Building a Business That Sets You Free | Cameron Herold (Podcast 359)

The most important reason you ever build a business is to have your free time, he said. Building a business is not about money. It's about having as much time as you want to do what you want, when you want. And if you focus on building a business for your free time, you'll make as much money as you could ever imagine because you'll delegate and you'll grow people.

It's interesting hearing a bit about your story as we've been chatting before the cameras went on, but also I've consumed quite a bit of your content recently to learn more about you after our good friend Ken made the introduction. Yeah, now you've written many books, who will come onto your new book in a while. But let's just talk about business for a while because a lot of people listening and watching this podcast will be entrepreneurs on some part of a journey. There'll be people out there either trying to make it as a solopreneur or built a company to a certain level. And I find a lot in business that when I look at many companies, they don't seem to have a destination or no destination I can really identify with. They seem to be growing and they might be using the word better or year on year increases, but I see that it's like, what is your objective? What are you trying to achieve? What's your outcome here? As a salesman, as I've always been, creating an outcome for myself was pretty standard. You know, that might be a one year outcome. That might be right. This is my goal, this is what I want to achieve. And now I'm going to work back from that goal and establish what I need to do to achieve it. Quite kind of simple, quite binary really in the thinking process. But as a salesman, if you're on commission, then a lot of people are essentially businesses within businesses, of course, but it's very easy to do that kind of thing to establish that.

Reverse engineer the delta.

Sure, yeah. But in business, lots of companies, I hear lots of people say we want to grow our business to this revenue or we want to sell our business for this amount of money or we want to be, this is, I hear a lot, we want to be the best in our business. But so many businesses don't end up being either the best or achieving their, their objectives. And there's generally a bunch of reasons for that. So what have you learned on your journey?

I'll explain that, but I'm going to give a, I think a piece that's almost in the middle of that and it's a Lesson I learned from my father. When I was about 15 years old, we went to the golf club that we were a member of in Canada. And it was about one o' clock in the afternoon and we were just going off to play golf. We just finished eating lunch and he showed me all the people coming into the golf club and he said, you know, that guy owns a car dealership and she owns a clothing store and he owns this business and she owns that business. And then we went off and played golf and we came back at 5:30 and we were sitting eating my french fries and gravy and drinking my cherry Coke and my dad was showing me all the people walking into the golf club at 5:30 and he said, you know, he's a teacher and she's a car salesman. She works at this company and he works at that company. He said, do you see the difference between the people that came at 1 o' clock today on Tuesday and the people that came at 5:30? And I said, the people that came at 1 o' clock run their own business. He said, the most important reason you ever build a business is to have your free time. He said, building a business is not about money. It's about having as much time as you want, to do what you want, when you want. And if you focus on building a business for your free time, you'll make as much money as you could ever imagine because you'll delegate and you'll grow people. And so for me that was a foundational part of every business I've ever built, was the reason I'm in. It wasn't necessarily for the year on year growth or for the bigger number. Those will all happen. I built the number two company in all of Canada to work for. Built a company from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in six years. So the growth can happen. But when the focus was on free time and having a better life, it forced us to build a better business. So that's kind of the part in the middle. I think the number one thing that I see most companies missing on is this concept that I created called the Vivid Vision. And I learned about it from an Olympic coach. The Olympic coach worked with these high performance athletes on the process of visualization. So he taught us this idea that became a four or five page written description of your company three years in the future so you can have your BHAG that 20 or 30 year stretch and you can have your long term goals and your core purpose that Simon talks about and all these amazing tools that will Stretch you. But the intermediary step is a vision that is about three years out that describes your company and what it looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future so that all of your customers, suppliers, employees, all stakeholders can see what you as the entrepreneur can see. And then they can help you reverse engineer that and figure out how a world that people will understand is, if you're building a home or doing a renovation, the homeowner is really the CEO of that project. But if I'm building a home or doing a kitchen renovation, I don't know how to do electrical. I don't know how to do plumbing. I don't know how to hang cabinets. I know what I want it to look like, but I don't know how to make it come true. But if I don't explain what I need built, the contractor will come and build an amazing home that might not look like anything I want, but if the contractor is clear on my vision, they can create the plans or the blueprints. They can hand the blueprints and the vision to the employees, and the employees can build my home without ever speaking to me. So that tool, that vivid vision concept, became something that we really worked hard at crystallizing to help companies kind of in their growth.

And give me some examples then of where you've seen it go wrong, the kind of mistakes that companies make. Because I think a lot of people listening to that wouldn't necessarily have an aha moment because they're in their own headspace of, yeah, well, we're doing good things anyway. So how do companies identify where they're getting that wrong and what steps that they need to take?

