RECAST - How to Share Your Vivid Vision | Cameron Herold (Podcast 592)

Who is the CEO of a new home being built? The homeowner, right? The homeowner is the CEO. If the homeowner is the CEO of getting their home built, how many of those CEOs have any skill at building the home? Fucking none. Not a single homeowner knows how to build the home, right? So you have an incompetent CEO hiring a second in command who is the general contractor. You could hand $2 million to the contractor and say, build me my dream home and leave. For a year and come back and you go, what did you build me? Because it doesn't look like what I wanted. Quick little poll of the audience. If you're the entrepreneur in the room, I'm going to list 11 traits of entrepreneurs. As soon as you hear 5 traits that describe you, I'd like you to stand up. If you're the spouse of the entrepreneur, as soon as you hear 5 traits that describe your spouse, stand up. Or if you're here supporting the entrepreneur, like Maybe you're the second in command. If you hear 5 traits— so it's all about the entrepreneur, not you. Okay, so here are the 5 traits. Are you often filled with energy? Does your mind get flooded with ideas? Are you driven? Are you restless? Are you unable to keep still? That's 5. Stay standing. Okay, we're at 5 out of 5 with 70% of the room. Are you often working on little sleep? Do you get euphoric? Do you get easily irritated by minor obstacles? Do you burn out periodically? Do you act out sexually? A couple people standing up on their chairs. And do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision? So take a look around the room right now because you all stood up to the traits of bipolar disorder. Now I'm not making fun of bipolar. My oldest son was clinically diagnosed with bipolar. They since removed the designation, but he spent some time in the psych ward in Vancouver with a hypomanic episode. I have 11 of the 11 traits of bipolar disorder. Most entrepreneurs are very far off to the end of the spectrum on bipolar. By the way, you can't be on the spectrum or off the spectrum. The spectrum is a spectrum. So you're all on the spectrum, either at one end or the other. But most entrepreneurs are very bipolar. If you said yes to 9, 10, or 11 of the traits, you would probably be clinically diagnosed as bipolar and often medicated for it. I also have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder. My wife was saying if I was paying attention during the testing, it would have been 18 for 18. Entrepreneurs are hardwired differently and we need to understand how to actually leverage some of that. I'm not gonna talk about that content, but I know you because I've lived your life. So tonight, or today, we're gonna cover a lot of different content. Igor and I, when we were prepping, and Danny, when we were prepping for this presentation, went through a lot of the content that I could be delivering. And I'm gonna try to give you the best possible practices for you to execute inside of your companies today. As Igor mentioned, I joined 1-800-GOT-JUNK as employee number 14. When I walked into the head office, there were only 14 employees. I was number 14. Brian had just sold his 12th location. And when I left 6.5 years later, there were 3,100 employees system-wide. We went from $2 million to $106 million in revenue. We were very profitable. We'd landed 5,200 stories in the media about us. Including being on Oprah. We ranked as the number 2 company in Canada to work for, twice ranked number 1 in BC to work for. These systems that I used to help scale 1-800-GOT-JUNK are the ones that I'm going to give you today. So don't think about them as the ones that we were using to run a $100 million company. By the way, who's here has heard of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Put your hands up. Okay, if I was doing this presentation 20 years ago, none of you would have known the company. But these systems will work for you inside of your business. Keep your mind open today that maybe I'm right. Maybe these systems will work for you in your business. Um, it is going to be like drinking from a bit of a fire hose. A lot of this content is going to be coming at you very fast and furiously. This is not a normal canned presentation. This is some new content that I've never presented. This is some content that I presented for 20 years. We've tried to take some of the best possible content that will work for you in the services businesses. And like Igor said, I started in the home services industry in 1986. This is a photo of me with the very first College Pro yellow vehicle in Canada. Who here has heard of College Pro Painters? Awesome. So College Pro, what a lot of people don't know, was the largest residential house painting company on the planet. Every year at the head office, we had to go out and recruit, hire, and train 800 university students to be franchisees. And then in 6 weeks, those 800 franchisees who were all between 19 and 23 years old had to go out and recruit, hire, and train 8,000 students to paint houses. And then from May 1st till August 31st, in 4 months, 17 weeks, we did $64 million of house painting. September 1st, 8,800 kids quit and went back to school. The 60 of us at the head office got drunk. Woke up September 7th, we got really fucking drunk. Then we would wake up September 2nd and we would do it again. So imagine having to hire and train and build a company with 8,800 new people every year. And I was in the top 30 people of that organization globally, as was Igor at one point as well. So we came from the same background, the same DNA. These are the systems that I use to scale 1-800-GOT-JUNK. These are the systems that I've used to help Tommy Mello with A1 Garage Doors. With Nurse Next Door. All the companies globally that I've coached are these systems I learned back in the college pro days. And then even the 1-800-GOT-JUNK days. This is a photo of me 20 years ago as well. This talk, we're gonna cover 4 different parts in this talk, and then we're gonna have some Q&A. Somehow these slides did not convert. I don't know what they did with my slide, but you can't see them. The first part we're gonna cover is what's called the Vivid Vision. Has anyone read the book Vivid Vision? Awesome, that's a pretty good start. I'm— this is not to make money, like I'll make like $7 off the book, but I highly recommend you all get the book Vivid Vision or the book Double Double, and chapter 1 of Double Double covers the Vivid Vision concept. It is the starting point of what really helped Brian and I scale 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Brian and I learned the concept 2 years before I joined him. 120 entrepreneurs in Vancouver were invited to a lunch with a high-performance sports psychologist. About 20 of us went, part of the Entrepreneurs Organization, or EO, and we learned this concept together. I was building an auto body chain, which is now called Boyd Auto Body. It's called Gerber in the United States. I was a partner in Boyd. It's now the largest collision repair chain on the planet. So you can kind of see the theme here. These systems help scale large, well-known brands. The starting point is like a jigsaw puzzle. Put your hand up if you've ever done a jigsaw puzzle. Okay, all of us. Imagine if your mom handed you the jigsaw puzzle when you're 12 years old and all of the pieces of the puzzle were red, like a 5,000-piece puzzle with red pieces. You'd have no idea where to start. That's like running a company today. Your employees need to have a vision for what you're building, and the vision is not a one-sentence statement. It's not a mission statement. I'm going to talk to you about the most important concept you need inside of your company, and it's called the Vivid Vision. It is the jigsaw puzzle approach. I've been paid to speak all over the world on this. Mindvalley has this concept on their course, but the concept is like looking into a crystal ball. And I know that sounds a little bit woo-woo, but just play with me on this one. Every single high-performance athlete Every Olympian uses visualization in this sport, whether it's the high jumper standing off to the back of the track with their eyes closed, kind of picturing themselves going up over the bar, or the gymnast who walks around the floor and pauses at each spot on the floor and pictures herself doing part of her routine, or the downhill skier at the start, at the start of the top of the mountain with his eyes closed, kind of skiing the actual course and picturing themselves. They use visualization so that when they're in the moment of performing, they can perform completely on instinct. Now you're lucky coming out of the kind of home services space because in this presentation in 1998 where we learned the concept of vision, we had to come up with one industry that used visualization every day. And the one that we came up with was home builders. The reason that home builders use visualization Who is the CEO of a new home being built? Who's the CEO? The homeowner, right? The homeowner is the CEO. Now, if the homeowner is the CEO of getting their home built, how many of those CEOs have any skill at building the home? Fucking none. Like, not a single homeowner knows how to build the home, right? So you have an incompetent CEO Hiring a second in command who is the general contractor. Now the key is for the general contractor to understand the vision of what they want built. And for the CEO to say, I have confidence that you can now make my vision come true. You could hand $2 million to the contractor and say, build me my dream home and leave for a year and come back and you go, what did you build me? 'Cause it doesn't look like what I wanted. So the contractor has to get inside of the mind of the owner. This is where the concept really made sense to us. I built a home in Dunbar Point Grey, and I didn't do any of the building. I can't do electrical, I can't do plumbing. I really am bad at construction. I can barely hammer a nail, but I could visualize what I wanted my home to look like. I understood the budget that I wanted to spend. I knew what I wanted to feel like when I walked in the door. I knew the quality of the materials I wanted to see, but I had no idea how to put it all together. So I found a really good contractor who could do it, and we spent a lot of time for that contractor to be able to read my mind. They then created blueprints and plans and elevation drawings. And I remember about 6 months into the project, I walked in, walked in up the front steps and walked into the living room. And I froze as I looked at the fireplace on the other side of the room. And it looked exactly as I described to the contractor. And one of the employees who I'd never met, the one who had been designing the fireplace, looked at me and he said, "Is it what you wanted?" And I went, "Yeah, it's incredible." And then he said, "Look at this." And it was a little photo that I had given the general contractor on the first day that we'd met. And he had the photo taped to the wall beside the fireplace to go along with the elevation drawings and the blueprints, because he could actually make my dream happen without ever having to talk to me. The problem that we have with entrepreneurs, with all of us in the room or outside, is that our employees can't read our mind. You have an idea of what you want your meetings to be like. You have an idea of what you want your customer service experience to be like. You have an idea of what you want the job sites to be like. You have an idea of what you want your dashboards to look like and your culture and the— you know what, but they can't read your freaking mind. So how do we get them to understand what we're building? The vivid vision becomes a 4 or 5-page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like 3 years in the future. So that your employees can reverse engineer that 5-page document and figure out a way to make every sentence come true. That's what you're gonna start with in scaling your company. When I joined Brian in October of 2000, he handed me what he called his painted picture, which was his vivid vision. I read it and I said, "Oh, I totally know how to do this." He goes, "Good, 'cause I have no idea." But I'd already built Boyd Auto Body. I'd already built College Pro Painters. I knew how to scale a franchise company. I just needed to know his vision so that I could put the plans and the systems in place to make his vision come true. But if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. I was speaking with one of your members, Brad Gordon, this morning, and I was asking him what's the vision of where he wants to take his company. If I know what his vision is, I could help him get there. But if I don't know where his vision is, I could take him in a completely different direction. Does it make sense? The same as you could have the smartest employees in the room, But if they don't know where you want to go, they could all be going in the wrong direction, which is why they're driving you crazy. But it's your fault so far. Who here has seen the movie The Sound of Music? Put your hand up. Who's never seen the movie The Sound of Music? Who has no idea what the movie The Sound of Music is about? Brad, you have no idea for real? Awesome. Okay, can I make fun of you? Okay, good. Can I make fun? Okay. So don't say anything to Brad. Brad, we gotta make you stand up for a sec so everybody knows who the guy in the room is. Brad, there's, there's a very famous scene in the movie The Sound of Music. I want you to recreate that scene for BTA, okay? So, so we need you to recreate the scene so we can all show up in that scene at the next event. It's the picnic, it's the picnic scene in The Sound of Music. Should the picnic be at a beach? Should it be at a park? Or should be in the mountains? At a park. Okay, good. So the picnic in The Sound of Music is going to be at a park. Okay, don't say anything. Don't say anything. We should probably bring some food to the picnic. Should we get it at a little hut at the park? Should we buy it at a grocery store? Or should we bring it in a picnic basket? Okay, picnic basket at a park, good. And then let's bring our kids to the picnic too. It'd be fun to have our kids there. Should our kids be playing croquet, playing baseball, dancing? What should our kids be doing at the picnic? Right, yeah, okay, playing croquet. So we're gonna have a picnic with food in a basket, we're gonna have our kids playing croquet, and that's exactly like the scene in this. Like, what the fuck, dude? Were you not paying attention? The Sound of Music was a clue, right? It's held in the Austrian Alps with the song with Juliane, the hills are alive with the kids are singing and dancing. Who here knows that scene? Right? All of us. But why did we have a great, strong, solid employee recreate that scene and completely screw it up? 