to get together for dinner do you want to go golf together like yes that's exactly what i would do right because so often we default to hey do you want to get together for a coffee not really no like i i would rather go for a walk or go for a hike or go spend time with you exploring the city especially when i'm a nomad traveling the world like i'd actually rather go and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
let's go for a one hour walk through the city together. That would be cooler than just sitting in a coffee shop.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Have you spent much time in Budapest?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Just check the box, get it done. But yeah, it's five Oh, and go at this point, just get 50%.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
What a super cool experience that is, right? To really, truly understand instead of just like celebrating with madness. Yeah, Budapest is on my list of cities. I have a long list of cities that I want to be able to spend, you know, one or two months in and it's on the list for sure. I've been there for just a short few days, but I want to know these cities, right? I want to go and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Like we're in Sydney, Australia for a month and we're in staying in four separate areas of the city just to really immerse ourselves and get to know a place and Budapest on that list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I was at the local coffee shop this morning at 6.45 in the morning before my first call, and I shook hands with the owner of the coffee shop. I said, I won't see you again probably because I'm moving to a different area of Sydney today, but it's been really cool getting to know you and your story and getting to hang out here every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Not really.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
It's kind of nice to be able to drop into a neighborhood that way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, I never wanted to write a book. I had a speaker's bureau that asked me to write a book because they said they could get me a higher speaking fee for my speaking. So I asked them what they could get the fee up to. And when they told me, I said, okay, I'll do it. So I didn't really want to.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. No, he's made the connections by doing a couple of internships. So he talked his way into a company called Grow Rev two years ago. It's about a 60 person ad agency out of Vancouver, Canada, worked there and made some good connections. Then did an internship in London in the UK and made some good connections and got some ideas on how to run his own company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Then once I wrote the first book and I saw the leverage off of it, then I realized there was a system to get more out. So I've written six, but yeah, I didn't want to be a writer. I just understood the power of actually getting one written and getting it out the door and doing it. It was all though completely aligned with my core purpose.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Do you know the name Simon Sinek who wrote the book Start With Why?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, so Simon used to sleep on my couch. Simon was on our board of advisors for four or five years before he wrote the book, Start With Why. He was on our board at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, did a bunch of marketing for us for a year when he ran his marketing agency. And Simon was at my home for dinner about a year before he wrote the book, two years before, and helped me figure out my core purpose.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And my core purpose has always been to help entrepreneurs make their visions come true. So everything I do helps entrepreneurs make their visions come true. Whether it's writing the book, Vivid Vision, writing my six books, that helps entrepreneurs. Doing my speaking events helps entrepreneurs and their companies.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
My online leadership course, which is called Invest in Your Leaders, that's how they grow their people. It helps them make their visions come true. My COO Alliance grows their second in command. So everything I do is aligned with that. That's why it's easy for me to do things That is in alignment with my core purpose.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So even being on your podcast, it helps people with an entrepreneurial mindset, not necessarily all entrepreneurs, but that entrepreneurial mindset where they're not waiting for the government to hand them something. I was invited to go speak to a group, to a government agency recently, and I just said no to it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Even though they wanted to pay my full fee, it has nothing to do with the alignment with my core purpose. I'd rather actually spend time with my wife or my friends or family than go and do something that's not aligned with my core purpose.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I've only ever coached one big company. Most of the companies I coach are in the entrepreneurial small to medium size of the 50 to 500 person company. The only corporate kind of enterprise level company I coached was Sprint. And it was because Marcelo Claret, who was the CEO of Sprint, had built his own company from zero to a billion dollars. He sold to Masa at SoftBank.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And then he was appointed as the CEO of Sprint to turn it around. So because he was an entrepreneurial CEO, I said yes to coach him. And I coached his second in command, Jamie Jones, for 18 months. But that's the only big company corporate because it's not aligned with my core purpose. My core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their visions come true, not to help.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
What's that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I coached the royal family that owned the country of Qatar, and I did not continue coaching them after a while because they weren't aligned with core values. And I wasn't allowed to keep bringing up core values with their email and the team. The COO said, you can't talk to them about this. I can't talk to them about this. So that was a problem.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, he's made some connections, but I think he would have made connections as a 21-year-old hanging out with 21-year-olds doing internships at companies. As a Canadian, it's not as expensive. He's Canadian, so his university tuition is only $5,000 US a year. There's a better ROI off that than going to a US college where you're spending five, six times that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I've definitely seen entrepreneurial companies that are so focused on revenue and profitability that they forget that it's actually about your people, that the number one core metric inside of any organization is your entrepreneur, your employee net promoter score. That's the number one metric. How happy are your people? The number two metric is how happy are your customer?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So your customer NPS, and then it's profit and revenue. And I think if they have that upside down, that doesn't tend to be in alignment with me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And the reason for that is that if you have really, really happy employees, they'll go through brick walls for you to take care of your customers. So if you have really happy employees that are engaged and they don't feel like they're the second person thing to think about, they're going to work harder. And if your customers are then happy, then you can charge a lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
But if you focus on how happy are your customers, your employees feel burned out. Your employees feel taken advantage of. They feel like they're coming second rate. But if all you care about is them, you care about their home life. You care about their problems, their insecurities, their fears. You care about their dreams. You care about their work. You help coach them. You develop them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You help coach their kind of confidence. they'll go through brick walls for you to take care of your customers. And when your customers feel that much love, you can charge a lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I don't focus on being their friend. I focus on caring about them. And that's a very distinct line. I'm not friends with any of my employees, but I care about their home life. I care about their kids. I care about their insecurities. I care about their dreams. I care about their financials. But I have a very fine line between friends and caring. I'm also firm but fair.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I'm very kind of focused on our goals. I'm focused on our promises. I'm focused on our core values. But I don't cross the line with just hanging out and being their friend. That's a distinction.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, that's a very entrepreneurial distinction too. Entrepreneurs often care about being liked. And so they don't wanna make the tough decisions. They don't wanna deal with conflict. They don't like firing people. Often entrepreneurs carry the wrong people for too long because they're trying to be liked.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And sometimes they'll then offload that to their COO and they'll have their second command make the tough decisions of their second command fire people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
