479. Envisioning a Vivid Future with Cameron Herold

We market to the COO who joins the CO alliance as a member. So we have this large Mastermind community of second in commands from 17 countries that meet online and in person to help each other grow their skills and their confidence and their companies and their connections. Very different from an entrepreneurial mastermind group where it's just entrepreneurs. We have to market to the COO and to the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur writes the check and the COO attends. Very similar to a husband and wife going out and buying a vehicle. If he's buying the car, she definitely has to say yes. If she's buying the car, he definitely has to say yes. Even though one person is driving the car. There's two decision makers when you're selling to a CEO, let's say someone like you. To join the Genius Network, you just have to get you engaged, you have to get you excited and you write the check. But if it's your coo, there's two decision makers involved in that process.

Welcome to Marketing Speak, a series of interviews and monologues featuring thought leaders and industry practitioners in search engine optimization, e commerce and online marketing. Here's your host, Stefan Spencer, SEO expert, author, speaker, consultant and Internet entrepreneur. The ability to turn a vivid vision into reality can transform a $2 million company into a 106 million dollar powerhouse. This principle has guided Cameron Herald, known as the CEO whisperer who engineered the remarkable growth of 1, 800, got junk from 14 to 3,000 employees in just six years. As the founder of COO alliance and a speaker who's presented on all seven continents, Cameron has helped build multiple hundred million dollar companies and coach some of the biggest names in business. In this energizing conversation, Cameron talks about his journey of balancing leading a global business while living as a digital nomad. Visiting 54 countries in 39 months, he shares his insights on crafting and implementing a vivid vision that aligns an entire organization. He explains how to build flywheels in business that create powerful momentum and reveals the secrets behind generating massive PR coverage without spending a dime. From leveraging AI in business to nurturing company culture that attracts and retains top talent, this episode is packed with battle tested strategies from someone who has scaled companies to nine figures multiple times. So without any further ado, on with the show.

Cameron, it's so great to have you on the show.

Hey Stefan, good to see you again.

Yeah, so we just saw each other not too long ago at Genius Network. Not at the annual event, you missed that one. But you've been in Genius Network for how many years now?

Yeah, I was a member for eight years. I'm actually in that pause right now for about a year. Joe keeps hitting me every month or two, kind of pulling me back. But my wife and I sold everything three years ago to become global nomads. So we've been 54 countries in the last 39 months, and we're not going to really be in North America very much to be around the Genius Network. So I'm taking a pause for a little bit, but members for eight years.

Gotcha. Okay. And how is it to be a digital nomad and go bopping around the planet?

It's kind of the glass is half full and half empty. Right. The half full is amazing experiences, opportunities to say yes to events all over the world, to explore different countries, to explore different cultures. Just have unbelievable experiences. And then the half empty is every seven to 10 days, having to find a new coffee shop and a new trainer and a new gym and a new yoga studio and a new grocery store and pack our stuff up and move. So there's this constant feeling of go, go, go, which is half full and half empty, but we're loving it.

Okay, awesome. What's been a highlight? What pops in your mind when you think about the magic moments or the epiphanies that have really stood out for you?

I think some of the places we got to go to Antarctica right towards the end of COVID That was a pretty magical moment to spend a bunch of time down there with a great group of entrepreneurs going up to the North Pole this summer on a ship. We were north of all land on the planet. There was no land any further north than we were. That was kind of neat to be on a boat up there for 10 days on an icebreaker, going to Uganda and spending time out in the rainforest with these gorillas. Bhutan, living in a monastery with monks. We've been checking off the bucket list pretty heavily. Some pretty neat stuff. One of my big ones last summer, I got to drive a Porsche on the autobahn. I got 268km an hour legally on the Autobahn, which was pretty badass. That's 171 miles an hour.

Wow. Wow. What'd you learn from the monks in Bhutan?

Wow presence. It was incredible. It was a monastery where these monk orphans were being raised as monks and kind of moving into that life and to sit with them and how present they were and how they remembered all of our names on the third morning when we were leaving, because we were actually asleep. We were only the second group ever to sleep at the monastery. We were getting up in the morning to leave and we were sitting having breakfast with them, and one of these 10 year olds came up to me and he said, Mr. Cameron, it was so nice to spend time with you at dinner last night. And I loved you teaching me how to make a paper airplane. And I was like, how do you even remember my name? But they all were so present because they're just, they're not distracted with everything else. That was a beautiful moment. And then having a little dance party with them at the campfire the night before. They're not allowed to dance, but the head monk let them dance with us. And they're only allowed one bonfire a year and they got to have the bonfire with us. And that was a pretty magical hour to just hang out.

Wow, that's wild. How did you end up at a monastery?

We were with a group called Wayfinders. We've been spending a lot of time with these entrepreneurial groups all over the world for the last 15 years. And a guy named Mike Brissick from Toronto, Canada, who I met at a event maybe 10 years ago, and he organizes these small groups of 25 entrepreneurs and takes them into pretty kind of out of the way places. So we've gone to Uganda with him. We just came back from Laos and Vietnam last week or 10 days ago with a small group over there. And then he took this group to Bhutan and got us into these places where he'll do some advanced trips and tries to meet people and just go two or three steps off the beaten track. So he'll go kind of off the beaten track and then he'll find the place that's just off that beaten track and then he'll go just even deeper to kind of take you to places that you just can't get to on your own. And it's kind of weird. We were laughing about it in Laos a few weeks ago, saying, I can't believe I pay all this money to sleep on these 1 inch mattresses in the middle of nowhere in these villages that people don't go to. Why am I doing this when I can stay at any nice hotel? But the experience is pretty rich.

