Building $100M Companies from Age 20 | Cameron Herold (Podcast 413)

So I got to know these other successful entrepreneurial people by being in what would now be called a mastermind. So joining the right clubs, being in ypo, being in eo, being in baby Bathwater, being in War room. I spend a lot of time around those communities to learn from those people. I was just in Eden, Utah with a whole group of really successful entrepreneurs at a Halloween party. I think that's what I've invested my time and my money into is being in those communities so that I'm not the smartest person in the room, so that I can literally sponge off of other people.

Cameron Herold, how are you? Good.

Eric, how are you? Good to see you guys.

Good to see you. So I just picture this knowing you, like the day you're born, you come out, you start reorganizing the way the hospital operates. Right. You start giving tons of critiques, you understand, like, hey, you're not taking care of your people here. We got to redo these processes here like that. It just started from the beginning. Right.

It's funny, I probably would have sat back in the corner and watched things for a while.

Yeah.

I think when I was quite young, I was observing and seeing the world in a different way and seeing the world just watching. I remember when I was in grade two, sitting in an open air classroom, which meant that there were no walls between any of the classes. So grade one was beside grade two is beside grade three, all the way down to grade six at the end. And you could see the whole length of the school. And I remember sitting, watching and observing. And I think that was something that has probably stayed with me.

That's really cool. I didn't even know that was the kind of thing that existed.

Yeah, it was a test. It was a test concept that was really horrible for anyone with ADD because. But. But it was also kind of cool because you watched the bigger kids, you saw the kind of progression and you moved around. It was a. I don't know if they still run that way or not, but it was a really cool.

Where was this? Where were you?

That was in Winnipeg, Canada.

Okay, so you're from Winnipeg?

No, I lived there for a few years. I'm from a small city called Sudbury, Ontario, which is about four hours north of Sudbury. Sorry, north of Toronto. And it was a. A blue collar mining town. My dad ran a business there and both sets of grandparents were running companies. And we just grew up in this very blue collar, small city.

But also you came from sort of an entrepreneurial lineage. So saw these different people Running?

Yes. Yeah. My dad groomed my brother and sister and I to all be entrepreneurs. And that's really all that we've ever done, is either be the entrepreneur or work second in command with one. Yeah. But we've all been running our own companies for between 2020 and 25 years.

And so when you say groomed, what does groomed look like?

So my dad told us. But first, my grandparents showed us that being an entrepreneur, you had time, you could do what you wanted when you wanted. You could go to the cottage and on vacations. And we had this very present sets of grandparents that were playing with us and had. They had hobbies, and they had the money and freedom to do stuff, but it was about time, was what they showed us, and that they got to do stuff they loved. And then my dad started to just teach us that having a job was a bad idea.

So I.

So I'll give an example of one lesson. When I was around 13, I wanted to go caddy at the golf club. And my dad would show us that caddying was entrepreneurial in a way that you were seeing somebody who wanted to pay you to do something. You kind of saw an opportunity, and you capitalized on it. And then if you hustled, you would get tips. But he also showed us that that was almost like trading an hourly wage. So I spotted a hill on our golf course, this very big hill. And I think this was very similar to me being the two, you know, grade two student. I saw adults struggling, hauling their bags up the hill. So what I did is I went and parked a lawn chair at the bottom of the hill in the shade, brought my Walkman and my book, and I would sit there, and I'd wait for each foursome to come by, and I would ask them if I could hustle their bags to the top of the hill. And I would run two bags up at the same time, and then they'd. They'd hand me a buck, or they'd hand me 25 cents. They hand me 50 cents. And. And sometimes they're like, I don't have any money, but I'll, like, I'll drop the money off in the pro shop for you. Because they all knew who I was. I was a member of the golf club, and I was making, like, 40, 50 bucks over four hours. And my friends were making. My friends were getting paid $15 to haul a bag around the whole golf course for five hours. So I was making. So they. That was like the little entrepreneurial venture. My dad showed me that Trading time for a check was a bad idea, but finding a way to make more money per hour know was a good idea.

Got it. And how old were you at that point?

