RECAST - The Dark Side of Scaling | Cameron Herold (Podcast 594)

October of 2000, I was standing in an elevator in Seattle. I just prepared to move back to Canada, and one of my VPs tapped me on the shoulder and he said, are you okay? I weighed 30-odd pounds heavier than I do today. I was smoking, I was drinking a lot, I wasn't eating very well, I certainly wasn't getting exercise. I'd never been to the gym. I turned around to say, yeah, I'm totally fine, and I collapsed on the floor of the elevator and started sobbing. I was having a full nervous breakdown, and no, I wasn't okay. I was a fucking train wreck. As you would do back in those days, I just went for dinner that night and had my steaks and red wine grinding Grand Marnier and Manhattans, and that's how I got through the night. And then I woke up the next day and was back in the office at 7:00 grinding. A week later, I went to the doctor's office. The doctor said, how's it going? I'm like, it's pretty good. I have this weird kind of a metallic taste at the back of my neck. So the doctor did a test, and he gave me a series of questions, and each question had some points attached to them. And if you get 250 points, you have a 90% chance of a heart attack. I had 435 points. I was clinically redlining, which is why I'd had the nervous breakdown the week before. But instead of me going, oh, there's something wrong, I should maybe go seek help. I did what most guys do, which is, oh, that was fucking weird. Let's go have a drink and some smokes and have a couple of good steaks and I'll be fine.

Right?

The lesson that I got was to listen to my body more. And the whole Latin phrase of mens sana in corpore sano, the healthy mind in a healthy body. I had to start getting my shit together. This is not a normal presentation. I've been paid to speak now. It's actually— this is my 30th country. That I've spoken in. So, and I did get to speak in Antarctica to a group of CEOs about 4 and a half years ago. My wife and I were down there on a cruise and we got paid to speak there. This is not a paid presentation. This is not a canned presentation. I decided to present on something that I call the hero's journey or lessons from the edge. And I'm going to talk about when I've either almost gone bankrupt or almost lost the company at $100 million in revenue or $9 million in embezzlement and fraud, or when I had a nervous breakdown and I'm kind of talking about some of those lessons. So I'm not going to talk about any of my successes. I'm going to talk about all of the real crisis that I've gone through in my 30 years or 40 years now, I guess, of running companies, which is crazy. Fuck, it's been 40 years. Holy shit. Fuck, I got old somehow. First off is entrepreneurs never share this stuff on social media. The only time anyone ever goes on, on social media and says, I'm going to be vulnerable, you know, within 4 seconds that they're full of shit because they're going to pull you into their funnel. 60 seconds, right? So I can be all vulnerable at something. Fuck off. Or like the fake tears of doing something like, we know you're pulling us into something. We never in the moment talk about being embezzled or almost bankrupting the company or our CFO stealing from us because you're dealing with it in that day. And you can't talk about it because your employees, your leadership team, your customers, your board, you'll scare the shit out of them until a few years later that they know you've recovered from us. So we never actually talk about the real stuff in the moment. At best, we talk about it in a, in an EO or YPO forum, or when we're getting really vulnerable here. And yet we all show up and talk about how big our sales are and what our, you know, what our, our EBIT is or how big our success is. But we never talk about the real stuff. And the problem is we all struggle with the real stuff and we go through the stress and depression at home and our spouse sees us and it freaks them out because they're strapped to our back as we're riding this roller coaster. So I'm going to talk about some of the real shit that I've gone through and hopefully make it easier for you to know that the shit that you're going through is actually real. Almost every one of you today is actually going through something really tough in your business or relationship that you're not going to be talking about on social media for 3 years. Just a quick show of hands of who would feel that that's probably pretty accurate right now. Right. That's like 90% of the room agrees that there's stuff you're going through that we're not talking about. So hopefully this inspires us to throw it all out there because this is the group that can help us through it. The first one is, is we have a, we give a fake perception of how easy entrepreneurship is. Here I am on my beach in Bora Bora with my fucking laptop, right? Here I am. And I do it like, here I am globe trotting around the world as a digital nomad. Dude, like it gets really freaking hard. It's not that easy. When I was 20 years old, I had 12 full-time employees. I was running my first business that is now 40 years ago, which is crazy. I had 12 full-time employees. I was running a house painting company in Canada.. And in the first 2 months into my business, 5 of my 12 employees were some of my best friends from university. They'd driven 5.5 hours to a different city to live in Sudbury to help me run my business, to work for me. And they all hated me by the end of the second month because they thought I was rich. They thought I was making too much money. And I went and talked to my dad who'd been an entrepreneur for 20 years, and I said, My friends all hate me. And he said, why? And I said, because they think I'm rich. They think I'm making so much money. And he said, you haven't made a profit yet. And I'm like, I know. And he goes, well, why do they think you're rich? And I said, well, every job that we do, they see how much I'm charging the customer. So they know I'm charging the customer $1,000 and they know they each made $100 and they think I'm putting the $800 in my pocket. And he goes, well, why don't you show them the truth? I'm like, how am I going to do that? And he goes, take out your accounting. Show them your general ledger, show them your books, and show them the truth. So I'm like, all right, I'll do that. So I brought them into my living room, ordered, ordered pizza, sat down with a case of beer. A case in Canada is 24 beers. We sat down and we literally had pizza and beer, and I showed them my accounting. I showed them workers' comp, liability insurance, my royalties, my advertising, my gas, my soft supplies, my unemployment insurance. I showed them my paint bills.. And within 30 minutes, all 12 of my employees went from being terrified— or sorry, hating me because I was rich— to going terrified that we were going bankrupt. In 30 minutes. In 30 minutes. I swear to God, they were like, holy fuck, we're not going to have a job. And we moved 5 hours away to work for you, you fucking— like, what the fuck? But it was a really important lesson for me that open book financials doesn't mean open book financials to brag about your profit. Open book financials means to show everybody how tough it really is so that we're not the only one going through this war to get like on our own. So I learned from it. Who's here or has heard of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? So almost all of you. If you're in North America, you've heard of the big blue trucks driving around. We were on Oprah. We landed all the press about us. But what you don't know is when we are approaching $100 million in system-wide revenue, we had about 3,000 employees system-wide. We had 248 people at the head office. We almost bankrupted the company. And what happened was we had $5 million in cash in the bank and we paid $2 million for an office renovation and a move. We were moving into 60,000 square feet spread over 3 floors of a Class A building. We spent $800,000 on a glass stairway to open up the floors. We were the number 2 company in Canada to work for, so we wanted this incredible culture. Uh, we spent $800,000 on, um, employee leadership team profit sharing, spent $600,000 in taxes, and our $5 million in cash went to zero within about 8 or 9 weeks. We were really happy about the fact that we were able to pay all of that with cash. We're like, this is fucking great. Look, look how smart we are. But we're like, shit, we don't have enough money to meet payroll. So we, we, our, our head of finance went to meet with the bank to say, can we get a credit line? Because We didn't need a credit line. We were so smart building a $100 million company. We had no loan, no credit line. And by the way, when you're running a $100 million company, you can't get free credit cards and max out your line like that. Doesn't do fuck all when literally, right? It doesn't do anything. Our payroll for 2 weeks for just the corporate office was $420,000 just for payroll. Brian had to go and borrow money from his mom to meet payroll. Because the bank wouldn't loan us any money, wouldn't give us a single credit line because we didn't know how to run a business. We're like, what do you mean? Look how good we are. Look at all the press we're getting. Look at, you know, how big we are. Look at our growth. 6 years in a row of 100% revenue growth. We're incredible. And they're like, you don't understand how to leverage a balance sheet. You'd understand that cash is your oxygen. And when you're a small company, like 1 to 10 employees, if you can't pay your bills, you just max out a credit card or you don't pay yourself for a month or two, or, you know, you don't pay yourself back for your expenses. Or at the end of the year, you pay, You can't do that, right? Your cash is oxygen. And so we learned a really, really big lesson that we needed to understand our financials better. The biggest lesson I got though was if we hire employees, we need to listen to them because our head of finance for the entire year prior had been saying, are you sure we're not growing too quickly? I'm worried that we're opening up too many corporate locations. Why are we opening up Australia and the UK all at the same time? And myself and Brian, the CEO, just kept saying, no, no, we got this. No, no, we got this. Because we were these dominant Type A, you know, I was a 98-I in DISC. Like, we were going 100 miles an hour without being able to see 2 miles in front of us. But our head of finance was very quiet, very analytical, very amiable, kind of an introvert who didn't have the ability to get our attention, and we didn't have the ability to listen. And so the big lesson that we got from almost losing the entire company was if you're not willing to listen to your employees, hire people you're willing to listen to. But God gave us two ears and one mouth, and we should use them in that ratio. We also had to learn how to understand a budget and cash flow. So our new CFO that had come in right around that time that showed us we were going bankrupt started giving us daily cash flow projections. So every day, at one point we were getting it twice a day, we were learning what our cash in the bank was going to be for tomorrow. Twice a day to project where we were going. We had to fire 30 of the 248 employees in a single day. Not fun. We had to call— I had to call— I had to call all of our suppliers. Like, I'm talking like our Google Ads people, our social people, like all of the marketing, our printing companies, our— the guy making our boxes for the back of all the trucks, the big blue boxes. I had to call all of our suppliers and tell them we couldn't pay them for 90 days., but they had to keep producing. One of the CEOs of one of our marketing agencies started screaming at me over the phone, like, how can you fuck up? I'm like, ma'am, if you keep yelling at me, like, I'm not even gonna put you into the lottery to see if we pay you 30% of what we owe you in 90 days. Well, that was what we told them. We said, we can't pay you for 90 days. We will pay you back in 90 days. We'll pay you 30% of what we owe you, and then we'll start paying you a little bit more and we'll make you whole over 6 months. So she was losing her mind and I'm just sitting there trying to keep the company together. So the big lesson is like, understand your financials, get a fractional CFO in place to help you with your financials. Listen to your people. Don't be the person who thinks you've got it all put together because at times you're going to be wrong. And the way you run a business when you're small is not a way you run a business when you're older. Where's Eli? Eli, how old are you now? Okay. When you were 3 years old, you were Eli. When you were 13, you were Eli.