'Cause he'd never seen the movie. Your employees are doing the best they can with the vision that you've given them. And the reason they drive you crazy every day and have picnics with kids playing croquet is they don't know the movie that you see in your mind. Okay, you can sit. Thank you. I needed you to do that, by the way. I had somebody one time say the picnic should be in the Alps and the kids should be dancing. And I'm like, really? Now I have nowhere to go with this presentation. So if you're going to write a vivid vision for your company, you got to get out of the box. You can't sit in your office and do this where you're in planning mode. You can't sit at your home office in planning mode. You can't sit with a laptop where you're actually solving problems and budgeting and planning all the time. You need to get out of the box. You need to go somewhere where you're inspired, somewhere around nature. Go to a park, go to the mountains, go to your cabin, rent an Airbnb somewhere, go to a high-end hotel and sit in the lobby, but go somewhere with just an actual notepad and a pen like this yellow pad that Johnny's holding. That's what you're going to start crafting your vivid vision with. Not a laptop, not an iPad, because you always get sucked back into the real world there. I want you to pretend that you're hopping into the DeLorean time machine and you're gonna travel out to December 31st, 2028, and you get out of the time machine and you walk around and you're looking at your company. You don't know how it happened, but you can describe what it looked like. You can describe your meeting rhythms, you can describe the pulse, you can describe the energy, you can describe the interactions of your employees, you can describe what the media is writing about you, you can describe your customers, you can describe what your employees are putting on Glassdoor, I want you to come up with a whole bunch of ideas and mind map it out. Just put a bunch of your ideas into some organized areas. You're not going to be writing the actual full document. Your job is to just get a bunch of bullet points together, pull all of those bullet points together, and then, yeah, you can throw it into Grok or Claude or ChatGPT and have you write the first draft. You can hand it to a writer or copywriter and have them polish it or give it to somebody on your marketing team or a freelance marketer and have them run it through. AI a bunch of times to get it really polished so that it actually vibrates and is exciting and polarizing. And then you can add some design elements to it so that it looks and feels like your brand. These are a couple of clients of mine from years ago, a company called Gong Show Gear that sold clothing for guys that loved hockey. And this feels like kind of a hockey brand. So they incorporated some of their design elements. Another client of mine, Billy Jean, who runs a big marketing agency, It feels like his brand. Now, I want your Vivid Vision document to be like a magnet. It has to attract people into your business. But if a magnet attracts, what else does it do? It repels. You have to be okay with pushing some people away as well, because if you water it down and try to attract everybody, then no one cares, right? As an example, the only clients that work with me are young, fun, entrepreneurial, high viral, high growth, pre-public. I don't work with government agencies. I don't work with nonprofits. I don't work with boring manufacturing. Like, and I don't mean young like a 24-year-old, but like young at heart, vibrating, fun. If I talk to somebody and they're kind of like old, boring, whatever, I don't want to work with you. Like, God forbid you show up wearing a suit and tie. Like, you just— we're just not the right tribe, right? I'm wearing purple high-cut Converse. Now, what I mean by polarizing, remember when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, which is crazy that it was now 19 years ago, it was 2007. What was missing on the first iPhone? What did we all think was missing? The keyboard, right? And then we heard somebody clicking on it for the first time, like, oh my God, can I try it? And as soon as we tried it, we were hooked. He was willing to push 99% of the people away to have the zealots come in and say, I just want that. And if you attracted those people, then the rest of us would follow. Now, having a BlackBerry is kind of like disco. I mean, they used to be cool. But I actually heard of a venture capitalist the other day. Somebody on his team showed up using a BlackBerry around 10 years ago, and he said, if you ever show up with a BlackBerry in a room again, you're fired. And he's like, why? He goes, because people literally think you're a moron. Like, like if you're in the tech community, you just, you use, you use Mac products. You just have to. What happens when you roll out the vivid vision is you get complete alignment. And I'm talking about sharing your Vivid Vision with your customers, your suppliers, your employees, potential employees, your partners. Everybody in our organization reads my Vivid Vision for our company every month. I wrote a Vivid Vision for my life as Cameron Herold. It explains me, fitness, fun, finance, what I do for travel, sexuality, use of substances, vacation time. It's all there. It's a 5-page description of me. My wife and I went offsite together We're offsite together. That sounds a little weird. We went offsite. She did her mind map and her bullet points of our marriage. I did mine. And then we wrote a merged version of us as a couple. So I have a vivid vision for me. We have a vivid vision for us as a couple. And I have a vivid vision for my company, the COO Alliance, which is kind of like Breakthrough Academy, but only for the second in command. By the way, quick side note on that. Who here has a COO or a second in command in your company? About a third of you. That's your next opportunity for growth is to start getting some of the stuff off your plate that you're not good at or you suck at or drains you of energy. When you can get, and a COO, it doesn't have to be a COO, it could be a vice president of operations, could be a director of operations, could be a general manager, but who's that person that you can give a lot of the operational stuff to? When you do that, your company really scales. So the next thing I wanna talk about is what I visualize every company. I call it the jigsaw puzzle. For growth. I visualize the jigsaw puzzle as having these core components. The first component is really the picture on the front of the box, right? Your vivid vision. And then for me, the four corners of your jigsaw puzzle are your core values, your core purpose, your BHAG, which is your Big Hairy Audacious Goal that Jim Collins talks about, and then your one-year plan. Now Igor mentioned a couple things when he came up here that core values are really important for BTA. Do you know that I left College Pro Painters in 1994? Elon Musk's younger brother worked for me that summer. I hired Kimbal Musk and then also his cousin Peter Reeve, who built SolarCity. They were both franchisees for me in 1993. So I leave College Pro in October of '94, 31, 32 years ago. The core values for College Pro Painters: deliver what you promise, respect the individual, pride in all you do, and find a better way. Now, if I can recite the 4 core values for a company that I worked for 32 years ago, I guarantee you, if I walked up to a whole bunch of you who have core values in your company, that 95% of you couldn't recite them. And you don't want to test me on that because I know I'm right. I could bet every single one of you $100 in the room and I would walk out with thousands of dollars that most of you say you have core values, but you don't even know them, which means your employees don't know them. And you certainly don't live them because you have people coming to work every day who break your core values, which means they're not core values, they're merely aspirational core values. At College Pro Painters, we were willing to fire people who broke the core values. I remember in 1993, I was sitting at the head office of College Pro Painters because I worked in Toronto. And one of the vice presidents made a very disrespectful remark to one of the women in our office. In these days, it would have been like a #MeToo, big bad moment for this person's career. And I called him on it and I was like, Kevin, respect the individual. And he went, don't call me on the core values in front of the team. And he walked out of the room. I'm like, oh, fuck, I'm totally getting fired. And then about 10 minutes later, he called me into his office and the rest of the team was like, dude, you are totally getting fired. And I walked into his office and he said, don't call me on the core values in front of the employees. And I don't know where it came from, but my instant response was, don't break them. And he thought about it for a minute and he was like, fuck. And Kevin and I, 30-odd years later, are still very good friends, probably because of that moment. 'Cause I knew that he didn't mean it. But for him to see me care about the core values so much meant that I would go through brick walls for the company. He had to go through brick walls for me. If your core values are important to you, at least know them, at least enforce them, and at least fire people who break them. And by the way, the government and post office are always hiring. They'll take care of your benefits. Bad people. They'll hire them. But core values are critical. Another thing Igor mentioned— by the way, this is a little ADD moment for you, brought to you by Cameron Herold— if you want to get the most value out of this event, write down the names of 3 people that you want to meet while you're here. Write down the names of 3 people that you want to have in-depth discussions with while you're here. Write down the names of, or the, the 3 big things you want to learn about, and make sure that every conversation you have, you ask the people— excuse me— about those 3 things. Like, how do I hire somebody? How do I fire somebody? How do I do whatever? How do I raise my prices 20%? Whatever the 3 things are you want to learn more, ask in every conversation those 3 things. And then what are the 3 things that you can teach people while you're here? And make sure that you offer that up in your conversations. If you do those 4 things, you'll get way more out of this event than any other thing else you ever do. Okay, I hope that's helpful. So the first side of the jigsaw puzzle are the people systems, right? So you have your four corners of your jigsaw puzzle, and then you go to your side. I can't go into all this content, it's hours and hours of content. So you can bring me back for year two and we can go into kind of the corners and sides. But the people side of your business is critical. And when I talk about people, I talk about the recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, The talent, leadership development of people, and the offboarding of the wrong people. It's the full life cycle of people, or the people systems you need to have inside of your company. Who's here has heard of the saying in the book Good to Great, get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everybody in the right seats? This is the bus. In the book Good to Great, he talks about the bus. It's called Further that was driven around the United States in the early '60s by the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey and some of the people from the Grateful Dead. They were all tripping on acid. The reason their mantra was so important was you're either part of the scene or you're not. You either get it or you don't. You're either on the bus or off the bus. And they knew that if they had the wrong people on the bus, it would ruin the trip. Literally. If you're in a party and you have some negative toxic person coming to the party, it fucks up the trip. That's