Mastering Leadership, Tech, and Personal Growth with Cameron Herold

We need to understand how to leverage computers, how to leverage the different tools that computers can do. I saw a CEO on a plane 10 years ago typing like this, and my first thought was, if I was on his board, I would give him three weeks to get his typing skills to 70 words a minute, or I would fire him as CEO of his company. You just can't run a company and type like this. You can't run a company and think that people are going to be able to deliver at the rate that AI can start to deliver some things. Normally when I do these place, remind everybody it is really an open format. I'm also going to let the others on the call because we've got a lot of smart people here answer some of the questions as well. And then I'll try to go last, which I think is a really good reminder for all of us as leaders, that every meeting that we're in, we should be the last person to speak. The reality is our job as leaders is to grow our people's skills and to grow their confidence. And the more that we're sharing our ideas and our opinions, the less that we're letting them share their ideas and their opinions. If we speak first, we're swaying them a little bit. And really what we to do is step back and just say to the team, what do you think? What are your ideas? And create a safe space for them that they feel good about sharing. And often they'll share an idea that's either the same as ours or better than ours. And sometimes we don't need to say anything at all. I remember I was at the Warren Buffett shareholders meeting back in 2008. Now, someone in the audience would ask Warren Buffett a question, and he would very clearly answer the question. And then he would turn to Charlie Munger right beside him, and he'd say, charlie, anything, dad. And Charlie'd say, nothing, dad. And then the second question, and Warren would give this amazing answer, and then he'd turn to Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Anything, dad. Nothing, dad. And, you know, after the seventh question, Charlie might add something, but he didn't feel the need to be adding and communicating. And I think we need to remember that as leaders that God gave us two ears and one mouth, and we need to use them more in that ratio. I'm going to try to answer at least after somebody else gives it a stab or shares their experience, and then we'll open it up to any questions that any of you have. The second thing that I like to do is start off with Just something I've been thinking a lot about and two things really. The first one is I've been thinking a lot about AI and the second thing I've been thinking about is communities where we as leaders and our second in commands can continue to grow. I'll kind of go on the leaders one first. Often CEOs are a part of a community. Jim, I know you're a part of the Genius Network and I think you're also part of Strategic Coach. You know, Nick, you went to a Wayfinders event. Chad and Matt and Zach and Hugh, are you guys parts of any communities at all? Ypo Vistage. Huge opportunities to do that. Lacy, I know you're a member of the COO alliance. Matt, are you a member of the CEO alliance yet?

Jordan is in COO all and that's.

Really his, you know, his thing. So you guys, your CEO is a member as well. As CEOs. And as CEOs it's really important to be in one or two communities. They can be online communities, they can be Facebook communities. But I think it's the cross pollination of ideas and it forces us as CEOs to step out of the business to work on the business and not in the business. It also allows us to do what I call ideas having sex, where you take an idea from one group and an idea from another group and they usually spawn into something else. I did seven years with Strategic Coach and seven years in Genius Network and four Baby Bathwater events, five Mastermind Talks events, four years as an entrepreneur's organization member, two War Room events. I would get a whole bunch of ideas from the Genius Network and I often never got any ideas from Strategic Coach. But the time that I was at Strategic Coach was when I was able to take my ideas from other groups and put them in place. Or I would be at the Entrepreneurs Organization event and then I went to like 9 or 10 of the main 5 day TED conferences. I would meet people that I would know from one community and spend time with them in another. And it was always this cross pollination of ideas and also pulling myself out of the day to day that forced me to delegate more, allowed me to think at a higher level, usually inspired me and connected the dots in different ways. And I think as CEOs it's important to not just be in one community, but to be in at least two or three. Not to be a Mastermind junkie, but definitely to be really cognizant of the fact that if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room. And often the room that we're in is our meeting rooms, right? Often we're showing up as the CEO. But what about the opportunities to connect and network with lots of other CEOs? Nick and I just spent 10 or 12 days in Uganda together. And I think what we went through together we never would have experienced in a meeting room or in a boardroom doing some of the hardest hiking I've ever done in my life and hanging out with gorillas and going deep and vulnerable in conversations. And those lessons are things that we bring back into our business that really help supercharge things, right? It supercharges the relationships, relationships with our suppliers and our partners and our employees and our leadership team. So really thinking a lot about communities and our ability to kind of network, spend time away from the business. But you're actually working on the business, right? When you're in these communities, you're generating ideas and inspiration and networks and connections. And that is working in the business, right? It's just working in it in a very strategic way. The second thing that I've been thinking a lot about and Hugh nailed it, is AI. I don't know when I'll stop talking about AI. Possibly never, because it really is changing the landscape of business. And there's an AI for that shows that there are currently, as of today, 5,113 different AI tools. Chat GPT is one of the 5,100 tools that exist today. And there's currently 1,445 identifiable AI tasks that exist. That's a lot of things that AI could be doing for our business. I'll just show you an example of one I use today and then I'll. I'll talk show you what I've been thinking about, you know, as it comes to AI in business. I just did a podcast interview. Literally got off the interview and I said to ChatGPT, please write a bio I can read to introduce Gladys Kong, the COO of near, as a guest on our Second in Command podcast, Gladys Discusses. And all I did was scribble down some notes from my book as I was doing the podcast of the things she discussed. And I said, make this a strong intro for me to read. This is what it came back with. I didn't even read it. I was like, that's too long. So I said, make it 50% shorter. This is what it came back with. And I'm like, that's pretty good. So I just read that. That was my intro. I Mean, that's way better than me or my team could do. And that took me all of about two minutes to come up with a really good, strong intro bio that I can then read. I've used ChatGPT to write Phantom stock agreements, to write blog posts, to write headlines. I had it create 20 captions for some photos that we're going to be sharing. The opportunity to get ideas to 80% or 90% really, really quickly is huge. So here's the challenge I gave my team this week. I said to my team this week that the only employee whose job is at risk because of AI is the employee that does not embrace AI. And it's very similar to when the personal computer came into the workforce back in 1989 or 2000 or 1990. We need to understand how to leverage computers, how to leverage the different tools that computers can do. I saw a CEO on a plane 10 years ago typing like this. And my first thought was if I was on his board, I would give him three weeks to get his typing skills to 70 words a minute or I would fire him as CEO of his company. You just can't run a company and type like this. You can't run a company and think that people are going to be able to deliver at the rate that AI can start to deliver some things. But the key to remember is it's not just chatgpt. That's one thing. So here's the challenge I've given my employees every week for the next 50 weeks. They have to spend one hour a week playing with some AI tools. I don't care which it is. And they have to show up on Monday and demo one thing they've used AI for this week to make themselves faster or more efficient or automate processes. I don't even care what it is. But every employee every week has to do an update of one thing they've used AI for to get a little bit better. Imagine if we brought that kind of a mentality into our work and let employees know that again, the only employee whose job's at risk is the ones who don't embrace AI. So any thoughts around the masterminds or AI before we kind of drop into questions and kind of general discussion?

