The Importance of Culture, Skills, and PR in Business Growth

It's great that you enjoy what you do, but you don't want to hear a lawyer talk about being a lawyer and you don't want to hear a dentist talk about being a dentist. You don't want to hear a chiropractor talking about being a chiropractor. No one wants to hear you talk about your business either. What we want to hear about is your life and your activities and your hobbies and your bucket list. And I'm glad that you enjoy what you do, but it's boring for everybody else. So. And I think, I think at the end of the day, if you drop dead at 45 years old, is that really how you wanted to spend your entire life? Or would you have rather had had more time with your four little girls or more time with your spouse or more time with your friends? I think John was fairly balanced, but I think a lot of people are not. So my background is I was groomed as an entrepreneur. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. I was raised to become an entrepreneur by my dad and my grandparents, as were my brother and sister and I. We've all been entrepreneurs for three of 20 to 25, 30 years, each of us. And then I also have written six books. I've been paid to speak now in 29 countries on every single continent. I got paid to speak three years ago in Antarctica to a group of CEOs and I started an organization called the COO alliance, which is kind of like EO, but it's only for the second in command. So we have COOs and presidents of organizations from 17 countries that are members of the CO Alliance. And I also launched a course three years ago called Invest in your leaders, which is all the core leadership and management skills that everyone who manages people needs to be good at. And we're rarely trained in those things until you get into a real, true enterprise level company where they have training departments and personal development plans and those things in place. So I created that content just to really grow people. So this was back in the era when being an entrepreneur was not cool. Right? So for 10 year olds and 12 year olds today, they think being an entrepreneur is cool. Social media talks about being an entrepreneur is cool. The parents think being as an entrepreneur is cool. Everybody out there thinks being an entrepreneur is kind of cool. They may think there's a little bit of greedy capitalist there, but it's still kind of like a cool occupation. When I was growing up in the, in the early 70s and late 70s being an entrepreneur, we were vilified we were greedy, we were capitalists. We were ostracized from family. The schools didn't like us. It was not a cool thing until about 1998 or 99. So. So 20 years prior, when I was growing up, my father was teaching us to be entrepreneurial, giving us the skills to be entrepreneurial, but not necessarily pushing us to be entrepreneurs. But he definitely did show us that being an entrepreneur was better than being an employee because you could control your time, you could do whatever you wanted, when you wanted, where you wanted. And that was what he focused on as the benefit of being an entrepreneur was to have the free time to really have a great life. It was never about the money. And entrepreneurship now tends to be more about the money, which I think is really hurting people. In grooming us to be an entrepreneur, he focused on the skills that we need to be good at things like problem solving, leadership, being able to think on our feet, delegation, managing time, managing projects, managing our own confidence, sales skills, kind of the basics. And he would let us do little businesses and not over involve himself. And, and I think often now what parents do, let's say that Bobby wants to have a lemonade stand. Well, they help Bobby make a lemonade stand. They help Bobby do the perfect sign. They create flyers for Bobby that they go down and they get them printed and they bring them home. They help make all the Kool Aid for Bobby. They stand out on the sidewalk and they wave cars to come in. You know what? Mom and dad should go run their own lemonade stand because Bobby hasn't learned anything. Bobby feels discouraged. He feels like his stuff wasn't going to be good enough. He had his ideas, but he had to use mommy or Daddy's. Mommy and daddy need to let Bobby go, create a crappy little lemonade stand and a crappy little sign, but give him the confidence and then have him come back inside going, nobody's buying my lemonade stand. Coach him from in the kitchen, make him go back out to the curb again, try it for another 10 minutes, come back in, coach him, make him go out. But when mommy and daddy are over involved on all these kids businesses, the kids aren't learning. So those are some of the lessons my dad made as he let us run our business ventures. He encouraged us to run our business ventures, he coached us on them, but he didn't do any of the work. So what happened was I got involved in an organization called College Pro Painters. And College Pro was this residential house painting franchise that was operating all over North America and I was so terrified of failing that I memorized their operations manual. So they were really good at giving us the systems and the playbooks. And I was so scared of failing that I memorized the manual and I did everything it said. And I've always thought about business and learning the same way. Now if I had like my Invest in youn Leaders course, I would take the content, I would study the content, I would do exactly that content and I would know that I'm going to do better in my role because the person who done it has done it before me. And I think so often the smart people tend to question everything because they're smart and they try to figure it all