Things You Didn't Know About A Painted Picture

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Cameron is a brilliant business mind helping to grow three 100 million dollar businesses in his career. Most notably when serving as the COO of 1-800-got junk and helping to grow it from 2 million to 106 million in six years with no debt or outside shareholders. He also has a reputation for building world class culture within the companies he works in. His TED talk, let's Raise Kids to be Entrepreneurs is widely regarded as one of the best on the topics of parenting and entrepreneurship. With over 25 years of experience, Cameron has launched Back Pocket COO where he is a mentor to entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Cameron Herald.

Thank you very much. I need to do a quick little survey of the audience. I'm not reading my email up here. I need to find out how truly entrepreneurial this year's crowd is at the Mastermind Talks. I'm going to read to you a list of traits that Describe entrepreneurs. There's 11 traits on this list. When you hear five that describe you, I'd like you to stand up and remain standing. Are you often filled with energy? Are you often flooded with ideas? Are you driven? Are you restless? Are you unable to keep still? Okay, we're almost all up already. Are you often working on little sleep? Do you get euphoric? Do you get easily irritated by minor obstacles? Do you burn out periodically? Do you act out sexually, which is like flirting? And do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision? Take a look around the room really quickly. You actually all stood up to the list of traits that describe people with bipolar disorder. I need the clicker. The remote. Anyone have that? Supposed to be a remote for me. Jason's got it with him. So the reason I bring that up is entrepreneurs are wired differently. Those are actually the clinical diagnosed traits for bipolar disorder. And the reason I bring that up is as a child I had a lot of those traits. I also had all the traits of attention deficit disorder and narcissism and Tourette's speaking out loud. And I talk about that in my TED talk, which is on the Ted.com website. It's been up for about four years. I'd love for you to take a look at it and share it with the world. It's not what I'm going to talk about today, but I am on a mission to get people to understand that ADD and bipolar disorder is not a disease. Those are simply traits of entrepreneurs. I've read those same traits to 350 accountants and only seven people stood up we're wired differently. The disease is not add. The disease is the school system and the medical community saying there's something wrong with us and trying to medicate it out of us. We're supposed to be wired differently. Today what I'm going to talk about is something around vision. Now, we've all got vision statements or mission statements. Put your hand up if you have a mission statement or a vision statement for your company. Okay. You all wrote it the same way, right? Get all your favorite people in the room, put all your favorite words up on a whiteboard, vote on your favorite words, eliminate all the ones that got no votes. Mash those seven words up into one sentence. That's your vision statement. Go, team. And then you kind of walk out of the room going, that's horseshit. I don't even believe in it. Well, I'm going to show you a new way to put a vision statement in place. This is what we did when we built one, 800 got junk. I joined as the 14th employee. When I left, we had 3100 employees, system wide. And this tool was what we did to actually grow our culture. This is what I do now behind the scenes with companies you might know the name of is. I teach them how to use this same tool to build and create alignment within their teams. It's called the painted picture. And the idea is something that we learned from an Olympic coach. There were 70 of us as CEOs in Vancouver, and we were invited to go to a lunch and only 16 of us showed up. And about three minutes into the lunch, all 16 of us were wondering why the heck we were there. Because it was starting to sound a little bit flaky. This high performance sports psychologist, an Olympic coach, was talking about how athletes would visualize themselves performing the event. And he said, if we could almost go in a time machine three years into the future and see what our company looked like in the future, we could come back to today and make it a reality. Well, at that point, all 16 of us were like, we're out. Like, we're going to go in a time machine. This isn't making any sense to us. So he gave us another analogy. He talked to us about Brooke Shields. He said when Brooke Shields was getting married to Andre Agassi, she didn't like her legs. So she put a picture up on the refrigerator of what she wanted her legs to look like on the wedding day. Her perfect legs. Well, we know that the wedding between Brooke and Andre didn't work out. Andre ended up getting married To Steffi Graf. The crazy thing was those were Steffi Graf's legs. So the process of visualization worked. Unfortunately, it worked for Andre, not for Brooke. Again, we still had no idea how do we bring this into the business world. So we looked for a business that used visualization and we came up with home builders or contractors. Anyone here ever done a renovation or built a house? Put your hand up, it's almost all of you. Good. So the idea with a home builder is the homeowner is really the CEO. The homeowner has a vision for what the finished product is going to look and feel like. They are gone out into the time machine they know with pictures and sketches and drawings and photos from magazines and pictures you've taken at your friends houses when they were not looking. And you hand all those to the contractor and the contractor takes your vision. And what does he do with them? He creates blueprints. Then they take the blueprints and they hand them to the employees. And the employees can literally build your vision. That analogy started to make sense to us if employees could see what the CEO could see. See all of us as CEOs or entrepreneurs have a bit of a video or a movie in our mind describing what our company