Top Tips to Hire a Second-In-Command You Can Trust | Cameron Herold (Ep. 237)

The way you attract good people is don't show them your company today. Show them the company that you're building and what it looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years from now. Look, if I came to you and said, here's a bare lot of land, are you excited? You're like, no, it's just ground. But then if I showed you the drawings and the vision of what my home was going to be, when you share the vivid vision for what your company looks like, you'll attract A-players. When you share the vivid vision for what your home looks like, you'll attract people that want to build it.

Hey, everybody. Brian Kaskavalciyan here and welcome to another episode of The Wealthy Contractor Podcast. And I have got a great guest for you today. He is not a contractor, but very familiar with our world. Cameron Herold. Welcome, Cameron.

Hey, Brian. Good to see you. Yeah, I'm not a contractor, but I've definitely built a couple of businesses in the contracting space. For sure.

So what is unique about Cameron? So Cameron is, I met Cameron many, many years ago. We were just trying to determine how long ago it was. It was a long time ago. He had just written his first book, which I highly recommend, Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit, muy importante, and profit in 3 years or less. He runs a thing called the COO Alliance. He is your number 2 guy or gal whisperer, I guess. Well, how else would, how would you say that? You are, you are the person in the world to go to, to understand how to effectively hire, manage, deal with, work with a number 2 at your, at your company. In fact, your latest book, is on that topic.

Yeah. My latest book is called The Second in Command. You know, it's interesting. You and I both kind of got our first masterminding experiences in the Entrepreneurs Organization back when it was called YEO, Young Entrepreneurs Organization. It's now called EO. And I've been involved in a number of entrepreneurial mastermind groups for years since Genius Network and Baby Bathwater, Strategic Coach. I've done a lot. Spent probably close to $1 million on myself in terms of investing in my skills, being in a mastermind. And I do run, you run one for contractors. Well, what I recognized was, was there was no mastermind community for the second in command. There were groups for lawyers. There was groups for doctors. There was groups for neurologists. There was groups for engineers, for marketers. There was so many CEO groups and there was nowhere for that COO. So I wanted to create a place where the COO could work on their skills, their confidence, and their connections. And so that we could help them become a better yin and yang partner to their CEO counterpart. So. Yeah, that was what I started. That's my entire world. I've been running it for 8 years.

Yeah. So let's talk about the, as you say, the yin and the yang, because as I get older and I get more business experience, it's been, you know, I hate to admit it, but it's been like almost 35 years now. And I'm finally, Cameron, I'm finally starting to get it. It's finally, it's finally starting to click. But the importance of that relationship really for me, but really came about as a result of implementing EOS and where you've got that visionary integrator relationship, which I think is a really good way of describing the whole, you know, entrepreneur and their second in command. But I want to hear it, but I'd rather hear it from you.

Yeah, I think Gino Wickman, who wrote the book Traction and then invented the EOS model, the Entrepreneurial Operating System model, branded and gave a definition for the CEO as the visionary and as that second in command, whether it's a vice president of operations or a COO or a general manager as the integrator. And so he did a really good job with explaining how those two are very different. Almost in a way I talk about the book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. You know, men are not hairy versions of women. We see the world differently, perceive the world differently. We interact with situations and problems differently. We need to understand how to work together to build a really strong partnership as a team, very similar to the visionary integrator, CEO, COO, you know, counterpart. So he did a good job. The only kind of not complaint, but criticism I have of the EOS model is it's become so trendy and popular that people are saying, oh, I'm hiring an integrator. Well, you can't do a job description for an integrator because 99% of the companies have never heard of this term. So that means that most people have no idea what the heck an integrator is, which means you're never going to be able to hire one. And if you send out an email to somebody and your job title is integrator, they don't know what you do. They have no idea. So it's a description for inside of your company, but it's not a job title for the outside world.

That's great. But I'm guilty of that, by the way. We talk about that all the time, hiring an integrator. So what, so, so let's get clear then.

Let me get clear on that part too. So the reason I even called my book The Second in Command is the CEO, right? The visionary is looking for their counterpart, their second in command, the person to be their yin and yang, to be their integrator, to help them make their vision come true. The title comes later. A title that you give someone is based on the amount of strategic insight they bring, the amount of P&L responsibility you'll give them, the amount of autonomy that they'll have day to day in running their job. Like, do you have to delegate everything to them? Are they showing you what needs to get done? The amount of people and systems and partners they bring to the company when they come, right? That's— and then the, the, the amount of money that you're willing to pay them, the metrics, that's what the title is based on. So your integrator could be a director of operations. It could be a general manager. It could be a vice president operations. Maybe it's a COO. I've had so many people go, I'm looking to hire a COO. I'm like, well, what are you paying? Oh, $120,000. That's not a COO. A COO is like $250,000 to $450,000. I was making $306,000 as a COO 18 years ago. That's a COO. If you're paying $120,000, at best, that's a director of operations. So put the proper title in place to actually recruit the proper person. So they don't go on Glassdoor and Indeed and Google and ChatGPT to go, what does a CEO get paid? Oh, I get paid $300,000. Then they feel like they're getting underpaid. No, you just gave them a bigger title. Same with your head of finance, head of marketing, right? Your head of finance might be a controller, director of finance, VP. Be very careful and cautionary with titles. That's my first starting point. Second part is your first, second in command as an early stage contractor. Is actually an executive assistant. And I think you probably know the name Jack Daly from the EO world. I do. Jack and I have been friends for 30 years now. Jack has always said, if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. So the first person you hire is an EA or a fractional EA to get all the stuff off your plate as a contractor so that you can actually spend time on the revenue generating, on the growing the team, on the networking, but get all the day-to-day admin off your plate. If there's any task that you do today that's a minimum wage job, somebody should be firing you because you shouldn't be doing a minimum wage job for the money you're making, right? That's your first true second in command, is your, your true partner is your first EA.

