The Secret Formula For Growing Businesses And The COO Role

How are you doing today? Cameron? Can you take us back and tell us a little bit about how you got started and where your entrepreneurial career came about and how you've gotten to where you are today?

Sure, yeah. So I was groomed as an entrepreneur. My father and both my grandfathers, a couple of my aunts and uncles, they all owned their own companies. So all we ever really knew growing up was entrepreneurship. And I grew up in an era when entrepreneurship was not cool. I had probably about 16 different entrepreneurial ventures by the time I was 18 years old. I actually chronicled all of those on a talk. It's on the main Ted.com site. If you go to Ted and look up my name, you'll find my TED Talk. Raising kids as entrepreneurs from 10 years ago. And then when I was 21 years old, I had 12 full time employees in my first company that I really built and ran. I had a company for three years while I was in university. I got involved in a group called College Pro Painters, which ended up being the largest residential house painting company on the planet. I recruited, trained and coached 120 of their franchisees by the time I was 28 years old, I had coached 120 entrepreneurs before coaching was a thing. And I've coached companies now in 28 countries. I've done paid speaking events on six continents and I've written five books that are all on Amazon, Audible and itunes.

So you just been kind of hanging out and things have just been, you know, magically coming your way and all that your whole life, right? They just land in your lap.

You talk about growing 1-800-got junk. You grew several other companies as the COO. And I know a lot of our listeners, they're growing companies themselves. And I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs, when we're starting out, we tend to think, okay, the COO is responsible for growing our company. So the COO is responsible for everything. And he's the guy that makes the decisions and he's the guy that decides if we're going to be successful or not. And some people, people think about the cfo, the chief financial officer. So the guy who's responsible for all the money stuff in the, well, not just the accounting, obviously, but from a high level, all the money stuff. A lot of people don't think about this role as COO and don't recognize the value in a growing company of a coo, a chief operating officer role. Can you talk to us a little bit about, like you as a coo, what your specific role in a company is how do you. Does your role relate to what a CEO does, to what a CFO does, to what other parts of the company do?

Yeah. If you go back over the last number of years, 30, 40 years, and look at some of the best companies that have scaled, that have really grown, there's often almost always been a two in the box kind of model where there was a CEO and a coo. And one of the best examples today is Sheryl Sandberg. Sheryl Sandberg is the COO for Facebook, so she is the second in command to Mark Zuckerberg. And it's a true yin and yang approach where you have Mark's creative and geek and kind of tech and kind of vision, and then you have Cheryl's operational and execution and people and culture side. And they mesh those two together and they're like nitroglycerin, they're on steroids. Harvard actually wrote an article about 15 years ago called the misunderstood role of the COO. And they identified seven distinct types of chief operating officers. So the COO is very different, but they tend to be the person who does everything that the CEO sucks at and everything that the COO doesn't want to do versus the CFO or the CMO or the CTO that tend to stay in their lane on running an area. So sometimes the COO has finance report to them, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the COO has marketing report to them, sometimes they don't. They just tend to operate and run everything that the CEO doesn't love or isn't good at. And a very, very high trust factor is between the COO and CEO. In fact, we actually started an organization three years ago called the COO alliance as a place to give second in commands, a place for them to come and share information with each other.

And so you run COO Alliance. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that organization?

There's just so many groups for entrepreneurs. There's groups for real estate people, there's groups for marketers, there's really great groups for lawyers and engineers and accountants. But there was never a group or a mastermind or a community for the second in command. The place for them to go and share with each other, grow themselves, grow their company, learn how to operate with tighter relationships with their CEO. We have five events per year and the members pick three of the five events to go to. Minimum criteria for membership is 5 million in revenue and 30 employees.

