Smooth Sailing Ahead | The Benefits of a Strong COO CEO Relationship

So, Cameron, thanks for coming to join us on the show.

Of course. Thanks for having me, Spencer. I appreciate it.

It's interesting hearing a bit about your story as we've been chatting before the cameras went on. But also I've consumed quite a bit of your content recently to learn more about you after our good friend Ken made the introduction.

Yep.

Ken's quite a guy, isn't he?

He's amazing. But there's one thing that you don't know about me yet. I need to explain why I was late this morning. I told you.

Oh, yeah, that's a good thing.

I know you probably have a way to start most of your shows as well, but today you're going to have to start it differently.

Let's go. Why were you late to my podcast this morning?

Today's my birthday and I had a birthday breakfast with my wife and I wanted to make sure I could enjoy my egg sucks suca. So I think you have to sing Happy Birthday.

You agreed to come on your birthday?

I had to because I'm only here for another five days and this was important.

And so you're 57. 57 years old today?

I am.

And your wife and you had some shat shuka this morning, which I really love as well.

I love shocks.

Did you. Do you have somewhere special you go for breakfast?

I did, and I can't remember what it's called. The Friend's Cafe.

Something down near where you live?

Yeah.

Where are you staying?

In the marine area.

Okay. How many times you've been to Dubai?

This is my third.

What do you make of it?

I really like it. It's probably going to be one of our two hubs. We're looking at buying a place in Dubai and a place in Porto and Portugal is our two hubs. But I really like it. It was first here 11 years ago, and then we came back in May. We're here for a couple weeks in May and then now.

Why is it with Americans that struggle to travel? You know, there's certain nationalities that, that in the Irish, for example, have a great wanderlust. The Kiwis have a great wanderlust. But Americans seem to be, as a nation with such a huge population, not really well represented in many countries around the world.

I don't know. I, I'm Canadian, so I don't know what their problem is because I, I, and I've lived in the US for 10 years, lived in Canada, but they, I, I have a, I have a fundamental issue with them not traveling. I like, I love the British travel and I love the Aussies travel and the Canadians travel, the Germans travel. There's something the Dutch travel. I don't understand why the US stays so US centric. I think a lot of it is their media like everything they're fed is just about the us they really aren't outside of their bubble. And it's sad to see.

It's, it's. I mean you could argue that there's lots of great stuff to see in the States and so, you know, why would you ever need to leave? There's so much there. But I just feel that, that often Americans are so. They don't understand different cultures. They don't really know how we think differently, how we behave differently. They find a nuances about us and you know, I'm sure the limeys as they called us over in the uk, yeah, the problems as well some people call us, it says that we are, that their perception of us isn't necessarily reality.

No, it's not. It's one of the reasons why my wife and I decided to sell everything and travel and, and live globally now is we just, we kind of had seen enough of Canada, we'd seen enough of the United States would like them. I think I've been to 48 of the 50 states but there was much more around the world to see. Right. We've hit 34 countries in the last four years and we just want to keep exploring and living. But I also don't want to be a tourist. I want to go into these cities and countries and drive around on a lime scooter and go to the coffee shops and get to know the baristas and get to know the little cafes and go to the grocery stores and just live like a local for a few months and then pack up and hit the next place. And I really want to explore, I don't want to hit every street.

It's interesting you say that my parents when they retired didn't know where they wanted to live and so they decided they were going to live for three months in six different countries. So they were going to go to each country for three months and see rent a place and see what they thought of it. They only made it to one, so it's not like it worked out. The first place they went to they liked but I like the idea of that kind of going and engrossing yourself in the environment, the culture, the people and understanding what it's really like to be there rather than going in for a two week holiday.

There's hard parts of it. Hard parts are, you wake up in the morning, you go, we have to find a new yoga studio, a new gym, a new personal trainer, a new grocery store, new a new coffee shop. And then all of a sudden you're in for three weeks and you're like, oh, now it's time to pick up and move again. And so it's hard to have that routine. It's hard to have the commonalities with some friends. So you give up for sure, right? It's not. The grass is always greener for sure.

Now you've been to some interesting countries recently. You're in Bhutan. Yeah, tell me about that.

Bhutan was a place that was on my wife's bucket list, had never really been on my list. So we're doing what we call our bucket list life. We're trying to create this huge long list of experiences that we want to have and then cross them all off and on. Her list was to go to Bhutan. So I had a friend of mine that was organizing a mastermind trip, a group of about 20 entrepreneurs and Bhutan was the trip. So I said, well, can we go? And he said, sure. So we wrote our checks and off we went. And I didn't know what I was in for. I thought I was just merely going on a hiking trip to Bhutan to visit some monasteries. Turns out he took us through the whole hero's journey. I mean we spent very long, very long days from like 6:00am in the morning, 5:30am in the morning till 8 or 9 at 10:00 clock at night, really doing deep exercises, going internal journaling, meditating. We had a couple nights where we actually slept in the monastery on the floors, on 1 inch mattresses with the monks. We were at 13,500ft on a couple of hikes, we were hanging prayer flags. It was a pretty intense experience and unbelievable.

Would you recommend it?

Yeah, yeah. For me especially, it happened at a time that was, I think really important. I heard a lesson when I was there that when the cracks open up, the light can come through. My dad passed away six weeks ago, very suddenly and very unexpectedly. We were in Poland together two months ago, hiking and having a great trip in Poland and laughing and having a great old time and then heart attack and boom, he was out and I was struggling with grieving and then off we were into Bhutan and we were forced to be very present. We had no technology, we had no access to the Internet or to data. We were with these monks that had never really had any of that anyway. So we were just completely Present and then just going inward and being silent and was a real big first for me. You know, I'd done little bits of meditation and little bits of journaling and little bits of inward work, but even just seven days of being completely off the grid and, and with them was pretty humbling. You know, sitting on the floor and eating the same food every day for seven days with them was a pretty interesting experience.