Apartments.

Okay. And when you were 23, you were Eli, but you wouldn't have been able to run this business at 23 or at 13. You're the same person, but you had to evolve as a person. What we had to learn was how to evolve as a company and how to understand how to evolve our financial management as a company and how to listen to our people as a company. Because it gets really, really horrible when you have to sit down with 30 people in a single day, more like over about 3 hours and tell them all they're getting fired. It was every 3 to 4 minutes. It was like walking one into a room, telling them they're letting go, someone escorting to the next room, and me going to get the next person and coming in. By person number 10, I'm in tears, and the person number 10 knows what's coming because the other 9 aren't coming back to their desk. And we can't go on social media. Well, there wasn't any social media there. Facebook hadn't started yet, but there was— you're not going to share this. Like, you're not going to go on social media and say, I'm doing this, I'm struggling, can anybody help me? Right. It's a really terrifying place to be. I went on a ski trip last month with Dan Martell and 48 entrepreneurs. We went to a place called Baldface to go cat skiing, which makes the skiing here look like preschool. It's some of the most intense skiing in my life, but the most intense moment of this 4 days was a friend that I'd brought from Australia to the trip, a guy who I'd met 19 years ago. He runs a big mold remediation company in Australia. And he told us about how he almost lost his company last year with $9 million of fraud that he was going through. And he's allowed me to tell the story to you because it's a big lesson for all of us to be aware of. So he was— here's how the fraud happened. He had 140 employees at his head office. And by the way, if you don't think it can happen to you, then it's happening now. Okay. For real. He had 140 employees, really good company culture. Everybody loved everybody. Everybody got along. All the people were getting their friends to come work for the company. It was incredible until he found out that his COO and his executive assistant had conspired to commit fraud, and they started hiring a bunch of their friends from within the Polynesian community to come and work in the company. And they made sure that they had a couple of people working in every business area. So the COO and executive assistant got a couple people into finance and into sales and into operations and into IT. So they could literally rig the systems to commit fraud. So some of the frauds that they did in a construction-related business, they took company credit cards to the Home Depot of Australia with a bunch of contractors every week or two and said, buy whatever you want as long as it's under $25,000. We'll get to the door. I'll show you the bill. You give me $0.50 on the dollar. I'll run it through the company. You can take all the equipment. You give me 50% in cash. They were doing that every 2 weeks for 18 months. They were taking company gas cards because he had a fleet of vehicles and people were taking all their girlfriends down to the gas station and they were all filling up their family vehicles with gas. $20 to get a full tank of gas, putting the gas on the company credit cards. They're putting $20 in their pocket. They set up fake companies that they were invoicing the finance department. So like if I sent an invoice to most of our companies, for $3,200 and you had somebody inside your finance department paying the bill, you never know what's happening. But there were these $3,500, $8,400, $19,000, all these expenses being run because the person in accounts payable was in on the fraud. And so they were doing that. They were, um, they were taking cash jobs, taking jobs off the schedule, going to the client and saying, Igor, I know we're supposed to fix your house. It's normally going to be $18,000 to do this mold remediation. We'll do it for $9,000 if you pay us cash and we'll still give you a receipt. Igor is going to say, fuck yeah, let's do it. He doesn't know it's fraud. He just thinks the company is doing it for cash. The reality is it was going to be a $9,000 job anyway. They knew because the head salesperson was in on the fraud to kind of charge more to get the cash job. They were then taking the cash, running the labor through the company. So over the 16 or 18 months that this was happening, he wasn't making money and he'd go back to his finance team saying he'd get really pissed off. They would stop the fraud for 2 or 3 weeks, build up some cash into the business again. He'd get some breathing room and they'd start it up again. Anyway, hired a forensic auditor, found out what was happening, fired 40 out of 170 people. Thankfully, during that period, he also raised his prices by 35% to try to start making some money. And the market actually sustained his price increase. So now he's coining it like he's making so much money. Um, but that's a pretty big scam. When we built the barter company, I built a private currency business. I was the sec— second in command for a large private currency company that we sold for $64 million in, um, October of 2000. We sold the company in January of 2000, 3 months before the NASDAQ started its 78% crash. So we lost a, a $64 million cash out. We ended up with about $3 million. So the— yeah, it was somebody worse than Jesus. It was worse than that. I was, I was sitting, I was, I was sitting with the CEO. We were on the 4th floor of our office in Seattle, in Belltown. And Steve looked out the window and he said, it's too bad we're only on the 4th floor. And I said, why? He said, we're only going to break our legs. This was, you know, we'd been building this company for years. This had been Steve's entire life. But the lesson that I learned from this was don't keep saying that you're putting all your money into your company, you're investing in your company, 'cause it's effectively like going to Vegas and doubling down every year. Every once in a while you lose that bet. Every once in a while you don't actually make the money. I'm lucky because the company I was running that had been acquired by Steve was the public company that we then lost. But he'd spent 16 years building this company to then go from the, his valuation down to effectively zero. So the doubling down idea of continually putting money— sometimes it's good to pull some money off the table. I was lucky that I sold 35% of my stock right when we did the transaction because we weren't allowed to sell anymore until we had exited. So I was at least able to pay my taxes, but I lost all of my equity in the company, which led me to October of 2000, I was standing in an elevator in Seattle. I'd just prepared to move back to Canada and one of my VPs tapped me on the shoulder and he said, are you okay? I weighed 30-odd pounds heavier than I do today. I was smoking. I was drinking a lot. I wasn't eating very well. I certainly wasn't getting exercise. I'd never been to the gym. And I turned around to say, yeah, I'm totally fine. And I collapsed on the floor of the elevator and started sobbing.. And I was shaking. I'm shaking now as I'm saying it, but I was having a full nervous breakdown. I was literally shaking. I was sobbing like a 13-year-old crying. And no, I wasn't okay. I was a fucking train wreck. And then as you would do back in those days, I just went for dinner that night and had my steaks and red wine and Grand Marnier and Manhattans. And that's how I got through the night. And then I woke up the next day and was back in the office at 7:00 AM grinding. A week later, I went to the doctor's office and the doctor— I was getting insurance for a home that we were buying in Vancouver, and I needed to get a physical to be approved for the house insurance or mortgage, I guess, the mortgage. And the doctor said, how's it going? I'm like, it's pretty good. I have this weird kind of a metallic taste at the back of my neck. Is anybody ever like super stressed in their neck and shoulders and you have like a metallic taste or a chemical sensation? Has anybody ever had that feeling? 1, 2, 3. So when I'm not, maybe not describing it correctly, but often entrepreneurs have this weird kind of feeling or taste almost at the back. I can only describe it like I was chewing on tinfoil or aluminum foil. And so the doctor did a test and he gave me a series of questions and each question had some points attached to them. And if you get 150 points, you have a 50% chance of a heart attack. If you have 90%, 90— sorry, if you have 250 points, you have a 90% chance of heart attack. I had 435 points. I was clinically redlining, which is why I'd had the nervous breakdown the week before. But instead of me going, oh, there's something wrong, I should maybe go seek help, I did what most guys do, which is, oh, that was fucking weird. Let's go have a drink and some smokes and have a couple of good steaks and fuck, I'll be fine.

