The Secret to True Fulfillment for Business Owners

If you're always trying to get to the horizon, if you're only going to be happy when you get to the horizon, you forget to look in the rearview mirror to see how far you've come. You forget to enjoy the drive because you're never going to get to the horizon. It's going to keep moving. It's always going to go further ahead. So if it's always like, I'm going to wait until I'm retired, you've missed 60 years of being retired. You missed 60 years of having a great life. I'm not saying to put stuff on hold that I'm saying you can enjoy the journey as much as you enjoy the destination. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. I was raised by a father who was an entrepreneur and two sets of grandparents that were entrepreneurs. So my brother, my sister and myself have all run our own companies for between 17 and 25 years. I had always kind of thought of entrepreneurship as a journey that I really should be going after and that we were always taught that having a job was really a bad idea. I'm a dad. I'm a global nomad. My wife and I have been traveling around the world for the last three years. And I run an organization called the COO alliance, which is a large mastermind community. For the second in command. I have a course that I launched called Invest in youn Leaders, which is how youw Grow youw Leadership Team skills. I've written six books and I've also been paid to speak in 28 countries, soon to be 29. And I've been paid to speak on every continent, including Antarctica. I open. I opened the west coast of the United States for College Pro Painters. In fact, I was just down there. Opened up Washington in Oregon for College Pro Painters. Did some recruiting in Idaho as well. I was then a partner in the franchising group for what is now called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States and was Boyd Auto Body in Canada. We built that company up and took it public. Then I was also hired as the president of a private currency company that we built and sold back in 2000. And then I joined my best friend Brian. He was building up what was called the Rubbish Boys. I joined him and called the name, changed the name over to 1-800-GOTJUNK and I joined him as employee number 14. I was the second in command as chief operating officer. And we grew the company out to $106 million in revenue in six and a half years. 3100 employees system wide. We were operating in four countries, 330 cities. But I left that company 17 years ago. So I've been working behind the scenes with clients now in about 25, 26 countries all over the world. The current COO, Eric Church, has been with them now as the COO for 13 years. Eric and I started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada, in 1987. I was president the year one. Eric was president the second year. And now here we are 35 years later, and he's the COO of 1-800-got- junk. And I was there in the early days. What's amazing is he would have been horrible in the first seven years, and I would have been horrible from the 100 million to the 450 million. We were really there with the right CEO match, but we were there for the right season of the organization, for our skill sets to match up. We only build a company for one out of three reasons. Either to put a kind of stake in the ground or a flag in the ground to say that we've accomplished something, right? We're trying to get praise. Finally. We're trying to prove that we're not stupid because we were told we were stupid in school. We're trying to do something and say that we accomplished it. So that's number one. Number two is to give us money, right? And at some point, we've built it big enough that we've got enough money coming in. And number three is to give us free time, right? To allow us to do what we want, when we want, wherever we want. That was actually the core reason for me starting a company was so that I could control my time. It was a lesson my dad taught me at a very young age. What happens to most entrepreneurs, or many entrepreneurs is they lose. Lose sight of who they are as a person. They don't have any hobbies, they don't have any things that they're chasing. They're not trying to learn anything. And they keep telling themselves, oh, my business is my hobby. Well, then your hobby sucks, because I don't want to hear about your hobby. You know, no more would you want to hear about my hobby if I was a lawyer or a dentist or an accountant or an insurance salesman. You wouldn't want to hear, what would I do to make money. I don't want to hear about what you do to make money. But because many entrepreneurs lose sight of their hobbies, lose sight of self, lose sight of their relationships with themselves, their spouse, their kids, their friends, they end up having nothing left other than their business, which is sad. So what happens to many is we get to a stage in our career or in our life where we've got the business, it's up and running, we got enough cash. Now we're like, oh, if I actually hire a second in command or if I build the company for the right reason, I can have my life back. When they decide to have their life back, their companies often go to the next level very, very quickly because they start delegating everything except genius. They start building out the right teams. They start building the business for the right reason. At that point, you know, at some point, you have enough money, right? I had memberships at two amazing golf clubs, an