Nick and I came up with an idea and we kind of implemented this with our employees as well, where we are requiring them to spend an hour a week utilizing AI tools. We just did that, what, last week? Nick?

Yes.

This would be the first full week of doing it.

And they have to go and present to their managers and Then the managers bring it to Nick and I. So we're pretty excited to do that. And then I think eventually we're going to do like an AI newsletter once we get it rolling.

So yeah, you know what's really cool about it is it's kind of like a modern day version of the suggestion box. Right. Remember like 20 years ago, every company had a suggestion box and it was out on the workflow and you wanted employees to write suggestions. Every once in a while there's a suggestion that's pretty good. And if we as leaders, instead of telling them what to do with the tools, just say, hey, these tools exist. And if we give them an hour a week to play with stuff, they're going to be replacing way more than an hour a week of their time. Right. They're going to automate and optimize and also get more confidence in their jobs. Anybody else doing some stuff with AI, We've kind of used it, I guess.

For the basic aspect of SEO.

Doing blog posts on the website some and play with it. I, I tend to play with it more than most people do in our company.

And I think a lot of them.

Are scared thinking in the home service.

Businesses that AI could replace anything.

So I'm still young and tech driven.

So I'll probably play more with it.

Well, the good thing is you can play with it and then you can share what you did and what you learned. Right. It's kind of like what I just did. If I share those examples with my team, it inspires them to think of what they might be able to do. Right. I heard Somebody take an 8 page legal agreement and have ChatGPT summarize it as one paragraph with grade 8 reading level language. That's amazing, right, Jim? The amount of stuff that you guys have to read and go through and there's no way that you can go through it. It's literally a copy in place and rewrite as a grade eight. And the reality is, is it perfect? No, but it's pretty perfect enough, right?

Yeah. We're talking a lot about really two things. One is legal document review, which we do a lot of as well as deal review. So when entrepreneurs are looking at investing in a real estate deal, especially a syndicated real estate deal or a private equity deal or something like that, both of those areas we're looking at very hard because we obviously have to be very accurate. We can't just rely on AI. But I think it, what it does and I think copywriters who are afraid of losing their job, what it actually does is makes the greatest copywriters even greater. Just like I always think of TurboTax, and TurboTax came onto the marketplace. A lot of CPA firms were like, oh, this is going to put us out of business. And what it did is it put out of business the tax preparers that were doing the most simple basic tax returns. But the ones that were doing complicated business returns, it actually made them even more valuable because people who tried to do it on their own knew that they needed the expertise. So I think the same thing with AI is if you're an expert in your field, this will just allow all the kind of the basic stuff to get done so that then you're starting from a much higher level and you can spend your time on really where your value is not doing the basic stuff. I love that.

Any thoughts around the communities? Any thoughts around that or any hesitation around that?

I really do love the alliance for myself, and I really see a lot of other COOs, like, get into it. It takes a minute. I know, like, last call, there was a guy on there for the very first time, and. And I tried to, like, I called him out a little bit about it. I'm like, you're pretty quiet. And he, you know, he opened up a little bit about, you know, like, he was a little nervous. And I'm like, you know, there's no need to be nervous. Like, this is a community to, you know, talk, air your frustrations. And like, we're all here dealing with the same shit. It is like a very unique connection that you get to have. And I'm very thankful for it because one in a million business, and it can suck sometimes.

It's hard, right? When we're sitting in our jobs and we're doing. We're working as hard as we can, and often we don't have that safe space or we don't have the time to sit back and just say, how is everybody else approaching stuff? You know, we've all seen the fly, right, Working hard, trying to get out the window. And that fly is going to keep banging its head and keep trying to get out the window. And then what happens? It's always dead on the windowsill. And if the fly would ever sit back for a second and listen to us sitting in the room, we're like, dude, there's a door right here. Turn, go at the goddamn door. Like, and sometimes our peers can see that. And then I'll give an example, Chad, for a second. You know, you run a painting business, Chad. You could probably talk to 12 other people that run painting businesses in the similar industry to you in different markets that are never going to compete with each other. If you could go get like 12 people who run businesses about the same size or bigger who want to share resources with each other all over Zoom sometimes that it's kind of like the dealer 20 group, you know, the car dealers get together and they're all from different cities. Well, the guy from Montreal and the woman from Dallas and the guy from Seattle, they're never going to compete. So what they do is they give all their secrets to each other and what happens is they destroy the rest of their market. And I think that's what we're trying to come from as well. The other part that I always think about from these mastermind communities is, is that you're going to learn just as much from someone outside of your industry as you do from someone inside your industry. Do you know that there's not a single company that I've ever coached that I actually understand their business. I coached the CEO and the second in command at Sprint and I have no idea how a cell phone company works. They're the 82nd largest company in the United States. I coached them for 18 months. I have no clue. The guy that I was coaching, his base salary was $2.7 million a year. I have no business coaching this guy. Right. But it didn't matter that I didn't know his industry because I didn't talk to him about his industry. That's something else to remember as well, is that the ideas that we can get can come from different industries or from people within our industry in non competing team territories, non competing markets. And you don't have to worry about anybody letting your secret out. There's nothing that secret about what we do. You know, there's really nothing that you're ever going to share that's really going to put your business at risk. What really puts our business at risk is staying inside that container and being fearful of talking and getting ideas.