Sorry, I was like 13, 14.

Okay.

I had about 16 different business ventures and I could probably tell you all of them by the time I was 18.

I would love to hear that. I won't hold you accountable if you miss a couple, but what were those?

Okay, I'll go back to the earliest one I remember was basically coat hanger arbitrage or recycling. So back 1972, Winnipeg, Canada, they used to pay people 2 cents per coat hanger as a recycling fee. And then the, the dry cleaners would reuse those coat hangers in their dry cleaning shops. So I started cold calling dry cleaners out of the yellow pages. And I remember writing the phone numbers beside or writing the amount they would pay me beside everyone's phone number. And I was talking to this dry cleaner and I said, I want 4 cents per coat hanger. And he said, I'm going to give you three. And I said, how about three and a half? And he started laughing and he said, how old are you? And I said I'm seven. How about three and a half cents a coat hanger? Like I was, I was like a dog with a bone. And he's like, fine, I'll do three and a half cents a coat hanger. And I turned around and my mom was standing there and I broke into tears because I realized I'd been lying to my mom for about two weeks. I'd been going door to door in the neighborhood collecting coat hangers and I had a closet filled with them. And then I got my mom to drive me and you know, it was like a two week business. I think I only did it once and only got it recycled once. But then I sold license plate protectors door to door. I did comic book arbitrage where I purchased all the comics from all the kids in the neighborhood. Then I took them up to our cottage and sold them where the kids had more money so I got paid more. I made pin cushions and I made them in two different colors, red or white and brown, like shaped like rocking chairs. And I sold those door to door.

So you start all this at seven. Where do you think that I'm going to say, like confidence, lack of inhibition, like so many kids are shy. So many people never get over the idea of cold calling or knocking on a door. Where did that come from?

A few. One was just I wanted to make money and the People that had money were inside their houses, so I had to go knock on their door to ask them for it. My dad also didn't stand at the corner when I was selling lemonade. I would come back into the house frustrated that nobody was buying. And he would coach me and send me back out to keep trying. You know, he didn't stand behind me waving in the car, he told me what to do and I went out and tried it and I came back in and coached me again. There was a lot of that, a lot of the, the early stage coaching and just trying. I got a news, a newspaper route when I was in grade three or grade four. And then I hired a neighborhood kid to run half my route for me. And I went and collected the money, what, weekly? Because I got the tips and I paid him a per newspaper fee to deliver. So I had my first employee when I was in grade four. I did lawn care things. Same thing, hired somebody to do lawn stuff. My sister built out a big lawn care business doing exactly the same thing in high school. It was a lot of that, that kind of just. You knew where the money was, you had to go get it. And, and I didn't have that fear.

And what was it about wanting money because you're 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, what, years old. What was it? Was it just the intrinsic value of making money or was it like, I need to buy this thing?

No, it was the hustle and the game of just. It was just fun. And I, and I was like, money was hard to come by in the 70s, right. And like I had this cash. I was like, I just, I remember reading Richie Rich comics and Scrooge McDuck comics and they were sitting on these piles of gold and something seemed cool with that. But I didn't really go spend it on things. I used to save it. I had my first stockbroker when I was 16, started buying stocks at 16. I didn't realize I was day trading, but I was day trading out of the newspaper at one eighth of a dollar. Like, you know, it was up, it was up three eighths. And I would try to sell the stock. My broker thought I was an idiot. Yeah. So I just, it was the hustle, it was the fun of it. When I was about 15, my dad took me to the golf club one day and he said it was about 12 o' clock on like a Wednesday. And he started showing me each of the people coming into the golf club and he said, you know, he owns a car dealership and he owns an Accounting firm, and she owns a clothing store and he owns this. And we went and played golf. And then we were sitting on the balcony at like 5 o' clock and eating my fries and gravy and drinking my cherry Coke. And he's showing me all the people coming into the golf club at 5 o'. Clock. He's like, she's a teacher and he's a lawyer and he's an accountant and he works for this company and he works for that company. He said, do you remember what everybody who came in to play golf at 12 o' clock does for work? And I said, yeah, they run their own business. And my dad said, when you run your own business, you can play golf whenever you want. And when you work for somebody, you can only play nine holes of golf after work. And that really stuck with me, that being an entrepreneur was not about the money, it was about the freedom to do what you wanted when you wanted. And then my dad also was extraordinarily present with us as a kid, where I saw the value of running your own company meant you were with your kids all the time. You know, you were at home for family dinners, you were out there activities, you were on vacations. So I was very fortunate that my dad wasn't a workaholic entrepreneur, that he was a very balanced with hobbies and friends and family entrepreneur. And I think that was a good lesson that stuck with me. You know, again, back in the 70s and 80s, being an entrepreneur was not cool. That being an entrepreneur is very cool now. But when I was growing up, we were greedy, we were capitalists, we were vilified, we were kicked out of school, we were sent to the principal's office constantly for selling stuff in class. Nowadays they have like entrepreneur classes and entrepreneur trade fairs, and not at all when I was, I was shut down by the school five or six times, selling stuff to kids.