Yeah. Wow. So you were on this podcast five years ago and we spoke a lot about free pr, and five years is a long time. And Internet years, dog years or whatever, it's an eternity. So what have been the biggest insights or epiphanies or paradigm shifts that you have either come up with or experienced in these last five years?

Wow. I guess one of the Biggest ones. And it's interesting. I just got a tattoo to kind of commemorate this. I'll try to show this on YouTube right now, but it's a Hindi saying that says, we're walking each other home. And it's a Ram Dass quote that has just really stuck with me over the last bunch of years, that none of this really matters. We are just kind of walking each other home. We're growing together and supporting each other. And at the end of the day, what really matters is, I guess, the legacies we leave behind and the people that we touch and the connections that we have. And I'm less focused on business, business, business, and I'm more focused on everything else. I think that's probably become very omnipresent for me as we've spent a lot more time living in Europe and Asia, where if you meet someone and you ask them, what do they do? They probably say, I like cooking and hiking and skiing, and I spend time with friends and I'm exploring myself, and I do a lot of reading in North America. When you say, what do you do? People talk about work, and nobody in Europe and Asia talks about work. And I think that's just become a beautiful thing for us is we don't focus on it as much as we used to. Still do it, still passionate about it, still have my core purpose, but it's not my reason for being anymore. The reason for being is the connection with people.

I love that quote from Ram Dass. I actually heard him speak many years ago, in the 90s. Yeah.

That's cool. Where'd you see him?

In Madison, Wisconsin. He did an event, and I remember the Combat Blindness foundation sponsored it, and then they got donations. I actually offered to help them build a website and help them with Internet marketing. So I did that for a while. Yeah, Way, way long ago.

That's neat. We just had some friends from Madison, Wisconsin, come and spend time with us at a festival in Montenegro this summer. So there's the world colliding, going from Ram Dass and Madison to Madison to Montenegro.

Yeah. Well, it's a small world as you're experiencing, even though you're traveling the world. You know this idea in Kabbalah that time, space, and motion are all illusion, part of the simulation. So you're hopping on planes or you're getting on trains and renting cars and whatever you're doing, but you're not actually going anywhere. We're all just playing this video game, and it's more like a blank room, like the holodeck on Star Trek than anything else.

Yeah, it's pretty neat. We were in Vietnam and we were up on this mountaintop sleeping in these tents and we were looking up at the Milky Way and it was so bright, this kind of cloud of stars. And yeah, we just realized how small we all were. And the path that we're all on is pretty beautiful.

Yeah, that's awesome. So let's get into some marketing because this is marketing speak and we better not get too metaphysical or we're going to lose some people.

Or gain some. Yeah.

Or gain some. Yeah. So what is, I guess the biggest challenge in running the COO alliance or doing really any kind of business venture while you're traveling the world? I personally get really distracted by hopping on planes and finding hotels or Airbnbs and moving from place to place. It's hard for me to focus on business while I'm doing that. So consequently, I don't do that a lot. I used to be a road warrior speaking at a lot of conferences every year and it's exhausting.

Yeah. So I'm not doing a lot of speaking as much as I used to. I mean, I'm speaking to 6,000 people in Dubai in January and to another small group of entrepreneurs in Dubai in January, which will be nice. I've been working from home and working remotely now for 17 years since I left 1-800-got junk as their chief operating officer in 2007. So the fact that I've worked from home for 17 years, I've gotten into that groove that's been probably, I guess, part one, part two is because I've really prioritized all parts of my life now. I don't get caught up in the busy work of running the day to day of a business. I definitely focus on the goals and priorities and flywheels. My focus on the big things that are going to move the needle and stay very focused on those. And I try to not one. I really don't let the rest of all the busyness kind of get in my way. I think the harder part right now with marketing the CEO alliance isn't even necessarily the travel. It's that we're marketing to two people, which is different from anything I've ever marketed to before. The analogy I've worked with my team on is that we market to the COO who joins the CEO alliance as a member. So we have this large Mastermind community of second in command from 17 countries that meet online and in person to help each other grow their skills and their confidence and Their companies and their connections. Very different from an entrepreneurial mastermind group where it's just entrepreneurs. We have to market to the COO and to the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur writes the check and the COO attends. Very similar to a husband and wife going out and buying a vehicle. If he's buying the car, she definitely has to say yes. If she's buying the car, he definitely has to say yes. Even though one person is driving the car. There's two decision makers. When you're selling to a CEO, let's say someone like you to join the Genius network, you just have to get you engaged, you have to get you excited and you write the check. But if it's your coo, there's two decision makers involved in that process. So that's been number one. The second thing that's been really different is 30% of our clients quit their jobs or get fired every three years, which is really kind of weird to think about. Entrepreneurs don't get fired, they don't quit their jobs, they'll always write the check for themselves. But it seems to be that the life cycle for mid to senior level person is every three to five years they're moving. So we're losing our base 30%. Every two to three years we're losing 30% of our base even if they're super happy.

So how do you deal with that?