That is definitely an entrepreneurial kind of downside or weakness that many entrepreneurs have that I've had to coach people through to get them okay with firing people and realizing that just because you gave them five years working for you doesn't mean you owe them the next five.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You know, we really, I've always believed that your A players are your resources, your B players are your workhorses, and the C players have to go to the glue factory. And I think entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, and here's what's important. The government and the post office are always going to hire your C players, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
The government will always hire your Cs, the post office will hire your Cs, but entrepreneurs should give more time to their A players. Entrepreneurs should be coaching and developing their A players and not spending all this time with the C players that you should just get rid of. It's the two volleyball players versus six.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
If you get rid of your bottom performers and spend your time with your two A playing professional beach volleyball players, your company goes to the moon.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
A person who is curious about others. a person who can lead others, a person who can kind of gather the energy around them. So I'm looking for somebody who can get others listening to what they say, who kind of grabs the energy of the room, and then is just curious about the other people to learn about their strengths and their fears and insecurities. So someone who can build that kind of trust.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I'm looking for that strong leadership. You know, the three core things I look for in entrepreneurs, really strong leadership, really strong goal orientation, and then really strong tenacity. So it's the leadership to lead yourself, to lead others, to lead suppliers, to lead bankers, to lead employees. That's key. The goal orientation of always driving forward, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And then that tenacity, that dog-like work ethic to get over, under, around any obstacle put in your path. Those are the three things you need to be good as an entrepreneur.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
None of this stuff matters. This is just what we're doing to make money. To remember that we need to enjoy the journey. We're all just walking each other home. Let's have fun along the journey because if you get so focused on this, you forget that at the end of the day, we're all going to end up as a kebab. We're just going to be meat on a stick. Let's enjoy the journey, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I didn't even know that was awesome. I didn't know you could get better than a four. My wife has like a four. Yeah, you can't. I didn't know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
59. 59.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, you mentioned in the middle of the podcast about our friend Steve Sims having cancer. And while I was talking to you, I instantly sent him a message. He's already replied. I've replied to him. I sent another mutual. While I'm being interviewed with you, this interview matters, but not as much as Steve Sims and my relationship with him matters.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So even though I was being interviewed by you, I was allowing myself to care about what really mattered. Yeah, did you tell him you were on with me? I will as soon as we're done. Yeah, there you go, yeah. I'll do a screenshot and I'll share it with him.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Steve would not to be wrong, but yeah, I just sent Steve a screenshot of you and I both. And he said, John's a good lad. So that's what I mean by none of this shit matters, right? This is just what we're doing to make money.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And I think that that's a really important lesson for everybody as an entrepreneur or a leader is that if you care more about your employees, if you care about what they're struggling with, You care about their relationships. You care about their home life. They will go through brick walls for you and build your company, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You'll get to the result that you want to get to by caring about people and enjoying the journey with them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean. Yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons why you got to put yourself into these rooms, right? Go invest in yourself, go to these mastermind events, go to the conferences, unplug from your normal network is that, you know, we've heard that out is where the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So that's, you know, your mindset is your health is your fitness level is like, yeah, go spend time with cool people doing cool stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Wow, and the only people that call me Cam are my friends and family. So welcome to my friends and family network. There it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
All good. Yeah, so my main website, CameronHerald.com, and it's H-E-R-O-L-D, CameronHerald.com, has links to my online training. It has links to the CEO Alliance, links to my six books. It has links to my Second in Command podcast. That would be the best place for everybody to go to.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
We will for sure. John, thanks so much. I appreciate it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. But don't go get a general arts degree, right? A bachelor of art.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And I think for the normal person that wants to be an entrepreneur, yes, unless you can get into the Stanford and you can even get like a, maybe you can get like a scholarship to be there. That, that one might make sense. But if you're going to be an entrepreneur, I think you'd be better off going and apprenticing for four different companies, taking minimum wage.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And here's what my son did with his apprentice. He said, look, I'm going to work for you for free for four months. but I want to be able to sit in on finance meetings, marketing meetings, sales meetings, board meetings, leadership team meetings.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I want to sit in the corner of the room and I want you to allow me to observe stuff for two hours a day and work for six hours a day and I'll do it for free." And they said, yes. So he really came out of that with a real world MBA after four months. That's the style of learning that I think, and then go online, do online courses, watch videos. I think you can learn as much
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
as going to do a general VA.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. I gave him introductions to a number of different companies, but he set up his own interviews, set up his own videos. Yeah. I didn't say go hire my kid. He kind of talked his way in those doors for sure. But I definitely gave him some introductions. The one that he landed in the UK, he did all on his own.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
He found a guy in the UK that ran a student promotions business, which is what he does in Montreal, and ran a digital marketing agency, sent the guy some videos, scraped a bunch of LinkedIn emails from this guy's entire leadership team, sent it off to 12 people at the company, and they said, look, hire this kid. So that was all him. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, and Tim, you know, Tim Ferriss, I've been friends with Tim since 2008. Tim decided to not do his MBA because it was going to cost him $250,000 of actual cash and opportunity costs. So he earmarked $250,000 of his own money and invested $25,000 in 10 different companies back in 2008, 2009. as a way to get a board seat or an advisor seat or to be able to sit in the room.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So it was like, I'll invest 25,000 in Evernote, but let me come to some meetings. I'll invest 25,000 in Twitter, but let me come. So he bought his MBA by, so I think, no, I don't think it's too old. I think you should have to be creative, which is what Tim did.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, and no one really knew him when he did his investing one, right? And Michael Ellsberg did the, I think, Secrets of Millionaires. Nobody knew Michael and he interviewed all these people. So yeah, you could start your own podcast, interview all these people. you know, go to meetup groups, go to mastermind groups. You can get your way into room. You can apprentice.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I have, I've seen young students or even 30 year olds apprentice at the Ted conference, the main five day Ted, their volunteers there that are putting themselves in the room. I've seen apprentices at the genius network. I've seen volunteers at baby bathwater and YPO events, mind Valley events. So you can be, you can hustle,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Anyway, I think that the days of the normal, traditional educational route are being massively disrupted because you can access all this information online. When I went to university, I still used a typewriter. We didn't even have personal computers yet. If you were going to write an essay, you had to go to the library to pull out the book. There was no Google. So those days are gone, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
