Building Strong Company Culture - Tips from Entrepreneur Cameron Herold & MindValley Vishen Lakhiani

Hi everyone and welcome to this conversation with the brilliant mind of Cameron Herold. So a couple of things about Cameron. By the time this guy was 18 years old, he had really started a string of businesses. His mind just operates like that. And in his 20s and 30s, he had already become a prominent entrepreneur in Canada. He was mentoring other entrepreneurs, one of which was Kimbal Musk who is Elon's brother in law. In fact, when Elon and Kimbal in 1995 turned in their first business plan, Zip, I think it was called Zip 2, Zip 2 to be ceased. Cameron was a reference on that business plan. Cameron then went on with a buddy he met at EO entrepreneursorg who had a simple like junk hauling company and they turned that into 1-800-got junk. It became one of the most recognized brands in Canada, one of the best companies to work for in Canada. It reached about 100 million in revenue, operating in four countries and hundreds of cities. And a lot of that was because of this man's ability to scale businesses. So I remember reading your bio and there's one story that really stood out. So Cameron was speaking at an event and a guy comes on stage and goes, oh my God, you're a real human being. Cameron goes, what do you mean like that about that? It turned out that in the entrepreneurial community people were saying, entrepreneurs were saying, gosh, I need a Cameron. I need a Cameron. I need a Cameron. Because Cameron is the ultimate COO, the ultimate right hand person that helps entrepreneurs and CEOs explode their business. So he went on to start COO alliance, which is a group to help COOs who are the second in command of a business come together to become better at what they do. I've had my COO be part of Cameron's alliance and my coo, Kay Minglani has raved about what he's learned from Cameron. So we are so honored to have you here.

Thank you.

Cameron has written some incredible books. Vivid Vision is a book that inspired me to create the vision of mindvalley. So now when I'm talking about Mindvalley to bankers, to prospective investors, I don't do a traditional plan. I share my vivid vision which I learned from him. His book Vivid Vision. Another great book by Cameron is Double Double, which is on doubling your business. Great book. And we are so honored to have Cameron as an author on MindValley with his new program Vivid Vision. Cameron, welcome to MindValleyU.

Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Vishen.

Oh yeah, I also got to say, he's a really Cool guy. He's a burner. While he's here, he posted in the community group that he wants to meet other Burning man enthusiasts. Cameron is here for two weeks. He didn't just fly in. He's been hanging out at all the events, tossing his own social gatherings, and just a really great guy to be around. So get to know this man.

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I actually wear Burning Man Playa Dust around my neck. One of my kids thinks it's cocaine. I'm like, no, coke is white. That's gray.

So, Cameron, first tell us about your MBU experience. How's it been going for you?

Pretty amazing. The. The. One of the things I noticed, because I've been working with entrepreneurial organizations and conferences all over the world. I've been paid to speak in 26 countries, and I've actually been paid to speak on every continent, including Antarctica. I got paid to speak there in January. There's no ego here. And in a lot of the events that I go to, people are kind of jostling for position, and they're jostling to make sure that they're seen or that they're better or bigger than the others in the room. And there's no ego here, which I thought is really interesting. I've noticed that all week long, that people are just here to connect with each other as humans. And it's almost like what we do is really secondary to who we are, which is cool.

Exactly. So it's really interesting that you picked it up for the longest time. When we started doing these conferences, we would entrain people with that belief of the orientation. We would say. We would literally use that line, what you do. Sorry, who you are is more important than what you do.

So.

So I'm glad you noticed that.

Yeah.

But what you do is also important. Right. It's also great to be able to network with each other. So don't shy away from sharing that. So, Cameron, let's talk about Vivid Vision. So this is a phenomenal book you. You penned. I read the book, loved it. I asked you if we would turn it into a quest on mindvalley. This is now a quest on mindvalley. Tell us about why that matters and why Vivid Vision is important. And all of you have access to this on your Mindvalley membership?