How do you work up to— so it's EA, and then it might be a director of operations, and then it's a COO. How do you know when to go to the next level? And, and maybe what we could do is kind of— so a lot of the clients that I work with and that are in our Success Society are multimillion-dollar home improvement companies. They've got sales teams, they've got marketing. They, you know, they're pretty sophisticated.

100 employees, 30 employees. How many, how many employees? Ballpark?

You know, if they're doing, if they're doing a few million dollars in revenue, depending depending on if they're doing the stuff in-house or they're using subs, they might have 20 or 30 people.

Okay. So let me walk you through the different stages then of the growth. I call it the ones and the threes. When you go from 1 person to 3, from 3 to 10, from 10 to 30, 30 to 100, 100 to 300, there's very distinct stages that happen. Almost every contractor for the most part was the guy out swinging the hammer at some point. Doing some odd jobs. Then he hired a couple people to help him out. He had 3 employees. He's telling everybody what to do. At some point you get to about 10 people. You're like, I can't manage everybody. I need someone to manage my people. And you get a general manager, a project manager, a site manager to manage all these people for you. So now you've got your first people that you're managing others. Then you go to 30 people and you probably have your first management team. You have someone running marketing, somebody running sales, somebody running You know, your site, somebody running customer, somebody running finance, right? But none of those people have probably done it before. They're usually like from the industry. You promote them to their ceiling of complexity. You give them more responsibility. When you go from 30 people to 100 people, you now have your first leadership team. That's when the true titles of vice presidents and C-levels should actually be there. So if you're at about a 30-person size, Everyone managing people in your company is probably a director level and being paid a director level salary. That's where most people should be thinking. And then moving to the vice president. For the CEO, right? The visionary entrepreneur. It's all about what are the things that you work on day to day in your company that you're really, really good at? What are the things that you could be doing inside of your company that give you energy? Right? So what are those two things? You love doing it. You get energy from it. You're really, really good at it. And can you delegate everything except those things? If you can delegate all of those things to an EA, great. If you can delegate them to a project manager, a site manager, a director, great. If all of a sudden you need somebody more senior, more seasoned, more VP level, great. You hire that person. But based on the roles and responsibilities and the tasks that you're delegating, that tells you the title of who you're hiring. No different than I need to get someone to pull electrical. I'll hire an electrician, right? You're not going to say I need someone to build a house. What part of the house do you need to get built? Right? As the projects determine a more seasoned, skilled professional, you get that person, right? The person hauling stuff out to the garbage is just a guy, right?

One of the hardest things I think for us entrepreneurs is letting go and determining that next level. And, and then to complicate things, we then will hire somebody, we'll bring them in, and then we'll start to— yeah, there you go. You already know what I'm gonna say.

So how do we deal with that? Because most entrepreneurs have done all of the jobs before. When we're the one person, we did sales, we did marketing, we ran QuickBooks. So we all we did the things our way. What we need to remember is that we need to get results through people. And the only way we can really scale the company is to hire really good people to do it. A really good example is this in your industry. The homeowner who's building the home is actually the CEO of the project. When I built the home in Vancouver, I'm the one who decided what to build. I'm the one who decided the budget. I'm the one that said, this is how it has to look and feel. And then I was the one who said, I have no idea how to do any of these things to my general manager, general contractor, who is basically my COO. And I said, you figure out how to make my vision come true. You hire the people to make my vision come true. You manage the people to make my vision come true. You do it on budget. Right? Well, that's what a general contractor now has to do in their company. Right? The general contractor has to describe the vision of their company and let the team start to figure it out. So if a homeowner can build their dream home without having any skills, which I've done, I don't know how to hang a cabinet. I don't know how to put in the gas. I don't know how to put in the flooring, but it looks exactly like I want it. That's what a general contractor has to remember is my job is to get really good people around me to do what I need done, not do it my way.

How do you attract good people?