looks like three years in the future. If we could just go out in that time machine and describe what we see, we'd be able to figure it out. Give an example. Who's seen the movie the Sound of Music, who's never seen the movie the Sound of Music, who has no idea what the movie the Sound of Music's about? Like really no idea at all. What's your name? Michael. Michael, so you have no idea at all? I know it's a musical. Okay. Who has less of an idea than that? Okay, Alex, you have no idea what the movie sound of mixed about? Okay, don't say anything. Okay. So Alex, first off, what the hell do you do in your free time besides traveling with Mimi all over the world? Watch the movie. Okay. When you go home. Okay, so I'm going to ask you three questions. There's a really famous scene in the movie where they're having a picnic. Now if you've seen the movie, you know the picnic scene really well. But Alex, I need. You're my like my biggest guy, my $350,000 COO, my MBA from wherever, right? I'm delegating this project. Run the company picnic, just like the movie the Sound of Music. Any idea what it looks like? Ok, I'll give you a hint. And then I got to Run. I'm on vacation for two weeks. I'll just tell you three things. Is it in a park at the mountains or at a lake? A park. Ok, good. And where are we going to buy or where do they get the food, Alex? Do we get it at a grocery store, in a picnic basket or at a little hut? A little hut. Ok, so we're at a park, we get the food at a hut. And are the kids playing croquet, dancing or playing baseball? Playing croquet. Playing croquet. Awesome. Alex, you completely screwed this thing up. You're the smartest guy, my Harvard mba, and you're having the picnic in a park with the kids playing baseball and you bought the food at a hut. It's the Sound of Music. They're in the Alps in Austria. The kids are singing. It's called the Sound of Music, Alex. See, the problem is that Alex has never seen the movie, so how could he possibly recreate the scene from the movie? He only sees what he can see, not what I can see. That's where the analogy stuck with us as entrepreneurs was our employees, the smartest people that we get. If they see something different than we see, at best, they're making their own educated guesses. The way to create alignment is to get everyone to conceive, believe and then achieve. It's to get everyone to see what you see in the crystal ball and be able to describe it in the same level of detail. The painted picture is not pictures, however. It's a written three or four page description. And if you write it, you got to get out of the box. You, as the entrepreneur, have to get out of your office. No laptop, no iPad, take a notepad, Go out somewhere where you're around nature, somewhere where you're inspired. Go sit somewhere where you're relaxed and you can literally think and dream about your company. Describe operations and IT and finance. Describe marketing. Describe what the press is writing about you. Describe what your customers are saying three years out, what your employees are saying three years out. Describe the feeling that you have when you walk into that office space, that visceral feeling. Don't worry about how it happens, because again, you've gone into the time machine three years out, you're describing what you see. Then you bring that description back to today and your team can figure out how. So your job, when you're off site for half a day and it's all it's really going to take is a half a day to a day maximum, do a mind map describing all different areas of Your business. Describe it all in rough notes and then pull it together with some bullet points. Pull the bullet points together so that you just kind of organize your thoughts into little areas. And then when you take all of those areas and you write it up into a rough three or four page description, that's as far as you have to go as the entrepreneur. And again, don't worry about how it happens. Don't put a whole lot of numbers in there. Just describe in vivid detail what your company looks and feels like three years out in the future. Then you want to get it off to a writer. Get it to somebody who can really take the written word and make it jump off the page. Get it to somebody who can really, really make this thing exciting. I have a client that I worked with called mci. I taught them this concept. They were running a program that's held at MIT every year. It's not an MIT course, but it's held on site at MIT at a place called Endicott House. And it's 65 entrepreneurs from around the world that come there and meet their businesses. Range between about 5 million in revenue and 500 million in revenue. And they come on site for four days, then they go back a year later for another four days and they come back a year later for another four days. So I taught this 30 year old Sebastian Tondor from Geneva this concept of a painted picture. And it was back in September or sorry, in May of 2007. And he leaned forward to 2009. He leaned forward to 2012 describing what his company looked like three years later. His company at the time was doing 120 million in revenue. He leaned out the three years and described his company doing a half a billion dollars in revenue with $100 million profit, described what it looked and felt like, then rolled that out to all of his employees globally. And we started to work behind the scenes to figure out how to reverse engineer that. But three years later, his company was doing $506 million in revenue and had $120 million profit. He'd taken the company from three years from $100 million in revenue to $100 million in profit. Sebastian then leaned out again and described his company doing a billion dollars in revenue 2015, December 31, 2015, doing a billion dollars in revenue, operating around the world. He sent me an email about six months ago. Almost giddy in his email. His number one competitor in the world has just gone bankrupt. Sebastian is picking up the pieces of a 600 million dollar company right now. The billion dollar vision is not quite a fait accompli, but everyone is completely aligned and everyone is having the same picnic because everyone can see what Sebastian can see. Once you have your painted