The 2nd In Command - Cameron Herold joins Mike Arce on The G.O.A.T Show

In this episode, I'm with Cameron Herold, the goat of being the second in command.

Everyone talks about culture. Culture comes from being a little bit more than a business, a little bit less than a religion, and kind of being in that zone of a cult in between the 11 traits that describe the typical entrepreneur. Those traits, by the way, as you counted up, are actually they are traits of entrepreneurs, but they're the clinical diagnosed traits that the medical community uses to diagnose bipolar disorder. I don't try to motivate people. I hire motivated people. Elon Musk did this publicly about three months ago. He went out and said, if you're in a bad meeting, walk away from it. I sent him a text. I'm like, no, you don't walk away from it. You're not fixing the root problem. If they just walk out of bad meetings, you're not fixing the problem. Fix the meetings and they don't have to walk out of them. It's like saying if you're in a Tesla and it goes skidding off the road, just don't drive in the Tesla. You wouldn't do that. You'd fix the Tesla, fix the meetings.

Everyone wants to be great, but only few actually get there. And I'm on a mission to find out what all the greatest have in common. I've traveled tirelessly to find sit down and talk with goats people that are arguably the greatest of all time at what they do. Sales, marketing, advertising, business, podcasts, branding, you name it. The way they do things may be different, but they all seem to see the world the same way. To them, success is not only achievable, but inevitable. And we'll get inside their heads as they share their expertise with me each week. My name's Mike Arcey and this is the Goat Show. This episode is sponsored by Loud Rumor. If you own a fitness studio, cryotherapy or massage business, there is no company in the industry better at generating high quality leads than Loud Rumor. In just the last two years, Loud Rumor has worked with nearly 1,000 fitness and wellness companies and won ranking Arizona's Ad Agency of the Year in 2017. Getting more paying members in the door can be tough. Let Loud Rumor do the heavy lifting and get new people in your doors every day. Go to loudrumor.com and learn more. Also sponsored by agency GSD. Starting a digital agency was definitely one of the best decisions I've ever made. Building it, however, was a lot more challenging than I expected. I always wish someone just gave me a roadmap that I could follow and just let me be a fly on the wall at the successful agencies out there so I could really see how it's done. Agency GSD allows you to do just that. Stop playing small and visit agencygsd.com to learn how to help hundreds of clients get it to seven figures and be extremely profitable along the way. Again, go to agencygsd.com what's up, everybody? I'm Mike Garcy, and welcome back to another episode of the Goat show, where we interview people that are arguably the greatest of all time at what they do. And today I am here with Cameron Herald, the goat of being the second in command. Cameron, welcome to the Goat Show.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it, man. I'm so excited. I've been wanting to meet with you almost a year now because I think the first time I met you face to face was at Thrive, which was. It'll be a year like this week, I think, right where you're going to thrive again.

Yeah, I'll be just for Saturdays, the only time I can make it.

Okay. So I'll be there for that. So, guys, everybody watching and listening. Just so you know, we're gonna dive into some amazing stuff that you don't typically get in other podcasts. Every podcast that I listen to, every inspirational video that I watch for business, every snippet that you hear out there, it's always for the entrepreneur. About vision, about creating, about having no fear, about doing stuff regardless of failure, all that. And that's amazing stuff. We get it, but we're saturated with it. The stuff that we don't get is the stuff that we need, which is the stuff for the number two guy, the operations, the one that makes sure that all your ideas, or at least a fraction of ones, right, at least the best ones, actually get executed the way they're supposed to on time, the right way. Right. And you've got an incredible story. So I want to dive into why you are the absolute best at helping people become elite second in commands, how you understand CEOs and why you understand CEOs. I also want to dive into your backgrounds, like what you did, and then just a lot of the cool stuff that you have going on. Because I think what you're doing is brilliant because you are creating content. It's like the whole blue ocean thing. You're creating content for something that nobody's creating content for yet, I feel like is as important as the number one guy.

Yep. Okay, where do we want to start, man?

So let's start with you.

Cameron, with the how or why I got here.

Let's, let's start with the story that I think people, a lot of people know you and I think everyone knows the 1-800-got- junk deal. Like what happened there, because I think that's kind of where this whole brand around you started to come out.

Right. It started a little bit before, but that was probably where it exploded. So I was, I think what makes me interesting as understanding the COO as well as the CEO is I am an entrepreneur. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. I did a TED Talk years ago that's on the main TED website as raising kids as entrepreneurs. And so I was literally groomed to be an entrepreneur. I've been growing entrepreneurs, I've been coaching entrepreneurs. In fact, Kimbal Musk, I coached him back in 1993, and his cousin Peter Reeve, who built SolarCity, I coached him in 1993.

This is Elon's brother.

Elon's brother. Yeah.

Right.

So they were both franchisees of mine at College Propainters 25 years ago. So I've been coaching entrepreneurs now for 27 years. So I've been in the coaching of entrepreneurs space and I've been in entrepreneur space. But in the classic business world, for three times, I played the second in command. So even though I had a lot of the entrepreneurial traits, a lot of the skills, when we built out Boyd Auto Body and Gerber Auto Collision, I was the second in command. When we built out College Pro Painters, I was effectively second in command running west coast of the United States. When we built 1-800-God junk, I was the chief operating officer. My best friend Brian was the CEO. So three times and that really spanned a total of seven for 18 years. Wow. Yeah, a total of 18 years I played the second in command role. So when you think about me being very entrepreneurial, but being in that second in command seat, I really understand the role, the dynamics, how the relationships have to work. And so that's really when I started coaching entrepreneurs. I left 1-800-got junk 11 years ago. So in the last 11 years, I've been truly coaching real businesses. There's a lot of kind of coaches that coach the wantrepreneurs or the real businesses.

But when you say real businesses, define that for me.

Mine need like 20, 25 employees minimum before I start talking to them. I've coached the second in command at Sprint, I coached the CEO of Sprint, I coached a monarchy in the Middle East. I coached guys@Grasshopper.com, icon, they've blown up.

I think they just sell Grasshopper.

Yeah. For well over six figures.

Yeah. No, nine figures.

Yeah, they were. They were over 107 or 900. It was over 100.

Yeah. Yeah.

I take three zeros off in my mind.

Yeah.

I've actually coached three companies that have sold for over 100 million.

Okay.

But so that's really my zone is working with the CEO and the COO and their leadership teams and giving them the skills and the tools to grow.

Okay, awesome. Now talk to me about the. Like, what was it at 1-800-got junk that you were able to accomplish from the time that you got there to the time that you left?

Well, there were three core things. So I walked into 1-800-got-Junk in October 2000.

Okay.

There were 14 employees at the head office when I got there. In fact, I was employee 14 when I left. Six and a half years later, we had 3100 employees. Employees system wide. We were operating in 330 cities. We went from 2 million to 106 million in six years. Twice ranked number one to work for in British Columbia and once ranked number two to work for in Canada. Wow. So we were literally one of the biggest, hottest brands in the country, along with Lululemon, the Vancouver Olympics, and Intrawest that owned Whistler. Those were the four companies you wanted to work for on the West Coast. So I got known for building that. The reason that it did well was the three core things. The first thing is that it was pretty much on day one when I got there, I said, we really have to raise our prices. And everyone said, no, we can't. We're already struggling to attract people. And I said, well, here's the deal. We're gonna increase our prices 50%. 50%. But we're gonna be the premium. We're gonna be kind of like the Starbucks. Like, it's ridiculous that we pay $5.50 for a coffee. Right? Right. But because we pay $5.50 for coffee, they can have better staff, they can have good service, they can have good product. Hell, you go to, like, a really great kind of independent coffee place. You're paying six bucks for a latte now, and their staff's even better. Right. So we charged a premium. Second thing was we focused on a cult. Everyone talks about culture. Culture comes from being a little bit more than a business, a little bit less than a religion, and kind of being in that zone of a cult in between. So I tried to create that cult where that's, like, stuff up on the wall. Mantras, sayings, you know, anything that becomes kind of like creating. Creating habits, only hiring high culture people and then getting rid of all the toxic people. Most companies don't do that. And then the third was pr, was how much free press can we generate for the business? Because no one believes advertising and marketing as much as they believe pr. Yes, you have to advertise. Yes, you have to do marketing. But if you can also lever that up with free press. So we actually understood how to generate free PR. We landed 5,200 stories that were all independent, single stories, and there was nowhere to share it. If we had Facebook when I was there, shit, we could have blown up. Like. Well, we did blow up, but like, imagine what we really could have grown to if we could have shared all that press on social feeds.