They're over.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
But there was nothing online.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, but we didn't, we didn't like, we had to start the paper file because I was the first president of the first fraternity in the city of Ottawa ever. What fraternity was that? What fraternity was it? It's called Acacia. Okay. So they'd started back in 1904 at University of Michigan. They had about 50 chapters in the US. We learned about them and we got mentored by their head office.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
But I was literally the very first president and an active member and a pledge at the same time, which was really weird.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, I just saw some data points around that about a week ago that something like 25 or 30 percent of the current last two years MBA classes are still unemployed, that they haven't been able to find career jobs yet, which is pretty scary that you've invested in yourself and you can't get there. Yeah, the middle class is getting decimated, sadly, in North America. It is quite sad to see.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And the second part of that equation around the global financial crisis or the housing crash was Banks really were committing fraud in allowing people to get mortgages that they knew they didn't qualify for. And some people should be going to jail for that and they're not. And that's not okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And yes, the taxi driver who knew he was filling out the paperwork kind of fraudulently should be kind of getting slapped on that one too. So everybody was complicit in this. Anyway, yeah. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Okay, so first, When a Tender Got Junk was not a massive company when I joined them. I was employee number 14.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I built it. Yeah. I took them from 14 employees. I took them from 14 to 3,100 in six and a half years as their COO.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. Brian was 12 years getting to 2 million in revenue. So he started in 1989. I joined in 2000. He got it to 2 million. And then I helped take them from two to 106 million in the next six years. So then it was a massive company. So your question around, what was it, around education or?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, I would not look for somebody who has education. I only want experience. So I'll give you an example. You know how to do breaststroke, front crawl, back crawl, and butterfly, right? You know how to do them. Do you know how to win an Olympic record or win an Olympic gold?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yes, you do. Be faster than everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Right. And you know how to win an Olympic or to set a world record.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And you know how to be in a team event, but you've never done any of those. So why would I hire someone who knows how to do it versus someone that has done it? I would rather hire an Olympian who broke a world record, who won an Olympic gold, who competed in all events versus someone who knows how to do it. It's really easy to read all the books. That's knowledge.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
But I would rather hire someone that has actually done it before. And there's a real bias now against MBAs to hire people that have actually done it before. Most of the Bay Area tech companies are biased against education now, unless you have the education and the practical experience to back you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Hey, John. Thanks very much for having me. Nice to see you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And I think that explanation of the swimmer is a really good data point or a really good example that illustrates that.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Totally. So I've always said that I want to flip the org chart upside down, right? Turn it upside down. So the CEOs at the bottom supporting the VPs who are supporting the managers, who are supporting the frontline staff, who are supporting the customers, like an inverted pyramid. Everyone can see the vivid vision of where we're going.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
The customers, suppliers, partners, employees can all see where we're going. And then you build your company inside your core values and your core purpose, right? Then it's very easy to be in service because my job as a leader, I was asked by Fortune Magazine in 2003 in the actual physical print magazine, how do you hold employees accountable? I said, I don't. I hire accountable people.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I hire people who are going to do what we need them to do, who have done what we need them to do already. And then my job is to remove obstacles, to coach them, to praise them, to problem solve for them, to help them, to care about them, but not to drive them and manage them, right?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
If I inspire them and I'm in service of helping them, if I grow their skills, their confidence and their connections, that's all they really need of us.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I bring a lot of analogies back to traditional marriage, like a husband and wife or raising a family. My job as a dad is not to tell my kids what to do. It's not to manage them all the time. It's not to show them what their chores are every day. It's to show them our values as a family. It's to show them and inspire them to become better adults. It's to grow their confidence to be better adults.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
It's to grow their skills to become adults. It's to help kick them out of the house to be confident, to make sure they've got hobbies and passions and friends. That's easy. Well, if I grow my kids that way, why would I not grow my team that way? The same thing. Sadly, most entrepreneurs have never had any training on leading and coaching and delegating and leveraging situational leadership.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. Looking forward to it.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So most managers revert to, I'm going to hold people accountable and tell them what to do. It's because they're bad at interviewing, they're bad at hiring, and they're bad at kind of working in support of people. When you're good at that, business gets very easy.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Yeah, because there's not a single employee has equity in the company. So they're not going to care, right? At the end of the day, in fact, I even have a tattoo on my arm that I got back about four months ago. And it says walking each other home in Hindi. And it's just a reminder that none of this shit matters. Like, I've been joking recently that we're all going to end up as a kebab.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We're just meat on a stick, right? At the end of the day, we're all going to die. And our employees have lives. They have hobbies. They have insecurities. They have fears. They have families. They're just here to make a paycheck. Now, they want to do great work. They want to be a part of a cause. They want to build something with meaning.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But when you own the company, that's why you have a bigger stake in the outcome than they're going to ever have. You can't expect them to care like you're ever going to care because you're not giving them the same. And nor am I saying you should, I don't think you should give them equity in a company that you're starting, but you also can't expect them to do that.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Now you also said something else though, you know, employees work or employers, CEOs working like 17 hours a day. I just sat with two very successful entrepreneurs two hours ago for breakfast and And I gave them shit for working more than eight hours a day because they're slowly creating problems in their marriage.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
