Strategies To Free Up Your Time as a Leader | Cameron Herold (Podcast 371)

But it doesn't have to be the same for every organization. A Chief Marketing Officer handles all things. Marketing CEOs handle very different things in every organization. It's based on what drains the CEO and what areas will really leverage the coo.

I love it. So it's really looking at the strengths of the both individuals and figure out what works. So there will be that yin and yang like you described. So then you create a whole. It's a wholeness in the organization.

In this episode, I had the pleasure of sharing my expertise as a business growth guru. Drawing from years of experience and successful ventures, I explored crucial topics such as effective leadership, time management and maximizing productivity. I discussed the importance of aligning core values within an organization, emphasizing the need for strategic thinking and operationalizing key aspects of the business for growth. By focusing on the critical few tasks and delegating the rest, businesses can optimize their resources and drive efficiency. Additionally, I explored the significance of training and empowering employees, highlighting the impact of investing in leadership development. Furthermore, I shared practical strategies for time management, stressing the importance of setting clear priorities and delegating tasks accordingly. By implementing systems and processes, businesses can streamline operations and achieve greater success. We also touched on the power of effective meetings and the value of optimizing workflows to eliminate unnecessary complexities. Overall, this conversation was a valuable guide for entrepreneurs and business leaders seeking to scale their companies and drive sustainable growth. To tune in to gain actionable insights and learn how to unlock your organization's full potential.

Hello, Cameron. For those of you who don't know who Cameron is, he is the business growth guru. He is the person behind the growth of hundreds of companies. And is that true? One of them is a monarch.

The monarchy? Yeah. The family that owned the country of Qatar. I coach them at the senior leadership team level about how to make their companies better places to work in Qatar.

Amazing. That is amazing. And four national wireless companies.

No, not four. I coached one of the big four. I coached the CEO and the second in command at Sprint for 18 months. So Marcelo Claret and then his second in command, Jamie Jones, I coached for 18 months from Sprint.

Amazing. That's amazing. So with that resume, we don't have to say more, but I know that you're coaching so many other companies and you are the author of five books. Do I have that number right?

Yeah, five books. I wrote Double, Double Meeting, Suck and Vivid Vision. I co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs and then one of my clients. And I also co authored a book called Free pr.

Yeah, I Love, I love that. I mean, I love all your books. I mean the vivid vision is amazing. And then you have the double double where you actually wrote about your experience as the CEO of 1-800-got junk. That where you got them from 2 million to 106 million in six years, which is amazing.

I came into 1-800-got junk as the 14th employee and when I left six and a half years later, we had 3100 employees system wide. We went from 2 million to 106 million in 6 and a half years. And we ranked as the number two company in all of Canada to work for as well.

Amazing. So of course I'm convinced that you are the guru of business growth. And I now think our listeners are convinced as well. And definitely I would recommend you pick up your books and read them. They are easy read. I love to listen to them on audibles. But there are so many things that you can pick up and implement which is absolutely incredible. We're going to talk about the importance of the second in command and how it all relates to systems.

Thank you. Yeah, it's interesting. I've played the second in command role a couple of times actually in my career. Three times. Once I was the second in command for the franchising group for an auto body chain that went on to become the largest auto body chain in the world. It's now called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States and Boyd Auto Body in Canada. I was also the second in command for 1-800-got junk, as we mentioned. And then I really kind of played that similar role with a private currency company as well. So I've been around that kind of role a long time where you have the founder, the CEO who shares that kind of entrepreneurial vision, who is the culture person who is driving forward usually with strategic thinking. And then you need that person who is on the inside of the organization making it all happen. And Harvard actually wrote an article about 15 years ago called the misunderstood role of the COO. And it's a role that people just didn't understand because as they described, there were seven types of chief operating officers in inside of one company. You could have someone who's focused on execution, someone who's focused on maybe the heir apparent, somebody who is more of an MVP role, someone who's a change agent. So there's all these different things that COO can be doing. What really makes a great COO is someone who has the same core values as the CEO but a very different yet complementary skill set. So you almost become that Yin and Yang partnership between the CEO and the coo, where the COO is great at stuff, the CEO and the CEO is great at stuff, the CEO just doesn't want to be doing as well. And then as long as the trust is really strong between them, they can really operate as that real strong partnership.

That's great. So let's say we have somebody listening to us right now and they're wondering, should I find the CEO from within or is it smarter to bring a CEO from the outside and train them?