Right.

You just tough, tough your way through it. But my mom was dying. She'd been diagnosed with cancer. I got married and realized it wasn't someone I was in love with. She'd just told me that she was pregnant, and I knew that if I could wait till my child graduated high school, then I could leave home. My child wasn't even born yet. André, where's Andreas? That's the son I was talking about today. Wasn't even born, and I was ready to leave the house. I was, was overweight, wasn't eating, wasn't doing well. We'd lost the entire company. Stock market had crashed by 78%. Like I was moving from Seattle to Canada and I thought I was fine. The lesson that I got was to listen to my body more, right? And the whole Latin phrase of mens sana in corpore sano, the healthy mind in a healthy body, is I had to start getting my shit together. I was written up in the Wall Street Journal that October as one of 4 supernovas, people whose careers had gone very high, very quickly, and flamed out with stress. That article is still online. A year or two later, I was then written up in the Globe and Mail as someone who's turned their career around and their life around by, you know, getting in shape and running and getting some shit happening. But it's pretty scary when at 35 years old, I was literally having a nervous breakdown. So I was 25 years ago and I was literally clinically redlining. I, in January, of last year or December of last year. So a year, 14 months ago, I got an email request and it was, hey, we'd like to have you on our podcast. Somebody asked me yesterday if I've been on any podcasts. I've probably been on 200 podcasts. I've been interviewed by every major newspaper magazine, like the actual physical prints. So I'm very used to dealing with the media. And it was a very normal request to be on a podcast, not one of these like, hey, we'll pay you to be on, which is totally scams. It was like a legit, here's the show, here's the email. Would you like to be on the show? I respond, cool. They book it for a month out. A week later I got an email and it said, um, can you send us your bio and your headshot? I sent them my updated bio, not the wrong one that I sent Eli today. I sent them my updated bio, sent them my proper headshot. They go, great, that's amazing. We'll see you in 3 weeks. A week later I got another email that said, here's some questions we're thinking about asking you on the podcast. How do these look? I'm like, yeah, those look all great. Perfect. See you in 2 weeks. A week before the episode, they send me an email. We need you to do an AV check. We're going to be streaming this across multiple platforms. It's going to be on YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram all at once. We need to make sure your tech— I'm like, I've never fucking done that. So yeah, I'll do this tech setup. So we hop on Zoom and I'm over in Dubai at a speaking event. I hop on Zoom and I'm on video and right away the person says, sorry, I'm on audio only. I'm driving my kid to school. I heard you're in Dubai this week speaking. And I said, yeah. And he goes, are you really at the Mindvalley event with Vishen? Yeah. Are you doing the main stage thing? Yeah. Like, I heard you were doing the opening keynote. Yeah. And he goes, sorry, I'm wasting your time. Let me help you get the tech set up. So then he goes, go here, go here on Facebook, open up the business manager, whatever, click on this. And that's not working. Click on this one. No, that's not working. He goes, hang on, I'll send you a link. Click on the link and that'll help it get set up. And I go, You know what? I'm fucking frustrated. I was, I was getting frustrated and I was like short on time. I said, let me have you do this with my marketing manager. She can set it all up for you. I'm going to go back into the speaking event that I'm at. So I shut my laptop, message Bianca, my head of marketing. I said, hey, can you do the call with this guy? Make sure our tech is all set up properly. Yeah, no problem. She gets on a call with him the next day. I heard Cameron's over in Dubai. How's his speaking event? Is he really at Mindvalley? Oh, sorry, I'm wasting your time. By the way, I'm only on, on audio because I'm driving my kid to soccer instead of school or whatever. Hops on, takes him in. Nope, that's not working.

That's—

she sends, or he sends her a link. She clicks on the link. That doesn't work. He sends her a second link. She clicks on the link. After about 5 or 6 minutes, her spider senses are going, there's something's off here. She goes, hang on, my kid's crying. Let me call you back. She closes her laptop, calls my EA and goes, lock out our accounts. Close everything out. She realized that something was going wrong. In that 7 minutes, he'd taken us all off the Facebook account, had put himself in the business manager, and had started 2 new pages. Thankfully, we were able to lock him out because what he was gonna do is run an offer to his pages using my credit card inside the business manager, and his cost per acquisition could have been upside down. He could spend $1,000 to make $50, right? Because he's spending my money. And he knows that it's going to get shut down by Facebook at some point, but not until he's at least run— like, he spends $100,000 on my Amex Platinum. He could have— anyway, what happened was because we then got it shut down, I then go back into Facebook, talk to Facebook. I'm in Dubai. My assistant is in Brazil. No, my marketing manager's in Brazil. My EA's in Oklahoma. Facebook got spooked that all this had happened because this guy was somewhere in like Karachi or something. So they shut down my account. And then I had, and I was a Facebook verified profile 13 years ago, back when you were, you had to be like a legit figure. You couldn't buy it. My, anyway, so all my stuff was like legit verified for a long, long period of time. I'd run pages for years. I'd never had a single warning. I got locked out of the account after about 6 months. We finally got back into the account and then I had to upload my, my, uh, passport in a video to prove it was really me again. That flagged it and it shut me down. I was out of Facebook and out of my pages for about 10 months until I hired some guy out of Turkey who paid people inside of Facebook to actually get my stuff back set up and back verified again. So I'm back on, but that was a shitty situation to go through. We had an email scam about 8 weeks ago where an email was sent to my assistant with me being on the sub, um, the thread. There were a bunch of like emails on this thread. It was a company saying, hey, can you pay our bill? Me saying, sorry, I'll get it paid. Hey, it's still not paid. Sorry, I'll send it to accounts payable, CC my assistant, and then them sending it to Meredith. All of those emails were faked. So the thread was all stuff they created.. And in the thread, it's me with my email addresses in blue saying, do this. But none of that was from me. It was just faked emails. Meredith got the email from me to pay this $17,000 bill. But when she read, I sent it to accounts payable and, uh, pay it. She's like, we've never had an apartment called— we're like a company of 8. Like, what do we have accounts payable? What the fuck are you talking about? So she called me, she's like, is this legit? I'm like, no, it's not legit. But those scams happen so often, right? And when you have controllers or directors of finance or whatever, they don't find this stuff. Oh, I had an employee theft that legally I'm not even allowed to talk about where we were stolen about $150,000 and it was fraud and I'm not even allowed to talk about the situation. So that's all I can say other than inspect what you expect and trust but verify. So that's some shit on, on Finance. Balance. Let me talk about balance. You know, people always talk about like career-life balance. I don't think there's any such thing as career-life balance. What I've found for me is it's like an elephant on a teeter-totter that you, that you're always kind of doing a little bit of this, that for 4 or 5 months or 3 months, you might be all about fitness and friends and finance, and then it might swing into like, it's more about balancing all of the different obsessions in your business. So, When Ben was talking about all the stuff he's done with his family, Ashley and I have written a vivid vision for our marriage where we discuss friends and finance and family and vacations and what we do for money and relationships and sex and use of psychedelics. And we've discussed all this stuff and I'm like, I have to look— and I've written that for me. And I look at how can I work hard on a couple of things? I might let a couple of other things slide and then I try to work hard on a couple of other things. 'Cause if I try to keep everything perfectly balanced, I feel insanely guilty all the time and I realize there's no possible way. I think that's why so many women feel that it's impossible to be a mom and a lover and a friend and a business person and a, like, it's fucking impossible to be all of that. It's kind of, you gotta just do a little bit of this. So I, I, I got better at, at doing some of that. Um, I learned through a lot of my years And in stages that I wasn't spending time with my friends, that I was just so working, always working. I, and work was my biggest dopamine rush. So because I felt better with working, it was easier to go and do that than it was to spend time with my friends. So I lost a lot of my friends over those years. And it's only been in probably the last 7 or 8 years that I've decided to spend more time actually really getting to know people. But it's because one of my employees in 2007 told me something at a cocktail party and it scarred me. And Jillian, whose husband was on our board and we were friends, and Jillian worked with me, came up to me at this cocktail party and she said, Cameron, can I tell you something? And I said, sure, what? She said, you're fucking boring. She said, all you talk about is 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And I realized that she wasn't telling me what else to talk about because I didn't have anything else in my life. I wasn't going to festivals. I wasn't getting tattoos. I wasn't traveling the world. I wasn't, you know, engaged. I wasn't listening to music. I wasn't reading books. I wasn't traveling. I wasn't engaged in bucket lists. I wasn't wanting to learn about sexuality or spirituality or my childhood traumas. I was literally— all I could talk about was work. And I realized that that was not who I wanted to be. And then later I was sitting in an event. You guys know the name Dean Graziosi? Dean and I were sitting at, we were at an event like this together in the room as sharing information. We were in a breakout group of two and our exercise was, how do your kids describe you? And Dean said, my kids describe me as a really good investor and a really good marketer and really good in real estate. And we lived like 10 blocks away from each other in Arcadia in Scottsdale. And he said, how about you? And I started to cry. And then he started to cry because we realized that's not how we want our kids to describe us. And now if you said to your kid, my kids, what's your dad do? They would say he hikes and he travels and he likes going to Burning Man and he's like madly in love and he's doing all this crazy shit and likes cooking and oh, what does he do to make money? Yeah, he does these other things. But if you'd asked them that 15 years ago, they would have said my daddy is a coach or my daddy does this. And that's not who I wanted to be. And it's not how I want them to describe me. So that, that for me had to be a big change is how do I, who's the man that I'm looking at in the mirror? And what's, and if it's just work, then that's really fucking boring. And the reason it's boring, by the way, and I had to learn this was if you've ever heard, I'm not going to ask you who you are, cause I know there's at least a handful of us in the room that have said business is my hobby. If you've ever said business is your hobby, no one in this room wants to hear about your fucking hobby. Imagine if a lawyer said, but law is my hobby, or a doctor said, medicine is my hobby, or an accountant said, accounting is my hobby, or an insurance salesman said, insurance sales is my hobby. We don't want to hear about anybody. Why is every other profession never talked about at cocktail parties? Teachers don't come in and talk about life is how exciting it is as a teacher. They have fucking hobbies. And I realized I didn't have any hobbies. Now I have a lot of hobbies. I'm at a point now where people ask me about business and I try to not answer the question enough times that then they start laughing going, you're not going to tell me. I'm like, no, I'm even bored of what I do. Well, how are you going to be excited about it? I learned that working the 12-hour days, 14-hour days to catch up was a lie. There was one year in— this is 30 years ago when I was opening up College Pro Painters in Washington and Oregon, and I hired 220 people in 12 months from 0 to 220. And I'd worked 17 hours one, one week. No, one day I worked 17 hours one day. I thought, hang on, no, I'm trying to do the math in my head. Yeah, I worked 17 hours in a day.

