Tech as a Game Changer!

So as companies and as leaders, we have to embrace AI. We have to get 25 year olds to teach us all these different tools. We have to start showing people what we're working on and find out ways to optimize and automate and leverage AI and not only investigate the tech stack that we're using, but show us how to optimize and automate things. That's the future of work. And we need to start embracing technology and getting way ahead of that wave faster. And we need to get a lot of baby boomers to start to realize that the true wisdom that they can embrace is the is the wisdom of the Gen Z. See.

I am proud to welcome an old friend of mine, Cameron Herold. Cameron has done a lot of amazing things, including the founder of Back Pocket coo, founder of the COO alliance, best selling author, speaker Cameron, do you want to give a little more background about what you've been up to lately? And a world traveler. Every time I see you, you're in a different continent.

I got known for building a company called 1-800-GOTJUNK. I was their chief operating officer, grew them from 14 employees to 3100 employees in six years. I had two EO qualifying companies prior to that one that went on to become the largest collision repair chain in the world. It's called Gerber Auto Body in the US and Boyd Autobody in Canada. And then we had a private currency company. So I'd been known for building all these companies quite quickly. When I left 1-800-got-JUNK, I started working behind the scenes coaching typically people with 50 to 500 employees. But I've worked behind the scenes with companies all over the world. I've done paid speaking events now in 27 countries on every single continent. I have written six books and I started something called the COO Alliance. I also have a podcast called the Second in Command podcast. That's about it. And I'm a father of two and I live on the road. My wife and I sold everything in North America a couple years ago and we're full time traveling now.

How's that change your perspective about running a business when you're always remote?

I've always traveled a lot, but I always believe that we needed to be more location based or certainly closer to our team, closer to our clients. But Covid certainly opened up that whole paradigm of remote teams or hybrid teams. And then clearly we've had Wi Fi for 20 plus years now and laptops for 20 plus years and now we've got the tech stack to Enable us. You really can be anywhere in the world. The big juggling component is time zones. Right. I'm actually talking to you right now in Barcelona. Juggling time zones is the only real thing. But I've already had a great day. I've been to the gym, I got a massage, I've done some work. You know, I'm going to be doing a few hours of calls. I'll have a dinner doesn't start in Barcelona till 8 o', clock, so we'll go for dinner at 8 o'. Clock. You just kind of. I have an amazing assistant who's been with me for eight years and then my wife who really is the one who's logistically planning everything because we're, we're really hitting a bucket list item every probably two or three weeks right now.

What's your reflection on that? What advice do you give to CEOs and CEOs now who talk about we want to have remote teams.

What I've noticed over the last three years, and I mean I've spent, I've been, been very well known in the culture space. I've coached companies all over the world that have gone on to rank number one in their country to work for. I used to believe it had to be in the office. And virtually every single aspect of what you can do in an office you can actually do over tech, over zoom. What's tough is the interpersonal relationships. What's tough is the real connecting with people. So off sites, you know when you used to have like the in person office and you'd go off site to go somewhere. On sites are the new off site. Right. Like getting everybody together in an office or getting everybody together in a physical space is equally as important as getting everybody out of the office. Used to be and companies now really have to focus on getting their teams together. And now I'm not talking. If you're a 500 person, 5,000 person company, you're not going to get all 5,000 people together, but you're certainly going to get people together in regions, in work groups, in business areas. But it's important to build the connections as a team. But culture starts with alignment, with vision, alignment, core values, alignment with core purpose, alignment with the bhag, you know, alignment with your vivid vision. And when you have all those components really locked and loaded, you have the right people pulling in that direction, then you can leverage technology to kind of amp up the culture side of things. There's tools that you can leverage to connect, but it is, it's tougher but we're not going back.

And you wrote a book called Vivid Vision, so you know of what you.