I know that our listeners are, you know, we've got a bunch, we've got some that are smaller organizations and some that are large organizations. So I'm going to kind of COVID this question from all aspects. So the first part, if you're a smaller company and you're looking to hire your first second in command, the first thing I'm going to ask you is, do you have an executive assistant? Because if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one and you need to try to get some of that administrative work off your plate to free up your time to work on the bigger areas of the business. So often the CEOs don't need a CEO right away. They need a really strong executive assistant to free up their time. Now, if you already have one, and if you truly do need that second in command, don't call them a CEO right away. Maybe it's a director of operations, maybe it's a general manager, maybe it's a VP of operations, maybe it's a CEO. The bigger the title should mean, the more responsibilities, the higher the roles are and what you're going to be paying them. So be careful giving away a title that's too big too early. We've often gotten really kind of very lax with giving titles away. You know, you'll have a CFO of a 30 person company. It's not a CFO, it's more like a controller or a Director of finance. But the person thinks they're a cfo. So they start hiring all these people and trying to build out all these teams and they build more complexity in the organization and they don't even have a title to chase down. So if you're getting the title correct, then you really need to sit down and say, what are the things in the business that you're working on day to day that drain you of energy? What are the things that you're working on the organization that you're really not good at? And can you find a second in command regardless of title? Who can do those things. Based on that bucket of things, what would the title be and what should the compensation be to make sure that you have the right person? That tends to be the starting point for me.

Right, so what's the difference then between what a CEO is going to do and as you mentioned, an executive assistant in terms of like this is a similar process in terms of looking what's on your plate and let's get off the plate of the CEO. The things that are really not an income producing activities. Right. That's for the executive assistant and the.

COO may take off in things that aren't income producing as well, but they, you know, they might oversee finance. Maybe the COO oversees legal, maybe the COO oversees engineering and IT and sales and marketing to free up the CEO to focus on the board and culture and strategy, networking, rainmaking. Some cases the CEO is very outward facing like a Brian Scudamore at 1-800-GOT junk is very outward facing. In some cases the CEO is very inward facing, like a Tobias Luke at Shopify who's all focused on engineering. And his CEO Harley Finkelstein is more of the outward facing sales, marketing, biz dev. So you don't have a traditional role and responsibility other than that true partnership. You know, my brother and his wife are funny. They, they've divided up the house over the last 20 years and they call it pink jobs and blue jobs. But they're not the pink jobs and blue jobs of my grandparents generation. You know, when my grandparents were growing up, my grandmother did the laundry, my grandmother did the shopping. You know, my grandfather did the work around the house. My brother and his wife have said, well, my brother's like, I like cooking. She's like, great, I hate cooking. My brother's like, I hate cleaning up. She's like, I like cleaning up. My brother's like, I don't like doing laundry, but I like folding it. So they've just divided it up. And what they mean by pink jobs and blue jobs are, those are his responsibilities, those are her responsibilities. But it doesn't have to be the same for every organization. As chief marketing officer handles all things marketing. CEOs handle very different things. In every organization. It's based on what drains the CEO and what areas will really leverage the coo.

I love it. So it's really looking at the strengths of the both individuals and figure out what works. So there will be that yin and yang like you described. So then you create a whole. It's a wholeness in the organization.

Yeah. And that's why I talk about that yin and yang partnership between the two, that they're really the sum of the parts. Right. That when you add up the two of them, they become that really strong force. And if the trust is very strong between the two, the COO can start taking on all of the hard decisions and the hard systems to put in place and make the CEO look good. Right. My role as COO at 1-800-GOT junk was to make Brian the shining star. And his role behind the scenes was to make sure that everyone still liked me after me being the hard ass all the time. Right. Oh, Cameron just has to do that. Cameron has to push hard. And meanwhile, I was taking all the tough decisions and trying to roll them out to make Brian iconic so that we would always believe in this beautiful shining light. And as long as I trusted that he had my back and he trusted I had his back, then we were that force.

Absolutely. So when you started at 1-800-GANJIANT, did you have that vision that it's going to grow the way it grew?