And that was after your father passed?

Yeah, it was after my father passed.

So, I mean, I'm sorry for your loss. I mean, the thought of losing your dad must be a very difficult thing to go through. How did, how did, being in Bhutan then help you to come to terms with it, process it, grieve? Did you experience any of that while you were there?

I think one was just the silence of, of not being able to emotionally detach. Right. I wasn't sitting drinking alcohol and I wasn't sitting, you know, on the Internet. I wasn't running my business, so I wasn't able to detach in other ways. I was forced to just be present and just be still with it. You know, when you're hiking for six hours every day and, you know, you're hiking up these mountains and it's me and a Sherpa leading the way, and you're not really doing much other than thinking and then sitting down and journaling or meditating, it just allowed it all to come out. It was pretty profound. And then the monks, like, there was, there was like, I'll flip this for you a second. The second last night that we were there, we asked the, the head monk at the monastery if we could have a bonfire outside at the top of this, you know, we were about 11, 000 square foot or 11, 000 foot that night, which is like about 3,000, 3,300 meters. And they said, yes, they'll do a bonfire, but they said it's very rare. We only have one bonfire a year, but we'll do one with you. And we're only the second guests in history to stay at this monastery. So they make this, bought this bonfire up and, and all these. Some of the monks are as young as seven years old, and then some are about as old as about 40. So it's kind of their growth area. And some of them are going off into these caves for three years and three months and three weeks to be silent. So we're, with all these monks, we have this bonfire going and they're loving the bonfire. They're just like in awe of this bonfire. And then My wife pulls out this Bluetooth speaker and my wife Ashley loves music and dancing and she puts on this Bluetooth speaker and puts music on and the kids start dancing and the older monks are kind of sitting back and watching and smiling and they keep looking over to the head monk and the head monk is kind of watching and kind of guardedly approving. And for an hour we're all dancing together. And we spoke to him later and he said the kids have never danced and for them it was this amazing experience of presence and joy and having fun. And for us as the Westerners, we didn't know that we were doing something that they weren't really. Not that they weren't allowed to do, but they just weren't exposed to. But it was so much joy flowing from us to them and from them to us and present. And then as it was finishing, this massive full moon came in through the clouds and it was just like God kind of going, I see you. It was. And then my wife walked up to me and she said, my heart is bursting right now. It was an unbelievable experience.

Wow.

Yeah, it was super cool. The next morning we were getting ready to leave and this little eight year old monk that had dinner with me two nights before came up to me and he said, cameron, we'll miss you. I'm like, how do you even remember my name? You met me and heard my name once and I spoke to a friend of mine about it and he said, I think it's because they're so present that nothing else really matters except exactly the conversation. And as, as North Americans, Europeans or as humans, we're so busy with everything else that's happening. I think we're missing the point.

Living in the moment. It's quite profound when you think about it as you tell the story of that experience, it makes me feel like that's the place I'd like to go.

It was amazing.

Spend time and I've been to Nepal. I've been in the mountains in Nepal and stuff and been with, been with local people and been into some, some really interesting areas.

But yeah, it was the way that Mike put this event on and the way that he crafted the whole eight days. It was this hero's journey. The first couple days we were kind of on this arc, going up and thinking about all the positive experiences we had as entrepreneurs and getting to know each other and. And then all of a sudden we hit this really down and these super hard hikes and then sleep floors and really grinding it out in this monastery. And then coming out in the last two nights we spent in this five star hotel and we had massages and you know, beautiful food and, and it was just like wow, you really scripted this thing. And I think that was part of the, the whole experience. It was cool as well.

Man come back from that refreshed, invigorated.

Feeling alive and then walked into Dubai.

As was culture shock with the chaos that's here now. You've written many books so we'll come on to your new book in a while but let's just talk about business for a while because a lot of people listening and watching this PODC be entrepreneurs on some part of a journey. There'll be people out there either trying to make it as a solopreneur or built a company to a certain level. And, and I find a lot in business that when I look at many companies they don't seem to have a destination or no destination I can really identify with. They seem to be growing and they might be using the word better or year on year increases but, but I see that it's like what is your objective? What are you trying to achieve? What's your outcome here? And I suppose in, as a salesman, as I've always been, creating an outcome for myself was pretty standard. You know, that might be a one year outcome. That might be right. This is my goal, this is what I want to achieve and now I'm going to work back from that goal and establish what I need to do to achieve it. Quite kind of simple, quite binary really in the, in the thinking process. But, and, and as a salesman, if you're on commission then a lot of people are essentially businesses within businesses of course, but it's very easy to, to do that kind of thing to establish that.

Reverse engineer the delta.

Yeah, but in business, lots of companies, I hear lots of people say we want to grow our business to this revenue or we want to sell our business for this amount of money or oh, we want to be that. This is, I hear a lot, we want to be the best in our business. Right. But so many businesses don't end up being either the best or achieving their, their objectives. And there's generally a bunch of reasons for that. So what have you learned on your journey?