I'd love just to comment on masterminds because it's been such a huge game changer for us and our business over the years. Like Cameron said, I was always going to industry stuff for many years and I just thought, God, everyone has the same old tired ideas in this, in this group or in this industry. And so then I now of course it was easy for me. Cause Joe Polish has been a friend of mine for 25 years and a client for that long as well. So, you know, natural thing was for me to join Genius Network. You know, I think last year, between travel and Masterminds, wherein Mimi spent. Mimi and I spent my wife about $300,000 on masterminds and travel and everything else. I have to say it's like some of the best money we've ever spent. And I met Cameron through Genius, Genius Network. And Cameron changed our whole trajectory with a couple of things. So one thing he did was after he started working with us, I remember I was talking to him and he said, you, you are so crappy at explaining what you do that I had to hire you. And then 12 months later I was like, this is amazing. That kind of stung. But he was so right. And it made me rethink about how we actually communicate what we do to entrepreneurs. And that changed the whole trajectory of our company, our ESOP that we did. So we became employee owned in September of last year. That came from Masterminds and even the providers that we use came from Masterminds. So I would say a couple of things. I would say there's an old adage which actually isn't true, but people say it all the time. You're the five people who are closest to you. That's who you, you are. But actually I heard a neuroscientist who actually is well known for saying that that's not true. He said, the actual truth is you are the communities of the five people you know best because it goes much farther. And when you're in a room with like minded entrepreneurs, whether they're in your industry or not, something magical happens. And they've even shown there's brain science that your brain changes to emulate the people around you. Anyone who says they start with a new company and there's 30 employees and they go, I'm going to change the 30 employees. Think, behave, act. It's not true. They will change how you behave and how you act. No one goes in and changes 30 people. But a community of 30 people would change you. And the same thing, your brain will start to mimic these other entrepreneurs. And what Mimi and I found out was we thought different, we thought bigger. We came up with new creative ideas because we were surrounded by people like that. And then we go back to the real world and realize how weird we are and how we don't really relate to anybody in the real world. So. So I'm a huge proponent of masterminds and of communities. And you know, of course Cameron COO alliance is one of the best as far as second the best as far as second in commands and it's been really good for Bryce, who's our second in command.

I've also thought it's quite interesting how some of the best learners that we have in the COO alliance are the biggest companies. And they're not talking, they're showing up and asking questions. They're showing up and learning from some of the younger members. You know Matt, you guys are, have an extraordinary COO. He's 20 or 20. 21.

Yeah, he's about, he's turning 21 actually in about eight days, seven days. So we're going to celebrate that as a team too. Yeah.

He's literally one of the smartest operators I've ever met at integrating and optimizing and automating, leveraging technology. You don't have to be a big company, you guys have about 70 employees, but you also don't have to be 50 years old to be the smart person in the room. Right. So it's just about that cross pollination we. Somebody else mentioned something about a newsletter. I'm just going to drop a link in. This newsletter is actually a newsletter that I launched back in just January or December from someone in the Genius Network. It's an AI powered, AI created newsletter that covers leadership lessons. I don't do a thing. It's literally scrapes the Internet of the best leadership articles of thought leaders that I've said yes to. And it pulls together and creates and sends out a full automated newsletter for me on a weekly basis. So like there's some tools out there, they're doing some pretty cool stuff that don't cost a lot. Just while we're on communities, before we go into the next question, this is one that I launched a new community. None of you probably even heard about it. I launched it three weeks ago. This is a community where anyone who reports to the COO should be a part of. It's called the Op spot and it's a community of like operations managers, Director of operations, VP ops. This is a place for them to share with each other, connect with each other, collaborate together. They don't have any access to me, but we've already got 101 members in the first three weeks. And the goal, goal is to scale this up into the thousands of members globally. We've already got members from seven countries so it's a way to plug in like Jim, anybody that reports to Bryce or Lacey, people to report to you. It's to give them a community. And currently the founders price is only 649 a year for them to be A member. So it's a bit of a rounding error in cost. Let's open it up to questions. Who's got questions about any area of the business? The people, ops, growth, you know, the economy.

What's going on about the newsletter, super interesting. I can see how we could maybe do something like this for our clients, our prospective clients.

Right.

How do you get the AI to, to do that for you and then.

Make the newsletter and send it out? Drop me an email and I can introduce you to the company. Joe Stulte's company. That does it. I was sitting at the Genius Network back in November. This guy's up on stage speaking, explaining this whole concept. And I'm like, that's amazing. He walks off stage, and before his ass hit the seat, he was at the table next to me, 350 people before he sat down. I said, I want to be a client. He goes, done. I go, I want to be a beta user. He goes, you're in. I'm like, okay. It was literally like I met him at breakfast the day before and he blew me away. And then when he did the speaking event, he completely blew me away. And I was like, wait, this is a technology that I can leverage before other people even know it exists? It's a hell yes. Right? It was like a full body yes. And he's, he's made the whole process super simple.