That's awesome. The reason that I was really excited to get you on and I'VE been familiar with your work for a while, but it kind of came top of mind. A couple months ago, we had a guest on Brandon Turner, and Brandon was telling a story about how a couple years ago he had laid out a vision for creating a real estate empire. And over the last 18 months, much of that vision has come to fruition. He has grown a tremendous business. He's acquired nearly a thousand mobile home units. And he credits much of his success to a work that you did, a book that you wrote called Vivid Vision. And I know you've written several books, and I'd love to talk a little bit about the books you've written and just kind of get your expertise in various areas. But I'd love to focus a little bit more for the time being on this book, Vivid Vision, and how it has the ability to take entrepreneurs or want to be entrepreneurs and really focus them and focus their goals and focus their vision on achieving tremendous success. Can you talk to us a little bit about the book Vivid Vision and how it came about?

Sure, yeah. So the concept of the vivid Vision is something that I learned about 20 years ago from an Olympic coach. And I was working with a high performance sports psychologist who coached Olympians. And one of the things that he focused with them on was vision. And he got the athlete to visualize themselves performing their event, and he would get them to close their eyes and see themselves and feel themselves performing. They would literally visualize themselves in every aspect of the game. So we understood how athletes did it, and we looked for an analogy that worked in the business world, and it was home builders. And we found out that home builders used the vision that the homeowner had. And the homeowner would explain the vision of what the home had to look like. And the home builder would create blueprints or plans to make that vision come true. And then the homeowner would sign off on the plans, the contractor would sign off on the vision. They would hand the blueprints to the workers, and the workers would build the house without ever having to talk to the homeowner. That was a perfect handoff. Execution of vision to plan to execution. Well, that never existed in the business world. In the business world, we were told to have a vision statement or a mission statement. That one sentence that was supposed to align everybody. But that sentence didn't explain the culture. It didn't explain the meeting rhythms. It didn't explain how it would operate or what the customers were saying or how the employees were relating with each other. It didn't Talk about your office environment or the leadership teams. The idea of the vivid vision was the entrepreneur leaning out three years into the future and describing every aspect of their company as if it was already built three years from today. So leaning out to December 31, three years out, and describing every aspect of your company as if you were walking around your company. That's the role of the entrepreneurs to describe the future and then let the team figure out how to make that come true. The vision becomes a four or five page written document describing your company in its finished state. And then you get a writer to polish it and make it pop off the page so that people can figure out how to make every sentence come true.

Very cool. And I love how you're very specific in not only the pieces of this in the process to get there, but I keep hearing over and over just this leap from the Olympic athletes to the home builders, to the organizations and companies, and how that one specific word, vision, is prevalent throughout it. It's not just a mission statement. It's not just a nebulous thing that doesn't necessarily mean anything in particular. It's a crystal clear picture. It's something tangible, something you can really look to have people jump on board, all relate with together to execute that vision. Right. So would you say that this vivid vision is important for just individuals or for small businesses starting out for businesses that have already been successful in business? Who is a vivid vision important for?

Yes, yes, and yes. So it's very important for businesses that already exist because they have all these employees, customers and suppliers that need to be aligned with that common purpose of where we're going. So I think of a jigsaw puzzle, that the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle are the vivid vision, the core purpose, the core values, and the bhag. You need all four. And more often than not, companies have been operating without the vivid vision. A small entrepreneurial company needs a vivid vision to align people, to inspire people, to attract new employees, to join you, to attract customers, to trust you, to get people excited with what you're building. You started your podcast off 35ish episodes ago. You had to explain to people what you were building to get the first few guests to say yes. And then after you got the first few guests, it was easier for the others to buy into the vision. When I started my Second in Command podcast two years ago, same thing, I had to explain the vision of what we had. And that gets people excited. It's really important for the startup entrepreneur to have a vivid vision and then lastly, for the individual, why would you wake up every morning and just go through the routine of life instead of having a vision for what you're going to become as a human? What are your family relationships going to be like? What are your relationships as a spouse or a partner? What will your relationship to your friends be like? What will your relationship to health or fitness or finance or food? What do you do for fun and really describing yourself as a human? Maybe two or three page description of you so that you share that with your friends and family and they can start holding you accountable. One of my friends who's going to be in town and a friend of mine is coming out to Vancouver next weekend and he sent me a note and said, hey, are you going to be in town? I said, yeah. And he said, do you want to go do yoga while you're in town? I saw that you like doing yoga and your vivid vision. Maybe we can do yoga together. I'm like, that's awesome. It's better than going for a beer. Let's go to yoga and have coffee afterwards.