amazing tennis club. I was flying private. I had two unbelievable cars. I was traveling all over the world. How much more money do you really need? So three years ago, we sold everything. Clearly, I didn't need that much money. Now it's like, you know, I only own two pair of jeans and a pair of beige pants where I used to have closets filled with stuff, right? I got rid of the golf club memberships, I got rid of the cars, sold all the furniture. What I need now is experiences. What I crave now is relationships. What I want now is growth as a person, as a friend, as a husband, as a lover, as a dad. I'm doing those things, and I find those much more meaningful and much more satisfying than stuff. And then also, at the end of the day, I even avoid the question when I meet people who say, like, what do you do? I'm like, oh, I hike and I travel. I love cooking. I go to festivals. Like, no, what do you do to make money? I'm like, yeah, I don't talk about that. And it really messes with them. And I'm trying to surround myself with more and more people who don't talk about what they do to make money, who do talk about their hobbies and their passions and what they're learning and what they're working on and what they're involved in. And the, oh, what I do to make money is kind of secondary to that. Even if we love our business, it's not our reason for waking up in the morning. It's just part of what makes us us or part of what we do with our time. And none of this actually matters. And this is just what you're doing to make money. And at the end of the day, it's kind of like what Ram Dass said, that we're all just walking each other home. At the end of the day, if you don't decide to do other things with your life, at some point, it is the end of your life. Like, I'm sorry, regardless of whether you have a plan or not, you are going to die, right? So why not decide to have the best possible life that we can? Why not engage in the best hobbies and have the most fun and connect with the best people instead of getting sucked into the day to day of our business or getting sucked into the day to day of social media or, you know, watching reality TV or kind of being bored. Right. That was one of the reasons why my wife and I decided to sell everything was there's so much out there to explore, there's so much out there to see. There's so much out there to be excited about and to try and to experience. I would rather go through that as my life's journey. And maybe I'm also finally understanding life. You know, my dad passed away a year and a half ago. My mom died 20 years ago. I was 35 years old and experienced death for the first time. When my mom died, actually I was 37. So I really didn't have a good understanding of how fragile life is and what life was all about until maybe I was, you know, approaching middle age. And you know, what's interesting is it's very European to spend time with friends and family and hobbies. It's very, sadly, very North American to be so obsessed with working and what we do for work. You know, my wife and I have been to 49 countries in the last three years. And so we have a very global perspective on, on life and what life can mean. And the rest of the world doesn't obsess about what they do. And then they're, by the way, extraordinarily successful in their careers, but they don't obsess about it. It's not their reason for waking up in the morning. It's part of who they are. Well, what, you know, what's really interesting is to observe what a different class or a different group of people, a different cohort of people think of work. And it's kind of the blue collar working class. They don't bring homework with them, they don't work nights, they don't work weekends. They, they go to work, they put in a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, they shut the door and they go and have a life and they spend time with friends, spend time with, with family, with hobbies, with activities or maybe social media, whatever else they're doing after hours. But they're not obsessed with work. And I think this obsession with work and this workaholic thing, I think it's certainly breaking. And I think Covid gave us some of that back where we were forced to be around friends and family a little bit more. And a lot of people liked the taste of that, which I think is really good. And then I think the other part is we're, we're no longer spending time driving to an office and driving back from an office, which for many have given us some of our freedom back too, some of our time back. I think it, it does, but I don't think it, I think we can learn a lot of the lessons if we're open to learning at a younger age. I had the younger age lessons of having balance. When I was 20 years old, I had 12 full time employees. I was running my own company at 20 and my dad got me to re engage with some of my hobbies and activities. When I was 22, the third year of running my business, I started playing more golf and windsurfing and spending more time out in the lake and with friends and a little more time of delegating and getting the business to run itself. But I also developed some very bad habits of becoming and getting more energy from work. I found that having connections with friends was hard. So instead of learning that and working on that, I defaulted back to work. So I think I've gone through those migrations and I think I told myself some of the lies earlier on that, you know, I needed to work hard. I had a stage in my career in