By building a great culture, by firing the jerks, by paying for the best people, right? I was sitting in, I was speaking at an event. I get hired all the time to come and speak at conferences. And I was speaking at a conference in Dubai 3 weeks ago, 2,500 people. I did the opening keynote on stage. And when I came off, I was talking to this guy. He's 6'6". I'm 6'4". And he's a professional volleyball player, professional beach volleyball player. And I'm like, if I, if I had you and one of your buddies play against me and 5 of my friends, so 2 on you, 2 of you and 6 of us, do you think you'd beat us? He goes, every game, every game, all the time. I would always kill you because it's 2 A players against 6 B or C players.

Right?

Well, if those 2 guys were $200,000 each and my 6 people were $100,000 each, I got 2 people for $400,000, 6 people for $600,000. The 2 are going to kill us. So the way that you actually can build your dream as a contractor is hire A players, not Cs. Your A players are racehorses. Your B players are workhorses. Get rid of the C players and get rid of the toxic cultural cancers in your organization, including, by the way, clients. Don't work for jerks. Don't build projects for jerks because you'll bring that negative energy back into all the other sites that you're working on.

How do you know they're an A-player?

You know, they're an A-player for the money that you're willing to spend. They can show up with the behavioral traits that you need with living the core values that your company already obsesses over, and they've done what you need them to do already. So here's a good analogy of this. You know how to swim, right? Do you know how to swim front crawl and back crawl and breaststroke? Basics, right? You know how to do basic, right?

I know how to not drown.

Yeah, correct. But you know how to do basic front crawl, right? Yeah.

Okay.

Do you know how to win a gold medal?

No.

Yes, you do.

Swim really fast.

Be faster than everybody else. Okay.

All right. Then I do know how to do it. Right.

Do you know how to break an Olympic record? Yes. So would I rather hire you who knows how to do front crawl and knows how to win a gold medal and knows how to break— or would I rather hire someone who has done it? Yeah.

Someone who's done it. Definitely not me.

I know how to hang electric or how to pull electrical. I would destroy the home. I know how to do it. You drill a hole, you pull stuff through. I could read a book about how to install flooring, but I've never done it. So you hire A players for the money that you're willing to spend, and they've done it before, and they show up with the kind of people you want to have to your home for dinner. Yeah. And by the way, for every one of your clients, anybody listening, we already know this. We're not going to hire an electrician unless they've already been an electrician. They're certified. They've got all their tickets, right? Yeah. We're not going to hire a roofer unless they've done lots of roofing. Well, then don't hire a salesperson who hasn't done sales. Don't hire a marketing person. Like, hire the same people operationally who have done what you need them to do. And you're not going to hire the asshole— excuse my language— electrician. You're not going to hire the painter who's toxic and nobody likes. Like, so don't hire those people into your company on the operations side either.

Yeah, that's a really good analogy. I might borrow that one from you, Cameron. One of the challenges I think that smaller companies have, you know, I would say under, say, $20 or $25 million is how do you have enough money? First off, that's a whole nother conversation about profitability to hire the right person. But when you're a smaller company and you really need the help, how do you attract somebody that's got that racehorse talent that can take you from 5 to 10 or 15 when you're still small and kind of struggling and scrappy? Okay.

So there's two parts to this. I'm going to start with part one. Part one is really the vivid vision, which I can talk about that second. In the absence of that, you need to charge more. So when I went into 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which you've heard of, and almost everyone listening has heard of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. When I joined the company as their second in command, as employee number 14, no one knew of us. No one. Brian was operating and just opened his 12th city. He was only doing $2 million in sales. I came in as the COO to scale them. When I left 6 and a half years later, we were $106 million in revenue. We'd gone from 14 people to 3,100 people. Now everybody knows this. Now they're $800 million a year. Um, but back in the day, no one knew us. In the first 2 weeks I was there, I raised our prices in all 12 cities by 40%. Brian's like, we're going to go bankrupt. I'm like, dude, if we keep charging what you're charging, we're going to go bankrupt. So we're charging 40% more so we can hire better people, so we can treat them better, so we can have better marketing, so we can deliver on our promises to customers. We're going to position ourselves as the FedEx of junk removal or the Starbucks of junk removal, but we're going to raise our prices 40%. So we went from $338 a full load to $438 a full load. Everyone was terrified. And all of a sudden, you know what happened? We actually were able to deliver.

Yeah.

So the way that you can afford to pay more is charge more. It is a death trap going to the bottom where you're going to compete against price. So we knew that we had competition. We had 17,000 independent people with trucks hauling junk. We just made sure we were— they knew we were charging more. And guess what they did? They started charging more too. Yeah. We used to leave our price list on our dashboard so they could see it. We faxed it by accident to some competitors back in the early day. We faxed them our price list by accident so they could see it.

Oh, that's funny.

Because we knew that we had to raise our prices. So that's number one. Number two, the way you attract good people is don't show them your company today. Show them the company that you're building and what it looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years from now. Look, if I came to you and said, here's a bare lot of land, are you excited? You're like, no, it's just ground. It's dirt. Aren't you excited? No, it's dirt. I'm not excited. But then if I showed you the drawings and the vision of what my home was going to be, and I got you excited for the culture and the awards we were going to win, and I'll show you one right now. This guy just won the International Property of the Year. He's building a building in Dubai.