where the mantra came from. But I have never found a company yet in all the companies I've worked with in 29 countries around the world where I've coached companies I've never found a single company that puts enough time and systems in place to get rid of the toxic underperformers fast enough. We talk about recruiting, we talk about onboarding, we talk about culture, but we don't talk about getting rid of the toxic underperforming C players inside of your organization. So I want you to think about that as well. I learned a little bit about recruiting from one of my grandfathers. He owned a hunting resort up in Northern Ontario on the French River, and he had about 60 employees back in the '60s and '70s. So whenever we would go duck hunting together, the conversation somehow always turned to running businesses. It's all I ever knew growing up was my dad ran a company, both grandfathers were entrepreneurs. My whole world was entrepreneurship. Well, one of the things I learned from duck hunting was you put a bunch of decoys out, these wooden or plastic ducks to attract ducks into your blind. It's a weird concept, but it works. And then they have these little weird calls that they do and they call in the ducks into your duck blind. What are the decoys from your company? What are you using to attract people into your business? Hard to hear, but yell it out if you've got some things that attract people to your company. Vision, wages, your brand, purpose, people, culture. Okay, let me— core values. Let me talk about this stuff. If the outside world doesn't know these things, they're not decoys. You need to put your decoys out into the market. So your website is a decoy. If your website looks like something the government built, you're not attracting anybody. Your website looks to— it needs to be something that is more like Apple or more like Virgin that Richard Branson would have. You need to model the dot-coms, the internet-based companies. Your website needs to look and feel fresh and modern and clean. If you have a leadership team page and your leadership team photos have people in ties, you're pushing people away. You're not pulling them towards you. Right? If the bios from your leadership teams are freaking boring, you're pushing people away. You're not attracting. Your leadership team bios need to read more like a Tinder profile than a business bio. I was on a government, or on an internet company's leadership team page one day, and all the photos were amazing. One of them was this woman surrounded by shoes, all of her shoes, like 50 pairs of shoes, all different types of shoes. And it starts off and it's like, she's like the vice president of engineering from a $100 million company, by the way. And she's like, "Hi, my name's Elaine. I love shoes. My shoes take me all over the world. I have shoes for tango, I have shoes for rock climbing, I have shoes for kayaking, I have shoes for whatever, right? I have Jimmy Choos." I've got like, and I'm reading through her bio, kind of like reading through like a Facebook or Tinder profile. I'm like, this is incredible. And then at the end it says, "Oh, by the way, I have my undergraduate degree from Stanford and I have my PhD from MIT, but you don't really care about that. If you wanna know where my shoes come from," Where my shoes are taking me next. Here's my profile or here's my email. You know what I did after I read Elaine's bio? I read Tom's and then I read Bob's and then I read Kevin's. And then I was like 16 profiles in going, fuck, I don't even need to know this stuff. But they sucked me into their business. When you walk into your company's office, who here knows the name of Tommy Mello or A1 Garage Doors? So I coach Tommy, I coach his COO Luke. I've been coaching them for a year. His COO Luke Martin, is a member of our COO Alliance. They've got about a dozen of their managers going through my Invest in Your Leaders course. I was down at their head office in Scottsdale, Arizona about 3 months ago. I walked in the front door and I paused. It felt just like 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It was branded. It was vibrating. Every time an employee walked past me, they're like, hey, have you been helped yet? Can I get you a water? Like, I'm talking everybody. It was culty by design. They taught that, they indoctrinated that, they lived that. Those are the decoys that you have to put out there to bring people into your company. And then if you're hunting ducks, you use a shotgun. But when you're looking for best employees, you need more of a rifle-based approach. If you're putting job ads up on LinkedIn or Craigslist or wherever the hell you advertise for people, no A-players are ever on those sites looking for a job. A-players are working for one of your strongest competitors. A-players are working for other companies that are even outside of your industry but doing the job you need them to do for you. A-players are already working for really good companies and you have to entice them in, which means your website has to look amazing. You've got to have press coverage about your business that shows you as the best company to work for. You've got to be winning awards in your city or state or province or country as the best place to work. You've got to have like that kind of culty feel. You've got to have a really good social media profile. These are our recruiting tools as well as customer tools. But no great employee is going to come to work for an average company. I remember in 2007, I was in Calgary, Alberta, speaking at a conference, a group of 120 entrepreneurs, and somebody in the room put their hand up and they said, "It's really hard to find good people in Calgary." And I said, "No, it's really hard to find good people to work for an average company in Calgary." And he paused and he was like, shit, you're right. It's a bell curve. And most of us are horribly in the middle of that bell curve. If you want to really get great people and grow great companies, you've got to be on the kind of top 5 to 10%, which is actually much easier than you think. But the key is to obsess about that. And then get a recruiting agency. I've got 5 different recruiting firms that I use for very, very different— I actually talked to 2 partners of our CEO Alliance this morning, one that only does C-level searches and one that does fractional and full-time hires, all based in Latin America for a third of what we pay them in North— I was talking to both those CEOs this morning. I use and have all of our clients using search firms 'cause they go out and poach people and bring them into our organizations. The first interview that I do with people is a group interview, and I bring 6 to 8 candidates together in person or over Zoom, and I interview the 6 to 8 people to find out who vibrates like, vibrate? Who lives the core values like we, like we do? Who are the people I'd want to hang out with? And then after they go through the group interview, then I find out if they have the skills to do the job. But the group interview process is important. And then I show them the Vivid Vision of our company even before the group interview, and I ask them, after reading our Vivid Vision, if this sounds like the kind of company that you want to help fly to the moon, reply now with a 3-minute video of how you will help us make our Vivid Vision come true and why you wanna work here. I don't even read the resumes of people until I get the videos back. If I like their videos, then I'll look at the resume, and then I put them through the group interview. So they're already pre-sold, and they're selling me on why to hire them before I've even told them about the company other than that Vivid Vision document. So as Steve Jobs used to say, if I don't see the twinkle in their eyes, I don't care if they have the skills. People coming into Apple had to wanna build insanely great products that challenge the status quo and will change the human race. That was their kind of core purpose. And if you didn't think and want to do that kind of stuff, he didn't care if you had the skills to do it. That was what was different about Apple. Then I use something about job descriptions and scorecards. Again, this slide came up wrong when they converted it for me. Sorry, I apologize. But it was supposed to show you just the actual job description first and the scorecard second. But let me explain the difference. A job description shows all of the things that you're hiring for, right? Let's say I was hiring a swimmer. I want somebody who's fast and someone who's strong and somebody who knows all the 4 strokes and somebody who's competitive. That's a job description like most of us have. But the scorecard is more measurable. Someone who broke a world record, someone who won a gold medal, someone who competed at all 4 strokes. Again, I'll tease Brad for a second, but Brad, do you know how to win an Olympic gold medal? No, you do. You know how to win. Just be faster or better than everybody else. Okay? So we all know how to do it, right? Every single one of us knows how to win a gold medal. We all know how to break a world record. How many of us in the room have done it? Not many. I was hiring a guy one time. And we only hired athletes. We looked for triathletes, we looked for marathoners, we looked for team players, people that had competed in college and high school or above. And I'm interviewing this guy and I said, what do you do for fun? He looked like a runner. He goes, I run. I'm like, are you middle distance? He goes, yeah. I said, do you run 10K? And he goes, yeah. I go, what's your PB in the 10K? PB is personal best or personal record. He goes, dude, I'm fast. I'm like, no, what is it? He goes, dude, I'm really fucking fast. Any runners in the room? His personal record in the 10K was 28 minutes and 48 seconds. And I go, dude, you're lying. He goes, no, I was 6th in the US Olympic trials. I'm like, you're fucking hired. When someone is 6th on the US Olympic trials, they're goal-oriented, they're tenacious, they don't give up, they examine their own contribution to the problem first. They will do anything to get through those brick walls. And he loved our Vivid Vision, and he had the skills You're hired. I hired another guy one time. Has anyone ever done the Vancouver Sun Run? There's 54,000 people do the Vancouver Sun Run. You know that when you do the Vancouver Sun Run, you don't have to know the course 'cause you just follow the 20,000 people in front of you. Not Jeff. Jeff came 8th. How the fuck do you come 8th in a race of 54,000 people? When you're 8th, you have to memorize the course 'cause there's nobody in front of you. Like maybe 7 guys, but like, anyway. What we do is we raise the bar. Every time someone comes into our organization, they have to be better than 50% of the people that work with us in that business area. If I have 4 people in marketing, the next one has to be better than at least 2. I'm always raising the bar. When you raise the bar and when you have your employees hiring people they're excited and inspired to work with, that's building a real culture. And by the way, stop saying that you have a family culture. Half of the world population doesn't like their family. For real. Sorry, I came up in the family I love, but I'm amazed there's people that didn't have— like, they had really dysfunctional, bad families. So don't say you have a family culture. You're turning away half the world. And don't say that you're actually a team environment either. Think of it more like Cirque du Soleil, that you want to be absolutely the best in the world, and you can trust the other people because their lives are at stake when they're flying through the air and you're going to catch them. Try to raise the bar. So what would Jack do? Jack Welch in his day was the CEO and chairman of General Electric. I asked, asked his second-in-command, Jeff Immelt, for a system that Jack used to use at GE that they still use today. And every 6 months, every executive draws this on a piece of paper. It's a 4-box, a simple matrix with results on the up and down y-axis. Low results at the bottom, high results at the top. And across the bottom is your core values or your culture fit. With low core values to the left and high core values to the right. What do you do if someone's in the bottom left-hand corner? And you can think of it as a scale of 1 through 10, right? 1 through 10 on results, 1 through 10 on core values. If someone's in the bottom left-hand corner, they're below 5 on results, they're below 5 on core values. What do you do with them? Right. You fire them. That's easy. Now, what do you do if somebody is in the top right-hand corner? I'm saying like a 9 or a 10 in results. A 9 or a 10 on core values, what do you do with them? Maybe promote them, maybe hire them. You actually handcuff them to your company. You find a way to keep that person inside of your organization for at least 5 years. And there's no such thing as a golden handcuff program because every individual is completely different. If these two tables were my God forbid they ever quit A-players out of the room of all my employees, I would make sure that every one of you has something different. For some, they want to be promoted. Some, they want more responsibility. Some want less responsibility. Some, they want more access to the board of directors. Some want to do their Executive MBA while they're here. Some want more vacation time, more flex time, more responsibility. Some want you to buy a company and let them run them. Some want you to spin off a company and let them run that. Some want more executive development. Some want more vacation time. Some want more— right? You have to find the things that intrinsically satisfy that person and make sure that your company is the ladder to their roof. And then when they're up on the roof, pull away the ladder. It's true. You get— when you get your A-players so handcuffed to your company and there's no way out, they're not leaving. And then just take care of them. And by the way, 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? 