business when I was building companies. In fact, it was even in the, in the first couple years of 1, 800, got junk. And the three companies prior where I was playing a lot of intramural sports, I was playing rollerblade hockey, ultimate Frisbee on a couple of teams, beach volleyball. Like I was playing sports a few days a week. I was running more, I was hiking more. I think I was definitely more engaged in activities. But that was pre Internet, pre cell phone, pre kind of being tethered to our business. And I think we're having to relearn some of that. I think the true addictive nature of technology has pulled some of us even back further into that abyss or into that dark hole more than we even are aware. You know, I remember both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs and they were able to go play golf, but they didn't have a cell phone to check in on work. So they disconnected for five hours and hung out with their friends and they were very present. So I think we're lying to ourselves about the work hard part because I, you know, we can go back a generation and they certainly worked hard, but I think they had more balanced lives than we do now, probably because of technology. So we need to learn that skill. This Friday night, my wife and I are off to a one week cleanse, you know, doing a full body cleanse. We're working on all these nutritional stuff, we're doing yoga and meditation and mindfulness stuff, lots of dietary stuff, but we're also going on a full technology cleanse for seven days. So no, no laptops, no iPhones, no techno televisions at all for seven days. So that's going to be really intriguing to see how that full detox goes with everything. But I think it's needed and I think that's something. It's one of the reasons why we run companies is to give ourselves that free time. But we forget that it's then about us taking that free time, right? It's about allowing our employees to run the company for us and delegating everything except genius and, you know, giving them the freedom to actually scale and to work on themselves and even to delegate more to them and spend time growing their skills and growing their confidence so that we don't feel we need to be as involved in the day to day. I wrote a four page description of my life three years from now. I called it my personal vivid vision. And then my wife and I wrote a four or five page description of our relationship together, every aspect of how we wanted to show up three years from now. So reverse engineering that. I think employees need to do that as well. Employees need to decide who do they want to be as a dad, as a friend, as a lover, as a person, as, you know, how do they want to. What kind of hobbies do they want to be engaged in and really start thinking about their lives more intentionally? I think we're often going through this journey and we kind of wake up one day and go, oh sh T, I got old. No one's forcing you to do that, right? I think if we can slow it down and say, like, begin with that end in mind, as Stephen Covey talked about, right? Decide where we're going and reverse engineer that I was shown at a very young age to build your plan and work your plan. It's like plan your life and then reverse engineer that and figure out how to make that come true. It's also more exciting to be able to do that. It also allows you to really Be much more focused and much more intentional in your work. If you don't give yourself 80 hours a week to do it, you can only, you can only sit on one toilet at a time. And if you try to sit on more than one toilet, it gets kind of messy. There's actually, there's actually some systems in place to run multiple companies. And if company, if entrepreneurs would follow those core systems, you can have multiple companies up and running and run them successfully. But you need to make sure that you have that systematic approach for each of them. Yeah, again, a lot of entrepreneurs are so focused on, you know, I got 13 operating companies. Great. But how's your relationship with your wife? How's your relationship with your kids? What are your hobbies? What are you doing for fun? What are you doing as charity? What are you doing to build your city, your country that you live in? What are you doing to enjoy life? And their eyes will glaze over. They've completely lost sight of that. I think it's the rare, rare individuals who are highly successful and running companies and have balanced lives. And it's the same of anyone who's highly successful in their career. If that's all you do, you're going to miss out because you're now missing out. Then you start using kind of counter that, right. You end up using drugs or alcohol or sex or some kind of form of addiction or work becomes some of that addiction too. I talked to my son about this just a couple days ago and I said that someone living in Vancouver can have a very, very good life with no money. You can go hiking for free and go to tons and tons of great hikes. I mean, you can take the bus there, you can drive there. Like you have base money to cover basic needs, but you don't need to have millions of dollars to go around the world. You can go travel around British Columbia, you can go explore in your own city. You can go, go to the galleries and the museums and theater and go watch the performances and go check out all the street art and you know, you can go explore the food in different parts of the city. You can go check out all the street food in different parts of the