I'll explain that, but I'm going to give I think a piece that's almost in the middle of that. And it's a lesson I learned from my father. When I was about 15 years old, we went to the golf club that we were a member of in Canada and it was about one o' clock in the afternoon and we were just going off to play golf. We just finished eating lunch and he showed me all the people coming into the golf club and he said, that guy owns a car dealership and she owns a clothing store and he owns this business and she owns that business. And then we went off and played golf and we came back at 5:30 and we were sitting eating my french fries and gravy and drinking my cherry Coke and my dad was showing me all the people walking into the golf club at 5:30 and he said, you know, he's a teacher and she's a car salesman. She works at this company and he works at that company. He said, do you see the difference between the people that came at 1 o' clock today on Tuesday and the people that came at 5:30? I said, the people that came at 1 o' clock run their own business. He said, the most important reason you ever build a business is to have your free time. He said, building a business is not about money. It's about having as much time as you want to do what you want, when you want. And if you focus on building a business for your free time, you'll make as much money as you could ever imagine because you'll delegate and you'll grow people. And so for me that was a foundational part of every business I've ever built, was the reason I'm in. It wasn't necessarily for the year on year growth or for the bigger number. Those will all happen, right? I built the number two company in all of Canada to work for, built a company from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in six years. So the growth can happen. But when the focus was on free time and having a better life, it forced us to build a better business. So that's kind of the part in the middle. I think the number one thing that I see most companies missing on is this concept that I created called the vivid vision. And I learned about it from an Olympic coach. The Olympic coach worked with these high performance athletes on the process of visualization. So he taught us this idea that became a four or five page written description of your company three years in the future so you can have your BHAG that 20 or 30 year stretch and you can have your long term goals and your core purpose that Simon talks about and all these amazing tools that will stretch you. But the intermediary step is a vision that is about three years out that describes your company, what it looks like, acts like and feels like. Three years in the future so that all of your customers, suppliers, employees, all stakeholders can see what you as the entrepreneur can see. And then they can help you reverse engineer that and figure out how a world that people will understand is, if you're building a home or doing a renovation, the homeowner is really the CEO of that project. But if I'm building a home or doing a kitchen renovation, I don't know how to do electrical, I don't know how to do plumbing, I don't know how to hang cabinets. I know what I want it to look like, but I don't know how to make it come true. But if I don't explain what I need built, the contractor will come and build an amazing home that might not look like anything I want, but if the contractor is clear on my vision, they can create the plans or the blueprints. They can hand the blueprints and the vision to the employees, and the employees can build my home without ever speaking to me. So that tool, that vivid vision concept, became something that we really worked hard at crystallizing to help companies kind of in their growth.

And give me some examples then of where you've seen it go wrong, the kind of mistakes that companies make. Because I think a lot of people listening to that wouldn't necessarily have an aha moment. They're in. They're in their own headspace of, yeah, well, we're doing good things anyway. So how do companies identify where they. Where they're getting that wrong, and what steps do they need to take?

Yeah. If an entrepreneur or a business leader feels like they're coming in in the morning wondering why their employee is making that stupid decision, it's not because the employees are stupid. It's because they can't see the picture that you can see. So I use an example of the movie the Sound of Music. You ever seen the movie the Sound of Music? So there's a very famous scene in the movie the Sound of Music where Julie Andrews is playing guitar and the kids are sing dancing and they're up in the hills having a picnic. Right. The hills are alive with the Sound of Music. But if you've never seen that movie and I said to you, recreate that picnic scene. You might think the picnic is at a park or at a lake, and maybe the kids are playing cricket or playing baseball or playing soccer. But when I show you the movie, you're like, oh, it's so obvious what it looks like. In business, most employees aren't so clear on what the owner wants to build they know what the goal is, but they don't know about how the employees are going to work together. They don't know about how we're going to respond to customers. They don't understand the feeling and the energy that's going to be evoked in the day to day business. So this vivid vision is a way to describe every aspect of your business. Almost like you're walking around the company so that you can describe what you see and then people can figure out the how. So businesses that are struggling with aligning employees or inspiring employees or employees making the dumb decisions, it's mostly because the employees can't see what you can see.

Making the tough decisions to remove the people toxic within the business. Okay, that's a step people can take. Lots of people will say it's really hard to find really good people nowadays. People will say, I hear that a lot.

I hear it all the time.

You know, I say, yeah, but you know, where do you find the good people? And you know, I'll argue that here in Dubai, the airport's full of people moving here every day. You don't tell me everybody's bad that's moving to Dubai. There's got to be talented.

I got to speak to this.

Okay. Because we have a lot of people that work on in real. For example, are people on commission only?

Yeah.

And they say, oh, it's really hard to find great salespeople. I'm like, well, have you thought about them? As opposed to you? When it comes to recruiting, great people.

Will not work for average companies. Great people will not work for shitty companies. There's enough great people out there for your 20 person or 200 person or 2000 person company. If you build the cult right, to build an amazing business has to be a little more than a business, a little bit less than a religion. You've got to get into that zone of a cult where your culture is a magnet. And that cultural magnet, when you obsess about that, when you care about people, when you flip the org chart upside down so the CEO is at the bottom, supporting the VP's, supporting the managers, supporting employees, supporting the customers. When you build the company that way, great people will be magnetized to you. When you fire the assholes and attract the good people and pay them well and give them good vacations like the Americans suck at vacation. I mean, give me a break. Two weeks vacation, three weeks, it's got to be five or six weeks paid vacation, including your sick time at minimum. Just be horribly average in Europe. Yeah, right. So if you start doing that around the world where you create a great culture, there's enough great employees out there. But if you're an average company, yeah, it's hard to find good people, restaurants these days that are complaining, it's hard to find staff. The great restaurants have staff, it's the average ones that don't. But the average ones don't care about their people, don't have a good work environment, are paying minimum wage, don't really care about who they are as human beings, then yeah, it's hard to find good people.

That's a very important lesson, isn't it?

I think this whole great resignation is amazing right now. I think it's about time that all of these humans left the shitty jobs, didn't drive 40 minutes each direction to work for a crappy boss and got to work for a great company somewhere who actually cared about them as human beings. I think it's about time.