Yeah. If an entrepreneur or a business leader feels like they're coming in in the morning wondering why their employee is making that stupid decision, it's not because the employees are stupid. It's because they can't see the picture that you can see. So I use an example of the movie the Sound of Music. You ever seen the movie the Sound of Music? There's a very famous scene in the movie the Sound of Music where Julie Andrews is playing guitar and the kids are singing and dancing and they're up in the hills having a picnic. Right. The hills are alive with the Sound of Music. But if you've never seen that movie, and I said to you, recreate that picnic scene. You might think the picnic is at a park or at a lake, and maybe the kids are playing cricket or playing baseball or playing soccer. But when I show you the movie, you're like, oh, it's so obvious what it looks like in business. Most employees aren't so clear on what the owner wants to build. They know what the goal is, but they don't know about how the employees are going to work together. They don't know about how we're going to respond to customers. They don't understand the feeling and the energy that's going to be evoked in the day to day business. So this vivid vision is a way to describe every aspect of your business. Almost like you're walking around the company so that you can describe what you see and then people can figure out the how. So businesses that are struggling with aligning employees or inspiring employees or employees making the dumb decisions, it's mostly because the employees can't see what you can see.

Making the tough decisions to remove the people that are toxic within the business. Okay, that's a step people can take. Lots of people will say it's really hard to find really good people nowadays. People will say, I hear that a lot.

I hear it all the time.

You know, I say, yeah, but you know, where do you find the good people? And you know, I'll argue that here in Dubai, the airport's full of people moving here every day. You don't tell me everybody's bad that's moving to Dubai. There's got to be talented. I got to speak to this, okay. Because we have a lot of people that work on in real estate, for example, a lot of people on commission only.

Yeah.

And they say it's really hard to find great salespeople. I'm like, well, have you thought about them? As opposed to you? When it comes to recruiting, great people.

Will not work for average companies. Great people will not work for companies. There's enough great people out there for your 20 person or 200 person or 2000 person company. If you build the cult right. To build an amazing business has to be a little more than a business, a little bit less than a religion. You've got to get into that zone of a cult where your culture is a magnet. And that cultural magnet, when you obsess about that, when you care about people, when you flip the org chart upside down so the CEO is at the bottom, supporting the VPs, supporting the managers, supporting employees, supporting the customers. When you build the company that way, great people will be magnetized to you. When you fire the and attract the good people and pay them well and give them good vacations. The Americans suck at vacation. I mean, give me a break. Two weeks vacation, three weeks it's got to be five or six weeks paid vacation, including your sick time at minimum, just to be horribly average in Europe. Yeah, right. So if you start doing that around the world, where you create a great culture, there's enough great employees out there. But if you're an average company, yeah, it's hard to find good people, restaurants these days that are complaining, it's hard to find staff. The great restaurants have staff, it's the average ones that don't. But the average ones don't care about their people, don't have a good work environment, are paying minimum wage, don't really care about who they are as human beings, then yeah, it's hard to find good people.

That's a very important lesson, isn't it?

I think this whole great resignation is amazing right now. I think it's about time that all of these humans left the jobs, didn't drive 40 minutes each direction to work for a crappy boss and got to work for a great company somewhere who actually cared about them as human beings. I think it's about time.

How do those people then find those companies? A lot of that now sometimes a challenge too.

Yeah, it is for sure. A lot of it now is who's getting the buzz, right, who's getting the press, who's being interviewed on podcasts, who's winning the awards, what companies are best companies to work for, best places to work, fastest growing companies, listening to the buzz on social media, looking at the Google reviews or the indeed reviews and just seeing where those best companies are and then putting yourself out there. A lot of it is also networking. I think it's harder for the good employees to get in front of those companies, but it's not hard for great employees to find great people or great employers to find great people. We were like a magnet at 1-800-got junk. There was Lululemon, ourselves and the Vancouver Olympics were the three companies that everyone wanted to work for. There was one day we had a guy picketing outside our front door wearing a sandwich board and a blue wig saying, please interview me. That's for real amazing. So that's because the culture was so strong, right?

When you think about what you've just said, then that means then you need to be a well marketed company as well.