city. Like there's so much that you can learn on YouTube and on Google and on Wikipedia that you can actually decide to learn hobbies and. But again, most people don't do that. They end up getting sucked back into the day to day or they get sucked back into social media. I think we have to decide what we want our life to be like and we have to go make that happen. And then also try to find people that are already doing it that you're inspired by. It's kind of like a person says, oh, I can't climb Mount Everest. Well, what about the guy that just climbed Mount Everest, had one leg, right? Or I can't do that. What about the guy that has no arms and no legs and is traveling around the world speaking, like, what about that guy? Or, well, I can't do that. What about the blind person that just ran? We give ourselves all these excuses and then we just don't try. Yeah, I think. I think it's a real cop out to say, well, it's easy for Cameron because he has money. I was traveling around the world in 1991. I did 18 countries by myself in 1991 with a backpack, and I stayed in youth hostels. And I see parents now traveling with kids under 8 years old staying in hostels and doing it on a budget. I think it's an excuse. Just as it was an excuse when I used to say, I have to work tonight to catch up. That was bullshit. I had nothing to catch up. Whatever work I got done, I was gonna have more work tomorrow. I was gonna set more goals, buy another company, spin off a division, grow. I always had more to do. What I was doing was avoiding relationships, avoiding pain, avoiding insecurity, avoiding the problems. And I was surrounding myself with the one thing that gave me satisfaction, which was the dopamine rush at working. So there's a concept that a friend of mine, Dan Sullivan, and another friend of mine, Ben Hardy, wrote about, or I think it was just Dan did, about the Gap, called the Gap in the Game. Ben might have been a co author on the Gap in the Game with Dan, with Dan Sullivan. But the concept is, if you're always trying to get to the horizon, if you're only going to be happy when you get to the horizon, you forget to look in the rearview mirror to see how far you've come. You forget to enjoy the drive because you're never going to get to the horizon. It's going to keep moving. It's always going to go further ahead. So if it's always like, I'm going to wait until I'm retired, you've missed 60 years of being retired. You missed 60 years of having a great life. You've also missed 60 years of being able to delegate to people and grow them and see them excited about their career because they're able to work on bigger stuff so you can have a better Life. I'm not saying to put stuff on hold, but I'm saying you can enjoy the journey as most, as much as you enjoy the destination. There's a lot of people who maybe work lots, but they probably don't waste time. There's a lot of people that also waste a lot of time, right? A lot of time getting sucked away on social media. A lot of time frittering around doing nothing, you know, polishing the stone that you can never finally polish. Like, so there is something to be said for being productive or proactive with your life and productive with your life versus just yes. And you have to throw all the work away if you were to write down at the end of your life the most important things that you did that gave you joy, or the things that you did that made your life worth living, or the things that you did that made you happy that you lived this life. Is it being on TikTok or being on Facebook or being on this? Like, it's probably not. Is it being at the office? No, it's probably not. So. So again, you are going to die. Like with absolute 1000% certainty you're going to die. Whoever's listening watching you will die. So it's up to you to decide what are you going to do with this time that you've got so that you feel good about the time that you've got, not so that anyone else will. The starting point is to craft a four or five page description of you. How do you show up as a dad, as a friend, as a lover, as a son, as a spouse, as a person in your society? What do you do for fun? What do you do for learning? What do you do to enjoy life? What are you doing for your hobbies? What are you doing for fitness? What are you doing related to your diet and health? Describe all of those things and write a description of you three years from now. Then work with your spouse and describe one together. What's your relationship like three years from now? That's a great starting point because it gives you something to be excited about that you start chasing down. And then you start figuring out how do you make each of those sentences come true? It's one of the reasons why I'm going to my trainer again this afternoon. It's one of the reasons why I quit drinking 11 months ago is these things are aligned. I need to make decisions aligned with where I'm going, not just out of habit. Right. The fact that I was drinking a bottle of wine every single day for six years was stupid. And I was waking up tired. I didn't have good energy. I wasn't showing up as a good dad. I wasn't showing up as a good lover. I wasn't showing up as a good husband. I was, like, kind of lethargic. And that's not okay. I didn't like that. So I got rid of that. Now I'm making better decisions, right? Going to a gym, I feel healthier. I've got a healthy mind and a healthy body. I'm excited. I look better, I feel better. You start making decisions aligned with that.