The Secrets of a $200 Million Entrepreneur | Cameron Herold (Podcast 331)

What happens is people are worried, though. Well. Well, then I might miss this guy. Well, if you're trying to be all things to all people, it means you're nobody. But if you become that expert in a niche and you're willing to lose, like if I'm just going to be a financial advisor for dentists and I say no to lawyers and no to business people and no to teachers, yeah, I'm going to lose those. But everybody knows I'm just going after dentists. So when they talk to a dentist who needs a financial advisor, they think of me. Or my book is financial advice for dentists. Now I stand out. Now I could actually give my book out to people. So you just have to pick a niche and just stick with it forever.

We were just talking before we went live here and you've got something you're very passionate about right now, the COO Alliance. What's cool is I've heard a lot of CEO coaching programs. I've never heard a COO coaching program. So can you give me where that was all born from, how it came about, why you're so passionate about it? And then as a caveat, if you want to apply that to financial services and some of the things that some guys might be able to learn from that, I would just love to hear the story.

I think what happened was I started to realize I've been coaching entrepreneurs and CEOs all over the world for nine years now. After I built 1-800-got junk and left there nine years ago, I started coaching entrepreneurs and CEOs up to very, very high levels. I coach a monarchy in the Middle East. I coach the CEO of Sprint on coaching real businesses and started seeing that there were all kinds of groups for entrepreneurs to go and learn from. You know, there were EO and YPO and Vistage, Genius Network and Mastermind Talks and Maverick. All these amazing places for entrepreneurs to go. You know, there's great places for financial advisors to learn and places for lawyers to learn, places for marketers and for engineers. But there was nowhere for the second in command. There was literally not a group anywhere for the COO's at a high level to go and learn from each other. So I created the COO alliance as a way for me to educate these second in command so that they can actually grow the entrepreneur's company and literally got huge response from it right away. I tested it as an idea with a few of my clients, second in command, and held an event here in Scottsdale and sold it out within 26 hours. I think maybe the lesson for the financial advisors is try to fish in a pond where nobody else is fishing. There's all kinds of ponds out there, but we always tend to go for that same group. I bumped into someone the other day who is a financial advisor and she only works with children of high, high net worth individuals. She won't work with the high net worth individuals who only work with their kids. I talked to someone the other day who only works with divorcees. She'll only work with female divorced clients. She won't take on anyone who's married. So they're literally finding these little niches and going really deep into those. I think that was what I tried to uncover with the COO alliance as well.

Makes sense. Speaking of second in command, my experience from financial services is you've got these great type A personalities. As a self admitted guy that has add a lot of financial advisors definitely relate to just it's a sales mentality. And I think one of the toughest things, and I'm into your book Double Double and you said something in there about how you guys were able to find a type of talent at 1-800-got junk. I think that's a constant struggle in financial services. And it is that transition of running a business as a sales guy to running a business as a business owner that a lot of guys struggle with. So you have some ways or some frameworks that they might want to think with of how they can break through that and find that top talent.

Yeah, well, so the way that you have to break through is before you worrying about finding top talent is you have to set your mind at a different level. And that means you really need to start envisioning your company as a company, not as a sole proprietor with just you running it. So the best example I've got is Elon Musk. Now I know everyone talks about Elon, but I've known Elon for 25 years. Elon's brother worked for me in 1993 and I was a reference for him in his very first round of funding in 95. So I've known Elon for a long, long time. The reason he created the Tesla Model S as a seven seater car. He has five kids, so he wasn't going to build this amazing car unless it would seat his family. So he leaned out into the future, wanted a car that was similar in design to his McLaren F1, super fast, super sexy, but also could seat his kids. And then he kind of said who's with me for financial advisors? The way they need to look at their business is lean out three years and do what I call the vivid vision. I describe it in pretty good detail in chapter one of Double Double. It describes in detail how to visualize their company three years from now without worrying about how they get there. They have to picture it as a business with other moving parts. And I think if they're always that one person doing everything, they're going to kind of be destined to that. But if they lean out past that and design a business that's bigger, they'll get there. Another thing is they have to surround themselves with the best. You know, your network is your net worth. And I think too often we spend time with people that are just like us. We need to be spending time with people that are running bigger businesses, operating at a better level, thinking at a bigger level. I'm part of three groups that I raise my bar with all the time. I'm part of Dan Sullivan's 10x for strategic coach. I'm in the Genius Network with Joe Polish, and I'm part of Jason Gaynord's Mastermind talks. And those three groups raise my bar and raise my game. But they're also making, you know, having me around other entrepreneurs that are doing big things and thinking in big ways. So I think that for, you know, any, anyone who's listening is to kind of surround themselves with those people and then remember, we don't have to be the ones to figure all this stuff out. It's already been figured out. All we have to do is our R and D should stand to rip off and duplicate. When they're trying to think about how do they grow their business from where they are out to here, instead of trying to grow it from where you are out trying to design what it looks like out here and reverse engineer them.

Now I have to bring this up because you mentioned it watching your TED talk you did a few years back. Now over a million views. So obviously it's resonating with a lot of people out there. You talked about basically how you did accounting. Will you share that story for the audience here? Because I think there's a great lesson to be learned there and a little background. The, the talk was on children should be entrepreneurs, and that was kind of the framework that this story came in.

Yeah. So I realized at a very young age that education was a way to get somewhere. And I also knew at a very young age I was never going to have a job interview. I was never going to get a job. I would always be running my Own business and growing companies. And I wanted to take accounting as one of my courses in university. But then when I got into the course, I realized my. I have a form of dyslexia called dyscalcia, which is I flip all of my numbers and I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder. And I was busy running a company. I had 12 employees when I was 20 years old. So I was, you know, doing other stuff, I guess. Shortcut. I hired someone to run my accounting assignments for me, and I was running a bar, and I hired one of my bartender bouncers to do my accounting assignments. And every week I paid him in beer and he handed his assignment to me. So I cheated, basically. But at the end of the day, when I was going in to write my final, my dad said I was crying because I knew I wasn't going to pass the final because I had no idea what the content was. And he said, well, how did you get this far? And I said, I paid somebody to do my assignments. He said, well, good. You learned how to hire your first accountant. And that was actually probably the more important lesson for me in university than memorizing how to do accounting was. I didn't have to be good at everything. I had to be able to find people who were good at it, find people who loved it, and hire them to do it. And then I could do what I was really good at. So, sure, I didn't pass accounting because I did it properly, but I learned more about accounting by hiring someone to do my bookkeeping than from actually going through the course. So, thankfully, my transcript is terrible and it would never get me a job, but I learned a lot from that. The funny part is kind of the whimsical epilogue. About 10 years later, I was contacted by the writer of the university textbook for managerial accounting, the course that I cheated in. And she asked me if she could quote me in the section on budgeting as an expert, not because I cheated in the course, but because she'd been reading about 1-800-got junk. So I'm actually written up in all of those university textbooks in the course that I cheated in, I'm an expert.

It's so interesting how that works. I was just out at a retreat in Philadelphia on how to be a better dad, run by a guy named John Vroman. And he multiple time, basically speaker of the year at the college level, never graduated from college.

