Step into a World of Possibilities | Hire Your Second in Command

In this episode of Franchise Secrets, I've got my friend Cameron Herald on. Now, Cameron is a favorite of podcast listeners and Mastermind members. So we talked about all kinds of stuff in relation to your second in command, hiring that person, recruiting that person. But we went on some really cool tangents of the why, the real benefits of hiring that second in command and some of the things that we have as entrepreneurs and founders and franchisees and franchisors of these blocks in our mind. Meaning sometimes we get into business. Most of the time we get into business because we want freedom, flexibility, make a lot of money. But once we have a lot of money, we have a lot of freedom and flexibility. So many of us are driven just to get more or the next thing, the next dopamine hit. And the reason to have a second of command is to create this epic life, to have this bucket list life, as Cameron says. So I think you're really going to enjoy this, this show with my friend Cameron Herold. Dud. Cameron, good to see you again, man.

You too, Eric. Thanks for having me. Nice to see you.

We, we're not going to tell everybody what we're talking about before, before we actually hit record, are we?

Nice. No, let's do this.

We'll keep that, keep that stuff top secret. All right. So you wrote a new book called the Second in Command. I've been talking to franchisees and franchisors. All of these people are really wanting a second in command or they really should have a second in command. Different for franchisees and franchisors. I know you've been on, on all side equation. So tell us about your book and maybe a little bit about your background for those that don't know who you are and then let's hop into it.

Yeah. So this is the book. It's called the Second In Command. Unleash the power of your coo and I'll speak to why this is really relevant and why I should, they should even listen to me. So I've been a franchisee. I was a franchisee for three years and I was extraordinarily successful as a franchisee. There were 400 of our franchises in Canada. I was in the top three. I then started to work for the head office. And for four years I recruited, hired and trained 120 of their franchisees. But we actually had to get 800 new franchisees every year. Not many franchise units in the world ever do that, but it was called College Pro Painters. And one of the franchisees that I recruited hired, signed A franchise agreement and trained and then coached, was Kimball Musk, Elon's brother. I also recruited, hired and trained his cousin, Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity. They were both franchisees for me. So I've been a franchisee. I've also been a franchisor for College Pro Painters, also for Boyd Auto Body and Gerber Auto Collision, which is now the largest collision repair chain in the world. It's a $2 billion revenue company, publicly traded. College Pro was the largest residential house painting company on the planet. And then I became the second in command for a franchise, or that a couple of people might know of. It's called 1-800-GOT Junk. We ranked as the number one franchisor in the world from the IFA back in 2004. We ended up taking them, or I took them from 12 and 12 franchises to 330 in six years, from 2 million to 106 million in revenue. We also ranked as the number one company to work for in Canada in 2004. We also won the number one call center of the year in North America. And then, as I mentioned, number one franchisor, we had a positive 98% net promoter score from our 330 franchisees. So I can speak a little bit to that. And then I've also worked behind the scenes coaching, which I don't do anymore, coaching franchisors. I coached about seven or eight franchise companies and franchisor companies around North America as well. So I've kind of been doing that. And I'll speak to that. That's a little bit of my background.

I love it. It's no wonder, whenever I have the opportunity to spend some time with you or the franchisees that I talk to and I push your podcast and just everything that you do, they. They just love you. Every time I, you know, you've been in, in the groups and the rooms that I have rave reviews and they're like, they're like, hey, Eric, I learned this from Cameron last time he was. Or I learned about this from Cameron on the podcast. So you've had massive impact in my audience. So thank you for being such a giver.

You're welcome. I was scared to death when I signed my first franchise agreement. I was 20. And I remember my dad telling me that there was no better time in my life to go broke, which is probably different from everybody who's listening now. We can't afford to go broke. But I was scared to death. And the one thing that I remember doing was just saying, you know, What? I'm buying the franchise because I like the franchisor. I trust the franchisor. I believe in their system. I was so scared of failing that I did everything that was in the manual. I mean, if it said yellow keychain, I had a yellow keychain. If it said hold your meetings at this time of day, I was like, to the dot, I. I just decided to be the dumbest person in the room and do everything they told me for the first year. And then after the first year, if I had some of my ideas, I probably even still did what they told me. You know, it was just so terrified of failure. And I think it's a good lesson for all the franchisees out there is we're often very entrepreneurial. But trust me, if the franchisor has a better idea than what's in the manual, they'll update the manual. They'll tell you, they'll let you know, like, just do what's in the manual.

You have your own business. Like, you coach, second in command, you have courses, you do, you do all kinds of things. Are you a true, like founder or you a true COO second in command?

I'm a bit of both. So I've been running my own company since I was 20. I did a talk that was on the main TED website that was called let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs. I had about 15 and I could rattle them all off 15 little business ventures by the time I was 18 years old. So I've always been an entrepreneur. The reason I was so successful as the second in command for 1-800-got junk was I had been a franchisee. I'd already been a franchisor twice. Brian didn't know how. Brian had sold two franchises, but there was no franchise manual at all. There was no franchise training program yet, was no franchise marketing. There was no franchise pr. Like nothing existed other than the idea and the dream and a really good current location that he owned and operated that people bought into. So I came in not so much as the operator, but as a kind of partner really, for the first four or five years who just knew everything we had to do and we just did it. So we were both very entrepreneurial. My Colby profile is a very entrepreneurial DNA profile. My disc profile is very entrepreneurial as well. So I'm a bit of an anomaly in COO world. And then I started what's called the COO alliance six years ago to really run a mastermind community exclusively for the second in command that no entrepreneurs are allowed to Join. So, yeah, I'm probably an entrepreneur with an understanding of the COO mindset.