out. I, I would just like rip off and duplicate. So if the systems are there, I kind of took those systems and ran with it. And then I didn't have to spend as much time thinking and problem solving and trying to figure it all out. I would just throw my energy and my momentum behind, you know, an easy to implement system. That's where my growth always tend to come from. I also really learned a lot about leading and growing people at College Pro Painters because we went through management training programs. Like I had probably 100 hours training on interviewing and hiring of people. I had dozens of hours of training around time management, project management, around communication, handling, conflict, delegation coaching. So we had this really strong executive training program to give us the skills. Very little training on painting houses actually, but a lot of training on how to lead teams and lead people and leave yourself. And I think companies are missing the opportunity right now and even leaders to be that self driven learner. Go and check out the Invest in your Leaders course, grab a great business book, watch some podcasts and sort of listen to some podcasts, watch some videos and try to grow your skills and your confidence so that you can show up taking on more responsibility and then try to bring some of those systems inside of your company. That's how you get promoted too. You get promoted by being that self driven learner who's trying to grow the organization versus trying to build a silo. Often entrepreneurial companies, the entrepreneur or CEO will have a CEO coach. They'll be in a CEO mastermind group. They'll read books, they'll talk to other business leaders, they'll grow their skills and confidence and connections. But they miss the opportunity to grow the skills and confidence and connections of their leadership team. The real replication and growth comes from growing the skills of people. So what I've always believed is that a leader's core job is to grow people. The VP or the CEO or cooers cmo, whatever your title is, if you're managing people, your job is not to do work. It's to grow the skills and the confidence and the connections of people so that they can do more work that's more predictable at a better ROI than paying you to do work. Right. Our job is to get results through others. We're in a time period now where business is changing, stuff is growing, stuff is moving, things are iterating, competition changes in the economy. It's like everything's faster. Lots of communication with slack and email. So what happens is business people and executives are busy being busy. They're running as fast and as hard as they can. In many ways, they're like the fly trying to bang their head on the window and they're going to keep working harder until they get out that window and they end up dead on the windowsill because they don't stop and look around and go, oh, there's a door right here that's open. I'll just go out the door. And I think that's what happens to many business leaders, many COOs, many CEOs, is they're so busy in the business, working in the business, doing work instead of stopping and saying, wait, I'm going to delegate this to everybody. Oh, I can't delegate it because they don't have the skills. Good. I'm going to delegate it anyway and I'm going to spend my time growing their skills and confidence so that, oh, they can do more of that, so that it frees me up to think, to inspect what I expect, to see the bigger picture. Right. And that's where leader, the really, really good leaders are the ones that are growing people and have free time to think and be strategic and make connections and see what's happening outside the industry and then come back in to delegate more and grow people's skills and confidence more. I focused on was three things. The first was that I wanted to try to turn the company flywheel. And the flywheel was all around culture. Because I wanted to build something a little bit more than a business, a little bit less than a religion. And if we could get into that zone of a cult, our employees would be happier. They would, they would join us faster, they wouldn't quit their jobs. We'd have lower training costs, higher retention, more word of mouth, more productivity. That flywheel would go right. And the better the culture was, we could attract better people, we could grow, we could pay people more. Number two is we focused on making sure that we grew the skill sets of people. It was all around again, growing the skills and confidence of our people. So training them on all the skills and they invest in your leaders course, certifying people in those skills, constantly working to grow their skills and confidence. Because we knew that every year the company was doubling in size, which meant the skills of our people had to double every year too. And if we couldn't get ahead of the curve, we were constantly going to be firing them, having to replace them, having to train them, which would hurt our culture, hurt our productivity. So we got ahead of the curve by growing the skills and always growing the skills of the people, which meant we needed to think about what skills are needed a year out and two years out so we could backfill that, reverse engineer that skill development. And then number three was we realized that we had no money for marketing. So we leverage getting free publicity, getting on radio shows, TV shows, magazine articles, newspaper articles. We were on Oprah. Now it's like being on podcasts. Anytime you can get the media to talk about you, and then you can share that content with your audience, with your listeners, with other media, that flywheel starts to take over. And it doesn't cost much, right? Me being on your podcast is an hour