Wow.

It is unbelievable what this thing looks like. Right. But if you just saw the bare land, you're not excited. But if he shows this to contractors and says, do you want to build this? They're like, yes, I want to build that. You share the vision of what you're building. So what I created, what I call the Vivid Vision, I used to call it the painted picture, is a 4 or 5-page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years in the future. You describe sales, describe marketing, describe operations, describe your customer engagement, your employee. And people should read the book Vivid Vision to understand it and they'll kind of grasp it. But when you share the vivid vision for what your company looks like, you'll attract A-players. When you share the vivid vision for what your home looks like, you'll attract people that want to build it. If you show the bare land, nobody's excited.

As you were saying that, I'm thinking about, you know, some of the clients that we work with that I know are having a hard time with hiring these great people. And I think one of the big mistakes that they're making is what you just said is they're talking about the business today, right? They're talking about, I need this, I need that. This is a problem. This sucks. This, that.

I don't want to join that.

I don't want to join that. Exactly. That's not what you're building either. Yeah.

But I want to build what you're building. So sell them on the future and hire people that have done what you need them to do and then get the heck out of their way. The reason that I even joined Brian at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, Brian and I were both in an EO forum together. So for 4 years, he'd seen me build 2 companies and then I got to see him struggling and building his business. I saw where I could help him. He was my best man at my wedding 3 weeks before I joined him as his COO. Sorry, 3 months. So then, like, I joined and he's just like, help me build this thing. I'm like, cool, here's what I'm going to do. You do that stuff. Let's go. Kind of 4 years later, 5 years later, he started telling me what needed to get done. For the first 5, I'd already done this 2 times before.

Yeah. Well, a lot of people don't run into people like you, or maybe they do and they just can't paint the picture so that people can see what that What that looks like.

Well, and Brian, Brian shared me what he gave me, a 2-page description back in the day that described 1-800-GOT-JUNK in 2003. And that 2-page description that I got in October of 2000, I was like, I get it. I know how to build it. And I showed him the list of what needed to get done. He's like, I don't know how to do any of that. I'm like, I do. And he goes, can you do it? I'm like, yeah. But I joined not because of what he, I never would have joined him for what he had. It had ripped carpeting. He was walking to work, driving his grandmother's old Calais. Like, it was terrible. It was a nothing little company. In fact, I just left a big internet company that we built and sold, took it public, and I was becoming a garbage man. My parents were like, what's going on with you? Yeah, how bad is your life?

So one of the interesting things that I find in our work, and, and I— my next book is going to be entirely on, on this, and that is What is it that you want out of the business? And I find that a lot of entrepreneurs can't tell me, they can't describe it to me. So what I do is I actually created this exercise where it's like, okay, well, tell me then what your ideal life looks like, and then tell me what it's going to cost for you to build that life. And then when you give me that number, then we could start to build a business that will give you that around that number.

Yeah.

So you wanna make half a million bucks a year and let's say, you know, you're in the replacement window. I have tons of clients in replacement windows, roofing, one-day bathrooms. That's most of our clients. It's like, okay, it's a formula. So if you wanna make half a million dollars a year, here's how much revenue you need to do. Here's how many jobs you need to sell.

Back in 1993, I sat down with a franchisee that I just hired out of Queens University. His name was Kimball. Have you ever heard the name Kimball?

Well, keep going.

Kimball is— Have you ever heard of his brother Elon?

Oh, no way.

So back in 1993, I hired Kimball Musk out of Queens University to be a franchisee for College Pro Painters. I also hired Peter Rive, who went on to become the COO of SolarCity with his brother, uh, Lyndon Rive. They're the cousins of the Musks. They were both franchisees for me back in 1993. The first meeting I had with Kimbal Musk, I said, how much money do you want to make this summer in profit? He's like, I don't know, maybe $15,000. In 1993, that was a lot of money for university students. That was a lot of money.

Yeah.

Especially in Canada, because tuition was only $3,000 a year. So I'm like, what would your life be like if you made $20,000? He's like, wow, if I made $20,000, that would be game-changing. I said, do you want to make a plan? To earn $20,000 in profit? He goes, yes. I go, do you know how to do it? He goes, no. I said, let me show you. Here's how much revenue you need to do with this much growth margin and with this kind of overhead that you can manage to end up with this profit. He goes, okay, let's do that revenue. I said, okay, great. We're going to do $100,000 in revenue. Do you know how many clients you need? He goes, no. I said, okay, if you need this many clients, this is what your average job size is. This is how many estimates you need to do. Why do I need to do twice as many estimates? Because you'll only land 50% of them. Okay, I get it. Where am I? Like, we literally reverse engineered from his profit number. At the end of the summer in 1993, Kimbal Musk made $21,000 in profit.