Sure. So I started coaching entrepreneurs in 1989. The coaching world didn't start until 1993. So if you go back to CoachU and the International Federation of Coaches, they started in 1993. I'd already coached 120 companies by 1993. So I'd been around the coaching world for a long time. And one of the things I noticed, and coaching real businesses, typically 50 million to 500 million, is the zone that I work in. What I noticed with all of these companies is they would issue a vision statement, like a one sentence statement, right? They take a bunch of words, mash them up and go, there's our vision. Go team. And their executive team and their management team and their frontline staff were all bewildered. They had no idea what the company was supposed to look like, act like, or feel like, because this one sentence didn't explain the vision at all. And then the entrepreneur or the CEO often had a much bigger vision of what their business was going to look like. But there was no way to articulate that to their employees. So 24 years ago, I had lunch with an Olympic coach. We were in Vancouver, Canada, and this Olympian was talking about how high performance athletes use visualization in sport. And he said, if you could take the visualization from the sports world into the business world, you would win. So what we realized was one business that used visualization a lot was the home building industry. So if you're building a house or doing a kitchen renovation, who's built a house or done a renovation? Okay, a lot of you. So when you've built a home or done a renovation, the homeowner is the CEO of that project, right? The person who wants the home built is the CEO. Now, when I've done my renos, I don't know how to do electrical or plumbing. I don't know how to hang drywall. I don't know how to put a wolf stove in. I just know what I want it to look like. I don't know how to do the work. So as the entrepreneur, you don't have to know how to build your company. You have to describe it in such a way that your team can draw the blueprints or the plans to make your vision come true. So the vivid vision document and idea came out of that discussion 24 years ago. It's how we built 1, 800 got junk. It's how Kimbal and Elon went on to do Zip2, which was their first business they sold for $315 million two years. And I wasn't just a reference on the business plan. I actually had to do reference calls with their VCs in their first round of funding. They only had one employee, but they were able to describe the business in its future state and get people excited enough to Invest. So that's the kind of purpose is to get your shareholders, your employees, your banker, your accountant, everybody to see what you can see so then they can help you figure out how to make it come true. That's a long answer.

That's really cool. That's really cool to think that you had a role in ensuring that Elon and Kimbal got their first round of funding. And Mae Muss, Elon's mom, is also a mindvalley author. Her new quest comes up. And in that quest, you learn about how that first run of funding led to everything that happened next, including Elon becoming the richest man in the world.

And what's interesting is they when, when I talked to Kleiner Perkins about investing, they only wanted to raise $600,000 for Zip2. So it was January 1995. And this is written about in Elon's book. College Pro Painters is written up in the book. And they wouldn't back Elon because he was such a crazy, out of the box thinker. He'd never done anything right. So he just dropped out of aeronautical engineering like you think, well, why wouldn't you back him? Because he was a bit of a lunatic. He was talking about this vision of building something that was so out of the box. But Kimball had the experience of having run a business, right? He had 12 employees when he was 20, so he'd run a house painting business. They backed Kimball's experience and the vision that Elon had. So when you can take your vivid vision and match it with a plan, people will support you, they'll join you, they'll quit your jobs, they'll invest in you. But if you just show them the plan, they don't understand what you're building. And then if you just show them the vision, they're not quite sure that you have the skillset to put it together. Right. I think it was Thomas Edison that said vision without execution is hallucination. So it's all about matching your vivid vision with your plan and then the people to then make it come true.

Okay, so the Vivid Vision is a four page document that articulates your business vision.

Yeah.

And this was actually something quite novel when I first heard about it. So. So what Cameron says is you articulate this business vision and then you share it everywhere. You share it with your employees, you make it downloadable as a PDF on your website. And tell us why, why is this so important and what have you seen this do for companies?