Speak wrote a book years ago called Vivid Vision. It's had almost a thousand reviews now on Amazon. The idea with with Culture is getting complete alignment with your employees, your customers and shareholders and all the employees so that everybody can see what the CEO can see. And if everyone is completely aligned with what the company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future, they can start reverse engineering to make that happen. And that doesn't require you to be in a physical space. Right. I can share with you a five page description of what the CEO alliance looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future. We share it with the world. So everybody's trying to reverse engineer every sentence of that document to make it come true over time. But I think we as leaders have to be very cognizant that you're going to lack the human connection because people are remote. You know, my youngest son right now is second year university, wants to work in a marketing agency in Vancouver and he's like, I don't want to work remote. Like, I want to be around people to get to know them and learn more. I'm like, you might, he might have actually missed the opportunity to ever work in a physical space.

What do you think is a proper cadence? What? You know, groups or teams, how often should they be meeting? Is it once a year? Is it twice a year? Is it more to kind of build on that internal culture and cohesion?

I think it's based less around how often and more around about what. So it's really about what are the people meeting. You know, you've got your annual planning meeting, you have your quarterly planning meetings, you've got your financial reviews, you have your business area reviews, you have business area planning sessions, you've got your weekly coaching, you've got your one on ones, you've got your daily huddles. So there's different types of meeting rhythms that you need to have baked into your calendar and then you need to decide which of those are important to have in person. Right. It's truly the annual and quarterlies that really are going to be best about the in person and often those are the leadership team and management teams. But then it's opportunities to pull the whole team together and it's also thinking about how do we get our employees to spend time together differently than we used to. So an example, I just held the COO alliance event last week. It was an in person Three day event in Scottsdale, Arizona. And normally all of my employees would have stayed in a hotel with the rest of our members. But now because we're all dispersed, I rent a big Airbnb and we all stay in an Airbnb together. All the members stay in a hotel, but we're in an Airbnb a few miles away so that we can wake up in the morning, chat with each other, sit around at the end of the day, chat with each other. Kind of just feel like we get to know each other and spend a little bit more time together. And I think we have to be more cognizant about that and push for those opportunities more.

With the in person event that you just had, how would you say that really enabled the community or how was that additive to the other activities that you have?

About a year ago I sat down with my wife and I said, the next big COO alliance event that we run, we call it the COO Connect, we ran the event, it ended 10 days ago. The net promoter score was positive, 80% which is very, very high for a net promoter score on an event. But our members were literally fired up because they got to know each other and they've been getting to know each other in the three hour events over zoom with the breakouts. But two and a half days together they re and I really worked hard at making them get to know each other. So I think we just really saw that it is super powerful that for them as much as the online community works and the online community has value and it's just something different when you can get them together in person as well. I think those are going to become more and more valuable and more and more important as time goes forward, as we need the human connection and we need to connect and we need that shared brain trust. It's one of the reasons why I started the CEO alliance six years ago as well as I want to give them a space. But I think communities and live events are going to become more powerful because we're going to be starving for that human connection. And I think the companies that can figure out both, we're never going to be going back to the office. At best we're going to have hybrid workspaces. But I think it's the CEOs and the leadership teams that find ways to connect as humans and then find ways to connect via technology. They're the ones that are going to actually lead.

Do you see a difference in the way people work, let's say in the Middle east versus Europe versus Asia versus North America.

I think the differences are there's difference in terms of cultures and the way that they operate at kind of the soft skills, the leadership, the way that humans connect. That's definitely different globally, but I think the rest of it has become fairly ubiquitous fairly quickly in the Middle East. I'm actually in the process of moving my residents to Dubai. I've already moved my companies to Dubai. So the United Barra Emirates is very quickly adopting a lot of the Western cultures because they're moving off the oil. And even Saudi Arabia is really relaxing a lot of their rules and trying to attract tourism dollars and trying to attract foreign investment. But Dubai is almost as entrepreneurial or more than Austin, Texas is. It's incredible to see the adoption of technology, the business events, the mindset is very, very entrepreneurial over there.

If we could take a step back and you said you started the COO alliance six years ago. Walk us through what you saw as the need for a chief operating officer versus a chief executive officer, where you see the split of who does what and how those two roles collaborate and are symbiotic or if they're very separate.