That's great.

But he would have never seen that had he not read my vivid vision of me doing yoga and connecting with friends, doing those things.

I love that. And I love how you're talking about this accountability where you're putting it out there, you're getting everybody else on board and they are holding you accountable to it and getting creative and clever on maximizing your time so that you are really doing those things that lead to that vivid vision and what you truly are about as a person.

Yeah, there's two things with that. One is there's some accountability where they're holding me accountable to it. But secondly, and probably more powerful, is they're helping me make it come true. And this friend of mine, Mike, came up to me and he's like, hey, how's it going? I'm like, oh, my God, I haven't seen you in like eight years. And he said, how's your bucket list coming? How's your vivid vision coming? And he read on my vivid vision, this was 10 years ago that I wanted to fly in a private jet. He hooked me up to go for a flight in his private jet. That one sentence was crossed off. Well, now I've flown in a ton of private jets, but that kind of began the process of thinking bigger and connecting with bigger clients.

It's love that.

Yeah, sometimes they just help make stuff come true.

Here's one of the things I love about the idea, the vivid vision and you talk a lot about this in the book, but I think something that jumped out at us when Brandon was on the show and talking about his vivid vision. Typically when we talk about a mission statement or a business plan for a business, we talk about a formal document. We talk about, here's the right format. This is what an angel investor or an investor or a VC or a partner is going to be looking for. Here are the different pieces of it. But when it comes to a vivid vision, there's no correct format, there's no prescribed way of creating it. Brandon talked about he had written a newspaper article and it was basically a four page newspaper article that basically was describing the history of a company that didn't yet exist in the future. And basically looking back on the history of this company that he was going to build. The nice thing about a vivid vision is you can make it anything you want, you can design it any way you want. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the different ways people have designed their vivid visions and espoused their view of their future companies and their future selves?

Yeah, most people don't have the creative idea to take it to the next level. So I give them a framework or a format for it to come out where it becomes a design elemented, professionally written, four to five page description of your company. Some people have done like the newspaper articles, others have done press releases that they've written about their future company. Others have written speeches where they've delivered a speech. I had someone who walked into a conference room with 500 of their employees and said, close your eyes, today is 2012. I want you to lean out into the future and imagine. And we're all walking around Hawaii and he started describing his company and they're like, what the hell are you talking about? This is 2009. But he literally got 500 people to move themselves into the future. I've had other people have done draw shop videos of their vivid vision where they've created a draw shop. You know, you have the hand drawing, you know, I've had people do it to music where they've done design elements and videos to it to music. So there's lots of ways to do it. And then I've also had people roll out the vivid vision to their employees or if they do a personal one, and then they get their employees to do a vision board of what the vivid vision means to them. So they might have a different idea of what a group activity means. Or we hang out together as a group so they Put some pictures on their vision board that represent that thing that excited them, and they're working towards that thing. So sometimes vision boards are the next level afterwards to keep anchoring it. And then lastly, I find that a lot of people are starting to do audio recordings of their vivid vision, and they listen to the audio recording on their drive to work, or during a morning meditation, or when they're doing their peloton bike ride, whatever. They're listening to their vivid vision three or four or five times a week.

That's really cool. So it sounds like the principles in crafting and creating one are all the same within the framework that you've laid out. But then everybody can really customize it to what resonates the most with them personally. And then, like you said, drive it down through the organization by having other people customize what it means and what's most impactful for them and how that relates to the overall bigger vision. Right.