What I learned about it is our school system is fundamentally messed up. I think what we should do a school is this. Now it worked 100 years ago. Here's how I think schools should work. All students should get an A period. They should all get the same result. All students should work together in groups. All of the tests should be open book. All of the exams should be open book. All of the students should collaborate, research together, propose together, and they should all get the same result. Because that's really the way the world works today. You don't have to memorize everything. It's on Google. What we have to teach people is to find information, pull it together, synthesize it, work together as a team, collaborate, use each other's strengths. People do presentations. But to have a system where only the top two kids in a class are the best and everybody else is worst. I was fundamentally beat up for 12 years. Every single day I was told by the school system that I was stupid and I wasn't good enough and I wasn't going to fit in. How is that possibly helping when we could give everybody an A and have them work together and work on their strengths? And I think we could, if we changed school that way, it would be incredible. The problem is the educators don't like it because it doesn't work the way they like to work.

Yeah, I read a book that just blew my mind along that same concept. Mindset by Carol Dweck. It talks about a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. And unfortunately, when you tell somebody dumb, when you call somebody dumb, you've now fixed in their mindset, well, I'm just dumb. I can't. I might as well not study. There's nothing that it's going to do for me anyway. Let's go on to another challenge for financial advisors. There's a quote in your book, remember, it's not about measuring everything. It's about measuring and monitoring the right things. Let's start at the most basic level, because I think a lot of especially very successful advisors, it is a sales mentality. It's on to the next appointment, appointment, appointment, appointment. And not a whole lot of time to track things along the way. So do you have tips, just maybe even step number one to actually measuring things so you can know how well things are going?

So again, I begin with the end in mind. So I try to look at where I'm going and then figure out what's the best path to get there. So if the destination for one of our viewers is here, what are the top three things they should measure to make sure they're on track for that? What are maybe the top 10 things they should measure to make sure they're on track with that. So think about that for a second. The next part is, I think we have to remember that it's about measuring the critical few things versus the important many. If you think about your car dashboard for a second, when you get in your car, you're going for a drive, your dashboard has a bunch of data on it. Now, what things on your dashboard do you see or do you look at more often than anything else?

The speed.

Okay, that's the number one, and it's the biggest dial. And you look at gas?

Well, I look at my battery monitor now because I'm a Tesla guy.

That's why we like each other. We look at the speed, right? That's number one. And the dial is a very big dialogue. And then we look at our battery or our gas because we need to know how much time. But we only look at our battery or gas every couple days. We look at the speed almost constantly. Now, we also know that the car is measuring everything so that if we have to take it to the dealer and we plug it in, they can actually look at all of the data. So you want to have the data available and the data being tracked, but you don't necessarily need to look at it. So as an example, with our financial data, in terms of your business, looking at your P and L or your balance sheet or your cash flow statement, I don't sit and look at that on a daily basis. I don't even look at it on a semiannual basis. But I know that it's being tracked. I know that it's solid. And I know that I can have a financial advisor look at it and go through it with me and give me insights, the marketing side of things. I know that all of my leads and tracking is being done in Google and AdWords and my Facebook campaigns. I know that all that data is being tracked. I don't look at it. But once a quarter, I have somebody come in and look at all that data and give me advice. So for me, it's more important to ensure that everything is being tracked and that I plug in my business every quarter to have some experts look at it and tell me what's being looked at. I think more often than not, we have business people sitting behind their computer playing business person. And I believe it's people by day, paper by night. They should be out landing more clients, talking to more clients, building their business, building their brand, and then having somebody else look at the data later. So for me, in my business, as an example, I have one core data point. That's it. And my data point is this. How many speaking events do I have booked on my calendar for the next 12 months? And as long as I have at least eight on my calendar, I know that everything is good because that's the top of my sales funnel. The more speaking I do, the more clients I get. It all just kind of flows through my funnel. So I only look at one. So it's my speedometer is booked, paid speaking events, but I know that everything else is being tracked and I can plug my business in once in a while. And I think if our viewers would think about that. What's that one number or three numbers that you need to measure to make sure your business is going to be successful and then just obsess about those three?

Well, it's interesting as I just listen and hear your business model, it's really not that different than a financial services model. A lot of our advisors give public events that then lead to set appointments and on from there. Right. So what's interesting though, I see a lot of advisors set their goals the opposite way, where it's these big pie in the sky numbers of I'm going to do 15 million, 20 million of assets. But they don't actually break it down to what are these weekly activities that I need to be performing to get.

The big results, have my business plan, I know what my revenue is going to be. I know all the different product categories and services and how much revenue will come from each one. I know my activities that I need to do on a quarterly and monthly basis to get to that plan. All that stuff is there. But I know the one core number is speaking. And then from there I know my coaching clients and speaking events and how many have to come from YPO and EO and speakers bureaus. But to be measuring all that stuff means I'm spending too much time measuring my business and not enough time doing my business. And as long as I know where I'm going, you know, most people don't know where they're going. They don't have that plan, they don't have that path. You know, our viewers are doing speaking, many of them, I'll tell you for sure, if they don't have a book, no one is going to take them seriously. That if they're in that advising space, they need, if they're a thought leader, they need to have a book. So I know, you know, I've just done my second one meeting suck. Now, I worked with a group called Book in a Box and I can give you a link to it if they want. Our listeners can actually get some free stuff by going to my link from bookinabox, but they need to have a book. Book in a Box will interview them, pull all the content out of their head, have a hard copy book that they can give away to clients. So I did a speaking event two days ago in Detroit to 850 CEOs. All 850 got a copy of my book. My cost per book was $1.40 and shipping was about 80 cents. So it only cost me $1,800 to give 850 people my book. Talk about positioning yourself in the marketing space. Right?

So Cameron, you said they got your book, but it sounds like, did you ship it to them after the fact?

No, I shipped it to the event and made sure that every single person in the audience had it. I will never do a speaking event without 100% of the audience getting a copy of my book. Either the event buying the book or the event buying it at cost or me giving it to them for free. But everybody will always get a copy of my book. It's a marketing fee.

All right, so I've got about four questions rolling here, so I'm going to pick one. First one is my buddy Michael Hyatt. And I'm in the middle, by the way. I will endorse Book in a Box right here. I'm two of my 90 minute phone calls in and it has been a game changer. And this is me hiring a professional writer before and struggling and battling for about probably four or five months now to now where it's just like 90 minute call talk like we're doing right here. And boom, it's all laid out. It's awesome. I know you're involved with them and do a great job.

I did my first book a completely different way. My first book Double double, took me 18 months to write. I've done one with the traditional way six years ago. Then I did one with Book in the Box. I've got two more that I'm doing with them now. It's an amazing process.

So we'll dig in on that in a second. So going back to my buddy Michael, who is a former CEO of Thomas Nelson, just been in that world a long time. He said there is life before the book and there's life after the book. So can you speak to that with your first book, Double Double, how did perceptions change? How did your business change before and after the book? Since we're on the subject.