'Cause the jerk's not doing well. Yeah, but I'm doing well. I want your time. I want your visibility. I just wanna hang with you. I would get more results here than back there. What do you do if somebody's in the bottom right-hand corner? Really, really high core values and culture fit, but they're not getting the results. Everybody says train them. Wrong answer. The first thing you do is make sure they're in the right seat. If you know they're in the right seat, then train them and coach them. We had a guy working for us who was coaching franchisees, but he was so massively dyslexic that he couldn't read the operations manual. We had a 330-page operations manual, and Christopher Bennett had never read it, but he was such a good speaker and so good at getting people to rally around his ideas that they just did whatever he said. So all of our franchisees were doing it differently, and we didn't know until we found out that he'd never read the thing. So I can't coach him or train him. What we did was put him into a different seat. We put him in PR, and PR for us is phoning journalists all day long and telling them about our company. Christopher landed all of the big press for our organization. He went on to become the head of PR for Best Buy Canada. Then the head of PR for Guitar Center in the United States, and then the head of PR and communications for Sprint worldwide. You put someone in the right seat, they don't need any coaching whatsoever. If they're in the right seat, then coach and develop them. What about if somebody's on the top left-hand corner? Really, really high results, but they're the cultural core value cancers. What do you do with them? You have to fire them. You have to get these people out of your organization. They get one chance. You have the come-to-Jesus meeting. They have to know where they have to change. If you're going to keep them and put them on a personal development plan for a month or two, then your job is to coach them until they get successful. If you're not willing to spend the time to coach them, then fire them right away. But you have to either get them to change right away or get them out of the organization. That's where the real growth comes for— or 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, or yeah, 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 Intrawest had signed agreements to work at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Great people can be poached and brought into great cultures, but they're not gonna 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. And 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, because of the rest. Like, 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 in January last year, 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. 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 As would destroy the 6 Cs. 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. So the rest of the jigsaw puzzle kind of looks like this. The people systems, the strategic thinking systems, and by the way, there's no such thing as strategic planning. There's strategy and planning. They're very different. They're as different as sales and marketing. Strategy is thinking about the what-ifs. Strategy is doing SWOT analysis. Strategy is looking at what your competitors are doing. Strategy is looking at what others in other industries are doing. By the way, it's amazing that you're all in BTA. You should all be in BTA for the next 10 years or longer. How many of you are also in a second mastermind community of entrepreneurs? Pretty good, about, about a fifth of you. All of you should be in a second mastermind community as well. It's ideas having sex. You need to take good ideas from outside of your industry and good ideas from inside of your industry. What's nice about here is you're also different industries right? But you're also still very home services, kind of construction-ish, right? But imagine if you spent more time with tech companies or global— like, I go to masterminds in Dubai, in Croatia, in, in all, all different places in Europe, in Asia. I'm like trying to get more of a global perspective on what's happening in the business world. So that's strategy. Your meeting rhythms is everything related to your annual meetings, your quarterly meetings. And by the way, it's amazing you're all doing planning, but you're 2 and a half months late. The fuck are you doing a planning meeting for in January? Your plan should be rolled out and executed by now. Your plan for the year has to be done by the end of October. Your budget has to be done, locked and loaded by the end of November. Your hiring plan, your staffing plan, your project plan has to be signed off on by your leadership team. Everyone in your company has to know what it is. So January 1st, you've already started executing. Man, it's January 8th. You are 8 days— you're like a week into a year. You're 2% of your year is over and you haven't rolled out your plan yet. So annual planning meetings, quarterly planning meetings, financial review meetings, one-on-one coaching meetings, daily huddles. There's stuff around meeting rhythms and then your financial systems, budgets, cash flow, understanding how to leverage your balance sheet. We almost bankrupted 1-800-GOT-JUNK at $100 million in revenue because we didn't understand how to leverage our balance sheet. We'd been very profitable, but we had no credit lines, no loans. Anyway, you need to understand these different parts of your jigsaw puzzle, and then culture emerges from there. So the next thing that I've always obsessed around is leadership skills. And with leadership skills, it's so critical when you're in what I call the death zone. Is anyone here running— and I want you to stand up— If your company is in the $3 million to $10 million zone, stand up. You're in the death zone. So the death zone is where often companies start building complexity. You can sit now. The death zone is when we have a mid-level team of people that are trying their best, but they've never really done it before. The death zone is because we don't understand how to go out and hire the right people who have done it before. The death zone is because we're pissing away money that we didn't necessarily need to be throwing away. So I see every company going through different iterations at what I call the ones and the threes. When you have $100,000 in revenue to $300,000 in revenue to $1 million in revenue— at $1 million, you're starting to hire some people. At $3 million in revenue, you've got a couple managers managing some of your people for you. At $10 million in revenue, you have a management team, but they've probably never really run companies before. They're working hard, they're trying their best, they're doing a good job, awesome. At $30 million, you've got a solid first leadership team. At $100 million, you've got people that have built companies, sold companies, they've done it before. You don't even need to tell them what to do anymore. They've done it before. By the way, the difference between a C-level and a VP-level and a director-level, a director, you have to tell them what to do and they can execute. A VP, there's a bit of a meeting in the minds, and the C-level comes in and tells you what to do. And they come in with a level of autonomy, strategic insight, P&L responsibility. They typically bring employees with them and companies and suppliers with them, and you get to sit back and breathe. That's the true difference between a C-level, a VP, and a director. But the ones and the threes are these different projection points that you need to get through. And if you don't get through the death zone, you either waste a lot of time, you waste a lot of money, you drive yourself crazy, your spouse hates you because all you're doing is spending time on the business. The key way to get through this is to grow your people. To really spend time growing the skills and the confidence and the connections of your employees. Now what's amazing is you're all here growing yourself. Who here has their second in command or any of their management people in a Mastermind community? Stand up. Yeah, about 12, 15 of you. Okay, awesome. All of you need to get your key people into a mastermind and into some coaching. Here's why. Pretend that you're a duck, and as the CEO, you're working on strengthening your right wing, but your leadership team is your left wing. If you don't strengthen their skills, you're gonna start flying in a circle. At 1-800-GOT-JUNK, when I was the COO, I was in a mastermind. Brian was in a mastermind. I had a coach, Brian had a coach, and all 7 of us on the leadership team each had an individual mentor. I was being mentored by the incoming COO at Starbucks, Greg Johnson. Greg did a 1-hour call with me every month for 2 years and did a full-day meeting with me every quarter. One quarter I would go down to Seattle, next quarter he would come up to Vancouver. We did that for 2 years. And every single person on our leadership team had that. And, and I'm gonna walk you through it, we built a skill development program where I worked worked on the leadership skills for all of the people in our company that managed people. That's where our growth came from. So you need to think about that. So I've heard people say, well, what if I spend time growing people in my company? What if they quit? What if they stay and you haven't grown their skills? That's the bigger problem. We've heard of ROI, right? The return on investment. So what's the return on investing in your people? It's huge. It's the 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Tommy Mellow, A1 Garage, it's Boyd Autobody, it's College Pro. The return on investing in your people is huge, but the cost of inaction, the COI, is way, way, way higher. What it's costing you to not invest in your people is way more than the cost if you invest in them and they quit. And by the way, there's two things that Gen Y and Gen Z want from a company more than ever before. Number one is purpose. They want to work with a company that has purpose, direction, and lives the core values. Number 2 is they want skill development because they're terrified that the world is going to put them out of a job. If you help them get more skills, more AI skills, more leadership skills, more management skills, more skills at doing— not skills doing the functional stuff. Like if they're in marketing, yeah, they need marketing skills, but they also need skills to manage projects and time and priorities and conflict and people, right? If you give them those things, they're going to stick. So the problem right now is that most of us don't know the leadership skills that our people need. Number 2, as we just touched on, most of us are growing ourselves, the CEOs, but we're not growing our leadership team and our managers. It's interesting, I was coaching a company in Florida called Blue Grace Logistics. They actually raised $140 million from a group called Warburg Pincus. He went to become one of the largest logistics and freight companies in North America. I coached them from 40 people up to 700. When he was about 400 people, I was coaching him on one of these leadership skills, and Bobby said, "Wow, this is gonna change our company." I'm like, "No, it's gonna change you. What's gonna change your company is teaching this skill to everyone in your organization that manages people." The ripple effects of growing your people is greater than the skill sets of a strong CEO. Number 3, the problem is that most small, medium-sized companies don't have training departments. So you don't have a team of people to do this stuff. You don't even know where to start. You don't know how to train them, so we just don't do it. And then lastly is we don't really know the skills. So the solution is knowing the skills that they need. So I'm gonna tell you right now, and this next screen you should take a picture of. These are the core 12 skills that every single person in your company that manages people needs to be good at. These are the skills you need to be good at, These are the skills your CEO needs to be good at, your management team, your leadership team. Igor, do you recognize some of these skills? Right? These 12 skills, with the exception of vivid vision and email management, 10 of these 12 skills were taught to Igor and I at College Pro Painters. I was certified in these skills in 1989, meaning I was trained in it, I went through classroom training, I listened to speakers about it, I had Paul Woolner teaching me, I had Greg Clark teaching me, then I had to actually show and demonstrate these skills in the field and I got certified in performance of these skills. Here's the core skills from those 12 that I really think that the leadership