Yep. Funny how that works, right?

Yeah. A year and a half later, Kimbal called me and asked if I'd be a reference for he and Elon in their first round of funding for the first company called Zip2. The reason College Pro Painters is mentioned in the book that Walter Isaacson wrote about Elon Musk is that they backed Kimbal and Elon Musk's first company. 100% on Kimbal Musk's experience of having built a house painting company because Elon had only ever dropped out of school at that point. They'd built nothing.

That's an incredible story.

Well, it's true. Like you start with, like, he still to this day introduces me as his last boss. I'm the last guy he ever worked for. You start with the end and then you reverse engineer that. You plan your work and work your plan. Yeah. And then you stay focused. You said something entrepreneurs struggle with. One of the big things entrepreneurs struggle with is all these ideas, right? It's the ability to stay focused. So, plan your work, work your plan, say no to everything except what's on your plan, get the skills and the people to help you build your plan. That's where growth comes from. And then Peter Rive did the same with SolarCity.

So, the piece, the kind of the missing piece here, and that's where your vivid vision comes in. And I strongly recommend that everybody— I've gone through with you, I think we went through painted Picture, which is what you used to call it.

Yeah, I just changed the name because people thought you had to do drawings or use vision board, so Vivid Vision made more sense.

Yeah, that's a great name. But I, I've, I've been— we've got our big event happening in a couple of weeks, and we've got a new, uh, I'm sure we're going to have a whole new batch of new members into our, what we call our Success Society. And one of the things that I'm going to do at our first meeting is talk about why I've kind of gone back to the whole Simon Sinek thing because I see a lot of people talking about, well, this is what we do, this is how we do it. And then it's like, well, why? It's the same thing. Well, why do you want to make money? How much money do you want to make?

Do you know this story about Simon?

What story? He used to work for you too. You gave him the Golden Circle.

No, no. Simon used to sleep on my couch in Vancouver. Simon's— when Simon flew out to Vancouver in 2004 to meet Brian and I. He'd read about us in Fortune magazine. He was running a 5-person marketing agency in New York City, and he had invented what was the— it wasn't even the golden circle at that point. It was a cone. It was a, it was a, but if you looked at it from the top down, it was a golden circle. So Simon was on our board of advisors for a year. He did marketing work for us for about a year, spoke at our company conferences. He was at my home in Vancouver. I was making dinner for he and Brian one night. And he's the one who helped me understand my core purpose, my why, which is to help entrepreneurs make their visions come true. It's what I've always done. I helped, helped Kimball make his come true. Like it's all, so being on your podcast to help entrepreneurs make their visions come true. By the way, one of the key things that everyone listening needs to do, I'll drop into the chat. You should share it with them. They need to grow the skills of their people. Most entrepreneurs are growing their skills. That's great. But you need to grow the leadership skills of your people. Anyone managing people in your company, your site managers, your project managers, general managers, whatever, head of finance, they need to know how to interview. They have to know how to onboard. They have to know how to coach people, how to delegate projects, how to manage timelines. So if you go put them through the Invest in Your Leaders training that I launched, those are the core skills that I trained Kimbal Musk in. Those are the core skills that I trained all the leadership team at 1/8 Under Got Junk in. When you grow the skill sets of your people, you can step back as the entrepreneur and actually stay focused on vision. Most entrepreneurs don't even have the skills that are in that course, right? Most entrepreneurs, like, as an example, how much training have you ever had, Brian, on doing job interviews? Yeah, not a lot, right?

And I'm not great at it.

I had somebody and he said, well, I've interviewed, I've hired about 100 people. And I said, have you ever had any training? He goes, no. I said, maybe you've done it wrong. He goes, oh my God. Maybe I've done it wrong every time. Like, right? You would never hire an electrician that's had no electrical training. So why do we let people manage people without the training to become managers? And then we have the blind leading the blind. It'd be like me training an electrician. That would be dangerous. Yeah.

Can you, um, I know vivid vision is a whole big thing and it's going to take, and it takes time and, and to go through it. But let me ask you this. So if somebody is stuck on that, how do I, how do I create that vision? I'm just trying. I'm just trying to get by. I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to make payroll next week. You guys are talking about creating a vision and my why and how much money I want to make. I just need to make payroll next week. How do you go from that to taking control? Creating that business.

So the entrepreneur, again, if you've hired somebody to build the homes or to do some of the projects for you, then you can hire somebody to do the minimum wage stuff that's on your plate. Or you can stop watching football and stop watching social media and spend a few hours to think about what your business looks like and feels like in the future. So I would say read the book Vivid Vision. I would go on the internet and find my TEDx. I've done 4 TEDx talks, but the one that's called Your Vision Statement Sucks. Um, if you watch that TEDx, it will be very helpful. It's an 18-minute video on how to write a vivid vision. Basically, you're, you're, yeah, I would start there. It's too hard for me to kind of in a, in a snapshot tell you how to do it, but yeah.