It was a funny part of that is my first book when it first came out is version one. In the introduction, it said thank you to my wife Jane. And now if you read double double, it says thank you to my wife Kim, because we've been divorced and remarried. So there's life before and after for sure. I get along really well with my ex wife and my wife and my ex wife get along great. So we can all laugh about it. But I definitely got life before and after.

That's a big change. Before and after the book.

My book has definitely positioned me as a thought leader and an expert. It's been a way for my ideas to get shared with people and for them to share it with others. It was a way for me to get all these ideas swirling in my head and package them in a way. I didn't have a desire to be a writer. I didn't wake up in the morning and have some need to say it. But my clients wanted more information and it was a way for me to position myself as a more impactful thought leader. My speaking fees have tripled since I put my book out seven years ago. It's like six years ago. Yeah, they've tripled and my coaching fees have tripled. So, I mean, yeah, big for sure.

Game changer.

Yeah, big time game changer.

All right, so quick takeaway if you haven't caught on yet. If you're a financial advisor out there and you want to take things to the next level, need to write a book, which a number of our clients have written books. So I've also seen them before and after, and it's huge. All right, so let's go to this. Cameron, how in the world do you speak as much as you speak? You've got now two books, and in my last conversation with Tucker, who's your compatriot over at Book in a Box, Tucker Max, for those of you that know of him, you've got two more books in the works currently. So three more. Did you add one?

I'm co authoring the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs with Hal Elrond.

Oh, that's right.

That's right. November 14th. Then I have two more books with book in a box, one on PR and one on vision that are both coming out.

Only, like one more book a year from that point on.

No, it's a lot of work. These were ones that had to be written. My bhag is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. I have some major platform speaking events that want me to Speak about landing free pr, because I'm pretty much a global expert on landing free press. So that book had to be done. And then the opportunity of co authoring with Hal Elrod for the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs was just a no brainer. When he asked me, I said yes.

Yeah, how's the man Suck was the.

One that really had to be written. You know, I'm just so frustrated with people complaining about meetings. And the problem is meetings aren't the problem. It's that we haven't trained our employees on how to run meetings.

Okay, so takeaway here because a lot of our clients struggle with the same thing, which is super busy schedules. They've got the bhags that I want to write a book, I want to get a radio show live. Just the big thing. So what methodology do you have to be able to fit all of this in and put space on the calendar for it?

Sure. So I do an impact filter with an ROI analysis. So I take a look at what's the idea and what's the real impact it's going to have on my business. And then what are my costs, what are my people costs, my time costs or my money cost? And what ROI am I really going to get from that? And if it's not big enough, I cross it off the list or I delay it. So I'm very clear on where I'm going. I'm very clear on what my vision for what my company looks like three years from now. And if what I'm working on today doesn't drive me to that vivid vision three years from now, it's not going on the list. So I've gotten very good at saying no to opportunities. The reason I'm on your show is it helps me build my brand, it helps me share my ideas, it helps people understand my products. So this is a clear yes, it's easy, doesn't take any time, doesn't cost me any money. You know, it's literally one hour of my time, but it's massive reach. So that's a yes. But to do my own podcast is a huge no.

Yeah, well, which I'm guessing if we did the math here real quick, for an hour, your time. This is a huge investment that you're sharing with us, so I appreciate it.

Yeah, my coaching time is 3,300 an hour, so I am, I'm giving up my billable time for sure.

No pressure on my part. This better be a good show.

So.

So let's keep going here. You hit on a powerful point there that's actually in your book Double Double. And it's the. There's a parable about Warren Buffett and I don't even know if it's true, but he was helping his pilot do a goal setting list and he had his top goals. And then he said, well, what are you going to do with the rest? So here's your top three goals. What are you going to do with the rest of these goals? And he's like, oh, work on them when I get time. He's like, no, that's your avoid at all cost lists.

Right?

So that's a very strong point you make in Double Double. Besides just some of this filtering stuff, what about the stuff where it's a buddy that asks you to do this? You feel obligated, or do you have any clear set rules that just kind of help you break through that?

I had a real big aha moment yesterday at this event that I go to called Strategic Coach. Again, I'm in Dan Sullivan's 10x program and one of the guys in the group said, you're no longer wasting your time, you're wasting your life. So I'm looking at my time now as a very, very finite commodity and really realizing that it is about saying no more often than saying yes. I've always been pretty good at that. But I'm no longer going to just say yes for the sake of saying yes. Because this is my only life and I don't want to waste my life. You're right about the activities. I mean, our look. I don't think we should have a to do list. We should take our ideas and put them into our calendar and make our calendar our to do list. If we don't have enough time in our calendar to do the stuff, we either have to cross it off the list or delegate it or outsource it. But our calendar is our to do list. How much time is it going to take to work on that project? When are you going to do it? Put it in your calendar. Otherwise all that stuff just becomes very stressful.

It's a great tip. So while we're on the subject of Dan Sullivan, you mentioned a big piece of your success has been essentially your free days actually unplugging from the business and just actually live life without the worry of any business stuff that's going on outside. I got some insider info that you're also a fan of Burning Man. Is this a piece of your free day or can you kind of talk through philosophically what that does for you? Because I Know, a lot of advisors struggle with that.

So I will never work at night. I always, I'm done at 5:30. I don't do client calls. I don't do any work. I don't try to catch up on email. The reality is we're never going to catch up. We're never going to get it done. We're always going to have more goals. As we get our list done, we'll set new goals. So you tend to lie to yourself by saying, I'm just going to work tonight to catch up or I'll just work this weekend to catch up. What you're really saying is I'm not that engaged with my spouse or my kids or my hobbies or my friends. So I'll fill my time with being busy with work because that fills me. I think that's a sad life. So I won't work weekends and I won't work nights, which means I don't check email. I don't work on my business. I don't read business books. I read books for fun. I play golf, I'm running, I'm hiking, I'm playing tennis. I'm hanging out with my wife. I'm hanging out with my children. I've got four kids. I'm really engaged in that aspect. And on my vacations, I don't read business books. I read books for fun. Or I just hang out. Like I don't want to, I don't want to. And I work really hard when I work, but I play really hard when I play.

Is it that easy or was there something that you had to work through to get there? Has this been a struggle for you in the past at all?

Oh, for sure, yeah. No. I was written up in the Wall Street Journal back in October of 2000 as somebody whose career went very high and flamed out with stress. I had a complete burnout. I collapsed on the floor of the elevator, sobbing in tears. My mom was dying. I just quit my job. Our company went from 64 million to 3 million over the course of two months. I'd sold my house. I was moving from U.S. to Canada. I was literally redlining on stress. I had a calic taste at the back of my neck where I could almost taste like I was chewing on tin foil, the back of my neck. And it's actually a chemical secretion caused by stress. So I'm just not willing to go there anymore. I was 35 pounds heavier than I am today. I would start every dinner with a Manhattan. I would finish every dinner with Grand Marnier. I'd have a couple bottles of wine in between. And I was thinking that was just okay. But day after day after day after day, working, working, working, I was a complete stress case. I'm just not willing to go there anymore.

So was it flip the switch at that point or was this bring some great coaches into your life that helped you get through that turning point?