They're slowly creating habits around their relationship with their kids that at the end of the day is gonna hurt them. And they tell themselves a lie that I'm just doing this to catch up. I'm just doing this to move this ahead. It's just a stage we're at in the business. No, delegate everything except genius.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Find the two or three things that give you energy that you're amazing at, that you're so good at, and delegate everything else off your plate. And one of them said, well, I can't. I don't have the people that can do it.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I said, good, learn how to interview, hire people, and then spend your time coaching them and giving them the skills and the confidence and the connections to do what's on your plate. But your to-do list does not have your name on it. Right? Your Ryan's to-do list doesn't say Ryan's to-do list. Even if it does, you don't have to do it.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
You can delegate 90% of what's on your to-do list to other people and then grow their skills and confidence and connections so they can do that. That's what really gives us scale.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
You know, if you look at a sports team or a professional athlete or the Cirque du Soleil, none of those performers or athletes are performing in their peak, you know, sport 60 hours a week. There's not a baseball player, a basketball player, a soccer player, an athlete. football, but there's no professional athlete that is performing in their sport 60 hours a week.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
You know, they might do four hours and then they're off. They might do 30 minutes and then they're off, you know, like. a tennis player playing tennis for three hours, they might be practicing the rest of the week, but that's not high performance, perform, perform.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And when entrepreneurs think that they have to be performing 60 hours a week, they forget that some of their time would be better spent thinking, connecting, praising people, showing up as the chief energizing officer, right, to bring good energy into the group.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But if we're drained and stressed, we're bringing in that drained, stressed, negative energy, and that's what we're throwing into our organization. So sometimes it's about doing less, praising people more, showing up with positive energy more, thinking strategically more,
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
You know, it's about the two guys, you know, they were told to go clear cut forests and you got manager one and manager two, and they're both clear cutting the forest and they're both like being super efficient. And the one manager climbs up to the tallest tree and looks around and says, holy shit, we're in the wrong forest.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Well, if a leader doesn't have time to be strategic, to be in mastermind communities, to be spending time with coaches, to be just spending time observing, disconnecting, inspecting what you expect, Yeah, you might be productive, but you might be productive on the wrong stuff. And I think a lot of businesses are very guilty of that.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Okay, so there's a couple of interesting points here. One is, you know, I've been following Trump since probably 1989 as a business person and a negotiator and, you know, the way he operates and works with the press. I think I first read The Art of the Deal back in 1988 or 89. And then secondly is Elon. I've known Elon since 1995. Elon Musk's younger brother worked for me in 1993.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
That's stupid. Well, there's two parts to that. Working hard is like a fly trying to get out a window. That fly is working really hard. And most of those flies end up dead on the windowsill. If the fly would stop and look around a little bit and go, oh shit, there's a door over here. Maybe I'll go out the door. That path is easier.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Working hard is kind of a very kind of 1970s Protestant work ethic, right? Work hard, keep your nose to the grindstone.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Instead of saying work smart, find the cheat sheets, find the hacks, find the shortcuts, find, as two of my friends Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy wrote in their book, Who Not How?, find the people that know how to do that so that you can get them plugged in so that they can actually get your how. But this whole work harder, work harder, work harder doesn't scale any company.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Even Elon Musk said the other day, and I thought this was really insightful, if you don't know the one big thing, the one big problem facing your company today, you're the problem. And if leaders are so focused on busy, right? Jim Collins in the book Good to Great said it's about working on the critical few things versus the important many things.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Being busy doesn't necessarily mean being productive. Working hard doesn't necessarily get you the same results of working smart. Taking pause and saying, maybe I can sharpen the saw. Maybe I can work on the flywheel approach. Maybe I can get a little more focused. Maybe I can say no to 80% of our projects that aren't driving gross revenue.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I worked with a CEO in Austria a few years ago that I was coaching. They've got a... But a $60 million company, they had 960 outstanding customer service requests. And she was really nervous because they were going to go from four full-time people to eight in customer service over the next 12 months because they were doubling the company.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And I said, I want you to set a goal that you're going to go from four full-time people to one. She goes, that could never happen. I'm like, well, why don't we look at what all the customer service requests are? 90% of them were the same seven problems. So we spent 50 grand and we fixed five of the seven problems, spent another hundred grand and fixed the other two.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
She was spending $200,000 a year for four people. She went from four down to one. So she's now saving $150,000 a year. And instead of having 900 outstanding requests, they were down to 30. So their business got simpler. Their customers were happier, but they spent time on the right stuff instead of just working harder.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Most companies would just go out and hire more people and hire more people and hire more people instead of fixing the problem, right? At the end of the day, we only have a customer service department because of four reasons. Either our customer was overset with expectations, right? We promised them more than we can deliver.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
The product sucks, our service sucks, or the FAQs on the website aren't clean enough and clear enough for people to solve their own problem. If you can actually make your FAQs on your website, two sentences each in 20 point font and very visible with no phone number and no email address, people will solve their problem.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
If you fix the actual problem, if you fix the actual product, like I had a customer that I was coaching and they told all their clients, phone us 24 hours a day, here's our cell number. I'm like, that's terrible. They're like, no, it's great. We're giving them 24. I'm like, you're not going to pick up the phone if you're sleeping.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
You're not going to pick up the phone if you're going to the bathroom. You're not going to pick up the phone if you're having sex. So you're literally, there's going to be times that you're going to miss that expectation. Why don't you say, here's how to solve your own problem and fix all the problems so they don't have problems.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I was a reference for Elon and Kimball in their first round of funding for Zip2 in January of 95. So I've known him as a business person before, you know, most people on the planet knew that he existed. And it's just because his brother worked for me at College Pro Painters and his cousin, Peter Rife, who built SolarCity.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And then maybe say, if you email us, we promise to get back to you within 24 hours, which is pretty darn good. And then live that promise by wowing them and getting back to them within six.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
One is to recognize that more often than not, entrepreneurs that are saying that my business is my hobby, they don't actually have any hobbies. And the reality is no one wants to hear about your hobby. You know, if you went to a cocktail party and somebody who's a lawyer says, well, being a lawyer is my hobby. I don't want to hear them talk about law.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I don't want to hear an insurance guy that happens to love insurance talk about insurance. No one wants to hear about whatever your business is either. So it isn't a hobby. It's a business. It's what you do to make money. Hobbies are hobbies. More often than not, most of the people that have business as their hobby are getting a dopamine rush. They're getting a hit.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