Gina Wickman, who wrote the book Traction, created the eos, the entrepreneurial operating system, did a very good job of talking about the visionary and integrator. And that's kind of what the CEO COO is. The CEO is the one that has the vision. The CEO is the one who makes it happen. I think Thomas Edison said vision without execution is hallucination. So you can't just have the ideas. You need someone to put that in place. And it's very rare as a company scales past 30 to 100 people, the CEO often doesn't know how to do it. They need the team of people that know how. And a lot of the soft skills of leadership is what the CEO tends to bring to the table. We also bring to the table the areas of weaknesses of the CEO. So it's a very different role. I would have been a horrible CEO for probably 95% of our CEO alliance members because I don't line up perfectly with their CEO like I did with Brian or with Steve White or with, you know, Terry Smith. There's a lineup of core values and core competencies and I have to be really good at the stuff that they suck at. And I have to love working on the areas that drain them of energy. And in some companies that means like at 1-800-got junk. I was a very outward facing CEO. I was biz dev, I was sales. I was Marketing, I was pr, I was doing speaking events, I was culture, I was operations. And in other companies, the CEO is very inward facing, very tech, very engineering. In fact, the current CEO at 1-800-God Junk, who I've known for 35 years, he is a very inward facing COO. He will never speak to the media, he will never do speaking events. He would have been a horrible COO in the seven years I was there, and I would have been horrible in the time period that he's been there. It's a different time. Right. So the CEO is all about the season that we're running the business in and the CEO and what they need at that particular time. It's a tough role.

Do you have a tool or some sort of assessment to help the CEO figure out who she needs to be their second in command? And conversely, do you have something for your CEOs to help understand what type of CEO they would mesh best with?

So I have the book the Second in Command that just came out in January, so it just came out a few months ago, is getting huge reviews globally right now. Because I really have uncovered what, what a real second in command is. We're not talking visionary integrator, we're talking typically 50 to 5,000 employees. Right. If you're looking for a second in command of a real company, I talk about what one really is and how to find them and how to bring them into the organization and how to build a relationship and the kind of the true yin and yang relationship. And then I have two scorecards as well. One, the CEO kind of does a scorecard of their current second in command, whoever that may be. And regardless of what your titles are, in a company, you have someone who is second in command to you. You have that de facto person that you turn to when it could be an executive assistant, it might be a director of operations or a GM is typically someone who is focusing on getting the stuff done for you so that you can continue to drive vision and culture. Right. So I have a scorecard the CEO will do for their second in command to rate them in eight areas. And then I have a self assessment that the CEO can do as well to assess their own skills on these eight core areas that we see CEOs.

Needing to be strong in as things have changed. You know, specifically I'm thinking about just the last year, the explosion of AI onto the scene. You know, the concern about, you know, right now in the United States, we're having a writer strike for all the content creators. And now they say There's a director strike and I just read an article the other day saying it's purely about ChatGPT. Once your content is there, it's now in the matrix. And so, you know, ChatGPT or any other AI can now recreate derivatives of your content and you're never going to get paid. What's your thought about how AI is transforming the way companies work and what people should be thinking about?

I saw a saying years ago and it said, if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. When I started at 1-800-got- junk, Brian laughed at me with a laptop and he goes, what are you gonna do? Walk around from meeting to meeting with that thing? I'm like, yes, actually. And three days later he owned a laptop. So we can't slow down progress. We have to embrace it, we have to get ahead of it. And then you need to understand the technology tools to leverage that and automate and optimize all of our work. Because this is why 25 year olds can kick the ass of a 60 year old at work. Today. A 60 year old's going, oh, I have 40 years experience. No you don't. You have five years experience eight times in a row. You've been doing the same thing for 35 in the last 40 years. You get a 25 year old who's got two years experience and the technology skills to kick our ass. So as companies and as leaders, we have to embrace AI. We have to get 25 year olds to teach us all these different tools. We have to start showing people what we're working on and find out ways to optimize and automate and leverage AI and not only investigate the tech stack that we're using, but show us how to optimize and automate things. That's the future of work. And we need to start embracing technology and getting way ahead of that wave faster. And we need to get a lot of baby boomers to start to realize that the true wisdom that they can embrace is the wisdom of the Gen Z be. It's looking to the 25 year olds to 27 year olds and saying, teach me stuff, show me how I can do this work faster. To optimize it, to automate it, to outsource it, to leverage AI. But if we sit in our corner offices pretending that we have our shit together, we will be the next blockbuster, right? We will be out of business.