Yeah, it's just a great way to keep yourself top of mind and people sort of omnipresent in there, you know, with them. And they see you're just building your expertise, know, like, and trust factor with these people.

Even though you're not really doing anything, the articles are coming to them. Right.

So I love that.

Yeah. Not doing anything at all. And the fact that it just goes out the door and it's automated and then in the middle of every newsletter, it's either marketing the op spot or it's marketing the CEO alliance or it's marketing my invest in your leaders course. And it's just a really, really easy way for me to stay top of mind, but not to be selling, selling.

Selling, staying with technology. I don't think, think that we've got somebody in our group of 80, 90 that could take the updated up to date on technology. So I wanted to ask your group, do you all have somebody responsible for keeping your organization aided on technology? Because there's it, there's software and now Cameron, you mentioned AI. I don't have anybody that I could say, oh, when something good comes up, they're going to bring it. And there's only so much that I'm going to come across.

So who's got somebody looking out or how do you guys stay on top of what's happening with technology?

We do it through our executive team meetings that we have on a regular basis. And it's really up to the executive team to drive those kinds of things and to keep that on the forefront because I mean, our technology stack has changed dramatically over the last couple years. So I think it's just kind of a fabric of what the executive team knows that we need to look at on a regular basis. I mean, that's how we handle it. We don't expect it to come from anywhere else. Although certainly we try to create a culture of communication and transparency. And so every, everyone on the team, every employee we have can come to us with ideas and we try to take those seriously. But as far as who takes the leadership position to talk about this stuff and make sure it's being considered, it's our executive team. That's how we do it.

Yeah, I agree with Jim. Same thing for us, we would definitely.

Lean heavily on the leadership team to.

Be, you know, looking at their scorecards and making decisions based on real data. We need to make improvements to our software. They're going to be shown there and they're going to be the leaders, really the real driving force. But also like Lacy said, you know, integrating that AI, email, company wide and other things like that, I mean, I think they're useful, but I don't know that I would ever hire just to have somebody be researching software, not to say never. But I don't see a day where that becomes a real focus.

But don't we all have like it, we outsource it, our it and I lean on them to come and say, hey, listen, there's this new software that will protect you more or whatnot, you know, so I'm not necessarily saying somebody in house, but I wonder if there's companies that you could outsource that could understand your business and some stuff to you. I just came back from a trade show. Yeah, just from walking around and of course everybody's there to sell you something. And there was a lot of cool new technology. Like even for our inventory, we're going to implement something that's going to end up being a $27,000 investment, but it's going to save us 10 hours of labor a day. This is going to pay for itself within freaking weeks. What I have not been willing have sat through the presentation. I would have missed out on this opportunity to save thousands of dollars over the next year.

