How to Thrive in an Entrepreneurial World

But I think now what students are younger, Gen Y and Gen Z should be saying is join an entrepreneurial company, find out what the gaps are in your skill set and then get online, on Google and YouTube, on your own hours or even during work hours and get all that skill set that's there for free. Why go work for a big corporation and pull your hair up when you're a cog in the wheel and waste all this time and just to get some skills when those skills are available. Tonight, right now, for free. Foreign business for me for sure. But I say no to a lot of the stuff that doesn't feed me with energy. So a lot of my business doesn't feel like work. And then I think there's definitely a legacy component to it where I'm not doing this to make money anymore. Like I still am doing it to make money but I'm not like I'm not chasing, you know, the Lamborghini or anything. I'm a proflying private. Like I have had enough and have enough money to do what I want, where I want, whenever I want. So I think I'm definitely trying to make a difference. Difference in many ways. I feel like entrepreneurs are like the fly trying to get out the window and they keep banging their head on the window and they're going to keep trying harder until they get out the window. And I'm always kind of sitting off on the side. I'm going, there's such a better way. Like there's a shortcut, there's a path of least resistance. And because I've seen so many companies over so many decades and help them, I kind of show them the right direction, I can help them get out the door that's right there. So I think a lot of my work is just to help them because I've watched so many get so frustrated for so long. My dad was a great example of this. My dad read my very first book, Double Double. I've written six books. But when he Double Double, he's like, I wish I knew this when I was running my company 30 years ago. Like I didn't know any of this stuff. And, and that was painfully apparent to me because When I was 20 years old I had 12 full time employees, I had systems my dad didn't have in his business. So I think that's probably why I'm doing it is to help entrepreneurial companies globally. One is the lack of vision and clarity where the entrepreneur has an idea of where they're going but their partners, their shareholders, their Suppliers, their customers, the employees. Nobody can read the mind of the entrepreneur. So I've created a system that really helps align everyone so everyone's pulling in that same direction. That's number one. Number two is, I think so many entrepreneurs lack focus, entrepreneurial companies lack focus and they're chasing the shiny object. They're distracted by all the newest trends and what's happening on social media and it's, it's a very complicated world for them where there's, there is some simplicity if they'd focus on the right things. So it's really helping them focus on the critical few things versus the important many and putting systems in place so that their people and their apartments can focus on the critical few things. That would be number two. And then I think the third is I don't find a lot of small to mid sized companies obsess about growing the skill set of their people enough. Whereas if you're a larger enterprise organization, you've got HR departments and learning departments and you've got teams growing people's skills and you've got emerging leaders programs. But if you don't have that in a small to medium sized company, you're always bumping into their glass ceilings. People are always getting frustrated, you're always frustrated with them. If you double the size of the company, nobody can keep up because their skills haven't grown. So I've always believed the leader's core job is to grow people. I created a course called invest in your leaders to give them the skills for that. But I don't find a lot of small to medium sized companies obsess about growing their people enough. So they end up saying, well, I can't delegate this work or I have to do this work because what I always do is I delegate it anyway. And then I spend my time growing the skill sets and the confidence and the connections of my people. So that would be the three I'd come off with. I think that's a very kind of 1990s, 2000 approach, even 1980s approach. But nowadays, like my youngest son is in third year university and he's like, dad, this is pointless. Like I can learn everything that I'm going to learn in this four months on YouTube and Google in the weekend, I can literally find all the information for free, faster, more concise by experts with projects like why am I sitting in a class? I'm like, I don't know man, I can't, I can't give you that answer. You're right, university is completely pointless. So yeah, I think you're right. 30 years ago, 20 years ago, go join the big company, learn from them. But I think now what students are younger, Gen Y and Gen Z should be saying is join an entrepreneurial company, find out what the gaps are in your skill set, and then get online, on Google and YouTube, on your own hours or even during work hours and get all that skill set that's there for free, right? Why go work for a big corporation and pull your hair up when you're a cog in the wheel and waste all this time and just to get some skills when those skills are available Tonight, right now, for free, plug yourself. The invest in your leaders course is 700 bucks. Why go work for some big corporation? I remember when I hired Kimball Musk, Elon's younger brother, to work for me 30 years ago. I was interviewing Kimball and he said that he was being trained in his management program at Queen's University. He