And remember that if you're going to do a vivid vision for your Business, Right. That four or five page description of your company three years in the future. You can also do one for your life. I'm friends with John and Missy who did Lifebook. I understand that process. You can do a four page document describing your life. My wife and I have one that we're just putting our photos into right now that describes our relationship as a couple. We just got married two months ago. We're describing our marriage three years from now in every single aspect of our marriage. So think about how it works in all those cases. So the Vivid Vision document for your business would describe your meeting rhythms, your management team, what marketing is happening, what your customers are writing about you online, maybe what your employees are writing on Indeed or Glassdoor. And as the entrepreneur, you don't know how it's going to happen, but you can describe what it feels like. You can describe the future state, you can describe what your Zoom meetings are like or what it feels like walking through your office or your interactions with the team and the Pulse and the dashboards. And you end up with this description as if you were walking around your company three years from now. It's almost as if you hop into a time machine or and you Travel out to December 31, 2025, and you walk around your company and then you write down everything you see and then you come back to today and you hand it to your team and you go, this is what it looks like. I don't know how to do it. But they can take every sentence and come up with one or two projects to make each sentence come true. And then you ended up with a huge list of projects and you just simply put them in order. Much like building a home, right? You build a foundation. You put in the plumbing in the walls. Most entrepreneurs want to put the Wolf stove in the subway or the sub zero fridge and the cabinets in day one, right? You got to build the foundation and put in the electrical and the plumbing in your business. You've got to build the foundational parts of your business first. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs get a little off the rails working on all the fancy stuff when they really haven't nailed the foundational parts of your business.

That's amazing. Now tomorrow you're going to be speaking at Mindvalley youy and going deeper in all of this. Give us a glimpse of what you're going to be talking about tomorrow.

Yeah, tomorrow I'm actually going to cover. So I left 1,800got junk 15 years ago. So I was 41 years old. It was the third hundred million dollar company that I'd helped build. And I took three and a half months off and I decided to just journal. So I did mind maps and lifelines and wrote lists and, you know, what do I suck at? What am I good at? What have I learned? And in that journaling for three and a half months, 20 minutes a day, I ended up with about 60 lessons that I called the letters to my younger self. And they were the business lessons that I knew today or that I knew when I was 41 that I wish I'd known when I was 21 first starting in business. So tomorrow I'm going to walk through all of those leadership lessons with you. A lot of them are grounded in failure. A lot of them are based on where I screwed things up or, you know, the trials and tribulations or as I call the lessons from the edge, sometimes the hypomanic edge. I had one point where I collapsed on the floor of an elevator sobbing in tears and had a complete nervous breakdown. So I talk about all of those lessons and what I really learned about those and how to put them into your business or into your life today. So we're going to be covering that. And then the last half of the two hour session, I'm going to do a full open Q and A. And right now, like when I have CEOs paying me for coaching, it's $4,400 an hour. That's my coaching rate. And I've coached the CEO of Sprint. I coached a monarchy in the Middle east, like the family that owns the country of Qatar. So you're going to have access to just ask me any questions about your business and I'm going to give you completely unfettered answers.

That's amazing. So this is one of the sessions I've been most looking forward to in Mindvalley youy. So if you're an entrepreneur or if you aspire to be one, if you're running a business or working for one, I think you're going to find this session with Cameron tomorrow really, really, really mind blowing. There's a reason why he's written so many of my favorite business books. So you speak, you've spoken in all continents. What do you typically speak about other than vivid vision? Give us an idea of what else you cover.

Yeah, so I have I think four or five core topics. The first one I call the leadership at 100 miles an hour and it's how to build fast growing companies. So when we built 1-800-got junk, we had six consecutive years of 100% revenue growth. So we went from 2 million to 106 million in six years. We had no debt, we had no bank facilities, bank loans. We gave up no equity in the company. And we ranked as the number two company in all of Canada to work for. So I took them from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in six years. So I talk about that. How to build a great company with really good growth without giving away the farm. Second thing I talk about is building a world class company culture. So I've coached two companies that went on to rank number one in Australia. I coached the number two company on Glassdoor in the US number 12 on Glassdoor in the US number one in Florida, number one in Ohio. I built the number two company in Canada. So I talk about culture and it's not about the free perks. Culture is not about the massages and the free lunch. It's all based on the foundational things. And so it's how to build that company culture, even when you're a five person company or just starting out. Third one is around PR, which is we landed 5200 stories about our company, including being on Oprah. So it's how to generate real press coverage. And, and then the fourth is the leadership lessons to my younger self.