Yeah. Brian actually handed me something. So he and I both learned the concept of the Vivid Vision about three and a half years before by an Olympic coach. That was about two years before we were meeting with an Olympic coach here in Vancouver and he talked about how high performance athletes would visualize themselves performing the event. And he said if you could actually describe your company in the future, your employees could see what you can see. Because Most entrepreneurs, most CEOs, have a vision for what they want their company to look like two or three years out. But no one can read our minds. So what we came up with was this idea of a three or four page document. I've now codified it. It's now a registered trademark as Vivid Vision as a four or five page written description that describes your company in its finished state three years in the future. Well, Brian handed me what he called the painted picture back then. I read it and I said, I know how to make this come true. Kind of get out of my way, let me do this. And then he got to run the areas of the business he liked, and I got to run the areas of business I liked. And off we did, and we built it together. So as long as I was very clear on what he wanted, it was easy for me to figure out how to make it come true. Almost like building a home, you know, if you've ever built a home or done a 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, but I know what I want my home to look like. If I can explain the vision and give the budget and the timeline to the contractor, the contractor can come up with the blueprints or the plans to make that come true. So the contractor is the COO for the homeowner CEO's vision. And then when they're both on the same page, when the contractor signs off on the vision and the homeowner signs off on the blueprints, you hand the vision and the blueprints to the employees, and the workers can build the home without ever talking to the homeowner. And that's the power of the vivid vision and that CEO COO relationship.

I agree. And I think that vivid vision is so powerful. You know, I first got introduced to it by a client of mine. His name is Paul Miller. He's from Amazing Exits. And you know him because he was working with you. He was one of your clients as well, in terms of creating a vivid vision. So let's say you don't know how to do electrical and plumbing, etc. But if you're thinking to yourself, well, I'm also not that good in visualizing or figuring out, well, that's where somebody like you comes into play, or your company, because you help visualizing it. Because it's the same thing as, like, you know, when we renovated our house, you know, we hired an interior designer because we needed that expertise to actually get us faster to what we want because we had an idea, but because we hired that person and they asked us the right questions and analyzed our lifestyle and what do we want to use each room for, and et cetera, they were able to come up with this beautiful design that I would never be able to do by myself. And that's what I observed that you did for Paul as well. In terms of creating that vivid vision. I mean, obviously you asked the questions to the actual person who is going to create it. But that's the power of coaching. And that's first when I saw your work and I was super impressed. And. Yeah, and obviously since then, you coach so many CEOs.

The vivid vision now has gotten so big and so it's all over the world now that I can't do it one on one with clients anymore. So I have a partner, Jennifer Houde, with a company called Conscious Copy. She and her team have helped hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the world craft their vivid visions and roll them out personally designed. They do an amazing job. So what I do with organizations is either through my books or through my coaching or through the CO alliance or through my course. I help give them the skills and the tools, the systems to actually make their vision come true. So I work with them on understanding, once they know what their vision is, then I can help them figure out the plans and how to execute on those plans. And so that tends to be the zone that I play in now.

Cool. So the vivid vision has to be created by, let's say we have an already existing organization and there is a CEO. There is a second in command or somebody that the CEO identified as the second in command. So how would you work with them in terms of, would you start by creating the vivid vision and then work with the coo?

We do a little bit in tandem. Sometimes I'm working with the CEO to figure out the vivid vision and then I'm working with the COO in tandem to help them put core values deep in the organization. Companies do it wrong, helping them make sure that people are aligned with core purpose, helping them put all the right systems in place for recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, training, and leadership development of people spending time around strategic thinking and their meeting rhythms, really thinking about how to actually operationalize all aspects of the business for growth and removing the complexity. You know, so many organizations just keep working hard and they're like flies trying to get out windows that if they keep banging their head on the window, maybe they'll get out, but they never do. They end up dead on the windowsill. And I give them the shortcuts to be able to scale. So I have an organization called the COO alliance, which no entrepreneurs, no CEOs are allowed to be in. It's only for seconds in command. I have a podcast called the Second in command podcast where I give away the systems that we interview. Had 180 guests now from all over the world who are COOs. And then I have my course, the invest in your leaders course that gives managers and leaders the skills to grow the company. Because often the CEOs are getting skilled training, but it's their, their team that needs the skills to actually run the company. The CEOs have to know what has to happen, the C level and managers have to know how to do it. And once you get to an organization with like 500 or more people, you probably have a learning development team in place. But if you're less, if you're 10 employees, up to 500 employees, you probably don't have a strong leadership development program inside your company. So at Best, you're reading a random business book. So what I try to do with the course and with the co alliance and then occasionally with my coaching is to help put those tools in place of the team so they can actually scale and make the vision come true. Good.