was in commerce to be a middle manager in a corporation. And he goes, kill me now. He goes, the last thing I want to do is be a middle manager at some corporation. I want to build one, but I don't want to be a middle manager at one. I think the world has changed very, very quickly. And I'm not even necessarily a big fan of university anymore. Again, back in the 80s and 90s, you needed an MBA to grow in your career. Nowadays, a lot of organizations are wondering why you did the mba, how you can actually rationalize the ROI of the time and the money that you spent on that in terms of opportunity cost. Like, show me the math. And there's not a single MBA that can actually rationalize the the ROI on it. So then it's like, are you the smart person in the room or the dumb person in the room? But 30 years ago, we had to go get the MBA because we had no access to the information, right? We'd go to the library and that one book was checked out. We had to change the entire thesis for our essay. But. But it was just a different world then. Three years ago, two years ago, everyone was terrified that universities are going to know that you're using AI and they're going to check to see if you're using AI. Universities have thrown that out and they're like, you may as well use AI. We know you're using AI anyway, and you better learn how to use AI to be relevant in the business world, because whatever job you have tomorrow, you're going to be leveraging 18 different AI tools, so you may as well use them to get through university too. They know that every student is doing all their work with AI and in two years the university's completely embraced it instead of trying to catch who's doing it. That's pretty powerful. If you're not self motivated, the government's always hiring. The post office is already hiring. Somebody's going to kick you. Like, you need to be self motivated. I was asked by Fortune magazine in 2003, how do you motivate your employees? I said, I don't. I hire motivated people. You need to bring people into your organization that are driven, that are high in precision, that want to learn, that have a desire to, to be a part of a group. Like figure out those core behavioral traits and hire those people. But yeah, and if you're an individual and you think someone's going to give you your career or someone's going to help you get ahead, or someone, you are sadly mistaken. Like you're going to get destroyed in the real world. But that's okay because the, the bell curve shows that 50% of the people aren't necessarily the high achievers. Right? The high achievers are in the top 10% of the bell curve. So there's plenty of room in the middle. And there's lots of jobs, you know, in the bottom third too. Lots of jobs foreign. I was lucky enough in 1998 to be invited to a lunch of a group of entrepreneurs in Vancouver, Canada. And there was an Olympic coach who was presenting and he was presenting on how high performance athletes visualize their event and how they harnessed visualization so that when they were in the moment of performing, they could act completely on instinct. So an example was Mary Lou Retton would walk around the gymnastics floor, the, the famous US Olympian for gymnast, and she would literally stop at each spot on the floor and go through her routine in her mind. And then she'd move to the next spot and go through the routine. Or how skiers would close their eyes at the top of the race and they would ski the course, kind of using their hand to remind them of what was happening on the race course. There's still races that I had from 30 years ago as a skier that I can still feel. I can literally feel the course in my mind because I skied it so many times to, to know it. He taught us about that process in sport. And then we went aside, a few of us, and we were thinking about businesses that used it. And we came up with the idea of homebuilders that every day the general contractor asks the homeowner what they want the home to look like and feel like, or the kitchen renovation. And they get enough ideas of what the finished date looks like that they can create the blueprints or the plans to make that home come true. Then they hand the vision and the blueprints to the employees. The employees can build a home without ever speaking to the homeowner. That process really hit me because I was going through a home build and I realized that everything was happening in front of me by people that I'd never spoken to. So we tried to extract that idea and we brought it into the business world. Brian at 1-800-got-JUNK, myself and another entrepreneur, we were in a forum group in eo. We all wrote what we called our painted picture or our vivid vision for our business. I was was running a private currency company at the time. Brian was running what was called the Rubbish boys. It's now 1-800-got junk and Dan was running a commercial manufacturing company. So we learned the process, we put the process in place. We all had some pretty good early success with it. And then when I joined Brian at, at 1, 800, got junk as his first chief operating officer, you know, I walked in the door and he handed me the vision for what he wanted his company to look like. And I instantly could understand all of the things that we had to build. And I basically handed him the plan. He's like, I don't know how to do any of this. And I said, no, I do. You run it and finance and I'll execute the plan for the next three years. And in the next three years, we went from 2 million to 36 million and then the next three went to 106 because we understood that concept of vision. When I then left 1-800-got junk, I was being asked to speak all over the