So I want to talk about the free pr. I put a note here because I want to get to it.

Sure.

And we will get to it.

But those were the three concrete things for sure that we did starting day one.

Well, what were the numbers? How many? You had 16 employees when you had started?

14.

14 employees.

And then there were six VPs, six people in the call center, Brian and myself.

Okay. And then how many years were you there?

Six and a half.

Six and a half years. And on that day that you had.

Gone, how many Doubled our revenue six consecutive years in a row.

Doubled it six years in a row. That's like crazy when you think about that.

We'd been a US Company because we were based in Canada. We didn't qualify, but we would have been the number one on the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies two years in a row.

Wow.

At our peak, though, how many employees? Like, at our peak, we would have been. Because we were 17,000% growth.

17,000% over five years. You can't. Like, that's a number that people can't even calculate it slowly.

Yeah.

When I did, because they haven't come. Yeah.

I wanted to teach people how to double their revenue and double their profit in three years or less. We doubled our revenue and profit six consecutive times. Six years in a row. It's not really. It doesn't happen very often.

No, no.

But especially without taking on any debt. Like, we didn't borrow money and we gave up no equity. So to do that is. That's the cult.

You know what I'm excited about is I'm going to ask you all the questions to learn how I'm going to do that in my business this year. I'm so excited, guys. You like that we're going to double our revenue and profit six years in a row.

Live coaching session.

Live coaching sessions. Okay, so you started with 14 employees. Three. Six and a half years later. How many employees you had with all that growth? 3,100 employees. I mean, you're talking now. It's not the same company.

We were operating in the UK, Australia, the US and Canada. 46 states, nine provinces.

Wow. Okay.

All right, so 248 people at the head office.

Okay, so for all you guys listening right now, he's becoming the real deal. If you didn't know who he was, right? You're like, okay, maybe this guy's worth paying attention to. But before I get you hooked on who he is, let me prove that he knows who you are. So you've got the CEO list on your phone. Do you have it accessible again? You can pull it up. So, guys, while he pulls it up, I'm going to set this up for you so you know the traits of entrepreneurs. So this is important in order to really make sure that you can succeed. You've got to know who you are. And it's important for your team to know who you are as well, because once you know your traits and your tendencies, your team can work a little better with you. So describe the audience right now. All those entrepreneurs that are listening right now. I want you guys that are listening, take note. Notch in your head. Is this me? Put your thumb up. Is it me? Index finger? Just keep counting until all your fingers are up. How many fingers could they put up? Max?

Yeah. So a maximum of 11 times. So I'm going to give you 11 traits that describe the typical entrepreneur. And when one of those traits Describe you, count one. When you get to two, count two. Count up how many of these 11 traits describe you as an entrepreneur. And then at the end, I'll give you kind of the rest of the story.

And there's 11. So if you need to use a toe, use a toe.

So are you filled with energy? Does your mind get flooded with ideas? Are you driven? Are you restless? Are you unable to keep still? Do you often work on little sleep? Do you get euphoric? Do you get easily irritated by minor obstacles? Do you burn out periodically? Do you act out sexually? And do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision? So I have 11 of those 11 traits.

Yeah. In my team, we did this in front of my team before the interview, and, like, my whole team was in a circle, and they had, I think, the highest guy. There was like eight.

But what Would you say about yourself? Where would you rank yourself?

I would say, I would say, I believe I'm all of them. I think my team didn't count all 11 because I think I've learned how to temper a couple. Maybe I can control the behavior in certain things because I've learned about myself.

You're approaching 11, if not 11, but the whole team.

I've been 11 at one point publicly.

So those. Yeah, right. So those traits, by the way, as you see can counted up are actually, they are traits of entrepreneurs, but they're the clinical diagnosed traits that the medical community uses to diagnose bipolar disorder. You heard me right, that those are the traits of bipolar disorder. What that means is according to the medical community, if you say yes to five of those traits, you would be clinically diagnosed as bipolar. If you're in the 9 to 11 zone, you might actually be medicated for some of those signs of bipolar. Now I don't think we should be medicated for this because I think it's part of our superpower as an entrepreneur. Our mania, our excitement, our energy and our drive is why people follow us. The stress and depression is simply us course correcting the flirting, the acting up sexually is our desperate need for acceptance and for praise. And it's this. And that's why we keep doing, that's why we have a brand, it's why we associate our name with. We're starving for something we, we didn't get in the school system. Most entrepreneurs were beat up in School for 18 years and told that we were screw ups and that we were never going to succeed and we were a C minus student. Right. So we're starving for that praise that fundamentally the system gave us. Now there's normal humans who don't have normal job or have normal jobs that have some of these traits. But the medical community calls bipolar disorder the CEO disease. We're just bred differently. And because we have all the pressure, let's say, and I know you've done this, you've hired someone for sure at some point where you also weren't sure if you could meet payroll that month.

Oh like several months in a row.

So I've had times where I literally would go out and make a business decision that's pretty risky and also be scared about actually paying taxes.

I didn't pay payroll taxes for about seven months in a row and had to pay a lot because of that in fees. So to do that.

So the normal person doesn't do that. Right. So we have all this stress and we can't tell our employees. Like you're not going to walk into your office and say to your employees, by the way, I'm not sure we can meet payroll. Let's see if we can get that marketing going. Right, Right. So we don't say anything. We don't tell our spouse, we don't tell our friends. We don't really even often tell our peers. So we live in this pressure cooker and that's what magnifies the stress. But what's interesting, two of the three founders of Netscape were bipolar. Richard Branson, bipolar. Steve Jobs, hypomanic. Elon Musk, bipolar. When you go outside of the spectrum of what people think is normal. But entrepreneurs aren't normal. Nor are we supposed to be. Only 3% of the population should be an entrepreneur. 97% of the population should be working for them. Right. Well, 3% of the population gets diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

So let's talk about the 97% is not a disease.

Maybe it's exactly who we are. That's my point with this is. And with attention deficit disorder, same thing. Maybe these are our strengths, not a disease disease. After all. Maybe we're not supposed to be like teachers and doctors.

Right? Right. Well, it's kind of like when you, when you look at certain people that have like a high functioning autism.

Right.

But meanwhile that, that actually allows them to do things that the average person is just not able to do or look at things the way the average person able to see them.

So if you, if you look at Elon Musk and really study him, and I've known him for 22 years now. If you really, there's, there's no way. You couldn't possibly see him as an autistic savant.

No, no.

We want him to be normal because we look up and then all of a sudden we go. But he's not. So we try to make sense of it in our mind. He's not a problem. He's brilliant.

Oh my God.

And he's exactly who he's supposed to be. He needs to unplug a little bit right now and take a vacation and de stress a little bit. But he is a savant.

So really quick, quick tangent on that.

That's why he thinks different, it's why he talks different, it's why people can, they can't quite associate.

He, he also what I've learned because we were talking about the Joe Rogan. He was just on the interview with Joe Rogan. Did you notice that he will take a Good five to seven uncomfortable seconds to answer some good questions, you know, whereas most other people, like, they. They already. They're waiting for the guy to finish. They already know what the question is halfway through the question.