And you know, in terms of like reading a random business book, one of the problems, I mean, even if somebody's listening to us right now, I'm thinking, well, I do what I need to do as a CEO and actually listen to three audibles a week. Right. But what happens is that you listen to the books and you listen to the books, but there is no implementation.

That's a terrible strategy. And I'll explain why.

Yeah.

So if you're just listening to another book or you're reading another book, you're listening to another podcast, you're learning a bunch of random information that's not applicable to what you're working on this week or this month. What you want to be doing is learning about the stuff that matters. So if you're firing someone next week, you should be devouring content about how to fire someone and how to have a good exit with that person. If you're interviewing people next week, you should be reading about interviewing. If you're doing like everything should be taught, your learning should be focused on what you're doing and then you'll actually absorb it and you'll be able to use those systems. The problem with reading a book right now about search engine optimization is you forget all that information because you're not working on it. And my course, however, the invest in your leaders course, the reason it's so powerful is the 12 skills that we work on are used by every manager every single day. But most managers have had no training on any of the 12 skills.

What out of 12 skills?

Situational leadership. So it's adapting your style to the person's skill level and confidence level. And it's one on one coaching meetings. It's the coaching of groups. Email management, time management, project management, conflict management, interviewing. Effective meetings, like most managers have never been trained on how to do job interviews. So of course you have the wrong people. You know, most people say meetings. Well, it's because you've never trained people on how to run a meeting.

Right.

So the skills in the course are used every day, but then the the rest of what the leaders need to be work on, you should be learning based on what you're working on right now.

Wow. So how long does it take to do the course?

It's a total of 41 videos. So it's only about four hours of videos broken down into the 12 modules. So the way it works is every module has a pretest. So you'll do the test and you'll fail. There's no chance you're going to pass. You don't know the information. You'll be like, holy, I should learn this. You'll watch two or three videos per module and then you can read the information that was in the videos and then you do a post test and you'll see how much you learned and you can rewatch them and do it as much as you want. And then you can do the second module, etc. And they're all done in the right order that you should be learning the content in. I've got clients that just signed up like 17 of their managers all at once and they'll do two modules this week and then they'll talk about it on Monday. Next week they'll do two more modules. They'll meet and talk about it. So they're kind of working through it as a cohort or as a team.

I love that idea, you know, because then you're not alone. Because I know about signing for courses. And then you say, I'm gonna do it. It's great now I have the login. It's good for a year and do it sometime, some day, sometime. But having that accountability of doing it with your fellow staff, with the team, and then talking about it and really implementing it and holding each other accountable, I think it's a great idea.

And I even teach that in the system on classroom teaching, that the way that people learn, the way that adults learn, is first they learn the concept or the abstract conceptualization. So ac and then once they've learned the concept right by watching a video or reading, then they can practice it, they can try it out. That's the act of experimentation or ae. And then after they've practiced and tried it out, they can go and do it in their day to day job. That's the concrete experience. And then when they sit and talk about it afterwards and they think about what's gone well and what hasn't gone well, that's the reflective observation. And then they can go back and watch the content and read it again, go back to the abstract conceptualization, they keep repeating that cycle. So the whole content is built in a way that adults learn and a way to supercharge. And it's irresponsible for people not to do it. I think it's $667 per manager. So it's like. It's almost irresponsible not to have your managers in it because they're going to grow. And I give lifetime access for it as well, because I'm the same. I hate the whole one year. Cliff. They can watch this stuff year after year, too.

That is amazing. So how do they sign up?

They just. They go to investinyourleaders.com and they just sign up right there.

Tell me about the biggest mistakes that leaders make.

So I'll talk about some of the mistakes I've made. One of the big mistakes that I made. We almost bankrupted 1-800-got junk when we were over the $60 million company, because I was very driven, very focused, very go, go, go on the vision that Brian had for the organization, as was he. And we had a VP of finance who was very quiet, very amiable, very analytical, who kept saying, do you think we're going too quickly? And are you sure we should do it that fast? We're like, yeah, yeah. And we didn't listen to him. We had someone in a very senior role, and we didn't listen to him. And because of that, we didn't understand how to leverage our balance sheet. We almost ran out of cash. We went to the bank to borrow money, and they couldn't loan to us because we'd spent $5 million in cash that we just had. Instead of going to getting a credit line or a loan, we were running the company the same way, from 2 million all the way to the 100 million. We didn't understand how to financially run the $100 million business. So what I learned from that was, if you're going to have someone in a role, listen to them. And if you're not willing to listen to them, hire someone you're willing to listen to.