We just have to stay ahead of the curve. First part dealing with it was understanding it, right? Just understanding the numbers that we were working with. So if we're working with that 70% base and we look at it as 70% of the base on an annual basis that we can really market to is what's our net promoter score of our hundred percent and then what percentage of the seventy can we get back? So our goal Is to get 90 or 80 to 90% of the 70 to return, which is very high. So we're looking for about a 55 to 60% renewal rate of the hundred every year. So it's really high net promoter score, making sure that our members know each other and have friends because they actually are not going to leave their friends. They might leave a group, but they won't leave their community. So we're working really hard to get them to come to a couple of in person events a year so the online events and the slack community can stay powerful for them. And then the next one is really connecting with their CEO who doesn't show up to the events, who the CEO. It's not for them, but making sure the CEO gets Value. So we're trying to explain on a monthly basis, here's what we just covered. Here's the value your COO just got. Here's how you and your COO can debrief. Almost like sending a report card home to the parents of the kid. You know the kid's going to school, but you need to let the parents know what's happening at school so they can communicate. So we're starting to figure that out now, too.

Gotcha. And what are some of the points from. Perhaps let's pick one of your books, Double Double. What are some of the key points that help you to grow and evolve your business? Your COO alliance, now that you wrote about years ago in Double Double. When did that book come out?

Yeah, it came out in 2010, I think it was. So about 14 years ago. Double Double really was all of the systems and tools that I had used to scale 1, 800, got junk. College Pro Painters, Gerber Auto Collision, and then uBarter.com, which were the four companies that I got known for building. And it was the systems and processes we used to scale those. So one of the systems, and some of them weren't even my tools, they were tools that I learned from someone else. So one that I really worked hard on was the Flywheel concept from Jim Collins in Good to Great. And that was a process that we really obsessed about at 1-800-got junk. We really obsessed about it@ubarter.com we absolutely obsessed about it at CollegePro Painters. That flywheel approach of finding that one thing that if you focus on it constantly will start to create more momentum, and that momentum will create more momentum. That Flywheel approach is something we're really focusing on for the CO alliance and for us. Right now, the Flywheel is getting everyone that we know to listen to the Second In Command podcast. Because the more that we get people engaged in that podcast, the more that they want to become members. And then once we have them as members, it's creating that really positive environment for them, really positive net promoter score and just kind of keeping them in there. And then I think the second part is that really understanding that lifetime value of a customer so that we understand what we can pay to acquire the customer and what they're worth over the lifetime with us. And then what's that payback cycle or the cash conversion cycle of that number. So taking some of the lessons from digital marketing companies and really applying those into our business. So in Double Double, I talked about the concept of R and D Stands for rip off and duplicate that. I was never the smartest person in the room, but I can take the best systems from the best companies and put those in place. And we definitely do a lot of that for the CEO alliances. I didn't come up with the idea of the cash conversion cycle or cost of acquisition or lifetime value, nor do I ever really hear people in mastermind communities talking about that. But I've really taken that concept and really focused on building our business around that number and that formula.

Yeah. And did you have the concept of Vivid Vision from back then that you wrote about in Double Double or not yet?

Well, the first chapter of Double Double is actually on the vivid vision concept. When I first wrote the book, we used to call it a painted picture. But after about seven years of doing speaking all over the world, people started to get confusing. Confused with what the term painted picture meant. They thought it was like creating a vision board or drawing pictures. So I changed the name of it to A Vivid Vision, which becomes a four or five page written description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future, and then sharing that written description of your company with your customers, your shareholders, your suppliers, your employees, Potential employees, potential customers. So everybody can see what the entrepreneur can see the future looking like, and then they can help you make that come true. But yeah, that was absolutely the first chapter of the book, Double Double. It then got so much traction that people wanted me to write a full book about it, which became the book Vivid Vision. And I also wrote a chapter in the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs that I co authored with Hal Elrod.

Yeah. Awesome. So was A Vivid Vision a key part of growing COO alliance and is that still part of it?

It really was. And it's interesting. I was sitting in a Genius Network event, Joe Polish's mastermind for CEOs in Scottsdale, Arizona, probably nine years ago now. I remember where I was sitting. I could literally show you the spot in the room. It was kind of where Joe and Nunes used to sit towards the back of the room. I was sitting right there and I was watching somebody up at the front of the room do a speaking event. I was like, oh, I could just do this for coos. I just realized that there's all these groups for entrepreneurs, but there was nothing like this, like the genius network for COOs. So I put up a one page, landing page. The next week that I was going to host an event at a place in Arizona. I'd met this guy on a plane three weeks before that owned a 10 bedroom hacienda. 10 bedrooms and five kitchens. It's called the Royal Arcadia Hacienda. I put up a one page landing page and I said the first ten coos that sign up to spend two and a half days with me, we're going to mastermind about how to grow you, how to grow your skills, how to grow your confidence, how to grow your companies. And the price is 65 or $6700. First 10 have got a spot. There was no agenda, there were no speakers, there was no more information than that. And 25 hours later, 10 people had paid 6,700 bucks. So I'm like, oops, I guess we have a business model. And then after running that event and all we did at that event was I had all 10 attendees present a 10 minute or 15 minute talk on something they were strong at. And then the second day they all presented a problem they were having and the group helped unstick them on the problem. And that was the two and a half days of agenda. And, and after that two and a half days, nine of the 10 people wanted to continue meeting. And that was the genesis of the CO Alliance. So I had to get the vision of what I felt in that day and articulate it in a way that everybody else could see what I could see. People that had not been at the Genius Network could see it. People that were not a part of a mastermind would understand it, or entrepreneurs who had seen it could explain it to somebody else who was then going to attend. So I then wrote a five page description of the CO Alliance. Every three years since, I've revised that. The one that we're now working on, kind of completing is the one that ends December 31, 2025. And that vivid vision is on our website. It's shared at speaking events. We can link to it in the show notes if you'd like here. And it's a really great description of what I see the company looking like, acting like and feel like in the future.