How do, how do those, those people then find those companies? A lot of sometimes a challenge too.

Yeah, it is for sure. A lot of it now is who's getting the buzz right, who's getting the press, who's being interviewed on podcasts, who's winning the awards, what companies are best companies to work for, best places to work, fastest growing companies, listening to the buzz on social media, looking at the Google reviews or the indeed reviews and just seeing where those best companies are and then putting yourself out there. A lot of it is also networking. I think it's harder for the good employees to get in front of those companies, but it's not hard for great employees to find great people or great employers to find great people. When you think we, sorry. We were, we were like a magnet at 1-800-got junk. There was Lululemon ourselves and the Vancouver Olympics were the three companies that everyone wanted to work for. There was one day we had a guy picketing outside our front door wearing a sandwich board in a blue wig saying please interview me. That's for real amazing that you know so, so that's because the culture was so strong, right?

When you, when you think about what you've just said, then that, that means then you need to be a well marketed company as well.

It's like the Tiffany's, Tiffany's jewelry isn but the robin egg blue box with the white ribbon. It's the packaging every company needs to be packaged and branded. A restaurant that looks good, feels good, has a good brand, has good social media proof. Of course good employees are going to want to work there. When you Go there and they have the pretty hostesses and the good looking waiters and the good looking staff and a culture that feels good. Of course you're going to attract good people. So it's all packaging and branding. That's all part of business today. I say that every company should go and stop in their parking lot and look at their front door and say, what would Richard Branson do if he bought this company? Or what would Steve Jobs do with my entryway? Then walk in the front door and walk around your office. If you've got cubicles and a boring beige workplace. And not Martha Stewart beige, but like boring beige. Right? You got to clean this shit up. Or go look at your company website. Like does it feel like a government website? Look at your leadership team pictures. If you have a picture of anybody with a suit and tie, that's grandpa's company. It needs to be a Tinder profile. Picture the bio. The last thing on your bio should be where you went to university and what your degree is. No one cares. Your bio should be like a Tinder profile. Everything is about marketing and branding and positioning now.

So for all of you that have got a Tinder, a Bumble and whatever other app profiles, just imagine taking your picture that's there and putting that in your LinkedIn.

So I always say that my dress code I hire for is a first date dress code and I make sure that people's first dates are similar to my first date because yeah, there's some pretty. I go to Burning Man a lot and there's some pretty different people out there.

Now do you go into companies and solve this problem for them or do you coach CEOs to be able to do that for themselves? What's your role that you play?

Yeah, I don't do work. I actually coach. I have an organization called the CEO alliance, which is the only mastermind of its kind in the world for seconding commands. And we teach the CEOs how to make their CEOs companies come true, how to make the visions come true. So we give them the tools and the systems to be able to do that. So if I'm coaching someone, I'm also teaching them. Like I didn't do work for Sprint. I taught Marcelo and then taught his second in command for 18 months how to turn around Sprint and make it entrepreneurial so they could merge with T Mobile. It was the entrepreneurial systems that I work with them on. It's just sometimes it's a mindset, sometimes it's a system, sometimes it's removing Obstacles or holding a mirror up, but I won't actually do the work Now.

You've taken three companies to in excess of 100 million valuation over the years. Two of them were when you were very young.

Yep.

Before the age of 35.

Yeah.

Has everything that you've done become from learning by mistake or has it come from you having a mentor that really guided you along the way? How did you manage to achieve what you achieved?

Yeah, it wasn't from mistake because I'm terrified of mistakes. I hate this whole like, failure is good that I like learning from everybody else's like. So my dad when I was 16 said, you'll never be smart enough to figure it out on your own. If I showed you my cv, you'd laugh. I'm horribly bad at school. So I learned how to rip off and duplicate. I found. My dad said there's really good companies that have spent millions of dollars figuring out everything. Just do what they're doing, it'll get you most of the way. So I always found the cheat sheets. So very early on in my business career, I was 20 years old, I was given a franchise of a house painting company and I was so terrified of failure. That 350 page operating manual, I basically memorized it. If it said a yellow keychain, I had a yellow keychain. Like I was step by step by step because I was terrified of failure. And all of a sudden what happened was I followed these simple systems. I was super successful. I'm like, okay, I get it. So that's all I've ever done. Like when I read Good to Great, I just put the stuff in place. Like it's just, it's obvious, right? So I probably read less books, but I do exactly what the right books tell me to do.

Tony Robbins talks about it the way that he sees in business, if people are doing it right somewhere, what's, what's the harm in you doing what they're doing?

Right.

It's like, why do you need to try and create your own version of it? Why don't you just copy it?

Yeah.

It doesn't call it copying though, because.

People call it R and D, rip off and duplicate. We even learned that the worst franchisees and probably the worst entrepreneurs are the MBAs, engineers and pilots. Pilots because they can't be entrepreneurial. They have to follow the checklist, right? Yeah. Follow the system.

Yeah.

Engineers want to rebuild everything. And MBAs are so smart, they need to create a pivot table just to be able to like kill a snake. Right. It's like pick up a dick, bash the snake over the head. We got it. But they need to create some big.

System for it and they, and they statistically work out to be the worst types of entrepreneur.

Yeah.

What are the, what are the. In your experience and the statistics you've gathered, what are the ones that naturally.

Are the best then people like this. But it's the C students like the, the 2.5 GPAs, this, the 65%.

Put that into terms that are people outside of the west will understand.

65% average.

Okay.