That's a good point. Because. Is it. You didn't listen because you thought that you knew it already or that person was not strong enough to actually voice the saying, no, no way, don't do it. I mean, where was the disconnect?

There was both. They weren't strong enough to get our attention. But then we were too stupid to slow down and listen to them. You know, they were trying to speak, but we were. We were. I have a 98D in disc. I'm going 100 miles an hour.

And.

But that's dangerous if I've got someone trying to say, hey, do you think we should slow down? Like, I need to learn to listen to that voice. You know, God gave us two Ears and one mouth. We should use them in that ratio a little bit more. We didn't have the skill to slow down and listen. We didn't have the skill to be as strategic. We didn't have the skill to be as empathetic. And that means we either need to hire someone who can get our attention or we need to work harder at listening to them. So I just choose to now learn to listen more.

And that's a different. Do you think if that person would had more experience, like saying, okay, I'm actually experienced in getting the company in companies from 100 million to 250 million, you probably would have listened better, right? Because.

Well, and that's. That's exactly what happened. We ended up replacing him and bringing on a new cfo, Trish. And Trish literally kind of pulled the fire alarm one day and said, holy, we're running out of money. We're going to go bankrupt. And we're like, wait, what? And we heard her very loud and clear, to the point that she almost pulled the fire alarm too loud. I think she scared the shit out of the whole company. But we heard. We heard very clearly. And then we changed the ship and turned it around and we were okay. The other thing that I learned was that the leader's job is to be the chief energizing officer. CEO is chief energizing officer. Our job is to infuse the organization with positive energy, with praise, with gratitude, with excitement. And we often don't do that. We're often so focused on the horizon, so focused on the future, so focused on the next goal, so focused on the SWOT analysis that we forget. And if we ever raised our children that way, we would hurt them. Right? If all we ever did was drive, drive, drive, and we didn't praise, praise, praise, we would really hurt them. And I think we need to think of that inside our organization as well. And so I learned that as a leader, that my job is really to grow the confidence of my employees and to grow the skills, and then grow their confidence. And then grow their skills, then grow their confidence. Those are the two things I should be doing. So I flipped the org chart upside down where the CEO is at the bottom supporting the VPs and C level who are supporting the managers, who are supporting the employees, and everyone is supporting the customers. And I obsess about my employees. Net promoter score. And if they're super happy and super engaged, they'll care about my customers for me?

Absolutely. Good. So that's two of them. What are other mistakes? You See, companies make from your own experience or coaching others.

Lack of focus. I think they're distracted by the big shiny object. They're distracted by the flavor of the day. They're distracted by the book they just heard, they're distracted by the seminar they just attended. And they, they lack focus of working on the critical few things versus the important many. There's so many possible things we could be doing, but if you're very aligned with the goal and your core purpose and your bhag and your vivid vision, it becomes very clear with the lack of those things, anything could be possible. And I think that's the issue, is you can just go in any direction. The Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland said, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. And I see a lot of organizations, small and large, that don't focus and don't have systems to stay focused in place, and then it just doesn't matter at that point.

Absolutely, I agree 100%. I see that as well. And it disperses people. It's all over the place. They have to have the stability. So you were mentioning the CEO should also energize and encourage and show gratitude and acknowledge what's right. Not just like, let's go, go, go with also acknowledging what's right, but also staying focused and not going all over. Oh, today I came up with this new idea and next day is another new idea because people are not going to listen anymore.

Yeah, Our businesses only have three inputs. We have our people time, like days and weeks ahead of us, and money. And our job is to get the highest return on investment of those three investments. Right. How do we get the highest return off our people? How do we get the highest return off every hour, every day, every month? How do we get the highest return on our money? And if you're not focusing on that, you're really just busy doing busy work. And I think a lot of companies really miss that. It's why organizations get so complicated and bureaucratic and big and they can't get much done is because they're not focusing on getting that fast return or that higher, higher return.

I agree. So one of the modules in your course is about time management. Right. So give us some. A little bit of a preview of what is your concept of time management and your approach to time management.