It's like the Tiffany's. Tiffany's jewelry isn't great, but the robin egg blue box with the white ribbon. It's the packaging every company needs to be packaged and branded. A restaurant that looks good, feels good, has a good brand, has good social Media proof. Of course good employees are going to want to work when you go there and they have the pretty hostesses and the good looking waiters and the good looking staff and a culture that feels good. Of course you're going to attract good people. So it's all packaging and branding. That's all part of business today. I say that every company should go and stop in their parking lot and look at their front door and say, what would Richard Branson do if he bought this company? Or what would Steve Jobs do with my entryway? Then walk in the front door and walk around your office. If you've got cubicles and a boring beige workplace. And not Martha Stewart beige, but boring beige. You got to clean this up or go look at your company website. Does it feel like a government website? Look at your leadership team pictures. If you have a picture of anybody with a suit and tie, that's grandpa's company. It needs to be a Tinder profile. Picture the bio. The last thing on your bio should be where you went to university and what your degree is. No one cares. Your bio should be like a Tinder profile. Everything is about marketing and branding and positioning.

Now a Tinder profile. So for all of you that have got a Tinder, a Bumble and whatever other app profiles, just imagine taking your picture that's there and putting that in your LinkedIn.

So I always say that my dress code I hire for is a first date dress code and I make sure people's first dates are similar to my first date because yeah, there's some pretty. I go to Burning Man a lot and there's some pretty different people out there.

Now do you go into companies and solve this problem for them or do you coach CEOs to be able to do that for themselves? What's your role that you play?

Yeah, I don't do work. I actually coach. So I have an organization called the COO alliance, which is the only mastermind of its kind in the world for seconding commands. And we teach the COOs how to make their CEOs companies come true, how to make the visions come true. So we give them the tools and the systems to be able to do that. So if I'm coaching someone, I'm also teaching them. Like I didn't do work for Sprint. I taught Marcelo and then taught his second in command for 18 months how to turn around Sprint and make it entrepreneurial so they could merge with T Mobile. It was the entrepreneurial systems that I work with them on. It's just sometimes it's A mindset. Sometimes it's a system, sometimes it's removing obstacles or holding a mirror up, but I won't actually do the work.

Now, you've taken three companies to in excess of 100 million valuation over the years. Two of them were when you were very young.

Yeah.

Before the age of 35.

Yeah.

Has everything that you've done come from learning by mistake or has it come from you having a mentor that really guided you along the way? How did you manage to achieve what you achieved?

Yeah, it wasn't for mistakes. I'm terrified of mistakes. I hate this whole, like, failure is good that I like learning from everybody else's, like. So my dad when I was 16 said, you'll never be smart enough to figure it out on your own. If I showed you my cv, you'd laugh. I'm horribly bad at school. So I learned how to rip off and duplicate. I found. My dad said, there's really good companies that have spent millions of dollars figuring out everything. Just do what they're doing. It'll get you most of the way. So I always found the cheat sheets. So very early on in my business career, I was 20 years old, I was given a franchise of a house painting company and I was so terrified of failure. That 350 page operating manual, I basically memorized it. If it said a yellow keychain, I had a yellow keychain. I was step by step by step because I was terrified of failure. And all of a sudden what happened was I followed these simple systems. I was super successful. I'm like, okay, I get it. So that's all I've ever done. When I read Good to Great, I just put the stuff in place. It's obvious. So I probably read less books, but I do exactly what the right books tell me to do.

Tony Robbins talks about it the way that he sees in business. If people are doing it right somewhere, what's the harm in you doing what they're doing right? Why do you need to try and create your own version of it? Why don't you just copy it?

Yeah.

It doesn't call it copying though, because.

People call it R and D. Rip off and duplicate.

Rip off and duplicate.

We even learned that the worst franchisees and probably the worst entrepreneurs are the MBAs, engineers and pilots. Pilots because they can't be entrepreneurial. They have to follow the checklist.

Yeah.

Follow the system.

Yeah.

Engineers want to rebuild everything. And MBAs are so smart, they need to create a pivot table just to be able to like kill a snake. Right. It's like pick up a stick, bash the snake over the head. We got it. But they need to create some big.

System for it and they. And they statistically work out to be the worst types of entrepreneur.

Yeah.

In your experience and the statistics you've gathered, what are the ones that are naturally the best?

Then people won't like this. But it's the C students, like the 2.5 GPAs, the 65%.

Put that into terms that are people outside of the western London.

Yes. 65% average.

Okay.

Yeah. So someone who's getting 65% on their tests horribly average in school. Someone with massive attention deficit disorder, which in the business world is a superpower. So I have 17 of the 18 signs of ADD. My ex wife said if I was paying attention during testing, it would have been 18 for 18. She's probably right. So because I'm so ADD, I'm hyper aware of everything. I'm aware of the economy, the suppliers, the markets. Years ago, when I was building one, 800 got junk, I saw the Canadian dollar going up. You just notice everything that's happening about you, but you get so overwhelmed because you're seeing it all that you have to delegate it quickly, which is a superpower for entrepreneurs. And then most entrepreneurs are bipolar. So if I read you the 11 traits of bipolar disorder, most entrepreneurs are on the spectrum between 9 and 11 of those traits. I'm 11 for 11.