Yeah. I think we're seeing the overlap with sports there as well, where a lot of athletes that have used the visualization process, we take what they've used in visualization and taking that into the business or personal use now as well. Like the process of a vision board is something athletes have used, or the process of visualization and listening to themselves over and over again as an athletic principle.

Excellent. So when. When you're talking about somebody developing this vivid vision from the beginning, do you. Who do you recommend we work with? Do we do it as an individual or do we partner up with a partner, a spouse, or with other people on your team? Or do you recommend right off the bat, people get input from other business associates or mentors or other people that they're working with another company, who is that person who should be. Or people who should be putting that together from the get go?

Yeah. So the entrepreneur is person to write the first draft version one of their vivid vision, and then they would pass that to a copywriter to make it pop off the page. But it's really up to the entrepreneur to decide where the company's going, what the company looks like, and then get a whole bunch of other employees to say, hell yeah, I'm with you. Or, you know what? I think I should change buses and go work for another company. But when the entrepreneur tries to get a whole bunch of other people to help craft the vivid vision, it's kind of like a homeowner who says, I'll go get a bunch of my neighbors and some of my friends and family to help me design what my house should look like. No, no, this is your home. Like, get the pictures out of magazines, get sketches, do drawings, think about what your home should look and feel like, and get the contractor to figure out the plans to make that come through. But if you get too many people to do it, it'll be nice. But we have different tastes. Right?

That's a beautiful clarification.

Yeah. I was just going to say it's much like corporate culture, and we like to think of corporate culture as being defined by the people that work in the business and the managers business. But at the end of the day, corporate culture is driven from the top, and it's often driven from that single person at the top, maybe a couple people at the top, who are often. They're drilling down the things that they care about and their beliefs and their mentality and what's important to them. And they expect everybody below them ultimately either has to buy in or leave Your vision for your company. It's not going to work. It has to come down from the top.

Yeah. I have a great example of when this happened was about 15 years ago. I was teaching a company. I coached big companies all over the world. And one of the clients I was coaching had 80 employees. And we were getting ready to roll out his vivid vision to all 80 of his employees. We took the whole company off site. Every single employee locked the doors for the day, took everybody off site for the day. And at the end of running this training session and doing presentations to them, the CEO stood up and started to read out the vivid vision to all the employees. And at the end, he said, you know, about 15% of you hate what you just heard. And he said, that's okay. Today is the right time for you to quit, because this is exactly what we're building. He went to the next slide and said, tomorrow when you go to work, please go to this office address, because today when we were off site, a moving company came and has packed up our entire company and moved us to the new location. About six weeks later, 15% of his company had quit. Two years later, Dean's company, Citymax, ranked as the number two company in British Columbia, Canada, to work for. But you have to be prepared to roll out something that polarizes, because then it attracts and it repels even your podcast. There's a certain demographic that loves it. There's a certain demographic. You're like, this isn't for me. They want a finance podcast or they want an art podcast. You can't be all things to all people, right?

Exactly. And that like you said, when you're not doing it to please everybody else. Sounds like you should almost make it a challenge to yourself when you're developing this vivid vision to say, how crystal clear can I be? So that it truly will polarize a lot of people, it will make a lot of people not want to be part of this anymore so that I really can focus on moving forward with the vision that I've set out for my company. Right?

Yep. Exactly right.

That's awesome. So if I have a company and I'm literally interviewing an employee for my company, should I be sharing my vivid vision with that employee that I'm interviewing and basically saying, here's how we expect our company to grow. Here's what we value at this company, and so they can make an informed decision?

I would not share it with them during the interview. I would share it with them before you decide to interview them.

Oh, okay.

I only want to spend time with employees who are already resonating and vibrating and excited about the vision. I want to push potential employees away before I waste any time with them. So what we do is anytime a resume comes in, we hit them with an email right away saying, thanks for your resume. Please read our vivid vision of what our company looks like three years from now. Read this recent article of us in the media and then reply now and put interview me in the subject line and we'll bring you in for a group interview. The only people who reply are the ones that are excited. I've already pushed away the ones that don't like the future.

That's a really great tip. So you're not even wasting time with people that aren't on board from the get go.

The vivid vision becomes a magnet for those who are excited because they've never.

Seen anything like this because it's so unique. That's really cool. So you create it. You are putting it out there to people who even send resumes to make sure that everybody is on board and then some. So what's next? How do you stay accountable with it on a daily basis and stay on track and really implement it into every facet of your business each and every day? What are those things we need to do?

Yeah. So the first process is making sure that every employee has read the Vivid vision. They have a copy of the vivid vision that they can actually refer back to. I like pulling out the Vivid vision every quarter and having every employee, every customer, and even suppliers read the Vivid Vision every quarter. I bring the vivid vision into every quarterly planning meeting so that we look at what the vision of the company is in the future. And then we start talking about, about how to reverse engineer that. And then I have a Word document copy of it so that as each sentence of it starts to become true, I highlight the sentence in green. And then I have other sections that we're working on that are in red. So you start seeing it. Every quarter becomes more and more green. Last thing that we do is we take any specific sections, any specific sentences that are like project based things that we can work on. We create a spreadsheet kind of by paragraph so that you can actually see which things can become goals, that you can have specific projects that will make those come true. And you start to plan those out using a sauna or base camp. Very similar to building a house, right?

Yeah.

Building a home. You've got the foundation, you put up the walls, putting the electrical and the plumbing. You build a business or you build your life the same way.

We could talk about Vivid Vision all day. And I think anybody that's listening to this should go out and get the book. But this isn't your only book. You have a number of books. You have. Well, your first book, I believe, was Double Double, which talked about how to double your revenue and your profit in your business in three years. I think that was the first book where you actually mention Vivid Vision. So this has kind of been a theme throughout all your books. One of the books you're best known for is you co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs with Hal Elrod. I absolutely love that book. Could you talk to us a little bit about what that book was about and some of the tips for us as entrepreneurs?

Hal Elrod and I were both members of an organization called the Genius Network. And when we were talking at one of the Genius Network events, we agreed to co author the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs Together. Hal had created something called the Morning Savers. And the Morning Savers was a six letter acronym for the habits that he used to start his day. And they started off with silence and then doing A, which is your affirmation. Then you go into visualization and then E is your exercise. And then reading, whether it's just listening to an audiobook or listening to a podcast, and then the final S is scribing, which is just your five minute journal or any kind of journaling or writing. Those were Hal's Morning Savers. And then what I brought into the book was kind of the rest of the day. So it was areas around visualization, areas around leveraging a second in command and then just a lot of personal principles related to focus and how to get stuff done with less people faster. Because I've struggled with so much add, I've had to put systems in place to allow me to be hyper productive while the ADD can actually be very distracting. So I talk about a lot of those success habits that anybody can use in business.

It's very noteworthy that when you're talking about the parts of that book that you were an expert in that you really brought to the table, there are a lot of those things, like you said, around systems processes that are more of the traditional like COO role. Right. It's fascinating how it's just interwoven through all facets of what you do. You're partnering with Hal, for example, on that book and he brings more, you know, the more high level visioning type of stuff and you are like more systems process type of guy. So I think that's fascinating how you've made that work for you on so many levels.

Cameron, can you give some of our listeners. A lot of our listeners are wannabe entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs. They basically, maybe some of them have just launched their businesses. What are some of the best tips that you can give our listeners on how they can really start to get their businesses off their ground, how they can start to scale and grow their businesses?

Sure. So I'm gonna give you what I call the secret formula. So the secret formula to success is F times F times E. The first F is focus. So if you think about, you know, yourself as an entrepreneur or your employees, how focused are you on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, you know, are you focused on your goals? Are you focused on a market? Are you focused on a product? Or are you distracted by social media? Are you distracted by the busy work? Are you distracted by all the things you could do instead of focusing on the things you know you need to do? Are you working on the critical few things versus the important many? Are you working on things that will help you launch a rocket that will stay in orbit so you can launch it again and stay in orbit? Or are you just working on stuff that you always have to be busy? I think a lot of entrepreneurs get distracted by the busy work. They get distracted by social media, but they don't necessarily work on the highest ROI activities. And we only have three inputs. We have people, we have time, and we have money. With those three inputs, what's the highest return on those investments that you're going to get? So that's the first one is focus. And what I would ask yourself, on a scale of 1 to 100%, put down what percent focused you are. The second F. So F times F times E is faith. That's how much faith do you have in yourself, in your market, in your business, in the model, in your community? How much faith do you have in your team? Or are you getting shaky? Are you worried? Because when you start losing confidence, when you start losing faith, that really shakes everything. So it's really about protecting your confidence, protecting your faith in those things. So again, I would ask yourself to rate yourself as a percentage, how much faith do you have in all of those things? And give yourself a rating of somewhere between 1 and 100% on faith. And you can do this on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly, quarterly. Right? You can rate yourself and then the E is effort. You know, how much effort are you putting in? You know, a lot of people think that, you know, well, being an employee is the same as being an entrepreneur, right? When you're an entrepreneur, you should be able to work 9 to 5. No, not at all. Being an entrepreneur is more like a five to nine job. You're always thinking about it, you're always writing notes about it, you're always worrying about it, you're always obsessing about it. And people think that it's so easy to start a company and make a lot of money because they waste time in a corporate world or in a normal job. Well, that's not true. If you want to be in the top 1% of all individuals in terms of money and free time, it's a lot of work. So rate yourself as how much effort are you putting in? Your success comes from the multiplication of those three. So let's say that you gave yourself 50% focus times 50% faith times 50% effort. That gives you a 12.5% chance of success. So you think, okay, well, let's get to 80% focus times 80% faith times 80% effort.

Right?

That sounds pretty good. That multiplies up to 51.2% chance of success. So truly being successful as an entrepreneur in the startup arena or in the medium, enterprise arena, and even more when you get into the enterprise level is around Getting yourself to 98% Focus times 98% Faith times 98% Effort and working to get those levels always up because that multiplies up to a 94% chance of success. I'm okay with 6% failure odds.

I absolutely love that. And I think this just reinforces that COO mentality that you have. It's all about efficiency and it's all about optimization and it's all about eking out every last percent. Because when you multiply out the percentages, 1 or 2 or 3% drop, multiplied by 1 or 2 or 3% multiplied by 1 or 2 or 3%. I mean, if you drop 3% on each of those three times three times three, it multiplies out quickly. It's exponential, not linear. You mentioned the job that you had or the company that you started when you were 21, but sounds to me like you probably were doing stuff before you were 20, 21 years old. So what was the very first, first job you ever had and what lessons did you take from it?

The first job or the first little business venture?

I'm going to let you tell me, which one did you learn more from?

I probably learned more from having a newspaper when I was around 11 years old. And I learned about customer service. I learned about handling rejection. I learned that I made all my money in tips, which was based on customer service and blowing people away. I learned that I could hire someone to deliver papers to a whole bunch of houses and I could collect the money at the end of the week. And I made the money on tips and I could, I could pay them a wage. I got in trouble for it because it was my brother. I was hiring half my work and my dad praised me at the same time. I think I learned a lot from that. But my first business venture, I was collecting coat hangers door to door and selling them to dry cleaners because they paid a recycling fee.

No kidding.

I was seven years old. They used to give you two cents per coat hanger. And my mom caught me phoning everyone in the yellow pages. And I had someone who wanted to pay me three cents and I asked for four. And I finally said, how about we do three and a half cents?

And laughing.