What's your disc profile?

I have a 98D and a 78I. I'm literally like run so fast and I'm not even sure what I can see. Like it's just, it's go. And my Colby profile is 4393. I'm a high quickstart.

So I'm very similar on, on the disc. So how do you as an entrepreneur with the high DI function in that COO role? And I think that's what makes you brilliant. Being able to kind of bridge the gap and be able to talk to the C O O and talk to the entrepreneur, the founder or the COO or the CEO.

Yeah. So one thing I learned when I was quite young was the cheat sheets. I learned that I was never going to be smart enough to run the complicated systems. I'd be never smart enough to get 98% on all the exams, but I could in an hour study enough and get a solid 2.4 GPA, which was enough. No one's ever asked me for my transcript. I got a degree. No one ever cared what my grades were. So I always understood momentum, creating momentum. And I also understood that every system had to be good enough for the worst franchisee in the worst market, in the worst weather, with the worst employees to still deliver our quality focus areas and our service level agreements to our customers. So for me, every system's written on a post it note. So it's kind of like the cheat sheets, right? Whereas most business owners and most businesses, they're like a fly trying to get out the window, they're going to keep banging their head and they're going to keep trying hard, trying hard, trying hard. There's a door. Just turn. Go out the door. So I just find the shortcuts. And I think as a coo, I was very good at seeing the shortcuts. I was very good at finding the cheat sheets. My dad, who was an entrepreneur and both of my grandfathers were entrepreneurs, raised the three of us, my brother and sister and I, to be entrepreneurs. So it's all we ever knew. And their whole thing was, you'll never be smart enough to figure this out on your own. Your R and D stands for rip off and duplicate. So find the good system. So as an example, right now I'm getting some marketing stuff ready to go. I'll never be smart enough to do marketing, but I know for sure that Alex Hermosi has nailed the testimonial style marketing from his clients and posting them on Facebook. So we're just going to do that. We're going to get lots of Testimonials from our COOs, put those on Facebook and take some of his copy and R and D it. I'm going to get Testimonials of the CEOs who write the check. I'm going to post them on Facebook and R and D the copy. You know what is it perfect? I don't know, but it's way better than what I can do.

So I realized for myself personally, I didn't realize the how great it would be to have a second in command. And I'm referring to you when I had a true second in command, when I built out 12 solo salon studios and eventually sold that for an eight figure exit. Mirko, our CEO, our CEO, their second in command did so much for us. He was better than any of the partners could have been because we were all too entrepreneurial, too much of a, of a founder mindset. So is that common for people to like all of a sudden get a great second in command and be like, I wish I had done this sooner?

Yeah, there's two parts to that. I think Gino Wickman did a really good job with his book Traction at explaining the visionary and integrator idea where the visionary entrepreneur, typically in the one person to 50 person size companies, needs somebody to put the systems in place to organize their madness, to organize all their crazy ideas, right? To maybe even to help save the entrepreneur from themselves. My sister calls it that the CEO is the brakes to her gas or the leash to her wild dragon. Right? Like that's what the entrepreneurs are. The earth. Sorry, what the CEOs are. The second part of that is that most entrepreneurs, before they hire a second in command, need to hire an executive assistant first. Right? If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. So it's how do we get all the admin off our work? How do we get all the low, easy to do tasks off our work? How do we get all the minimum wage stuff off our plate to free us up to work on the bigger stuff? When your business gets big enough that you don't have enough time to grow the people that are reporting to you when all you're doing is managing them and doing work and managing people and doing work where you're not growing their skills, growing their confidence, mentoring, removing moving obstacles. When you don't have enough time to truly lead and grow people, that's when you need a second in command, somebody who can come in to free up time so that you can also, as the CEO, be in charge of vision and culture and recruiting. You know, the virtual bench. That kind of stuff needs to be done.

Let's take a little rabbit trail down the EO EOs. Rabbit trail.

Yeah.

I've had some training for my mastermind members and they're one of the implementers, did a great job and, and has really helped out a lot of companies that I know your book combined and process that you kind of train the COOs in versus EOs. Is it the same thing? Are there some little facts that you have or, or like, you know, don't be afraid to hurt Gino's feelings in this. I know Gino's on to other things now.

No, they're not even. Yeah, Gino's sold. No, it's not even the same. It's not even like apples and oranges. It's like apples and skateboards. They're not even related. So traction are the systems that a smaller entrepreneurial company needs to put in place to help them scale. What I talk about in the book, the second in command is how do you recruit a second in command? How do you onboard them? How do you build a strong relationship with them? How do you build that true yin and yang partnership with the second in command, whether it's an integrator or a president or a COO or a VP Operations or a director of operations or a general manager or a project manager. How do you get that yin and yang to you, by the way? I would be. So I've got 170 plus members of the COO alliance from 17 countries. I would be a horrible second in command for 95% of their businesses. They would have been a horrible COO for 1, 800 got junk. So just because you're in the role of a COO or in the role of a second in command doesn't mean you could be a great one in other companies. That's something to be very careful with. And I've been joking about this recently. I'm married, but let's say I was single and I was looking for a wife. If I found a woman who used to be married, I'm like, oh, you used to be a wife? You should be my wife.