That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. So let's go deeper in this. I'm curious about culture and I'm curious about pr. Are you guys interested in learning more about that? Okay, so let's, let's go a little bit on culture because culture is such an interesting topic right now in the post pandemic world and so many companies, I've seen people work remotely. What are some of the key things you think entrepreneurs need to keep in mind?

So has anybody here ever done a jigsaw puzzle? Okay, all of you who's not done a jigsaw puzzle to get the hell out of the audience. Really? You've never done like, you've never done a jigsaw puzzle for, you know, Gen Y, Right. Or Gen Z. Right. What's the jigsaw? All those little tiny pieces? Oh, yeah, just the little tiny pieces you put together like 5,000 pieces, they become a picture. Yeah. Gen Z have never done jigsaw puzzles. Right. They're doing Minecraft or something, whatever. So. So the jigsaw puzzle, the most important thing with the jigsaw puzzle is the picture on the front of the box. Right. Imagine if I gave you a box with 5,000 pieces and they were all red it would take you forever to build that puzzle. So the vivid vision is the picture on the front of the box. Culture starts with knowing that vision. With all of your employees, your customers, your shareholders, only recruiting employees that are excited about the vivid vision, pushing potential employees away that don't like the future of what you're building. That's where it starts. And then the four corners of your jigsaw puzzle. The four corners of your business are your core values, your bhag, your core purpose, and the one year plan to make your vivid vision come true. Three year plans are way too far out. Everything changes. The core values have to be so deeply ingrained in your organization that you're willing to fire people if they break them. You should only have a maximum of four or five core values. They should never be a single word. They should be a very short phrase that's easy to understand, that needs no explanation, no other bullet points. The only time I've ever allowed a single word as a core value is one of my clients used the word simplify. And I'm like, fuck, that's perfect. Core purpose. Simon Sinek, who popularized the whole start with why Simon was on our board of advisors four years before his first TED Talk. So Simon has slept on my couch. I knew Simon when he was broke. We've been really close friends forever. Simon helped me understand my core purpose, which is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. But you have to. So my everything I do helps entrepreneurs. My CEO alliance, my second in command podcast, my books, it's all helping entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. If this was a government audience, I would have said no to be here because it's not following what my core purpose is. So you really have to know your core purpose as your second corner. The third is your bhag. Right? What's that? Jim Collins, Big hairy, audacious goal. It's never measurable. It's not a million somethings or a billion, whatever. By definition, the BHAG is a 20 or 30 year stretch that aligns the organization that from the inside seems possible and from the outside seems impossible. So an example of a BHAG in 1972, Nike's BHAG was to crush Adidas. That was crazy. In the 50s, Boeing's BHAG was to democratize air travel. Google's in 1997 was to organize the world's information. See, it's not a measurable march, but it's something you're always pushing towards. My BHAG is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide it's like a 20 year, 30 year March. So that's your third corner and then the fourth is your plan or the one year plan to make it come true. Culture is when everything is really emerging from there. And then the sides of your jigsaw puzzle. The first side is when culture really hits the road. And that's your people systems and that's your recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, training, and the leadership development of people and getting rid of the wrong people and having those really tight systems in your organization. Culture kind of comes out of that. Notice it's not the perks. It has nothing to do with free lunches or massages or whether they get free health care.

Yeah, that's so, so, so true. It's never about the perks. So when you took 1-800-cot- junk and made it one of the best companies to work for, was there anything that was really, that really stood out about the culture?