Yeah. So someone who's getting like 65% on their tests, a horribly average in school, someone with massive attention deficit disorder, which in the business world is a superpower. So my, I have 17 of the 18 signs of ADD. My ex wife said if I was paying attention during testing it would have been 18 for 18. She's probably right. So because I'm so ADD, I'm hyper aware of everything. I'm aware of the economy, the suppliers, the markets. Years ago when I was building 1 8, Thunder got junk. I saw the Canadian dollar going up. Like you just notice everything that's happening about you, but you get so overwhelmed because you're seeing it all that you have to delegate it quickly, which is a superpower for entrepreneurs. And then most entrepreneurs are bipolar. So if I read you the 11 traits of bipolar disorder, most entrepreneurs are on the spectrum between 9 and 11 of those traits. I'm 11 for 11.

So attention deficit disorder plus manic depressive.

Yeah. So the mania is the energy of why people follow us. Right. It's high energy. It's why they'll quit their jobs, it's why they'll invest in the company, it's why they'll believe in our dreams, it's why they'll join a startup or they'll say hell yeah to the idea that's not even fully formed yet. The stress and depression is simply us literally on the fringe where we've mortgaged the house, we've hired somebody that we're not sure how we can pay yet. We convince them to quit their job, but we're not sure we're going to be in business. You know, we bought the company, but we don't know how we're going to integrate it yet. And we can't really tell our spouse because that'll freak them out. So we just kind of like live with it and we can't tell our employees and we can't really tell our board everything. So you live in this little zone which is why organizations like ypo, Young Presidents Organization or eo, are so powerful for entrepreneurs to have a forum. But, yeah, most entrepreneurs are bipolar and add, and those are the superpowers. If we medicate those, it takes away our strengths.

Everything about me that I've been accused of, that's bad.

It's good.

I was hopeless at school. I got one O level. I. I wasn't clever enough to go to university, they wouldn't let me in, or even college. I've got attention deficit disorder. All of the things that you've just describ.

See, I went back to my high school 2050 reunion.

I can't wait to show this to my mum.

I went back. This is how I met Marcelo Claret. So when I met Marcelo, the CEO of Sprint, so he'd sold his first company, Bright Star, for over a billion dollars to Masa from Softbank. I'm sitting on a plane with him and he keeps going like this. And I said, you've got Tourette's. And he goes, how do you know that? And I said, well, you have a nervous tic. And I know entrepreneurs. And I said, you're an entrepreneur. And he goes, yes, but how do you know that? I said, you have really bad attention deficit disorder the whole time we're talking about. And I told him everything he's distracted with on the plane. And then I said something about, and I'm pretty sure you're bipolar because you talked about some very stressful times in your business and all the success. And then I said, you know, what's. What's the size of your business? How many employees have you got? And he's like, 17 or 18. I'm like, oh, so small company. And he goes, thousand. I'm like, oh, 17,000. Like, what the hell? But he said, why do you know me? Why do you know this? And I said, I just know entrepreneurs. So he flew me out to Miami to meet with his wife, Jordan, and I met with him for breakfast at the Soho in Miami. And I drew these diagrams explaining bipolar and ADD and the superpowers of it. And she started crying and she said, wow. I realized that that's who he is. There's nothing wrong with him after all. And if you had medicated Marcelo Claret, you would have taken away his natural strengths. But we're not like teachers, we're not like doctors, we're not like engineers. So when I was in grade six, I was sitting outside of the principal's office and my dad went in and was talking to the principal with the door closed. And the last thing I heard, because I couldn't hear much, but the last thing I heard my dad say is, there's nothing wrong with my son. There's a problem with the school. And my dad stood up, slammed the door and said, come on, we're leaving. And I said, what's wrong? He said, there's nothing wrong with you. You're an entrepreneur just like me. And that was when I realized that I was different because I knew I was really smart. I was talking, I was crying with my wife yesterday about this. I was emotionally abused for 18 years in the school system. Every day that I got a test back that I tried really hard and the teacher would walk around and say, Dave A plus, Billy C, Cameron C minus. I was heartbroken. Or in university I'd go and look at our grades. 150888 was my university number. D minus. Like that kind of emotional abuse on a kid who's trying their best and running a business with 12 employees at the same. So I know I'm smart. That was really. I don't think I've ever recovered from that. And I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are trying to put the stake in the ground to say, look, ma, I'm smart. Because we were beat up for so many years in a system.

Whether it's, whether it's beat up. And I, I was bullied at school. So I, I had something I wanted to prove to somebody. You know, there's two kids at school and many people know my story about this. And it's like the two that bullied me. The motivation that I got from that experience lasted probably until my. And so when we've been through some form of trauma or some experience along the way, I don't know anybody that's been successful that hasn't had that in some capacity in some way through there, through their childhood, something that's triggered some form of pain to make them react to that.

How have you gotten through the trauma? Plant medicines or therapy or meditation or just finally success.

Justin Zimmerman and Paul Fowler. There you go. I know their names very clearly.

The.

When I was 19, I'd bought my first hot hatch car. I was doing okay for myself, 19, 20 maybe. And I, I pulled up at a set of traffic lights in my new fancy car. And the car, the next to me was a guy on a motorbike like a scooter. And he looked at me and I looked at him and all I could see was the visor. But I knew his Eyes. I knew who it was. And he went, Spencer. And it was one of them, Justin Zimmerman.

Wow.

And so the lights went green and we pulled over and he went, wow, that's an awesome car. How you doing? And whatnot. Like it really friendly with me.

Right.

When he was never friendly. And I, and I just looked him, I said, the car? He said, yeah. I said that was because of you. Thank you.

Wow.

And he looked at me, what do you mean? I said, because I, I needed to prove to you. And he goes, I, I said, I said to him, I can't believe that I've bumped into you. And it's almost like I wanted to take the car and shove it down his throat in that moment. Moment. But it also left me feeling amazing.