But how important, well, let's do this then. How important is it?

It's critical. Yeah. How, like, look, none of you would ever, if you're ever going to build a home or do a renovation, you would never start the project without having full clarity on what your customer wanted. Yeah. It would be like me showing up to paint houses and not at least knowing what they want the paint job to look like. What's the level of sanding or preparation they want done? Like, why would I just show up and paint the house beige when they wanted it green? Like, why would you even paint it the same color it is now when maybe they want to change the color? Like, you can't run with the assumption. Your employees, the reason your employees are driving you crazy as a person listening is because they don't know what you're building, right? If I— yeah, so, so they need to have the clarity of what you're building, right?

Yeah, that's good. I, I mean, you, you say it in a way where it's actually simplifies it a little bit. It, it causes you to think about it in a little different way rather than getting— you know, a lot of people make it so complicated.

You know, here's— you've got behind you the, the poster. If anybody's listening, they can't see this, but behind Brian is a poster of the Rocky movie. Now we all know if you've seen the movie Rocky, it's about a boxer, but if you've never seen the movie Rocky, you had no idea what the movie Rocky is about. And I said, I need you to show up in a costume for a costume party dressed as someone named Rocky. And you can't ask anybody what the costume is. People would show up dressed as like a Flintstones character or a a mafia guy or like, right? And be like, why didn't you show up as a boxer? Like, I don't— boxer? Why would it be a boxer? Because Rocky's about boxing. If you have no idea what the movie's about, you can't recreate the scene. If you have no idea what the business is supposed to look like, how are you ever going to be aligned and build that? Right? So the vivid vision is the most critical starting point for everyone. And then it's going through that training and the Invest in Your Leaders training to grow the skill sets and the confidence of your people. So you can delegate more to them. I was coaching a COO recently, our CEO Alliance, and one of the CEOs said, well, I have a list of stuff to get done, but I don't have anyone who can do it. And I said, take item 1, delegate it to someone, and then coach them using situational leadership and coaching and delegation so they can do it. But you're not allowed to do any work anymore. I want you to take the 15 things, delegate those 15 things to different people, and then spend your time coaching them and growing them so they do have the skills and the confidence to do those things. Game-changing for them as a company.

Well, and the reality of it is you cannot build that organization that you want to build without money, cash. So we always tell people the only way you're gonna grow your business is by charging more, which is what you said earlier, and by surrounding yourself with the best people you could possibly, you could possibly find.

Yeah, there's 3, there's 3 parts of that. I just did a video about this the other day. So you need to raise your prices. You need to control your cost of goods sold. So that's either negotiate more or it's cut some of your overhead on, or cut some of your variable costs and control some of your overhead saying no, not hiring the jerks, hiring A players instead of C players, saying no to some of the projects and initiatives that are just busy work that doesn't necessarily give you the ROI, right? So it's raise prices, control your COGS, control your overhead, and a lot of money drops to the bottom line. And then it's grow revenue.

So let's— I'm looking at the clock here, and I, I want to get to the— to me, which is, is kind of like the, the promised land, which is I found a Cameron Herald for my business.

Yeah.

And I'm able to say, hey, this is my vision. I want to build an X million dollar business. I want it to do this and this and this and be this and this and this, and this is how I'm going to benefit from it. So I'm very clear about what I want, and now I've hired a, a cameraman. First off, what are the pros? You know, how's my life going to get better? And then how can— how am I going to mess it up, potentially mess it up?

Okay, the pros are you're going to have more free time, you're going to get to start working on the stuff that gives you energy and you're really, really good at, you'll have time to actually grow people. You'll have time to reconnect with your spouse. You'll have time to spend time with your kids. You'll have time to get some hobbies again and have a life, right? Because at the end of the day, none of this stuff matters. We're all going to die, right? Like, I got news for every single one of us. We are going to exit our business. We will die at some point. So we may as well enjoy the journey because we're all just walking each other home. I've been saying recently, we're all going to end up as a kebab. We're just going to be burnt meat on a stick at the end of the journey, right? So, Let's enjoy the journey. That's how you're going to get a benefit. The way you're going to mess this up, if you're not careful and you just dump everything on the person's plate, they can make mistakes. And that almost happened to Brian at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. When I left 1-800-GOT-JUNK as the COO, Brian took 12 months to find my replacement. He found what I thought and what he thought was an amazing replacement, the former president of Starbucks North America. But the woman, Lonnie, who came in was former president. Was very corporate, very bureaucratic, very much about hire consultants. She did not embrace entrepreneurship. She didn't embrace the blue, the blue-egg culture. And she, Brian kind of dumped everything on her plate and ran away. And then a year later realized everything was really fucked up and had to get rid of her. So delegate, don't abdicate. Inspect what you expect, right? Don't just like delegate everything and walk away and show up a year later and go, well, how's it look? Like show up at the job site every day. So take a look at the work they're doing, make sure they're not struggling, make sure they're getting to where you want to get to. Don't tell them how to do the work, but make sure that the work they're doing is up to spec. Is that what you need, right? Is up to code. So inspect what you expect and delegate, not abdicate.