So attention deficit disorder plus manic depressive.

Yeah. So the mania is the energy of why people follow us. Right. It's the high energy. It's why they'll quit their jobs, it's why they'll invest in the company, it's why they'll believe in our dreams, it's why they'll join a startup or they'll say hell yeah to the idea that's not even fully formed yet. The stress and depression is simply us literally on the fringe where we've mortgaged the house, we've hired somebody that we're not sure how we can pay yet. We convinced them to quit their job, but we're not sure we're going to be in business. We bought the company, but we don't know how we're going to integrate it yet. And we can't really tell our spouse because that'll freak them out. So we just kind of live with it. And we can't tell our employees and we can't really tell our board everything. So you live in this little zone, which is why organizations like ypo, Young Presidents Organization, or EO are so powerful for entrepreneurs to have a forum. But, yeah, most entrepreneurs are bipolar and add, and those are the superpowers. If we medicate those, it takes away our strength.

Everything about me that I've been accused of, that's bad.

It's good.

I was hopeless at school. I got one O level. I wasn't clever enough to go to university, they wouldn't let me in, or even college. I've got attention deficit disorder, all of the things that you've just described. I can't wait to show this to my mum.

I went back. This is how I met Marcelo Claret. So when I met Marcelo, the CEO of Sprint, so he'd sold his first company, Bright star, for over $1 billion to Masa from Softbank. I'm sitting on a plane with him and he keeps going like this. And I said, you've got Tourette's. And he goes, how do you know that? And I said, well, you have a nervous tic and I know entrepreneurs. And I said, you're an entrepreneur. And he goes, yes, but how do you know that? I said, you have really bad attention deficit disorder. The whole time we're talking about. And I told him everything. He's distracted with on the plane. And then I said something about, and I'm pretty sure you're bipolar because you talked about some very stressful times in your business and all the success. And then I said, what's the size of your business? How many employees have you got? And he's like, 17 or 18. I'm like, oh, so small company. And he goes, 1,000. I'm like, oh, 17,000. What the hell? But he said, why do you know me? Why do you know this? And I said, I just know entrepreneurs. So he flew me out to Miami to meet with his wife, Jordan, and I met with him for breakfast at the Soho in Miami. And I drew these diagrams explaining bipolar and ADD and the superpowers of it. And she started crying and she said, wow, I realize that that's who he is. There's nothing wrong with him after all. And if you had medicated Marcelo Claret, you would have taken away his natural strength. But we're not like teachers, we're not like doctors, we're not like engineers. So when I was in grade six, I was sitting outside of the principal's office and my dad went in and was talking to the principal with the door closed. And the last thing I heard, because I couldn't hear much, but the last thing I heard my dad say is, there's Nothing wrong with my son. There's a problem with the school. And my dad stood up, slammed the door and said, come on, we're leaving. And I said, what's wrong? He said, there's nothing wrong with you. You're an entrepreneur just like me. And that was when I realized that I was different because I knew I was really smart. I was talking, I was crying with my wife yesterday about this. I was emotionally abused for 18 years in the school system. Every day that I got a test back that I tried really hard, and the teacher would walk around and say, dave A. Billy C. Cameron, C minus. I was heartbroken. Or in university I'd go and look at our grades. 150888 was my university number. D minus. That kind of emotional abuse on a kid who's trying their best and running a business with 12 employees at the same. So I know I'm smart. That was really. I don't think I've ever recovered from that. And I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are trying to put the stake in the ground to say, look, ma, I'm smart. Because we were beat up for so.

Many years in a system, whether it's beat up. I was bullied at school. So I had something I wanted to prove to somebody. Two kids at school. And many people know my story about this. And it's like the two that bullied me, the motivation that I got from that experience lasted probably until my mid-40s. And so when we've been through some form of trauma or some experience along the way, I don't know anybody that's been successful that hasn't had that in some capacity some way through their. Through their childhood, something that's triggered some form of pain to make them react to that.

How have you gotten through the trauma? Plant medicines or therapy or meditation or just finally success?

Justin Zimmerman and Paul Fowler. There you go. I know their names very clearly. When I was 19, I bought my first hot hatch car. I was doing okay for myself, 19, 20 maybe. And I pulled up at a set of traffic lights in my new fancy car, and next to me was a guy on a motorbike, like a scooter. And he looked at me and I looked at him and all I could see was the visor. But I knew his eyes, I knew who it was. And he went, Spence. And it was one of them, Justin Zimmerman.