And he said, how old are you? And I said, I'm seven. And he said, fine. He goes, I'll give you three and a half cents a coat hanger. And then my mom was standing there and she's looking and she's like, but where are you going to get them? And I opened up my closet and they were filled with coat hangers. Because I'm going door to door in the neighborhood collecting them from all the neighbors. That was just me spotting an opportunity and recognizing my mom was bringing coat hangers in and getting paid. I could do that too. And then negotiating, you just had to hustle and phone everybody.

Wow.

Like a seven year old does arbitrage.

At seven?

Yeah. So I was seven years old. I was in grade two.

That's amazing. In second grade. I love it. Okay, so you had so many entrepreneurial ventures along the way. I would love to know, is there some opportunity at some point that you decided, no, I'm not going to do that. It's an opportunity that you said no to. And in retrospect, you think it was the right decision?

Well, I've got one that I said no to. That, in retrospect, was a horrible decision. The summer of 2008, Tim Ferriss was a good friend of mine. I was taking Tim to his first Burning Man. He called me the night before and said he asked if a friend could come with him. And I said for sure. This friend was pitching us on this business idea, and he was explaining that you would go to an app store, and we didn't know what the app store was like. Is it like a 7 11? Do you have to go to the mall to go to this app store? He's like a website on your phone. You'll go to a website and you'll download another website. I'm like, okay, so we'll go to. We'll download an app, right? And then what do you do when you're on this app? Well, you'll press a button and, like, limousines and taxis will come to you. That is the stupidest idea we'd ever heard. And it was Garrett Camp, who was the founder of Uber. Six months before he hired Travis, Garrett was pitching us on Uber, and four of us told him it was the stupidest idea we'd ever heard of.

Wow, that's crazy. And probably one of the more complicated COO positions on the planet. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

That's awesome. So in every industry, there's a lot of bad advice that floats around in your industry, whether it be as a coo, whether it be as a mentor, a coach, a business owner. What is some of the worst advice you tend to hear, and how would you flip that around and turn that into good advice for our listeners?

I think a lot of the advice that we get is based on opinion or based on experience without having enough data to understand if that advice is applicable. So somebody saying you should be advertising on, really? Do you know what my client is? Do you know what the demographic is? Do you know what my lifetime value is? Do you know what my cost per acquisition is? Do you know what my business model is? Do you know where my customers spend their time? Oh, then maybe I should not be advertising on that. Medium. Maybe I should be advertising on this medium. There's a lot of opinions on. You should be on Facebook, LinkedIn, marketing, Google Radio, TV, billboard, outdoor, print, newspaper. So I think we have to be very careful with listening to the advice until the people giving it have enough data. I frequently will get asked, you know, who should I get as a coach? That's a stupid question. The world's littered with coaches. What do you want to learn? What do you need to improve on? What kind of a coach are you thinking of looking for? What have you had in the past as coaching that might tell you what kind of a coach you need? But, you know, Marshall Goldsmith is a great coach, but he's 250,000 a year. Oh, you don't have that budget. Okay. And you want to learn about running a small business not working on mindset. So, yeah, Marshall's a terrible coach. You know, and Tiger woods is a coach. Oh, that's a golf coach. So I think people are very, very quick to give opinions on you, and they're usually trying to help. But opinions are like a holes. We all have one.

Excellent.

Okay.

What is something along the way in either your personal or professional life that you've splurged on that was totally worth it?

Well, my Tesla Model S P90D was ridiculous and awesome. And, you know, it's $130,000 vehicle, but it was spectacular. But years ago, I went by helicopter from Kathmandu to Everest base camp for champagne breakfast, and that was a big splurge. That was totally worth it at the time.

Awesome experience.

Yeah.

Just what a perfect time to just get out there and do that Vivid Vision now. And as long as we're at the beginning of this again, this new year with new clients, new customers, new employees, new initiatives, why not just make that happen now so it's really relevant, really timely, and I absolutely loved it.

Yes. So everybody go out, grab a copy of Vivid Vision, grab a copy of the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs or any of the other books that he has that sound really awesome.