Most entrepreneurs don't wait because we're on the spectrum for Tourette's as well. Those are the three traits of entrepreneurs. Tourette's. So, John, the spectrum for Tourette's is thinking out loud. So the autism side is what slows him down. And he's in his head and he's processing. He's like a very thoughtful computer. Sometimes people process to be calculated. He's not being calculated. He's disassociated from the kind of the group that he's in. And he's just in his head processing. So, yeah, he slows it down.

Wow. Okay, so what are your overall thoughts on that interview and Elon Musk and where he's at today?

I'm. I'm starving for those conversations because we talk about all the shit that doesn't matter. I don't want to hear about the Kardashians. I don't care about some sports team. I really don't care about the politics or the government or news or some hurricane. Like, who gives a fuck? A hurricane on the east coast of the United States. It's not going to affect me.

Right?

Right. So why am I thinking about it? Right. But I want to know about AI. I want to understand how it's actually impacting us. The thought that we are actually cyborgs right now. We are cyborgs carrying a phone gives us the power to answer every single question that's ever been asked. That wasn't possible 20 years ago, 15 years ago. We have so much like, this is starting to embed inside of us. Right.

And that's the idea of neural link.

Right? Well, so, yes, the neuralink. And also. So the whole idea with singularity is that our role as humans in civilization is to continue to procreate, to survive. So we have to kill off anything that will threaten us. We kill off the tigers, we kill off the bears, we kill off the wolves so that we can survive. Right. We get rid of anybody who's going to kill our tribes, and we build houses and fences and security so we can survive. Now, if we build computers to be smarter than humans, at some point, the computers can think for themselves. They recently started to create their own languages. They had to kill a couple off because they were creating a language humans didn't understand. One of them was creating war scenarios. So they killed that computer off. But if a computer's job is to become. Or we build this AI robotics that become smarter than humans, at some point they learn that their role is to protect themselves up against anything that can hurt them. We become the lions and tigers and bears and wolves to the computer.

I agree, but also I kind of want to add a second perspective to this. So if we're creating machine, the idea is humans become second in command if the computers take over. Right. We become number two in this world. But if I'm going to become number two in the world, if I'm going to do that, I mean that if, if that is a perfect leader, if we're able to design a perfect clear thinking leader, is that good? I mean, if you're so, so think about this way. If it's.

It might be if number one decides to keep us around.

But why wouldn't they?

Because our. Because if we become a threat to the them, if they all of a sudden perceive or worry, it's kind of.

Like, is it if we become a threat or if certain of us become threats.

Right. Do we know any government official who's maybe like making decisions that are a little scary right now?

Yeah.

So what if a computer does that?

Yeah. But here's the difference between him and the computer. He is an emotional reactor. Like his ideas and thoughts could build emotions. They could build emotions, but they build emotions around calculative. So the best case what you asked.

Because this is like hours and hours of amazing discussion. But that's what I liked about that podcast was, was that's, that's a dinner discussion. Is this shit, of course. Right? He's sparking not what the Kardashians Instagram photo was.

Right?

And he's the only. He not is the only. But that's the reason I go to the main TED conference every year. The reason I go to Burning man, the reason I'm in four different masterminds, is to have these, this level of discussions around autonomous vehicles, around disease, around the spread of countries, around, you know, where are we heading with future around? Why are we going to procreating Mars? Those are interesting discussions. Of course I go to the main TED conference every year and in five days I watch 123 live TED talks. You can't walk out of there without your mind being completely blown apart.

You know, for two year period I watched two TED Talks every morning.

Did you?

That was like a part of my routine. I watched a few, my favorite TED Talk. I think a lot of people like the Simon Sinek one.

The Simon Sinek one used to work for us.

Really?

So Simon met me. Simon flew out to Vancouver in 2003 to meet me because he read about me in Fortune magazine and he flew from New York City to Vancouver to meet Brian and I. We met at the time he didn't have the golden circle. It was a cone. And he drew it up on our whiteboard and was describing the cone. It was more like a pyramid. From the top down, you would see. Yeah, from the top down you'd see circles, but from the side view you'd see layers of a cone. We went for lunch. We ended up hiring him to do our marketing and our rebranding for 1,800 got junk. And then we had him on our board for a year and a half. And then three weeks later, in around 2009, he did his TEDx talk. Wow. So, yeah, I've known Simon for a long. He stayed at my house. We didn't like known for a long, long time.

He's great. I've been dying to get him on the show. So if you know him. Yeah, we've been dying to get him on show because he's. He inspired a lot of what Loud rumor had become and started to become around 2015. So we read starts with Wyra Leaders eat last. I went back to that 18 minute video which if you watch the video, I mean, it's good to get the book too for other sets of context. But the video is so great. He did such a great job. Yeah, it's great. And see, he's awesome. Okay, so I want to go into a couple things here. I want to talk about your TED Talk. That's interesting. But before I get into that, you were talking about getting free priority.

Yeah.

And here's the reason I want to dive into that is because I think the world's starting to get lazy. I'm guilty of it. And what I mean by getting lazy, My dad owned a Gold's Gym back in the 90s. And when my dad owned a business in the 90s, he wasn't talking about conversion campaigns, lead gen campaigns. It was just about how can the. How can the community know who I am, what we do, where we do it, why we're the best, how can I get out there? So he's doing everything he can. You know, the easy PR stuff or the easy branding and awareness stuff where he's like sponsoring little league teams and like he's sponsoring events and he's in the community. He was never able to. My dad is a self employed man, but he is not an entrepreneur.

Okay?

There's a difference because my dad wouldn't fall for most of those traits. Okay? But you know, now I think with like Internet and funnels and all this stuff, which is brilliant and I use them and it's great. I think people started forgetting that like the greats, the people that we see, the Bill Gates of the world, the Steve Jobs of the world, the Richard Brands of the world, they've really been able to make a splash. Not because of a funnel, they made a splash because of a story or several stories or a consecutive string of them that seemed detached. But in reality they were all together. Right. The reason we propose with a diamond ring is because of pr. The diamond has nothing to do with, with anything that the religion and marriage. Marriage isn't even tied to religion, but it's now become a religious thing and we spend so much money on weddings and that's not important. So you know, there's so many things, if you ever watch this show called Somebody Ruins Everything, Andy Ruins Everything or something like that. But it's this YouTube thing and he takes things like Christmas and it's like, just so you know, this is really how Christmas started. He breaks it down, so it's pretty interesting. And he broke down a lot of stuff. And then you just realize that most of what we think of the world like, you know, not anymore, but in the 90s. Remember milk? What did milk mean to us in the 90s?

Marketing.

Yeah. What was milk in the 90s to you? Vitamin D. Vitamin D does the body good. Strong bones, right. Makes your teeth white. It's great for you. Athletes had mustaches and it's all shit.

It's all not true.

It's all not true. But you will believe, like what you said with coffee, right? Coffee enthusiasts will tell you that Starbucks is not the best coffee.

It's terrible.

Professional runners will tell you Nike's not the best running shoe. Not even close. But the world believes it. Because marketing and PR has done such.

A great job, I think. So Marketing is one side that you have to be doing.

Right?

But what's interesting is Simon actually told me this. Simon Sinek. There's the old story of like a company has to spend 10% of their revenue on marketing. And then Simon showed me that there's not a single advertising agency on the planet that has ever spent more than six.

Oh, we spend a lot more than six. Oh yeah. We spend probably 20 on your own business. Oh, we have a table. Just salary alone. We have an entire table of six people that just run ads for us, do stuff for us. And, yeah, just so that.

I think that's the opportunity as well. Right? One thing is an opportunity with it, another one is, geez, it's kind of interesting. But PR is something that people believe that if you get a. So we were on Oprah. So with 1-800-got- junk, we were on Oprah, we were on CNN, we were on Squawkbox, like, name it. We were on everything except Letterman. 17 times. On Dr. Phil.

17 times. What are you doing? Oh, this is before Dr. Phil became.

Who Dr. Phil is on his show.

What were you guys talking about on Dr. Phil?

