Turning Good Entrepreneurs into Great Business Owners | Cameron Herold (Podcast 319)

We have to find the people to make the plan happen. Right. Again, if I have the vision for what my home is going to look like, and I have the blueprints to build my home, I'm not going to start throwing hammers and hanging windows. Like, I don't, I don't know how to do that, but I know how to find the people that can make that plan happen. Right? So I'm not going to worry about how to do it. I'm going to worry about who can do it full time. For fractional outsourced freelance entrepreneurship is something.

That you're well versed in. I think by the time you were 18, you had 14 different businesses. Maybe just start off by giving a little of your background. But I'd love to hear why you love entrepreneurship so much.

I was groomed to be an entrepreneur. My father ran his own company and both sets of grandparents ran their companies. So all I ever knew was being an entrepreneur. And I grew up in an era where being an entrepreneur was not cool. Right? Entrepreneurship only started to get cool around 1998, 99 and the rise of the first Internet boom. But prior to that, entrepreneurs were greedy capitalists. We were vilified. No books and magazines talked about entrepreneurs in a cool way. So I was that kind of weird kid in school who was always being picked on, the school telling me to shut everything down. But I saw it as something that was super fun. And the one big lesson that I think I learned at a young age that was probably very formative for me was that being an entrepreneur was about the free time that it would give me to do whatever I wanted. It was never about the money. And my dad always taught us that if we focused on building businesses to give us the time, the money would take care of itself and we'd have more than we need. And I think it's a shame that so many entrepreneurs now tend to focus on the money. The money, the money. And they miss the whole point because at the end of the day, we can't take the money with us. And if we don't enjoy the whole journey, being an entrepreneur is pretty rough. So that's how I was groomed. Both my brother, my sister and myself have all run our own companies for around 25 years. And that's kind of the deal. When I was in second year university, I had 12 full time employees for my first real business.

You just said something there, I want to jump in. And maybe I wasn't even going to ask you this question, but I think there's a great perspective there. You said, you know, being a great entrepreneur can free up time. What are the things that a business owner, entrepreneur has to do to free up that time? And let me back up one second and say it this way. A lot of the entrepreneurs, a lot of the advisors that we work with are working so much that they don't have that freedom of time yet they're trying to get to there. So what are some of the most important things to get to a point where you have that time and that built into the business?

Sure. So I'll go off, kind of off. First off is that you're never going to get it all done, right? You're never going to get your to do list done because by the time that you knock off everything on your list, you'll have added six more ideas, you'll buy another business, you'll expand, you'll grow something, you'll keep building your list. We tend to lie to ourselves when we say I'm going to work tonight to catch up or I'll work this weekend to catch up. No, what you're really doing is you're working tonight or you're working this weekend to avoid your spouse or avoid your frustrations or avoid the struggles with your kids, or avoid the fact that you've lost touch with your hobbies or you miss your friends and you feel embarrassed to reach out to them. So what I try to do is I try to schedule all of the fun stuff, the activities, the time for me, the stuff with my friends and my hobbies and my vacations. And I build the business around that. For example, in 2021, I took 13 full weeks vacation. I took every Saturday and Sunday off. And I also went to Italy for 6 weeks and I only worked 3 days a week from 1 till 7pm in addition to the 13 weeks vacation and my business grew, I added employees, I made more profit, I invested more money, but it's because I started to delegate everything but genius. So the first is really schedule everything, be aware, you're never going to get it all done. Force the stuff you really want to do into your calendar and then delegate everything except genius. So I'm really good at lots of stuff, but I don't get energy from doing it. So I delegate that. The only things I love doing are coaching and speaking and networking and planning around strategy. And then I love to delegate everything else to get it off my plate.

And it's funny, we were talking about as we tried to even schedule this like you had been to the grenadines Chile. Antarctica. I think so. Some, some good advice.

Costa Rica. Yeah. And, yeah. And Antarctica. I've been to I think six countries in the last two months, two and a half months.

What's fun to see is when that, that light switch goes on for advisors and they realize that building a great team around them and delegating out the things short, I think you said it perfect short of the genius frees them up. It's, it's a tough transition, but when it happens, it's, it's one of the best things that can happen to you.

