Cameron Herold
speaker
284 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Cameron Herold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Working hard is kind of a very kind of 1970s Protestant work ethic, right? Work hard, keep your nose to the grindstone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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