picture written up in a way that everyone can see what you can see, you add some graphic design elements to it. This is a client that I work with out of Ottawa called Gongsho Gear. They create cool clothing for hockey fans, and they've created this kind of theme around it. If you read the content of their painted picture, it actually sounds like a hockey guy talking about it. My wife actually wrote the content for this painted picture for their CEO to make it pop off the page. And when you read what he wrote versus what a real writer can write, it's incredibly different. You can add other design elements. I had a client who was building a chain of bilingual preschools, so they use little crayon sketches. I don't recommend you use crayon sketches for our businesses, but when you have a chain of bilingual preschools, crayon sketches make perfect sense. A client that I coached who's based in New York, who's ranked as the number one technology company to work for in the U.S. now they have a big search engine, marketing, SEO, pay per click company. Their alignment that's happening in all their offices around the US Is the same thing. This painted picture is also sent to your customers, to your suppliers, your accountants, your lawyers. And it's supposed to be like a magnet. It's supposed to be written in a kind of way that it literally compels people when they're reading what your painted picture talks about. Now, if it's like a magnet, what else does a magnet do? Right? It also repels. It should also push you away. You should be reading some parts of this painted picture and go, that doesn't sound like the company I want to work for. Awesome. Imagine if every potential employee read what your company looked like three years in the future and didn't bother to apply because it didn't sound like the place they wanted to work. Wouldn't that save you a whole bunch of time? Or imagine if the only suppliers that wanted to work with you were so excited about what the future looks like. I have clients who've landed funding. I have clients I love rewards based in Toronto. When I taught them this concept, a year later, they landed $26 million funding from Sequoia. This stuff really works because people are excited about the future and they can see and feel it. It's different from looking at your financials or a business model. It's so visceral. And it creates this complete alignment in the organization that everyone is literally pulling the same way. Here's the only challenge with a painted picture. It's different. See, we're all going to these fancy business schools and learning that we have to do this mission statement by putting all of our words up on the whiteboard and voting on them. So when you roll out a painted picture, it's different. People aren't quite used to this concept of what you're rolling out, and it's going to look and feel a little bit stupid. So as the entrepreneur or the CEO, when you roll out a painted picture, people can only see today. They don't quite see the future yet. So I'm going to show you a little video that illustrates what it feels like to roll out a painted picture throughout your organization. Let's say this is you, the entrepreneur. You've got an idea, and you're going to dance. Your idea is that you're going to keep dancing. And you want something to happen, but it's not quite happening, except a lot of people are looking at you thinking you're a little bit strange. See, These are your VPs, your accountants. Sooner or later, a marketing guy joins in. Marketing people will join you quicker than anyone else. They get the vision thing. They can lean out into the future. They'll dance with you. But you keep communicating your painted picture to your suppliers, your accountant, your spouse is pretty sure you're nuts at this point. And you keep dancing. You're gonna dance until everybody dances. You're gonna communicate your vision, your core values, your core purpose, until everyone gets in complete alignment. But the problem is, for a few months, no one is joining you, and you're gonna have doubt. But you have to keep dancing because you know it feels right. Sales guy will join in, marketing guy leaves, and you keep dancing. See, marketing and salespeople will join in, and you keep communicating it, as Jim Collins said in Good to Great, until your people are making fun of you, until they're mocking you, your ideas have not started to stick. You communicate. You communicate. You communicate. Communicate. A couple operations people will join in. A couple of small trade publications might write an article about you. One supplier might join you. Because of it, you might get another, bigger piece of press. Talking about the future. When we built 1-800-got- junk. We used the media to land 5200 stories about our company. And we only talked about the future. And that's all they wrote about. And because they wrote about the future, people wanted to be a part of it. We kept telling them how great our culture was. So people were running to come to work for us because they could feel what it looked like, even though today didn't quite feel like the future was written. But you keep dancing. This is what it felt like when we ranked number two to work for in Canada, number two company to work for in all of Canada. We were getting 250 resumes for every job posting because everyone was completely aligned and excited about what the company looked like in the future. But look at the people sitting closest to you. A couple of your VPs that are not joining in. These are the ones you know you have to get off the bus. If you've got these cultural cancers that are inside of your organization, the wrong suppliers, the wrong customers, the wrong employees, you have to get them out because they're destroying your company from the inside out. This video goes on for about another two minutes, until 45,000 people ended up dancing. Because one person had a vision and he was going to dance until everybody danced. The problem is that vision without execution is hallucination. So that's chapter one of my book, Double, Double. Read it, embrace it. Then you got to figure out how to reverse engineer it. We'll talk about a little bit of that later on. Thanks for having me.