That actually helped my brother, my brother, who's nine years younger than me. So I was, you know, a decent amount older when he was in high school, and he started the school store out of his dorm room and he went to a boarding school in high school for a couple years. And he got in trouble because the school had a store, but he had a better one. He was going to Costco and pick a ton of great stuff, and so everybody wanted to shop. So he actually stole a bunch of business from the school store and they went and shut him down and was like, you need to talk to him about monopolies. Threaten to call the ftc, like, this is this is un, this is unfair business practices. This isn't going to fly.

Very similar to what happened to my sister Christy when she was at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. For her first year, she started a clothing company selling sweatshirts and T shirts and hats with the university logo on it because there was no trademark registered for their logo. And the school started getting upset with her and she went and actually sat with the head of the commerce program, the dean of the business school, and said, look, I'm a business school student and your university is giving me for competing. They need to learn how to run a better business. But if you shut down a business student, I will make sure that all 300 kids in the business program know that. So she said, here's the deal we're going to have. I'm going to pay a licensing fee to the university for 10% and your university is going to understand the loss that they have because they didn't trademark their logo. But I will pay you a 10% residual for the next four years that I'm here. And the school said yes. What she did at the end of the four years is she sold her clothing company to somebody else with that same program in place. Nowadays universities would have this built in, like they would get it and promote it. But it was hard being an entrepreneur back then when I didn't fit in. Right. I wasn't like the other kids.

No. And that's, that's. I think, I don't think the sort of in vogue sex appeal of being entrepreneur really kicked in until the 2010s. Like it wasn't a thing. Even when I, it started to get a little better in the 90s and 2000s. Even growing up for me in the 90s wasn't like a cool thing to do.

No. The rise of the dot com era made it not even cool to be an entrepreneur still. They were still kind of the beauty capitalists who were VC funded. And then. Yeah. After the 0809 financial crisis, the second wave of the entrepreneur kicked in at that point. And then it became trendy for.

Yep, exactly. And so.

Okay. And probably it's probably because the Internet and social media. Right. 2007 we had the Facebook. That was really the advent of sharing these stories because the newspapers weren't going to cover entrepreneurs. But social media made it cool.

Yep. I totally agree. And so to just rapid fire as we get through what the, what were the 16 businesses?

So comic book arbitrage, recycling, golf balls at three different levels, house painting business. I did metal recycling where I went to auto body and automotive shops and collected copper and brass and went to recycling to get paid for those. I think I hit 10 with those anyway.

Did you end up going to college after high school?

I did. I went to the only university that accepted me, so Carleton University. And my sister said it was buy one term, get one free. I struggled in school because my brain doesn't work for memorizing stuff very well and I work with practicality. And then I also was so distracted. I had 12 employees when I was 20 years old.

Yeah.

So I had a, I had an operational company when I was 20, so tried to go to second, third, fourth year university while I was running a company. I was president of my fraternity. I was on the university ski team. The point of sitting through accounting class and memorizing everything didn't make sense to me. So I hired somebody to do my accounting assignments. But I got through school with a, I think it was a 2.4 GPA.