Yeah.

And I, for the rest of that drive home, wherever I was going, I can't remember now. And I was like, I'll show you. And it then ignited more of I'll show you. And I need to find this Paul Fowler. It's kind of I'll show you. And some years ago there was a social media app that started before we had Facebook called Friends Reunited.

Okay.

Wasn't an app, it was a website. And Friends Reunited, you have to, you had to go and pay £5 to join it. But you would go into it and you would join your school.

Oh.

And so everybody that was on there from your school. So I graduated from high school in 1986. So that year. And I start looking down this list of people and I'm looking for these people. They're not on there, but I'm looking for them. And I'm like, that's the place. I have to find them. Otherwise I didn't know how to, how to get a hold of them. But they continued to be this motivation. I'll show you. And it was like, don't you dare tell me I can't be something. Don't you, don't you, don't you dare tell me I can't be what I want to be. And all this kind of stuff, horrible stuff that went around my head to get to a place that I could then turn that into some form of fuel that then would turn into action, that then would turn into results.

Right.

And that's how it was for me.

That's cool. You know, I think, I think all of us, like everyone listening that we're all 16 year olds trapped in adult bodies. I think we all still struggle in many ways with our 16 year old selves and trying to, you know, overcome that whatever confidence issue or insecurity issue or fear or do you think about that at all?

I think that every time I have a birthday and I talk to someone of a similar age, we laugh, you know, quite easily about the fact that we still feel 30 years old, right. Or many years younger. And guys, guys will do it more that, more maybe, I don't know, because I'm not a girl. But guys are there, you know, why are we still looking at the 20 hot 25 year old, thinking we've got a chance, you know, when clearly we have no chance. It's never going to happen in a million years.

And by the way, the reason that that waitress is being so nice to you is, is it's her job. Yeah, I heard that one day I'm like, because it's her job. I'm like, oh, that makes so much sense now. She's not hitting on me.

So it's kind of for me when, when I, when I, when I look at that and then I see that birthday come and I think we're, we're still young and you know, we're still young inside when we're not. You're absolutely right. There's, there's a, there's, there's a child inside of me or a very young person inside of me that is still trying to prove something to someone and feeling pain because I've not, I've not been able to do it either. Enough. What was it? Someone happened to me the other day with it. It was someone saying to me, you know how well you've done? And this was it. I was talking to somebody. They said, you go on stage and on stage in front of everybody. These people worship you. They think you're fantastic, they think you're awesome. Everyone wants a selfie with you. Everyone's inspired by you, they're motivated by you and whatnot. But yet you don't see any of that. And I'm like, I know because I think I'm a fraud.

Well, I, I do still do too. I still have that imposter syndrome. I've been paid to speak almost 800 times in 26 countries. And I was recently paid to speak on my seventh continent. So I've spoken on every continent, including Antarctica. And I still get off stage and go like, I can't understand why they paid me to go talk about this stuff. Like, I just, I know I'm a good speaker, but like, I don't really. I'm still this kid who's just trying to figure this out. But I think where I'M going with some of this is, and I'm only thinking out loud as I'm doing it is I think every one of our employees is that 16 year old too, right? The one who's missing a project or who's writing too long or who's talking too much in the meeting is still that 16 year old struggling with their shit, right? And if we can kind of flip that org chart upside down where we care about them and we connect with them and we get to know them instead of trying to manage them and hold them accountable, but like actually know them and care, I think we can really crack a lot of these people open, right? And as I learned with in Bhutan, the cracks is where the light comes in. If you can crack them open, that's where their growth is going to come.

I think this is a subject that we could talk about for a long time actually. There's lots to explore there.

There.

You've written your sixth book. So I wrote one book.

Who's horrible in English.

I hate writing books. I've only done one. You've done six?

Yeah.

What, what, what? First of all, what reason do you have to want to keep writing books? What desire do you have? And, and then let's get through that one and then we'll talk about the book.

So I, I, I read a quote somewhere about like, I don't, I don't like being a writer. I like having written. I never wanted to write a book. It had never occurred to me, write a book. The reason my first book came out double, double. Twelve years ago, a speaker's bureau that was representing me said they could get me higher checks from stage if I had a book. So I was like, well, what do you think you can get me? And I think I was charging five grand at the time. They said, well, we can probably get you 10. So I said, okay. So now I'm getting 40. So I'm like, well, a book. If you can get me 10 grand, yeah, let's do it. Right? So I wrote the book and people liked it. People actually liked the content. And I, and I had a process for doing my book. So this was 12 years ago. I used dragon dictation. I walked around my home with a headset on and I talked and I talked about the table of contents, I talked about all the areas of the book and I just got all this stuff out of my head and then I sent it off to get it transcribed before Rev.com existed or Siri existed. And I took all the notes from the transcriber and I cut and paste and it became chapters. And then I sent the chapters out to friends and that was my process. So it went okay from there. I was at a business event. I'm in a lot of these mastermind groups where I go to learn from others and connect with others. And I meet a guy named Tucker Max. And Tucker's a phenomenal business person, has had three New York Times bestsellers at the same time. And he had started a company then called Book in a Box. It's now called Scribe. And he said that he wanted to produce a book for me and my ex wife. My wife at the time signed me up to do three books with them. I'm like, are you kidding? Like three? What are you thinking? I don't even want to do one more. She goes, no, you're going to do three. And so because she'd signed me up for this with my money or our money, I was kind of pot committed and I decided to just listen to my audience, listen to my. My businesses that I was working with for what they wanted. So I wrote one called Meeting Suck. I wrote another called Vivid Vision. I wrote another called Free pr. And then I also bumped into a friend at another mastermind group called the Genius Network guy named Hal Elrod. Hal had written a book called the Miracle Morning. He asked me to co author the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. And I said, hell yeah, because your brand is strong and I want to do something for entrepreneurs. And that book took off stuff. So it was just. It just kind of became this natural process. And then I just wrote my sixth and this was probably the only one I've done strategically. I have this organization again called the COO alliance, and it's all about seconds in command. So I wrote a book called the Second in Command about how to unleash the power of a coo. And it's how to. To go out and recruit and onboard and build a relationship with an amazing second in command. And it's. Most companies struggle with that.