Well, every single person listening, I would guess, does not clean their own toilets and bathrooms and scrub their own floors. We've probably hired a cleaning lady or a person to come clean for us. Most of us probably don't cut our own lawns anymore. We've hired somebody to come and do our landscaping for us. Most of us don't paint our own homes anymore. Although we could, right? We, we've delegated those minimum wage labor jobs that we don't love to do. I think if we look around our business, let's say that as an example, an advisor earns, you know, $300,000 a year, or let's call it $500,000 a year because it's an easy to work with. If you earn $500,000 a year in profit, your effective hourly wage is 200, $250 an hour, right? $250 an hour times 50 weeks, times 40 hours a week equals about 500,000. So if your effective hourly rate is $250 an hour, if I was paying you $250 an hour to work every day and I saw you doing $20 hour tasks, I'd lose my mind, right? As the entrepreneur, I'd wonder why am I paying you a half a million dollars a year to read emails? Why am I paying you a half million dollars a year to proofread something? Why am I paying you half a million dollars a year to cold call? You should be closing, you should be networking, you should be doing the stuff that is worth a half million dollars a year for. And let's hire some EAs, some fractional people, some junior people, some outsourced people to do all the stuff that is 20, 40, $80 an hour tasks.

It's funny you say that. I was literally on a coaching call with one of our advisors right before we hopped on two young guys that are actually, they're grown like crazy. And this was the exact conversation we had there. I said, why don't you just track everything you're doing for a week and highlight the things that you could pay someone else to do? What to free up more of your time to do? You know, as an advisor, probably your most valuable thing that you can do is sit in front of prospective clients and convert them into clients or at least where they're at in the phase of, of their business. I said if you can free all that other stuff up to do more of that, like it's a good return on investment.

If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one, right? So I have a little system where I pretend that someone follows me with a video camera for an entire month and I write down everything that I'm doing. Opening emails, replying to emails, setting up meetings, booking flights, whatever. Write down all the 86 things that I do over the course of a month and then I categorize them in one of four ways, either I for incompetent, meaning I suck at it. C for competent, meaning I'm okay at it. E for excellent, meaning I'm really, really good at it, but I don't necessarily love doing it. And U for unique ability, meaning I'm really good at it. I love doing it and it gives me energy. And then I put in an hourly rate beside everything. What would I pay someone just to do that task? 40 hours a week. And I try to start delegating the incompetence and competent and low hourly rates. And then at some point, and this is where I am now, I'm even delegating the stuff. I'm excellent to free up more time. And as I'm working only in my area of unique ability, I get better results because I'm doing everything with so much energy and it's fun and it's passion and I've never burned out.

That's good. I love it. That was just a master's class right there. So one of the things we talked about, about all the times, our goal is to help good advisors become great business owners. Obviously you have this long history not only as an entrepreneur and business owner, but also coaching other entrepreneurs. Are there certain traits that you see that are basically predictors of success in the best entrepreneurs?

There's certain traits and there's certain skills. So I'll go with the traits first. Entrepreneurs have to be strong leaders. They have to be very goal orientated, they have to be very tenacious, they have to be very introspective where they'll blame themselves for the problem instead of the outside world and they have to be very kind of interdependent. They'll follow systems that exist, like maybe advisor Excel systems. If a system doesn't exist, they'll wing it and figure it out on the fly. Those are what I see as the five core traits. To be strong as an entrepreneur. Yes, you need to be good in sales and good financial, but you can outsource that stuff or hire that stuff too. But then on the skill side, where I think people need to be really good, created a course called invest in your leaders. And it's the 12 core leadership skills that every manager or leader needs to be good at. So if you think about all of your advisors, they need to be good at coaching because they have to coach their people. They need to be good at time management, they need to be good at delegation, they need to be good at interviewing. You know, most of us hire people and we've never been trained on interviewing. They need to be good at running meetings. They need to be good at one on one coaching sessions. They need to be good at teaching or classroom sessions. So I created this module set of modules and this is what I've coached all of my teams and all of my leaders on for the last 25 years. And these are the skills that never change. Right. Situational leadership. So I think it's a combination of the core traits and then the core skills.

Let me ask you a question about scaling because obviously you've done that quite a bit and that tends to be who you coach a lot too. But what are, as I'll use some of our advisors is their business, you know, has 10 times and you've heard that talked about a lot. We see so many of them that have 10 times their business, probably something they never dreamed it would be at. But as that scale grows, what are some of the biggest challenges that you've seen or entrepreneurs have to overcome if they're going to continue to keep that growing and scaling going?