Yep, gotcha. And you have a vivid vision, which we'll include in the show notes a PDF document of that for COO Alliance. But you have other ventures that you either have now or you had previously in recent times since we've known each other. You had other vivid visions for. Right, because I recall that, what was it? Conscious Copy had shared several examples of your vivid visions, not just your COO alliance one, but maybe one for you personally or something, I don't know. Can you refresh my memory on that?

Yep, exactly. So over the years, what I started to realize was that not only could I craft a vivid vision for the COO Alliance, I could craft one for the rest of my businesses that I run. So I have my speaking events and I have all of my books and I have my online training called Invest in your leaders. And I have my one on one and group coaching. So I crafted a vivid vision that kind of described Cameron Herald Enterprises. And then I thought, what if I could do one for me? What if I could craft vivid vision for me? And I'd been exposed to John and Missy Butcher who wrote Lifebook, and that becomes like a five day session where you end up with this full workbook describing your future as a person or as a couple. I thought maybe a four pager would work a little better for me as a human. So I wrote a vivid vision for myself. And that one actually now expires December 31, 2024. So in December of this year, I'll be in Bali at a place called the Time Chamber, and I'm writing my 2027 Cameron Herald vivid Vision. That describes me as a dad, as a father, as a friend, as a lover, as a parent, as a traveler, as a human, as a member of society. What I deal with, my travel and fitness and finance and spirituality, it kind of describes me. And then I share that with everybody and they help hold me accountable to that. And then my wife Ashley and I also crafted one for our marriage. So I went off and described me as a husband and then she described herself and we described all aspects of our marriage together. So how we vacation and how we use fitness and what our food like and sexuality and use of substances. And we merged all of the points together into this shared vivid vision document. And we share that with the world. And then, as you mentioned, Jennifer Houde from Conscious Copy is a Genius Network member. She and I met at one of the Genius Network events. Oh, gosh, probably 10 years ago, maybe longer. She saw me rolling out these vivid vision concepts and she started helping companies write theirs. And now she's my partner on all things vivid vision. So we send her hundreds of companies. She's written. She and her company have written, I think, 800 vivid vision documents for companies all over the world. And now they're helping CEOs write their personal vivid visions too.

Oh, that's awesome. So could we share with our listener viewer some of these examples that are not just for the COO alliance, but maybe for you personally, maybe for, I don't know if that's too personal, but your relationship or whatever. Like it'd be, I think, very inspiring for a listener to see that so that maybe they could write something similar for their own relationship. For their own.

Yeah, we can link. I'll send you the links to my personal Vivid Vision document and then to my wife and our Vivid Vision document. You can share both of those. And then once I craft my 2027 personal one, we can flip that out for the current version that's expiring. So pretty interesting to go through that process of hitting the end of the three year period. What I like to do is I go back through the document as a word document and I highlight every sentence that has come green and you can really see how much I've grown as a person over that three year period. And then I can take the sentences that aren't quite green yet and I can figure out do I still believe in them? And can I then stretch those into my next document?

Super cool.

It's a fun exercise.

Yeah. Yeah. An exercise that's a little bit related here. Because you mentioned the founders of Lifebook, I took the AI Mastery program with Mindvalley. So Vishen Lakhiani was one of the instructors of it, also the founder of Mindvalley and he showed how to upload to ChatGPT as a prompt, like a sample vision document. This was actually from John of Lifebook that he used as a sample and then prompting ChatGPT to write a new vision based on a bunch of bullet points for the person that is being written about. So don't use John's goals and visions and so forth. Use mine. But here's mine in rough form. Bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet. And then use John's write up as inspiration. And it turned out something really impressive.

So I don't know if you use.

ChatGPT to do that sort of thing.

Before the world is colliding in a really crazy way right now. So I love that you just mentioned Vishen Lakhiani. Vishen and I were texting each other 15 minutes before you and I hopped on this call. The 6,000 person event that I'm speaking to in Dubai in January is Vishen's Mind Valley event called Future Human. They paid me four or five years ago to do a quest that's on the mindvalley app on the vivid vision concept. And the way that Vishen and I first Met was around 12 years ago. He'd heard about the vivid vision or painted picture I was calling it at the time and wrote about me in his book the Buddha and The badass. So we've done a lot of work together and I love the program that they're putting together, but I love that you just mentioned that he's doing that too. I'm going to try something when I get off this call with you. I'm going to take my Vivid Vision document, I'm going to pull it into ChatGPT4 and ask it to strip it backwards for me and build it out into a project list for me and see if I can actually have it. Help me create a list of projects that I can do to make each sentence come true. Because I've done a lot of that manually, but it just gave me an idea of maybe I can help it, see if I can use it for a tool to help me speed this thing forward. Because I work with companies now all over the world. My core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their vision come true. So what I coach people on is helping them reverse engineer their Vivid Vision document. I just started coaching Tommy Mello from A1 Garage Doors. He and his second in command, they've got 850 employees, $180 million company. So we do one on one calls with them monthly. I'm helping Tommy reverse engineer the vivid vision for his company in three years and then figure out the steps to make that come true. So even though their current State is this 850 person company, the vision of where he's taking the company over the next three years, we reverse engineer that delta and that Vivid Vision concept is how he can get his suppliers and customers, employees, potential employees, everybody, to see what he can see and then it's complete alignment. Right? And that allows the entrepreneur almost to step back and stay as the chief visionary, stay as the chief culture officer, stay as the person stirring the Kool Aid and everybody on the team can then figure out the plans to make that come true. So it really frees up the entrepreneur to work in their unique ability.