That's a lot.

Yeah. It's like drinking from a fire hose with me. I come out, I've got so much value that I can bring, but it's—

well, look, this is definitely one of those episodes. I say it every once in a while. This is definitely another one to listen to again, because, you know, People like to talk about, in fact, my book is called The Seven Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. We, you and I both know there are no secrets anymore, but when we package them as secrets, you know, hopefully we can reach 5 more people.

You know what it is though, is like, this is the part that I don't understand and you get. Yeah. Is we've all seen the fly banging its head on the window. Uh-huh. And I'm going to try really hard to get out that window and the fly just keeps banging its head on the window. And what happens to the fly? It ends up dead on the windowsill.

Yeah.

The secrets are, there's a shortcut. There's a door right here. The door's open. Just turn and go out the door. Like your seat cuts are the cheat sheets that allow someone, but the school system messed every single one of us up. The school system said, try hard, work hard, get a tutor to become average at what you suck at. You know, you have to be the smartest person in the room. And I'm saying, no, you don't. You can actually take the cheat sheets. You can use the shortcuts. You can take the secrets that you give them and you can do those. And you know what? Those are going to get you way further, way faster. And then you can reinvent the wheel later. My dad, when I was 16, told me that my R&D has to stand for ripoff and duplicate. Yeah. He said, there's millions of companies out there that have already figured out anything you want to do. Just do what they're doing. So I did.

So why don't more people do that?

Because the school system, because the school system told us to figure it out. The school system told us to learn everything. I have a really close friend of mine, Joe Polish, runs a big mastermind community called the Genius Network. So Joe said, you have to be great at marketing. I said, no, I have to know people who are great at marketing. I have to know that landing pages exist and I have to know someone who does them, but I don't want to be good at that. I have to know that copywriting is the thing, but I'm never going to be great at copywriting. I have to know people that are good at copywriting. So entrepreneurs, the school system said we have to become good at everything. What I'm saying is, no, we have to know all the really good people. Imagine if you took a classroom of 30 people and you said, all of you work together, all of you get to write the exam, all of you submit the one exam, we'd all get perfect because we'd collaborate, we'd probably all work on our cool skills. Somebody would do the design, somebody like, right? But what we did was we fucked everybody up and said we all had to be perfect. So every contractor is trying to figure it all out instead of realizing you're allowed to use the cheat sheets. You're actually allowed. Nobody's going to give you a D minus for using a cheat sheet. You actually are going to get the A plus for using the cheat sheet. Use the secrets.

Yeah. And like we're doing our big annual conference in 2 weeks, actually from today, we've been doing this for 9 years and every presentation from the stage is real world. Here's what we're doing now, step by step. All my speakers, they're cool. They, they, they, they show everything. They're not up there pitching. They're not selling stuff. They're up there just sharing.

I've been paid to speak to groups in 29 countries. I've been paid to speak to conferences now on every single continent, including Antarctica. I got paid to speak to Janik Silver's group in Antarctica 4 years ago.

Incredible. Wow.

And, and all I do is help entrepreneurs make their visions come true. I just try to give them the cheat sheets, the same cheat sheets I gave Kimbal Musk. Back in 1993. I get frustrated watching everyone bang their head against the window.

Me too. Because our, our thing is helping home improvement business owners achieve more success, wealth, and freedom, whatever that means for them. That's every— that's what we do. That's our why.

That's— and Simon was in my kitchen. Simon Sinek was in my kitchen helping me understand my why. My core purpose was to help entrepreneurs make their visions come true. So saying yes to being on your podcast, speaking at events, running my course, CO Live, everything is a hell yes. Now, if you were a government group, sorry, can't do it. If you wanted me to come and speak at your conference and it was a group of neurologists, nope, not coming because it's not aligned with my core purpose. And by the way, if we want to do, if we want to do a part 2, if you're listening, send Brian or drop a note into the comments. What are the questions you would like to ask Cameron? And Brian can probably weave something into a part 2 Q&A.

Absolutely.

Yeah. It would love to be pretty powerful.

Yeah. Great.

Good.

Good one. So one of the challenges that entrepreneurs have with this whole idea is that I'm now going to be delegating. And then they'll say, well, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? And then, and then they get freaked out. Like they go to the office every day, they sit down, they go into their emails, and then they get freaked out and they sit there all day.

Accomplish nothing, or they become the seagull manager and they fly in, they swoop all over, they shit all over everybody and they fly away.

Well, yes, that's the other side of it. Yes. That we love to do.