world. And one of the things I spoke on was this concept of vivid vision, which then became a book. And, you know, now is on the mindvalley quests. And I've been paid all over the world. I think I've been paid to speak in 29 countries about some of these business lessons. What it is is it's a four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future. So you describe what your marketing team looks like, you describe what your marketing to the customer looks like. You describe sales, describe it, you describe finance, you describe your interaction with your customers and your meeting rhythms, your use of technology. You literally have maybe 10 or 15 different areas of your business and you describe each of those with three or four or five bullet points per area. And then you can get a writer to polish it and make these pop off the page and then get a designer to add some design elements to it so it really feels like your company brand. I've written vivid visions for my company for the CEO alliance. I've written one for myself as a human, right? How I show up as a dad and a friend and a lover and a spouse and a confidant and what I do for fun and for travel. And then my wife and I even wrote a vivid vision for our marriage describing all the different aspects of our marriage. So it's that same three year out future state written in enough detail that people can now read your mind. And it's important that you only go three years out because if you lean out too far into the future, you're, you're kind of, it's too far out there that there's not enough tension to make it happen. Oh, we got 10 years, we don't have to worry about it. And one year out, everything is too similar to today, right? So it tends to be a good balance point that we found to work on. So the BHAG by definition is a long term company stretch that from the outside seems impossible and from inside your company seems plausible. And it's not to be measured. So it's. You couldn't measure a computer on every desk. It's not a billion somethings or a million whatever. Those are just big goals that people are confusing how the BHAG works. My BHAG for me and my companies are to have vivid visions replace vision statements worldwide. That's literally my company's bhag. So it's in my books, it's in my speaking, my CEO alliance members use it, it's in my course, like everything is driving towards. And I know that to make that happen, I can then help all these organizations scale. I can give them the leadership team tools to scale. I can give them the plans to scale. So that's my company's bhag. In fact, I think of every company like a jigsaw puzzle that your picture on the front of the box is your vivid vision. And the four corners of your jigsaw puzzle are your core values, your core purpose, your BHAG and your one year plan. And then the four sides of the jigsaw puzzle are all the people systems from recruiting, interviewing, training, selection, onboarding, leadership development, strategic thinking systems, your meeting rhythms and your financial systems. Those are the four sides of the puzzle. And then culture kind of emerges from. From there. That's the way I visualize every business. For me, culture is the alignment with those four things, right? As long as your company is obsessed about core values, meaning you fire people if they break them, you recruit people who live them, you recruit, you reinforce them every day. You do shout outs on, you celebrate them, you coach people on them. Like it's, it's an obsession around living core values. That's. That drives culture, right? Firing people who don't live those drives culture. If you just kind of merely throw them up on the wall, that hurts culture. So culture starts there. Core purpose. Is everyone aligned with some kind of greater purpose? Right. Something. My core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. That's my stated core purpose. Simon Sinek was in my kitchen with me back in 2007. I was making dinner. This was two years before he wrote the book Start with why he was on our board of advisors two years before that. He helped me come up with my purpose, my core purpose, or my why. So everything I do is aligned with helping entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. My six books, my leadership course, my CEO alliance, my speaking, my group coaching that I do with CEOs, everything helps entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. It also allows me to say no. My bhag, that's the third corner is that big, hairy, audacious goal. It's that to colonize Mars. It gives people something longer term and exciting and cool to build. And for me, it's like if you ask the three bricklayers in Barcelona, Spain, a hundred years ago, what are you doing? First guy goes, I'm making bricks. Second guy goes, we're building a wall and I'm making the bricks to build the left wall. And the third guy says, we're building the Sagrada Familia. It's going to be one of the greatest churches in the world. And I get to make the bricks to build the left wall of the cathedral. So the culture comes off of having really big purpose in some of the most meaningless or menial work. And then the fourth weight culture comes from is having a plan so that people realize, okay, we're driving towards something. I see value in my work. I see how my work contributes. I see what I'm doing, what it's making happen. Culture emerges off that. Culture is not the free massages or the free lunch. Those are perks, which are fine. But culture is the alignment with those four things. You have to fire anybody inside of your company that breaches core values. You have to treat them like a cultural cancer, right? If you went to the doctor today and the doctor said, hey Carl, you've got a cancerous tumor in your lung, but it's okay, you can leave it there for a while, it probably won't be much or we can take it out, what would you like? You'd be like, get that sucker out, right? Well, if I come to you and say, hey, Carl, you've got this person in your company, he's toxic, he's a bit of a cancer, nobody likes him, he's driving everybody crazy, he's pissing people off. I know he. But you can keep him, just keep him over in the corner and let him do his thing. No, you get him out of the company because other people start getting frustrated. You're gonna have an A player come to you and say, you know what, I'm quitting because I can't work with that jerk anymore. You're gonna have customers that aren't giving you all of the revenue because they don't like that jerk over there. You have people that feel like the jerk's getting special treatment and I have to show up at meetings, but we don't make him come because he's a jerk. Or he gets the private office so he doesn't disturb anybody, but I get to work on the floor. You have to cut those people out of the company. And when you do, it sends such a shockwave through the organization that core values matter and results matter, that A players and B players rise to the top. You can often fire the C players and you don't even need to replace them. The first one is the examination internally. If you know you've got somebody you're having to fire, the examination has to happen as to why did we hire them in the first place. What did we do wrong in the interview process? What did we do wrong in the onboarding process? What did we do wrong in the training process? What did we do wrong in the management and leadership of that person that we're now having to fire them because we were excited on day one? I really go back to that self examination. First and foremost, before I end up firing somebody, I definitely sit down with them and have that come to Jesus meeting of look, here's why your potentially job is at risk. It's because of core values or results. Here's what we need from you. Here's why we need this from you. Here's what I'm willing to do to help you get there. How do you feel about it and what do you need from us to help you get there and what are you willing to do to make sure you get there? I'll often have that meeting with somebody on Thursday and then I'll say to them, take tomorrow off, go home and think about it for the weekend. Come back in Monday and tell me what you need from me and what you're going to do to change one of those two things. You know, results are core values. About 10 or 15% of the people come back on Monday and they're like, f you, I'm out of here. You're a jerk. I'm quitting. I'm like, cool, See you don't let the door hit your house on the way out. The other 85% are like, yeah, I'm going to stay. I'm going to work through it. I may not be happy, but I understand. Here's what I'm prepared to do. Here's what you're prepared to do. If we're lined up, I'm going to keep them. And from that second forward, I'm going to work to help them get there. I'm going to celebrate every all their successes. I'm going to catch them doing something right. I'm going to leverage situational leadership and coaching and better delegation systems to help that person. I'm not going to keep looking at all the stuff they're doing wrong, but I'm only giving them probably 20 to 30 days to get there, to really start making changes. You don't give them a 90 day plan because business is changing so quickly. We don't have 90 days to do stuff anymore. And then if they're improving, awesome. If they're not, that's when you sit down, you go, look, it's not working out. I'm sorry, it's not working out. And you make the cut. If it's a real core values breach, it's like a two or three strikes and you're out, right? It's not like you go to church and you say you're 12 hail marys and your three our fathers and your sins are forgiven. It's like you don't break the core values, period. It was all college pro. College Pro Painters was probably one of the best developmental learning programs of almost any company on the planet back in the 80s and 90s. And the reason was there were 60 people at the head office. I ended up in the top 30 people of the head office. And every year we had to hire and train 800 university students to become franchisees. And then in one month, those 800 franchisees had to go out and recruit, hire and train 8,000 students to paint houses. So that meant over five months, we had to recruit, hire and train 8,800 students. And then between May 1 and August 31, we painted $64 million of external painting of houses. So when you're building a $60 million company from scratch, hiring 9,000 people and training them, you become operationally world class at the recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and the leadership development of people at the head office level. They were bringing in consultants. We had book clubs. We were watching videos. Like I was watching videos of Steve Jobs in 1990 in a passion for Excellence and A Search of Excellence with Tom Peters. I have videos of Steve Jobs that I still have content of today with NeXT computers, running his business meetings and talking about culture and what matters. Like, we were studying some of the best companies. I was getting trained in situational leadership when I was 23 years old. The skill development that I think GE and Starbucks and, you know, would. Would have built into their companies, we were getting that at College Pro Painters. I was a reference for Elon and Kimball in their first round of funding for Zip2 in January of 95. And because they weren't going to back Elon because he hadn't done anything, he just dropped out of school. So Kimball had actually been with College Pro for two years, two summers. And I got to explain College Pro Painters and his expertise on running teams and running operations and time management, marketing. They tried to raise 600,000 from Kleiner Perkins. And Kimball called me that night. He's like, what did you tell them? I'm like, did it go bad? He goes, no, they gave us $3 million instead of 600,000. And it was entirely based on his experience of having run a company. And I was his boss. My leadership training was. I got very, very fortunate at a very young age. I think there's, there's really good thought leaders that are sharing information on Instagram and on YouTube. I'd say follow them, play one less video game and watch one more video of a thought leader. Read chapters of books about the, the areas that you want to get better in. Like, if you want to get better at time management, watch three or four videos on time management and go read two or three books like Getting Stuff Done by David Allen on time management. That'll get you to a bronze or a silver in kind of competency in that skill level pretty quickly. You know, if you want to get better at running meetings, read meeting suck. Read Death by Meetings. Go watch two videos on meetings. Harvard Business Reviews have great booklets on almost any leadership skill you need just kind of cobble it together. That's what's cool is all the information is sitting right now on your phone. We don't have to go to a library to find this. We just have to go on chat GPT, you know, how do I run better meetings? And boom, it gives you the system. How do I interview people? Boom. What questions do I ask for? Culture. Boom. What? Like it's crazy. So it's just, it's understanding what questions to ask. So sometimes that's turning to your peers and saying, where do I, where am I weak as a, as a leader, where can I improve? And then figuring that out, asking your boss, doing the self examination of yourself. Instead of blaming external environments, look at your own cause. Foreign. The rule of 27. So there's an old adage in marketing that a prospect needs to see you nine times before they take action. But now because we're being bombarded in so many different ways, we only see one of every three things that are put in front of us. So I need to hit you 27 times so that you see me nine times so that you take action. So I think it's being okay with that. I'm in London, England right now. I was out for dinner four nights ago chatting with this couple standing at the door of the restaurant and the woman says, you know, where are you from? Blah blah, blah, and what was your business? And I said, the CEO Alliance. And the guy goes, the CEO alliance. What's your name? And I said, Cameron. And he goes, what's your last name? I said, cameron Herald. He pulls out his cell phone, he goes, is this from you? And it's a text message from the day before. It goes, hi, my name is Cameron Herald. I wanted to introduce you to the CEO Alliance. He hadn't deleted it and it was the very first text message we'd sent out to our database. Now I'm sure there's lots of other people that deleted it, but here's a guy from the United States in the uk and then, I kid you not, I get a message from him on WhatsApp. Hey Cameron, it's Ko. We were waiting for ice cream at the, at the restaurant and then I found out you and your team wrote me earlier that day via text. I love the serendipitous nature of the meeting. As if that guy's not going to become a client marketing. We're being bombarded and I'm Kind of the same. But every once in a while something gets through to me. It catches me at the right time, in the right moment or I see you on Instagram, I see you there. I hear you on the podcast. Somebody, I see somebody reading your book. Like it's the omnipresence, it's the 27 hits is how you're going to get people needs to be more omnipresent. You have to worry about your return on ad spend and you have to worry about the magic number, like what your marketing is turning into in terms of revenue. Companies all need to know the lifetime value of their customer and the cost of acquisition and the cost conversion cycle between those. If you don't, you're dead. I spend a lot of time with our co alliance members, my group coaching, like working with clients on that stuff so they get it. But yeah, I think the numbers are getting, we're gonna, they're gonna be getting more. I just heard of a funny tool today. It's called Pay Human and it's a new online platform that AI chatbots can use to hire a human being to help them figure something out. If the AI tool can't figure it out, it's like, it's like the opposite of us looking for outsourcing people. This is like AI chatbots can now outsource to humans. If the AI tool can't solve the problem, that's how fast technology is changing. So this is where I disagree with some thought leaders that talk about let read a book a week or read a book a month. Completely disagree. What you need to do is identify what you're working on over the next quarter and then find the resources, books or videos or courses that most apply to what you're working on over the next quarter that you can get better at. So kind of take your, your this vast library to Barnes and Noble or the Internet and tailor it to okay, if I'm firing someone in two weeks, how can I learn how to fire someone better? Let's read about that. Or if I have a board meeting coming up or it's kind of focusing your learning around that. That that's my big starting point. The reason my invest in your leaders course is so powerful for companies is anyone who manages people needs to be strong at the 12 modules in my course today and next week and the week after. Like everyone who manages people needs to be good at situational leadership. They need to be good at coaching, they need to be good at delegation, they need to be strong at time management. They need to understand Project management. They need to be good at handling conflict, they need to be better at delegation, they need to be good at interviewing, they need to be good at running meetings. Like, I nailed the 12 core skills that anyone managing people needs to be good at. That's a great starting point for anybody right now, right? For any company. Plug 10 of your people through that, grow their skill set as leaders so that then they can work on their functional skills. Second. But right now, so much of the adult learning happens because there's a gap between what we know and what we want to know. If you don't have a gap created, sometimes that information just passes by you because there's no real reason for to trap it. But if you're trying to target your learning around something you really care about or something you're working on right now, you're more apt to take that information and synthesize it. And then you can practice it, and then you can do it in their job and then you can reflect on it. So the cycle of learning, you go from abstract conceptualization to active experimentation to active experience to reflective observation. And if they don't go through that cycle, they're not really going to retain any of the information. So it becomes fairly pointless or very random. Well, the entrepreneurs, you know, their biggest strength and their biggest weakness is their add. So the ADD is not a disorder for an entrepreneur. It's our superpower because we see what's happening with the customer, the market, the suppliers, economy, our employees, the metrics, the website. We see it all, we take it all in, and we get so overwhelmed with it that we need to delegate it. So a lot of these random ideas, we don't know what to do with them. And in the absence of a system to keep track of our ideas, to start them in some organized fashion, we need it out of our brain. We tend to delegate it in a way that the person thinks we have to start. So we kind of become our problem on our own. So creating, I teach all of the COOs that are in the CEO Alliance a system to take that idea from the entrepreneur, understand the idea, filter it, and decide whether you green light, yellow light, or red light the project. Green light, meaning we'll put it in place, but we might need to bump something that's on our current plan because we only have so much people, time and money. Yellow light mean we're going to do it, but not right now. And red. Well, now that we've asked all those questions, it sounded like a good idea, but now we're killing it for the entrepreneur that that's kind of saves them from themselves. That's number one. The way I try to prioritize what to work on. The first is what's the low PETA factor things, right? What's the low pain in the ass factor? Projects that are going to give me returns, which returns can I get that are going to pay dividends forever? Kind of like if I launch the satellite and I get returns for the next 10 years, that might be a good one. Third is will it help my employees be happier or my customers be happier or drive more gross margin or profitability? If it doesn't really hit on those things, it becomes a distraction. So I kind of start around that if I have very happy employees, they're going to take care of my customers which is going to drive more revenue and gross margin. But if all of I'm focusing on some back end thing or making something better or plugging something in, but it's frustrating my employees or it's taking away margins, you often don't get the return on investment or the return on time that you're hoping for. Foreign business. For me, it's always been the employee net promoter score first, right? If I'm building a business where my employees are super happy, I know that they're going to build the business and make it more successful and it's more fun, doesn't feel like work. And so I usually start there on the business success. You know, when we were building one, 800, got junk, we wanted to build a globally admired brand. A company that I was coaching in Florida Blue Grace Logistics. I helped them build this world class company culture where they became the number one company in the state of Florida to work for. They won best company to work for by Ernst and Young. They were winning awards in PR and becoming a great company to work for. And then they went out and raised $255 million from Warburg Pincus. Partially because of their growth, partially because of this kind of strong cult like environment that they had. So I think that's how I kicked on the business side. On the personal side, it's. It's really kind of examining in the mirror, right? It's doing that self examination of where can I show up and how can I be better? How can I be better as a spouse, as a husband, as a friend, as a father, trying to ask the tough questions, right? What do you need from me? And me asking the tough questions of how can I be better for my wife and I, it's by looking at our vivid vision that we talked about earlier, the vivid vision of ourselves or the vivid vision of me and where am I falling short and how can I keep driving towards that and then also realizing that, you know, I'm always going to be growing, right? I'm never going to be perfect. I'm never going to be there. So just keep trying along that path, along that journey.