Wow.

And so the lights went green and we pulled over and he went, wow, that's an awesome car. How you doing? And whatnot. Like it really friendly. With me. Right when he was never friendly. And I, and I just looked at him. I said, the car? He said, yeah. I said, that was because of you. Thank you.

Wow.

And he looked at me.

What do you mean?

I said, because I, I needed to prove to you. And he goes, I, I said, I said, I can'. Believe that I bumped into you. And it's almost like I wanted to take the car and shove it down his throat in that moment. But it also left me feeling amazing.

Yeah.

And I. For the rest of that drive home, wherever I was going, I can't remember now. And I was like, I'll show you. And it then ignited more of I'll show you. And I need to find this Paul Fowler. It's kind of. I'll show you. And some years ago, there was a social media app that started before we had Facebook called Friends Reunited.

Okay.

Wasn't an app, it was a website. Sorry. And Friends Reunited, you have to, you had to go and pay £5 to join it. But you would go into it and you would join your school.

Oh.

And so everybody that was on there from your school. So I graduated from high school in 1986. So that year. And I start looking down this list of people and I'm looking for these people. They're not on there, but I'm looking for them. And I'm like, that's the place. I have to find them. Otherwise I didn't know how to, how to get hold of them. But they continued to be this motivation. I'll show you. And it was like, don't you dare tell me I can't be something. Don't you, don't you, don't you dare tell me I can't be what I want to be. And all this kind of horrible stuff that went around my head to get to a place that I could then turn that into some form of fuel that then would turn into action, that then would turn into results.

Right.

And that's how it was for me.

That's cool. You know, I think, I think all of us, like everyone listening, that we're all 16 year olds trapped in adult bodies. I think we all still struggle in many ways with our 16 year old selves and trying to overcome that whatever confidence issue or insecurity issue or fear. Do you think about that at all?

I think that every time I have a birthday and I talk to someone of a similar age, we laugh quite easily about the fact that we still feel 30 years old or many years younger and guys will do it more, maybe I don't know, because I'm not a girl. But guys will do it. Why are we still looking at the 25 year old thinking we've got a chance? Clearly we have no chance. It's never going to happen in a million years.

By the way, the reason that that waitress is being so nice to you is, is it's her job. Yeah, I heard that one day. I'm like, because it's her job. I'm like, oh, that makes so much sense now. She's not hitting on me.

The only person I think that's mastered that is Chris Boss. But so, so it's kind of for me when I look at that, I see that birthday come and I think we're still young and you know we're still young inside when we're not. You're absolutely right. There's a child inside of me or a very young person inside of me that is still trying to prove something to someone and feeling pain because I've not been able to do it either. Enough. What was it? Someone happened to me the other day with it. It was someone saying to me, you know how well you've done? And this was it. I was talking to somebody. They said, you go on stage and on stage in front of everybody. These people worship you. They think you're fantastic, they think you're awesome. Everyone wants a selfie with you, everyone's inspired by you, they're motivated by you and whatnot. But yet you don't see any of that. And I'm like, I know because I think I'm a fraud.

Well, I do still do too. I still have that imposter syndrome. I've been paid to speak almost 800 times in 26 countries. And I was recently paid to speak on my seventh continent. So I've spoken on every continent, including Antarctica. Wow. And I still get off stage and go like, I can't understand why they paid me to, to go talk about this stuff. I know I'm a good speaker, but I'm still this kid who's just trying to figure this out. But I think where I'm going with some of this is, and I'm only thinking out loud as I'm doing it, is I think every one of our employees is that 16 year old too. The one who's missing a project or who's writing too long or who's talking too much in the meeting is still that 16 year old struggling with their right. And if we can kind of flip that org chart upside down where we care about them and we connect with them and we get to know them instead of trying to manage them and hold them accountable, but, like, actually know them and care. I think we can really crack a lot of these people open, right? And as I learned with in Bhutan, the cracks is where the light comes in. If you can crack them open, that's where their growth is going to come.

I think this is a subject that we could talk about for a long time, actually. There's lots to explore there. You've written your sixth book. So I wrote one book.

Who's horrible in English.

I hate writing books. I've only done one. You've done six. First of all, what reason do you have to want to keep writing books? What desire do you have? And then let's get through that one and then we'll talk about the book.