Yeah, and I want to speak to that. And I also want to speak to something that you do really well at Mindvalley. So I just met Dragna. And you hired her at a cocktail party because her boyfriend Alex was starting to work with Mindvalley. He noticed a cultural DNA in this person where she just kind of felt like the right culture. And he's like, what, what do you do? What, what are you good at? Like, it's get the right people on the bus, right? And then we'll find a role for you. That's where culture really starts from, is identifying that. So at the early, early days of 1-800-got-JUNK when I got there, Brian had a very clear vision of what he wanted the business to look like. Brian was at that same lunch that I was at two and a half years before. Because we were in a forum group in eo. We both invested in being a part of a mastermind community called the Entrepreneurs Organization. We were actually in the same forum group that met every single month for four years. Brian was my best man at my wedding two months before I joined him as his coo. So we had an unfair advantage, right? We already knew each other, trusted each other, but the one thing he had was really, really strong vision. The second thing was he really gave a shit about people, not their birthdays and when their, you know, what their dog's name was. He actually freaking cared about them as a human. Like when they were struggling or what was happening at home. He spent an inordinate amount of time out for coffee and having lunch with people, giving a shit about them. And I noticed that Those were probably the two kind of kernels of culture. When I came in, I said we had to do three things. The first was we had to raise our prices by 50% because no one was making money. He thought I was crazy. I'm like, no one's. We're not making money. You're not making money. The guys in the trucks aren't making money. So we're raising our prices. 50% will be the FedEx or the Starbucks of junk removal. Secondly was we had to build something a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. We had to get in the zone of a cult so that we could attract people and attract customers and attract press. And the third flywheel was we were going to generate as much free publicity, free PR as we could because we had no marketing budget whatsoever. Those were the three flywheels.

Okay, so that, that's crazy. How would you take a company that's basically a garbage hauling company, 1-800-got-JUNK. So it's a company that you call when you have like large pieces of junk that you need hauled away, right? Like you disassemble some furniture or stuff. How do you take something like that?

It's not sexy.

It's not sexy. But how do you turn it into a cult and then get 5,300 media impressions?

So 5,200. So the. And it was like 5,208. And they were individual, unique stories. There was no online. You couldn't like, do a press wire and get like 72 stories. Like, these were individual, unique stories, including Oprah, like the physical print edition in the New York Times, print edition of the Wall Street Journal, print edition of Forbes. So what you do is you. What was the question? I have really bad ADD. But you remember 5002, 8208. Yeah, yeah.

So how did you turn something so unsexy?

Oh, yeah. So it's, it's the people. It's really, really, really focusing on bringing great people in and sharing the vision. And we, we wrote the vision, the vivid vision. Brian called it a painted picture. At the time, the idea was to polarize. So when you read it, 50% of the people was like, there's no way I would work there. Good, go work for government. But the other 50% of the people, like, oh my gosh, I want in. Great, come on and we'll interview you.

What caused that? I mean, it's junk hauling. What is that?

Polarizing One by one. It's one person at a time. Like Christopher Bennett was An early iconic hire. Jesse Corzan was an early iconic hire. We had two employees before we hit the 4 million mark that had permanent logos tattooed on their body of our brand. 1, 800 got junk. 1. One was on his shoulder, one was on his hip. So when you create a cult, it's one person at a time. So I've actually. Has anyone ever watched the show the Vow? The TV show the Vow, about Nexium, the sex cult? Have you seen that? So I'm actually on their podcast. I'm friends with Sarah Edmondson. It was a hundred and I think it was like 17,000 members of this massive leadership and sex cult. Keith Ranieri just went to prison for it. I'm on their podcast called the Little Bit Culty. Talking about when a company culture can go too far. And we didn't go too far.

But.

But we understood the DNA. We understood how to make cultures. It's what I'm known for. But it's one person at a time.

But that's crazy. I can't imagine any. I can. Okay. I can imagine someone Googling the sexy mind value.

I did it at house. We did it with house painting. 1900 got junk, but we did it with house painting. I hired college pro painters, went on to become the largest house painting company on the planet.