So, George, you just touched on, on one, which is getting out of the office, getting exposure in masterminds in your industry events, at whatevers and just keeping our eyes open. We used to call it, when we were building one, 800, got junk. We called it reading the newspaper with both eyes. You know, we would be reading the story, but we would also be reading why did they write that story? And how could we get them to write a story like that about us? I'll tell you, smartest people are in technology. They're not the people with gray hair. The smartest people in technology are the youngest people at the table. Yeah, Hugh, sorry, you are not the smart guy at technology. It's Lacy, right? It's probably Lacy and Zach are going to maybe Matt, like in that order, are going to be the smartest ones at this table when it comes to technology. So it's turning to them and saying, what are you seeing? And we can also turn to the people that work for us that have really smart 24 year olds working at some other company and can we pick their brain? How can we sit down with people that are really smart, that are younger, who don't necessarily know as much as we do. But Jim, I'll tell you, there's probably dozens of these, you know, like you've met a few of them. You met Conor Blakely, right? How do we meet the Connor Blakely's who want to learn about wealth management, who want to learn about managing their assets, who want to learn about actually investing and not investing in GameSpot. And what can you teach him for a half an hour and what can he teach you for a half an hour about technology on a monthly basis? You know, how can we just get them to teach us what's being used on a monthly basis or every quarter so they can show us what's happening. So we did a call yesterday with a woman, Natalie. She's probably 25 years old. You know, I can run circles around her in business. But I'll tell you, when she was demoing ClickUp, a software tool that's better than Asana and easier to use. And it's a task and project management system. And she's demoing that to us and now is offering to teach our team ClickUp and help us set up ClickUp internally for pennies, like for a fraction of what it would ever cost. So I'm turning to her as the smart person in tech and she's, she's Just thrilled to do it for me because she knows to help me is going to make, you know, she's going to learn from being around me. So years ago I was at the Vancouver Lawn and Tennis Club and I walked in and this old guy, Jimmy Patterson was sitting there. And Jimmy at the time was about 85 years old. He was also the richest man in British Columbia. So he's a billionaire. He's one of the richest people in Canada. And he's sitting at his table at the tennis club with his laptop and his iPad and his iPhone. They're all stacked together like a little mini pyramid. And I'm like, I gotta see what's going on because this is too funny, because there's no way Jimmy's sitting with all of his technology and in walks this 25 year old girl. And Jimmy stands up and he pulls 50 bucks out of his pocket. And he goes, kelly, good to see you. And then just like a typical, you know, grandparent does, he walks up with the money. He's like, like, here's your 50 bucks. What can you teach me this week? And Kelly sat down with Jim Patterson and for an hour asked him what he wanted to learn. I hear these things can talk to you. Can you show me how it can talk to me? I hear I can talk to it and it'll type. Can you show me how that'll work? Jimmy wasn't going to go to his executive team at the Patterson Group when he's the richest person in Western Canada and ask his VPs to teach him how to use his phone own. But for 50 bucks once a month, he sat down with his 25 year old who taught him how to use technology. That's where you learn technology. You open the door to the Gen Y and Gen Z and say, here's how our business is running. Can you show me how to optimize it? I'll tell you, Laci knows how to use her phone way better than Jim knows how to use his phone. Right. Lacy can use her phone way better than George can use his phone. Because she's a digital native, she grew up with a fucking phone. My 20 year old can use a phone way better than I can use it. So what we need to do is say, hey, here's stuff that I'm doing. Can you show me how to optimize that? Can you show me how to automate that? Can you show me how to make it faster? Here's tasks that I do. Like when we showed Natalie how we were managing projects, she started laughing and Saying, I feel so bad for you guys, I'll help you. It was like she was talking to a group of grandparents. So the way you find people to help you is I think by embracing Gen Y and Gen Z and showing them what we're doing and just asking them for help. And then it's by surrounding yourself in these mastermind communities and putting your hand up and being the dumb person in the room and saying, I don't know how to do this. Can, can somebody show me? It's also by not getting taken by the snake oil salesman and not getting taken by the people that are going to rip us off. So it's by very carefully selecting who can help us and by very carefully selecting what we want help in. Because it's kind of like saying how high is, you know, is up, up is up, just keeps going, going. We need to at some point leverage a little bit of technology. But once it starts getting too expensive or taking too much time or taking too much energy, it's probably not worth it anymore. So make sure that you manage to some kind of an ROI in there as well. Just a quick snippet about us. Seven years ago my dad still owned the company and we were still handwriting checks. He was didn't use QuickBooks, he had paper books, kept track of everything. Three years ago now I purchased the company from him four years ago. The year before he left, we moved to QuickBooks. Like literally we were dinosaurs. So today we're much more advanced. But I know we have so much to learn. Even being hesitant to even talk today, it's a bit overwhelming for me. But the AI portion is really interesting because I had not even thought about that and what we can do at Gibson Painting Group that could benefit us. So I appreciate you bringing that to my attention. Attention. But what you guys are talking about is extremely interesting, but it is a little overwhelming. At the same time. We need to keep some of this stuff simple as well. Right? So what I talk about is some of the low hanging fruit, you know, what are the simple things that we can do to make our business more efficient and a little bit faster to not over complicate things. What are the parts of our business that if we automated them or if we leverage technology is going to give us 4 or a 5x return? And then it's also getting back to some of the simplicity, right? Dude, I remember when I started my house painting company, the CEO told me to learn how to use a sprayer. I'm like, I don't want to go anywhere near A sprayer. I was afraid of technology 30 years ago, you know, in the painting. Now can you imagine painting a factory wall without using a sprayer? That was my dad, by the way. I did the outside of a shopping center with a roller. You have to start to embrace this stuff. Otherwise I heard a saying years ago, if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside business, you're out of business. I think the distractions can sometimes overweigh the benefit as well. So years ago we had somebody come in and work with us to help us put a, do a risk assessment on our company. And they looked at every possible thing that could ever go wrong inside of our business that could be a threat to our business. You know, I think it was an insurance company that helped us do it. And they identified maybe 10 or 12 things that we should be doing. And some of them were pretty easy, some of them were kind of no brainers, right? Like get a generator and keep it in the warehouse and you know, if the power went down, turn on the generator and throw a hose out the window and at least our call center of 70 people could keep working. That was okay. But one of them they wanted to do was an earthquake proof, vibration proof floor in our server center. And we're like, yeah, we're not flying any planes, we're not running brains or like we're a junk removal business. Like we, they're like, yeah, but if there's an earthquake and like if there's an earthquake we'll sit and listen to it for 30 seconds. Like again, we're not putting in an earthquake proof vibration proof floor because the cost of it and the disruption to the business to do it just wasn't working worth it. So we have to apply a little bit of logic to some of these tech solutions as well, right?

One of the neat things about Chat GPT and I think Jim was talking about it earlier and Cameron referred to it, is that it's amazingly good at taking what probably takes you an annoying hour that you really didn't need to spend like writing the next memo to your leadership team or whatever. You can just put in bullet points and say write a 250 word memo that says these bullet points and all of a sudden you got a nice thing that you can do little edits and ship it out. So that's kind of what's exciting is, is you know, if something that you were doing or an email you have to write to a supplier or whatever it is, you could save 45 minutes of thinking. Did I write this right? You know, however it is that people waste their time trying to get the language right, that's enough to just dip your toes. And it might not transform your whole business, but these tools that are coming out can just help you do very little things. That just saves time and, and you know, again is not transformative necessarily, but it can maybe give you some ideas, oh, we could use this to do whatever in the future.

So I think the idea is to look for the easy, low hanging fruit things, the simple things. And Charlotte, I'll give you an example of one. I'm always asked for my address, but I don't want to have to type in my address. So I type in a D, D, U and I press space and it autocorrects to that. And I'm, I'm always asked for information on my coaching but I don't want to have to type an email. So I type in ccing and it autocorrects to that, that. And I'm always asked for information about my speaking so I type in SPK and it autocorrects to that. Do you know that those shortcuts, just a quick show of hands, but I have them for email addresses like all my email addresses, like BPO puts in my Gmail, CCH puts in Cameron@CameronHale.com, but it just teaching your employees those. And that's a free tool that's been on every computer since 2000. Those are little incremental things that we can do better. Better or just talking to our phone and transcribing everything? Or talking to our laptop and transcribing everything. These are little hacks and little tools. But I'll tell you, there's no 21 year old that lives life without these things. This is just how they operate. Like it would drive them crazy to think of typing something up. They're constantly talking to their phone and it's typing everything for them. So we have to start learning those little baby steps and not worrying about the big huge CRM integrations with, you know, Salesforce. Right. Those are the ones to avoid until you get all the basics in place. Let's switch gears though. Any thoughts around people or operations or strategy or meetings?