So one of them is about me focusing on the critical few things that I'm really good at and give me energy and delegating everything except genius. So one of the things that I'll try to do at the beginning of the week is I'll make a list of all the projects I need to work on this week or all the tasks that need to get done. And then I think about how many hours or minutes are involved in each of the tasks or projects, and I add them up. Let's say I end up with 55 hours of stuff that needs to get done. I'll try to delegate 80% of those hours right away. So I'll delegate 80% of what's on my plate, leaving me with 20% to work on, which frees up my time to cheer on my team, think about strategy, grow people's skill sets, be involved in rainmaking. But I try to free up the to do. It's not how do I get it done, but who can get it done.

Yeah, I agree.

I often hear people saying, oh, I need to do this. No, it needs to get done like your toilet needs to get cleaned, but you don't need to clean your toilet. And. And if you take that to the nth degree in your business, there's a lot of stuff that people are working on that takes up their time that could be done by someone else or could be stopped. Maybe it doesn't need to be done at all anymore. Maybe we've just been doing it for so long, we could stop it, or maybe we can optimize it, or maybe we can automate it, or maybe it can be outsourced. And I think if people would approach things in that way, they can again, be more productive.

I agree. I mean, you know, that's what we do is systematized businesses. And that's really the approach of, like, okay, so let's see, what is the existing process? What can we automate? What can we delegate? Who is doing? And as you said, the things that I always look for is like, why are you doing it? Because it's always been done this way. Well, that's the number one enemy, right?

I was talking to someone the other day about that, and they said, why do you always say that? The, you know, the step three is to optimize and then automate. Why do you automate before outsourcing? Why don't you just outsource it? I said, well, let me give you an example. If I water my grass at my home every week, I could outsource that and have someone come to my home and water my grass every week. That would be a quick outsource. Or I could hire and get someone to put a sprinkler system in my home that would automatically go on twice a week and would automatically water my lawn. And after about a year or so, I would have complete payback. And now I've automated a process that I don't need to outsource. So if we don't think about it in the right way, or I could just say, what, you know, in Arizona, why do I even water a lawn? Why don't I replace my lawn with artificial turf? Like, so many people have had lawns in Arizona that are just artificial turf. So now we're not even watering it, We've optimized it, or we just don't water our lawn at all. And so that's the way that I try to get companies to think as well, is how do we get more done with less people faster.

I agree. I mean, that happened to be actually with my executive assistant. You know, I used to have my executive assistant helped me with scheduling. So it would be back and forth. Okay, so Monday at 2 or Tuesday at 4, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So it was a lot of her time was scheduling, but now we implemented an automatic, like a calendar. Basically we're using calendly. And so that took a lot of time. She still helps me. You know, I don't have to answer the email. She would say, you know, here is a link to a deschedule. And then if you, of course, cannot find something and I can assist you, she still can. We can have the human touch, but it basically count down like 20 hours a week that she was basically using on scheduling. Now I can use her to other projects. And it only cost me like $12 a month, you know, to have that link to automatic calendar scheduling.

That's right. And, and that's, I think, what organizations need to be more aware of. And we're so often they don't slow down to think about how do I scale this in a more efficient way, how do I grow faster, how do I get a higher return off my people or my time that they focus on the wrong things? You know, I was coaching a CEO one time. I coached them from about 40 employees up to 700 employees. And I taught him a skill about email management. He said, wow, this is going to change my whole company. And I said, no, it's going to change you. But I said, what will change your whole company? If you take your 27 VPs and managers and you train them on email management, that will change your whole company, especially if they train all 700 employees. So if you roll out something like the Investor leaders. Course that changes your whole company. But again, people often don't stop and think about that stuff. You know, Elon Musk put a tweet out a year ago and said, if you're in a shitty meeting, stand up and leave the meeting. Well, Elon's brother worked for me back in 1993, so I've known Elon forever. I was a reference for Elon. His first round of funding for Zip 2 in 95. So I sent him a text message. I said, don't tell your employees to leave meetings. Train them how to run meetings so they run highly effective, amazing meetings and they won't be in a meeting for the first place. You know, fix the root cause, stop trying to think about the system. And companies, again, often don't spend time.

On that for sure, because it's easy to, you know, to complain about something or stop doing something because people don't like doing it. But if you don't like doing it, then identify why you're doing it to begin with. Like, meetings have their place, right? I mean, it's a great coordination. You know, it's a, it's a way of collaborating. It makes things simpler than to go back and forth on emails on some things. So figure out why and then how to correct it and how to make it efficient. And as you said, you know, it's a no brainer to sign up for your course. It's only 667 per liter. And it's, it seems like it addresses all the key components that makes our lives miserable when we're trying to play the role of executives. Right.