Nice. I got through.

I didn't even realize, I didn't even realize until five years ago you could get more than a 4. My, my wife has a 4.2 GPA and I didn't realize that even existed. I thought 4 was perfect. I had no idea.

Yeah. And so, and what was the business you were running during school?

House painting.

And so when did that kick off?

I was 20 years old because it was in, in December of 1985. So I just turned 20. I was walking through the university building and I saw a flyer on the floor and I picked it up to throw it out and it said, Earn $10,000 and run your own business. I'm like, that. $10,000 in 1995 was a lot of money for a university kid. So I, it had like a meeting that night and I went to the meeting and learned that I could become a franchisee of this group called College Pro Painters and I could run a house painting company. So I thought, well, it seems kind of cool. Filled out the application, went to the interview, got really excited, and then they handed me a 67 page franchise agreement at the second interview that I'd have to sign. And I called my dad and he said there's no better time in your life to go bankrupt because you have no responsibilities, no kids, no real assets to seize. So all you're going to lose is your startup capital. He said, I'll loan you six grand to buy an old van and some painting equipment and start it up. And I was so scared of failing that I did every single thing that was in the manual and it was like a 300 page operating manual. And I just learned where the information was in there and I just did what it told me. Like every checklist, I just did it. And I ended up being very successful. Did that three summers in a row. And then I ended up joining the head office of the company and recruiting and coaching franchisees. I ended up recruiting Kimbal Musk, who was Elon's younger brother, to work for me and his cousin Peter Reeve, who built SolarCity, also worked for me. So I got a very early stage training around businesses, but that's where I started was college pro.

Tell me more about that. Like, you followed their directions. Was this company that been around a long time, like, did they have a tried and true formula that was easy to just follow? I know, like, it sounds like Cutco and I know we have a lot of friends.

Yeah, yeah, it was. They had a tried and true formula. It was 14 years in business, but it had never been in my city before. So I opened up my city. No one knew of it, and I had to knock on doors and put up signs. But their program worked as long as you put the effort in. You know, it's like a shovel doesn't dig a hole. You got to pick up the shovel and use it, you know? And this iPhone could be a great hammer, but if you learn all the tools that are on the phone, it can be a very powerful productivity tool. I learned all their systems and used all of their systems and was successful. We had other kids that were franchisees that didn't follow the systems or didn't put the effort behind the systems and weren't as successful. I worked really freaking hard though too. Like, I really threw my body at it.

So do you graduate and then join the company? Was that what happened?

Yeah. After my fourth year university, I joined the company full time and was a district manager and I started recruiting, training, and coaching franchisees for them. Yeah, my first summer I recruited and coached 16 and my third summer I'd coached, I was recruiting 30 and overseeing 30 of their franchises. And then I ended up getting to open the west coast of the United States for them. So I opened up Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and I went from the day that I got there until 12 months later when I left, I had 220 employees in 12 months. So I was able to learn how to execute and scale within this kind of a box. But like, yeah, it was like everything from opening a bank account to getting business cards to recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training, high management. Production management. You learned all of it just by. It was a real world mba.

Yeah. And how many years did you spend there? Like post college?

Four years, post call.

Okay, and what caused you to want to leave? Sounds like it was on a great track. I'm guessing you were making great money.

No, we weren't making. We made way more money as franchisees than we were at the head office. We did okay, but it was not for the time, for the amount of hours we were putting in. Got it. So I ended up applying for a vice president role at the company I'd ranked as the number one general manager. They had 20 GMs throughout North America. I was number one that year, applied for a vice president role in Western Canada, and they gave it to the founder's younger brother. And the founder had been gone for six or seven years. And I just basically called patronage and said, you, I'm out. I left. I was like, if you're not going to do it as a meritocracy. But they wanted to keep me in the west coast because I'd done so well. They wanted me to scale it, but that wasn't what I wanted. So I left and I joined a family friend who was going to build out a chain of auto body collision repair shops. It was called Boyd Auto Body at the time and now it's called Gerber Auto collision in the US and we took it from seven locations to 65 locations in four years. So I got to do franchising in the adult industry, you know, with, with adults. And I learned the differences between 20 year olds and 50 year olds. And then I also learned the similarities and got to do that.

