In this keynote, Cameron Herold argues that leaders waste time on underperforming C‑players while neglecting high‑impact A‑players. He urges firing low performers, giving visibility and “handcuffing” top talent to prevent poaching. He illustrates his point with stories: recruiting senior staff from Intrawest to 1‑800‑GOT‑JUNK, a beach‑volleyball anecdote that quantifies the outsized value of A‑players, and data from Topgrading showing a wrong hire can cost 15 × the salary. He links talent quality to rapid AI adoption and profitability, claiming a few A‑players can out‑perform many C‑players even with lower payroll. He closes with a free‑book offer for CEOs/COOs and a stark warning that paying peanuts yields monkeys.
Chapters
Stop spending time with your underperformers. Fire your underperformers and spend your time with your A players. Why am I not spending time with my A players and I'm spending time with the Cs? Now my A players feel like the ugly stepchild. Like, why are you spending time with the jerk? Because the jerk's not doing well. Yeah, but I'm doing well. I want your time. I want your visibility. I just want to hang with you. I would get more results here than back there. That's where the real growth comes from in your organization. is the right people in the right seats and you spending your time with the right people and you making sure that your A-players are handcuffed to your company. And if you don't have your A-players handcuffed to your company, guys like me come and poach them and I do it for fun. I'm not kidding. Who here has heard of Whistler and Blackcomb? Whistler and Blackcomb used to be owned by Intrawest. In 2006, Intrawest was acquired by Fortress, which is a hedge fund in New York City. Now, a ski resort company being acquired by a hedge fund company. I'm like, huh, I think your culture is going to kind of change. But I wanted the mid to senior level people at Intrawest to come and work for us at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, right? We're approaching $100 million in revenue. We were a cult. They were a cult. I'm like, we got to get some of these people. So I knew 3 people that knew people at Intrawest. I asked for introductions. 6 weeks later, 6 of the top 10 talent people inside of Intrust had signed agreements to work at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Great people can be poached and brought into great cultures, but they're not going to sit with an average company. And if you don't have them handcuffed, again, guys like me will poach them, or my search firms that I work with will poach them. All right, 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, 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. The wrong person inside of your company costs you 15 times their annual salary. The data from a group called Topgrading says that if you're paying someone $100 grand a year and they're the wrong person, it's costing you $1.5 million. Because of the opportunity cost, because of the time you're spending with them, because of the people they're pissing off, because of the mistakes they're causing, because of fraud. There's so much cost and waste in having the wrong people. It's just better to get rid of them completely. So I was speaking to a group of about 2,000 people in Dubai, a group called Mindvalley. I came off the stage and I was speaking with a guy who's 6'7. I'm 6'4. And I was asking him, what do you do for fun? He said, I play volleyball. I'm like, like how much? He goes, I play pro. I'm like, oh shit. So you play 2-on-2 pro beach volleyball? He goes, yeah. I said, well, I played on my high school team and I played in college, recreational in college. I said, if we had like 6 of my buddies and I didn't even have a chance to ask the rest of the question. He goes, dude, we'd beat you every game. I'm like, so you and your partner could beat me and 5 of my friends, like 2 on 6? He goes, we'd beat you every game. So I thought about it. I've been kind of obsessed about this for the last 12 months. And again, I've been growing companies for 30 years. This concept hit me so hard that A players are free. If I had 2 A players paying them $200 grand a year each against 6 C players paying them $100 grand a year each, the 2 A's would destroy the 6 C's. And I've got $600,000 in payroll against $400,000 in payroll. The $400,000 in payroll would destroy us. The reason that most of your companies are not really embracing AI across every single function in every single business area is you have very average people that aren't strong enough in AI. If you brought in really strong people that are already obsessed with AI, they would change the profitability and trajectory of your company overnight. It's very, very hard when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