Most employees spend one to two hours a day on phone calls, on zoom calls, or in person meetings. So a meeting is anytime two or more people are working together, either over video or in person or on the phone to move something forward. If people are spending one hour a day, let's just say it's one hour a day. That's 12% of their time they're in meetings. If they don't know how to run them or attend them or participate in them, they're wasting 12% of their day. You multiply that out by the cost of a year of an employee. You have a $100,000 employee or $200,000 employee who's spending 12% of their time doing something they've never been trained on. Of course, business is difficult.

Absolutely. And also your approach to time management, you do the things that matter where your genius zone, where you're going to shine. Our listeners need to think about the Amount of money and wasted time, which is money spent on things that are not necessary by that particular person to do. And then you get more time.

Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the space that we give it. So one of the things I talk about in the Investing youg Leaders course in the time management module is when you have a project, and even in the delegation module, when you're delegating a project to someone or working on it for yourself, think about how little time you want to spend on that project and how much or how little money you want to spend on that project. So if I said to my assistant, Meredith, book dinner for me and three CEOs tomorrow night, she might book a steak dinner at the fanciest restaurant, thinking, I'm trying to entertain the beautiful bottle of Bordeaux that's decanted in advance, and we got all the nice steaks out, and we spend $1,000 on dinner, and it takes three hours. What I really meant was, Meredith, can you book dinner for three CEOs? And I. It needs to be quick because we got to get off to the ball game afterwards. Like, 150 bucks total for the four of us will be fine. She would book a place. We'd be in and out in 30 minutes. 150 bucks, done. But it's because I didn't think about the amount of time I wanted to spend on something and delegate it that way. And I didn't give her a container to stay within. But if you don't teach people that, then of course they're going to spend more time, and of course they're going to spend more money. If I told my two kids, clean the house. It'll only take you an hour. No, it'll take, like. And they'd groan and complain. Or if I said to my kids, I have friends coming for dinner in an hour. I need you to clean the house. Do as best as you can. Don't spend any more than 30 minutes. They'd be done in 29 minutes with no complaint.

Absolutely. It's the purpose.

But I thought about the project and the time allowance, and I delegated in a different way. So that's the stuff again. If you don't teach that stuff, then of course, business is complicated because you're overcomplicating it.

Absolutely. And, you know, that was one of the questions I was going to ask you, but I think you answered it is. You know, we hear a lot from executives that it's, well, I'm just going to do it myself because I know how to do it better or to to teach me. When I try to teach to somebody else, it's not working. Or it will take me more time to teach than to do it. And I am guilty of it as well. And I had to really discipline myself. Yes, it might take me now 10 minutes to train my consultant or train my executive assistant to do that. But if I don't take that instead of doing it myself in a minute. But if I don't train right now using the 10 minutes to do that, how many 1 minutes would be repetitive throughout day the. The next month, I'll give you another.

Way to do the coaching of people. I again talk about this in the, in the invest in your leaders course. Don't stop your job to train someone. Keep doing your job and have them sit over your shoulder and watch you. Have them watch you over zoom. Have them be seen on emails, have them listening on phone calls. So you keep doing your work. You don't stop for one second and they watch you do it all. Then you don't spend any time training them whatsoever. They get to watch you learning and read what you're doing. And they can literally, probably 85 to 90% of it, they learn without you spending a single minute.

Brilliant.

But again, if no one's been trained on that, then we don't know how to train. I learned that at college Pro painters, where every year we had to hire 800 franchisees and then they had one month to hire and train 8,000 painters to paint houses. Well, we couldn't sit down and train all these 8,000 painters one on one. So we created a system using duragi to have them learn. So again, those are all the systems that I try to give away because I just feel bad for these entrepreneurs and companies that are working hard. You know, they're like that fly that'll bang their head on the window and they end up dead on the window. Still, there's an easier way. So it's hard at times and you can fall out of routine. But what I like to do is at least say, okay, I'll try and do a few things and then I'll give myself a break and I'll try better tomorrow. So for everybody who's listening, I think it's about progress. You know, as Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach always said, it's about progress, not perfection. How can you get just a little bit.