I mean, I think about, you know, Southwest Airlines In December of 2022, right around Christmas, they had a. A literal meltdown and their system literally collapsed. And so when I explained that to people, I'm like, did a plane crash? Did pilots stop knowing how to fly? No, it was actually their booking system. There was an archaic booking system that couldn't handle all the permutations of rapid change. And it literally was like, you know, smoke coming out of it. And then on top of that, everyone started calling them, and their call center couldn't handle the volume of calls, so their call center collapsed. Examples of the technology causing the core business, which is getting people from point A to point B on an airplane to not function. And that's, I think, an important thing that now a lot of executives are like, okay, technology. We need to make sure it's a competitive advantage and it's not a stumbling block for us.

Technology every year is doubling, right? The ability to do more. Moore's Law talks about the speed and the cost of it, is that these are technologies that would have been unthought of 30 years ago, and now they're free and how fast you can work on stuff. So, yeah, if companies aren't ahead on every single area of the tech stack, they're out of business.

And is that a role for a coo, a CEO, a cio? What's the interface like? How do you have that conversation internally about, are we doing the right thing? Are we up to speed? Whose responsibility should that be?

What's interesting right now that we're noticing is most COOs are starting to have to have very strong abilities or competencies in the tech space that it used to be that you could have a COO who would manage somebody who was good in tech. The COO needs to at least be competent in tech and understand tech, because it's all tech now, right? You know, 30 years or 20 years ago, it was, well, we're an online or offline business, and an online business, everything's online. Like, even the most offline businesses are online now. So there's so many just areas of technology that are touching the businesses that they have to actually be competent in that. I have a friend of mine in Vancouver, he turned to his head of IT and he said, for the next 12 months, the goal of it is to find 12 expenses in the company and replace them with 12 free software solutions. You're not allowed to build anything, you're not allowed to buy anything. Go find 12 solutions to replace 12 expenses. That's it, go. And 12 months later, he gave them the same task again. Often it is trying to build stuff and integrate stuff, whereas often there is a faster, cheaper, leaner way. The big companies are starting to embrace some of these leaner solutions as well. Not for everything, but it doesn't all have to be complicated. And ChatGPT is an example of that, right?

Yeah.

Some big companies will be like, oh, it doesn't integrate, it doesn't integrate. It just works. Have people figuring out some of these 4000 AI tools and using some of them in some way to replace 10 or 20 or 30% of their hours this week. That cumulative is massive.

You know, I know you're very passionate about fintech and you know, you have a lot of experience from the crypto world. I mean, I always find it interesting that they bring up regulations like the Glass Siegel act, you know, that was written in the early 20th century. And my analogy to people is like, think about if the regulatory regime that the airlines followed were written before automobiles were on the road. And I mean, that's kind of as crazy as it is now. And you know, I also think that regulatory wise, you see a lot of countries embracing innovation in financial services and communications. And it just seems, at least in the United States that our whole regulatory regime is slow to broken. They're not moving fast enough. The average person sitting in Congress is, you know, our grandparents age and barely just figured out how to use email, let alone something new. So I'm concerned about that. And at the same time, you know, you look in the financial services, a lot of companies with innovative financial services have said we're moving offshore. You know, we can't be in the United States because it's, because it's too complex.

That's what I did. I mean, I'm Canadian. I was living and working in the United States for eight years, just under eight years, because after eight years the United States on a green card can consider me as American for the rest of my life and tax me on worldwide income. There's only two countries in the world that tax you on worldwide income, the United States and Eritrea. So as a Canadian, I had to get out of the US so I moved to Barbados where my Corporate taxes are 3.5%, my personal taxes are roughly about $20,000 a year, and I'm done. And I only have to go there one day a year now. And now I'm in the process of moving to Dubai, which is just even better and cleaner and more modern and better banking and better roads and better. Like it's incredible. Like we have to adopt or die.