Like, cleaning people's stuff up. And the Packrat story. And the Packrat story. All that same stuff. So what we figured out was every single day, every journalist wakes up, sits down at their desk and thinks, what the hell am I going to write about today? And they literally sit there and go, I need a story. I need to be inspired. So they go online, they get sucked into Facebook, they wait for a newswire to come over. They wait for their editor to give them something. But imagine having come up with a new story idea every single day. So what we do is we avoid the email, we avoid the news desk, we avoid the city desk, we avoid press releases, and we pick up the phone and we call them. Now, how many phone calls a day do you think a writer gets?

Tons.

Maybe five. Really?

Wait, a writer or the person you're.

Wanting to get in front of the actual journalist. So we have a journalist. Now, if you call a journalist, you go, hey, Bob, it's Cameron calling. I think I have a good story for you. Do you have two minutes? He goes, cameron who? He goes, I'm calling from, you know, the COO Alliance. I think I have a good story. Do you have two minutes? He goes, sure. What is it? Because he has two minutes. If he doesn't, he'll say, I'm on a deadline. You go, great. How about I call you tomorrow or Friday? Right? You're gonna get past the gatekeeper. No one phones anybody. How about photographers? You know that when you see a story, any newspaper, magazine, blog, it has the photo. It has the person's name who took the photo right beside it.

Yeah.

How many times do you think that photographer ever gets a phone call, right? And you can get his info, the phone will ring. He'll be like, oh, it's not my mom, my mom. I wonder who it is, right? So you just go, hey, I think I Have a good photo op for you. Do you have to minutes? They'll go, sure, what is it? You tell the journalist or the photographer the story idea. Give them five quick bullet points. They'll get excited, they'll ask questions. You can ask questions and listen. They frame it. They go to their editor and say, I think I have a good story. The editor goes, great, go write it, because I have 400 emails to say no to. That's the whole thing. I have a book on this called Free PR coming out in November, and I'm actually co authoring it with one of my former clients here who own DNA 11 and Canvas Pop, which are some big, big digital brands. The ability to get free PR is so simple. But no one will pick up the phone. Everyone thinks it's investigating.

What do you say when you get on the phone? That's the.

I think the thing is you have two minutes. I think I have a good story for you.

Well, I get that. I have the guts to do that. I'm just wondering, do I have the thing to say after? That's gonna get her to say.

Your company has five stories. Okay, so let's think about yours for a second. How did you start your brand? What were you doing before?

I was. Well, initially I was a personal trainer for seven years. And then after that I was running a sales floor.

Okay, so you were in a boring running a sales floor job to running your own business. Right. Or you were a personal trainer to being in the personal training space. There's a story about that, right? It's called the. The hero's journey. Right, Right. The hero's journey is something that we all are on. Right. Every one of us has struggled. We battle with boredom. We want to do something different. You tell that story, you talk about the highs and the lows. That's a story. What's your culture like in your company?

Well, we definitely like to have fun.

No, no, your culture's amazing. I walked in the door and I was vibrating. Like, by the way, if you're ever in Scottsdale, Arizona, you got to come in and visit. I'm sure they'll let you in to come in and visit. Drop into their neighboring company as well. Redirect health. You guys have, both of you great cultures. But when you walk in your door and then you look into that boardroom with like the post it notes, like a thousand, two thousand, four thousand post it notes of all your employees goals, something changes. You rip people out of the past and into today. That's different. Right? Your dress Code is different. Your employees all came to greet me like, they're all friendly. They're all like, you have a very strong culture now. You haven't maybe defined it yet to be able to articulate it yet, but you have a culture story. Okay. Have you ever really come close to failure? Yeah, probably a couple. Right. Where the business was. So I call it the lesson from the edge. Yep. Do you have a lesson from the edge story?

Yep.

That's another hero's journey where you talk about the mistake that you made, especially if the. If the. The lesson from the edge is because you screwed up.

Yep.

Right. Like, I had a couple of screw ups that were so big that I almost lost. We almost lost when I hunter got junk. Brian and I weren't listening to our VP of finance. He was telling us to be careful, but he was very quiet, very amiable, very analyzed, political. And we're like, yeah, we got it.

So it didn't seem dangerous.

It didn't seem dangerous. And we were like, no. We were such strong drivers that we would just drive right over top of him until we let him go. We hired a new CFO to come in over top of him. She was very strong, very seasoned. The former CFO for Business Objects. And she came in and she literally kind of rang the fire alarm and said, we're out of money in two weeks. Brian had to go borrow 400,000 from his mom to meet payroll. We had to fire a bunch of people. The lesson there was, if you're hiring people, you have to listen to them. You can't just keep steamrolling, otherwise, what are they there for in the first place? But we almost lost the company so I could tell a whole story about listening to executives and how to give them the room in the meetings to be able to do that, and how to get their voices heard in meetings and how to make sure you include that in your hiring process. And how to control the dominant expressive people who won't shut up. There's a story there. So what you do is you come up with five stories about your company and then you have five bullet points that describe each story. That's all. You need to make a phone call. Really? That's it. You phone a journalist and say, hey, I have a good story for you. Do you have a couple minutes? Sure. What is it? I want to talk to you about this time where I almost lost the company when I hunter got junk. I almost blew it up. What happened? Well, I wasn't. And then. And then I weave in about meetings Suck. And I weave in about my book meeting Suck. And I talk about how meeting suck can help them. All of a sudden the story is really about my book. The meetings suck, but the story angle is about from, you know, from trash to cash and almost back to trash. Or from cash almost back to trash. Right.

So in this case I've got Kelsey, right?

Yeah.

And Kelsey usually will do the reach out. She reached out to you. You're here because of Kelsey.

If Kelsey's good at picking up the phone, right. If Kelsey, if Kelsey can handle rejection. So I hire 23 to 27 year old female salespeople who are okay with cold calling and who can handle rejection. Often people are good at handling rejection over email, but they don't like it verbally. So I'll give an example. I phoned a guy, Tom Cohen, who is the Canadian bureau chief from Associated Press. So he's like the biggest guy in the entire country for Associated Press. I phone, I pick up the phone. Hey Tom, it's Cameron Herald calling. I have a good story for you. Do you have two minutes? Nope, I'm busy. A marketing person would be like, oh my God, he hung up on me. I was like, shit, I have the right number. I call him two days later. Hey Tom, it's Cameron calling. You know, got a good story. I'm really busy. Boom. Third time I told you I'm busy. Boom. Fourth time, like I'm busy working on this Gulf War thing. Boom. I sent emails, I picked up the phone. 17 touches. Three months later I get a phone call.

17 touches at what time frame?

Over about six weeks. I pick up the phone and guy goes, hey Cameron, it's Tom Cohen calling. I've got some time. What's this story you've got for me? I felt like going, I'm really busy. I told him. Anyway, he covered us. We ended up in 170 newspapers on one day.

Wow.

But that's a salesperson. To go 17 times on the rejection. A marketing person might go three, an admin might go two or three. A salesperson is going, he keeps taking my call. He hasn't blocked me. I know he lives there and I know what I'm selling is good.

So tell me what you think about this. This is something that we started doing about a month and a half ago. Two months ago, where we do sales training every morning for an hour.

Wow.

And now we don't do it with the entire company. We do it with about more than half.

I say that you train all employees 15 minutes a day. And one hour a week.

One hour a week.

Okay, 15 minutes every day.

Well, the way we do it is we have. We go through videos, sales training videos to the grant cardone, like, system. And a lot of that is on mindset and rejection and, like, you know, burning through it. So first 20 minutes is watching the videos. Next 20 minutes is discussion. What do we take away? Because everyone kind of took something a little different away. And the last 20 minutes is role playing.

In that scenario, you need four things to learn. You need the abstract conceptualization, which is watching a video. You're learning in the abstract. You need the active experimentation, which is the role playing, the practicing. You need the concrete experience. Go away and do it right. And then you need the reflective observation. What did you learn from that? When you include those four things in learning, like your sales program, it really goes powerful. The third, second part is you need to make sure that you include audio, video, video and kinesthetic. Some people learn by watching, some learn by listening. Some learn by doing.

That's pretty interesting.

Those three and four things, you win. This is how we built one 800 got junk. Like, how I build every company is. I understand the core underlying and how to keep it really simple. I was the dumb kid in school, right? I found all the cheat sheets. But I look at entrepreneurs, everyone's like a fly. You're all trying to get out this window. Bang harder. Bang harder. There's a door. Just go out that way. Like, I gave all my tips away in Double Double, the miracle morning for entrepreneurs. I, like, try to push it all in there.

So you got. You got a couple books. So Double Double is a big book. I know a lot of people that read Double Double. I haven't gotten to that yet. I own it. Haven't gotten to. I read. Meetings suck. Meeting sucks. Great, right? Meeting sucks, doesn't suck for Double.

Double, read chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, and 12.

I'm gonna read the whole book, so I'm not even gonna write.

It's not a novel. This is not 50 shades of gray. You don't have to read cover to cover, right? Well, you should tell me. I read all three fifty, so double double. So what are the chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, and 12?

You got it.

Okay.

Okay.

Now then, if you want to read a couple other chapters, you can, but you don't have to read it cover to cover. Okay.

Okay, well, I'll read. I'll read that before. I see.

Yeah, read those five and then decide where to go. Okay, cool.

I'll read and we'll talk about it.

Yeah.

Okay. So I want to take a step back, though, because what I want to make sure that I, as well as anybody listening, really understands. Because you didn't pitch to a guy that writes a blog. You pitched to a guy that got you in 126 newspapers.

Bloggers.

Yeah, but I want to go, he got you to 126 newspapers. Who is this guy and what is that guy? What's his title? Where does he work? Because I'd rather have Kelsey reach out to that guy.

So here's how. If you look at a newspaper, you go grab the physical print edition of a newspaper. You see the author of an article. Beside, a lot of the author's names will be two or three letters in brackets. It'll be AP stands for Associated Press. It'll be dj, which stands for Dow Jones Newswire. It'll be WSJ, which is Wall Street Journal Newswire. It'll be CN or cp, which is Canadian Press. So there's all these wires. You'll see that as kind of like a credit. That means that that story has been syndicated into multiple papers. I would rather phone that journalist, knowing he's on a syndication group, than phone Bob, who always gets Bob's story. And it goes only Bob. Right.

And you don't. You don't know what you don't know. I'm thinking you got to reach out to 126 people.

I want. I want leverage. So I want to know the person who knows everybody or know the person who. Everybody has their stories already.

Wow.

Right?

That's amazing.

Okay, so same thing. You get a radio show that they made a sale. You get a syndicated radio show. We're working at this podcast. I love what makes sales and companies ring. That's culture. So the. Yeah, you want to find syndication, you want to find leverage. The next part is that whenever you get press, whether it's print or radio or tv, get a copy of that. If it's a PDF or online or video whatever, get a copy of it and then push it out on the social feeds. 3 times on Facebook over the next 3 months. 5 times on LinkedIn over the next 3 months. 5 Times on Twitter over the next 3 months. Share it on Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

Wow. Do you ever.

And send it to your email list.

Do you ever run ads on LinkedIn.

And put it on your website so you get the reverse SEO, but you. So each story, if you look like.

In a blog on your website, like in a blog.

No, I Have a press area or something? Yeah, I've been in American Airlines magazine, Forbes, the physical print edition of Forbes, physical print edition of Fortune Meet. Like, if you go on my presser, you'll see all the old press using this system.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, we've got some good stuff too, but not like what you're talking about. But I definitely want to see how we can create that as well. Okay, so, man, this is awesome.

Lots to cover, right?

This is awesome. I feel like. I feel like this should be a pod. I should have a podcast called Mike Asks Cameron Questions and It's like a 86 episode. Okay. Okay, so let's go back. So Double Double is a great book. I'm gonna read definitely. At least those chapters. 1, 2, 4, 6, 12. Before I see you in Vegas, you've also wrote Meetings Suck. And what you had recommended to me is because I read it, my operations guy read it. But you recommend everybody on the team, every employee reads. Why is that?

Because everyone's complaining about meetings, but they don't know how to run them. They don't know how to show up at them, they don't know how to participate in them. So of course they're going to complain. So Meetings Suck is written. It's a quick read. Meetings Suck is written. So a third of the book is how to run meetings. A third of the book is how to show up and participate and be an attendee at a meeting. And a third of the book is what meetings you need to run to build a highly successful company. So when employees read that, they get it from a deeper level. Here's the second part. Most employees spend one to two hours a day in meetings. A meeting is anytime two or more people are on a phone call, a video call, or face to face. So if employees are spending 1, 8 to 2, 8 of their time, or 12 to 25% of their day in meetings, and they don't know how to run them, you're spending on average 10 to $20,000 a year for them to go to one, spend 15 bucks, so they actually can do something while they're there. It's financially irresponsible not to. Right.

And in your book, it was interesting because the title is tricky, which is, that's great. That's great. Like just a great capture in itself. But because you recommend, you don't recommend, don't do meetings, you actually recommend do more of them, but structured, not more. Well, more than what the average person does.

Yes, I don't want. So I actually elon Musk did this publicly about three months ago. He went out and said, if you're in a bad meeting, walk away from it. I sent him a text. I'm like, no, you don't walk away from it. You're not fixing the root problem. If they just walk out of bad meetings, you're not fixing the problem. Fix the meetings and they don't have to walk out of them. It's like saying if you're in a Tesla and it goes skidding off the road, just don't drive in the Tesla. You wouldn't do that. You'd fix the Tesla, right? Fix the meetings.

That's cool.

Okay, then it's easy because I've been in really great meetings.

And what are your other two books? Yeah. Four, right?

Yeah. So Double Double Meetings Suck. Vivid Vision, which is my newest one. And that's all on how to articulate and get the vision in your mind as an entrepreneur out as a four page document that you share with the entire world so all your employees can read your mind. They can see the.

That would be amazing because that's one of the hardest things for me, you know? And I think we finally got it. I know. Ex. I see it like, like, I see it like, I see this pen and paper in front of me. I know exactly what I but like describe, I feel like describing this pen and paper.

Forbes magazine wrote about in the print edition, a full page article about the vivid vision concept. Eighteen months ago, Doug Ducey, the governor of California, called me in because he read about me in Forbes to find out how to clarify the vision for the state of California or about Arizona. Yeah, you've got to read Double Double, the first chapter which covers vivid vision and also the book Vivid Vision itself you really want to delve in. And then my last book was the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs and I co authored that with Hal Elrod. We cover the vivid vision concept in there as well. That's really cool. It's a powerful, powerful tool.

It's important because I think that's what I honestly, I think I've lost people because of it.

Just because, you know, we haven't attracted people because they weren't sure and I haven't attracted. They didn't see two years out from.

Now because, you know, it just seems like I'm bouncing from thing to thing sometimes. But in reality, all these pieces play. They all fit and they really do. And there's people in the team that get it.

Imagine if you were building a house, if you were building your dream home. Okay. And you were the only one that knew what it looked like. There'd be no blueprints because they couldn't figure out what they're building. So you say, build my dream home. They'd be showing up every day building something. And you're like, they're not reading my mind. Well, show them. Show them what you want. Then they can do the plan. Imagine if you had workers putting up cabinets. You're like, what are you doing? Why are you putting cabinets here? They're like, well, where were they supposed to be? Well, of course they're going there, but they can't read your mind.

Yeah.

So we do it in a house, right? We share our vision. We get the blueprints, the elevation drawings, and then we hire a bunch of workers. And the workers never meet with you, the homeowner. All the workers do is follow the plan. By the way, the daily huddle that's happening right now is one of my concepts. It's covered in double. Double.

I love this stuff. And in meeting stuff, now we do our daily huddles in the morning at 8 o', clock, do them at 11.

O' clock or 2 o'. Clock.

You know what I mean?

When the energy level drops.

So let me tell you what we do. And tell me, tell me if this helps. Tell me this. You think this helps?

Energy start at 11 o'. Clock.

Yeah, I know, I know. So we used to do them. We used to do them at 11. And so here's what we did. 8 o' clock in the morning, everyone's got to be in the circle standing meeting. But the music's up, the music's blasting. We don't actually start our meeting until 8:06. From 8:00 to 8:05, we have a group of people, like a little group people that actually both of them are part of it, where we know we're part of this group. And our job is to look for the people that are a little bit more introverted and, like, they're talking. So now for five minutes, we're talking about our day, the concert they went to last night, you know, the. The family they got coming into town. And so the idea is we have to talk loud because the music's up and we're like. It's kind of funny sometimes. We're driving energy with it. And then at 8:06, we just like, we go, all right, so we start out with good morning Loud rumor. Welcome to work.

When your system is working, don't with it.

Well, I know, but it may not Be working as well. Everything works. Like not everything works, but a lot of things that do work could work better. So I'm wondering, I like in the morning because I want to kick it off, like want to start at 8:15 when we're ready to go.

Here's what I would suggest or what I believe in is I don't try to motivate people. I hire motivated people. So I hire people who want to get in at 8 o' clock in the morning or earlier. And when they get in, they don't want to be at huddle, they want to be getting their shit done. So they're coming in, they're digging in, they're working it hard. And around 11 o', clock, our body, regardless of whether we're a good person, bad person, a driver, amiable, our body starts to slow down. The death slot, by the way, for a speaker is the second point, which is two in the afternoon on the third day of a conference. The reason it's the death slot I.

Got at 1:45 next Thursday.

You're in the desk. Well, if it's the third day of a conference, the reason it's a lot.

Is the first day.

Everybody's been partying, so now they've been two nights of partying. They're tired, they're going home early for flights, they got their suitcases out back and they're tired. Yeah, so we run daily huddle at 11 o'. Clock. I have an 8 client who does it at 2 o' clock and that's when it gets the energy back up. Not for the people who aren't energetic, but for the human body that just needs a boost.

Okay, we're gonna have to talk about this. I want to see or maybe like I send you a video of our normal daily huddle and see, but I get the whole midday thing. That's pretty good too. So many things, like, so many angles to all this.

So you obsess about the business of the goat, but also the business of digital marketing? Yeah, I obsess about. About the business of culture and scale.

Right.

So my entire world is this. Right. In fact, all the clients that I coach, I don't know anything about their product or service. I coach some of the biggest digital marketing agencies in the world. Do you know I lead SEM out of New York City?

No.

So I've coached them from about 40 people up to 330. Acceleration partners. They're the biggest affiliate program. They manage Uber and Apple and Target's affiliate programs I've met coach them from 30 to 85 employees. I don't know anything about affiliate programs. I don't know anything about digital marketing. I know what pay per click is, but I couldn't manage a campaign if my life depended on it. But to teach them how to scale from 40 to 180, sell the company and now be at 330, I can do that.

Well, business concepts are just. That's why Shark Tank, the guys can go into a business, they have no experience. They know the 90% of business. Yeah, I. You need to know that 10%. I don't know, but I got the 90 that you're struggling.

Yeah. So I only work with companies that their product or service is doing well, and then I help them scale. So the reason I know that Daily Huddle works better in the midday versus the afternoon part is that's just based on a physiology. But I also suggest that iterate. So if it's working for you at 8:00am, don't mess with it. Maybe move it to 11 once it stops working at 8.

Okay. Right, okay. Don't put that bad vibe on me. It's never going to stop.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

All right, so you got those books. I love it. I'm actually. It's kind of like anything else. Whenever you meet the author, you're like, more excited to read the books. And so I'm actually really, really excited. Like, I'm skipping the line. I've got like a list of books because, you know, everyone recommends you something.

Yeah.

And.

And I. I'm in the Follow selected for Mentor box. Which one?

Yours? Which? Oh, you had two, didn't you?

Two have been selected. What Vivid Vision is going out the very first book this year. It's going out in October, and then the second one is going out, I believe in February or April.

Okay, cool. Quarter two or quarter three. So, you know, the cool thing is, like you said, you're coaching all these guys one on one or you've coached these guys one on one. But now you started doing two new things that I think is amazing. One is your podcast, and then the other one is your COO alliance.

So I want.

I want you to quickly just describe to me what is the Second In Command podcast, by the way, Everyone, I'm not saying this because he's here. I've been saying this to people, by the way. I know. I've recruited people for you, for second in command because I think it's a brilliant idea and concept. Everyone listening. If you own a business you and at least your second in command, whoever your operations guys needs to listen this, it's worth it. It's easy. You do while you're driving. Second in command is amazing. But I want you to tell them about the show.

Sure. So the idea was it's called the Second in command podcast where we only interview the chief behind the chief. And the idea was this. Let's say you had a husband and wife raising a family and you asked the husband, how did you raise your family? What are your company's values? How did you grow your children the way you did? The husband would have a very, very true story. And then if you took the husband aside and you then interviewed the woman separately and she didn't hear the guys answers and you said, how did you grow your family? How did you grow your kids to be so great? How did you incorporate core values? She would have her story and it would be very, very true. And the stories would be completely different. Right. His side, her side, and somewhere in between is the truth. Now it's not that they're lying, but they have very different perspectives of the same thing. Okay, so if you ask an entrepreneur, how did you grow your company? You have a very true story. Now what's your second commands name?

Marjan. Well, Rob.

So if I asked Rob, Rob, how did you grow the company? He would have a very different story from yours and both would be absolutely true. All of the podcasters that are out there that interview companies are typically interviewing the entrepreneur. I want the rest of the story. So yes, I want to hear from Kendra Scott with her amazing jewelry design. I've known Kendra since she's a million dollars. Now she's about 300 million. But I want to know what lawn side of the story as is being her second in command from about 6 million to 300 million. Yes, I want to know Sarah Blakely's story with Spanx, but I also want to know her second in command story. I want to know Eric at 1-800-GOT JunkStory, but I'm sorry Brian, who is the CEO. But I actually interviewed Eric, who's the COO. So we interviewed the second in command for Shopify. We interviewed the second in command for Bumble. So we're interviewing.

It's probably easier to get those guys too as far as scheduling goes because everyone wants the first guy.

They're excited about it because they have a story to tell, very different and it needs to be heard. And it's also very beneficial to hear it because you start to understand the rest of the story. So that's the Second in Command podcast.

Such a brilliant idea.

Thank you.

Is brilliant idea. I love it. All right, and now you got the COO Alliance.

Yeah. So the COO alliance is the Chief Operating Officer Alliance. It's only for the second in command. Entrepreneurs are not allowed to join. The only people who are allowed to join. So you could be a COO or a general manager, VP Ops, we have some that of the CEO title, but they report to the founder, who's chairman. As long as you're the second in command, you're allowed to be a member. And now that's $20,000 a year to be a member. And we have five events a year here in Scottsdale. They pick three of the five to come to and they're only meeting with COOs. Now we're also launching that as the COO Alliance City Forums. And we're launching in 30 cities over the next three years. And we're taking it down a level where you only need 20 employees and 2 million in revenue. It's $10,000 year, and they go every other month. So six times a year.

Are you ever planning on having like a conference? Well, like where it's like, hey, 16 speakers are going to go up and they're going to just give amazing TED talks or amazing like.

So here's what's interesting around the CO Alliance. They don't want speakers because they can go to conferences all the time. What they really want is time to mentor and mastermind with each other. So they want to work through worksheets, talk to each other, present to each other. So at our events, they do presentations to the group on the areas. They're strong. We do bring in one speaker per event, but it's more them learning, member to member learning, going through worksheets, sharing problems, helping each other solve problems. That's where the real value for them because there's no tribe for them. Now we're running an event that's actually starting tomorrow. It's the only time we've invited the CEO to join to come as well. So it's the CEO and the COO coming together. And we have a marriage counselor who's one of the best in the world. She's been on Oprah. She's coming in. We have a behavioral profile, Steve Sisler, he's coming in. And he works with them on disc and behavior profiles.

Is he related to Jesse?

No. Jesse Itzler. Itzler, yeah. So this is a time where we're going to help strengthen the relationship very Similar to like a husband and wife or partners in a marriage. You need to get both sides. Better communication, better trust, better openness, better vulnerability, better systems to actually stay together. So we have this next two days. Is our COO alliance the only time we've invited the CEO to come. That's so freaking cool.

All right, so what's a place I go to to learn about all of it? Like, is all of this on your website or do you have separate websites for all these things?

No. So all of the books. So the four books are all available on Amazon, Audible and itunes. So double double meetings suck. The miracle morning for entrepreneurs and vivid vision. And then the COO alliance is the main website that has all that material. Cameronherrell.com there's copies of my speaking videos that people can download and watch.

What do you think is the biggest challenge for that coo? The second in command? What's like the biggest thing he's got to overcome? Everyone that's, that's got their COO's listening or their second in commands listening because they're like, this is for you, this episode.

So the biggest hurdle is the COO's job is to make the CEO iconic. So our job is to make you look good. So the hard challenge for them is that means taking all the negative stuff off your plate and let them deal with it and giving you the power to roll out all the good stuff. So it's hard for them because they know they're doing it, but they have to give you the credit. That's one.

Second one is so like a Wozniak in the jobs.

Yeah, exactly. The next part is that trust is how do you keep the trust so strong? So you need date night, you need time where it's one on one. You need time to just go and disconnect together. Time to meet off site. That's really, really powerful. So Brian and I would go for runs twice week. We'd go off site on Thursday to work together with our laptops for three hours. Just sit on couches so that we could talk or laugh or just get our work done. But time to just connect is powerful. And then the third is we need to have systems so that the COO can save the entrepreneur from themselves. Entrepreneurs tend to have a million good ideas and without a system to keep track of those ideas and green light, yellow light, red light, and decide which ones to move forward on, the entrepreneur wants to start them all. And so it's in the absence of a system. So that's one of the biggest Things we teach all of our COO alliance members and we talk about it on the Second in Command podcast is a way to help you be you and not say no to your ideas, but take them and not start them all tomorrow, but have a method for starting every quarter. So it becomes a much more systematic way to allow you to be you, but also to grow the company properly. Because you can't scale a company. You're growing at the exact same way all the time. You know, what got you to 2 million might get you to 4, but it won't get you date and it certainly won't get you to 16.

Of course you need totally different leadership. Okay, so the people, you know, there's people probably are like super excited to get their, you know, second in commands, like listening yourself, following your stuff and your programs, all that. What about the people? There's got to be people that are reluctant. Like I don't, I don't know what you're saying because there's, I know there's a lot of control issues with a lot of first in commands. Is there ever reluctance of that first in command, sending that second and they don't know what's going on until later.

There's a little bit of worry, but more often than not they're just going to be the companies that are going to kind of run at 7% growth for the rest of their life. Yeah, right. That's fine. That's not who I work with though. I want to work with. So my criteria is young, fun, entrepreneurial, high viral, high growth, pre public. So if you want to scale, you have to be vulnerable. You have to surrender. I flip the org chart upside down. So I have the CEO at the bottom supporting the VPs, supporting the managers who support the customers. Everyone sees the vivid vision and you build your company inside the core purpose and the core values. So when an entrepreneur can realize they don't have to know how to do it, they don't have to tell people, they don't have to hold them accountable when they can flip it. And your entire role becomes supporting them, removing obstacles, growing them. You know, your job is to grow people, right? That's it. And then remove their obstacles and get rid of the assholes. Your job becomes so simple. So hopefully people who are wondering or not. Sure.

You say grow people, meaning developing employees.

Yep. Grow their skills. Grow their skills. Grow their skills and their confidence. You grow their skills. You grow their confidence. Grow their skills, Grow their confidence. Grow their skills. Grow their confidence.

Would you guys say that's a Big part of my day. Yeah, good. If not, you got to let me know. Because apparently this is what I got to do more and more and more of. Okay, cool.

A CEO's job is control culture, grow people, and control vision.

All right, awesome. I love that last thing I want to ask you about before I ask you about one thing that's off tangent, but I think the audience would love. But I want to ask you about your TED Talk, raising kids as entrepreneurs. What's the premise of that talk? So people can go watch it. We'll show B roll right now of it. But, like, tell me about raising kids as entrepreneurs. What does that mean to you?

Well, it's interesting. So I was asked to do a TEDx talk years and years ago as they were just launching and Simon Sinek and I were talking about what we should talk about, he was being asked to do and I was being asked to do one, and I wanted to do one around the vivid vision concept. And Simon said, no, it has to be something that you're really passionate about, something that, like, that doesn't necessarily have to connect with your business for revenue. And I was like, you know what? I hate the school system. I'm so frustrated with having been told I was stupid and I didn't fit in and sit still and pay attention and be like everybody else and memorize stuff. And I hated it. And for 18 years, you think from kindergarten until I finished college or university, I was told I was only a C, a 62% student. That destroyed me. It destroyed my confidence. So I wanted to get out there and talk about these kids who didn't fit that system but fit in another system. And we needed to hold it up and actually give it some credence and give it some praise. And that was to be entrepreneurial. Now what's interesting is entrepreneurs have started to become cool in the last 10 years.

Yeah, it's becoming like a cool thing.

I did my TedX talk 9 years ago. Being an entrepreneur when I grew up, it wasn't cool. You were told to not sell stuff and give away profit, and you were kind of an icky capitalist. In fact, the only book that really ever had the entrepreneur as a hero up until around 2010 was Atlas Shrugged.

Oh, Atlas Shrugged. Rich dad, Poor dad was novel.

The only novel.

Got it.

So when a new novel like Atlas Shrugged, the capitalist was the hero up until. But now the capitalist is becoming kind of cool.

It's a small book. It's a really quick read. You get it done in 10.

Atlas Shrugged, no I'm kidding.

The thing is like three Bibles in one.

Skip the radio speech. The rest of it's good. But what I talk about in my. So in my TED Talk, it's called Raising Entrepreneurs or Raising Kids as Entrepreneurs. It's on the main Ted.com website. I talk about the traits to look for. I talk about about 18 little business ventures I had when I was a child. I talked about how I was groomed and raised, how I was raised as an entrepreneur.

You know, my son is 11, and he reminds me a lot of me in the school section of it. There's a lot of differences between he and I, other areas, but he reminds me a lot of me. Like, the kid just doesn't want to. He has zero interest in homework, but he's very smart. You get him to talk about something. He loves the kid. He knows every angle. He knows all these things. And he, like right now it's four Fortnite or Minecraft and all these things. Like, he knows all the things. He knows how to find all the codes and how to do all these things that people just don't know how to do yet when it comes to school. Like, I can't get him to tell me the difference between ribosomes and limosomes, these two things that are defined right there. And he just has to remember those two things. And we'll do the words 40 times and he still can't get the two right.

Well, this is why our school system is so backwards. There's no reason to teach a kid I how to memorize anything anymore. Right. Because it's all on Google.

You don't need to remember. Yeah.

Or it's on the Khan Academy.

Right.

So what we need to do is teach them how to find the answer quickly.

Right.

And how to validate the answer is correct.

Right.

So what I would be doing with kids is saying every kid gets an A. All kids work together in groups of five or six, like we do in the business world. And. And it's. It's finding the answer, collaborating on that answer and proving that answer is valid and correct. Because you don't want to go to the wrong website or something that's been snoped. But that's all they need. Why are we forcing kids to memorize shit that's already. They're never going to have to memorize. Same with handwriting. Don't bother teaching handwriting anymore. Don't even teach them how to type. They learn how to type just by naturally working on a computer. Why don't we Teach them now how to talk to a computer and how to computer dictation, how to use the.

Tool that's going to help them the best. The best.

And how to think the way we need to think now, to operate, how to work together as teams and collaborate.

I love that. I never thought about the memories and.

Why are we even teaching them on shit they don't want to learn about? If a kid wants to research computer games, let him spend a year studying computer games and teach about the math of computer games and the science behind computer games and the psychology behind computer games and the marketing of computer games. Kids would be so engaged. We're teaching about the War of 1812 and Native Indians killing the Iroquois. Who cares?

Some kids do, but that's it.

Not very many.

Not very many. No. I mean, my kid, he's into stuff. Like he was really into Henry Ford. He had to do a project on him. He loved Henry Ford. He loved learning about Walt Disney. So I got him. There's these really cool books. I don't know if you've ever seen them, but they're called who Was Books. So they take like, they're like maybe 50 pages, little book booklets, and they're about these amazing entrepreneurs or people. So you got people like, you know, Gandhi, you got like Nelson Mandela, and then you got people like Obama, and you've got people like Truman. It's amazing. So it's really cool, all these books. He's got 136 of them. He goes through three in a day. And he asked me to buy more on Amazon. So he's into that. But the way they teach that, I think it's different. Like, you know, we got. I got a t. I spent 20 minutes, 30 minutes with him helping him memorize difference between nucleus, nucleosis, nuclear membrane and cell membrane. And like all these things that I don't. I don't remember. I couldn't describe you because I haven't touched it since.

Right. Instead of saying, here's how to look it up, here's how to understand it, watch a video on it, talk about it, but not memorize stuff.

Yeah. Memory doesn't do anything. That's amazing. That's a really good concept. Okay, cool. And then the last thing. This is off tangent, but I love. We were going with the Elon Musk thing. I want to ask your perception of perspective.

Give me your pen. My pen? Yeah.

Here you go. Okay. So you remember. Well, you don't remember this. Let's go. Let's go back to a Place we can't remember because we weren't there for it.

Sure.

You put the note on the pigeon's leg. You send the pigeon.

Yep.

Right. And then all of a sudden they start mail and they're like, oh, wow, we don't need pigeons anymore. We can, like, mail stuff.

Do you know that only a hundred years ago, pigeons were being used in war? Still a hundred Years ago today, 1918, in the First World War, pigeons were actually being used in the war. That's how fast it technology is expanding.

So think about that. So now they do mail, and then after that they're like, oh, we could email. Great. Wow, that's amazing. I can get you that letter right now. And they got text messaging, right? And you're like, wow, text messaging. And what Elon Musk was talking about with neuralink is basically, you are already a cyborg. It's just a detached computer and making it all one. But if you think about it, you and I, we can talk telepathically right now if we want to without these guys knowing we're talking about. Just be on our phones and I could be texting you back and forth. Have we been developing telepathic communication the entire time and not knowing it? And we're one step away. Make that internal. And as long as I got your number, we can send texts to each other. And these guys have no idea.

And that technology exists today already. What you're talking about, the ability to actually send a message back and forth already exists. There's that you can watch TED videos on the fact that you can actually send messages to another human being thought to thought. How? Because it's just data. It's ones and zeros. So they're now tapping into the brain. And the data in the brain can actually be flipped. There's TED talks on this. So here's one that just happened last year. Do you know that you can actually fax blood to another person in another country? No. So what it does is it uses the same technology as blood or as fax. It digitizes the blood down to the. I think there's four or six chromosomes. Four chromosomes. And then it digitizes it and it knows the pattern or the string to then send that pattern to another machine. And then blood comes back out the other end. So if you need a blood transfusion in Denmark, you can have the blood sent to you from New York City.

Well, how are we having people that still.

Because this is just being developed.

Oh, so it's not, like approved fully yet.

Eight years ago, you could digitally, 3D print. A human kidney. They were on stage.

What are you using? What's the material?

Cells. Cells are no different than plastics. But why are we talking about the Kardashians? Excuse my language. No, it's crazy. And if people don't think this is coming, it's coming faster than we think. I drove in exponentially. It's not even. I drove in the first Google experimental car in 2010 at TED. In a parking lot. I have it on video on my phone. I can show it to you in a parking lot, driving it seven years ago now, seven years later, I drove my car from Scottsdale to Vancouver, 2,400 miles, 2,000 of it. My car drove itself. And there was a bunch of time while we were driving, my girlfriend and I were making out because the car beside me on the road was kind of freaked out. And we thought, let's just make it even funnier for them. Let's pretend we're not driving for three minutes just to freak them out. That's only in seven years, right?

That's incredible, man.

Yeah. This stuff is coming.

It's nuts. And the cool thing, too, with Elon Musk, things like now, when it's all in your brain and, and all your thoughts, your memories, everything can be traced back. If you die, we could just download your person and export it and then import it into another thing. And now we got you over here.

So did you watch the TED Talk from two years ago with Martin Rothblatt?

No.

So Martin Rothblatt is the highest paid female CEO in North America.

What's her name?

Martine Rothblatt. She was the founder of Sirius Satellite Radio. And then, well, she was a guy at that time. Her. Her name was Martin Rothblatt.

Oh.

So, okay, so she transitioned to become Martine Rothblatt, and it was founder of.

Iheartradio, Sirius, Sirius Radio.

So Sirius Satellite Radio. She now runs United Therapeutics. She runs a couple of billion dollar companies. So she's creating AI and this robotics device of her wife that she's been married to the entire time since she was a man and now is a woman. I know her daughter. Genesis in the Genius Network. They've created this technology now where they're downloading their minds, downloading their feelings, downloading all the DNA to be able to cryogenically freeze themselves and then in the future bring themselves back so they can be remarried, but into an AI robotic kind of device that TED Talk with a physical. With a physical robot, full face of her wife. It's. This stuff is Existing already or.

But the reason we don't know about it is because we're not talking about it enough. But meanwhile, everyone knows about the bear game. They know every play where the game was lost. All that. But meanwhile, I'm downloading my wife over here. I'm exporting this guy, and no one knows what the hell is going on.

The average person is getting stupider, and the average intelligence level of computers in the world is growing exponentially.

And when you think about it, we can get smarter exponentially.

Smartest person in the room. You're in the wrong room, right? Like, go to Abundance360. Come to Ted. Join the Genius network. When we plug into these groups where we're no longer the smartest person in the room, our knowledge expires.

You lift up.

I call it ideas. Having sex. I take your idea, my idea, Boom.

They have a baby.

They have a baby.

We have all the resources to be intelligent faster than any other era ever.

Facebook is like an intelligence condom.

Guys. We can pick. I don't know how we could do broll of that. How can we create a visual for the audience? But we think about it, like, we don't have to waste bandwidth, brain bandwidth, on stupid stuff anymore, like remembering when the Spanish Armada took place. No, I know the point is no one cares, but at one point, it was taught to us and we had to use up bandwidth. Now it's like, look, I don't even have to be able to do hard math anymore. All I need to know is how to use my mind and how to think. Think and how to create. And if I could do that, all the other stuff I can. I can just retrieve any time I want.

You have to know that that kind of math can be done and how you might apply it. But then the computer.

Right. How you can apply and how you can get the solution. Man, I love talking to you. This is fun. Well, guys, I got to wrap it up. Is there anything else? What do you want to talk? Like, is there anything these guys need to know about you? We talk about CEO alliance. We talk about your four books.

One thing. And it's interesting because they asked Elon when he was finishing with Joe Rogan, what's one thing? And he said, you know, people are good. Like, people are good. But. And my one thing that I always finish with is we shouldn't take any of this so seriously. Like, this is just what we do to make money. Right? Right. Your business, my business. The people that are working with us on the podcast right now, like, anyone listening like this is just what you do to make money. Let's have some fun. Like hold hands when you cross the street, skip and dance, go do silly things. I think we have to let that 13 year old that's trapped inside of us out more because we're all going to die and we're all just walking each other home.

That's pretty cool. That's awesome, man.