Yeah, super cool. Of course, all these worlds are colliding. I just noticed, I don't know, 12 hours ago when I was looking through my calendar, there's a shared calendar set up with my wife Orion, who also is podcasting. And I just noticed 12 hours ago that I guess this is Vishen's ex wife, Christina Lakhiani. She's going to be interviewed by my wife next week.

Crazy.

And I just saw a Vishen at the Genius Network annual event like two weeks ago. So that's another.

Oh great. I didn't know that.

But yeah, I saw him there.

That's Cool. Yeah. Great guy. Yeah.

It's a small, small, small world. Okay, so one thing that I thought of when you were talking about what you're going to do with ChatGPT after we get off this interview, what if you also asked it to evaluate the feasibility of each of your goals and then anticipate potential roadblocks or hindrances and then come up with contingencies and workarounds for each of the potential roadblocks it finds?

Yeah, I think the roadblocks would be interesting. I think the feasibility you definitely want to place in that question or the prompt that you're putting in kind of what your boundaries are for it to decide the feasibility. Right. So you need to let it know your core values, the budget that you have, the skill set that you've got. Because if Kennedy had asked ChatGPT, Can I put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, it would've said, no, not happening. You got a bunch of guys with slide rulers like, it's not gonna happen. And well, I guess they did it where it was still up for debate. Right.

But.

They put a man on the moon. So I think it's dangerous to ask some. It's like asking a lawyer, an accountant, should I do something? They're always going to say no, but then if you give them the boundaries to make that decision within, then they might say yes, and here's how. So I think it's more. But yeah, I think there's something interesting there for sure.

Yeah, I mean, I wasn't asking, thinking that you'd ask ChatGPT for, I don't know, percentage feasibility or something, but more like a prioritization based on feasibility.

I think the prioritization, the roadblocks, like to think through something and help you establish a plan. There's going to be some really cool stuff in here that people can use. I was telling a leadership team that I was coaching about six months ago that the only people that should be afraid of losing their job to AI are the people that are not using AI in their job. Right. There's a great dashboard that's one of my favorites called there's an AI for that. And it shows something like 15,000 different AI tools that exist to do about 20,000 different AI tasks. I like the employees and leadership team to spend one to two hours a week playing with different AI tools, trying to use the different AI tools in their tasks, watching videos on AI and then showing up on Monday and doing a five minute book report on one thing that they Used AI for last week and how it made their life easier. And it's this constant kind of sharing because it's just a really new tool. It's almost like the tool StumbleUpon back in 1998 where we had to go and stumble around the Internet to learn that, oh my gosh, a restaurant has a website. I remember seeing the first gas station website or restaurant website, like, whoa, this is so cool. We just don't know what exists until we start trying it and sharing it. I think we need to, as companies, let our people play with AI. In fact, make our people play with AI very frequently on a weekly basis and report back what they're learning to really get. That Kool Aid starting to kind of swirl.

Yeah. What's possible now with AI is mind blowing. What will be possible in two years? It's a tectonic shift for our society. We just are not really prepared for it, I don't think.

No, we're not at all.

Yeah, it's Tony Robbins quote something along the lines of, if you can recognize patterns, you have an edge. Right. But it's not enough to just recognize the patterns, you have to be able to utilize the pattern. So it's about pattern recognition and pattern utilization and I think having ChatGPT and Claude and whatever other LLMs that are your llama, Gemini, et cetera, at your disposal and know where their strengths are and where their limitations are. But it's just an extension of you. It's in your muscle memory to use it all the time in different ways and to push the boundaries because the tool gets better and better each day. And to use the prompt engineering to identify, to recognize the patterns and then to utilize those patterns to get an edge. I think that's the way you're going to thrive in this next decade.

Well, I'm writing my seventh book right now, and my executive assistant and I are writing it together. And we're leveraging AI to do 100% of the book, including the drawings, the illustrations, the layout. And it's what grandmother knew about business or lessons from grandmother about running your business. It's all the sayings that we heard from our grandma, right? Like, don't put all your eggs in one basket. How do you apply that to business? Or better a bird in hand than two in the bush. How does that app. And I've got a hundred of these grandmotherisms and we're creating a book literally based on all of those. It's going to get punched out by January. And leveraging AI. I heard a Quote years ago. That has always resonate with me. And I guess it ties in a little bit to Andy Grove's only the paranoid survive comment or idea. But the quote that I heard was if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And I think right now AI is coming at such a fast pace that if companies are not embracing it and leveraging it and trying to adopt it and understand it fast, you're out of business in two years because too many of your competitors will and they'll literally destroy you. Right? Somewhere I saw this on a Nike T shirt 20 years ago. It said, somewhere right now someone is practicing and when they beat you or meet you in head to head competition, they'll beat you. Yeah.

What do you tell somebody who's maybe anxious or intimidated or freaked out about AI about all this change?

Invest in yourself.

I'm sure you've read who Moved My Cheese. Yeah. Change is scary.