What was that mission? Pulling these people forward?

So one was to build a globally admired brand. That was our bhag. Right. The other one was our core values were so tightly ingrained that people actually understood them and gave a shit. Another one was one person at a time. We would bring in these kind of cult like people with good energy. Regardless of if they were in it or marketing or a payroll clerk, they just had that special something. And people wanted to be around that special something. And then one by one, we pushed people out who didn't fit.

Wow.

Like, we got rid of the toxic. We got rid of the cultural cancers. We got rid of the underperformers because government's always hiring anyway. They can go work there.

How did you foster that culture and nurture and grow that culture?

One is by really caring. So you mentioned the Secret earlier. So as an example, we had every single employee when we were about 150 at our head office and about 200 franchisees had every single employee. And all of our franchisees watch the Secret. We had our top franchisees watch the Secret a second time with us on a cruise. We brought John demartini and John Assaraf in to actually speak at our company. So. So we. We understood Quantum Physics and quantum mechanics and how to stir the cult. And we just kept stirring it.

I'm so happy you said that because when I was talking about that law of attraction, I saw you in the front row and you kind of gave me a quizzical look and I thought, Cameron is really thinking I'm way too fluffy.

No, no.

And he's probably losing respect for me because I'm going off signs.

Who here knows the name John Asraf or the vision boards? Okay, so this is a really funny story. I had now just left 1-800-got junk. We're really deep into the whole quantum mechanics stuff. And I come back in a week after leaving the company to get them to look at my new laptop, to help out with my laptop. And Brian, I get there and Brian goes, oh, by the way, John Ashraf from the Secrets here today. Do you want to watch him speak? So they bring him in to speak to like 240 of our head office employees. I'm like, sure. So I sit and watch him speak. I'm like, fuck, I love this guy, he's great. I'm going to go up and say hi. So I walk up to John and I said, John, hey, I'm Cameron Herald. He goes, Cameron. And he reaches into his pocket and he pulls out the corner of an envelope. You can fact check this. Drop him a note. He rips off the corner of an envelope and it's got my name, Cameron, and my cell number. And he goes, is this you? And I said, yeah. He goes, I don't know why I was given this number, but A guy in DC, Jason Abernathy in Washington D.C. told me to look you up when I'm in Vancouver. I was going to call you later, can we get together for breakfast? I said, well, Brian just told me that you and I and somebody who works with you at one coach are going to go for lunch later. He goes, no, no, I want one on one time with you. That's how I met John Ashraf. Like you have to follow this stuff, right? That has nothing to do with any question. It was just a random add moment.

That's crazy. That's really, really cool. Okay, so you spoke about the culture, which is really mind blowing. Let's talk about those media impressions. How did you get the press, the New York Times? How did you get mentions on Oprah? Again for. Keep this in mind, right? Like a junk holding company.