So I read a quote somewhere about, like, I don't like being a writer. I like having written. I never wanted to write a book. It had never occurred to me to write a book. The reason my first book came out double, double. Twelve years ago, a speaker's bureau that was representing me said they could get me higher checks from Stage if I had a book. So I was like, well, what do you think you can get me? And I think I was charging five grand at the time. And they said, well, we can probably get you 10. So I said, okay, so now I'm getting 40. So I'm like, well, a book. If you can get me 10 grand, let's do it, right? So I wrote the book, and people liked it. People actually liked the content. And I had a process for doing my book. So this was 12 years ago. I used Dragon dictation. I walked around my home with a headset on, and I talked about. I talked about the table of contents, I talked about all the areas of the book. And I just got all this stuff out of my head. And then I sent it off to get it transcribed before Rev.com existed or Siri existed. And I took all the notes from the transcriber and I cut and paste, and it became chapters. And then I sent the chapters out to friends. And that was my process. So it went okay from there. I was at a business event. I'm in a lot of these mastermind groups where I go to learn from others and connect with others. And I meet a guy named Tucker Max. And Tucker's a phenomenal business person, has had three New York Times bestsellers at the same time. And he had started a company then called Book in a Box. It's now called Scribe. And he said that he wanted to produce a book for me and my ex wife. My wife at the time signed me up to do three books with him. I'm like, are you kidding? Three? What are you thinking? I don't even want to do one more. She goes, no, you're going to. And so because she'd signed me up for this with my money or our money, I was kind of pot committed. And I decided to just listen to my audience, listen to my businesses that I was working with for what they wanted. So I wrote one called Meeting Suck. I wrote another called Vivid Vision. I wrote another called Free pr. And then I also bumped into a friend at another mastermind group called the Genius Network, a guy named Hal Elrod. Hal had written a book called the Miracle Morning. He asked me to co author the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. And I said, hell, yeah, because your brand is strong and I want to do something for entrepreneurs. And that book took off. So it just kind of became this natural process. And then I just wrote my sixth, and this was probably the only one I've done strategically. I have this organization again called the COO alliance, and it's all about seconds in command. So I wrote a book called the Second in Command about how to unleash the power of a coo. And it's how to go out and recruit and onboard and build a relationship with an amazing second in command. And it's. Most companies struggle with that. So recruiting on board and then build the relationship with, like, really build that strong yin and yang relationship.

So who's the book for?

It's for both. It's for CEOs and COOs.

And so CEOs are going to read that book and go, oh, my God, we're not aligned. We're on a different page. That might be a signal for me to go find somebody else to.

Yeah. Or how to. How to change the relationship with. Right. Almost like a marriage. How can we make our marriage better? Or how do I find a better marriage? And it is a very yin and yang approach. It's actually. I put the yin and yang symbol on the COVID I think it's the only true partnership in the business. The CEO has a relationship with the CFO and a relationship with the cfo, but the COO is almost like their business marriage. They have to be on the same page. A huge amount of trust. Brian and I, when we built 1, 800, got junk, had an unfair advantage. He was my best man at my wedding three months before I joined him. So we had so much trust going into day one that he was willing to just say here. And we'd also been in a business group forum for EO together for four years. He'd watched me build two companies, so it's almost like he had a four year interview. But I teach how you can do that, how you can fast track that process.

What role does the chairman play in this process then?

Chairman? It depends. So if there's chairman of a board or if it's a CEO that's moved into a chairman role. It depends.

Okay, well, take me for example. So I've got a bunch of companies here in Dubai called the Blue Sky Thinking Group. We have CEO Daniel, who's essentially the person that's in charge of running the business.

And are they in charge of strategy or are they in charge of execution and implementation?

They're part of strategy and they're in charge of execution.

So they're almost a hybrid between CEO, COO in some way. You still have some CEO vision and strategy or do you really just let them run it?

I let them run it.

Okay. Then they're truly CEO. They might have a second in command who's more operational depending on the size of your companies. Right.

She's always had challenges finding the right people. She's. And we have some really talented people in the business, there's no doubt about that. But it's like sometimes their frustration will be they don't see what I see.

Has she had training, like serious training on interviewing, like actual skills training on, on how to do proper interviews?

I'm not sure.

Most haven't.

Okay.

Even think of yourself. Like how many hours worth of training have you had on interviewing?

Well, saying that this, that's, this is an interesting subject because interviewing periods.

Right.

Okay. They say that you'll decide whether you like someone in the first 30 seconds.

That's called an emotional response, but it's not an interview. Okay, so like in business, think about a business skill that you have. Like in finance, how much training have you had in, you know, tons. Right. Like you have to do like all these hours of courses and get certified. Most business people have had no training on the business skills. They need to actually be in business. I did a course called Invest in youn leaders.

Okay.