17.

Anyway, whatever the fuck it was, it, whatever it was, I ended up, I ended up going, oh my God, if I keep, yeah, it was 17 hours in a day. And I, and I was like, if I do this, because it was from like 7 AM till midnight, or 17-hour day. And I'm like, if I do this again tomorrow, that's gonna be like 34-hour work week in 2 days. Like I am crushing it. So I did it and I would, would go across the street to this little market and get Cherry Cokes and these, uh, chocolate-covered espresso beans, which are so good. It's like before you get into cocaine, that's where you start. They're really good. They're so good. And, and then on the third day, I did it again. I did another 17-hour day. So I did 3 17-hour days in a row. And then I did the math and I'm like, if I do this for 7 days, that's why I was doing the math in my head. It's a 120-hour workweek. I will have effectively done 3 40-hour weeks in one week. So I fucking did it. I went for it. I'm like, I'm a competitor. Like, I was competing with no one other than me, but I'm like, I want to see if I can do 100. And I did it. For what purpose other than like, who was I trying to impress? No, not even. No, no. It was like so dumb. But I didn't learn. Like, that was before the nervous breakdown stuff. But those habits are built when we're really young. The habits of working long hours and catching up and working. None of us will ever catch up. Your to-do list will never get done. My to-do list never got done because I kept setting bigger goals or buying another company or starting another business or being on another podcast or growing or coming to a mastermind. You have more ideas of more stuff to do. You never catch up. So the lie that you're telling yourself of working nights and working weekends is because you're avoiding your relationship or you're avoiding your kids, or you don't like the person you see in the mirror, or you're afraid to go to the gym. So all you do is whatever gives you the dopamine, which is your hobby. So I learned that. I also learned that I didn't delegate fast enough in the early days. College Pro Painters taught me a very, very bad habit because it was the radical self-reliance. We only had 4 months to build the company and scale it. And I didn't learn how to delegate fast enough. I learned how to really quickly get stuff done to minimum viable everything, but I had to unlearn that skill. So now the way I look at stuff is my to-do list does not have my name on it. It just says to-do list. And my job is to look at every item on my to-do list and say, who can I delegate it to? And if there's no one I can delegate it to, I still pick somebody and I delegate it to them. And then I try to coach them to give them the skills and the confidence and the connections so they can do it. But that's still something that I haven't worked, that I have to keep working on. Because I can kind of get back into that grind mode instead of delegating more. Um, and then, then kind of tied to that is, is focusing on growing their skills, right? If I can focus on growing the leadership skills of people, growing their skills around situational leadership and coaching and delegation and running meetings and giving them the executive functioning skills that I take for granted, then they're able to do more. Um, whoa, a lot. And profit sharing. We ran a really good profit sharing model for a couple of years at 1-800-GOT-JUNK where we distributed 10% of the company's profits as long as we made at least 10% EBITDA and we shared money. And every year people were getting really good bonuses. The problem was our management team got lazy and in recruiting we'd say to people, I know we'll pay you $80,000 a year, but everybody's getting about 14% bonus from profit sharing. So you can probably count on another $96,000. Like, we literally started telling people to expect it. So it became an expectation. The year after I left 1-800-GOT-JUNK, what happened in the '08-'09 financial crisis? Because I left in '07, all of a sudden in '08 and '09, there were no profit sharing bonuses. And '10, there was no profit sharing bonus. All these people that expected profit sharing didn't get anything. So I learned that it's also not aligned with what we really want. 95% of us as entrepreneurs are not trying to drive profit. We're trying to drive the economic value of our whole company. Which is revenue and customer engagement and profitability, right? And scale and IP. So if you're going to give people bonuses, align it with what you're trying to build overall, but also never use it as an expectation because we know that profit is something that we earn. We don't expect it. And if we don't get it, it sucks, but we just dig in harder. That profit system can go completely sideways. It did for us. Um, The last one is, is, um, the last two, there's two more. One is, this happened a couple weeks ago. So 20 years ago, I was standing at our daily huddle. We had an all-company standup meeting every day. It's on my YouTube channel. We've run it, they've run it for 25 years. Every employee in the company comes for a 7-minute all-company standup at 10:55 in the morning. Until 11:02. And on one of the daily huddles one day, I said something about 60% of everything we remove in these trucks gets recycled. And one of my employees put their hand up and said, that's not true. I'm like, yeah, it's fucking 60% of what we haul away. And they go, no, it's 57.6. I'm like, it's the same thing. And they go, no, it's not. And I'm like, whatever, fucking idiot. Like, right? All of us as entrepreneurs know that 60 and 57.6 is the same thing. They pulled me aside afterwards and said, if 60 Minutes, the TV show, or if that guy— what's that guy that's doing the— like, he found out about all the preschools that weren't open. What's his name? Nick Shirley? Yeah. If Nick Shirley came and investigated your company, is everything that you're saying in your marketing and on your website and to your customers and on social, is it all Nick Shirley proof? Because if it's not, it will unravel. And if it's not, your employees won't trust you. So this employee said to me, the reason that it's not the same is we know you're just rounding up and it's about the same and it doesn't really matter. And it truly doesn't really matter, but we need to know that what you say is what you mean and what you mean is what you say. And we need to know that everything you say is Nick Shirley proof or 60 Minutes proof. So 2 weeks ago, I saw a friend of mine. Do a video online and he said something about, I've, I'm a CEO and I've grown a $75 million business. And I was like, that's weird. Like I've, I know his business and I know like it doesn't, I've been around businesses long enough. I know it's not fucking $75 million. I just know. And so I called him out on it privately, but I also called him on it privately because two people that I'd met with that week, somehow they'd known that I'd seen this guy that week. Mentioned it to me as well. And they were like, it's kind of weird that he's doing it. They all like him. Everybody liked the guy, but they're like, we don't understand why he would say something that isn't real. So I called him out on it. I said, you're running, not running a $75 million business. He said, no, what I'm saying is that over 10 years, I built a company from zero to $75 million. Like, well, that's not true. That's like me saying I went to the gym today and I did, I lifted a million pounds in the gym. Or I did like 10,000 sets or reps or whatever the fuck. I'm like, no, you didn't. I'm like, yeah, I did. Like, I started tracking it 12 years ago and I just did my 10,000. Like, you don't fucking talk that way. There's not a single public company on the planet that posts their revenue of what they've done in revenue in the last 10 years. So my sister came to me after she saw my video and she goes, I just built a $161 million company because she's been running her company for 25 years and that's her cumulative revenue. There's no reason to exaggerate, right? The guy's business is fucking amazing. I'm a huge raving fan of it, but there's no reason to exaggerate something because then the employees know that you're exaggerating that. So they wonder what else is being exaggerated. So make sure it's 60 Minutes proof or Nick Shirley proof. It's really important. And then the, so the journey at 1-800-GOT-JUNK was I joined the company and Brian was my best man at my wedding 3 months before I I joined him. So we were best friends. We scaled it from literally nothing with ripped carpeting to the, the company that everyone wanted to work for in Canada and a brand that everybody knew. It's now $950 million in system-wide sales. We went from $2 million to $106 million in system-wide sales. And then one morning, Thursday morning, we were meeting with our leadership team and Brian and I would always meet 30 minutes before the leadership team would come in. So we could sync up before we would then have the team meeting. And we sat, we were at the Vancouver Club for breakfast and I ordered my traditional Eggs Benedict. I mean, it's awesome. And Brian ordered grapefruit. Like, what the fuck are you ordering grapefruit? You've never had grapefruit in your life. Like, you always order Eggs Benedict with hash browns, like grapefruit. And then he looks at me and you could see him kind of getting choked up. I was like, fuck. He goes, I'm sorry, it's over. And I started to cry. And then he started to cry and he said, you were the right guy to take us from $2 million to $106 million, but you're the wrong guy to take us from $100 million to a billion. He said, I need a very different COO now. I need a more detail-oriented, polished, strategic corporate second in command. Then I got past the crying part and I was like, 13-year-old primal fucking sobbing, complete total mess. It was really bad. And, um, and he was crying and he made me take a taxi home and he drove my car home because I wasn't capable of driving. I clearly didn't stay for the leadership team meeting either. Um, but I didn't talk about that on social media for about 10 years. Took a long time. A week after Brian fired me, He called me and said, um, I'm, I'm not gonna be able to go to the event in Vegas next year, the 20th anniversary of EO. Would you mind doing the speaking event that I'm supposed to do on my behalf? So here's like my best friend firing me and then asking me to go on stage to do the speaking event about 1-800-GOT-JUNK? the week after he's fired me. So of course I do it. I go in. For real, like it was fucked up. And then I did, then I did Dallas and Houston and Austin EO chapters 3 days apart the week after I got fired as well. I don't know why I'm telling this story other than it's not something you stand up on social media about, but it's something that I needed help on. I didn't know where to go other than I had a really good network of friends that were entrepreneurs that were the only ones who were there for me.