Going back to your upbringing and you know, these sort of entrepreneurial upbringing, it sounds like, I mean this now you spent. How many years were you doing Gerber?

Gerber was four years.

So you did eight years out of college. Now you did. You weren't being an entrepreneur, you were working for other people's companies. Don't get me wrong, there's entrepreneurial endeavors inside that. But you were being an employee and that sense.

Yeah, I had. Well, I had an equity position in gerber. I own 10% of the franchising group for them. So I had. Yeah, so that was my first EO qualifying company. It was called Boyd Autobody. But yes, I was not the. I wasn't the founding entrepreneur. I was the stockman in command.

And was that ever like, was there a reconciliation with that?

Ever?

Was it just you were fine, you were heads down or were you ever like, well, no, but I learned like it sounds like your dad really drilled into you about the idea of being your own boss.

I was able to in both companies still be my own boss because of the setup. So with College Pro we were given a region and P and L responsibility and we didn't really report to anyone in terms of like the day to day. Like I went to an office that I rented that was my own, that my team was running. So I got to be entrepreneurial within an entrepreneurial company. Yeah, it didn't feel like I had a job per se. And then with, with Gerber, the same thing. I mean like we picked the logo and colors and like I built it from scratch. Right. So it was again entrepreneurial. But yeah, not my own company. And so, and then in fact I did, I did two other roles right after that that were very similar. I was the second command for a private currency company and then the second in command for 1, 800, got junk.

So what private currency company?

What is that kind of what bitcoin is doing today? We did it from 1998 until 2000. We ended up with 30,000 companies in the US and Canada buying and selling using a digital currency that we created instead of the US dollar. It was called a barter dollar. But we had Starwood Hotels, Bose Stereo, Avis, Rent a Car, Hard Rock Cafe, all transacting using a multilateral digital currency. And then we just controlled the country. So I was like the CEO and controlled the currency swap. And it was backed by nothing other than people's trust in our currency. So we were. And then we sold that company for 64 million to a, a US public company called Network Commerce.

And so then you decided to get into the junk business.

My mom was dying, I'd gotten married. The stock market, the NASDAQ had crashed by 78%. From when we transacted in January until August of that summer, the NASDAQ literally crashed by 78%.

Were you asking to get out of that?

I wasn't locked in, but I was. I was locked in for 12 months. But I sold 35% of my shares right away to pay my taxes. But my $4 million stake was worth about 250 grand when I was able to get out. Yeah, that was the dot com bust.

Yeah.

So I left Seattle and moved back to Vancouver and I was going to start coaching entrepreneurs and my best friend, he had been my best man at my wedding two months before, asked me if I would start coaching him and his team. And I came into to what was called the rubbish boys. Brian had just changed the name over to 1-800-GOTJUNK. I started coaching him and after about two days his second in command quit because he couldn't do anything I was going to teach him. Jesse went to Brian and I and said look like you need to just get Cameron to do this. So I started billing Brian by the hour and after two months Brian was like dude, I've never seen anyone put in 80 hour weeks. And I'm not calling, I know you're doing the 80 hour weeks but I can't afford to pay you 120 bucks an hour, 80 hours a week. This is ridiculous. So I joined him full time as his second in command and employee number 14. And when I left six and a half years later with 3100 employees but again I'd been the second, second command for, you know, the business plan.

Yeah. And so when you saw the 14 employees and you joined on, did you think, were you like oh this is going to be thousands of people in six years, no problem?

Like no. Brian handed me what I now call a vivid vision. We learned this concept from an Olympic coach. He handed me a two page description of his company three years in the future. So he described Wendy's undergod junk in 2003. I didn't see thousands of employees but I understood the vision of what he wanted to build. And because I'd already built a couple of franchise companies and then we built this private currency company up to about 900 people. We'd done it a few times. I knew what to do and he didn't know what to do. So he ran it and finance and I ran everything on the operations, culture, pr, marketing, franchise sales, call center. Kind of built and scaled that up. I just knew what needed to get done so I just went head down on hiring and growing people and executing.