So I'll go, so. So the media, the way the media works is every single morning, every journalist, every blogger, every podcaster, every TV host, they wake up first thing in the morning and they're what the fuck am I going to write about today? And they sit down at their laptop waiting to be inspired. They get hundreds of news releases and hundreds of press releases and hundreds of emails. So what we do, and I learned this at college, Pro Painters, you pick up the phone and you call them and you go, hey, Dan, it's Cameron calling. Do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you. Now Dan is going to say, sure, it's only two minutes. I'm waiting for a good story. And it's easier than going through the 200 emails. What's your story? And I have four core stories that all of you have for your business. The first story is the genesis. It's how you started it. You quit your shitty job, you got fired, you saw a problem and wanted to solve it. It's the genesis of how you started your story. The second one is the hero's journey. It's the lesson from the edge. It's the trials and tribulation where you had to fire your best friend or you almost went bankrupt and how you kind of came and rose again from the ashes. They love those stories. The third is your culture, how you're building a culture. Whether you're pulling lessons from the Secret or Mind Valley and you're sharing that, they love that stuff because it inspires and it educates. And then the fourth is anything around your customer. So it's like I have COOs that are in the COO Alliance. I have COOs in 17 countries. So I could target the business media in all 17 countries. I could pitch the same story in Thailand. And then when I get two or three media articles, I could go pitch it in Australia. Same story, different country. Pitch it again in China, pitch it again in Vancouver. So it's just having those core stories. So then the first lesson, you call them and say, hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you. They'll say yes. If they say, no, I'm busy. You say, okay, can I call you tomorrow or Thursday? So I'll give you how we landed 225 stories in a single day. No, 220 stories, sorry. In a single day. I just landed a Bloomberg Newswire and that got us the 70 stories. It took a while. They wanted to write it. Bloomberg's a very business journal, business, kind of focused media. But he loved the weird junk angle. So I decided to just talk about weird junk. Like you want to write about weird junk. Let's talk weird junk. You want to talk about culture? We'll talk about culture. So I decided I was going to land Associated Press. If you get an Associated Press writer, that story can end up in lots of newspapers on the same day. So I called Tom Cohen, who is the Canadian bureau chief for Associated Press. Because we were a Canadian based company, I thought, I'll go to them. And they have about 20 different offices. And I called Tom and Tom said, yes, it's Tom, I'm really busy. And he hung up the phone. Now a marketer or a communications person would get scared and never call Tom back. I'm a sales guy. I'm like, fuck. He answers his phone. I'm halfway there. So I call him. Two days later, Tom, hey, it's Cameron Herald calling, still busy. Click. Fucking, hey, man. This guy always answers his phone like this is a sure thing. Then it's like, no, I'm busy. I told you I'm busy. September 11th hits. There's a war or something going on. I was like, God, I never get through this guy. Over three and a half months, I called him about 14 times. I sent him two or three emails, I sent him two or three postcards. One morning the phone rings. Tuesday morning, I pick up the phone. We literally have desk phones, okay, this is 2001, and it's Tom Cohen. Tom goes, or Cameron, it's Tom Cohen calling Associated Press. I felt like saying, I'm really busy. I go, what's up? He goes, you said you got a good story for me? Tell me the story. So I started pitching and he goes, I can be there on Thursday. Are you and Brian available when the media calls? You drop everything. So I said, yes, we'll clear our calendar. We'll be there for you. He goes, okay, I'll be on the 10 o' clock flight. Can somebody pick me up at the airport in Vancouver? Great. So he flies from Toronto to Vancouver. Now, if the Canadian bureau chief from Associated Press is flying to Vancouver, who do you send to the airport to pick him up? Me, the CEO. He'd expect us. We send Tyler. Tyler works for us. We just hired our first PR guy. So if you're going to pick up the Associated Press bureau chief, what do you pick him up in? Nice car? Limo? A junk truck. Fucking right, man. A big blue junk truck. And Tyler is standing at the gate waiting for Tom Cohen wearing a blue wig and a sign that says, 1-800-GOT junk welcomes the associated Press. And he's wearing his full outfit and Tom walks off Business Guy. And Tyler says, by the way, before we get to the office, I need you to change. And he hands him a grocery bag filled with blue pants, a blue junk shirt, a pair of socks, a pair of gloves. He's got some work boots for Tom. He goes, we're going to haul junk. So they hauled junk for two hours and then he took him into the office. Tom was so blown away by the way that we treated him and educated him. That story ended up in 220 newspapers in a single day, including a photo.

Wow.

So I talk about, so I talk about how to do that and how companies can do do it and how you don't need to be a big company to do that stuff. So that's in Free pr. That's the book. Free pr.

That's amazing. I'm going to read that book next.

It's really good you got for you guys where you're expanding. Like I was just talking to your new head of, I think like in the IT side he was from, from Fox and Disney.

Head of retention.