We have to roll out our vivid vision to the whole entire company. Right, Nick? I want to be able to do it the best way possible so that everybody can hear it and the energy that Nick has for it, I just don't know how to do that best.

Here's the process that I use or That I recommend. First thing is to share the vivid vision with your leadership team team. So make sure that every member of your leadership team gets together in person or over zoom. Have everybody read it, read it together out loud. And then have people write down or circle the sentences or phrases that most inspire them. And then after you've read it out loud, have them read out what they're inspired by. Then you're going to do the same thing with all of your employees, ideally in person. Worst case, some of them over zoom. Try to give all them a printed out copy of it and have them read out the copy. And you know, Nick can read a few sentences and Matt can read a few sentences and George can read a few sentences until the who document gets read out. And again, have them circle the sentences or phrases they're most inspired by. Your job as a leader is to watch the people that are rolling their eyes kind of making fun of it. Like the toxic cancer people. Those are the people you know you have to get rid of. But the ones that are inspired and excited, you'll see it, they'll get it. The key when you roll this out as well is to make sure that you remind them that this is like building a house. When you build a home, it doesn't get built in a weekend end. For the first, you could keep going back to the site. You're building the home every day for three months and all that's happening is the foundation. It takes forever to get the foundation and then all of a sudden the walls go up and then they put in the, the electrical and the plumbing and then the drywall. And it takes a year or so to build a home. Well, some parts of your vivid vision are not going to come true until the third year. Some parts of it are not going to come true until year two. Some parts of it won't come true until fourth quarter and some not until third quarter and some not until second quarter quarter. But each sentence of it will start coming true over time. And it's to remind them of that because they're going to read it, they'll be inspired, but they're also going to think you're a little bit crazy. After you've rolled it out to your employees and your leadership team, then you roll it out to your suppliers, your accountant, your lawyer, you ask them to read it, send it to your manufacturers in China, have them read it. Then you're going to send it out to all of your current customers and you're going to ask them to read, read it. Then you're going to send it to all of your potential customers and your potential employees and you'll get them to read it. And then every quarter you want each of your employees to reread the Vivid Vision again so that every quarter they're being inspired by where we're going. They remember where we're going. But you're able to keep them focused on kind of the day to day execution along that path as well.

I remember before we rolled it out, I went back and I read the chapters that, that in your book that explained how to roll it out. I strongly suggest that you do that. The more effort, time and effort that you put into doing this, the more you're going to get out of it. I've already used it to bring in talent to negotiate with vendors. Coming back from this trade show, we had shared it with vendors and when we showed up, they were chasing us. They're sharing the enthusiasm and the vision. They want to be part of this train ride.

What's really cool is like so many companies and people have never seen anything like this that it blows them away. Like you'll land customers because they're more excited about what you're becoming than who you are today. It's you'll land bank financing because they finally understand your business more than a business plan or your spreadsheets have ever explained to them. And then as George said, reread the chapters in the book Vivid Vision that cover the rollout and execution. They'll be super helpful. When did you launch the Vivid Vision or disclose the Vivid Vision at college painters? And 1, 800 got junk. I mean, when did that take place and how did that. So 1, 800 got about junk. Brian and I were in a mastermind community called the Entrepreneurs Organization. We were in a forum together for four years prior to me joining him as his second in command. He was my best man at my wedding three months before I started to work for him. So we had a bit of an unfair advantage. Brian wrote what he called his painted picture at the time and I wrote one for my company. I was, I was the president of a private currency company and I wrote this description of what my company was going to look like. We learned this concept from an Olympic coach when Brian shared with me and I still have the copy of it today, the two page description, the painted picture of 1, 800, got junk. I got it. I understood what he was building and I saw all the stuff that he had no idea how to do that I knew how to do for him. And I Sat him down one day and I'm like, I can help you get there. Here's all the things you need. He's like, I don't know how to do any of that. I'm like, I know I do. And he literally said, here, run the business, I'll do it. And finance you. Build the company. Company. It was because I was so clear on what we were. And he described the company. December 31, 2003. This was October of 2000. When I joined in December of 2003, we hit all the goals. He walked up to my desk and he dropped the 2006 vivid vision on my desk or his painted picture. And he literally started laughing and said, I have no idea how you're going to pull this one off. Good luck. And three years later it described us being 100 million. We did the 100 million. We were at 106 in 20. So it was because of the vivid vision or his painted picture that I was so excited about what we were building that I also knew how to actually make it come true. It became a recruiting tool. We talked to the press about it. Anytime the media ever talked to us, we never answered the question. They'd be like, so what are your revenues this year? Oh, our 22,000. Like I'd be. If they asked me today what are your revenues, I would describe the CEO alliance. December 31, 2025, how many members do you have? Well, December 31, 2025, we'll have 500 members from 200 or probably 25 countries. Countries. That's what they write down. Everything you talk about is the future and that's where the excitement and energy comes from.

We have an existing software business. Our clients are higher ed institutions. We're relatively small, probably doing 3 million in revenue. But we've been growing nicely and sustainably over the last few years. I believe there is a much bigger opportunity for what we're doing that is orders of magnitude larger. And so I'm sort of navigating how to manage a good sustainable business that continues to grow in a healthy way that we can pay for, that's bootstrapped. But thinking about an opportunity that after years of thinking there was a much bigger opportunity, I've kind of started to see what that looks like. One thing I've done is hire someone essentially to run. So I have coo, but I also have someone sort of running the growth of the existing business while I think about the new stuff. I guess open ended question. Any advice?