And did you guys have to raise money for that? Because that kind of scale?

No. We went from 2 million to 106 million with no debt, we had no credit line, we built everything off cash flow. I actually raised the prices of the company by 40% on the probably second or third week I was there. Everyone thought I was a maniac for raising prices but we had no money. The franchisees weren't making money, the guys in the trucks weren't making money, the head office wasn't making money. So I'm like we're either going to go bankrupt because we're not making money or we're going to go bankrupt because we're too expensive. But we're Going to charge more. So we raised our prices and no one blinked. And then we actually started, this is really weird. We started to fax our price lists to all of our competitors by accident. Then we'd send them another fax saying sorry, I sent it to the wrong number. We also left our price lists on the dashboard of our trucks fully visible, knowing that our competitors were like looking at what our trucks looked like and we basically wanted them to know our pricing so that they would raise their prices too. And it, it worked. And it wasn't price fixing. It was just very tension.

Yeah. That you're not, you're definitely not coordinating. You're just showing them competition. And that makes a lot of sense. That's really smart.

So, so by, by doing that we then had the room to scale and, and we were able to deliver. And we just obsessed about core values, we obsessed about systems, we obsessed about people growth. Only when we got to about the 30, 40, like when we were 4 million in revenue, Brian and I decided to do a hundred within five years. So we decided after the first double to go from 4 million to 100 million and 6. And we hit 106. So intentional.

And so how did, where did that confidence come from that you. Because had you built a hundred million dollar revenue company where you.

Yeah, Boyd, Boyd was a hundred million. College pro was about 60 million. So we've been in the zone.

Yeah, for sure. So you had, and you at that point you looked at the platform and went I can get this to 100 million. I just need to expand the business.

Yeah. What was really, I think what was really interesting at College Pro Painters and this is what people don't understand was every year we had to go out and recruit, hire and train 800 university students to be a franchisee. So that's hiring 800 people and training 800 executives. And then in one month we had to train them to hire 8,000 painters. So imagine in four months every year hiring 8,800 people. We became operationally world class at recruiting, interviewing, hiring, leadership development and the training of people. That gave me the confidence that got junk and at Boyd Auto Body like to, to be able to replicate that. For sure.

That makes a lot of sense. And so you build this for you get to 106 million. Did you keep going what was kind of the path from there?

So Brian and I had, we had a leadership team meeting every Thursday morning at 7:30 or 8:00'. Clock, I think it was 8:00 clock start. And Brian and I would often meet for Breakfast before that. So we were meeting for breakfast at 7 o' clock in the morning, May 17, 2007. And I ordered my traditional eggs Benedict. I used to weigh 40 pounds heavier than I do today. And Brian ordered a grapefruit. And like grapefruit. You've never ordered a fucking grapefruit in your life. You're like eggs Benedict, extra sauce, extra bacon, like, what's with the grapefruit? And he looked at me and he said, I think it's over. And I looked at him and I said, I think it's over too. And I started to cry and he started to cry and he said, you're the right guy to get us to the hundred million, but you're not the guy to get us from 100 million to the billionaire. And he was right. I am not the corporate. You know, we had 13 operating PNLs. We were operating in 330 cities, four countries. We had 248 people at the head office, 3100 system wide. It was big. And so they took 12 months to find my replacement. They brought the former president of Starbucks USA in to replace me. Lonnie came in and said, what a cute little company. And meanwhile I'm, I'm like pulling all my hair out. So it was a very painful, very painful discussion. Took me at least a couple years to recover from that. Brian and I are good friends today. But it took took some time to go through that.

Was there resentment when that came up or did you actually immediately accept that this, you're right, you need to find someone that can take this to the next.