of my time. I'll put it on my website, it'll have backlinks for SEO. So there's all these additional values that I can leverage off PR. We built a really strong PR flywheel inside of 1-800-got junk. And we landed 5200 individual unique stories about our company in six years. And that was before Facebook even started. So we had no social media to share all the PR. But we landed 5200 stories individual uniques in six years. So the first was just understanding how leaders actually grow. Right. So how do adults actually grow? Well, adults grow from learning the concept, from practicing the concept, from using the concept, and then from thinking about the concept later. So if you understand that's how leaders grow, then you can kind of build a training program around a little bit of that growth so that they can actually, you know, grow. The third part is remembering that people are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. So some people learn from watching, some learn from doing, and some learn from actually listening and reading. So you have to build a training program that incorporates all three so that you hit people's primary and secondary learning style. So I understand adult learning and principles. I even teach that in my invest in your leaders course, in the module on classroom teaching. I teach how to build training programs internally so that, that you can train your own people. The second thing that we looked at was what are the core skills that every manager and every leader needs to be good at to get results through people? So they have to be good at situational leadership. They have to be good at coaching. They have to be good at running one on one meetings. They have to be good at delegating projects. They've got to be good at project management, they have to be good at time management. They have to be good at managing email and slack communication, handling conflict. They have to be good at looking at the CEO's vision and reverse engineering that those are kind of the executive functioning skills that everybody needs to be good at. Yes, they need to be good at marketing, if they run marketing. And yes, they'd be good at it if they run it. And yes, they'd be good at using software. But no one ever trained them on the executive functioning skills. So what I looked at was a leader's core job is to grow people and to get stuff done through others. Those are the core skills they need to be good at. That became the core curriculum that I decided on. And yes, we had curriculum for other parts of training. Like we trained the guys how to drive trucks and how to do specific marketing tactics. And so we trained people on what to do. I focused on training people how to do. I noticed years ago that there were a lot of groups for entrepreneurs out there. You know, you've got the Entrepreneurs Organization or eo. You have ypo, which is Young President's Organization. We have vistage, We've got the Genius Network and Baby Bathwater and War Room and gobundance and all these amazing groups for entrepreneurs. And then there's events for marketers and lawyers and engineers and dentists and doctors and neurologists. There's all kinds of industry events for everybody. There was nothing for that second in command. So what happened is COOs kept going to the next closest thing. We kept going to events for entrepreneurs, but we didn't fit in. And it's kind of like a guy showing up at a baby shower. It's cute, but we don't really belong. It's supposed to be the women with the kid. Like it's just, that's just the DNA that's supposed to be at the baby shower. And we realize that we don't fit as soon as we walk into the room. Right. Or it's like the woman who wants to go to the bachelor party. Yeah, she can hang out, she'll Go see strippers. Then all of a sudden she's like, you know what? This is a dude thing. Like, I shouldn't be at a dude. COOs are not like CEOs. We think differently, we perceive the business differently, we operate differently, we solve problems differently, we communicate differently, we have different personality profiles. So we don't have a space in their room. When we go into their room, we feel like we're the odd one out. So I started the COO alliance as a network of second commands. We now have members from 17 countries, and we meet every month for two hours online every month. And then we meet in person every year, once at MIT's Endicott House in Boston and once in Vancouver, Canada. And we get all these coos together to meet in person, to work through issues together, to collaborate together, to learn each other's skills. And it's not me teaching them as much as it is me getting them all together to learn, facilitate, and collaborate with each other. And it's a way for them to grow their confidence, their connections, and their skill set so that they can be better leaders and so they can grow their company. And then membership on that is only $4,900 a year. So it's reasonably easily priced for any company to put people into. And by the way, no entrepreneurs are allowed to come. Like, we don't allow the CEO in the room. If you get five guys together and then you invite three women, the conversation changes. If you can get five guys together to talk about relationships and being a better man and showing up with better polarity and guys will actually go there, but you need to give them the space to go there. Well, that's what we're doing with the COO's is giving them a space to grow without the CEO influencing that conversation. And sometimes the conversation is, my CEO is crazy. And I love that my CEO is crazy. How do I help my CEO embrace their crazy? How do I be the leash to their crazy dragon without choking them? Or how do I be the brakes to their gas without being the