There you go.

That's some shit I went through.

Still hard.

It's hard to talk about some of that stuff because I'm used to talking about how good I am and how smart I am and how amazing it is to build stuff. Ashley, my wife, knows the whole story and sees the person trying to help everybody and the guy who's struggling to get through life at the same time. So I got this tattoo last, last year. It's a Ram Dass quote, and it's the— I got it in Hindi, and it says, it says, walking each other home as a reminder that none of this shit matters and we're just walking each other home. So anyway, part 2 of this whole fiasco is just to answer some questions, right? "Removal route approved." Nice.

Give some, some feedback for Cam. How much more refreshing is it to hear a message like that versus looking what I do, right? Everyone agree? Cool. Thank you, brother. Again, such a beautiful, like, the vulnerability. Thanks, Cam. So it's the real stuff. We've all been through it. Panic attacks, breakdown, embarrassingly crying on a hotel floor thinking we're gonna run out, like business is gonna go under. We've all been in spots like that or something close to it. Your own version of that. And I think by you leading with that gives us all an opportunity to, again, to connect more deeply throughout the, this week and, and ongoing and get more out of each other than we normally would without it. So, so again, I wanna thank you for that.

Thanks.

A couple questions to kick it off and we'll go to Q&A. Yeah. Um, like, why do you think this is an important message for entrepreneurs to hear?

So chapter 12 of my first book, Double Double, is about the highs and lows of CEOs. It's the emotional roller coaster that we go through. Um, Tim Ferriss covered it all on his blog in 2008 when Tim and I first met. So he took my entire chapter and posted it, and I talked about this transition curve that we go through, the uninformed optimism, the Informed pessimism, the crisis of meaning, hopeful realization, and this, this natural rollercoaster that doesn't stop. Like we can't get off the rollercoaster. And it's important for us to understand when we're at the crisis of meaning, when we're at the scary hard stages, that there's ways to get through that, which I didn't talk about at all. But the ways you get through that are things like coaching and mentorship and talking to a priest or a pastor or a rabbi, talking to a friend, talking to a spouse. Going to the gym, you know, smoking up a part of a joint, having a part of a drink, like, like going to yoga. Like the problem is you can't, you can't obsessively do anything to get through the crisis of meaning, but like lots of little things will get you through that. It's a bit of a truth will set you free. It's a bit of an understanding that it's really, it's really, really freaking hard to be an entrepreneur. And social media has made it too trendy. This group is okay. The group I feel really scared for are the ones who think they want to be an entrepreneur and they're not meant to be one and they don't have the entrepreneurial DNA, right? Most entrepreneurs are ADD and bipolar, clinically diagnosed on this, the far right-hand side of the spectrum. So I think it's important for us to understand how to go through the crisis of meaning. By the way, everyone who says like, I'm on the spectrum, it's actually impossible to not be on the spectrum. It's a fucking spectrum. It's like a bell curve. You can't, it's like you can't, you can't fall off the bell curve. Like, oh, you're at like negative 1 on the spectrum of like, fuck, you're on the spectrum. Where are you on the spectrum? Um, I'll go to, I'll take questions and make, I just heard that the other day. I'm like, oh my God, you're so right. We're all idiots.

Uh, I think one of the things you hit on that was really beautiful. And I think everyone here gets, gets this is why we're doing this with a purity opt right now is. I call it just being one-dimensional, you know, just being the person who only knows business. So I think you talk about it's boring. It is what you shared. Um, obviously people are here because you want a full range life in different buckets. Uh, but I'm just curious to know, like, what is a rich life to you?

Because I'm gonna go back to part one of that. So part one of that is like, none of this shit actually matters. The death rate is still 100%. We are all going to die. And like doing this to make money is cool, but like you're going to die for fucking real. And the time that you have with your spouse and your friends and your family and your kids and yourself should be about enjoying the entire journey and not like something that's so reasonably empty. So for me, that's, that's the first kind of dawning, like you and I were talking in the hallway today and you said like, what are you most excited about with business? I'm like, actually probably selling the CEO Alliance, like, you know, kind of downshifting. Like I'm in a very different stage now. I'm pretty close to like my number where I'll never be able to spend all the money that I have. And, you know, I'm, what else do I really want? And what am I doing this for? What I'm doing now is I want to travel the world. I want to explore. I want to spend time with my wife. I want to grow. I want to, grow as a man, as a person. I want to spend time— I can't fucking wait for my younger son to get here in like 4 days so we can go skiing in the Dolomites. And like, I want to cross off more bucket lists. I want to go back to Africa Burn. I want to go to Borderland. I want to listen to the Dead. I want to like, I want to just see life. It's pretty cool shit out there. And the other one is like, and I want to know you, like I actually want to know you. Like I really don't care about any of your companies. I really don't. There's no way you care about mine. But like, I want to know about the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Like, why? What was that? They grabbed that and like, I want to talk more about the dead and co with you and like what it is that you liked about the dead when you're in the dead part too. And, you know, I wonder what, what, like you and buying your home and your kids and what's like being a dad and Pedro. I want to know, like, you know, what your experience is like. Cool.

We'll go to questions. Uh, let's go to Shai first. So as like someone that has to ramateki sometimes during really dark times and no one else knows it's very dark and you're having to carry that weight and pretend like everything's absolutely fine to the rest of the employees, how do you voice that or how do you like Show anyone that.

Yeah.

So, because it's like, it's like darkness where it's like, it is, I don't want my friends feel like weight from that. I don't want my partner to feel weight from that, but it's like, yeah.