team needs to be bulletproof in. Your leadership team and you and your CEO needs to be good in these skills more than any other skill in the company. This will be an interesting one. If you have ever done a job interview and interviewed to hire someone, I'd like you to stand up. Okay, stay standing. So all of us have done job interviews, right? Stay standing. I was— stay standing. I was talking to a CEO one day and I said, you know, have you ever had any training on interviewing? He goes, no, but I've interviewed 100 people. I said, maybe you've done it wrong every time. I want you to sit down only if you've had at least an hour's training, and this is not reading a book. How many of you been through some classroom training or solid training on how to do proper job interviews, sit down if you've had at least an hour's training. Stay standing if you've not had an hour training. The rest of you, this is the problem in your company, is all of you are hiring people without a fucking clue how to do it. But that's normal. I want everyone to stand up if you've ever run a meeting before. Stand up if you've ever run meetings before. Now, if you've never had at least an hour's training on how to run meetings, how to get collaboration, how to get the youngest and earliest people in the room, how to deal with moderators and parking lots and timekeepers— if you've never had at least an hour's training on running meetings— and I'm not talking reading the book Death by Meeting— if you've never had at least an hour's training on running meetings, I want you to sit down. Or sit down if you had it. Okay, again, most of you run meetings and have no idea how to run meetings. Okay, you can all sit down for a second. See, the problem is that most of us are trying our best, but we're all like a fly trying to bang our head on the window, and we're gonna work really hard until we get out the other end of the window, and we all end up dead on the windowsill. We would never send our little kid off to play Little League baseball without teaching them the basic skills of how to hold the bat and catch the ball and toss the ball, right? Remember when our kids were going off to play sports? We always— they were incompetent as hell. But we at least practice with them, because if you don't practice with your kid, they come home from Little League and they say, Daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. Who here believes that business is difficult? You're the fucking reason. Maybe I shouldn't have sworn, but maybe you shouldn't be running a business without the skills. You have all lost the right to say business is difficult when you're working and running a business without the basic skills to run a business. Most of your managers are coming to you saying, "I need to hire someone." No, you need to know how to manage priorities better. You need to say no better. You need to know how to make decisions better. You need to align your priorities. Like, no, we don't need to keep hiring. We've built all this complexity into our business because we're like kids going off to Little League without having a clue how to do the basics. This is why Igor and I got trained on this stuff at College Pro Painters, was because we only had 4 months to hire and train 800 franchisees. And then we had, again, 6 weeks to hire 8,000 painters. I was a reference for Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk in their very first round of funding in January of 1995 for Zip2. So I've known Elon for 31 years. His brother, his brother Kimball, worked for me in 1993 at College Pro Painters. I had to be a reference for Zip2. And the reason College Pro Painters is mentioned in the autobiography on Elon Musk, the one by Walter Isaacson, College Pro is talked about, is because the initial funding they got was Kimball Musk's operational and leadership skills that I trained him in, that he got from College Pro. They weren't going to bet on Elon because he'd never done anything. He was this crazy autistic a way out of the box thinker, but Elon had the skills to manage people, projects, time, interdependencies, conflicts. So they put— Kimball called me that night, he goes, what did you tell them? I'm like, did I fuck up? He goes, no, we asked for $600,000 in funding, again January of '95, they gave us $3 million. That was the first— they sold Zip2 2 and a half years later for $317 million cash to Compaq, the largest cash all acquisition in history at the time, because of the skill sets that they had coming into the company. So I packaged these skills up in a course. It's called Invest in Your Leaders. Take a screenshot of this, go look at it. To put yourself through it, it's $350. To put any of your employees through it, it's $350. They get lifetime access. And guess what the skills are that are in this course, those 12. So you can recreate an entire training program for your company, or you can take the training program that I put into 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and put it into your company for $350 a person. That's pretty simple. When I was 16, my dad pulled me aside and he goes, Cam, you need to learn something in business. You're never gonna be smart enough to figure this out on your own. He said, "Your R&D has to stand for rip-off and duplicate." You have to take the best systems that the best companies have done and put those in place inside of your organization. If you've got 5 people on your management team and you put them through this for $1,500 total, that will change the trajectory of your company forever. And again, I'm not doing this to make money. I've already hit an economic free zone. I don't need to make any more money. I'm based out of Dubai. My company's based in Dubai. I don't pay taxes. I've already hit my retirement number. I'm trying to give you these things, these systems to scale your company. This is the stuff that I did for Brian 25 years ago. Next thing I want to talk about is how to unleash the power of a COO or a second in command. Who here has a second in command? Stand up if I can see who has like a general manager, VP Ops, director of ops. Okay, good. All of you should take a look at putting that person into the COO Alliance. It's like BTA, but only for them. You're not allowed to come to the meetings, but they can join. It's only $6,000 a year for them to be a member. Who here wants to have a COO? Yeah, good. So I'm going to talk to you about, about how to leverage the power of a second in command. My last book that just came out is called The Second in Command, and it talks about how to unleash the power of the COO. I've run an organization that's global. We have members of COOs and second in commands from 17 countries called the CEO Alliance. Our next event coming up in Vancouver, you need $5 million of revenue to send your second in command to this one, but to be a member, you only need $2 million. But to come to the next in person, they need to do $5 million or member. And then again, I was the COO at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. So let me talk about what a COO is. Where do I start? Harvard wrote an article about 20 years ago called The Misunderstood Role of the COO, and it's because it's a very complicated role. If you're the head of marketing for a construction company, you can probably be the head of marketing for any construction company. In fact, if you've been the head of marketing for a home services company, you can probably be the head of marketing for any home services company. If you've been the head of finance, the same. The head of IT, the same. The head of customer engagement, the same head of sales, probably, right? The second in command is so different because we have to be really good at whatever the CEO sucks at. The COO has to be really good at whatever the CEO doesn't like to do. And we have to be the right size organization COO. The current COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK is a guy named Eric Church. Eric's been there for 14 years. Eric and I started a fraternity in Ottawa, Canada in October of 1987. I was president year 1, he was president year 2. Weird, right? And now I was COO and then he's COO. I was COO in the entrepreneurial zone, the $2 million to $106 million. I wasn't the right guy to take them to the billion. 2 years later, they'd gone from $106 million to $70 during the global financial crisis. During 2 other COOs, Brian fired one and had an interim one. And then they hired Eric, and Eric came in at $70 million, and he's taken the company to $900 million today. Eric would have been a horrible COO for the first 6 years. He'd never built a franchise company. He wasn't entrepreneurial. He wasn't what Brian— he didn't know how to build it. But he knew how to scale what was already complicated. He walked in and went, "What a cute little company." And I was like, "Fuck," pulling my hair out, right? So the weird thing about the COO is you have to be good at whatever the CEO is not good at. You have to be good at whatever the CEO doesn't like to do. You have to be the right kind of size and scale kind of COO. So it's a complicated role, but I talk about that in my book, "The Second in Command." The second in command also has to be the leash to the entrepreneur's dragon. Most entrepreneurs, me included, are very kind of ADD, distracted. By the way, you scare all of your employees that you're at this event right now because they know you're coming back on Monday with 12 new ideas and 34 others, right? They know, and they know that you're going to give them about 25 seconds per idea and expect them to execute. Like, this session alone will scare the shit out of your employees. So your second in command needs to be the leash to your dragon. They need to be the brakes to your gas, but not the parking brake. And they can't choke you with the leash. My job was to slow Brian down and keep him in control as I then made his vision come true. I was about 6 months into 1800 Got Junk and Brian said that he wanted to start a second brand. And I said, I remember this so clearly, I'm like, if you ever mention a second brand to me while I'm still here, I will walk out the door that day. A person can only sit on one toilet at a time. You try to shit on more than one toilet, it gets kind of messy. My job was to keep Brian focused until we got to the size and scale that he could then open the second brand. He didn't open the second brand until they were about $150 million in revenue. By the way, it took Brian 10 years to go from $0 to $2 million, and it took us 6.5 years to go from $2 to $106 million because he brought the right COO in who'd done it before, who knew what to do, and Brian could step away and focus on what he was good at. So you can hire a second-in-command that's the executor, someone who can help get stuff done, someone who's the change agent. Someone like me who was more of the mentor, because I was able to show Brian what needed to get done, or I was the other half or the partner, because I could actually help divide and conquer. Brian was really good at IT, and he was really good at finance. I'm horribly weak at both of those. I, I don't even like them. I also have a form of dyslexia called dyscalculia where I flip all of my numbers around, so it's really, really hard for me to run that side of the He loved that side of the business. He loved details. He loved like really getting granular. For me, I was more of an outward-facing COO. I was PR, I was sales, I was marketing, franchising, corporate operations, development, execution of vision. Who here has an executive assistant? Okay, this one should scare you. If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. If any of you, if I was on your board of advisors, or if I was a shareholder in your company and I found out that you were making $200,000 a year or $1 million a year running your business and you were doing $15 an hour work, I would fire your ass. Why am I paying you $200 grand a year or $500,000 a year to do minimum wage work? I've had an EA for 25 years. My current EA has been with me for 10. We don't live in the same city. When I was originally hiring Meredith, I said, I really want an EA who's local. And she said, why? I said, I want someone to do some local tasks for me. She said, no, you need some local tasks done. I'm like, okay, Yoda, teach me. She said, what's some, something? I said, I need somebody to like take my dry cleaning in once in a while, get my tires changed. She goes, great, I'll find someone on TaskRabbit. Next. I'm like, oh, I need someone to file this stuff. Cool, I can bring someone in. Okay, next. Like she was able to think, like someone to pick up groceries, gotta get a grocery delivery service. Like anything that I thought I needed a human for, she could find a service for. Here's another ADD moment for you. I was sitting in a sauna at a speaking event I was doing in Hilton Head 3 months ago. A group called Baby Bathwater brought me in to speak, and I was talking to one of the entrepreneurs in the room. I said, I need to hire someone to do cold calling. He said, no, you don't. I'm like, no, I need a cold caller. I've got a really good closer. I need a cold caller. I need a setter. He goes, no, you don't. I'm like, all right, Yoda, teach me. He goes, you need an AI agent to do cold calling. I'm like, no, no, I need someone to pick up the phone and call people. He goes, no, you need an AI agent to pick— I'm like, can it