That flipped a switch pretty hard for me. I mean, I've had moments along the years that I've fallen for. Sure. Like I trip and fall and I'll wake myself up. But I'm more aware now. I'm more aware when I. If I go to dinner with business associates and I order a Manhattan, it's a sign for me that, geez, maybe I'm stressed, maybe I'm not doing this to enjoy the Manhattan. Maybe I'm stressed. If I'm catching myself being manic, I slow myself down. If I'm starting to think about work a lot, I'll unplug. So I definitely catch myself for sure.

Huge lessons for our industry there. It's interesting because I think our industry has a perception of success is what's on stage either in production numbers or awards or whatever. And a lot of times when you pull back some of those stories, not all. I've met some very successful people that have great balance, but a lot of them it's from 70, 80 hour weeks and it's just not sustainable long term.

Well, I think if we go and look at professional athletes for a second, there's not a single professional athlete on the planet, not one who is working in their exact professional athlete space for 60 hours a week, maybe working 10 hours a week or 20 golfers maybe are working more than anybody else because they're five hours for four days straight in a golf tournament. So maybe that's 20 or 30 hours, but they're not. But then they take a couple weeks off or a professional football player, they're not playing a game every single day. You need to detach, you need to take a break, you need to work on your game, but you also need to have activities outside of your game. You need to have other passions and other activities. And look, if we show up at our friends cocktail parties or our friends parties or at the club or on vacation and all we have to talk about is work. It's boring. I don't really care what you do for work. You don't really care what I do for work. I want to know about your sports, I want to know about your passions and your Fears and your insecurities and your joys and what you're doing for fun. I don't really care what you do to make money. We don't really care what any of our friends do to make money. So we have to detach from that a little bit. And if we're only going to be happy when we get to the horizon, we're never going to be happy because the horizon keeps moving. So I'll slow down when I get to this goal. No, you won't, because you'll set new goals. Or I'll only work these next three nights to catch up. No, because then you'll be behind on your next list of stuff. So we're lying to ourselves and it's just not worth it. We get one life.

That's powerful stuff right there. So let's speak to fixing the problem. So going back to type A personalities, advisors, and we all know only we can do everything the best, right? That's rule number one to type A. Did you have issues early on delegating things to where you could now hand things over to key team members and going back to your whole concept of double double, which actually I'll let you say it because I don't want to butcher it. So for those that haven't read the book, the concept of double double, what does it mean?

Yeah. So, yes, I definitely had trouble with delegating and it was a learned behavior. When I was really starting off in business with college program painters, I was a franchisee and we only had four months to run our business. We didn't have time to hire and train and delegate. We had to do a lot. So I became kind of stuck in that mode. And now what I recognize is I need to get something done, but it doesn't mean I have to do it. In fact, if I take my effective hourly rate, I should delegate everything below what I'm earning per hour. If I'm doing something that's less than $3,000 an hour, it's not worth my time. It's better for me to delegate everything and me only to work on those high, high revenue producing activities. We've started bringing a chef into our home to cook for us. I don't do any work around the house at all. Like zero. There's no reason I should because why would I do a $12 or $15 an hour task where I could spend that hour finding one more coaching client and pay for landscapers for the next 10 years? I really think of my time as that finite resource and I Would rather do stuff for fun or work on my highest revenue producing activities than just being busy. That includes in our personal life. Sorry. Double double is all about how do you double your revenue and double your profit in three years or less, which is really growing your company by 26% three years in a row. For me that's actually very slow. I'm more used to well we built 1, 800, got junk. We doubled six years in a row. Even with my current business today I'm 500% in nine years. So I'm well past a double double.

So you just wanted to chunk it down so people could keep up basically. So that I'm hearing you say.

I kind of dumbed it down. Look, my business today is up 50% over a year ago. Actually it's up 50% in the last six months over the prior year's revenue. I'll probably double this year on a seven figure business already I'll double it again. So yeah, I'm dumbing it down.

So let's circle back around to the delegation factor because in the book Double Double you talk about a talent, right? And that is a big struggle in financial services because guys just struggle to find good people. So tips to this?

Yeah, so this is true in every business. People struggle to find good people because they don't sit down and define what does the good person have to get done in their job and how do I find someone who has done that before. And we often don't need full time people. We can hire people to do components, we can outsource, we can hire fractional, we can hire heck, you got places like Elance and Odesk and hiremymom Fiverr where you can have experts doing stuff. And I think if we look for a level people to work on a project for an hour or a project for five hours, you don't need to have a full time salesperson. Maybe you need someone to sell five hours a week. The freelance economy is huge right now.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's changed my life.

It didn't exist in our parents era when the best of the best in the financial services industry, the 50 and 60 year olds were starting, they didn't have freelancers because they didn't have a computer to go find them. You'd only look at the classified ads in the newspaper. So they're not wired this way. But now these experts will work for 3 hours, 5 hours, 25 hours, 2 weeks a month and they're all online and they're all saying hey, hire me. Why do you want full time employees when you can have experts working just for that fractional amount of time? I think that's where your financial advisors will really grow is by looking for.

The freelance economy and typically from a price standpoint, substantially cheaper than you could hire somebody full time at an hourly rate in the US it's crazy. From my experience.

Yeah. Take a look at a site called hiremymom. These are brilliant women that are at home and they want to work during what I call the mommy shift, which is when the kids are at school between 9 o' clock and 3 o'. Clock. But these are like former heads of sales or heads of marketing or heads of copywriting that they're doing work for 40 or 50 bucks an hour just to keep their brain flowing. But they used to make 300 grand a year.

Wow. Very cool. Never heard of it. I'll check it out. Let's go to. In the book Double Double you mentioned, essentially if you want to get great talent, they already work somewhere else. And the whole mindset of. Because I've seen it a lot where if you offer kind of industry standard wage, the people that show up are the people that don't have a job currently. So can you speak to your secrets to head hunting? Great talent?

Yeah. So the step one in looking for great talent is to recognize that a players are already working somewhere and they're not going to leave a full time job to go work for an average company. So you have to make your company an amazing place. Now that's not just the perks. It means they have to be aligned with where they're going. They're only working with other a players. They've got a good environment to work in. They have to understand that what they're working on is driving value. They have to be paid at a reasonably good level. Not necessarily the absolute best, but a reasonably good level. Lots of good vacation time, you know, just really, really treated well. That's step one. Step two is you have to think about what are the things I need to get done in the next 12 months and hire someone who has done those things before. You don't want to hire someone who knows how to do it, you want to hire someone who has done it. So the example I always use is a swimmer. Let's say we needed a really good swimmer in our company. Most people would look for someone who's fast and strong and competitive and a team player. But that could be a six year old, fast as a six year old, competitive as a six year old. The Team player is a six year old. Now what I want to do is hire someone who has won Olympic records, who has won individual and team events and has won Olympic gold. I don't want someone who knows how to do that. I want someone who has done it. Now the difference between hiring a fast, strong, competitive team player and someone who has won Olympic records is very different. So when we're hiring people, we need to think about what are the things we need to get done. And let's find somebody who has done that stuff. And often that's why you can get the freelancers is because they show you what they've done and you don't need them full time. More often than not, if you have somebody 40 hours a week for the whole year, they're spending 30% of their time getting reply all and cc'd and going to meetings that suck. What you need them to do is that 20 hours a month of really, really poor work, you don't need them the rest of the time.

All right, I'm gonna steal a thought out of our listeners heads that I know is going on right now. They're like, oh yeah, that works in other businesses, Cameron, but it doesn't work in mine. I'll give you an example. A lot of our top clients, they're doing a lot of direct mail, where they're doing public events, typically at restaurants where they're going to try to invite people, 500,000 of investable assets to show up, hear them speak for an hour and then hopefully book an appointment. So change their mind if you can here for me, hire a marketing director virtually. What are your thoughts there? Is that possible, somebody to run an event like that?

Yeah, absolutely. You can hire salespeople as well. You could hire people who are just going out and doing the marketing and sales for you to fill your funnel. Then you go in and close the deals. You could spend more of your time in the places where your clients are spending time like join the private clubs or spend time around the events. I have a friend in New York City who joined the board of the Guggenheim and he took the role that no one wanted at the Guggenheim. He took the fundraising role. So his job was now to cold call every high net worth individual in Manhattan and go into their offices and sit and talk to them. But he had the Guggenheim business card to get in their door. Now imagine being a financial advisor who's on the board of the Guggenheim. This is a guy who, he thought his way around the issue. Everybody's doing what you're talking about everybody's booking, everybody's coming to dinners, everybody's going, blah, blah. It's the same stuff, different day. They've got to go fish in ponds that nobody's fishing in. They've got to get ways indoors that nobody's getting in. So sales funnels, managing your data better, creating value and creating touch programs with people or finding a niche that nobody else is in.

Do you have some examples, some different niches? It's niche in Canada. I've noticed with my Canadians friends, I always go niche in the US I think it's a cultural difference.

We still use the King's English.

Oh, there we go.

Okay.

Do you have some examples of some cool different niches that different advisors or different businesses have gotten into?

That the couple that I heard recently are divorced females, you know, only going after divorced females. They won't take on any male clients. They won't take on any married female clients. They'll only deal with divorced females. Second, because they have predictable cash flow. They're all getting spousal support. Are they getting child support? Right. Or they're sitting on money and they don't know how to manage it. Another one is the children of high net worth individuals. Another one is small business owners. Another one could be pro athletes. Another one could be going after just being a financial advisor for lawyers or just being a financial advisor for doctors. Just being a financial advisor for dentists. Pick a market and then go deep into that marketplace. What happens is people are worried though. Well, then I might miss this guy. Well, if you're trying to be all things to all people, it means you're nobody. But if you become that expert in a niche and you're willing to lose, like if I'm just going to be a financial advisor for dentists and I say no to lawyers and no to business people and no to teachers, yeah, I'm going to lose those. But everybody knows I'm just going after dentists. So when they talk to a dentist who needs a financial advisor, they think of me or my book is Financial advice for dentists. Now I stand out. Now I could actually give my book out to people. So you just have to pick a niche and just stick with it forever.

It's interesting on that concept with your upcoming book, Hal Elrod's Miracle Morning. Great book. But now he's targeted it specifically. And hey, I'm gonna bring in Cameron Herald as my co author for entrepreneurs because obviously you're an expert in helping entrepreneurs and so he knows that's gonna speak more directly to that individual.

Right. He also has the miracle morning for realtors. He has the miracle morning for network marketers, he has the miracle morning for families. So he's created these niches and he's going deep into that niche. That's exactly my point. But I think too often what will happen is our deals will be like, no, I don't want to lose that one deal over here. Okay, then it's kind of like light. If you think about light for a second, if you disperse light, it will light up a room. If you highly focus the light, it becomes a laser and it can cut through steel. The best of the best are the ones who highly focus. So me as an example, I charge more than almost any other coach on the planet. Except Marshall Goldsmith. He's the only one I know that charges more than me. Currently my COO alliance, if you're an entrepreneur, you're not allowed in the room. CFOs are not allowed in the room. It's only for seconds in command. So I'm really kind of niching myself.

How many CEOs have you had try to sneak into your events out of curiosity?

I have a couple that are co owners, but I actually made sure that they really are the COO to the real CEO of the business. Even though they're the co owner.

Well, I just see obviously you're a master of your craft and I could just see how CEOs would be like, hey, I know this is only for second in command, but cut me a favor here, Cameron. Let me in the room.

I'm pretty sure there'll be some events coming up that are exclusive for CEOs as well. I'm putting in about 18 months. It's going to be 120 CEOs on a boat to the Antarctic and that will be exclusive for CEOs.

Wow, why the Antarctic?

It's on my bucket list. And I thought what a better way to go than take 120 brilliant people with me. Imagine if a financial advisor decided to do a 10 day hike to Machu Picchu with 100 potential clients and they marketed it as an event and they spent 10 days hiking to Machu Picchu or Everest base camp or heli skiing. Imagine if they took their prospects on something like that instead of to just another restaurant for just another dinner. Prospects to pay to go to the event.

Yeah. Which would have to. In financial services, as you know, with all the regulations, they would have to be them paying their own trip. But just the fact that they organized it and created this Movement, I could see how that can be huge. We've had a few clients take mission trips to Africa and things like that where clients have come along. So definitely the concept's a winner. So I feel like we haven't spent much time at all on Meeting Suck. And I haven't personally read the book yet, but everybody that's read it is just like, you've got to read this book. So can you give us a 30,000 foot view? Here's the concept of the book and here's. I'll add one other thing on here before I let you run. Most financial advisors, they're actually the opposite of typical business. They struggle with even having meetings because they're so busy. Sales, sales, sales, sales, sale. Oh yeah, I should probably let my staff know what's going on once a month or so. If you can speak to that, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Sure. Well, a meeting is also a time when you're meeting with a prospect or meeting with a client that is a meeting. So the reality is, the reason I wrote the book Meetings Suck is I was getting tired of people saying meetings suck. And the reality is meetings don't suck at all. We suck at running meetings. And what we need to do, we would never send our kid off to little league baseball without teaching them how to catch a ball and throw a ball and hold the bat. You know, we would give them the basics. We wouldn't want our kid to go to Little league and feel like a complete failure. But we let our employees or our leaders attend meetings or participate in meetings or book meetings without having any training. It's insane. So the reason I wrote Meetings Suck was for all employees at all companies to finally have that hundred page book to teach them how to attend them, how to participate, how to lead them, and how to actually run highly effective meetings. And that's kind of what's happened, is people are buying them by the hundreds, giving them out to clients, giving them out to all their employees. It's coming off really nicely.

So what are some tips you have to keeping your meetings running on time? Because a lot of our clients struggle with that.

Well, the best way to have a meeting start on time is to finish everything five minutes early. So if we're on a call from 8:00 clock until 9:30, we finish at 9:25. And that gives us time to walk down the hall, talk to our assistant, get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, check our email, and then pick up the phone right at 9:30 to say, hi, I Know I'm on time for a 9:30 call. Just a reminder, we finish everything five minutes early and that's how we show our respect. So when you start everything on time by finishing five minutes early, that's a huge, huge tip.

That's gold. That's a simple one. Everybody can run with right there.

Everybody can do it. And it involves no change. You don't have to put a buffer in your calendar. It's just stop five minutes early.

What other concepts out of the book do you think financial advisors out there could benefit from? Just high level stuff that you could share in the next few minutes?

They definitely benefit from the actual structure of running meetings. So every meeting has to have a clear purpose. Just the one sentence, why are we here? Every meeting has to have a maximum of three agenda items. What are the three main things we're going to get done in the meeting? Then no agenda. No agenda. Just allow people to say, look, if there's not an agenda in the notes section, what we're covering, in what order and how many minutes on each item, I'm not coming. So even when I do my coaching calls with clients, they send me the agenda for the call. They rank in order the topics that they want to cover. Topic one might be six minutes, topic two might be 23 minutes, topic four might be 15 minutes. And then we know how long to spend on each item. Then we start on time, we finish five minutes early and we book everything for half the time. We first think about booking it for. And I always joke, I say it's like a quickie, you can get it done in less time if you need to. So if you're going to book a call for an hour, book it for 30 minutes, you'll get it done. If you want to book a meeting for a day, book it for half a day, you'll get it done in less time. Those are the basic kind of core premises. But I also talk in the book about how to run all different styles of meetings, how to run a financial meeting, how to run a strategic planning meeting, how to run one on one coaching meetings. So I talk about all the different types of meetings and how to run those as well.

So literally you're saying as a company leader, if I don't put an agenda in there, you don't have to come to my meeting.

Correct. I also want people to opt out of meetings. It should actually be a badge of honor or like heck, that's a great thumbs up. When somebody says I don't need to be here. I look through the purpose and outcome and agenda. I'm not needed. It looks like you've got it covered. We should be happy that people are opting out of meetings because they have more productive work to work on. But we also should feel good about not inviting everybody because we want them working on their core unique ability areas. Jeff Bezos from Amazon has a rule that he only invites the number of people that can be fed by up to two pizzas. If they can't be fed by two pizzas, he's inviting too many people to the meeting.

I like that. I feel like sometimes with meetings in the corporate structure, it's like, oh, I've invited this person, so I have to invite this person. It's like a party. I can't leave this person out. And you're actually flipping that whole model on its head.

I look at the Navy SEALs. When the Navy seals go into a room to kill somebody, one person's job is to only look this way, and they will never look past this angle because they know somebody else's job is just to look this way and someone else's job is just to this way. And they know that these guys have got their back. I have to know that if I'm going into a meeting that everybody else who's not in the meeting is doing their job, and they have to know that I'm in the meeting doing my job and we've all got each other's backs. The whole Kumbaya group hug of let's invite everybody because we don't want anybody to feel bad. Really, we're going to get killed. If everybody running into the room gets to look around and make sure we're all good, Someone's going to get shot, and we have to treat business the same way. Everyone has a job to do, but it's not to do everybody else's job.

Okay, I want to get to this because this is some more gold and this has been awesome, Cameron, so I appreciate it. So actually your upcoming book is on free pr, or basically leveraging PR without having to pay a bunch of money for it. That is like, if you could just set something up here on a pedestal for financial advisors, they would run to that all day long. So there's a piece in Double Double about this magical wall that you created. I don't know if that's a piece of the book or not. Maybe that plays in, but I would just love to hear your thoughts on PR and how you guys did it.

Well, sure. So there's actually. I have a video that all of our viewers can watch. They can download it from my products page on CameronHerald.com and it's a video about a 90 minute speaking event on landing free PR. So they can get a copy of it there and download it or watch it online. But the basics of PR are every morning every journalist worldwide wakes up, sits down at their desk and thinks, what.

The heck am I going to write about today?

Every journalist, in fact every journalist sitting down right now between 8am and 11am globally is wondering what the heck am I going to write about today? So our job is not to email them because they get hundreds of emails, they get hundreds of press releases. It's literally pick up the phone, call the journalist and say, hey Brad, you have two minutes. I think I have a good story for you. And you know what Brad's going to say? Yeah, go ahead. Because you're looking for an idea. If I call you between 8:00 clock and 11:00 clock in the morning and say, do you have two minutes? I think I have a good story for you, you're going to say yes. If you don't say yes, you're going to say no, I'm on a deadline. And at that point I say, great, do you mind if I call you tomorrow or Friday? You're going to say yes because you always want a new story. Because every day you have to come up with a new story and nobody's phoning anybody today. I've used the same way to get PR for 25 years. It used to get hard to get past the gatekeeper back in the 80s and 90s to land free PR. But nowadays the only people. When my phone rings, it's. I was gonna say it's my mom, but my mom passed away. But it's like my dad or my sister or my wife calling. It's not no business people ever phone anymore. So you get through the gatekeeper and you're giving them a story that they're gonna then turn into their own story. So what we need to do is come up with the core angles, the story ideas that we can pitch. I cover that again in my book Double Double and then also in my video and then in my new book on PR coming out.

You also took this concept and you applied it to your team at 1-800-GOT junk, if I remember correctly, where you have this. I don't want to butcher this. It was this wall of potential things that the company could do in the future. Kind of a dream wall.

Yeah. So that was less about pr. And that was more about when we had the vivid vision concept of where the company was going. We then asked our employees and our suppliers and our customers, where could they see the company in three years? What could they imagine the company looking like? And they would give us these ideas. You know, can you imagine 1-800-got junk on the sides of Starbucks cups? Or can you imagine being featured on Oprah? Or can you imagine being a Harvard Business School case study? And we would put that up on the wall with the person's name below it. And then we would figure out a way to make those things happen. We were on Oprah 16 months after putting it up on the wall, we had a seven minute piece on Oprah. We had a guy come through for a tour one day that saw being a Harvard Business School case study. And he knew the guy at Harvard that approved the case studies. He introduced us. And for the last nine years, we've been studied by every MBA student at Harvard. We were on the sides of Starbucks cups. We were cup number 70 in the way I See it campaign. They had these quotes from famous people. And we were the first company name to actually be mentioned because it said, Brian Scudamore, founder of 1-800-got-JUNK. And then a quote, you are what you can't get rid of or something. It was by engaging our employees and where we were going that they got excited about what they were building as well.

Well, and what was amazing about tying the whole PR and the great people together that we've hit a lot on in this conversation, the Starbucks cup was actually one of your employees. Big visions that she was like, let's just, I think we can do this. And she was actually running with it. From what I remember from the book.

That's right, yeah. It was Andrea Baxter, who was one of our marketing managers, had the idea and she goes, can you guys see this happening? We're like, yeah, not really. She goes, I can. And we went, okay, we'll put it on the wall. And you figured out a way to make it happen. And she went out to Starbucks and about six weeks later came back and she said, you know, they want to put us on one of their cups, but they won't put 1-800-junk there. And we said, well, it says 1, 800, got junk on the sides of Starbucks cups. So she took a picture of the wall, sent it to Starbucks, and they okayed it. It actually went up to Howard Schultz to sign off. And the reason they said yes was because the comment was 1-800-got-JUNK on the sides of Starbucks cups. So essentially our vision wouldn't have come true had it just said Brian Scudamore, entrepreneur.

That's some ninja sales right there.

Well, but when you know where you're going, you can figure out how to get there, right?

Yeah.

Your vision, you can reverse engine. So that was always. We built everything backwards. We started with where we were going and we figured out how to get there.

Very cool. Cameron, we've got a few minutes left here. Are you good for me to start throwing some rapid fire questions at you?

Yeah, for sure.

All right, let's do it. Let's go with. This is one of my favorites and I get some of the most wide ranging answers here. So I'd love to hear your thoughts here. When you hear the word successful, who's the first person you think of and why?

Right now it's me. I'm really, really happy with where I am. And for me, I'm in bonus territory right now. I really feel like I've actually already made it. And everything I do from here on in is I just feel very happy with where I am right now. That's not a bravado or an ego thing, but I was always chasing success and I feel like I'm there. So I don't look at external people and go, wow, they're successful. I think I measure against. I measured down versus measuring up.

Well, and to speak to your story from, it wasn't 2000, wasn't too many years ago when you were pretty much on the exact opposite end of that spectrum there.

Well, When I was 2 years old, my grandfather died and he said with a name like Cameron Herald or Cameron Gardner Herald, that kid's going to be something someday. I think I kept chasing that. And I woke up years ago and thought, you know what? I'm already there. I'm already really there. And I think for me, that's probably why I can look at other people and go, well, they may have a bigger house or a fancier car or whatever, but man, I've got an amazing wife and great kids and my health and I live in an amazing estate and pretty darn happy like I've got, you know, I don't need anything else to feel happy. I feel pretty successful every day. I know that's not the answer you were searching for.

No, I. The answer I'm. The answer I'm looking for is the truth. And that's what you just gave me. And there's a lot of wisdom there.

That was the one that just hit me right away.

Well, this will be fun. This will be a good one to piggyback that one on. So if you looked at how old are you, did you say you're just now 50, Cameron?

Yeah, I'll be 51 the end of this month.

Okay, so you're 50 now. Okay, this will be fun. I'm just going to go right off your bio here so I'll read it for the listeners and the people watching here. So Cameron was an entrepreneur from day one. Age 21 he had 14 employees. By 35 he'd helped build his first 200 million dollar companies. By age 40 Cameron engineered 1,800 got junk from 2 million to 106 million. So if almost 51 year old Cameron today could go back and let's start with 21 year old Cameron that had 14 employees. Is there a piece of advice you'd give yourself at that age?

Yeah, I mean the last chapter of my book Double Double was letters to my 16 year old self. I wrote something like 65 lessons that I had really learned and internalized that I wish I'd known when I was 16 again, I'm not trying to sell copies of my book. The entire chapter was letters to my 16 year old self. The one that I think probably sticks with me the most is the story about Gorbachev and Reagan. And you know, Gorbachev and Reagan were meeting back in the 80s, trying to solve the world's problems. They both had headsets in listening to the other person, the translation and somebody came running into the meeting screaming and yelling and upset and Gorbachev laughed and smiled and said remember rule number six? And three times during the meeting he said remember rule number six? And at the end of the meeting they were solving all the world's problems. Reagan said I only have one question, what's rule number six? Gorbachev smiled and laughed and he said rule number six is don't take yourself so effing seriously. And Reagan said well what are the first five rules? Gorbachev said there aren't any. And I think at the end of the day that's really what this is about is this is just what we do to make money. This isn't our reason for waking up in the morning. So at 21 years old I wish I'd known that I could laugh and play and enjoy and be a little silly and not take myself so seriously because nobody else is. You know, I think more people are worried about themselves. They're not really worried about me. They're not looking at me, they're not judging me. They're worried what everybody else is thinking about them as well. So maybe we should just hold hands and have milk and cookies and have a good time. Right? Sure.

Hence Burning Man.

Right. I was just about to say.

That is on my bucket list.

So you gotta go. The art is spectacular. The connections is amazing. You'll never shake hands with another human in your life. You will only hug people.

Really.

It's an amazing, incredible, beautiful, amazing space. I've been five times. It has blown me away every time.

Is that just as of five years ago you started going, or is this.

Something that I went 2007 for four years in a row, and then I took a couple years off and then my wife and I went three years ago. We're going to go back together. We had the most incredible tantric week together that we've ever had in our lives. It was amazing, huh? Yeah.

Very cool. Well, I'm sold. I'm going. It's on the bucket list. It's going to get done.

Yeah. It's beautiful. It's amazing.

Would that advice that you just gave, would it change any at age 35 or 42? Did you already figure some of that out? Would anything else change?

Yeah, I hadn't figured it out yet at 35. I probably started to really, when I first went to burning man. So 2007. So nine years ago. So when I was 41 and 42, yeah, I guess it started to change where I met these people. I met this guy who was overweight, and he was standing half naked out in the middle of the playa with a leather utility kilt on, and he was playing a tuba with flames coming out the top of it. And I'm like, who is this weirdo, right? And it so happens that he was a billionaire who had made all kinds of money in the business world, and he just liked to play tuba and wanted to do something silly. So he stood there playing tuba. And I realized, like, I can't judge a book by its cover anymore. I have no idea who people really are. I sat beside a guy. I've gone to the main TED conference six times now. And at the main stage ted, I was sitting beside a guy who was kind of disheveled and a little bit dirty. And I felt like he was maybe autistic. And I'm not going to give his name just to protect him, but Bill Gates came up to say hi. Al Gore came up to say hi. Demi Moore came up to say hi. Not to me, but to him. And I'm like, Who are you? Turns out he's built two companies and he's worth billions of dollars. And he's this autistic savant who is trying to change the world in a couple of specific areas. And I realized that I can't judge based on the way somebody looks or dresses or acts, that people are people. People have their fears and their insecurities and their joys and their passions and their pain. None of us are getting out of this alive. We're all going to die. So I think for me, for sure, Burning man and the TED Conference, those things change me, for sure.

There's a lot to that. Don't judge a book by its cover.

I used to, big time.

I still do. And it's something I fight. I think as humans, we all naturally do to some level. But it's amazing. The more wisdom I soak in, the people that truly have climbed that scale, they've really started to figure that out. All right, time for two more questions. This is an expensive moment here, so I've got to get my bang for my buck here. So what was the best business advice you've ever received?

My network is my net worth, for sure. It's by hanging around with successful people that I either learn to be more successful or I find easier paths to success, or I find systems to rip off and duplicate, or they stretch me. They inspire me. You know, when you hang out with the money that you earn is the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The physical shape that you're in is the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You know, like, I'm going to the TED Women next week with my wife to just be inspired again for no business reason whatsoever other than to unplugging and connect at a whole deeper level. So for me, that's. That was one. My network is my network.

Did that come from a book or a person? Where did you originally hear that?

It probably came from my dad. I've heard the saying later, but my dad is the one who got us to understand why to join a private club and play golf at a private club is powerful. So I'm a member of a private club here in Scottsdale, the Arizona Country Club. I'm a member at Marine Drive in Vancouver. I'm a member at Vancouver Lawn and Tennis in Vancouver. I'm a member of the Genius Network and 10X and Mastermind talks Maverick. So I go to these events where I'm surrounded by brilliant people and my network is powerful. If I read you My list of who I'm actually one degree away from. I could pick up the phone and call Elon Musk. I could pick up the phone and call Tim Ferriss. I could pick up the phone and call Tucker. Called Joe Polish, actually. I had dinner at Dan Sullivan's home two nights ago. I really do have these intimate, deep relationships with people that are really doing some pretty cool stuff. But it's because I've worked to spend time with them.

So other than going to events, are there certain things you've done to make sure people like that, that are influencers that you really respect and want to connect with on a deeper level so that they know Cameron Herald is here for them? How did you connect on those deeper levels? If you don't mind sharing that.

Yeah, I've always been open to sharing and helping people. I don't operate on a quid pro quo, you know, like, yes, I'll help you if you help me, but if people ask me for help, I say yes. Tim Ferriss wanted to come to my home years ago and hung out with me for the weekend with his brother. And we hung out for three days and went to the movie Wall E and we talked about weird stuff and he wanted to just. And I was like, of course. Right. I didn't know where it was going to go or what it would. This was just as his book was coming out. He wasn't that famous at the time. Right. I met one of my very first clients because he was sitting in my house and asked me if I knew this guy Yonek Silver. And I'd never heard of Yannick. I didn't know what a Yannick Silver was. Right. Yannick's how I met Joe Polish. That's how my book is on neckaround at Richard Branson's. Like, you just say yes to those opportunities and help people. Yeah.

It's amazing how that that's happened in my own life as well. I mean, we wouldn't be on this podcast if it wasn't for the. The circle of people I've surrounded myself with.

John Rulin and I. John introduced you and I. But John and I met at the Entrepreneurs Organization. We met at eo. So we met at a global conference of entrepreneurs that we were members of. I met Brian from 1-800-Got Junk because I was an EO member. So I was in this network of entrepreneurs. My clients come from YPO and Vistage because I'm plugged into these communities. So your network is your net worth people that I'm too Busy to learn or I don't have time to be in. These groups are just going to kind of flatline or they're going to grow at 5 or 6%. But when you plug into the right communities, when you help people, when you have fun along the way, when you don't judge a book by its cover, when you slow down to just connect with people on a human level, it's pretty powerful.

Yeah. So I've got to ask a follow up question because you mentioned your dad in the book about kind of how he really, he created this, whatever this atmosphere of when you were a kid that really it was like entrepreneur boot camp is what it sounds like. And what did your dad do or what? Because you've mentioned him a lot, he's obviously inspired you a lot to where you've come to today. Can you speak to that a little bit?

My dad was an entrepreneur and both of my grandparents were entrepreneurs. In fact, I even married into a family of entrepreneurs. It's all I've ever known. My dad just got us to see opportunities to realize that having a job was a bad deal. To look for people's needs or ways to help people or ways to solve problems. He got us to realize that it was about leverage. He just kept teaching us these entrepreneurial systems. And he also had fun. He really had his free time. He took lots of vacations with the family and lots of vacations with my mom. He played golf every Wednesday. If you call his office on a Wednesday at 12 o', clock, they would all say he's at the doctor's office. But they all knew he was at the golf course. Played golf every Saturday morning, but he played golf at 6:30 and he'd be home by 11. As teenagers, we were just waking up at 11, so we didn't ever notice that he was gone. He always got his golf game in Saturday morning, his golf game in Wednesday afternoon. He was home every day at 5 o' clock for dinner. We had family dinner every day. So I saw my dad engaged, but working and I saw how free time was so powerful and he taught us that stuff well.

And I also took a parenting tip from your dad, by the way, so you can pass this on. Instead of giving you guys allowances, he basically gave you opportunities to find stuff to do and then negotiate pricing with him.

Yeah, he basically, you know, we recognized that to pay someone $10 a week to do the same thing was like a paycheck. You're gonna get the same $10. You got to do the same things. And what people try to do is less of it. So they're always having to nag you and remind you and manage you to do all the chores. That's stupid. So if my dad had a list of all the things we could do, and then we'd say, hey, I want to take the garbage out. And he'd be like, I'd be like, do it for two bucks. He's like, a buck. I'm like, no, I'll do it for two. He's like, I'll get your brother. I'm like, fine, I'll do it for a buck. We thought he was going to negotiate how to spot the opportunity before somebody else did. There was an unlimited amount of things that could be done around the house, but he taught us how to spot opportunity and how to negotiate and how to hustle and how to get it done in the least amount of time. At one point, I came home, my dad was really mad at me because I was paying my brother to cut the grass. Until I explained to my dad that, look, you paid me five bucks to cut the grass, and he's willing to do it for three. And I made two. And my dad's like, you know what? You just learned how to hire somebody. That's pretty cool. He detached from the fact that I was getting my brother to do my chore when I hired my brother to do it.

That is hilarious. I was allowed to do it.

He wouldn't allow me to hire my brother after that.

So my question is, is your brother an entrepreneur now, too?

He is. My brother bought my dad's company. My sister is also an entrepreneur. Yeah, that's all we've ever known.

All right, well, last question here. Cameron. This has been awesome. And actually, I got this from another friend of mine, a guy named Ron Carson, that he always closed his interviews with this. And so this is one of my favorites. What is one piece of advice you can share with me that led to your success? And I know you already shared your network is your net worth, but I guess if we took maybe your number one answer, what would it be?

It's focus. So it's sitting down on a daily basis and saying, what are the top three things I need to get done today? And it's working on those three things. If you think about if you're going to work for five days a week and you take maybe four weeks vacation every year and you don't work weekends, you've got about 210 working days, and if you just got three big things done every day, that's 630 impactful things. But it's thinking about what are the top three things I'm going to get done. So what I do is I use an app called Commit to Three. It's like $3. And I commit my top three things every day to Joe Polish. He commits his top three business things to me. And then I have another friend that I commit my personal top three with, Gordy Buffon. And Gordy commits his personal top three to me. So every day I have my top three business, my top three personal. And by putting them into this app and committing them to another person, it nags me to get that stuff done. I love it.

Accountability. That's what it's all about.

Well, accountability and also thinking about it. The other thing I'll do is I'll write my top three down on a post it note and I'll put the post it note on the side of my laptop and it nags me all day because I see it sitting in front of me and it reminds me what I really got to get done. The rest of the work is just busy work. We'll get that stuff done too. But focus on the critical few versus the important many.

Awesome. Well, Cameron, I just want to say thank you so much. I feel so fortunate that we both know John Rulin, who also happens to be an incredible guy and connected us for this conversation. So thank you.

Yeah, Brad, I appreciate it. Glad the viewers are getting some good content here. The real CEO CEO relationship should be a yin and yang relationship. You complement each other. You are each other's balance. The COO is the brakes to the CEO's gas. The COO shines the spotlight on the CEO and the CEO shines the spotlight on the COO. It's just a real strong partnership and balance. Very.