They're getting a boost from that. Because they have nothing else in their life that they're getting it from. Their relationships aren't very strong. Their relationship with the spouse isn't very strong. They don't have any really good hobbies or relationships with their kids. They don't have any good kind of spiritual relationship with themselves.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So I'm particularly interested in what Trump is doing right now on the business side of politics. And look, I'm not necessarily a fan of him as a person. I'm Canadian. I'm a little less glossy. I'm a little more augie shucks. I'm You know, Canadians, we apologize before we can even hit on a girl. Like, sorry, I think you're beautiful. So I don't like the ego behind a lot of Trump. I never did.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So what they end up doing is defaulting to the one thing that gives them energy in a rush. It's something that they're in control in. So recognizing that that's a problem is part of the solution. And then the second part is just kind of saying, well, we only start a company for one of three reasons. To give us money.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
to give us free time and to have that feeling of accomplishment that we did something. Well, once your business is up and running and it's successful, okay, you've got the accomplishment. At some point, you've got enough money. I mean, you can have FU money, you can have generational wealth, whatever.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But at some point, you've got enough money, you can go on all the trips, you can buy the nice cars. The rest is just bonus. The third one is to buying your time, right? A really good friend of mine, Dan Martell, I've been friends for 15 years, wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And it's all about identifying the stuff that is within your business that is below your effective hourly rate that you can actually hire someone else to do to give you time. But if you have no hobbies and friends and relationships, you have no incentive to want to do that.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So what I like people to do is to write a bucket list, write a personal, vivid vision for what they want their life to look like and feel like three years from now and start living that. And then realizing that business is something to serve us. I was very lucky. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My dad was an entrepreneur. Both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
My dad took me to the golf club when I was 15 and showed me all these people coming in to play golf at 12 o'clock. on a Wednesday, which is when we were playing. And he's like, that guy owns a car dealership. He owns a clothing store. I remember the people, like Bruce McCullough owns a car dealership. Jim Wilkinson owns a clothing store. Freddie owns this other accounting place.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So he was showing me all these entrepreneurs. And we went out and played golf. You know, 5 o'clock, we're sitting on the balcony eating our fries and gravy. I'm drinking my cherry Coke. And he's like, see that guy? He's a teacher. He works for the mine. He works for the car dealership. He works for Freddie.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
He said, do you notice the difference between who played golf at 12 o'clock and who plays golf at 5 o'clock? And I said, yeah, entrepreneurs play golf in the middle of the day. He said, entrepreneurs can do whatever they want, whenever they want. And when you're an employee, you have to work for somebody else. So for me, being an entrepreneur was about having the free time.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Okay, so stagflation, the last time it happened was 1974, and it happened up until around 1982. It was a painful eight-year period. It was a recession.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
plus inflation at the same time which is exactly what's happening right now we're pretending we're not in a recession but the reality is because the government kept printing money it gave companies a boost with all the the covid spending that happened individuals getting money it happened low interest rates people kind of lived beyond their means we lived with
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
money that we didn't really even have. 1974, most people weren't living off credit cards. Master Charge, which was now, or ChargeX, which became MasterCard and Visa were just starting around then. So the whole debt cycle and borrowing and living beyond your means started in that period of time.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Right now, companies have been so used to, over the last 15 years, low interest rates, those were artificially low. Six and a half to seven percent as a normal interest rate for a company to borrow money was normal. In 82, 83, it was 18% interest rates. So where we're facing right now is interest rates are probably going to stay where they are.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I don't like the gold faucets. I don't like the fancy ostentatious. Put all that stuff aside. He's doing something that absolutely needs to be done in politics and it needs to be done in every business. And there's a lot of waste. And I think a lot of business people miss how much waste there is inside of our company.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Government cannot afford to lower interest rates anymore because if they do, they continue to cause more inflation. If they're printing more money, they're dig valuing the currency, everything just starts costing more because there's more. So they can't afford to do that. What they have to do is get rid of waste. They have to get rid of some of the jobs.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And we have AI coming in way faster than we're anticipating. And anybody who's out there saying, oh, well, You know, the jobs are going to get absorbed. No, it's happening way faster than it did when we went from farming to industry and from industry to computers. You know, it didn't happen overnight.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We're gonna lose, in a period of about the next four years, five years, we're gonna lose every taxi driver, every limo driver, every car driver, every shuttle driver, every bus driver, all the parking lots, insurance companies, auto body. When autonomous vehicles come in, all that stuff is gone. when right now 14% of the workforce in Korea is robots, right?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
When AI and robotics come in, that replaces stuff too quickly. So I think what's coming right now is we're going to have more inflation, we're going to have more layoffs, we're gonna have companies cutting back,
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We've got taxation right now happening globally with these Trump tariffs coming in, which there's arguments for it being good, but most of it is gonna be bad for the individual because companies are just going to charge more. When we have to import all of our goods and services, we're going to have to charge more. So yeah, we might bring back manufacturing to North America,
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
but not fast enough to make a difference where costs are ever going to go down. So inflation is going to continue. Recession is going to happen, which means for companies, be very careful. Debt is good when the interest rates are really low. But if you can't keep borrowing money to pay for your business, that means your business have to pay for your business. So you've got to make your cuts.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
You've got to get rid of the waste. You've got to say no more often than you say yes. You've got to work on the critical few projects with the critical few people. You've got to stay focused on strategy. You've got to grow your leadership team skills and your management team skills so they can get more done with less people. So it's the better run companies that will do well.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But if you're the average company who is able to borrow money to get there or you're working on thin margins, you're pretty much out of business. There was a saying that I heard years ago, if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And I think for many businesses, we're going to go through that pain, but that's okay because the good ones are going to be able to do very, very well.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So I think it's right now about making sure that we right-size our organization, get rid of the wrong people, stay focused on the right stuff, make sure that we raise our prices where we can, keep our margins under control, and business can be very good.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I was the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, took them from 14 people to 3,100 employees in six years. We had at the leadership team a financial review meeting every three months, and the leadership team reviewed the general ledger, which is every expense