Yeah. So Prakash, so Prakash and I were just talking about if you're going to be expanding into the business world, you need to connect what you do now with the left brain business world to the press can help you do that. Because the business people believe what we read in the, in the media. We don't believe marketing. Right. But if you can get Forbes like and I'm not talking about like Forbes writers, like I've been in the physical print edition, a full page article about vivid vision in the actual magazine that and you have a big enough personality that they'll write about you. That's the shit that will connect the dots.

Thank you for that tip.

Yeah.

So in terms of, in terms of your.

He knows that already.

No, no, no, actually we've never, I don't think we've really focused on PR as much as we should.

I'll help you with it.

Yeah, I appreciate that. So Cameron, so other than everything you do business wise, tell us about in the last four minutes we have. Tell us about your personal rituals, your practices, like what do you do for, for wellness, for health, for being in the zone, for taking care of care of yourself.

I'll give you the full. Yeah. The quick and dirty. I'm not that good at it. So I co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs with Hal Elrod. And in the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs I talked about the fact that my miracle mornings often suck. I talked to Wampa Today and Reagan before we came in And I really wanted to go to his 8:30 session this morning. But I woke up at 7:30, I'm like fuck it, I'm hugging the pillow. So I'm not that good at that now. On some areas I'm really good. Like my weight is down 42 pounds from where I was 10 years ago. I used to be 222. I'm 180 this morning. So I watch what I'm eating, I'm eating healthier. I say to my wife I'm only as old as the woman I feel. So I married a woman who's a little younger than me and prettier and she's keeping me focused on being healthy. I'm staying active. I run a marathon. I had my hip replaced two years ago and I'm constantly hiking so I'm probably not that good on routine, but I'm really good on the kind of day to day decisions.

And you're big on Burning Man. Why does Burning man interest you so much?

So my first burn was 2007 and I actually took Tim Ferriss to his first burn in 2008. And my biggest miss in the history of ever in investing happened at Burning Man. One of Tim's friends came to our camp and stayed with us for the week. And it was Wednesday night at about three in the morning and I'm capping, putting MDMA into capsules and I have 360 doses of Molly and I'm capping it at 3 in the morning and I'm getting pitched on this business and he's pitching me it's a founder of a business and he's pitching me on an app and what an app store. We don't know what the App store is in 2008. I thought it was at a shopping mall or like a 7 11. He goes, he's explaining the App Store and then he's explaining what it'll do. And I'm like, I don't get it. He goes, okay, you're on a fucking website. You're going to press a button and a taxi is going to come to you or a limo. I'm like, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Of the five people listening, of the five of us. I said no. John said no. Mark said no. Kevin said no. And Tim put $25,000 into his friend's idea. And that was Garrett Camp, who is the founder of Uber. Six months before he hired Travis and I would have put 25. That was my normal investment round that year was 25 grand at the IPO. Tim's 25,000 was worth 108 million. So I go back to Burning man for those ideas? No, I just. I go back because I like the people. I like disconnecting. I like that no one knows me and I can just blend in. I have to confront all my biggest fears at Burning Man. I'm pretty insecure. I don't like groups. I'd rather be on stage than mixing. So I have to confront all that. I like the music.

And yet you missed the Burning man party we did on Saturday because you were tired.

Yeah, I knew that. I. Yeah, it was an insecurity. And we're traveling the world now, so we didn't have costumes, and I. I don't know, I let my insecurities get in the way. But I will be at the party on the 15th. And I'll be at the party, I think, on the 17th. I'll be on the 18th, too.

Amazing. Awesome.

And the speaker dinner tonight, so we.

Look forward to seeing this. So we have 45 seconds left. Any closing words to anyone here who's thinking about attending your session tomorrow?

I'm gonna say. I'll say one thing so the session tomorrow, you'll really benefit from it. It is for everybody. None of this matters. None of this shit actually matters. We're all gonna die. We're here for a fucking blink in time. Have some fun along the way. Hug some people, have a good time. Because what you're doing to make money doesn't fucking matter.

Thank you. Thank you, Cameron.

Thank you.