I. Oh, I absolutely accepted that. He was right. There was no doubt. In fact, I told his assistant Christina the night before that I was getting fired. And she's like, off, go home and spend time with your kids. Something in my gut, I just knew it was done. And so it was the right, right decision. It was done in the wrong way. Brian had, had, had taken advice from the board. And I think this is a good lesson for entrepreneurs. You have to trust your gut and the wisdom of others. It's almost like you need to gut check every expert opinion because his board told him to do it. Sever, make it instant. He was my best man at my wedding. Three months before I started to work with him, he was at all my kids special events and birthdays. I knew, I knew about all of his know, struggles with his marriage. It was there when he was crying and going through the bipolar stuff. There was nothing going to happen. So because he'd taken the advice of the board, he did it in the wrong way, which is why it took a couple years to recover. I only think I really, truly recovered when he wrote his book wtf, which is called Willing to Fail. And I was like, I hope he mentions me. And then it was like, page two, my name, and page eight and page 16. I think I was mentioned like eight times. And I was like, he actually did. And he never mentioned anyone else on the leadership team in the whole book. So I was like, you know, it was really hard. It sounds like I put too much of myself and my brand and my name into it, that it was very hard, but it was the right decision.

Yeah. And so you spent a year transitioning.

It sounds like I spent three and a half months where I didn't work and I just journaled every day. I talked to mentors. I never had a business meeting, didn't check email, played golf, hiked, smoked a lot of pots, and just disconnected from business. And I, in my journaling and writing, I made a list. I did lifelines and mind maps and timelines and lists of what I loved and what I hated and lists of what gave me energy and what drained me. And I realized at the end of the day, I loved speaking, I loved coaching, I loved connecting and networking, and there was a whole bunch of other stuff I was good at that I didn't love. So I started coaching entrepreneurs. And when I started coaching and I was coaching real companies, they typically had 50 to 500 employees. Two of the three that I started coaching had almost instant home runs that year. One was called Nurse Next Door, and then the other was called I Love Rewards, which became Achievers. Achievers went on to rank in the top 50 companies to work for in Canada five years in a row. And then Nurse Next Door ranked number one in British Columbia and blew up their brand. And then other entrepreneurs started saying, well, if you coach those two, can you coach me? And that kind of led to my books being written and all that jazz.

Yep. And so when did that start? What year was that you started?

That was two. That was September of 2007.

Oh, interesting time to get into coaching. I'm sure the next year was quite eventful. And so now we are 16 years later. Have you just stuck with that? How was that path of coaching and building? Like, you know, give me an idea of that.

Yeah, the coaching has been great. I mean, I've. I've been paid to speak to groups of entrepreneurs in 28 countries in person in 20. I've been paid to Speak now on every single continent. And I've coached well over 140 or 150 companies.

The Antarctica speech I heard was riveting.

It was super fun. No, we actually got made to speak in. Oh, you know, I, I got it, remember, handled a check. It was super fun.

That's amazing.

At the highest level, I coached the CEO and the CEO of Sprint for 18 months. So I coached Marcelo Clare and Jamie Jones. I coached a monarchy in the Middle East. I coached the royal family that owns the country of Qatar on all their operating companies. I've coached a lot of tech companies that are in the hundred million plus zone. So that it's been interesting. It's been fun. I have a group coaching model now and then I started a couple of mastermind communities as well. But what I've always loved about coaching is that I'm not sitting teaching you a structure or a methodology. I'm more sitting there as a mentor and kind of calling you on your. And showing you the struggles and. And also because I've coached in so many different industries, I never know my clients industry. You know, I've coached four or five companies that are in the digital marketing space. One was called. Is now called Tenuity. I coached them from 40 people up to about 400 when they were elite SEM. But I watched their growth for four years and I realized I don't even know your industry and I'm able to coach you. You know, I coach Bob Glazier from Acceleration Partners. Same thing. In working with all these cool entrepreneurial companies and CEOs, I recognize that I actually have the skills to help them. And it's fun because I work with really just fun, smart people and you know, again, got to keep my life. Right. So I got to be. I've been working from home for 16 years. I got to raise my kids and be at all their activities and be very present. I learned how to time block my days so that I could be very busy while they were at school and be completely unplugged when they're not, which I know you're going through. You got kids, so first one yours? Yeah. Your first one's what, like two now or 14 months? 14 months. So yeah. Like in a couple more years you get to do fun stuff with them.