parking brake? You know, because every COO wants to do well in their role and. And we need space to be able to talk to other COOs of what they're doing with their crazy. Add bipolar on the spectrum CEO. Right? We've watched a number of our COO members move into the CEO role, which is not very common at all, but we've watched a lot of them grow the skills and confidence and probably just even some inductation from being around me as more entrepreneurial coo, they were able to learn that and move into the COO role. Definitely saw a lot of camaraderie where behind the scenes they were there helping COOs go through tough times. Going through an acquisition, going through folding of a company, going through like being acquired, where they were all there backing each other up and providing input and connections and help to each other outside of the normal meetings. That was pretty powerful to watch them start their own little forum groups even. My wife and I are both kind of tired of being just around the North American audience and North American mindsets. And we wanted to explore the rest of the other 191 countries. Right? There's only between us and Canada. We got two of the 193. We want to check out the other 191 and get to know the people and the way that they think and the way that they act and the way that they live and what do they do for fun and how do they approach politics and how do they approach everything? Relationships and friendships and hobbies and sexuality and psychedelics. And so we're just plugging ourselves into all of these different groups all over the world to get a more global experience in our life. I have a very, I'm lucky to have a very global network of friends now, but that's something we're looking at doing, is how do we expand our really close friendships with really cool people doing real cool stuff. But maybe they're based in Greece or maybe they're from Italy or maybe they're from London or from South Africa. So we're trying to just plug ourselves into the global audience and the global narrative and chase down our bucket list items and then, yes, at the same time, build the COO alliance to continue to be a global, you know, organization for second in commands from all these different countries. The big similarity is that we are all humans and we all struggle with the human condition of, you know, life and family and worry and insecurity and relationships and growing kids and money like we all. And health like we all have those same issues. That's a very global. And so caring about employees tends to pay off. Globally, the differences are things like culture around drive and energy and how fast people make decisions. You know, in Italy it takes forever to make a decision. In the uk, people are more reserved and a little bit more inclusive. And, you know, in Germany and Switzerland, everyone shows up on time for every meeting and they finish every meeting and everyone delivers projects on time. No one misses expectations. Like everything is just deliver what you promise. Is normal. And in the US it's a lot more around culture and bravado and the cult of leadership and social. And that doesn't exist in Latin America. It's not about that at all. The one big thing I've noticed that's drastically different is in the United States specifically and Canada certainly following suit and maybe a little bit even in the UK is there's a lot of focus around work and people working and what you're doing for work and what do you do for work and where do you work and what do you do? And the rest of the world, no one cares about that in the rest of the world. They care about friends and relationships and hobbies and how their soccer team is doing. And they. They spend a lot more time on life and having a good life and having connections with each other. And the US don't even know what to do with vacation time. You know, in Europe, six weeks vacation is normal. In the United States, two weeks is a lot for some people because they don't. They don't have any life. They have no connection to what really matters outside of that. And I think that was what really touched me with John Rulin when he passed away four days ago, was that he's always cared about friends and family. He and I spoke a week ago over video for 45 minutes, and he was talking about his girls and how much he loved his girls and how much he was working on his relationship with his wife, like all the shit that matters. And then 43 minutes into the call, we talked about business. It's great that you enjoy what you do, but you don't want to hear a lawyer talk about being a lawyer. And you don't want to hear a dentist talk about being a dentist. You want to hear a chiropractor talking about being a chiropractor. No one wants to hear you talk about your business either. What we want to hear about is your life and your activities and your hobbies and your bucket list. And I'm glad that you enjoy what you do, but it's boring for everybody else, so. And I think. I think at the end of the day, if you drop dead at 45 years old, is that really how you wanted to spend your entire life? Or would you have rather had had more time with your four little girls or more time with your spouse or more time with your friends? I think John was fairly balanced, but I think a lot of people are not foreign. Definitely. Take a look at investinyourleaders.com that's my leadership course. So it's investinyourleaders.com all of my resources on coaching, group coaching, speaking, everything is on this the Cameron Herald website. So it's CameronHear l-d.com and then all of my books are available on Amazon, Audible and itunes. And then check out the Second in Command podcast anywhere. You listen to podcasts too? We've just had our 400th episode went live.