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Yeah, and it's about being ruthless. You need to come in and be a leader who's willing to make the cuts and say, I need to. We can't afford it. When Elon went into Twitter, he did it in the wrong way. He shouldn't go in with this callous, kind of jokingly, firing 80% of the people, fuck them attitude. But yes, fire 80% of the people. They're not needed. They weren't doing any work.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
They weren't doing anything meaningful. But you have to remember, these are human beings with lives and families. You can do it in a nicer way. Government getting rid of the waste. Yes, we should be getting rid of the waste. We can't afford, nor should we be spending $780 million to build a new embassy in South Sudan.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
what the we don't need a new embassy in south sudan 780 million dollars what are you building so stop that insanity inside of your businesses saying no being more ruthless focusing on the core projects that drive roi and your business will be very good
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But if you have a management team whose answer to every problem is hire more people, if you're a leader who's trying to be very inclusive and make sure everybody's liked, you're going to be out of business. And that's happening faster than we think. And then if you're an employee who is worried about AI, AI is not going to replace you. but an employee who uses AI will replace you.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So you as an employee need to be really good at AI. You need to be learning AI. Even our COO Alliance members, any of the COOs who are members of the COO Alliance, not only do they get the normal two hour call every month with a different thought leader, we also have a one hour AI expert call every month.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We have a different AI expert every single month presenting to our COO Alliance members so they can actually get more skills to bring into their company and to grow themselves. Those are the companies that are going to do well or that are the ones that are investing in their leaders, growing their people, getting rid of the waste, making the tough decisions.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
They'll do quite well or they'll certainly survive this tougher time. But the ones that are expecting stuff to go back to artificially low rates, you're going to get a wake up call. It ain't happening. It ain't coming.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Well, this is maybe where some of the wisdom of age comes in as well. It's very hard for a 35 year old to understand that interest rates are not going to drop again because in their lifetime, interest rates have always been low. So now that interest rates are going up, they're like scared. Interest rates are going back to very normal. I went through three major economic downturns.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I was running a company during the 08-09 financial crisis. I was building a big company when the 2000 stock market crashed and the NASDAQ crashed by 78%. I was running another company just before I hired Kimball Musk when the stock market crashed in 1991 and 92 and we had a major recession. So I've built companies in these slow times already, right?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
on the P and L. So we looked at every expense in entertainment, every expense in travel, every, we looked at all the credit card bills. And as a team, we discussed stuff that kind of jumped out at us. We looked at software licenses 24 years ago.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
When you've done that already, you understand that it's a different way. It is kind of what you mentioned, the wartime versus peacetime CEOs. You need to operate a little bit differently. And the companies that are willing to do that and ready to do that will do well.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
The ones that are fearful and kind of restricted or that don't cut fast enough and don't focus on the critical few things are going to find a wake-up call is coming. It's like anybody in North America who right now is saying, I'm only going to hire people that are based in the United States. You're out of business. You literally can't compete.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
When my entire team right now, I've got two people based in the Philippines, two people based in Argentina, one person based in Pakistan, one person based in Ukraine, one in Texas, and one in Oklahoma. that's a pretty good global team, right?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But if I was to say, no, they all have to be in the United States, I'm paying 80% more, 70% more, 60% more than I need to be, which is profit or gross margin that could be mine. So be very careful with how I be very careful with how you're thinking about your business and the decisions you're making around, around overhead and margins.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Oh, for sure. Are you telling me the absolute best people happen to live within 20 minute drive of your office? Cause nobody great wants to drive 40 minutes to come to you in 40 minutes back. So it's about 20 minutes. So draw a 20 minute grid around your office. 20 minutes away from you is your talent pool.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And you're going to find the absolute best people who line up with your culture and skillset and behavioral traits and AI expertise. Good luck. It ain't going to happen. We noticed that at one 800 got junk. It was tough to find the great people. And we were the number two company in all of Canada. There were only three companies that anyone in Vancouver wanted to work for.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Us, Lululemon, because this was their head office, and the Vancouver Olympics. Those were the only three businesses anyone wanted to work for. But it's hard to find people a 20-minute drive away.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I hope so. I hope that the cuts that they're identifying, that both sides realize that 90% of those cuts are good. You know, look, they looked at all these software licenses that there was, I have to make up some numbers, but 15,000 licenses and only 300 were being used. It's very hard for a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, no one can say, oh, let's keep the 15,000 licenses, right?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So there's so much waste that they're cutting right now that I think both the left and the right have to look at that and go, yeah, it's pretty hard to argue. 95% of that waste is really waste. You know, we don't need a new embassy in South Sudan. And I think there's a good lesson in there for entrepreneurs is to be very ruthless and to inspect what you expect.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
That's just waste. So all of those cuts should be okay with, like, I can't comprehend why we should build an embassy in South Sudan. So I think 90% or 95% of the waste we're identifying Everybody should just see that as wasteful. Let's argue about the 5% that maybe there's some philosophical differences that, no, we should take care of, you know, single moms living in wherever.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Yeah, we probably should more, right? Let's take care of, I don't know, even some of the gender issues maybe. Sure. But let's be more ruthless about that decision-making instead of saying yes to everything. And I love, I love that they are posting all the waste that they're seeing because then we can really look at it in front of God and our grandmother.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We can really look at it in the mirror and go, yeah, it's kind of hard to argue that one. That's pretty wasteful, right?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And it's no different than in our normal household, right? If you're a mom and dad and you're raising three kids, you want to make sure that you donate to some of the causes that are important to you. Absolutely. And you want to make sure your kids have food and your kids have clothes and your kids have a good education, your kids are taken care of. So we kind of want to do both.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But you don't want to be wasting food at home. I don't want to be buying a refrigerator full of food and throwing it out every four days because it's going bad. Nor do I want to be donating money to charity and having my kids go starving. So we just have to run the government a little bit more like a business. And there was always this argument that you can't. Well, I think we have to.