It is scary and I think it's very scary if you're alone. I think it's the reason why you and I both value mastermind communities, right? I've been in the Genius Network for eight years, Strategic Coach for seven years, Baby Bathwater five years, four Master or five Mastermind talks and events, a bunch of War Room events, a couple of Intelligent Change events, Four Wayfinders events. I go on and on with all these mastermind communities all over the world because I surround myself with a community of people that are progressive, that are thinking forward, that are sharing resources, that are sharing tips, that are sharing their fears and insecurities. But I think if you're worried, you should join a couple of communities and invest in yourself. That way you should get yourself a business coach who's done it before. Not just some online coach, but someone who's actually built companies before. Get involved in some kind of a group coaching program. Invest in your people, right? Invest in the skillset and communities for your leadership team so they can scale and you'll be perfectly fine. But if you sit back and worry and get nervous, yeah, you're in trouble. I talked to an entrepreneur in the fall of 2009 and he was talking about the global financial crisis and how hard it was on his restaurant business. And there was the global financial crisis. This and global. I'm like, stop. You've got six locations. Why don't you take every location you've got and create a marketing plan so that every man, woman and child within every zip code of those six locations knows about your business. Just market to every man, woman, and child in the zip code of each of your six locations. And you will knock the COVID off the ball if you do that for six months, because the global financial crisis, you're not operating in 193 countries. And he sat down, he thought about it, and he goes, yeah, I'm only operating in six zip codes of one city. You fast forward now from 2009 to 2024, and the chain is called the Cactus Club, and they are absolutely crushing it. They're probably about 40 times bigger than they were in 2009. But every man, woman, and child in the city of Vancouver knows of the Cactus Club brand. So this was somebody who decided not to freeze, took some coaching advice, decided to focus and get that real flywheel right. Just that one thing that will move the needle. But, yeah, if you're gonna sit in your home office or your office or sit on social media and worry about AI and not do anything about it, then, yeah, you're pretty much out of a job or out of the business.

I love this definition of worry that I got from my wife, Orion. And that is worry is praying for what you don't want. Whoa.

Yeah. And while when your focus goes, energy flows, right? If you keep thinking about your worry, your energy's gonna go there. If you focus on your goals and your vivid vision, you'll make that come true. It's that saying from Napoleon Hill's think and grow rich. Conceive, believe and achieve. And if you can kind of focus on that. We actually had that saying up on one of the walls at 1-800-got junk, because we so firmly believed in that concept of vision and then plan and then execution. Right. Vision without execution is hallucination. That was Thomas Edison.

And so the full quote from Napoleon Hill is, whatever you conceive and believe you can achieve, or something like that.

Yeah, we shorten it, at least. I try to give credit, but you've got more details than I do.

Well, I want to go back to this concept about the flywheel and Jim Collins, because I heard a somewhat similar concept, but it's more kind of metaphysical. And it's. The spiritual flywheel is what he calls it. He was a past guest on my other podcast on Get Yourself Optimized, which is spirituality and personal development. So David Guillaume is the guest that I'm referring to here. Came up with a spiritual flywheel. We didn't talk about it on the episode, but I learned about it from a class because he teaches Kabbalah. Classes and he taught how to grow a business, which he's been very successful with his wife and him growing the Mary Ruth organics brand, which is 25 million customers and just huge brand. Now he's a teacher at the Kabbalah center full time. But he also has a really successful, him and his wife this really successful global business. So the spiritual flywheel, clearly something's working, right? So I think he's onto something here, the concept of it. And let's see how this ties into your understanding of the flywheel from Jim Collins and how you've applied it. If you are working on, let's say, I don't know, 500 different tasks in your to do list, which isn't abnormal, that's we have a lot of things going on in our lives. Not 500 projects, but 500 to DOS. And maybe out of that there are 50 different projects. You want to sell your home, you want to buy a new car, I don't know, whatever. And each of these unfinished projects is stealing energy from you. It's draining energy. If you were to complete some of these projects, then all that potential energy that's stuck is going to get converted into kinetic energy and then you'll be able to really take on incredible, impossible goals and achieve great things. But while this energy is stuck, you're going to have to do something about it. And he said, kill those projects off. If you're not going to finish them, just kill them off. Them hanging around is not good. He gave this great analogy. If you had, let's say a project 90% complete and hypothetically, let's say you get 90 points of energy for what you've done so far with that 90% complete project. You're not going to get 10 more points of energy for completing the project. The remaining 10%, you're going to get 10,000 units of energy by completing that project. It will unleash so much energy for you that this is where the Satan the Devil gets involved is when you're getting close to finishing, he's letting you get as far as you want to that 90 some percent. And then he's involved because he doesn't want you finishing it because that's where all the juice is. What do you think about all that and how does that apply to the flywheel from Jim Collins?