do that? And he goes, I have two. So he demoed his outbound calling that does phone calls with prospects with South African accents better than I could ever set up. And they literally book people onto calendars automatically so that my human can then talk to people. That's fucking cool. But if you've got C players that aren't thinking about putting agents in place, then yeah, we need to hire more people. And like, he literally put in a, a second, like, an AI agent with a South African accent doing outbound calls. That's brilliant. And it's a computer. Anyway, if you have a second in command, you gotta have date night. You have to spend time with your key executives out of the office. You have to spend time with your second-in-command, building a relationship, building trust. Brian and I had a bit of an unfair advantage. I was the best man— sorry, he was best man at my wedding in 2000 before I started working with him 3 months later. He'd watched me build 2 other companies. He watched me build the private currency business that we took public. He watched me build Boyd Autobody. For 4.5 years, we were in a mastermind in the Entrepreneurs Organization together. So we already had that unfair advantage, but when we started working together, we made a promise that our relationship as friends was more important than the business. So we kept spending time every week doing stuff as friends, which allowed us to fight and argue like you're supposed to, right? Spouses, husbands and wives have to fight and argue, but not in front of the kids. And then you have to be able to spend time together and away from the kids so that you actually can build that trust together and like each other. So make, make sure that you do that. I also knew that one of my roles inside of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? was to make Brian iconic. I had to make Brian the shining star of the organization, which means I was the one who rolled out the tough decisions. I was the one that said no to franchisees. I was the one that cut budgets. I was the one that led firing initiatives. And I let Brian roll out the good news and I rolled out the bad news. But internally, Brian shined the spotlight on me. So internally, he made sure all the employees knew that I had to be the tough guy. It was kind of like when I was a kid and I got in trouble and my mom would send me to my room and my dad would show up 4 hours later and spank me. And then my mom would come in after and say, "Your daddy has to do that, but he still loves you." Like there was good cop, bad cop. But like, I know that was kind of a weird way to grow up back then, but it's kind of how we all grew up back then. But I did know that my dad loved me, but he had to be the bad guy. Brian made sure that all the employees knew that I had to be the bad guy. And that's a critical thing to think about inside of your organization. Most entrepreneurs are horrible at handling conflict. We avoid it. Most entrepreneurs are horrible at firing people. And by the way, if you ever say, "Oh, I'm so glad somebody quit," that's actually hurt your company that they quit. You are better to act from a position of strength than a position of weakness. It's better to fire someone than have them quit. 'Cause you wanna have this Scud missile approach where you control the way that they actually leave the organization. But if they quit, they start getting everybody a little bit nervous. And if you're firing somebody, cut deep, cut once. Fire 12 people, not one at a time for 12 weeks. I can go into a bunch of stuff on that. Imagine what your life would look like if you actually had a second in command and a leadership team with the skills to run your organization for you. And you had that vivid vision that they were executing on, like, business gets extraordinarily simple. It's really not that difficult. You're like the fly banging your head on the window, and I'm trying to show you there's a door that's open right here. Just go out the door. Take that path of least resistance. A couple other quick topics that we want to go into, and then I'm going to go into some Q&A. Cash is your oxygen. The reason we almost bankrupted 1-800-GOT-JUNK at $100 million was we didn't know how to leverage our balance sheet. We didn't understand that businesses' cash needs were different as we scaled. Remember when you were like 4 years old and your mom or dad threw a penny in the swimming pool and you drove down to get the penny and you came up, you're gasping for air? It's like, relax, you're not gonna fucking die. You were 4 feet down, right? It's like, you're not gonna die, man, you're fine. But then you go scuba diving for the first time, you get down to 80 feet, you run out of air. You're not gonna die, but you're probably gonna get really sick. But if you go scuba dive down to 140 feet and you run out of air, you will die. So business is the same. When you're a small company, you're starting out, $1 million, a couple million bucks. If you're tight, you just don't pay yourself for a month or two. You don't submit expenses for a couple months. You, yeah, you max out a couple credit cards. You borrow money from your wife, whatever. You just like, it's easy. Right? You got money in your left pocket, you pay for the expenses. Simple. When you're like a little bit bigger, you go to the bank, you get a credit line, you max out your credit cards, you get your executive team to not pay for a little bit, and you can get through it. But as you get bigger, you can't do that anymore. We were approaching $100 million in revenue. We had ranked as the number 2 company in Canada to work for, twice ranked number 1 in British Columbia to work for. We've been on Oprah. We were like, we were crushing it. 330 franchisees operating in 4 countries. We'd opened the UK and Australia. We were crushing it. We had $5 million in cash in the bank. And we moved the offices from Granville Island down to the Guinness Towers. And so, we'd moved into 60,000 square feet, 3 floors, 20,000 sq ft per floor. So, we thought, you know what? Let's design this office to be a cultural iconic office in Vancouver. So, we paid cash for the office renovation, a couple million bucks. We actually built a glass stairway between floors 6, 7, and 8. There was about $600,000 to build this glass stairway to connect all 3 floors because it would be really cool and more open office environment, right? So we paid cash for the glass stairway, and we paid about $800,000 in bonuses and profit sharing, gross margin sharing, to all of our team. We had another $400,000 bonus we paid to the call center, and we paid about $600,000 in bonuses out to Or sorry, taxes out to the government. Kind of bonuses to them too, because they're idiots. Anyway, but the $5 million, we drained it out of our bank in about 6 weeks. Because we didn't know how to leverage our balance sheet, and we had all the cash, we thought we'd just spend it. But then we're like, shit, we need some money. So we went to the bank to get a credit line. We were $100 million in business with no credit line, no loans. We'd never even increased our credit card balances every year, because we didn't need it, because we were making so much money every year. We thought we were king of the world. And we went into the bank to borrow money and they said, "We can't loan to you." We're like, "Why not? Number 2 in Canada. We've been on Oprah. Everybody knows us. We're a cult. There's only us, Lululemon, and Vancouver Olympics that people want to work for. Why wouldn't you loan to us?" They're like, "You don't know how to run a business." We go, "Yeah, we do. Number 2 in Canada." Like, "No, you don't know how to manage and leverage your balance sheet." We had no idea how to actually truly scale a company at that size. So, they wouldn't loan to us. Brian had to borrow $420,000 from his mom to meet payroll that week. I had to personally fire 28 members of our team. The call center had to fire about 20 people. And then I had to phone all of our suppliers and tell them they weren't getting paid for up to 3 months. Those were not pleasant phone calls. There was one phone call where the CEO started swearing at me and screaming at me. I'm like, here's the deal, you're not getting paid for up to 3 months, and if you keep yelling at me, I'm not even putting your name into the fucking lottery to see if you get paid part of what we owe you in 3 months. We need you to be there for us. I'm sorry, we fucked this up. We really screwed up. I know it's not your fault, but we don't have any money anyway. We turned the company around, but if you don't have the proper financial acumen You can hire that. You can get a fractional CFO. We've got two companies that are partners of our CEO Alliance. I can introduce you. You can have a fractional CFO that can— your, your P&L, that can manage your cash flow, that can coach your director of operation or your director of finance. They can coach your controller. You need financial acumen as you scale up the organization, but they don't have to be a full-time person. Let me give you the last part of this. I call this the secret formula to success. You can write this down or take a picture of it. This is what we figured out was our most successful kind of way to measure our business on a monthly or quarterly basis. And it's F times F times E equals success. So, the F is focus. How focused are you? How focused is your company? How focused are your leadership team? How focused are you on your budget, your goals, your marketing? How focused are you on your plan? And what you do is you give yourself a percentage rating around focus, somewhere between 1 to 100% focused. So let's say that you're examining yourself for the last month, right? How focused were you in December? Let's say that you're 50% focused, right? I'd say you're 80% focused, actually. Let's be kind of optimistic. The second half is faith. How much faith do you have in your skills How much faith do you have in your plan, in your budget, in the market, in the economy? How much faith do you have in your people? How much faith do you have in these unskilled, untrained managers to run your business? Let's say you still give yourself an 80% score on faith. And then the E is effort. How much effort are you putting in? Like, are you really working hard or are you hardly working? And effort does not mean 16 hours a day. It means when you're working, you're really really working, right? Are you fluffing it, right? Are you at this conference just out drinking and partying, or are you actually showing up trying to suck as much as you can from the group? And are you trying to give as much to the group so that you build more connections with everybody in the art? Like, how much effort are you putting in? And how much effort are your employees putting in? Let's say you give yourself again a score of 80% on effort. Well, you multiply 0.8 by 0.8, 0.8, it comes out to 51.2% chance of success. Those are pretty shitty odds. That's literally like going to Vegas and throwing it all on red or black. Like, you literally have a 50-50 shot of going bankrupt if you're operating at 80% focus, 80% faith, 80% effort. Even if you get to 90% focus times 90% faith times 90% effort, that only gives you a 72.8% chance of success. 0.9 times 0.9 times 0.9 is 72.8%. Where we pushed 1-800-GOT-JUNK was 98% focus, 98% faith, 98% effort. We were monomaniacal around making sure the organization was dialed in around those 3 things. And 98 times 98 times 98 gives you a 94% chance of success. Those were odds I'm willing to bet on. Those are the clients that we work with in our SEO Alliance. That's what you have to do to be successful. It is not a hard market out there right now. It's really not. There are people in your industry that are absolutely crushing it. I was coaching a client years ago, and he said that he was preparing for a tough year because the industry was forecasting only 3% growth for the industry. Who's heard this kind of things before, right? The focus for the industry. I said, so on the bell curve as humans, where is your fitness level? He goes, well, I run triathletes, I'm in the gym every morning, I eat healthy, I don't drink, I don't smoke. I'm like, I'm in the top 2% of humans. I'm like, okay, if you're in the top 2% of humans, where's your business amongst all the business in your industry? He goes, oh, we're top 5% in our industry. So then why are you planning to be average when you've never been average at anything in your life? I said, what would the top 5% be? He goes, well, we'd have to grow by 35%. I said, then let's put the plan in place and the people in place and the focus and systems in place to grow that 35%. He goes, okay, let's do that. Guess where they came in? 42% growth. The opportunity for you is to dial this stuff in. I gave you a lot of content. I really want you to take a look at this Invest in Your Leaders training. Again, it's not there for me to make money. It's there to really help you scale this stuff up. Put your second in command into the CEO Alliance. You're not getting that for them here. And it doesn't take away from here. And it's a rounding error in terms of cost. But they'll get value from it. This is my main website. If you want any of my books, my speaking, my— all my free content, my YouTube channels, my Second in Command podcast, it's all up there. So you can kind of grab all that information. Let's open it up to Q&A.