So recruit and.

Onboard, recruit and on board. And then build the relationship with like really build that strong yin and yang relationship.

So who's the book for?

It's for both. It's for CEOs and COOs.

And so CEOs are going to read that book and go, oh my God, we're not aligned. We're on a different page. That might be a signal for me to go find somebody else to.

Yeah. Or how to. How to change the relationship with. Right. Almost like a marriage. How can we make Our marriage better or how do I find a better marriage? And it is a very yin and yang approach. It's actually, I put the yin and yang symbol on the COVID It's. I think it's the only true partnership in the business. Right. The CEO has a relationship with the CFO and a relationship with the cfo, but the COO is almost like their business marriage. They have to be on the same page. A huge amount of trust. Brian and I, when we built 1, 800, got junk, had an unfair advantage. He was my best man at my wedding three months before I joined him. So we had so much trust going into day one that he was willing to just say here. And we'd also been in a business group forum for EO together for four years. He'd watched me build two companies, so it's almost like he had a four year interview. So. But I teach how you can do that, how you can fast track that process.

What role does the chairman play in this process then?

Chairman? It depends. So if there's chairman of a board or if it's a CEO that's moved into a chairman role. It depends.

Okay, we'll take me for example. So I, I've got a bunch of companies here in Dubai called the Blue Sky Thinking Group. We have CEO Danielle, who's essentially the person that's in charge of running the business.

And are they in charge of strategy or are they in charge of execution and implementation?

They're part of strategy and they're in charge of execution.

So they're almost a hybrid between CEO, COO in some way. You still have some CEO vision and strategy or do you really just let them run it?

I let them run it.

Okay, then. Then they're, they're truly CEO. So they might have a second in command who's more operational, depending on the size of your companies. Right.

Well, she's, she's always had challenges finding the right people. She's. And we have some really talented people in the business, there's no doubt about that. But it's like sometimes her frustration will be that they don't see what I see.

Has she had training, like serious training on interviewing?

I'm not sure.

Most haven't. On.

Okay.

Even think of yourself. Like, how many hours worth of training have you had on interviewing?

Well, saying that this, that's, this is an interesting subject because interviewing periods.

Right.

Okay. They say that you'll decide whether you like someone in the first 30 seconds.

That's called an emotional response. But it's not an interview.

Okay.

So in, like in business, think about a business skill that you have. Like in finance, how much training have you had? And you know, tons, right? Like you have to do like all these hours of courses and get certified. Most business people have had no training on the business skills they need to actually be in business. I did a course called Invest in your leaders. 12 modules that every manager needs. Interviewing, coaching, delegation, situational leadership, one on one meetings, running effective meetings, conflict management, project management, time management. But most people have never been trained in that. So of course it's hard to be in business because you have no skills. Imagine going out to play cricket and no one's showing you how to hold a bat or swing the bat or catch the ball. You'd be a disaster. So we would never let our kid go off to play without teaching them the basics. Like, I'm a Canadian, I even know. What was it? NBW means? I even know knees before Wicked. Like, because I had this British guy teach me when I was seven years old how to throw a ball.

NBW.

Yeah. Is that what it's called?

LBW?

That's a long time ago. Trying to go back 50 years.

I just thought, thinking about that for a second, I didn't remember cricket for then, so.

But you would. So that's why business is so hard is Most of our CEOs, most of our executives have no skills at actually doing the basics of the job. They know how to run their company. So if you're, let's say you're a CEO of a digital marketing agency, you've probably had lots of training on digital marketing, but you've never been trained on interviewing, running meetings. Most managers run meetings, they've never been trained on how to run one. Of course meetings suck. You suck at running meetings. It's pretty basic shit. Yeah, because I was, because I was the dumb kid, I had to learn the little systems, right? So I learned the little systems and then I'm like, oh, now it's simple.

Yeah, you're right. Then there's the responsibility of learning all those things can be quite overwhelming as well. Does the CEO need to know everything and then impart that knowledge onto the other person? Or does the CEO need to know an overview of those things?

And then bingo, you just, you just nailed what almost every CEO doesn't understand. The CEO needs to know it exists and the COO needs to know how to do it. So the CEO needs to understand. Oh, we have interviewing as a system that we don't really know. Someone should teach us that but the CEO doesn't have the bandwidth to learn all this stuff because most of us are ADD and a little bit too wired and too much stuff going on. But we have to know that these things exist. You have to know that coaching is a thing and. Oh, shit, no one's ever trained us on coaching. Let's find someone. It's a who problem, not a how problem. Problem. Right. But the leadership team needs to know the house. They need to know how to run meetings. They need to know how to do interviewing. They need to know how to do project management, how to do time management, how to manage email flow. Right. How to manage conflict in the system sense. The CEO needs to know it exists.

So, CEO Whisperer. You smile as you say that. And that to me, if somebody called me something like that, I'd probably recoil, thinking that maybe that was given to me rather than something I created. Created myself. So, first of all, is that given?

Yeah. So what does it mean? So I'll have to say, who gave it to me first? So it's the publisher of Forbes magazine. So this is a big deal guy who's. Who's met lots of the best business leaders on the planet. He had introduced me four different times to be a speaker at these big business conferences in the United States. And he sat in the audience watching me. And then we used to sit over wine at night and sit and talk. And at one night at dinner, I was talking about coaching someone, and it might have been Marcelo at Sprint. And he said, you kind of are whispering in their ear. And I said, yeah. He goes, you're kind of like the CEO whisperer. And I started laughing because there's that movie the Horse Whisperer or whatever, which I've never seen. But I got. I understood what he meant. I'm like, yeah, I guess, because what I'm really doing is kind of whispering in their ear what they should do, and then they go and do it. And so that moniker just stuck.

Okay, makes sense. What's one lesson your job has taught you that you think everyone should learn at some point in their life?

I think it's the big one, that you don't have to know all the answers. You just have to know the people that know the answers. Right. It's kind of like in school, we had to be the smartest person in the room because you had to memorize all the information. There was no Internet when I was in school. Right. But now I just have to know all the smart people. It's almost like we all get to do the test together. Right. I don't have to have all the answers. I just have to get seven good people and we can all figure it out. We all get to submit my test. That's been huge for me.

Do you have any unexpected experience, good or bad, during your talks or your shows?

One bad one I think is, is I have these weird out of body experiences where I feel like I'm off on the side of the stage looking back at myself and I get very. I can get fairly distracted. It's almost like I get kind of like, wow, this is interesting watching what he's doing over here. And it's. Yeah. Have you never had that? Yeah. Right. It's really freaky.

I don't, I'm not at the side, I'm, I'm above. I'm just at an angle looking down on me.

Yeah. And we're not schizophrenic. I've talked to a few people. So I don't like that feeling. Feeling. That's, that's a bad experience I've had. I don't know if that's what your question is.

I find it then hard to concentrate.

It's very hard to concentrate. Yeah.

Man. No one's ever said that to me in my life.

You know what's, you know what's amazing for me? I often do my best speaking events if I'm hungover or tired because I show up and I, I think it forces me to be present. Or maybe my brain isn't firing all over the place because I've had a good sleep. I don't know what it is, but. Yeah, I don't like the out of body experience at all.

People won't know that you're this, that you were this corporate guy that built these successful businesses. But now you're, you sold all of your possessions and you're, you're literally living, living out of a backpack.

Yeah.

And what, 50. How old are you today?

57 today.

So 57 years old today. You've kind of done it in reverse because most, most people do that in the early years.

I actually now own less stuff or have less stuff. Yeah. Than I did when I was a student. I own three pair of pants, three pair of shoes, three dress shirts, three black and three gray Lululemon shirts, a sweatshirt, a jean jacket. Yeah.

And your wife as well.

Yeah. Which is amazing. She sold like her Jimmy Choos and her Louboutins and 14 watches and she still has some of her diamonds, but she's in Lululemon every day.

How does it feel to get rid of all of that crap?

It's super empowering to, to just have. No. To just be able to say let's go wherever tomorrow and to not have this stuff. It was scary letting go of some stuff that, that, that I identified with. Right. The things that I kept seeing around me, books that I loved or possessions that, that I felt something to. So I've kept some art that's in a storage locker for when we buy a place at some point in the future. But I have a 5 foot by 10 foot storage locker. It's not very much stuff.

And after going through that experience is thinking about maybe buying somewhere in the future at some point and going to have a base, a home somewhere. Would that look completely different to anything else you've lived in before?

Yeah, it'll be. We're looking at a place in Dubai and a where place. Place in Porto is probably our two hubs and it'll be a place where we can come for a month, recalibrate, disconnect a little bit, change up some of our. And then hit the road again. A place to be able to call home and just kind of nest for a month. But it won't be a place that we spend a year in for sure.

It's this. There was a book, a verse called the Men that Don't Fit in. And it was given to me once when my dad was overseas and I wanted to know why he needed to be away. And it was, the story was all about this, this, this desire he had to go and feel other parts of the world and, and, and kind of like experience and engross himself into those different cultures and environments because it fed him something back.

I've thought about this a lot and I've asked my wife about it as well. Are we running towards something or running away from something? And we're running towards. We just, we just really want to see what's out there. We're just so curious. And, and I've only been to 56, no, 64 countries now. I've always had a goal to be to more countries than my age. And then I go to a country and I don't even really know the country. I only know a couple of cities in the country. Like I just want to, I just want to go see it.

Okay, good. Last question. Define success for me.

So When I was 2 years old, my grandfather passed away. And when, when I was one or when I was being born, he said to my dad, with a name like Cameron Gardner, Harold, that kid is going to be a success. I'm. And I heard that saying from my dad so often that it felt like a curse. And around 15 years ago, I wrote my first personal vivid vision so what my life was going to look like three years out. And I wrote down, I'm already a success. And I was trying to understand what that meant. And for me now what it means is it's not about things. It's about being able to wake up in the morning and feeling good at who I see in the mirror. It's about being able to explore life and enjoy life and have free time and. And the money's there, but it's never been about the stuff for me. I think that's why it's been so easy to purge. The stuff is now I can just.

Kind of breathe and do you feel that you've been as successful as you've always wanted to be?

No, I think I'll always pursue that. I want to be better for my employees. I want to create better lives for them and better opportunities for them. And I feel extraordinary. I took 13 weeks vacation last year and I had to sit with my team, and I felt extraordinarily guilty about that. And they're all excited for me, but I want to give them those experiences too. I feel like I've worked really hard and I've been given lots, but I feel an immense amount of this. I don't know if it's the Catholic guilt that I grew up with. Right. But, yeah, I feel like I need to still give back.