The Missing Link in Business Strategy | Cameron Herold (Podcast 311)

That's the power of the vivid vision. I get so excited about your business now just hearing the culture component. I want to know the rest of your business. When you share that with potential employees, they want to work for you. Bankers will finance you based on your vivid vision. You'll get partners based on it. You'll get people selling you stuff. Because your vivid vision is so strong, it's incredible how it becomes a magnet for everything around your business.

Ever found yourself yearning to paint a clear picture of your company's future? One that not only draws in the right talent and resources, but also propels you confidently towards your aspirations? Well, today I'm diving deep into the art of crafting a vivid vision for your business. Throughout this episode, I'll unveil how this concept can mold your organization's culture, magnetize the right talent, and set you on a trajectory of unparalleled success. Some of the topics I'll cover are crafting that perfect vivid vision for your enterprise, the pivotal role of core values in sculpting your company's culture. The secret to magnetizing the right talent and partners with your vision.

Why?

A well articulated vivid vision can be your business's superpower, the overlooked element in many mainstream business strategies. And trust me, there's so much more in store.

What did you learn from that first entrepreneurial venture and having 14 employees at the age of 21?

What did I learn? You know, one of the biggest lessons I learned was that it needs to get done, but not by me. And the second one was that being an entrepreneur was about having the free time to do what I wanted as much as it was about making money, because I was making more money than all of my friends who were working for me by a long shot. But I also got to play golf in the middle of the day and do what I like to do when I wanted to do it. And I really learned at a young age that being an entrepreneur was about that free time. The harder part for me, the lesson that I had to unlearn was I was able to do a lot of stuff and so I tended to do it and I needed to learn to delegate quickly. And once I started to learn that, that it needs to get done, not by me. That was pretty powerful.

Cameron, I don't know where to go with this interview. I've got vivid vision. I've got. Your meeting sucks. I've got so many questions I could ask you, but something just popped up. Where do you learn to become an entrepreneur? Because it's not something they Teach in school. I mean, were you born an entrepreneur? Did you have great peers? Where do we start?

It's funny, I just sent a note on Facebook two days ago to the founder of College Pro Painters where I started really my real entrepreneurship journey. Greg Clark started it in 1971. The company just shut down after 50 years this year and I sent him a note. It was my real world MBA and I really learned everything about. I ran a franchise for three summers and then I worked with the head office recruiting and hiring and training franchisees for four years. That's where I learned it was was at College Pro Painters and running a business for them and being trained and being so scared that I was going to fail that I just followed everything in the manual and it really put me in good stead. Now when I read a business book, if I'm going to read it, I'm going to do what it tells me. Whereas so many people read the book and they don't do anything in it. I've always just followed the really good thought leaders and kind of rip off and duplicate. So that was the big one for me. But then secondary. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. My father was an entrepreneur and both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs. So we grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My brother and my sister and myself have all our own companies for between 15 and 25 years.

So I'm a W2 employee. You know, at Jake and Gino we teach individuals and students how to become multifamily entrepreneurs because it's not just buying investing in real estate. You need to real run the business. What's the first thing that they need to do? Let's say they're not from an entrepreneurial background. I know the education we talk about. Education times action equals results. What should they start doing with their mindset? I mean books. Give me a book before Jake you at the end of the show. Where should they start?

Double Double is going to give them all of the best systems and tools that I've used to grow all the companies for sure. The miracle morning for entrepreneurs is great for anybody in that needing to have the mindset and the kind of some of the base methodologies is good. But let me tell you two things that I think are really important for anybody who's starting out in the entrepreneurial journey. The first one is it's not about working hard, it's about working smart. And we've all seen that fly trying to get out the window, right? Working hard, banging its head in the window all day. But if it would step back and take a look. There's a door just over here that's wide open. Just turn and go at the door. So look for the shortcuts, look for the cheat sheets. I was the stupid kid in university. I can pull up my transcript and show you I got C minuses, D pluses in every course in high school and college. So I wasn't the smartest kid in the room, but I was the one that found the cheat sheets. I was the one that found the shortcuts to get an okay grade. And momentum created momentum. So it's not about anything being perfect. It's about getting it. I call it minimum viable everything. Get the flyer done and out the door. Get podcast, interview done and recorded and out the door. Get the sales call done and out the door. But learn from everything that you're doing to make it a little bit better. If you try to perfect everything, it takes too long.

It's a really great point because we see a ton of multifamily investors and there's really two types. There's one that sits on the sidelines. They may educate themselves a lot. And then there's people that do deals. But you know what? We haven't seen someone that's been in it for a while that's just one done one deal, because it's not rocket science. So you have sort of this fence sitter crowd that just continually analyzes, but they never take that action. And I don't know if they think it's a pie in the sky or it's a belief thing or a mindset. And this other group that they get a deal done and then within six months they have another one and then continue to stack on that.

Yeah, well, and I was just thinking about where it comes from is that the momentum creates momentum. So when you do a deal, it creates the learning next deal going. The other part that's key to learn is school system. Us up. Frankly, the school system taught us to memorize everything, be the smartest kid in the class.

I can't remember. That's why I was terrible. It did not serve me at all.

So what we need to unlearn is, no, we don't have to know to do everything. We have to find someone to do the things. So when I started my house painting business, I didn't know how to paint houses. So I hired a guy for two weeks, Campbell Robertson. Campbell Robertson came and trained my first five because I didn't know how to train them. But he did. So I hired him. He Trained my guys. Was it perfect? I don't know, but it was way better than I could do. So we got it done and then we improved and that momentum created momentum, but it was the fear of failing, that. Hiring someone to just get it done instead of me trying to learn. I'm still terrible at painting houses, but as long as you know how to find someone who can, yes, you come and paint my house. I could say, I can get your house painted. I can't paint it. I mean, I could, but I would suck at it. I could find a painter in 15 minutes and I could get it done and I could deliver it on time and on budget. So key is, as entrepreneurs is to delegate everything except genius. To find the two or three things that give you the most energy and do more of that and then delegate the other stuff. If you like selling, sell. If you don't like selling, hire a salesperson. You know, two salespeople that work for me right now, they're 100% commission. They'll both make great revenue this year. There's no risk to me, but I just motivate them, cheer them on, give them skills, find more deals to put in front of them, cheer them on. It needs to get done, but not by me.

Cameron, can you speak to the deep work that you need to do? Because you're probably a really great thinker right now. When you said not work hard. We all get stuck in working hard and not working smart. But to be able to work smart, you really need to shut off the devices. You really need to think and really need. Can you speak to that? How do we get into that mindset? How do we get into that, that rhythm, I guess, or that routine?

Well, it's different for everybody. You know what the school system is, is how do we get in the routine, Teach everybody the same thing, but it doesn't work for everybody. What works really well for me, I'm massively ADD. I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder. My ex wife said if I was paying attention during testing, it would have been 18 for 18. I'm also 11 of 11 traits for bipolar. So I'm clinically a disaster. The way I work well is I find the time of day that I work really well and I work hard in those times. I also move.

What time of day is that for you? Just out of curiosity.

It's early mornings and it's late afternoon. I'm terrible from like 11 till 3 and then I work terrible after like 7 o' clock at night. But. But early mornings, like 6:30 till like 9:30, 10, I can be in the zone. And then like from 3 until 5 o', clock, I can crank through some stuff. I take time off. In the middle of the day, I take time, I shut everything down at 5:30, 6 o' clock every day. I never work nights, ever. And I never work weekends, ever. And I take a lot of vacation time, a lot. But I work. When I work, I rework. The other thing is my ADD gets served by moving around. So I have six different areas in my home that I work and I just stand up. After 20 minutes, I move somewhere else. Because if I sit in the same place, my mind drifts, I wander, I get distracted by all the stuff. But if I can go, okay, I need to move, I'll work on this project at that point. That kind of feeds me as well.

What about creativity though, from the moving around? Because I noticed in myself when I'm in a stagnant environment, the creativity drops drastically. But if I mix that up, it seems to really come alive again. You see that as well?

Absolutely. That's why when you're add, which most entrepreneurs are adding you. And ADD is not a disorder, it's a superpower. My attention deficit disorder shows me everything that's happening. I see what's happening the time my customers, my suppliers, the market. I notice trends, I see something wrong on a spreadsheet, I notice every little spelling mistake on a website. And I get so distracted by all the stuff that I have to delegate it quickly that it can get taken care of. So it's the superpower. If I'm so focused, I miss everything. So the school system taught us that the disorders of the entrepreneur were a problem. But there's not very many successful teachers as entrepreneurs.

I think the other thing everyone needs to know is that the sub modalities, whether you're a visual learner, an auditory learner, or a kinesthetic learner, for me, I need to touch, I need to see visually. If I hear an audiobook, Jake loves them, I just go to sleep. I can use that as a third modality.

Yeah, let me, let me tie into the learning cycle. So you mentioned auditory, visual, kinesthetic, that's how we learn. But the rest of the Lear cycle follows four models of learning. The first is what's called abstract conceptualization. So ac that's when you learn a concept by reading, by watching, by, by doing, you're getting the concept and then you have kind of the practicing or the active experimentation. Ae so you try it out, you practice it, you role play it with someone, you try it out in the mirror, whatever. And then you have the concrete experience from doing, right? You're going to learn from doing it. And then you have the reflective observation ro. And then you complete the. Then you continue the cycle. So let's say we. I wanted to learn how to craft a good memo. I would read about crafting a memo and then I would practice writing a memo. And then I would write a good memo. I have somebody critique it and I'd go back and go, where did it up and what look? And then I'd read about a memo from another group, right watch on how to write them. You kind of keep doing that cycle until you get enough proficiency, whether you're learning how to paint a house or learning to be a better coach or learning about delegation.

It's almost like space repetition with Ken Blanchard talks about, you don't just do it once and forget about it. You have to space it out and keep doing the repetition and keep repeating it. That's very, very important. I love that.

And then pivot as you go though, too, right?

You're going to go to a bank to establish like leasing or financing with a bank. You're going to read about it, learn a little bit. Then you're going to practice pitching, maybe with your wife or a friend. You're going to practice the pitch before you go into the banker. Then you're going to go do it, and then you're going to leave and go, what did I do wrong? What did I do well? What can I do better? Then I'm going to go back, I'm going to watch another video about pitching to a bank and I'll read something else for pitching to a bank and I'll practice that. I'll go pitch to the second bank and you keep repeating the cycle and you get better and better and better and better.

That is awesome. Thank you. No one ever told us that in school. And it's something that I think you're born with. And maybe you're supposed to know something like that, but being conscious and actually doing the work will make you a better student.

I launched a course recently called Investing Leaders, and One of the 12 modules is on teaching. And in the teaching module, I talk about the three styles you mentioned. Auditory, visual, kinesthetic. And the four cycles of learning is if you're going to teach your employees or if you're going to learn yourself, you need to understand this. Otherwise people get frustrated. Like, why didn't I learn? You don't learn from just reading the damn book. You also learn from then practicing it and then doing it and then thinking about what you did wrong and then reading something else. I always, by the way, and if I read a book, it's always tied to a project I'm working on this quarter. If I'm listening to a podcast, it's related to something I'm working on this quarter. I don't do stuff at random because my learning has to be part of the concept that I'm going to be practicing.

I want to touch on Vivid Vision right now really quick because I read the book and that's why I got excited to re interview you because we had you on a couple years ago. I've got my vivid vision here. This is for Q4. I don't want to blast the Jake and Gino team do it yet. I had to pucker up a little bit as I'm writing it. It's a little scary. Cameron, can you tell us what Vivid Vision is and why every entrepreneur needs to have their own vivid vision for their company?

Sure. It's a concept that I learned from an Olympic coach almost 30 years ago who was talking about how high performance athletes visualize themselves performing the event. And what most entrepreneurs have right now is a vision statement or a mission statement. They get all their favorite words, they voted on their favorite words, they took five or six of them, they put them into one sentence, and that was the mission statement. Go team. It doesn't explain your company. The idea with a vivid Vision is you're leaning out three years into the future, describing exactly how your business looks and acts and feels as if it's already come true. Almost like building a home. As a homeowner, I don't know how to build the home. I don't know how to do the electrical, the plumbing, the wiring. I don't know how to hang cabinets. But I know what I want it to look like. And if I can describe the finished home in enough detail to the contractor, the contractor can do the plans or the blueprints to make my vision of my home come true. If I then sign off on the blueprints and he signs off on the vision, he can hand the blueprints to the employees and they can build my dream home without ever talking to me. The vivid Vision is the explanation of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like. So your team can figure out how to make that come true and your team can figure out what things to work on to build your business for you. It supercharges every company.

I mean it's awesome. On ours we have core values, culture, content, media systems, customer service, brand. And then I have the metrics at the end. Let me just share with you the culture. Our culture is a direct result of living our core values which are people first, unwavering ethics, growth, mindset, extreme ownership, make it happen. And the students that we have attract all know our core values and are attracted to the company culture. We hire all team members based on culture fits and look to promote members within the organization to higher positions. We promote our a family type atmosphere within the organization and continue to stress the importance of communicating within the company. We adhere to the Rockefeller habits and are always looking to adding value to the other Rand family entities which are other companies. We're working on a synergistic level with the Rand fam and the power wheel is is turning. Charity is extremely important to the company. We're all partners with the Second Harvest Food bank of East Tennessee helping to eradicate hunger. We host a yearly food drive and have employees participate in events. Jake and Gino is also focused on delivering scholarships to young adults who are looking to learn financial skills through the personal finance academ. Finally, all of our team members are bought into the vehicle. Financial, education and real estate. There's constant growth and improvement throughout the company. Team leaders will always bring solutions to any problems that are confronted. As the leaders, it is our job to ask questions and work as a team to solve the challenges we face.

That's awesome. Like that is written so perfectly. And that's only describing your culture. That's not describing your meetings yet your leadership team, what your customers think. When people read the four pages describing your company, they can't help but want to work for you or work with you or support you or figure out how to help you make sentences of that come true. The thing that I also love. I don't know if you saw me throw my finger up right away when you read out your five. I think there's five core values. You crushed your core values. They're perfect. Most people mess up their core values. Yours are easy to understand. You kept the maximum to four or five core values. They don't need any explanation whatsoever. And I can guarantee you if you read them out, you'd be willing to fire people if they broke them.

We do.

That's the test. That's the power of the vivid vision. I get so excited about your business now just hearing the culture component. I want to know the rest of your business when you Share that with potential employees. They want to work for you. Or they read it and go, I don't want to be a part of this organization. Great, I'm glad I didn't waste my time with you.

Our last hire, we posted stuff like you know about the company like that on there. And she said, I thought you were describing me like I literally saw myself in that role. So it's like yes, yes, 100%.

What's beautiful, is it also someone else read it and go, this doesn't sound like me. So they didn't even bother applying, which is exactly what you want. Bankers will finance you based on your vivid vision, by the way. You'll get partners based on it. You'll get people selling you stuff because your vivid vision is so strong. Like it's incredible how it becomes a magnet for everything around your business. What's missing, we'll know of the book Traction. Gina Wickman did a really good job with the book Traction. But the Vision Traction organizer is only 10 goals. 10 goals is not the same as a four or five page description of your company. You can take the vivid vision and then do your Vision Traction Organizer and then your L10 meetings, everything else to make it come true. The vivid vision is what was missing with Rockefeller habits from Vern Harnish and scaling up. It's what was missing in Traction. It's what missing.

And we've done them all. And so I completely agree. We've done both programs to be.

I'm frankly, I've known Vern for 25 years and I are in strategic abundance 360 together. Like it's just that one missing piece that then their systems help you make it come true. Take a look at some of the examples of some good visions that a friend of mine, Jennifer Houde and her team have written for hundreds of companies. When you add your graphic design elements to it and get a writer to polish it, make it pop off the page and you share your actual designed vivid vision that looks and feels like your brand. Watch what happens to the growth of your company. Then it literally explodes.

And we need this because we're financial stewards. We're teaching people how to become financially free and we want to attract the right people. We don't want to get somebody who's thinking they're going to become rich in 18 months. This is a process. We have a hundred year brand where we're talking about long term growth mindset. So once again I'm going to tell you really everybody out there, pick up the vivid vision Book, do work on yourself, do work on your company. And I think it's in the long term, it'll save you thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars because you'll be hiring the right. You won't be on 30 interviews, you'll be on three interviews because the wrong people won't even be applying. So huge tip. Your next book. Meetings suck. Let's talk about that real quick because I think that's an important component. Everything.

The reality is a meeting is anytime two or more people get together on the phone or over video or in person to discuss and move something forward, the reality is you have to have meetings. No matter what company you're in, you're going to talk to other people to move things forward. So you either have a choice, you're either going to have meetings or you're going to have very highly effective meetings. So years ago I was coaching a company, I'd coached them for six years from about 42 people, up to 700 employees, called Bluegrace Logistics and I was speaking with Bobby Harris, who is the CEO of bluegrace, and he said something about our meetings suck. And I said, well, have you ever trained your employees on how to run good meetings? He said no. And I said, have you ever trained your employees on how to show up and attend and participate in a meeting? He said no. I said, well, meetings don't suck. You suck at a meeting. And he started laughing. And then I went off the top of my head, I said, if we ever sent our kid off to play little league baseball and we didn't teach him how to hold the glove and how to catch a ball and how to toss a ball and how to hold the bat, they would go to their first night at little league and they'd come home and go, daddy, baseball suck. No, Johnny, you suck at baseball, right? So we teach them the basics so that they can go and have a good basic experience at baseball. And yet we have employees running meetings or showing up at meetings every day. On average, employees spend one to two hours of every eight hour day in meetings, on the phone, in video or in person. One to two hours. So they're spending between 12% and 25% of their day doing stuff they have no training at. What the are we doing? It makes no sense why you wouldn't have every employee read the book meeting stock and do a five minute book report on what they learned. That alone spend 15 bucks is going to supercharge the growth on them for a year. So for me, I've always looked at my job as a leader is to grow the skills and the confidence of my employees. The more I grow their confidence, the more they'll grow their skills. The more they grow their skills, the more it grows their confidence, the more like I'm trying to ladder them up. So I just keep investing in giving them the skills at all areas of their job. Again, that invest in your leaders course. There's a module on meetings. There's a module on interviewing. All these managers do job interviews, but they've never been trained on how to do an interview. Of course you get shitty employees if you don't know how to interview them. Coaching, delegation, time management, email management. Have you guys ever been trained on how to manage emails? Nope. But you manage email all day long. So you're doing something, you don't even know how to do it. Yeah, like. No, but there's actually a methodology. There's a methodology for managing things. Time management, product management, conflict managers, methodologies that are used by the best companies on the planet. What I wanted to do is give the very simple versions, because I was the simple guy. That's how I built one, 800 young. Because I trained all of our employees on how to actually run a company. Our business wasn't about junk removal. I went from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in six years. That's tough with no debt. And we gave up no equity, so that's tough to execute that. But you do it by growing people.

14 employees to 3100. You said in five years.

Six and a half. I think back now, I'm like, what the hell was I doing?

Well, the cool part about it is you kept your autonomy. I mean, there's no debt, there's no equity. I mean, it's just basically keeping it for yourself. That's a very challenging thing to do.

We went from $2 million to 106 million in six years. They're now $450 million company. Wow.

So you got vivid vision. You're planning your vision. You got meetings suck. You're planning your meetings. What's something else that entrepreneurs or someone trying to build a business should focus on?

Their confidence. Because every day you're bumping up to another problem, another issue. An audit, a bank that says no, a customer. Somebody quits, my dog's sick. Like, you got to keep your confidence level up. And, you know, you mentioned that as Christians, you know, we're taught to. To be humble. Humility and confidence, like, confidence a point is really good. When you get to the cocky zone, that's not what you want. But protecting your confidence is really, really powerful. You know, the affirmations, the visualizations, the good exercise, the healthy eating, hanging out with successful people, hanging out with people. Like in Masterminds and coaching. If you hang out with negative people, you just get more of that. Right. You have to protect your confidence. As an entrepreneur, is there a habit.

That you do on a daily or weekly basis that has really impacted your life that you want to share with the listeners?

Yeah. Unplugging and realizing that I'm not going to get it all done. When entrepreneurs say I'm just working tonight to catch up, you're lying because you're going to work tomorrow night and the next night and the next night. You're not catching up, you're just working too much. And the reality is you're never going to get the whole list done because as soon as you do, you'll buy another property, you'll add more employees, you'll have bigger goals.

Constant improvement doesn't allow for that. Right.

So what you need to do is Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the space that you give it. Give yourself a container of 8 till 4 or 9 till 3. Give yourself 5 or 6 hours a day to work and really work in that period of time and delegate and work on the critical few things and get some exercise. Like I'm hanging out with my kids today. I'm working out with my personal trainer tonight. I've got a two hour physical this afternoon with a professional doctor group. I take time off every single day. I only allow myself to work one night per quarter to actually catch up for a critical project. And I just don't. I take a lot of vacation time, but it allows me to delegate everything except genius. You know, there's not a single athlete in the world that performs in their sport for 60 hours a week. There's not an athlete on the planet that does that. They cross train, they practice, they take up time off, they relax. Even the most overworked athletes, like baseball players that do 180 games a year, which is insanity, they're not really sitting there playing full out the whole game.

Yeah, I think especially the old guys used to smoke cigarettes and drink while they're doing it. Just helping them through those are the good old days. Hey, I know you're a global guy, but something that's really, and you may or may not have an answer for this, but your take, and specifically in the US on the current labor shortage and you're hearing this, liberals are Saying jobs are not there because the wages are not there and the pay is not there. And the conservatives are saying that the government is paying people to stay home. I don't know if either are correct, and I haven't got a straight answer from anyone yet. But right now it's extremely hard to hire. What's your take on that? If you have one, and then a potential solution going forward.

I was speaking to somebody yesterday and I said, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. And he laughed and he said, yeah, and I'm also delegating to midgets and expecting them to dunk basketball. So you need to decide what stuff needs to get done and what's the proper amount of pay to attract really good people who can actually do it and get more A players and more really good salt. So A players are racehorses, B players are workhorses, C players have to go to the glue factory. Most companies have too many C players taking up some of their payroll. And if you could pay people a little bit more and get true as and Bs, you don't need 50 people, you need 30. So you can pay a bit more. There is massive inflation right now. I don't know if you've been to a restaurant recently, but holy food just got real expensive in restaurants. Like, you used to pay four bucks for a great steak. Now it's like $62. Like, really, like, lattes are like $7.80. Like, everything is expensive. And guess what? Labor is expensive now, too.

If you're not 20% of the money supply in the US or 25 has been printed in the last year, this year.

So if you're not prepared to pay a lot more for labor, like, if you're not prepared to pay 30, 40% more than you did 10 years ago, you're getting crappy employees. And yes, the minimum wage is up and government subsidies are up. So you got to pay more, but pay more.

Where did the job.

Like, where did they go, though? Because I was reading something yesterday.

There's a lot of freelancers right now. There's a lot of employees that no longer will work for. But the reality is you don't need to have employees 50 hours a week working for you coming to your stupid office anyway. What you need is these tasks done. People who are around the world, like, my employees right now. I've got two that live in Canada, one that lives in Texas, one that's in Kenya, one that's in Arizona. Like, I don't even care where they live. I had one Guy, I didn't realize he was in Texas for like a full year. I thought he lived in California, but. So we need to get stuff done use and there's a lot of people freelancing. There's a lot of people that are in the gig economy that are doing their job for six companies. And I think we need to adapt to that very quickly. I read a saying years ago, if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And I think there's a lot of companies out there right now that are not adapting fast enough to this change that's happening. So what they're saying is there's not enough employees. Yeah, there are. They just don't want full time jobs. They want 12 hours a week for you, which you should be fine with if you can figure out. And no great employees are going to work for an average company because the bar has gone up. There's a lot of great companies out there hiring fractional people, freelance people, remote people. And the great people want to work for them. The average people are out there looking at average companies. So you need to be better than the average.

Yeah. It's just wild because from 2019, going into Covid, going into 2021, the labor and the hiring landscape has got flipped upside down. And I'm still like, I'm sort of mentally getting there and we're. And we're trying to pivot and change, you know, to make ourselves more attractive and all these things, but it is definitely different.

Yeah. No one's going back to an office. There's no one. No one Gen Y wants to spend 25 minutes driving to somebody's crappy office and have to go to the same place. That's just not what they want anymore.

Your take is a people seeking more autonomy in their lives. It sounds like with the gigs and then. Yeah.

The freelancers and living everywhere again. I've got one of my guys, he's like, I think you're going to go live in Barbados for six months with my wife and daughter. I'm like, great, as long as you do at your job. I don't care where you live.

You're big on scale and teams and all this. We have a lot of folks growing into multifamily or starting out in multifamily. Best tip. And you've owned real estate. For someone starting to scale an investment.

Business, it's to remember that you have three inputs in your business. You have your people. It might just be Yourself, a couple of employees or freelancers, you have time like days and weeks and months ahead of you and then you have your money and you need to get the highest return on those three inputs, highest return on investment. So I think in real estate you talk about cap rate. Your money has to be working for you to get you some kind of a return. But you need to get the same kind of cap rate off your time. If you're working 50, 60 hours a week, are you getting the right cap rate equivalent? And if you've got employees, you're getting the right cap rate. And I don't think people think about that. They spend a lot of time doing the extraneous, the frivolous, the non result activities. So spend your time like you spend your money and get your people doing the things that are going to get you the highest return. And I think that's how you get scale.

So it's ROI and people, money and time. Then are you maximizing, are you getting the return on your time? I think the money thing is for multifamily because we're so KPI based, that's pretty easy you can say like I.

Yeah, but a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand that one, right? They'll invest 50 grand on a marketing project that they won't invest 50 in a person. Where you guys understand the money side, I think it's about understanding the people and the time side. Enough return off of that.

What project are you excited about right now?

My COO alliance. I'm really focused on growing the only real network in the world. For the second in command. There's all these mastermind groups for CEOs. You got YPO and EO and Vistage, genius Network and Maverick and Baby Bathwater and gobundance and all these amazing groups for entrepreneurs. And there are groups for marketers and engineers and lawyers. So I started one five years ago called the COO alliance and I've got members now from 17 countries. And we're just scaling that up. No entrepreneurs are allowed to join. It's only second in command.

Entrepreneur says, hold my beer. You get no training, but I'm taking it. All right?

Entrepreneurs are a different breed, right? They're a different DNA. The operators, the integrators need to have their time to discuss. Like they want to talk about interviewing for eight hours. For an entrepreneur, interviewing is like a three minute discussion. But for the COOs, they want to talk about all the interview questions and the reference checks and the process and the rating of the resumes and like how do we bring them through and the reverse funnels. We need a place for them.

Cameron, can you answer this question for me? Because I struggle with this and people say you're the one or the other. Can you be an entrepreneur, a visionary and an integrator? Because for me, it seems like I go between the both because I can be visionary, but then again, I like to get into the weeds also. But I can see the vision and I can see going on to the future and the refi enroll and scale in the company. But at the same time, you like.

To get into the weeds for 20 minutes, but then after 20 minutes, you get bored of the weeds and you want to delegate. That's the entrepreneurial visionary integrator. So what happens is that as you scale and grow your company, you start realizing that we start getting in our way, you know, that the. The entrepreneur, we need to get into the weeds for a while, but then we start pissing our employees off.

That explains everything. Because I hate asana, I hate slack, Facebook, can. Can screw off. I can be on there for. All right, you explain something. It's an aha moment for me right there.

See, like, I started coaching entrepreneurs before coaching existed. So I was real. So I started coaching entrepreneurs in 1989. I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs, including Kimbal Musk, Elon's brother, in 1993. The International Federation of Coaches and Coach, you started in the early 90s. So I've been around this entrepreneurial DNA for a long time. They're very, very different breed to a professionally managed CEO of a company. The entrepreneurial DNA is that combination of visionary integrator and get to a point where now you have a management team. What you want to start doing is releasing yourself of stuff that you're not great at, and it doesn't give you energy and it's pissing people off and you start delegating everything except genius and then you stay in your zone.

I'm just laughing because what he's talking about, we have our CEO Jennifer, who when we started talking about hiring and things, it's so spot on because I'm like, here's what we got to do. Let's. Let's do this. But then she'll, you know, if you start getting into those questions about what the hiring looks like and stuff, I'm like, boom, end it now. Put me misery, because it's just not my space.

Have you guys done the Colby? Have you done your Colby A profiles?

Have you done that, Gino?

No, we have not your Colby Profiles are probably like 4, 3, 9, 3. You're very high. Quick start entrepreneurs. Her Colby profile is probably very high. First two numbers high. Fact finder, meaning she needs to ask a bunch of questions to start a project, or she needs to put the system and playbook in place before she starts the project. You guys start the project and figure it out as you go.

It's exactly 100%. 100%. So hardcore. What is it? The disc.

Right.

So I'm a hardcore high D high I.

And she's a high I.

Right.

I'm in 98D.

Yeah. I'm like, yeah, if you keep going off the, like, straightaway center field, that's my D lands and she's over on the I side.

This is Jake in a nutshell. Okay. He reads two sentences of an email. Number one. Number two is don't give me the problem. I want the solution. If you're going to come with a.

Problem right away, come with the solution.

Exactly. And don't draw it out. I mean, this is not drama. Let's just get into it.

Do not start an email with you won't believe can happen. You tell me what happened because I don't want the lead up. I'll freak out on you.

But with Jennifer, Jennifer needs is to just give you more of the details. What you need is the bottom line. The biggest gift you can give to Jennifer, by the way, your coo, is to say, do you have any other questions?

You're so right. It's so important for her to get the stuff out. It's so hard for me to receive it. Yes.

And she needs to catch up with you. So you just say, do you have any other questions? It allows her to ask two or three more questions to catch up and then she can go and run with it.

Yeah.

So, Jake, it's all about the five languages of appreciation.

The five love languages inside business are actually true. Like mine are words of affirmation and physical touch. When I was building one, 800, that's.

Going to get you in trouble there, Cuomo.

High five. Or hug or a pat on the back. That was huge for me. And then great job with the whatever was huge for me. That fed me. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

When you understand this is. It's so important to do these things with your leadership team. Like, I like doing one profile per year. You know, this year let's just do Colby. Next year let's do disc. Next year let's do love languages. But every year let's learn more about each other so that we Become a higher functioning team.

If folks want to learn more about the CEO alliance, where can they go to find out more about that?

CooAlliance.com is the main website for that.

Gino, why don't you take us home here? This has been a interesting little journey I'm going to.

Before I do read Vivid Vision. He has his vivid vision of his SEO alliance in there. That's where I got a lot of it. And it's rip off and duplicate. Just use the verbiage that he has in here. He's done the work for you. Just spend a couple hours to get clarity on what your mission is.

It's really important, Jake, I think, to remember that this is not an overnight thing. You don't start a business and be successful a week later. Like people would be like, oh my gosh, look how great 1-800got junk was. It took a long time to get to the night before we were the overnight success story. You know, like the 14 employees to 3100 employees didn't happen in the first week, in the first month, in the first year. Like it was 2 million to 4 million, 4 to 8, 8 to 16, 16 to 32 to 60, 4 to 106. Like it took time but then all of a sudden the momentum like build like the snowball when you. So just remember that every day you're getting the progress every day try to do three big things that are going to move your company a little bit more forward. And then, you know, three things times 250 business days, 750 things a year. But it takes time.

People always ask us this. They're like, how did you get to the size you are? And I've never seen an ad from you guys. And that comes down to two things. Realistically, if it was my brother's way, we would have had ads live years ago.

At Grow Rev.

The biggest issue ever since the beginning that we've always ran into is we don't have a lead problem. We have a hiring and training problem.