Amazing. Thank you, Cam. Thank you. Big round of applause, guys. I've seen many amazing speakers, and that was chock full of takeaways. Thank you, Cam. All right, we're gonna, um, guys, we're gonna open up some Q&A. You guys submitted some really great questions. There's a few of them that I just wanted to make sure don't get missed. So I'm gonna pass this mic first over to Matt Way. And Matt, where are you? There you are. So Matt is running a company, $2 million a year focused on growing to $5. Um, you've got a question here. Uh, I'll let you ask it. Sweet.

So what qualities and skills does an owner need to develop or exhibit to attract top talent in the second command type person? Should I rewind back to that slide that showed you? Yeah, you pretty much covered it. But yeah, that's—

elaborate on—

so you need those core leadership skills of situational leadership, coaching, delegation, one-on-one coaching, managing priorities. Those are core skills, but it's less of the skills that we need to attract top talent and it's more of the vibration we need to have to attract top talent. So the key is that— have you ever watched the movie The Secret?

Uh, no.

Okay. Watch the movie. It's on, it's on Netflix. It's a little bit cheesy, it's a little bit materialistic, but the laws around quantum mechanics and quantum physics that you can apply into the business world are extraordinarily profound. We had everyone on our leadership team watch the movie The Secret 2 or 3 times. We showed all of our top franchisees the movie The Secret a couple of times. I just showed all of our members of the COO Alliance the movie The Secret last year at our Vancouver event. It's really, really powerful. So the vibration that you show up with is how you're going to attract top talent, which means your vivid vision has to be really solid and really vibrating and really feel like your brand. Your website has to feel like that. You've got to show up with that constant, that kind of, um, confidence and that, that energy and that positive. And, and if you really give a shit about your people, they're gonna feel that. And really caring about your people is not knowing their birthday and their dog's name It's knowing their fears and their insecurities and their problems and their dreams and their bucket list. Like, it's really caring. If you show up with those vibrations, you'll attract great people.

Thank you. Awesome. All right, next up, um, we've got a great question here from Jeff Babcock. Where is Jeff? All right, I'm gonna pass this over to you, Jeff.

Are you any relation to a girl named Angela Babcock from North Bay? No, no, I'm not.

Sorry.

Okay, high school girlfriend. That would have been weird. I was— what was really weird, she also lived on Beaver Crescent, so figure that one out. Uh, looking back, what is your major business decision or scaling mistake you may— you made that you would advise against? Really good question. I actually, in the, the back of my first book Double Double, are 67 lessons that I learned over all my years of scaling companies. And they're the lessons from failure, from like really examining myself, my own contribution to the problem. One was the reason we almost bankrupted 1-800-GOT-JUNK wasn't because we overspent. We had a VP of finance who was very quiet, very amiable, very analytical. He was Indonesian. His DISC profile was like the exact opposite of mine, right? I was a high driver, high D, high I. He was very quiet and he kept saying, "Are you sure we're not growing too quickly? Are we worried we're going to run out of cash? Are we going to be okay?" And we're like, "Yeah, yeah, we got this, we got this." We never listened. God gave us two ears and one mouth. We need to use them more in that ratio. And the big lesson I got from this was if you're not willing to listen to the people on your team, hire people you're willing to listen to or just start listening to them. Because he was telling us to be careful. He was telling us to be cautious. We just didn't listen. So I think that would have been the big one is, is really just truly listen. I years ago would get a lot more defensive because I was working so freaking hard that I took any kind of form of criticism as a real attack on me. And it wasn't. It wasn't the school system telling me I was stupid, right? I was really bad in school. It wasn't my parents being hard on me. It was just someone giving me feedback. And I was good at giving feedback, but I was terrible at receiving it. So I would have been better at receiving feedback. I would have been better at listening to my people. Thanks so much.

Awesome. All right. Next up, over to Brett Farrington.

Thank you. Okay, I'm nervous. Okay, here we go. Good. Imagine you're back at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. You got $2 million in revenue and you want to scale your commercial sales in the next 24 months from $2 million to $4 million. You're in charge of sales and marketing. That's me. What do you do for this next first quarter of 2026? What do you focus on for the year? Great, great question. And I still talk with Brian from Got Junk frequently. We were emailing each other 3 days ago. Let me tell you something that I did at 1-800-GOT-JUNK in the first 6 weeks that I was there. I came into the organization and Brian had just sold his 12th franchise. None of the franchisees were making money yet. He had people in the call center that were all getting paid minimum wage. He was borrowing his grandmother's car to drive to the office because he had no money. The company wasn't making any money. And so I raised our prices by 40%. And Brian and the whole team thought I was crazy. And I am crazy. We're all crazy. But like, they literally thought I was going to bankrupt the company. And I'm like, well, you're going bankrupt anyway. But let's at least go out swinging. Like, if we're gonna go bankrupt, let's really fucking go for it. So I took our full load, the full truck, right? The big blue trucks used to be $338 a full load. I raised our prices to $438, $458, literally overnight. I didn't phase it in, I just changed it. And then this, this isn't collusion, um, but we by accident faxed our price list to all of our competitors so that they could raise their prices. And then, and then we by accident like left our price list on the dashboard of all of our vehicles so that they could see our price list as well. Within about 6 weeks, they started raising their prices too. So because we raised our prices more, we grew our revenue more. So if I had to go from $2 million to $4 million, I would really do some price examination across this room or across people in your industry and other markets, and I would gain the confidence to charge what the top 5 and 10% are charging. And then I would act as if I would have better branding, better customer engagement, better sales. Like, I would literally deliver at that. But we, we called ourselves the FedEx of junk removal or the Starbucks of junk removal. Remember, 25 years ago Starbucks was pretty fucking cool. Starbucks was crushing it. So to be the Starbucks of junk removal nowadays, it would be like the hipster coffee chain, whatever they're going to be, right? Um, in Vancouver it'd be like Purebred. Is it purebred? Like, they're like awesome, right? So I would, I would position yourself there is number one. Number two is I would take a look at who are your top two commercial clients and I would find out how to grow them by 30 to 40%, how to get more business from your top two. And then I would look at your next 10 and find out how to get them to what your top two are doing. I would only focus on your top 12 potential and current clients and I would just scale them up and then you'll hit your numbers easily. So it's hyperfocus.

All right, next question.

Just on that, like, we were doing commercial sales. I hired our entire commercial account sales team, and we were going after Public Storage because they had all these storage lockers. We're like, hey, we can haul that stuff away to the junk when your people don't pay. So we were talking to the head of Public Storage, and we asked them how much junk removal that they did across all of their locations. And we, we had coverage in 78% of the public storage market. So we had enough to be a real big commercial account for them. They were doing $2 million a year in junk removal. So we're like, well, how come we're only getting $180,000 of that $2 million? They go, well, we didn't know you. Our local guys don't know you. We're like, what would it take for us to get 50% of the $2 million? He goes, I can get you to 80% of the, of the $2 million if you give us a 5% discount. Fucking done and done. We just raised our prices 40%. I'll give you, I'll give you 12. Anyway, so, so it's like, but, but because we knew they were a big opportunity, a big target market, that's how we got them. I can tell you later how we landed Waste Management, got referrals from them.

All right, one more of these questions from Mr. Tom Fitzgerald. Over to you.

Thanks, Cameron, appreciate it. Uh, I think the guy that did your slides rewrote my comment here, but what's the most frustrating thing that you see when a company fails, like putting out the Vivid Vision? And if you had like a magic wand and you could just take care of that frustration, what would it be? Yeah, it's the fly banging their head on the window. It's like, I literally watch so many entrepreneurs. The sad thing is half of you will go back to your operations Monday and do none of what you learned. Half of you. Half of you won't grow your people. Half of you won't put your CO into the CO Alliance. Half of you won't go through the Invest in Your Leaders course. Half of you won't learn how to interview and run meetings, like the fucking basic shit that you actually need day to day. And half of you won't do it. That drives me bonkers. But you're all going to work really, really hard. You're all going to spend all this money. You're all going to not spend time with your wife and your kids and your friends and not have any hobbies because you're going to be so working hard on the business when there's actually a shortcut and a path of least resistance. Do you ever watch water go down a mountain? It doesn't go down the hard way. It goes down that path of least resistance. And I'm giving you that path of least resistance. That's what drives me bonkers. It's always driven me crazy. That's, that's why I do what I do. My core purpose— who here has heard of Simon Sinek, the guy who wrote Start With Why? Simon was on our board of advisors 5 years before he wrote the book Start With Why. Okay, Simon used to sleep on my couch in Vancouver when he'd come out for meetings. So one night at dinner at my home, Simon and I are having dinner. I'm making dinner for him in my kitchen. And Simon was asking me about why I do what I do. And I was telling him about this analogy. He goes, "You love helping entrepreneurs make their visions come true." I was like, "Yeah, that's why I do it. I like helping them make their dreams happen." So that's why I wrote the books. That's why I started the SEALs. It's like, that's the only reason I'm even doing this. I don't come here for the good of my health. I don't come here for the money. I literally, when I knew Igor and I knew he was college pro, 'cause I don't really do a lot of speaking anymore either. I, I've done paid speaking in 29 countries. I'm only saying yes very selectively to the groups of the right audiences. If I can help all of these entrepreneurs in a home services space have a better life, have more profits, have better companies, have better teams, have more profit, that's a hell yes. What drives me crazy is that half of you won't do anything and, and you'll go home and say business is hard.

All right, we're gonna open it up to 2 more questions before we wrap here, uh, for some open Q&A. Who has something that they would love? To ask Cameron Herold? All right, let's go right here, and then we'll choose one more from the back. Over to you, man.

Hello. I've started with Blueprints last April, and I listened to your podcast about the vivid vision. And I took so long to have that vivid vision prepared before I moved on to the next step. And I was really challenged by very thorough, you have to describe where you're at in 3 years and stuff like that. And I'm just asking myself, why is it so difficult for me? And was it like fear of not being able to reach that point and stuff? So have you ever met with people who were, who had difficult time creating that vivid image and what do you think about it? Yeah, the hard part for most of us as entrepreneurs in writing that vivid vision is that we're trying to get it perfect and we're often trying to put the plan into the vision document. It's not the plan. Remember, it's not how you're going to make all those things happen. But you kind of start putting in the goals and the numbers and how every step— that's not what it is. When I was designing my dream home, I didn't care how they made the cabinets. I didn't care how they hung the cabinets. I didn't care how they made it for the money I needed to spend on it. I just knew what I wanted it to look like. I didn't care how they put the flooring in. I didn't care where they bought the flooring, as long as it looked and felt like the flooring I wanted, right? So the entire home that got built, I just wanted what I wanted, not how it happened. It had to happen on time and on budget, Most people, when they get into it, they get worried and locked up and frozen on how they're gonna make it come true. When I then found the contractor and I showed him what I wanted, he goes, "I can do that." I'm like, "Can you do it on budget?" He goes, "Totally, I've done like 50 of these." So that was probably one reason you got stuck. The other reason you probably got stuck was you probably didn't get out of your office and you probably sat in your office or in your environment where you're normally getting sucked into email and business and management. When I wrote my first vivid vision in 2007, there's actually a photo of me in my backyard Globe and Mail in Canada covered it and took a picture of me on the front page of the Globe business section. I was in my hammock listening to the Grateful Dead. I'd just smoked the blunt. And so I was a little bit high and I was listening to the Grateful Dead. And so I wasn't thinking about planning at all. I wasn't worried about how, I was just fucking, my company's gonna be like this. You know, I originally called my company the Back Pocket COO because I wanted to be in your back pocket. I was like, "You can't afford me, but you can afford not to pull me out of your back pocket once in a while to help you." So that whole idea, and then I didn't know how I was going to make all this happen, but I had the SEAL Alliance described 18 years ago, my speaking, my coaching, my books, it was all in there without knowing how it was going to come true. I could show you my 2010 Vivid Vision document that I wrote in 2007. It's because I got high, I sat in the backyard in a hammock, listen to the Grateful Dead, and I just mind map without worrying about how I was going to make it come true. That's the truth.

Does anybody have any weed?

I do.

All right, Jane's not going to like this, but we're going to do one more question.

All right, uh, we're all going to drop acid tonight.

All right, one last question. Here we go. Yeah, so I'm just at a point in my business right now where I'm like, I'm needing to put that second command in person. I'm just having a really hard time kind of like picturing who that person is. I can kind of see it within my business a little bit, but it's like, I want that person to be perfect.

Yeah.

But it's like, how do I envision it? What do I put down?

Yeah, you're starting with the— we're starting with step 2. That step 2 is describing the person you want. Step 1 is describing yourself. I want you to make a list of everything that you suck at in business. I want you to make a list of everything that you're not, that you don't like to do in business, like all the stuff that drains you, that you avoid. I want you to describe your company culture. I want you to really know your core values. And they can't be the single words, they have to be short phrases. Like, I want you to know yourself and your company so clear. That'll then help you to understand who you're looking for. You're looking for the yin to your yang, right?

Yeah, thank you.

I appreciate that. Thanks very much, everybody.