12 modules that every manager needs. Interviewing, coaching, delegation, situational leadership, one on one meetings, running effective meetings, conflict management, project management, time management. But most people have never been trained in that. So of course it's hard to be in business because you have no skills. Imagine going out to Play cricket and no one's showing you how to hold the bat or swing the bat or catch the ball. You'd be a disaster. So we would never let our kid go off to play without teaching them the basic. Like, I'm a Canadian. I even know. What was it? NBW means I even know knee before wicked because I had this British guy teach me when I was seven years old how to throw a ball.

Nbw.

Yeah. Is that what it's called?

Lbw?

Okay. Yeah. That's a long time ago. Trying to go back 50 years.

I just thought, thinking about that for a second. I didn't remember cricket for then.

So that's why business is so hard is Most of our CEOs, most of our executives have no skills at actually doing the basics of the job. They know how to run their company. So if you're. Let's say you're a CEO of a digital marketing agency, you've probably had lots of training on digital marketing, but you've never been trained on interviewing, running meetings. Most managers run meetings. They've never been trained on how to run one. Of course, meetings suck. You suck at running meetings. It's pretty basic. Yeah. Because I was the dumb kid, I had to learn the little systems, Right. So I learned the little systems and then I'm like, oh, now it's simple.

Yeah, you're right. The responsibility of learning all those things can be quite overwhelming as well. Does the CEO need to know everything and then impart that knowledge onto the. The other person? Or does the CEO need to know an overview of those things and then.

Bingo, you just nailed what almost every CEO doesn't understand. The CEO needs to know it exists and the COO needs to know how to do it. So the CEO needs to understand. Oh, we have interviewing as a system that we don't really know. Someone should teach us that. But the CEO doesn't have the bandwidth to learn all this stuff because most of us are ADD and a little bit too wired and too much stuff going on. But we have to know that these things exist. You have to know that coaching is a thing and. Oh, no one's ever trained us on coaching. Let's find someone. It's a who problem, not a how problem. But the leadership team needs to know the hows. They need to know how to run meetings. They need to know how to do interviewing. They need to know how to do project management, how to do time management, how to manage email flow, how to manage conflict in the system sense. The CEO needs to know it exists.

So, CEO Whisperer, you smile as you say that, because to me, if somebody called me something like that, I'd probably recoil, thinking that maybe. Maybe that was given to me rather than something I created myself. So, first of all, was that given?

Yeah. So what does it mean? So I'll have to say who gave it to me first. So it's the publisher of Forbes magazine. So this is a big deal guy who's. Who's met lots of the best business leaders on the planet. He had introduced me four different times to be a speaker at these big business conferences in the United States. And he sat in the audience watching me. And then we used to sit over wine at night and sit and talk. And at one night at dinner, I was talking about coaching someone, and it might have been Marcelo at Sprint. And he said, you kind of are whispering in their ear. And I said, yeah. He goes, you're kind of like the CEO whisperer. And I started laughing because there's that movie the Horse Whisperer or whatever, which I've never seen. But I understood what he meant. I'm like, yeah, I guess, because what I'm really doing is kind of whispering in their ear what they should do, and then they go and do it, and so that moniker just stuck.

Okay. Makes sense.

I wish I was that good of a copywriter, but I'm not.

When I read it, you know, you're gonna. You're gonna either have a conversation with someone that almost lives up to that, you know, I'm the CEO. That's me. Let me tell you how great I.

Am a kid from Sudbury. By the way, the place that I'm from is such a bad. Not a bad place, but, you know, everyone in the United States is famous for something. I'm from this small town in Canada where they. They tested the lunar module because the landscape was so similar to what they thought the moon would be like.

Oh, really?

Yeah. I'm a small kid from that town, middle of nowhere.

What's one lesson your job has taught you that you think everyone should learn at some point in their life?

I think it's the big one, that you don't have to know all the answers. You just have to know the people that know the answers. Right. It's kind of like in school, we had to be the smartest person in the room because you had to memorize all the information. There was no Internet when I was in school. Right. But now I just have to know all the smart people. It's almost like we all get to do the test together. Right. I don't have to have all the answers. I just have to get seven good people and we can all figure it out. We all get to submit my test. That's been huge for me.

Do you have any unexpected experience, good or bad, during your talks or your shows?

One bad one I think is I have these weird out of body experiences where I feel like I'm off on the side of the stage looking back at myself and I get very. I can get fairly distracted. It's almost like I get kind of like, wow, this is interesting watching what he's doing over here. And so. Yeah. Have you never had that? Yeah. Right. It's really freaky.

I don't. I'm not at the side above. I'm just at an angle looking down on me.