So, so as an entrepreneur, we're going to have those periods, that crisis of meanings where it is very much internal. And one of the reasons why most entrepreneurs implode or explode is because we don't have the outlet to get it out.

Right.

So. When you're CEO or a COO of a company, you can't tell your board, not everything. You can't really tell the CEO or your leadership team, 'cause then they lose trust in you. You certainly can't tell the employees and they fucking freak out. Like I've actually had times where I'm literally trying to recruit a senior VP to come and work for the company, and I'm not entirely sure how we're meeting payroll, but I need them to come in 'cause I know they'll get us to the goal. And I'm not entirely sure how I'm gonna make all this stuff happen yet. But I can't. So, so, so the way you do it is you join a group like this, but you actually really open up and be truly vulnerable with this group instead of like talking and bragging to all of us about like how great our companies are. Why don't we actually fucking share tonight at dinner our lesson from the edge, our like Night of the Living Dead? Like, why don't we at dinner tonight share where we're actually really struggling and not as a humble brag, like, oh, I'm struggling with my growth. Fuck off. Where are you?

Right?

Where are you really struggling? Right? What is, what is the real dark? What is the real darkness inside that you're really going through? Joining EO is where I learned it. I joined the Entrepreneurs Organization in '95. I did a video the other day. I can read you the list, but I've spent $940,000 in 30 years on being a member of mastermind communities. And there's zero exaggeration. I was in the Entrepreneurs Organization for 5 years. I was in Strategic Coach for 7 years, Genius Network for 8 years. I was, uh, 4 Wayfinders events, 5 Baby Bathwater events, 2 War Room events. Um, which ones am I missing? A bunch. Oh, Harvest, Intelligent Change, plus some travel. Like, I've really— but in these things, because I'm surrounded by all these other entrepreneurs, I realize it's okay to actually be scared and vulnerable and weak. It's because we all are. You know, Keenan, Keenan and I met a year ago. I've been coaching Keenan for a year now. 12 months ago when I met him, how many entrepreneurs did you know 12 months ago? Right. Just me. 12 months ago, he didn't know a single other entrepreneur. The reason he's here is not because I want to coach him. It's because I need him to be around other entrepreneurs. He needs to know that he's normal. There is nothing fucking wrong with you, dude. Everybody here is as fucked up as you are. And we all go back to our rooms and doom scroll because we're scared of everything else too. But you, and then, and then go to, go to yoga and go to the gym and, and, you know, have the outlets.

So we're down for dinner to have that conversation tonight. No, cool. Awesome. Let's go over here to Pedro. So, uh, when you're telling that story of grabbing breakfast with Brian, yeah, you're grabbing the grapefruit.

I. Almost started choking up because I pictured myself having that same exact conversation, whether it's a year from now, 5 years from now, 10 years from now. Yeah.

Um, you know, in that second in command seat with, you know, the guy that we know very well.

He introduced me to my wife, I introduced him to his wife.

We've got that bond.

Yeah.

And inevitably it's like, both of us, we're not going to die in the business, right?

So someday it's going to end. Yeah.

And I'm curious, like, if you were to go back and maybe would even give me advice, it was like, do you talk about the divorce? I think it's going well.

This is such a good question. I've never been asked this question. It's such a good question. I'm so glad that he fired me. I don't like the way he did it. He got really bad advice from the board. I wish that we had talked about it and gotten through it. It was the right time for me to go. Here's what's messed up. The night before. So we all sat in an open office environment. Nobody had private offices. It was part of our culture was like to be with everybody, same desk, everything else.

I—

his assistant. And we sat opposite of each other's assistants. So I sat across from Christina. She sat beside Brian. He sat across from Monica, who sat beside me. And I turned to Christina as I'm standing up. I'm like, Brian's fucking firing me tomorrow. Like, my spider senses just— I knew it was over. There'd been too many things happening over the last few weeks where he was saying things that he'd never said. Like, I wish you were more detail-oriented and fuck what, like, I could just feel that it was like, I could feel it. And I said, Brian's totally firing me tomorrow. And she's, oh, cause he, she, he wants, she wanted him to change the meeting or something. And she goes, fuck off, go home and spend time with your kids. You're fine. And then I used to walk out of the office in a different way. I called it MBWA, management by walking around. And I would take a different path out of the office to talk to different business groups. So I walked down through finance and IT and then out through HR, and I walked through one of the boardrooms, and Helen, our head of HR, was sitting in one of the meeting rooms, and she turned some papers over. I'm like, fuck, what the fuck? Like, what? Like, she said, no one's ever turned papers over. I was a CEO, for Christ's sake. You don't turn papers over. There's no secrets. I'm like, wow, she's— I'm totally getting fired. So I knew it was happening. I wish that he'd had the courage to talk to me earlier. I also wish that I'd had the courage to go to him and say, you know what? I'm not having fun anymore. This isn't, this isn't my forever. I'm, I'm past my ceiling of complexity now. We had 13 operating P&Ls. Like, it was just big. By the way, 12 months later, he finally got my, my replacement hired. She was the president of Starbucks North America. Lani came into the company and looked around and went, what a cute little company this is. And meanwhile, I'm going, it's so fucking big. Like, I just, I should have resigned 6 months before. I should have known enough and trusted my gut to go, this is so far past me. I'm not having fun. I had fun for the first 5 years. I was challenged hard for the last year. And then the last 6 months were just too much. So that, I'm not going to give you advice, but that's my experience. I wish that when I knew— when you have doubt, you have no doubt. And I wish that I had known that, and I wish that Brian and I had discussed that. When I was able to finally talk to him truthfully and feel like I was going to be okay was about 6 years later, 5 years later, 4 years later. I'm trying to remember exactly where I was because he dropped off. He said, I'm dropping off my new book, WTF, It's called Willing to Fail. I'm dropping off my book WTF at your home for you. I just thought you should have a copy. I'm like, you know, fuck you, whatever. Thanks for your book. So that was kind of how I felt. And then I grabbed the book and I was like, I hope he mentions me. Like, I hope he just says to me somewhere in the book, thank you. And on page 2, he mentions me. I'm like, all right, this is going to be okay. And then on page 6, he mentioned me. And then on page 16, he mentioned me. And it was something like 7 or 8 times in the book he mentioned me to the point that it was kind of embarrassing because not another member of the 6-person leadership team got named once. But that was what— and then I was like, okay, he really actually valued me being there. It just didn't do it in the right way. So yeah, I think the separation— you talked about it earlier, and I think you really— it's like the conscious uncoupling. Like you just sit down and go, it's not working. You know, or I'm just not having fun or—

cool. Let's go to, uh, Andreas and then put your hand up and then we'll go to David. And again, all right, so this is a long question.

This context and— sorry, do we know each other? Kevin from Maverick?

Yeah, from that.

Christ, oh my God, I know him, I know him, I know him. I can't write Double Double like maybe 15, 16 years. Yeah, it went out in 2010 or 11. It was really impactful. You're welcome. Thank you. I kept hearing the name and I kept looking at your face just now. I'm going, God, I think I know him. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

So you're here because of the bear. You're sharing your wisdom with us with the best intentions, but there's no denying that the hard times made you who you are today, put you on the map. You had taken your own advice from today years ago, would you still be here? What's there to say about the value of difficult times and what are the sacrifices you're confident we need to make?

Great question. The hard times produce hard men. Hard men produce soft times, right? That whole quote. I didn't have to destroy my health for the journey. I didn't have to destroy my relationships for the journey. When I left 1-800-GOT-JUNK!, my two boys were 6 and 4. I didn't know them. I was like Ben with two 7-year-olds. That wake-up call for me gave me the time to not work until my kids got to school, and I started walking them to school and coming home. That got me to shut down work at the end of the day. 3 years later, when I got divorced, then it showed me how to be a single dad and really be fucking present and value the time. I could have learned to have been a better man and a better dad and a better leader and still worked hard. But I didn't need to kill myself to do it. I didn't need to do the 16-hour days. Those were lies. There's, there's plenty of success, like plenty of successful business people that haven't killed themselves doing it. So here's a story that you don't know. In 1993, I hired Kimbal Musk, Elon's younger brother, Elon's younger brother. I also hired Peter Reeve, who built SolarCity. They both worked for me as franchisees at College Pro Painters. 2 years later when they were raising money for their first company, Zip2, they had 1 employee. They were living in San Francisco, actually in Palo Alto. Kimbal called me to be a reference for Elon and Kimbal in their first round of funding for Zip2. I did a reference call with their venture capital firm. Kimbal called me that night to say, what the fuck did you tell them? I'm like, did I screw up? And he goes, no, we asked them for $600,000. They gave us $3 million. My reason for telling you this story is I knew Elon at a very young age when he was 27, 28 years old. His brother worked for me for a long period of time. I took 12 CEOs down to SpaceX for a tour in 2011, and they took a drop sheet off at the back of the factory, and Kim or Elon showed us the first Tesla before the press saw the Model S coming out the following day. And I was able to be there at that. When Elon did his first interview with Joe Rogan and he was crying and he was stressed and he was anxious about AI. I called and he was living in a tent. I sent Kimball a note and said, you need to pull your brother off the fucking, or out of the deep end. Like, and he knew Kimball knew the emotional rollercoaster because I taught it to him in '93. I said, he's at crisis of meaning. You need to pull him off. There's something, he's going sideways. He's not being functional. So, so people like Elon's a workaholic. Yeah. But he also has had some pretty, pretty brutal struggles, right? Richard Branson has had the opposite. Built some very successful companies, but he's had very successful relationships and lots of hobbies and lots of fun. And he kind of goes through life in flow. So no, I don't think that you have to actually be a workaholic to be successful.