Who's got some advice? And just give us A really quick perspective, like what's your revenue, how many employees? What's the. What type of business are you in?

So we're a software business. We make a platform that's used by higher ed institutions. They make it available to faculty to make educational materials, so sort of digital textbooks. Revenues are about just shy of 3 million Canadian this year, again growing 30, 40% over the last number of years. We have about 160 clients that are well recognized higher ed institutions. But our business model is very limited because it's really just fee for platform that's seen as kind of a niche application within the institutions. What we're looking at in the future is if we can start instrumenting that platform so that interactive stuff that the students are doing on this are feeding back data to both the students and the instructors that there's an opportunity there to be optimizing basically for learning of the students. And that kind of moves things up from the value chain from. From a platform used to make content great. That's cool to oh no, we're helping deliver the education in effective learning using sort of scientific methods about how you make learning happen. Well, and so reshaping our product towards helping the creators of content create content that is going to be very effective at transmitting that knowledge to learners and on the other side of the equation, helping learners get more out of it.

You remember when you were like 4 or 5 years old and you wrote a letter to Santa and your mom marched you down to the mailbox and we put the letter to Santa in the mailbox. And then all of a sudden, like six weeks later, lo and behold, there were three presents under the tree. And they were exactly what we asked Santa for. And we're like, mind blown. Like, Santa had no idea what we wanted. Our mom and dad were. Santa like, sorry to ruin it for you, but like your mom read the letter, your mom knew what you wanted and she gave you what you wanted. Wanted. My first mentor told me that the answer is yes. What are you buying? I'm not sure that I would try to figure out something to sell to people. If you're in 160 of these institutions and they're already paying you for stuff. I would find what else they want to buy and I would find some themes of what else they want to buy. And then I would start selling that to them. Because you're in their door, you've got trust and they have other needs in and around stuff. But I would be cautious about trying to create something and build something unless you know that There's a market for it. I was in India doing a speaking tour about 10 years ago, and I was talking to a CEO of a $330 million company, and I said, what do you sell? He said, oil. Oil for cars. He goes, no, cooking oil. I'm like, $330 million of cooking oil. How many countries are you selling in? I'm only selling in six states in India. He goes, in North America, you use 1 tablespoon of oil a day. Maybe in India, we use quartz. And he said, americans are all trying to invent something and sell it to people that don't want to buy buy it. I found out that there's 1.8 billion Indians that use oil every day. I'm just going to sell them oil. We're in a door of people that are paying us right now. I would be finding out what these 160 people wanted. Like, because they might come to you and say they need lockers, and you might get 120 institutions that want to buy lockers. And guess what? You now sell lockers. That all just came from a question, right? I mean, that's all that was. You're just saying, just ask your customers. The COO alliance starts started because three of my clients that I was coaching the CEO and coaching their coo, it was Zach Morrison from what's now called Tenuity. It was originally a lead SEM. They had 40 employees. They've now got 1700 employees. It was Bob Glazier from Acceleration Partners and his coo, Matt Wool. And it was Zach Obrant from Bookinabox, which is now called Scribe. I was coaching them and they were all talking to each other and they said to me, Zach Morrison said to me one day, could you get some of your coos together and let's like, mastermind for a couple days. I'm. I don't really coach coo's. He goes, well, you're coaching Matt Wool and you're coaching Zach Obran. I'm like, how do you know them? He goes, you kept talking about their company. So I reached out and we're now chatting. So I'm like, I'll put up a landing page, and if 10 COOs want to come together, we'll get together. 25 hours later, 10 of them had paid 6,700 bucks. I rented a place in Scottsdale, this 10 bedroom, five kitchen mansion, and we got together for three days. The night before the event, I was planning out the agenda. I had no idea what to do. So I had all 10 people do a 10 minute talk to present something they're strong on. And then I all 10 people present a problem they're having. And we brainstormed how to unstick it. And we went out for drinks two nights. That was it. And nine of the 10 said, can we keep coming every year? And I'm like, I guess let's start the CO alliance. It wasn't me wanting to start something. It was just me listening to them and saying, wait, you want to pay me so that you can talk to each other and I don't even have to teach you. I almost said nothing for two and a half days. The op spot's the same thing. I got all these people that are like, I want four other people to join the SEAL alliance. I'm like, you can't. It's for the one person. But like, let's create something so you can get six people in operation operations to join. I didn't even want to write a book. I didn't want to write any books. But a speaker's bureau told me if I had a book I could raise my fees. And then my clients wanted more of my content. Like, I'm not trying to create anything here. Jim, you were going to say something?