Yeah. And we're not schizophrenic. I've talked to a few people, so I don't like that feeling. That's. That's a bad experience I've had. I don't know if that's what your question is.

I find it in hard to concentrate.

It's very hard to concentrate.

Yeah. Man. No one's ever said that to me in my life.

You know what's amazing for me? I often do my best speaking events if I'm hungover or tired because I show up and I think it forces me to be present. Or maybe my brain isn't firing all over the place because I've had a good sleep. I don't know what it is, but yeah, I don't like the out of body experience at all.

You sold all of your possessions and you're literally living out of a backpack. How old are you today?

57 today.

So 57 years old today. You've kind of done it in reverse. Most people do that in their early years.

I actually now own less stuff or have less stuff than I did when I was a student. I own three pair of pants, three pair of shoes, three dress shirts, three black and three gray Lululemon shirts, a sweatshirt, a jean jacket. Yeah.

And your wife as well.

Yeah. Which is amazing. She sold like her Jimmy Choos and her Louboutins and 14 watches. And she still has some of her diamonds, but she's in Lululemon every day.

How does it feel to get rid of all of that crap?

It's super empowering to just be able to say, let's go wherever tomorrow and to not have this stuff. It was scary letting go of some stuff that, that I identified with. Right. The things that I Kept seeing around me books that I loved or possessions that I felt something to. So I've kept some art that's in a storage locker for when we buy a place at some point in the future. But I have a 5 foot by 10 foot storage locker, not very much stuff.

And after going through that experience, thinking about maybe buying somewhere in the future at some point and going to have a base, a home somewhere, would that look completely different to anything else you've lived in before?

Yeah, it'll be. We're looking at a place in Dubai and a place in Porto is probably our two hubs. And it'll be a place where we can come for a month, month, recalibrate, disconnect a little bit, change up some of our. And then hit the road again. A place to be able to call home and just kind of nest for a month. But it won't be a place that we spend a year in for sure.

There was a book, a verse called the Men that Don't Fit in and it was given to me once when my dad was overseas and I wanted to know why he needed to be away. And it was. The story was all about this desire he had to go and feel other parts of the world and kind of like experience and engross himself into those different cultures and environments because it fed him something back.

I've thought about this a lot and I've asked my wife about it as well. Are we running towards something or are we running away from something? And we're running towards. We just really want to see what's out there. We're just so curious. And I've only been to 56, no, 64 countries now. I've always had a goal to be to more countries than my age. And then I go to a country and I don't even really know the country. I only know a couple of cities in the country. I just want to. I just want to go see it.

What are you thirsty to go see soon?

Well, we're going to Israel next month and I was there 30 years ago, so I'm super excited to go and see that again and to go with my wife and see that. I want to spend some more time in Easter or sometime in Eastern Europe. I think as far east as I've done is Poland. But I want to go to Georgia, I want to go to Armenia, I want to go to Russia, I want to go and see Yugoslavia. I want to go and see real Eastern Europe and get to know that. And then some parts of Asia, South Korea, really Vietnam Laos, Cambodia. Haven't done any of those yet.

Okay.

Yeah.

Exciting places. Okay, good. Last question. Define success for me.

So when I was two years old, my grandfather passed away. When I was one or when I was being born, he said to my dad, with a name like Cameron Gardner, Harold, that kid is going to be a success someday. And I heard that saying from my dad so often that it felt like a curse. And around 15 years ago, I wrote my first personal vivid vision so what my life was going to look like three years out, and I wrote down, I'm already a success. And I was trying to understand what that meant. And for me now what it means is it's not about things. It's about being able to wake up in the morning and feeling good at who I see in the mirror. It's about being able to explore life and enjoy life and have free time and the money's there. But it's never been about the stuff for me. I think that's why it's been so easy to purge. The stuff is now I can just kind of breathe.

And do you feel that you've been as successful as you've always wanted to be?

No, I think I'll always pursue that. I want to be better for my employees. I want to create better lives for them and better opportunities for them. And I feel extraordinary. I took 13 weeks vacation last year, and I had to sit with my team, and I felt extraordinarily guilty about that, and they were all excited for me, but I want to give them those experiences, too. Like, I just. I feel like I've been. I've worked really hard and I've been given lots of. But I feel an immense amount of this. I don't know if it's the Catholic guilt that I grew up with. Right. But, yeah, I feel like I need to still give back.

It's been great talking to you.

I really appreciate your time.

When we're in a new market, when you've got a really interesting technology, when you've got such incredible customers right out of the gate, you can look out onto the field and say, gosh, there's so much I want to do here. And at a bigger company, you have the time, the resources, the people to kind of set all of those things in motion and watch all of them bear.