Are there any bad habits that you double down on even to this day?

Are there any bad habits? Yeah. Cocaine, for sure. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Met Mila, too excited on that.

Are there any bad habits The things that I would actually keep doing? No, no, no. I think what really made me successful was the skills that are in my Invest in Your Leaders training. Those skills, I would have doubled down on leveraging those more. I would have doubled down on being more vulnerable, on, on real— like the whole book Who Not How by Ben Sullivan. And then like, I'm friends with both of them. I know them both very, very well. That book about finding the right who instead of knowing how to do everything, I would have doubled down on that. I would've doubled down on, on getting rid of my insecurity and vulnerability that the school system caused me by routinely emotionally abusing me for 17, 18 years of telling me to sit still and pay attention and try harder. And if I could just work as hard as everybody else, I could be a good student. 'Cause I had a 2.7 GPA. So I'm emotionally abused and scarred by a system. I would've gotten help around that. But no, there's, there's not a single thing that was a bad habit that made me successful.

Yeah, go to David. Okay, so, um, it's— I'm trying to think how to phrase this. When, when you're on the, the rocket ship and you're growing, your identity can be so certain that you're on it and that you're, you're almost like on your destiny, right? But then that fuel runs out, or you face uncertainty, And, um, you, you kind of, how do you face like these existential crises that you're talking about? Because it's strange to be sad, like, or uncertain or depressed because it's like, I can do anything. I have all this freedom.

Yeah.

But it's like, it's like burn of like infinity.

Yeah. So the, so it's, it's kind of what Shay was asking about, like when you're in these tough moments, let turn to the group. Be more, be okay with being vulnerable, be okay with sitting, going, I'm scared. I don't know how I'm struggling. I'm confused. I'm overwhelmed. I'm going bankrupt. I'm like my, my sister who runs a very successful company, um, used to call, you guys heard of EO? It used to be called YEO. When I joined, it was the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. Then they got rid of the Y. When she got involved with it, she used to call it the, the YBEO. And it was the Young Broke Entrepreneurs Organization because everybody's like, oh, I'm doing $5 million in revenue. Great. You're paying yourself $180 grand a year. Like you could make more than that for another company. So I think there's something about being honest and opening up your P&L and opening up your investment accounts and opening up your heart and realizing that we're all struggling and going through this together. But the second part of it was what you first said was like, you're, you're on a rocket ship and your identity is kind of tied to it. Don't let your identity be tied to your brand. I used to wear a 1-800-GOT-JUNK? fleece jacket with 12-inch letters on my back everywhere to the point— can I borrow your jacket, babe? So we got to a point with these huge letters on the back— thank you— on the back of our coat that we would literally go to restaurants and we would put our coat on the back of the chair like this so everyone in the restaurant could see the logo. We would fold it up on planes and put it in the overhead bin like this with the logo pointing. So everyone walking to the back of the plane— I just heard about something called economy or coach.

So weird.

People would walk past the logo. We did it all the time. Do you know what I did on Valentine's Day one year? I wore my coat out because I knew I was going to a really good restaurant where I'm not kidding. On Valentine's Day, I put my jacket facing the restaurant to get more marketing. That, yeah, do with your family crest. Fuck yeah. Yeah. Because having your identity tied to something that doesn't matter is the bigger problem. It's only one part of the family crest is what I would put on the back of all your shit.

I, uh, I get that. Me too. I love it. And it's a great space to people where I guess I'm trying to get to how do you ride, I guess, a focus of growth versus the existential crisis? Are those, is that part of it?

It's true. It's, it's so Dan Sullivan wrote a great book called The Gap and the Gain. So the problem for a lot of entrepreneurs is we focus on the horizon and when we get there, we'll be happy. When we get there, we'll be satisfied. When we get there, it'll be good. My Ashley always jokes, she goes, It's coming. It's getting there because I'm always like, it's coming. It's coming. Like, it's been like, it's like my business is coming. Like, we're getting like, I've beaten all the goals, but it's still coming because I'm still stretching, right? It's better to look in the rearview mirror and celebrate how far we've always come. Like, oh, we just got that done. We just got that done. So it's enjoy the journey and celebrate all the successes and stop focusing on the horizon as your point of happiness. If you focus on the rearview mirror and all the things you've done along the way, the journey becomes amazing.

But didn't you need to go through that to grow?

No, I needed to grow, dude. I got these gray hairs because I'm now 60. Where, where most of the people, like where Keenan and I can learn from each other is he can teach me AI. Mike talking about using Claude code to build something. I mean, like I've heard of it, but like. But what I can teach them is the wisdom of having gone through this stuff. Some of you will, will listen and you'll learn and you'll believe me. There's also a principle in adult learning. I talk about it in my course that the learner controls the environment until you've stubbed your toe. You don't learn until you fall off your bicycle. You don't learn. Some of you will have to crash and burn and then you'll go, fuck, he was right. That's, that's the part that pains me is some of you will have to have the nervous breakdown. Or lose your marriage or double down on the— like, I have a really close friend of mine, Michael Schneider, who has no problem with me telling the story. I met him, he was 25 years old. He built a digital marketing agency. And then during the '08-'09 financial crisis, all of his clients started sending him IOUs instead of the payments 'cause they were— he was pay— doing work for the government in California. He lost his company. 2 years later, he started a business called Mobile Rhodey, got an offer at the 12-month mark to sell for $18 million. He goes, if my business partner and I split it and we pay our tax, I won't have enough to fly private for the rest of my life. He should have met Tommy and Eli. I'm like, dude, take the money off the table. 2011, you were bankrupt 2 years ago. Take the $9 million, pay your taxes, have your $6 million. He goes, nope, can't. He was bankrupt 6 months after that. I have another friend of mine, John Mara, who built a company with 130 employees, got an offer for $108 million. This was 1998. Said, if I get to $125,000, that'll be enough. Why? What the fuck is the difference? You know what happened? 6 months later, the government changed some rules. John lost Vantage. John was the president of EO Global. He's never made more than $1 million a year since 1998. He had $108 million offer. That was a lot of money back then. It's a lot of money now. That's like half a billion bucks. Don't— like, I hope you learn this stuff because I struggled through it. I don't want you to have to go through it too. My, the reason I do what I do is I see so many entrepreneurs like flies banging their head on the window and they're going to keep trying hard until they get through the window. And I see so many end up dead on the windowsill. And what I'm trying to show you is there's a door right here. Just go that way. If you go into the mountains and you watch water flowing down a mountain, it doesn't cut a straight line. It doesn't work harder to cut a straight, it follows the path of least resistance.

We got time for 2 more. We'll go to Zach Richman and then we'll go to Seth. So this is a little more business question. I was super intrigued on how you positioned, because initially it was, you were referring, Keiko, of a profit share. And interestingly, at least for our company, we're mostly e-commerce, so a lot of paid media. And we had interestingly kind of almost somewhat scaled this profit share model for a lot of our media buyers. We'll usually remove all the operational costs because you get a bottom line quite dependent upon the things, the update media. And we kind of seen it be somewhat holding them accountable to, you know, the performance. So it's not being scaled unprofitably, but then also tying that high incentive. So if it goes from, you know, $20,000 to $200,000, they get that percentage, right?