Yeah, I was just going to say that. The three questions that I always and I we do this repeatedly in our own company and have for years. But I tell all entrepreneurs here are probably the three most powerful questions you can ask. First is who is your customer or your client? And you want to be really deep on that and you want to continue to add ask who is your customer and who is your client? Because most business owners I talk to, they don't really know who their client is or their customer is in a really deep way. Second question is, what problem do you solve? And it's always a problem because people start talking benefits and all this kind of stuff. I mean, if someone who buys a Lamborghini, there's actually a problem they are solving, believe it or not. Because people will do anything to solve problems to get benefits. It's not as, as motivational for them. And then the third thing is how do you solve that problem for those clients or customers? Customers in a way that's different or better than their other options. And if you go deep on those three questions, you will continue to hone your business and like Cameron said, your business will change more than the outside world is changing. But more and more you'll start hearing things like we do from our clients. It's like, gosh, where have you been all My life. This is exactly what we've been looking for. It's just because we know our clients, we know the problem we solve, and we know how we do it that's different and better than their other options. You know, I think when you start a business, which we started 24 years, years ago, first you worry about revenue, then you worry about profit, and then you worry about enterprise value. And we're at a point in our journey where enterprise value is what matters, and for two reasons. One, the less dependent the company is on me and Mimi, the founders, the more valuable the company is, and also the better a life that we can have. And my whole life, I was raised by people that, you know, if you want to do better, you work harder. And it was as simple as that. And what I'm having a struggle with is changing my mindset and my behavior to not work all the time and to not feel like I have to be working to show everyone in the company that I work as harder, harder than anyone in the company, and transitioning more to a CEO position, a visionary position, and one where I don't feel I've got to work 50 or 60 hours a week. And by the way, our team, the executive team, is very much in support of this, and they want Mimi and I to do more of that. But I find myself feeling like I need to be doing that. I need to be working hard all the time, and it's really hard for me to make that transition. So any thoughts or help on that would be really appreciated. Appreciated.

Trial and error, I guess it's hard to let go. But if you never start, you'll never get there. It's not always going to be perfect. You're going to try some people. You're going to depend on some people. Some are going to work out, some are not. You go back to your vivid vision and stay true to that. Go back to the vivid vision, stay true to that, go back to the vivid vision, stay true to that, and eventually you get there. But it's tough because I was again brought up in a house where, you know, you just. You woke up and you went to work seven days a week wasn't enough. You just. I remember a customer telling me one time, george, I walked by, I looked in, I didn't see you. And I kept on. I figured, I'll come back when you're here. You know, it helped me realize that if I don't change the setup that I have now, I'm going to be a slave to this business all my life. And that's not what I got into business for. I got into business because I wanted to be financially well enough to where I could enjoy life. So I want to make sure to set the right people up in places and then manage them so that the business continues so to grow, hopefully better than I would have done it myself.

We also don't even have to manage people. If we hire people that manage themselves right, we can actually lead them and inspire them. We can remove obstacles, we can help grow them, but we don't have to manage Jim. You know, I think the best year in the Genius Network was the year Joe took off. Members got value. They were engaged. They knew other members. It was like, it went like everything kind of just worked right? Like, wow, that was a pretty insane model. I talked to my team about six months ago and I said I felt really guilty because last year I took 13 weeks vacation. And their response was, we're inspired. We're glad you take time off. It lets us get our work done when you're gone. And all we want you to do is to help us when we need help and get out of the way when we don't. I'm like, okay, I'm taking it again this year. My team knows I was just hiking with gorillas two weeks ago. Last week I was in Croatia on a private island. Next week, I'm going to go drive through six countries in Western Europe in a Porsche with Dave Berg and his wife and 12 other couples. Like, I'm not coming to work. But they don't care because they know what they're doing. They're aligned, they're inspired. Inspired. I'm there to help remove obstacles and to help grow them and cheer them on and then delegate more. At the end of the day, if I delegate everything except Genius, if I really get into that unique ability zone and keep delegating everything except unique ability and help create that unique ability teams, they're really happy about that. And then I end up showing up with really good energy and really enthusiastic and optimistic. But when I'm doing stuff that I don't like or I'm working too much in the business, then I'm driving drained. I snap at them. I'm pissed off. I'm showing up angry. Today's been fun. I've done two podcast interviews where I was a guest. I had somebody on my Second in Command podcast, and I'm doing this that wasn't even work.

Speaking of Charlie Munger, one of his famous quotes is, I didn't build this company. You Know and do what I've done to. To get rich. I never set out to get rich. I set out to get my time back.

You know, we. We started a business to give ourselves this freedom, free time. And often we get in the way of ourselves because we don't know what to do with our free time. So here's something that I recommend that all of you do. My wife and I did ours. Hers is, there's two sheets. If you look at the very bottom, hers is called Koala. Mine's called qt. This is our bucket list. This is the list of all the shit we want to do before we die. We keep adding to it. We share this with everybody. And we just keep trying to cross off more and more things on our bucket list. And as entrepreneurs, we start a business for only three reasons. To give us us money. And Nick, you don't need any more money. You got enough freaking crazy shoes and tracksuits now. So you're good there. And then you need to have like, to put a stake in the ground to say, we did it, right? Well, guess what? You've done it. You've built a company. You can be proud. Everybody in your city knows you've done it. You can be proud. You got that one. Now it's to have the free time. And what scares us most as entrepreneurs is what am I supposed to do with my free time? What are my hobbies supposed to be? What can I do for fun? Where can I travel? Who can I go hang with? Well, guess what, Nick? You can come hang with us whenever and wherever you want to. Ashley and I think you're amazing. Amazing. Let's go play. Because we got a company that's running itself for us, and we got people that kind of want us out of the way at times. But I think as leaders, we need to start embracing the rest of our life, right? And realize that. Look at Richard Branson. The guy's running multi billion dollar companies and he doesn't even go to a grocery store. They asked him one day on stage, when was the last time you went to a grocery store? And he said, I don't think I've ever been to a grocery store. Like, why would he do a minimum wage job? He hires somebody to go to his everything to free up his time. He only works in the couple things of the business that he loves to do. And the rest of the time he's kiteboarding and playing tennis and hanging out and having a good time. So with that, I would challenge all of us to work on our bucket lists. Share them with everybody. Work on our personal vivid vision. Share them. And then remember that we need to love bomb our employees more than we do because we need to thank them and praise them and show gratitude for them way more than we ever do. And I think we often miss on that as leaders, that our core role is to grow their confidence and grow their skills. And sometimes if we just say thank you to everybody, that's a huge week.