I'll talk about kind of all of those tasks that are on your list and then I'll go back into kind of the flywheel and combine the two. So Jim Collins talks about a stop doing list as well, right, we all have our to do list. But what are all the things we should look at that we can stop doing? I was actually working with one of the members of my team yesterday. He's been with me for about seven years. Manages all the IT projects, websites, projects. My online course handles a lot of stuff he did. I had him do an activity inventory of about a hundred things that he works on over the course of the average week and month. And then we looked at them line by line and decided what to kill, what to actually optimize, what to automate, what to delegate, and then what to actually what he should keep. And we realized that there were a bunch of things on the list that were just busy work that we were getting diminishing returns from. We'd done enough. Or maybe it was old projects that were just continuing on that we didn't need anymore. So killing those allowed him to focus on the critical few things. Then we took up the ones that were almost like launching a satellite into orbit. And I said, you know, it's going to take a bunch of effort to get that up. But once that satellite's in orbit, it pays dividends for decades. So what are the projects that, if we can just get it to completion now, will pay dividends for a long period of time. So that effort, there's going to be a good ROI on that effort. And we prioritize those projects. I think that kind of ties in with that flywheel approach. So the concept of the flywheel is from the manufacturing world. A flywheel is this massive metal disk in a factory. It's this huge, massive metal disc that's part of these machines. And the thing in the machinery is to get that flywheel to start turning. And it's really, really heavy. So you have to put all of your energy into pushing that flywheel. And you might spend days trying to get it to make one turn. And then as it's slowly turning, you keep pushing your energy on it, it makes a second turn. You keep putting your energy on it, it makes a third turn. But as it's slowly starting to turn and you keep pushing on it, it gets easier, and it gets faster and faster and faster, and it starts spinning. What? It's its own weight. That's the concept of the flywheel. So in the business world, it's picking that one core thing that if you put all of your energy on it and you keep focusing on it, it'll spin, and then that'll pay the massive dividends. So the example that I use is going back to 1-800-got- junk. We picked two areas of the business that we were going to obsess about for a five year period. Number one was around getting free public relations, free press coverage for the business. We did it because I had done a lot of it at college Pro painters, at Boyd Auto Body and@the ubarter.com Brian has had some good early success with what was called the rubbish boys. And we had no marketing budget, we had no money. So if we could get the press to tell our story, we had something to share. So we pushed hard to get media. We pushed hard to get media and we started getting it. We got Bloomberg, we got Associated Press, then we hired a PR guy. At the end of six and a half years, I'd hired six people that had no PR experience. They were basically cold callers, full time salespeople, and with them, phoning journalists, TV stations, radio broadcasters, magazines. This was prior to social media even existing. We'd landed 5200 individual unique stories about the company in six and a half years. That flywheel propelled us. We got on Oprah, we were in every major newspaper magazine like the physical editions. That's what grew the company. If we were able to have landed that press today, when Facebook and LinkedIn existed, they would have been an $800 million company faster than they got right. I took them to 100 million. They're now 800 million. 14 years later, we probably would have been 800 million 10 years ago. So that was flywheel number one. Flywheel number two was turning the company into a globally admired brand. So creating a company that was a little bit more than a business, a little bit less than the religion. We wanted to get into this zone of a cult and create a culture so that we could attract great employees for less money than we normally paid. We could keep employees so we didn't have turnover and we didn't have training costs. We could keep employees so they would produce more, we'd have happier employees who would produce more. And then we'd have really, really happy employees who would create really happy franchisees and really happy customers. And we could charge a lot. We became the number two company in Canada to work for. We twice ranked as the number one company in British Columbia to work for. We became a cult. And there were only when I left the company in 2007, there were only three companies in Vancouver that anybody wanted to work for. One was Lululemon, that was based out of Vancouver. The second was the Vancouver Olympics that was coming up in 2010. But everybody wanted to work for Van hawk and number three was 1-800-got- junk. We'd become this cultural icon inside of the city. So those two flywheels were what paid dividends and it allowed us to say no to a bunch of busy work that wasn't necessarily attached to those kind of end goals or in flywheel approaches. So, yeah, I think there's some tie in there. For us, it was more a decision filter. Right. It allowed us to say, hell yes, like a full body yes. Or really see how it's going to move one of those two needles. Let's just push it aside for now.

Yeah. So it does seem to dovetail quite well with the spiritual flywheel concept from David Guillam. Because if you invest all that energy in getting the flywheel started by finishing some of these loose end type of projects that are huge, you know, stealing your energy instead of giving you energy, and then you get 10,000 units freed up each time you finish one of these little projects. And now you've got so much energy to direct towards impossible goals.

That's all those satellites now in orbit, right. Like getting on Oprah. Took us almost two years to get on Oprah, but now they can talk about it for 21 years. Right. All that press coverage still lives on and they're resharing the online links on social media for the last 17 years. All the Google reviews have stacked up. All the trustpilot reviews have stacked up. The word of mouth has stacked up. The awards that we won as best call center, best number one franchisor on the planet. We beat out every franchisor with the highest record and 98% positive net promoter score of their franchisees. All of those became like satellites. So, yeah, that first 90%, it was hard to get really good, but it was really hard to get unbelievable. But man, once we were there, boom. That was another satellite in orbit.

Yeah. What's your next satellite?

I think the next satellite for me is really working on my relationship with my spouse, with my wife. We've gone through a really incredible and a really tough three and a half year period. So it's just really kind of not committing, but refocusing our travel and our life to finding a couple of forever homes. We're trying to find the places that will have some homes where we'll be able to spend half a year. So we're thinking Northern Italy, we're thinking Cape Town, we're thinking Bali as maybe three places. So really spending some time in those places to find. Do we like it? Does it feel right. Can we get that grounding? And I think if we can ground, then everything grows from there. So it's a lot less about business right now and it's a lot more about that primary relationship in my life. My two boys are kind of off and running. My youngest is running his own business. Just ran his first marathon at 21 years old. Ran a sub four hour marathon. He's going to school and starting in Singapore in January. My oldest is working in the film industry in Vancouver and actually working part time at 1-800-got junk in the trucks. But he's obsessed about investing. He has multiple six figures already invested at 23 years old. Both good kids. They don't do drugs, they don't drink. They're like a good connection with them. So my legacy project is doing well. Now it's time to get my relationship project with my wife back in center again.

Well, good luck with that. That's awesome.

Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah.

And I mentioned coaching. I'm even working with a couple of coaches on relationship stuff. My wife and I go to a couple of masterminds that are focused on relationships. And I'm working with a men's coach, Nick Warner, and we do calls on a monthly basis about. And I'm reading books around hilarity and around masculinity and just understanding the role of the masculine in the relationship of the healthy masculine, the way the superior man and no more nice guy. So I'm leaning into that part of growth just like I would tell people to lean into it in the business world. Right. Get a coach, join a mastermind, get group coaching, read books. That's how you're going to grow you. We have to drink our own Kool Aid.