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And I think it's very hard for an entrepreneur to go out to their company and keep saying, oh, we need to get more revenue. The only reason you need to get more revenue is to pay for all the stupid expenses that you don't really need in your company. And in government to say we need more taxes. No, we don't need any more taxes. In fact, if we operated properly.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I think we have to find a way that the bureaucrats don't actually get to stay in control because when all of this waste is being so uncovered and so glaringly brutal, that's where all the costs are. If we get rid of the waste, we don't have to raise taxes for anybody, for the working class, the middle class, the upper class. Nobody has to pay more.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And why should anybody say tax the rich more before we say get rid of the waste first? let's get rid of the obvious waste, and then if we need to tax some people more, sure, let's look at that. But let's not go out as a family and say, let's go get three jobs when we can get rid of some of the waste at home. Maybe we don't need three jobs, right?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Okay, so this is what a lot of people don't know about me. So 1-800-GOT-JUNK was the fourth company that I'd built. The third company that I'd built was a private currency company. So we did what Bitcoin is doing today back in 1998 to 2000. We had 30,000 companies buying and selling in the United States using our digital currency instead of the US dollar.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We had Starwood Hotels, the Olympics, Avis Rent-A-Car, Bose Stereo, Hard Rock Cafe, all using our digital currency. It was backed by nothing other than the promise that other people would accept it. So I understood alternative forms of payment very early on. In 2014, and all of my posts are still on Facebook today, you can look up Bitcoin
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
and then look up posts by Cameron Herald, you'll see all my posts, 2014, 2015, that I started accepting payment for Bitcoin back in 2014. I started accepting payment with Ethereum in 2017, and I started acquiring Ethereum and Bitcoin both in 2017. I've been buying more almost every single week since 2017.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I bought more three times in the last couple of days because Bitcoin came back down to 78,000. Me too. I've been buying. I can show you my transactions. Every week, I have an auto buy on Bitcoin. And every time there's a big crash, I do another tranche of Bitcoin. I still only own two coins. I only own Ethereum and Bitcoin. I'm slowly converting most of my Ethereum off.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
The reason I even got into Ethereum was I'm friends with Vitalik's mom and dad, Dmitry and Maria. We're part of a mastermind community together. So I got introduced to Ethereum online. when it was $200 a coin. But yeah, I've been in Bitcoin since when my first post was $450 a coin. So my kids both buy Bitcoin. All my clients are engaged in Bitcoin.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
If we operated efficiently, we could probably reduce the taxes. So one of the big reasons why I exited Canada 10 years ago and then left the U.S. four years ago, I'm now a resident of Dubai. My company is based in Dubai. It's because the royal family that owns the country doesn't allow for any waste, right? They don't allow for the frivolous spending.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Every single week, I think you should be buying some. But I now have a substantial portion of my net worth in Bitcoin. And it's one of the reasons why I'm also now based in the Emirates. I'm a resident of Dubai. My company is based in Dubai. They have very favorable tax strategies for a Canadian living overseas. So that's one of the reasons why I'm based there now too.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
As a company, if your company has a lot of cash, then yes, you should put some of your cash into Bitcoin as a strategic reserve and hold there and hold for five years. Just buy and hold, buy and hold, keep some there, and then invest in other things too. That's great. I don't think a lot of the countries that are talking about buying Bitcoin...
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
should be talking about buying it because they should be paying down their debt first. Like the United States is effectively bankrupt. When you're sitting on $30 trillion in debt, you don't have any money to be buying as a reserve. You should be paying off some of your debt and getting rid of some of your deficit so you're not adding to your debt every year
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But if you don't have any money, it's like as a homeowner, if I don't have any cash, how can I go buy something? So I think the countries that should be buying, and they will be buying, are the Saudi Arabias, the Dubais, the countries that are actually living within their means, they're gonna do well.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I think if you can somehow get away with, sadly, issuing currency and buying Bitcoin with it, yes, it'll work well for you, but it's still gonna screw the actual citizens of your country because you're creating more debt.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I don't do any of that. I don't do any gambling with anything. So I'll tell you what my 10 core stocks are. And I buy more of these almost every month, for sure, every two months. Some of them I've been buying now for 20 years. So back in 2003, my dad told me Amazon was too expensive. So almost every one or two months for 20 years, I've been buying Amazon. But I buy Nvidia stock.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I've been buying it for 49, 50 months. So over four years, I've been buying Nvidia stock almost every month. Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, Shopify, Tesla, and Uber. Those are my core. I bought two tranches of those of five of the 10 in the last week. I converted some of my safer equity stuff over to those. But almost every one to two months, I buy more of those 10.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Buy and hold, buy and hold. And those stocks are down 20, 30% right now. Awesome. They're on sale. Those are good quality companies that aren't going away. Very similar to what Warren Buffett did back in kind of the 70s, 80s, 90s. with Gillette and the Amazons and Coca-Cola's, they're good, solid companies that are always going to be there.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Those companies that I just rattled off, if you're a business person, I think you have to have a portion of your money saved. It's very dangerous for an entrepreneur to keep rolling their money over and betting on more growth, right? I'm going to bet on my company, bet on my company. At some point, the house always wins. So I think it's dangerous.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
The main website is CameronHerald.com, and it's H-E-R-O-L-D, so CameronHerald.com. That has links to my six books, which we didn't talk about, has links to my Invest in Your Leaders course, the COO Alliance. I have a podcast where I've interviewed 475 COOs. It's called the Second in Command Podcast. And we've had the COOs of Shopify and Bumble and name it.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And I think there's something that's really good that's happening there. A rambling answer.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We've interviewed most of them on our podcast. But yeah, it's all there. And then a couple of good YouTube channels too, a lot of free content shared.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Thank you. Yeah. If anybody watching, listening, have got comments and questions, drop them down into the notes. If there's a lot of questions, maybe we do a part two and, you know, we can answer a lot of the questions from your listeners and viewers too.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But let me, yeah, let me speak to that. So I, and, and I have a lot of ties to New York state. My grandmother was from peak skill. I used to go down to Cornell at Ithaca all the time. My school that I was at was in Ottawa, you know, lived across the border from Buffalo. So a lot of ties into New York state.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Again, I'm going to go back to college pro painters, which was the first business that I helped build and scale. It's where I hired Kimball and, and his Peter or cousin, Peter, the founder of college pro painters said a leader has to say no. more often than they say yes. And it's very difficult to say no.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
It's very difficult when we're trying to be inclusive, we're trying to let people's ideas matter, but I think good companies have learned the skill of being able to say no because we can't afford it, no because it's not attached to our strategy, no because it's not aligned with our core values, no because it's not aligned with our current cash flow, and we're good at handling conflict.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