I have an entrepreneur who I was coaching in San Diego. His name was Jason Hennessey. I've coached him for 4 years, one-on-one coaching. And he got 120 employees. He said, everything's going so well. I feel like I need to go break some stuff. I'm like, what? Because he goes, I don't know what else to do. I'm like, hey, we need to give you some core projects. That will grow the organization so you don't go break some stuff. Step 1 for everybody who's listening, if you delegate everything and you find yourself sitting in your office and you're not sure what else to do, go get a life, go get some hobbies, write your bucket list of 101 things you want to do or try or achieve or experience or places to go before you die. In the last 4 years, my wife and I have been to 56 countries together. Wow. We've been, we've been to every continent. In the world together. We've been to Antarctica. We've been— we're in Australia. I'm in Sydney right now talking to you. Like, we've been— so we've been paragliding, we've skied in the Alps, we've gone, you know, to Bhutan to go hiking with monks. Go get a life as an entrepreneur. That's step one. If you've got a good life and if you've got hobbies and you're playing golf and you've reconnected with your spouse, you reconnect with yourself, you got your health going, then what do you want to do inside of your business? Ask your team What are the 2 or 3 things I'm really good at? Get your team to tell you, because most often as entrepreneurs, we kind of undermine ourselves like, oh yeah, but that's no big deal. No, that's your unique ability. The stuff that you go, yeah, that's no big deal. That's what you should spend more time in. And then spend time just doing those things that your team says you're really good at and delegate everything except genius. But at the end of the day, you only started your company for 1 of 3 reasons: to give you money, to have the feeling of accomplishment and to give you free time. At some point you got the money, at some point you know you've built the business, now it's time to actually have the free time and use it, right?

Love it, love it, love it. So, um, you know what's interesting is, um, you mentioned College Pro Painters. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting how many very successful people and businesses have come out of that entity. But there was more than one, right? Was there two of them?

Well, so College Pro is the first, and then it spun off into Student Painters. You got Mark Moses, who built CEO Coaching. I've known Mark since grade— Mark since grade 2. We've been friends since grade 2 together, played competitive tennis in high school together. Then you've got Jason Reed, who came out of the Student Painters and still built College Works, and Matt Stewart.

Matt Stewart. I know Matt. I know Mark.

Yeah. So they all came out of— so College Pro started, and then Helmut Beeman and Neil Bradley split off and built Student Painters, and then Student Painters split into Student Works and Student Painters, and then Student Works in California became College Works. So that's kind of the family tree. But College Pro started in 1971. It was the first and the largest in the world. A lot of other entrepreneurs came out of the Cutco system where they were all building and selling knives. Some really good friends out of Cutco.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's interesting because I know Mark. I've known Mark for years through his friends in EO Orange County, and just recently he lives here now in Miami. So we've been hanging out, we've spent some time together. What an interesting, interesting guy he is.

Dude, he and I have had— so we bumped into each other on the YEO boat cruise in Toronto in 1998. I was standing talking to Jack Daly. And Mark turns around, he's like, oh my God, Cameron. I'm like, Mark. And he goes, you grew. And I blurted out, you didn't. And I didn't mean it in a negative way, but when he had last seen me, I was about 5 foot 4. So we played competitive tennis together, grade 8, 9, and 10, 5 days a week on a team together. When we were in grade school, we did speaking competitions, like public speaking competitions. So I know his brother Alex, his brother Eric. I know his mom and dad. We grew up together in Sudbury, Canada. He's from Canada originally, from Northern Ontario. Oh, I know.

Yeah.

So, so, but when he last saw me was in grade 10, grade 9, I was 5'4". I'm 6'4" today. So Mark's about 5'7". I'm 6'4". But yeah, very, but then he ran a house painting business for a bunch of years. I did. He went on to be in the head office. I did too. Then we both exited our companies in 2007, got into the coaching world. He now runs CEO Coaching. I run the CEO Alliance. Very, very similar, strange kind of shadow worlds.

Well, Cameron, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for, for being here. And, and look, to everybody that's listening, I'm going to put all of Cameron's stuff in the show notes because you got to, you got to read his books, you got to study all of what he's talking about. Because I mean, there's all this stuff like you could keep going on all of the people you know, and all of the people you've coached and the companies that you've worked with. And You know, success leaves clues. I say it here all of the time. And where that originally came from, I didn't come up with it, but success leaves clues. And if you aren't using those clues that are like banging you in the head of these are the things to do to build a business that works for you, that works for your family, that works for your team and works for their families. Here's the blueprints. I mean, it's been done. A million times before. So don't try and go figure it all out on your own. Here's a resource here. Go use those resources that are available to you and all of the other ones that we provide through the Wealthy Contractor and all of the other stuff that's available through the industry. But God, don't try and figure it all out by yourself.

R&D, man.

R&D. Love it. Well, thank you very much. And to everybody listening, again, I think this is one that you should go back and listen to for no other reason if for no other reason, just to embed in your subconscious mind that all of this stuff that we talk about, building a business that works without you, being able to surround yourself with great people, being able to make a lot of money, being able to have a life, it's real. You can do it. So if for no other reason, listen to this again, just for that. Cameron, thank you. And until next time, everybody, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan, and this is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast.