In this interview, entrepreneur and business coach Cameron Herold shares a series of vivid anecdotes and practical advice aimed at founders who are overly involved in day‑to‑day operations. He recounts how, at 1‑800‑GOT‑JUNK, he and the head of IT forced CEO Brian to take a seven‑day vacation by changing his laptop password, illustrating the power of intentional unplugging. Herold explains how his coaching focus shifted from CEOs to their second‑in‑command, arguing that CEOs should define the vision while COOs execute the details; he cites his work with companies such as ButcherBox, MailXL, and Acceleration Partners. He also describes his personal transition to a minimalist, location‑independent lifestyle—selling homes, cars, and possessions, traveling with only two carry‑on suitcases, and planning his year through meticulous time‑blocking of family events, festivals, and business commitments. Throughout, he frames traits like attention‑deficit disorder and manic energy as entrepreneurial superpowers that require delegation and mood‑management to avoid burnout. The conversation culminates in a call‑to‑action for COOs and CEOs in North America to claim a free copy of his book, The Second in Command, reinforcing his core message: leaders must step back, delegate, and design systems that allow them to operate at peak effectiveness without being indispensable.
Chapters
Too many entrepreneurs try to grind it out at 60, 70 hours a week. You get diminishing returns by the time you hit 30 hours. So we did this at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Brian, the CEO and founder, was getting ready to go off on his real first, probably vacation around 2004 since I started with him in 2000. And the head of IT and I decided that we were going to make Brian unplug for 7 days. So Roman, the head of IT, grabbed Brian literally as he's getting ready to go out the door and he said, I need your laptop for a second. I need to change something related to, you know, Junknet, our internal system. So he basically lied right to Brian. Brian's face. He— Brian opened the laptop, Roman changed the password, handed the laptop back to Brian, and he goes, you may as well leave this here right now because I've changed your password. And Brian's like, what? And he goes, dude, we got it. And we're not going to phone you if the company's on fire because you won't be able to do anything, you're on vacation. We'll call the fire department. Have a good week. So I started coaching entrepreneurs back in 2007, so right after leaving 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I landed 3 coaching clients right away that were all paying me 6 figures to coach them for the year. One was called Nurse Next Door, one was called Fairway Divorce, and one was called Achievers. It used to be called I Love Rewards. They all went on to have like massive, massive growth. And I was sitting behind the scenes coaching the CEO and coaching their leadership team. What I started to recognize over the years was I was teaching the entrepreneur how to do things, but it was really their second in command that was doing it. So what I realized was the CEO needed to know what had to happen, but the COO needed to know how to do it. So I started to coach not only the CEO, but the COO. So right now I'm coaching the COO of ButcherBox. I don't coach the CEO, I coach the COO of ButcherBox. We do monthly calls together. I coach the COO of MailXL. I coach the COO of Tenuity, which was a 2,000-person marketing agency, the COO of Acceleration Partners. So I was teaching the person who was actually making the entrepreneur's dream come true, Giving them the systems on hiring, on people, on operations, on meeting rhythms, on strategic thinking, on financial management, and giving the tools to the person who's actually making it happen. But then letting the CEO knowing what has to happen, but not how to do it.
You decided to sell your house here in Phoenix.
Yep. And my home in Vancouver.
And you live, you know, you've lived a lot of places. That seems hard for me.
It's hard.
'Cause a lot of times when I'm on the road, I'm like, I just can't wait to be in my own bed.
Yeah. So, Just over 4 years ago, my wife and I sold our home in Arcadia in Scottsdale. We sold our home in Vancouver in Canada, sold our cars, sold our furniture, sold all of our assets, gave stuff away. I actually have 2 carry-on suitcases and I've been in 69 countries in the last 50 months, some of them 6, 7 times. Like I've been to Dubai 9 times in the last 4 years. So the impetus was my youngest son decided to go away to university in Montreal, which was closer to London, England than it was to Vancouver. I'm like, why am I gonna wait in Vancouver to see you? You can come to Europe. So they were excited about that opportunity. So for the first year, we kept our homes and we just traveled. And then after we realized we don't need the homes anymore, let's unencumber ourselves of everything. Let's get rid of all the stuff that we don't really need. So it was just to go see the world and explore. And then I've got a very good team around me. I decided to delegate everything except genius. And I just have a really good kind of organization around my skills. I can tell you exactly where I'm going to be until the end of January. I know exactly what city by week. Until the end of January.
Yeah, I'm pretty like, Joe's like, dude, why are you missing my meetings? I'm like, Joe, I go to the $100K and I always make your annual meetings. Yeah. But I'm like, dude, I like, it's amazing when I go to those events.
Yep.
And I need those. And I'm like, I need next year. Yeah. I need to time block all of next year.
Yeah. So what I do for time blocking is I put the important things in my calendar first.
Yes.
So those are my kids' spring breaks, my kids' Christmases, like my kids' Christmas and New Year's. I put the festivals. I put my festivals in place. I put my retreats in place. I put my business events in place. I put my Canadian Thanksgiving in place. All that stuff's in the calendar. And then, I organize around that as to which countries do I want to go to or where am I going to slow things down and enjoy life. Alright. If you're the COO of a company that does at least $2 million or greater in revenue or you're the CEO of a company and you're in the United States or Canada, if you would like a copy of my book, The Second in Command, for free, Go to cooalliance.com/freebook. That's cooalliance.com/freebook, and I will mail you a copy for free. I will even cover the shipping. Jump on that one today. Attention deficit is called a disorder by a teacher, but you don't find a lot of inspiring teachers running companies. Einstein. Yeah, so it's not— it's what it is for us is a superpower because we see everything. We see what's happening with the economy, the market, our suppliers, the customers. We notice metrics jumping off the dashboards. We see the trends. We're hyper-aware of everything, and it's so overwhelming that we have to delegate that to other people to handle it for us. That's a superpower. But if we're— so the problem is that the doctors and teachers don't understand us because they're wired differently. They don't have this superpower at all.
They're the farmers.
But if they had it, they'd be disasters. I wouldn't want a doctor who was ADD. Yeah, right. I want a doctor who's laser-focused. The other one is the bipolar disorder, the mania. And I'm fairly manic right now. That's a superpower in this situation. It's good energy. I don't want to make a decision right now because I'm a little bit too manic. The stress and depression is simply us course correcting. So we have to catch ourselves when we're in depression and then unplug from the business and treat ourselves more like workhorses or racehorses. Too many entrepreneurs try to grind it out at 60, 70 hours a week. You get diminishing returns by the time you hit 30 hours, which means go to the gym, take vacation time, have some meditation, go on a hike. Disconnect a little bit so that when you're working, you're a complete machine.
One of the things that I've realized is, you know, you look at all the things we've got to do and how busy my schedule is for a month. And the funny thing is, you go out of town, something happens. God forbid it's a bad thing, like, like some death in the family. But let's just say you leave and you, you're going to make a week out of this, a wedding you feel like you got to be at or want to be at. Yeah, but I'm just saying you just completely— you get rid of your schedule. You're like, I got all this stuff planned. You miss it all. You go back and you're like, wait a minute, the world didn't fall apart.
Didn't stop at all.
Everything kind of worked itself out.
So we did this at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Brian, the CEO and founder, was getting ready to go off on his real first probably vacation around 2004 since I started with him in 2000. And the head of IT and I decided that we were going to make Brian unplug for 7 days. So Roman, the head of IT, grabbed Brian literally as he's getting ready to go out the door. And he said, I need your laptop for a second. I need to change something related to, you know, Junknet, our internal system. So he basically lied right to Brian's face. Brian opened the laptop. Roman changed the password, handed the laptop back to Brian. He goes, you may as well leave this here right now because I've changed your password. And Brian's like, what? And he goes, dude, we got it. And we're not going to phone you if the company's on fire because you won't be able to do anything. You're on vacation. We'll call the fire department. Have a good week.
Wow.
When Brian walked out the door, a little bit of nervousness, but left his laptop on the table and took his first real vacation. That was a foundational, formative shift for the company because we realized that by being workaholics, we weren't inspiring our people. We weren't getting more of the right stuff done. We were burning ourselves out.