government has said yes to everything. They've said yes because it's easier to say yes, they don't piss anyone off. It's easier to say yes because they don't have to pay the bills. It's easier to say yes because somebody else is constantly giving them more money. It's easier to say yes because they buy themselves votes.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
It's easier to say yes, and the top 2% are only making $300,000 a year or more, which means 98% of the people basically are kind of middle class or lower class. So it's easy for 98% of people to say tax the rich. There's not more money to get. In a business, you can't say, well, just go get more revenue. It's really hard to get revenue.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So business people and homeowners, if you're a normal homeowner, you can't say, well, let's just go borrow more money. The bank won't loan to you, right? So you have to live within your means. So I've taught my kids to save 50% of all the money they ever make when they're living at home has to get invested. When they move out, 20% of all the money they have to make has to get invested.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
I'm teaching them that mentality. Teaching them as a business, right? Take a portion of your money, invest in growth. Take a portion of your money, invest in savings. Take a portion of your money and decide where to spend it. Use zero-based budgeting. So if a business operated the way government does, we'd be bankrupt every single year.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
So good businesses operate with a level of rigor that is very different. And I think that's why Trump... It's why David Sachs, it's why Elon Musk, these people that are involved now in Doge and in the crypto and making big decisions for government are able to identify a lot of the waste is they're not approaching government like typical bureaucrats will. They're approaching it with like,
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We're bankrupt. We gotta make some tough decisions right now. And sadly, we're gonna go through another period of about 12 to 18 months of stagflation, which is recession plus inflation at the same time. Hasn't happened since 1974. No, the government is not gonna be lowering interest rates. You're completely dreaming it on crack, thinking that we can keep printing money.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
We can't keep printing money. It's no different than a business can't go out and say, well, I'll just raise another million dollars in revenue. It's hard to get that revenue. You can't just go out and borrow money from the bank because you got to pay that money back. So I think we're going to go through a period of tough times.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And I think businesses have to recognize that and have to operate that way. One of the things business people have to do is teach their management team how to say no. And most early stage managers, first time, second time managers, their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people. That's really never the solution to the problem. It's being able to look at the budget and saying,
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
wait, what does this idea do? Does it make our employees happier? Does it make our customers happier? Does it drive more gross margin? Does it drive more revenue? Is it making our vivid vision come true? If it's not, why are we doing it, right? Or why are we doing it now? And I think that's where government has gotten so lazy is they just say yes to everything.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
They're spending all this money that isn't even theirs. And then they're printing more money to pay it all back. And most humans don't even understand the difference between a debt and a deficit, right? The interest right now on our debt takes up about 40% of the revenue. If you were a homeowner, that means let's say you're paid $100,000 a year.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
$40,000 a year is just to pay your interest on your credit cards. And then you got to live on this, you'd all be bankrupt. So we need to recognize that these costs that they're cutting in government are very good. And I think we need to go look at our businesses in a very similar way, right? What are the critical few expenses we need? What are the critical few employees that we need?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Most of our companies can produce 50% of the output with the square root of our number of employees. If you're running with 100 employees, it's really 10 people are producing 50% of your output. Or even the Pareto principle of 20% of your people, so let's say 20 employees out of 100 are producing 80% of your output. You can look at that other 80% and go, Why are we even doing it?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Do we need to do this work? Are we just busy being busy? Are we, are we busy doing work that isn't producing any gross margin? Right. And I think that's the stuff that I've always been really kind of maniacal about.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
There's a couple of parts to that. The first off is it doesn't even have to be the woke kind of part bringing into the business world. It can also just be a desire of an entrepreneur to build a great company, right? I want to build a nice place. I want my employees to be happy. I want to live our core values. I want to do good in the environment. That's not woke.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
That's just being a good human being running a good business. So let's say like we built the number two company in all of Canada to work for. 1-800-GOT-JUNK ranked as number two in the entire country. Out of 1.4 million companies, we ranked number two. So we were just, it wasn't woke. It was just, we were a really good place to work. Now in doing that,
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
It's hard to say no to employees because you don't want to hurt their feelings. You don't want to be an autocratic dictatorial leader. So the lessons that I learned was to be able to say no because of these things. I can say to my child who's like when my kids were seven and five, no, you can't have cookies right now because we're eating dinner in 20 minutes.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
After we eat dinner, you can have one cookie, right? No, you can't have seven cookies because you'll end up fat and obese, and then you'll end up with diabetes, and you're like, because we're going to be a healthy family. So when you attach a no to core values or no to a core purpose or no to your vivid vision or no to your strategy or no to your budget, people understand.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But if you haven't grown the skills of your employees, right? One of the core skills in my Invest in Your Leaders online training program is managing conflict. If you haven't trained your managers in saying no, they end up saying yes because they feel like they have to be nice to people.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
Being firm but fair is better than being nice and having to fire people two years later because you've built a company with a lot of waste. That's number one. Number two, you talked about the facts and feelings. I love Google's mentality here and
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
You know, in the last 25 years, I guess 30, because they started around 1997, one of the top companies ever built, Google, has a very famous mantra inside of their meetings. And it says, I don't care what you think, or I don't care what you feel, show me what the data says. And I think that's really interesting is people that come in with, oh, I think we should do this. Cool.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
But show me what the data says. Why do you think? What's the ROI going to be of that decision? So I always go back to everything that we want to do as a company. Will it make our employees happier? Will it make our customers happier? Will it increase gross margin? Will it drive revenue? Will it make our vivid vision come true?
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
In that order, by the way, I always build everything with, will it make my employees happier? More than profit, more than revenue, everything else.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
If I have really happy employees, because they don't have to work with the jerks, they don't have to deal with waste, they get to work on important shit, they get to work with people that are producing results, they get to work with people that are living core values. If I get to work with those critical few people, they're going to take care of my customers.
The Ryan Hanley Show
The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold
And if my customers are being taken care of by really happy people, my customers will pay more. So what I ended up doing is by obsessing about my employee net promoter score, it drives my customer net promoter score, which allows me to charge more and everybody makes more.