That's right. Yep. I've interviewed some of the best relationship coaches and experts on the planet too. From my other podcast, obviously, okay. He wrote Getting the Love youe Want. He's been on Oprah. He's the founder of Imago Couples Therapy. So he's been on get yourself optimized. Dr. John Gottman, he's phenomenal. So he's the one who pioneered the research about micro expressions. And he was able to tell within five minutes of watching couples on video whether that couple will get divorced five years later. He was 95 plus percent accurate with his predictions because of just looking for micro expressions of contempt and what he calls the four Horsemen. It's contempt, criticism, resentment and stonewalling.

What's stonewalling?

It's kind of like crazy making or just not being Cooperative. Being belligerent and uncooperative and seeing them as an adversary. That's my understanding.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Not being accommodating or acknowledging the truth or the potential truth of your partner's position.

So you say contentment, criticism, resentment and stonewalling.

Yeah, contempt. Contempt.

Contempt. That's right. Contempt.

Contentment would be a good thing.

That's not a. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That doesn't make sense. Yeah, contempt. Yeah, it makes sense. Interesting.

Yeah. So if you have a chance, listen to those couple episodes.

I will, for sure.

Yeah. All right. Well, I know we're at time, so we went a little more philosophical than maybe our listener wanted. But you know what? It's all perfect.

As our friend Joe Polish says, we sell them what we want, we give them what we need. Right, Exactly.

Exactly. And so if we can leave our listener with one last nugget of wisdom, what would that be? And probably something that we haven't even talked about at all. So really bring it out of left field.

So I normally say, none of this matters. We're all just walking each other home. But if we're going to do something that's a little different, I think every single one of us as leaders in our life, whether we're leading a business, leading each other, leading ourselves, leading a family, whatever, we need to spend a lot more time sharing our praise and our positive reinforcement and our gratitudes and celebration. I think we're always so focused on growing. I know Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy wrote the book the Gap and the Gain, and we're so caught in the gap trying to get to those goals. But if we can say thank you, if we can say thank you for hitting projects, thank you for living the core values, great job getting that project done. If we can be that chief energizing officer in every role of our life, I think we're going to see way more dividends and everything gets a lot more fun. So, yeah, I would be focusing on that.

So a great synergy here with what we were just talking about a minute ago with Dr. John Gottman and with Harville Hendrix. Harvill Hendricks promotes this technique that he calls the Daily appreciations. And he has done it for decades, literally decades, with his wife not missing a single day. At night, before they go to sleep, they share three things they appreciate about each other, and they're not just the same ones each time. Sometimes they're repeated, but they try to come up with fresh stuff, and they've been doing it without fail, without missing a day for decades. And it was so inspiring hearing that back in 2016 when I first interviewed them, that my wife and I did this ourselves for about three or more years and maybe missed eight or so days out of that time period. Yeah, it was really special. So you might try it with your wife.

Yeah, we've done it a bunch of times. It's time to kind of recommit to that because we fell off the wagon a little bit where we felt that it was a little bit contrived. But I think at times we need to be a little bit contrived to kind of reinforce those things so we get caught up in the day to day. So, yeah, we're bringing it back.

A way to think about it maybe is prayer isn't contrived. You have structured prayer that is in the prayer books and that. And you use those too because they're tried and true, proven, inspired works. And then you have your personal prayer too, that you come up with just out of the ether. You come up with things that you're grateful for and things that you're challenged by and pleas for help and whatever. So maybe that same principle applies here, that it's not contrived if you're using a structured, proven system, like a structured prayer, but you're also coming up with the impromptu things as well. That keeps it fresh and not so constrained. I don't know. Maybe that helps.

And it is showing up with that intention. I love it.

Yeah. All right, well, this was great. Thank you so much, Cameron. If we could share with our listener the best place to go to follow you, to learn more from you and perhaps to work with you with your COO alliance, with your coaching and the courses that you offer. Where should they go?

For sure. Yeah. Check out the Second in Command podcast. Definitely want to subscribe to that. And then go to CameronHerrold.com, it's H E R-O-L-D.com. it has links for everything, my online training co alliance. And then all the books are obviously available on Amazon, Audible and itunes.

Awesome. All right, thank you, Cameron. And thank you, listener. Make it a great week. We'll catch you on the next episode. In the meantime, I'm your host, Stefan Spencer, signing off.

If you want to hear my previous interview of Cameron Herald, then head over to episode 176. If you want more conversations like this one about transforming bold visions into reality, then I recommend episode 450 with Gokul Rajaram, episode 457 with John Ratliff, and episode 474 with Tom Shipley. Also, I invite you to check out the Show Notes transcript, action based checklist and all the roles mentioned in this interview with Cameron herald@marketingspeak.com 479 and if you enjoyed this conversation, I encourage you to share this episode and more importantly the entire show Marketing Speak with a friend. It'll really help this podcast grow in reach and impact. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Marketing Speak podcast. This is your host Stefan Spencer. I'm the founder of the SEO agency NetConcepts, co author of the Art of SEO and author of Google Power Search. And in addition to this podcast, I also host Get Yourself Optimized which is about up leveling your life, relationships, peer group, career, business and spirituality. If you want more traffic and you want to work with me and my team, visit www.netconcepts.com. the site also contains a wealth of resources that include online courses, screencasts, webinars, white papers, articles and more. To reach me directly, email stefanstephenspencer.com or visit my personal website at www.stefanspencer.com until next.