Yeah, exactly. No excited for it. And I think that goes back to the freedom of being an entrepreneur that you're talking about.

Yeah.

What that allows you to do. And so a couple more questions for you. You've, you know, you've built out. You've become this COO whisperer and the person that really helps all these operators do incredible things. I know a lot of your clients, obviously, and they all love working with you. What do you think next? What is on your vivid vision? What is coming down the pike?

So my wife and I, a couple of years ago each wrote our bucket list, and we have about 150 items each on our bucket list. We share them publicly, but we're actually chasing down our bucket list items and we're trying to cross one per month off each of our lists. So for the last 26 months, we've been living globally. We've been to 41 countries in the last two and a half years, and we're literally just, you know, unplugged. I sold everything in Arizona, sold everything in Vancouver, and we've been living out of backpacks and living globally. So a lot of what's next for me is just being able to live and experience and explore. Going skiing in Japan this February.

Me too.

We're in Naseko. When are you there?

Me too. The president begin February 16 to 25.

We'll be around, but we're going to be. We're going to be there for about seven or eight days. Eight couples, the first week of February.

Okay. Well, we'll see Brad catch up. That's.

Yeah.

About that.

Brad Weimart. You know, Brad Weimar. Brad Victor will be there with us.

Yeah.

Alex and Jen. Alex Moscow and Jen. Who. They're going to be with us. So, yeah, we had a good group. So we're. What we're doing is these cool experiences around the world where we invite friends to come and then we just get to travel. And then I'm also growing my COO alliance, and I just launched another community called the OP spot for. For people in ops. I'm growing those while I'm still traveling. Awesome.

Got it. And so last question for you. For someone that wants to pursue their own dreams, be it, you know, at the highest level and whatever they're trying to achieve, what would be one piece of advice you either wish you got or did get that really helped you get to this point?

Yeah, I didn't get it as. As concrete as I'll give it, but the way I got it was my dad understood that being a member of the tennis club and being a member of the golf club, I was surrounded by all these other successful people doing successful things. I think you know Mark Moses from CEO coaching. Mark and I were a member of a tennis club together in northern Ontario, Canada. And played competitive tennis for three years when we were in grade school. So I got to know these other successful entrepreneurial people by being in what would now be called a mastermind. So joining the right clubs, being in ypo, being in eo, being in baby Bathwater, being in War room, I spend a lot of time, time around those communities to learn from those people. I was just in Eden, Utah, with a whole group of really successful entrepreneurs at a Halloween party. I think that's what I've invested my time and my money into is being in those communities so that I'm not the smartest person in the room, so that I can literally sponge off of other people and get inspired by other people. I think that's been something that I wish the lesson was a little stronger than being in at the golf club to play golf. I wish I didn't have to. Like, my dad didn't say, you're going to meet all the smart people and you'll learn from them. I wish I learned that earlier than I think. Joining EO when I was 35, I really wish I learned that none of this actually matters. And here's what I mean by that. My mom died when I was 35. My dad died last year. And I never understood that because I'd been protected from that. I was kind of buffered by. By that. I didn't realize that at the end of the day, we are all going to die. That we need to hang on and hold hands and have fun together and enjoy the journey. The journey is to the destination because we're all just walking each other home, as Ram Dass said. And I think. I wish I brought that to business at a much earlier age. I think I took myself way too seriously.

So, yeah, I was gonna say, what did. What do you think that would have changed?

Yeah, I would have had more fun. I would have laughed more, I would have played more. I would have just not taken every like. And I would have realized that every one of my employees is struggling with something too on a daily basis. You know, like, sometimes the reason they miss their project is they're struggling with their spouse or their kid or their health. Sometimes the reason why they're not thinking clearly is they're struggling with stress or financial. Like, none of this matters, man, I wish I knew that.

Well, really appreciate that. And again, Cam, this has been awesome.

You know, in order to be happy.

In life, it's really not about how.

Much money you're making, but it's about.

The person you believe, strongly believe you are.

And you need to match that image.

As close as possible. So the further.