And so, so where you're going is you're trying to try an incentive to give performance and trying to give an incentive so that you motivate them, right? So there's, when I used to go to, oh, I went to the main TED conference for 10 years. That's where I spent another $100 grand. One of the main TED Talks years ago was a guy named Dan Pink who wrote, did a video on the science of motivation. And he talks about how bonuses become more of a demotivator than a motivator for 95% of our employees. The only time a bonus program ever works is for a salesperson that's in an eat-what-you-kill role. The media buyer is supposed to be good at their job. So here's what I do now is I pay people at 85th to 95th% of the bell curve. I pay them very, very well. I give them 5 weeks paid vacation and I make sure they use it. Like, I want them to take time off. And if they do a really good job, they don't get a bonus. They get to keep their job. I've had people come to me and go, hey, I did a really good job this year. Do I get a bonus? I'm like, fuck no. I hired you to do a good job. It's why I pay you what I pay you. It's why I incentivize, why I give you a place to work, a great place to work. But like, bonus to do a good job. See, the problem for Gen Z and Gen X is you have— or Gen Y is you haven't learned to say no because you guys were getting 9th place participation ribbons and everything. I grew up in an environment where no was all the time. Now what I like to do is no because and show them, right? But if you hire really good people and pay them well, the other part, the other problem with the bonus is they're really happy for the 1 or 2 weeks they get the bonus and they're unhappy for the other 50 weeks of the year. And all of us as entrepreneurs can do anything we want all the time, but they're scraping money together just to send their kid to daycare. Pay people really, really well. Give them a really good environment. And I'm not like— and I know what I'm talking about in the culture space. Like, I built the number 2 company in all of Canada to work for. I coached the number 2 and number 12 company to work for in the United States on Glassdoor. Like, I got help get them there. I coached 2 companies that went on to become number 1 to work for in Australia. Number 1 in Florida, number 1 in Cincinnati. Like, I'm very well known for building world-class cultures. Bonuses are never a part of that.

So I guess, would you say a way as an alternative is basically high wages, um, and vacation time?

Because I saw that go sideways one time where somebody lost their second in command and she quit after he'd given her 20% pay raise 3 years in a row, paying her very, very well. Do you know why she quit? She didn't have enough time to spend her money. He didn't understand what mattered to her. So who here pays? Everybody stand up for a sec. If you give, if you give 2 weeks vacation to your employees, sit down. If you give 3 weeks, you don't have any employees. If you give 3 weeks vacation, well, you got a couple. Yeah. Me. Yeah. I'm an employee. Okay. Everybody who sat down that's giving 3 weeks vacation. I would never fucking work for you and I would never let my kid work for you. I would never refer to you. Sit down if you're 4 weeks or less. All of you suck. I want you to, I want you to spend some time in Europe and ask people in Europe and Australia what normal is. Normal is 5, 6 week vacation. Now, does anybody here have unlimited vacation time? Okay, you suck too. And here's why I'm going to tell you this. Here's why. Here's why. None of you mean it. Here's what I mean. So you give unlimited vacation time.

Two weeks.

What's that?

Two weeks.

Two weeks notice.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. I'm giving you two weeks notice. I actually want to take off for three months starting, um, April 1st. I'm not asking permission.

Yeah.

I get unlimited vacation time.

Sweet.

Cool. And by the way, I sat with somebody else today who runs a recruiting agency helping people job stack. So they run multiple jobs knowing that they're not doing 40-hour weeks with people. Nobody means unlimited vacation. So mean what you say and say what you mean. So what I say is 5 weeks vacation, including your sick time. And every month or two or every couple of weeks, I'm going to coach you on taking more time. It's like, hey, you've got 18 more days. Take the fucking time. You call Jackie Logan, who worked for me, and ask her about what happened to her one November. You can all sit. I sat Jackie down and I said, you had 18 more days left. And it was like the 1st of November. I said, if we get to December 31st and you haven't taken all 18 days, You're fired because you're running my call center with 100 employees and there's no way that you can inspire them if you're a workaholic and you're sending them work and you can't take a vacation. I will literally fire you. So let's plan it out. But she'd never had anybody care enough about her to help her take a vacation because we paid her enough. She could afford to take them. Or you help them do a staycation. A lot of people don't know what to do, so you help them do a bucket list. But when you actually give people 5 weeks and you make them take it, They're not going to quit and they do a good job because they're refreshed and you pay them at the 80th percentile. Last part on this was when I was in Dubai in January talking to this guy and he's 6'7", I'm 6'4" and we're sitting talking. So what do you do for fun? So I play volleyball. I'm like, do you still play? He goes, yeah, I compete. I'm like, like at what level? He goes, we're pro. I'm like, so you're like 2-on-2 beach volleyball? He goes, yeah. I said, well, I played in college a bit and I played, played on my team in high school. If we were 6 of us and he starts laughing, he goes, I didn't have a chance to ask the question. He goes, every game. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, we beat you every game. So what I realized is A players are free. If I got 2 A players and paid them $200,000 each, 2 media buyers, paid them $200,000 each, or I had 6 media buyers and paid them $100,000 each, my 2 at $200,000 each would destroy my 6 at $100,000 each. And they wouldn't be job stacking, working 3 other jobs, pretending they're doing their work. So pay them well, give them a good environment, care about them as humans, like really care, not just their birthday and their dog's name, but care about their insecurities and their fears and their relationships and who they are as, as people. You'll get way more out of them than you've ever expected. How do you do that for commission only? For commission only, like a salesperson? That's the only time it works. That's an eat what you kill environment. Then it works. Well, if, if you have, I give them the, I actually figure out what they're going to be making and I'll pay them to take time off. I've paid people to take time off. All my team that are in the Philippines, I pay them 15 to 20% more than what their group pays. I have somebody right now that I found out the payroll company we were using to pay them was taking 60% of the money and they were only getting 40. I'm buying them out of that contract to actually pay her more. I'm going to eat a cost because I'm like, there's no fucking way. She's doing the work. So I'm buying them out of a contract to pay her more. She—

pardon? You have the PTO carryover the next year.

It's— no, no, there's no carryover. It's use it or lose it. I want you to take your time off. I want you to go recharge. You go to Europe and Australia, it's 5 to 6 weeks. And in Italy and July, it is. It's 5 to 6 weeks and July. They just don't work. That's normal. But you'll get it done because they're not going to quit and all their friends are going to want to work for you and they're going to feel balanced and and you help put systems in place.

Last question we have from Simon, and then we're going to take a quick break before we go to big tech. Yeah, not so much a business question, but more fundamentally, you talked about your identity being so tied to business early on, and then later, like, realizing that, hey, maybe that's the truth I told myself, but then later on realized that, you know, that's a false truth. So my question for you is, what are some truths or beliefs that you told yourself later in life that then you started earlier in life, as later life that reflected on, said like, hey, for a very long time I was, every age of my body, believed that this was true. But that changed your opinion on to like, hey, this is actually a belief that is not.

I think it was, I think it was less of a truth that I told myself and it was more of, of a, um, a kind of coming of age that I could be actually really balanced and still be building a successful company. Here's what's really scary. 2 or 3 years after Brian firing me, a full 14 years that we were best friends and 7 years of me growing his company with him, I found out he liked to ski. I had no fucking idea. I raced in the Canadian-American Championships twice. I raced first and second year university in the Can-Ams, and I didn't know my best friend skied. And I had a home in Whistler. How did I not know this? 'cause we didn't talk about anything other than work. And I realized it really wasn't a best friend. It was somebody that we obsessively built a company with.

I don't know if that entirely answers the question, but yeah, I guess for me, I live by the principle of, you know, I read, reread Naval's book recently where quote stood out to me that says, we question all of our beliefs except for the ones that we truly believe, and those we never think to question.

So to me, Rosario, well, I wrote, so in the last chapter of my book, Double Double, I wrote 60 letters to my younger self. So I really did examine a lot of that stuff and wrote it in. I think I've really just started to grow. Like you and I were sitting talking in the lobby today. I can tell you what one of your hobbies is. What do you think it is? What was one of your hobbies that I learned about today? You got so excited, you sat— you stood up and sat down beside me. Jewelry. I noticed you wearing a Van Cleef Arpels bracelet, and I was like, oh my gosh, I like wanted to wear one so badly and looked terrible on me. It looks great on you. And then you said, oh, I saw one on your wife. Then you showed me your other bracelet. Then you got up and came over and showed me one. Then you asked me about watches. Like, you lit up because No, you did. Because you kind of went, no, no, you kind of did. Like, you actually stood up and sat down beside me to excite me. Like, that was when I really kind of was like, I like this guy. He's kind of cool. There's something interesting there. I didn't have that, man. I didn't have that. I was really, really wrapped up in one thing and it didn't matter.