What the.

That no relevance whatsoever. Like do we get along? Do we have commonalities? Like how do we like, do we like each other? Just because she's been a wife doesn't mean she'd be my wife. So that's something to be very cautious with, is, what are you looking for? How do you find it? And then when you've got one, how do you build that really good relationship and that trust so that you can scale and do it together? The next part of that is most COOs are there for a reason or a season, but not for the lifetime. Because most COOs as a company scales and scales and scales and scales. At some point, they won't be able to be the COO of that much, much bigger company. As an example, 1-800-got junk. We doubled our revenue size six consecutive years in a row. We went from 2 million to 106 million in six years. In year five and year six, the company was too big for me to really run. I left the company at year six and a half, kind of pulling my hair out, going, holy shit, this is really big. A year later, they brought my replacement in. She was the former president of Starbucks, us. And Lonnie walked in and looked around and said, what a cute little company, right? So. So there's a season component in there as well that we need to be quite cognizant of. And that's why we have to grow our people or also work with them on how to replace them at the right time, in the right way with the person who's there for the next season.

And that's probably a pretty tough. It's probably pretty tough to be aware of that, and it's probably pretty tough to be going through that transition.

Well, the current COO at 1-800-got junk. His name is Eric Church. I've known Eric for 35 years. Eric and I started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada, in 1987. I was president for year one. He was president in the second year, which is really weird. He has now been the COO for 1,800-got junk in the Ode brand group for nine years. He's grown them. It actually went from 106 down to 70 million. And then he took it from the 70 million up to 450 million now. But he would have been a horrible COO in the first six years because he didn't have the franchising experience. He didn't know how to do all the things that needed to be done. And there was nowhere there for him to lead and oversee because there was no team. So there was a right season for Eric, which was the 70 million to the 450 million, as there was the right season from me, from the 2 million to 106 million. And there's key lessons in that for all of us that are looking to hire the second in command, what's the season that we need them for or what's the reason we need them? Is it a turnaround? Is it to get shit done? Is it to, you know, change the organization? Is it to free up our time? Is it to bring in some skills that we don't have? What's the reason? And then what's the season for that COO as well?

I love that. So talk about bringing them in. Like we need to know who to bring in. And before you know who to bring in, you probably have to know yourself pretty well.

Bingo. That's the key, right? The key is who am I as the entrepreneur or CEO? What do I love to do? What do I hate to do? What am I really, really good at? What do I suck at? What things in the company feed me with energy because I should be the chief energizing officer. And what things in my company drain me of energy? And then how can I create a basket of stuff that I suck at, I'm not good at, I don't love doing drain me of energy? And how can I find somebody loves to do those things? Like, by the way, I hate it and I hate accounting. But there's people out there that love accounting. They went to school for it. They, they love it. Gives them like they, they would love to talk about it at cocktail parties, except we all think they're weird, right? So how do you find somebody who wants to do all that stuff and doesn't want to do the things I want to do again, back at 1, 800, got junk. I was a very outward facing COO. I was biz dev, I was sales, I was marketing, I was pr. I did speaking events for the company. I talked to because we had to push the brand and I had credibility because I'd done it twice before. Eric at 1-800-got junk. No one knows him. He's very inward facing. He doesn't want to talk to the media. I had to beg him to contribute a little bit for this book about the very inward facing, level five kind of leader because he doesn't talk to the outside world, right? You have to know yourself as the CEO. The second thing you have to know is what do I operate like, you know, what's my DNA like as an entrepreneur, as a CEO? And how do I find a yin and yang kind of counterpart to me that meshes well with my DNA so that my crazy won't drive them crazy and so that they're crazy. Won't drive me crazy because you're not looking for someone just like you. It's even why I did. The logo on the front of the book is the yin and yang. You're looking for that counterpart to you who's really strong at the stuff you're not. So that's the second. And then the third is trust. You need to know everything about the person so that on day one you would be willing to give them your bank accounts, your passwords, hand over your company because you kind of are. You're kind of letting them take over the business and run a lot of it for you. Don't tell yourself that you'll know in 90 days if they're the right person. If that's what you're saying, that's because you suck at interviewing. And you need to get the basic skills of interviewing to know how to recruit them, how to interview them, how to select the right person, how to hire them, and then when you've got them, how do you onboard them?

Right, so what are the quick tips on interviewing?

First off is ask a question. So you've built a number of companies and even for somebody listening right now, how much training have you had on doing interviews?

Very little.

Have you had any training other than reading a book or watching a video?

Some, some face to face training on. On that or at a conference or speak, you know, like very little.

Right.

Formal.

Yeah. So it's. And it's. And how many people have you interviewed and hired? Hundreds. Without the whole training. Like what the. Like you think like. Have you played any sports? Yes. What sports?

Pickleball, man. Pickleball, my sport now.

Have you had any coaching around pickleball?

Yes.

You've probably had more coaching at pickleball than you have at interviewing. Certainly that's true. You probably had. You've probably had more personal trainers hours in the gym than you've had at interviewing. Yep. So the problem with most business is so simple we over complicate it because ourselves and our managers have no skills to do what we do day to day. So I launched a course recently. I've got tons of franchisees and franchisors going through my course content. And it's all of the leadership skills that managers and leaders need to excel in their job. Regardless of what franchise model you're in, it's the skills around situational leadership, coaching, running one on one coaching sessions, interviewing, running effective meetings, classroom teaching, delegation, time management, project management, managing email and slack. It's like the core, the core shit that we need that no one trains us on. So if you train people on that stuff, they'll excel in their role.

So let's pause there. How do people find that?

It's called investinyourleaders.com.

Invest in your leaders.com. check it out.

That's 750 bucks per person. I had one of my clients say that if I'm not willing to spend $750 to grow one of my managers, I should probably fire them.

I've spent more than 750 on pickleball training and I'm not even that good.

Right, exactly. Do you know, do you know Matthew and Adam Torin at all? No, I don't. Or Rob, Rob Nunnery?

No.

A couple friends of mine, big entrepreneurs in the tech scene that are massive into pickleball as well. Pickleball is crazy fun.

Oh it is. I am loving it. When I go to conferences and doing my own masterminds. It's really designed around is there a good, good pickleball court community around and then we'll do it there.

So yeah, there's a crazy, there's a crazy weird sport you got to go on, on YouTube just for fun or on Google and look this up. I think it's called street ball and street ball is only played in Barbados. It's like the native sport in Barbados. The net is only about one foot high. It's played on a pickleball sized court with literally a net that's one foot off the ground. It's the weirdest thing ever. I'll check that out. I'll check it out.

Hey, you were talking about something just a few minutes ago about identifying what you really love to do. Keep doing those things and stop doing the things that you don't like, aren't good at or hate. All the same things I, I hate thing doing certain things in my business like accounting and books and different things like that and others. I just thought. It took me a while. Cameron. Took me probably two years to really grasp a hold of that and to get honest with myself about the things that I hate doing. Realize I hate doing them and really stop doing them. Last year and going into this year I'm only doing the things that I love. Like I don't do anything unless I love to do it and I'll hire somebody to do the things that I hate doing and I'm not really good at doing them actually.

It's, it's a, it's a real learn. Yeah. It's a learned skill. It's a Real learned skill or a real learned trait that entrepreneurs need to most. Like anyone listening right now, I can guarantee you that anybody listening does not clean their own toilets. They don't wash their own floors, they probably don't paint their own house, they probably don't cut their own grass, and they probably don't, you know, clean their own pool. But all that stuff needs to get done, but not by them. They don't change their own oil. Right? All those things need to be done, but not by them. In the business, we look for to need to look for all the stuff that needs to get done, but not by us.

I think I started to see entrepreneurs when I was a franchisee. As a franchisee, I would see other successful franchisees that were really good at operations. And so I thought to be a good franchisee, you need to be really good at operations. And I saw other franchisees that were crushing it, but they were really good at delegating, really good at elevating their employees, really good at hiring that second in command.

Bingo.

I kind of, I felt bad for a while. I'm not great at some of these operations and I didn't want to admit it to myself until I got comfortable doing that.

Well, so there's two parts to that. The first one is that the school system in North America messed us up because we were routinely. If you went from kindergarten through high school, that's 13 years, or kindergarten through university, that's 17 years, you were told that you had to be smart at everything. You were told to get a tutor, to work hard, to drive for an A. You weren't allowed to hire someone to do your assignments. You weren't allowed to pay other people to do your work. You weren't allowed to collaborate with everybody else. We had all was solo work. It was very bad habits and routines that we built. If the school system had said, here's your exam, go find five people and work on it together, here's your exam, go pay people to do it for you, we all could have excelled. Well, that's how you run a business, right? But because we've had four, you know, 12 or, or 17 years of training the other way, it's hard to unbreak those lessons. Second thing is there's a little bit of that, I call it the Catholic and Jewish guilt. You know, we have that kind of guilt that I shouldn't be taking vacation because my employees are working hard. Well, we started the business and most of our employees don't want us around anyway because we drive them crazy. So they're actually quite happy when we're not around because they can get their work done, you know, so, so the, another part is that we should be treating ourselves more like athletes. There's not a professional athlete on the world that is in their sport playing in their sport 50 hours a week. They might play six hours a week, they might play 12 hours a week, but they don't play for 50 hours a week. They relax, they cross train, they decompress, they practice like they practice their skills, but they don't play at their highest level. And as entrepreneurs, we need to spend time networking and masterminding and coaching and decompressing and going to conferences that have nothing to do with our industry. Like, I've gone to the main five day TED conference for nine years. I'm going again this April and I watch 125 TED talks in five days. It blows my mind apart, which fuels me with energy, creates ideas. I call it ideas having sex. Right? So it's, it's. We need to, we need to not work in our business so much, but we need to understand what working on our business is. The other thing is we only start a franchise or buy a franchise or, or start a franchise or start a business for one of three reasons. To give us cash, to give us control of our time. Right. For free time. And to put a flag in the ground or a stake in the ground to say that we did it right, we accomplish something. Well, if we've got it up and running and we're doing it, then we've got the stake in the ground. If we've got enough cash coming in, that's good. But what about the free time? You know, North Americans suck at understanding vacation. In Italy, they all take July off, 100% of July. Nobody works. Plus most of Europe takes five or six weeks vacation include plus the weekends, plus the government holidays. But they take five or six. Why are we doing two weeks vacation and thinking that's time off?

It took me a bit to get comfortable doing more vacations. We just booked a trip and you're like, you've inspired me to take more vacations. I follow you, I watch you. I see the lifestyle that you have right now. And we got a pretty good lifestyle. My wife and our three daughters who are 8, 10 and 13.

Oh, magic ages.

Yes. We started homeschooling them so we could take time off. We're taking almost three weeks off in March to go to Costa Rica. We got four different Airbnb's book and a nice car and we decided to.

Fly first class of all of them. Where are you going in Costa Rica? Every.

We're going like three. The, the south, the middle and the north on.

Amazing.

Yeah. So like three different areas and we're like, like we're just going to go and like spare no expense. It's not that expensive. You know, it's not like we're going someplace crazy, but just this, creating memories. But three years ago, I don't think I, I would have done that.

Oh no, you gotta. We were in 23 countries last year. My wife and I got, we went, we, we literally sold everything. Sold our home in Arizona, got rid of our home in Canada, sold our cars, sold our furniture. My sister just bought a place in Nosara in Costa Rica. Make sure no sorrow is on your list. It's incredible.

I'm doing it right now. Yeah, I, we can't, we can't wait. And then it's nice to get out of South Dakota in March. So. But you know, people, you know, entrepreneurs suck at, at like freeing up their calendar and everything. You were talking about. One of the things that I enjoyed by having a lot of freedom in my calendar is that flexibility to be able. I say no to so many calls and you've helped me do that. Roland Frazier has helped me like say no to calls because everybody wants to, to grab your time and really good at that. And now I have flexibility in my calendar and all of a sudden there are important, unique things that come up that are like, man, I'm so glad I wasn't on back to back calls today. Even though it didn't look like I was productive on my calendar, these calls produced revenue equity ideas. So many, so many different things that I would not have had or been able to do if I had a rigid back to back calendar.

Very much so.

You seeing that same thing with entrepreneurs?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, Dan Sullivan talks about focus days, free days and buffer days and deciding your focus days are working on your kind of unique ability stuff. Buffer days are when you need to get some of the stuff done. But then free days are like 24 hour periods. No business books, no business periodicals, no podcasts, no emails, nothing where you just completely unplug. I took 11 weeks vacation last year, completely unplugged for 11 weeks and did not work on a single Saturday or Sunday for 52 weeks and stopped working at 6pm on every single day of the year. Because you're never going to get it all done if you're a franchisee or a Franchisor what are you going to catch up? It's trying to sneak up on your shadow. You're going to sneak up on it when it's not moving. You're going to set more goals. You're going to build something bigger. It's your to do list is always going to grow.

My Mondays are my buffer days. Tuesdays are really mastermind days. Wednesdays are content days. When I say days, it's 10 to 2. That's what's booked on my calendar. Thursdays are days to, like, work on the business, work on my financials, work on things. And Fridays are that completely free, like, no business. Hopefully I'm skiing with the kids on a Friday or doing something absolutely fun that doesn't require work.

Well. And you know what a lot of entrepreneurs forget to do is to remember, what do we like to do? You know, what's our bucket list? What do we like to do for fun? What are our. Because at the end of the day, none of this shit matters. This is just what we do to make money. We're all going to die. Like, so. You know, we all. We've heard the saying, we laugh about the saying, but there's nobody I met on their deathbed who says, I wish I'd spent more time at the office. It's true. But if we don't have a good relationship with ourselves, if we don't have a good relationship with our spouse, if we don't have a good relationship with our kids, if we don't have good relationship with our friends, if we don't have hobbies and activities and passions and. And bucket lists and things that we're trying to do, then of course, our fallback becomes the one thing that gives us dopamine rush, which is our work. But. And to say that work is my hobby. I don't want to hear about your hobby. Like, I, I had a friend here the other night who was super excited about my new book coming out. I, I didn't want to talk about it. I wanted to talk about where we were going next on our travels and what we were doing for fun. Because I don't want to hear about their tech sales job or I don't want to hear about you as a lawyer because that's your hobby. You certainly don't want to hear about my business.

I was at a meeting in Nashville, just a mastermind group. That's not formal. Just some friends went out there. There's 20 of us. Everyone was netting over a million dollars a year. So good high performers, one of the guys said hey. I asked him because he's like, hey. And he was making about 3 million a year, net profit 3 to 4. And I said, how much time do you work in your business or on your business? He's like, I was working a crazy amount. I got a two year old kid now, now I'm only working five to ten hours a week. I'm like, that's awesome. And then somebody else was making about the same and he's driven to get to the seven million dollar mark and the ten million dollar mark. He's like, it's my hobby. I love business. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm driven. So what'? Between those two people, it's the person.

Who decides that family and activities and stuff, the focus is, is important to them, you know, because there's, there's equally as many people out there that have the two year old and they're going to work hard and they don't know their two year old. Right. I mean I grew up in a family where my dad was home every day at 5:30 and we had a sit down family dinner five days a week. And I remember like the one day a week my mom would be excited because we were going out for dinner to give her a break, you know. I remember my dad was at all of my sports growing up. Embarrassingly. I remember one day he came to my volleyball practice. I'm like, dude, it's practice. Like you're, it's weird that you're sitting in the gym watching us practice. Like no, I had nothing to do. I wanted, I'm like, no, go do something. But he also played golf twice a week with his buddies. Like I saw my dad having activities and passions and played cards like on Sunday for two hours. Like that was somebody who was very well rounded and I saw friendships and health and activities as the core and he ran a business. But when my dad passed away in September, his obituary didn't talk about what he did for work. And the hundreds of people that came to his funeral were friends of his that did stuff with him. They were his golfing buddies and his card playing buddies and his hunting buddies and, and like they weren't his, his work people who came too.

But that's powerful. I mean it's so easy to hear that and be like I'm, I will do that someday. I know I'm, personally I'm not there but I know people that are like that, they're like I will be there someday. Or I'm justifying, I'm Working so hard because I'm, I'm, I'm going, I'm doing this for my family. I'm doing it for whatever. And they want that said at their funeral. But they are just so, so driven.

I am. I'm 57 years old and I had had. There were six of us as roommates in fourth year university, and two of the six are dead. I, I'm not waiting till I'm retired to have a good life. Like, I, I also. Dean Graciosi and I were sitting talking to the mastermind one day and I said something about, dean, how would your kids describe you? And, oh, good at Internet marketing, good at real estate, blah, blah. And I was like, is that really how you want your kids to describe you? And he thought about it and he's like, oh, no. And I'm like, I'm the same. I need to change this. This was like 10 years ago, and I decided I wanted my kids to describe their dad as some. If they like, what's your dad do? Oh, he likes to travel and he likes golfing and hiking and skiing and playing tennis and loves wine and cooking. Oh, what does he do for. For work? Oh, he does this. Like, I, I don't want to be known for what I do for work. I want to be known for who I am as a person.

What triggered that? Was it. Did you experience loss 10 years ago?

No, it was, it was the sadness of talking to Dean Graciosi and realizing how empty that was. I liked him as a human, but I'm like, I don't give a what you do for money. And that's how you want your kids describing. I'm like, oh, that's probably what my kids think of me. My kids used to say something to be like, oh, is that. Do you know that friend through work too? Huh? And there was an emptiness in that for me where now I want them to oh, you met that friend skiing or oh, you met that friend traveling or oh, you met that friend. Like, Like, I have a good friend of mine was just here this weekend and we went golfing twice and we hiked camelback together. And he was at my wedding back in May. Well, we only met 12 months ago. We met when we were in Antarctica together. We met playing euchre card games on a boat in Antarctica. And I fell in love with him and his wife. So we invited them to come with us on our, our wedding. And then, like, I want more of those.

For me, it was. I grew up in a great family and they prioritize family. But my wife, she lost her mom when she was early 20s and then lost her dad about five years ago at this time of year. And so death is real to us. And so that's part of the reason we live, like knowing today might be our last day. And if you really do that, you really would live differently. And we are living differently because of that. So this is a fun, good sidetrack. I hope this helps some people out there, Cameron. I hope some people hear this. And whether you've experienced loss or you've heard the emptiness that Cameron realized, I hope this changes some people.

Well, and that's, that's a core reason why you can hire a second in command. You can hire a second in command to give you a life. And by the way, the more that you delegate and the more that you offload to that second in command, your business is probably going to grow anyway. So around 10 years ago, my sister called me and my sister Christie has been again a franchisee and a franchisor both. She's run her own business for 25 years. She's got 180,000 people playing co ed intramural sports in her leagues in seven cities. So she's crushing it. Ten years ago she called me and she was kind of crying and upset and I said, what's wrong? She goes, I don't know how big to grow my business and I'm frustrated. I said, what are you frustrated with? She goes, I want to spend more time with my kids. My kids are 8, 6 and 4 and I don't want them to grow up and me not know them. And I said, well, why don't you hire someone to do your job? She said, it would take three people to do my job. And I said, okay, well what was your profit last year? She said, we made 1.4 million in profit. I said, Then great. Hire four people or three people, pay them $150,000 each. Get the three people running your your business for you. Go in Monday morning and coach them. Go in Thursday afternoon for two hours and coach them. And then get the hell out of the way and go spend time with your kids. And Instead of making 1.4 million next year, you're going to make a million. Poor baby. So she did that. And you know what happened over the next seven years that she had these people running her company? It doubled. It doubled. Seven years later she was making $2 million a year. And then at that point her kids were like 19 and 17 and 16. And she's like, I want to Go back to work. And now she's growing the crap out of this thing again. So we get to cheat as entrepreneurs, we get that we can, can rig the rules or rig the game in our own favor. It's kind of like if we were, let's say you and I were going to invent the board game Monopoly. Well, every time that people go past go, they collect $200, but because it's our game, we collect 2,000. And every time you get near jail, everybody else lands in jail, but we get a free pass always. And every time you land on free parking, you take all the money in the middle. But if we, if we come near free parking, we get all the money because. And it's our game. If you don't want to play, don't play. That's what we get to do with our franchise. The franchisor does not tell you that you have to be there every day. The franchisor wants you to grow revenue so they get more royalties. You want to grow revenue so you get more profit. But you can also figure out a way to get the right people to do it all for you.

So many different reasons to have that second in command. I thought we were going to go tactical on it and. But we kind of went big picture. Like, one of the reasons to have the second of command is to have a life.

And you.

Most entrepreneurs originally got into business because they wanted to have the life. They wanted the freedom, the flexibility, all of these different things. And then they got. But yet they found themselves on this hamster wheel of wanting more and more and more or feeling they tied their value and their worth to the hours that they put in.

Yeah, I was really lucky because when I was 16, my dad took me to the golf club and we went and played golf at 12 o'. Clock. And he was showing me all the other people coming to play golf. You know, he owns a car dealership and he owns this firm and she owns that company and we played golf. And then at like 5 o', clock, we're sitting on the balcony and I'm eating my fries and gravy and drinking my cherry Coke and he's eating his, you know, burger and. And he points to these people walking into the golf club at 5 and he's like, she's a teacher, he's a lawyer. He works for that company. He works for this company. He said, do you remember the difference between the people who got here at one o' clock on Wednesday and the people who are getting here at 5:00'? Clock? And I said, the people who came in at one o' clock run their own business. And my dad said, running your own business allows you to play golf or do whatever you want whenever you want, being an employee. And it stuck with me that for me being a franchisee or for me owning my own business meant a free time. And the more free time I, I chased, the more I delegated, the more I hired people, the more money I made. I was, I was my own bottleneck.

So why do people get caught in wanting their second of command or their employees to see them working more like working more in quotes, putting the hours in.

Because the school system showed us that we had to work hard. We had to memorize everything, we had to be the smartest person in the room. If the school system for 18 years trained us to be lazy, to hire people to do your. Like I hired someone and paid them to do my 13 accounting assignments in second year university. I cheated. I was actually written up 10 years later in the managerial accounting textbook that all students in North America used. And I opened up the section on budgeting and I told the author of the textbook, I cheated in this course. And she laughed and she goes, it's okay, you just figured out how to hire your first accountant. That's why, that's why we're working so hard is we weren't trained in any other way. So we're like the fly trying to get out the window that we're going to work hard until we get there, but we might end up dead on the windowsill if we don't realize there's a door that we can just fly out with a shortcut.

So someone realizes they've got a great second in command on, on payroll, they're doing a good job, and yet they're still wanting to prove to that second in command how they work hard and, and whatnot. How do they start communication with that second in command to help them understand the value in the entrepreneur or the founder having a buffer day, having, you know, more freedom and flexibility or really to be able to work on that business.

You set up that as the rules of engagement right away. And you set up that as the way that you're going to recruit people. And the only people that join are the ones that say, hell yeah, that's what I want to be here for. I want to be here to run your company so you can go have a life. If that's what they sign up for, then you don't have to sell them on it ever. Because it's it was the rules for them coming in the first place. There's going to be a lot of people that are like you. I don't want to come into that. That's not what I want to do. Okay, Go work somewhere else. My assistant loves when I take free time. She forces me to take every Friday off in my calendar. Like, I'll show you right now, it's ridiculous. But here's my calendar. And you can kind of attest to this. I have one call on Friday, and then I have a call with our marriage coach that we talk to every couple weeks. But that's my. But here's my Thursday. I'm slammed, man. You know? And then here's my next Friday. I got nothing. I got a hold for somebody named Rudy. I don't know what that is, and I don't like, I can go to every Friday in my calendar, and I'm. I'm doing nothing.

And the things that you do do, if you want to have a phone call, it's because you want to, not because you have to.

I don't allow myself to want to do something on the Friday. I have to figure out a way to have fun on the Fridays. Because if I force my, my work into my Monday to Thursday, 8:30 until 6 all it'll force me to realize I don't have enough hours in my week to do all this stuff. I need to delegate more. So I used to coach this woman, Suzanne Evans. And Suzanne was a brilliant businesswoman. And every Sunday night she would sit down and she'd make a list of all the stuff that she had to get done this week. Then she'd take a look at the 23 tasks or projects. She would figure out how many minutes or hours each task or project would take. And then she would add up the hours and be like, 80 hours. She's like, I don't have 80 hours this week. Before she allowed herself to check an email or work on any of those tasks, she would delegate 80% of the week hours to other people. So she would take her 80 hours, she'd delegate 64 of them, leaving herself with 16 hours worth of stuff to do. She did that every Sunday. It needs to get done, but not by us.

Yeah, needs to get done, but not by us. And you have a kind of a framework to do that. Like, you put down everything that you that needs to get done. And it's like, is this a you thing or is that needs to get done but not by us and it's somebody else and that gets Delegated. Right.

It's One of the 12 modules that I even teach in the invest in your leaders course is how to take this system and use it to give yourself a life and to get more done. My first book, Double Double, was originally going to be called how to get More shit done with Less People Faster. Right.

Why did you change the title?

Seth Godin told me to change it and call it Double Double.

Oh, Seth, Yeah. He's not so dumb though, is he?

No, he's not so dumb. He's a great marketer. He wrote the COVID testimonial for it, so I took his idea.

So you and I both have pretty epic lives. I. We went to Mexico last year, me and my family for a couple weeks, Costa Rica for almost three weeks. This and so that's international travel or the beginning of international travel or the ease into it. I think next summer we'll probably do a trip to Europe. So that's next for us and kind of creating the lifestyle that we want. What's next for you? Like what does the evolution of your, your life look like and the freedom that you have and the businesses that you're building?

Well, we actually wrote a vivid vision for our personal life. So my wife and I wrote a five page document that describes our relationship as a couple three years from now. And it describes.

Let's stop there. Vivid Vision. That's a book that Cameron wrote. There's like, I hear so many people talking about that. So check out Vivid Vision. So I just wanted to preface that before you went into that, Cameron.

Sure. So the idea of the vivid vision is it's a written description of what your business or life looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future and it becomes a four or five page description of every aspect of your business or personal life. So what we did is we wrote what are our friendships like, what's our fitness like, what's our health like, what's our sexuality like? What's our relationship with each other? What are we doing for fun? Where are we living? And we, we wrote about all this stuff and then we meshed all of our ideas together and we agreed on every single sentence and now we share that with everybody. So now the more that we share it with people, the more that they're helping us make sentences come true. So we're just on an exploration path of the next few years of living and living life and exploring. And that's why we sold everything 18 months ago was to, to kind of really get on with this.

What's the thing that you, you know, you had expectations, selling everything going on this nomad life or journey, what's the thing that you thought would happen that didn't happen?

It's the, the, the Airbnbs are harder to find perfection in than we're used to. Right. Like there's always something broken or not quite, quite good, which drives her more crazy than me. We don't have the access, we don't have the familiarity of where's the right gym, where's the right rogue yoga studio, who's our trainer, where's the good grocery store? And by the time you figure that out, you're packing to go to the next city or next country. So it's hard to find routine which has been struck. You know, we struggled a little bit with that. So right now we decided to give ourselves two months to start this year to give ourselves some pause because we're going to have a great crazy travel period again. So we're doing a month in Scottsdale, a month in Sedona, and I've never spent more than three days in Sedona. So to go 30 days into this vortex of like amazing energy, but then we're off to Egypt and Dubai and Bali and Australia and you know, we're doing a, a, a seven day Porsche tour through Western Europe where we drive Porsches for seven days. We're doing a 12 day crazy adventure tour through Iceland. So we've got some cool stuff. We're calling it our bucket list life. What we're trying to do is we each have a bucket list and we're trying to cross off as many things as we can every year off of our bucket list.

The reason to have a second in command is to create your bucket list life. Yeah, I love that.

That's amazing. You know, like you're going to Costa Rica as an example. Ask your daughters, each of them independently, what are three or five things that you would like to do or experience or try in Costa Rica? Go on the Internet and look them up. And it could just be, I want to be able to make dinner one night or I want to be able to meet some people or whatever it is, I want to be able to take a class. But the more that you can kind of pull your kids ideas into things as well. As adults, we often try to plan everything for them, but sometimes it's let them come up with the ideas and then cross them off. And that really engages us too, too.

So what's the one thing? I just wrote that down, actually, literally wrote it down. I'll text it to my wife and we'll have conversations with the girls tonight about that. What's the surprising thing in a good way, like, wow, I didn't, didn't expect this. And it was really cool.

We've, we've been able to start meeting some entrepreneurs in almost every country that we go to and that's super cool. Some of them are clients of mine, some of them are just random people and some of them are people that we were meeting at these entrepreneurial conferences. Like we went to Mind Valley in Estonia for three weeks and we met all these amazing entrepreneurs from Mind Valley and now we're meeting them in other places. I'm going to Egypt. I will spend two week, two weeks in Egypt this year. I've got, the entrepreneurs organization is paying me to speak to their chapter in Cairo when I'm there. And then we're going dinner with this entrepreneur who we met at mindvalley who lives in Egypt. So there's this, this real meshing of worlds that's starting to happen with getting to meet cool people and then getting to see them in their home environments and kind of building out that web of cool people.

That's so awesome. All right, we're near the end. What kind of last bits of wisdom or anything that you want to want to say before we get off the zoom here?

Yeah, I usually talk about, you know, that none of this matters and we're all just walking each other home and have some fun along the journey. But I talked about that already, so I'll talk. On the business side is the more that we grow our people, the more that they'll grow our company. And I think as often as entrepreneurs, we're good at growing ourselves. Right. Franchisors are good at growing the franchisees, but what about growing the franchisees, key people? What about growing their key man? So put them into the invest in your leaders course. I've got a few franchisees who have their second in commands in the COO alliance because their business does 5 million or greater in revenue and they already qualify. Right. So growing your people grows your business, not just growing yourself.

I love it. Check that out. I'm going to buy it. Like I was going to email Caleb to buy it, but we're going to go buy that after we hang up. Cameron. And this was a lot of fun. Like this did not go where I thought it was going to go, but it's so good always having you on your wealth of wisdom. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Eric. Really appreciate the time again. Great seeing you. Same.