Yeah. One is that they have to flip the org chart upside down. I actually spoke about this when I was in Antarctica that we were at the bottom of the world and I said the CEO should be at the bottom of the org chart supporting the VPs who are supporting the frontline staff. We're supporting the customers, not telling everyone what to do. Right. Our job now is to grow people's skills and to grow their confidence and then grow their skills and grow their confidence. So the leader's job is aligning people with vision and then focusing on bringing good people into the company, growing their skills, growing Their confidence delegating more, coaching more, leading more and doing less. I find that the more that an entrepreneur is working, as we say, working in the business versus on the business, the more that you're doing stuff that's you're stunting your growth. What we need to say is it needs to get done, but not by me. And then how can I coach someone so they can do it and get a result better than me or faster than me, or even just an okay result, but I then don't have to do that?

And tying back into what you said at the beginning, that's also how you free up time, right? Our biggest advisors, our best advisors have more free like 10 times the free time of some that aren't at near the level they're at.

And some of that I think comes from the smartest people are in a way cursed because they were taught that you had to be smart in school. I was really stupid in school. I got 62% in high school. I scraped my way through university, got another C minus, like a 2.2 GPA. So I knew that I wasn't the smartest guy in the class. I had all these built in insecurities. But what I realized was if I hired smart people, if I delegated more, if I use the cheat sheets, if somebody told me like if I was an advisor for advisors Excel, and you said here's the 12 systems I should use, dude, I would follow everything to the T. Because I'm sure if there's a better way, you're going to tell me later anyway, hey, we found a better way. Good. I'll do it that way now. But I'm not going to spend any time trying to reinvent the wheel. It already works pretty darn good. What I will do is try to get more free time and say I like doing this. I'm going to delegate all the stuff I don't like. I'm just going to do more of what I do like.

And I'm guessing you were a lot smarter and you're giving yourself credit for it just probably wasn't something you enjoyed.

So I was street smart. But I'll show you my transcript. It's quite interesting. There you go. Can you see those grades?

Sort of. Yeah, it's. Yeah, those aren't very good. So I'm guessing you were bored in school as part.

I was very bored in school.

I've met you and you're very intelligent, so.

But in a different way. Right. But I was the kid who failed every. So what I meant though is the A students think that they have to have perfect. They think they need the perfect website or the perfect sales letter or the perfect. No, you just need momentum, creating momentum. So I knew that I could never get perfect, so I just roll stuff out the door. And I think where the smartest people get a little bit cursed is they feel like they have to work six more hours crafting that perfect email where what they should have done was just get the email out and then coach their team for five and a half hours.

Well, also there something I tell people all the time. They ask AES obviously a big business and some other ones, and they ask all the how do you do it? And I'm like, because we just do stuff and then we adjust on the fly, right? It's so much easier. You spend so much time trying to get it perfect and then it still doesn't work. I'd rather just launch it and then adjust to the kind of market conditions and the feedback that you're getting.

And science showed us that momentum creates momentum. So just get it going and something will happen and then course correct along the way.

I want to ask you about another topic or area that you're well versed in. You have done a lot of work, in fact, maybe more work these days on coaching COOs and the benefit of hiring a COO you even have, I think it's called the COO Alliance. This is the question I want to ask as our advisors grow. You know, when they start, they may have three, four or five employees now. You know, some of them have 15, 20, 30, some getting up to maybe 40 or 50. What are the signs that they should be looking for as the CEO slash entrepreneur that it's time to hire a coo?

Funny. The book that I'm working on now, which will be my sixth book, is around a CEO COO relationship. First off, when you're building a company, the first key hire that you need to have is the executive assistant, right? If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. And I've seen so many businesses, they're like, oh, I need a COO or I need a second in command. You hire the EA first to get all the administrative off your plate. That's now freed you up for another 18 months probably and saved you 150 grand a year, right? So, so get the EA hired first. Secondly, the second in command to you, don't give them a CEO title too early, right? Remember that 20 years ago to get a CFO, CMO, COO to get a C level title. 20 years ago, you had to be a major player at a major company. And now I see these companies with like 16 employees. They've got a CFO and CEO. Basically you have a director of operations with a big title. You got a controller with a big title. You got a marketing manager with a big title. So don't worry about the title. What you're going to look for, though, as you're kind of yin and yang as your partner in helping you grow the business, is someone who you can really trust. Like, you'll give them your bank account information, your passwords on day one, you'll let them take care of your kids, you'll let them go on vacation with your spouse when you can't be there, like so much implicit trust. Right. Secondly, that they're a kind of person that you just want to hang with. They may not be exactly like you, but you would go for dinner with them. You vibe off them, they vibe off you. You can kind of finish each other's sentences. You see the picture in different ways, but you see it together. And then third is you're looking for someone who's really, really good at the stuff that you suck at and who doesn't want to work in the areas that you love. So as an example, coos, Harvard wrote an article years ago called the Misunderstood role of the COO. And there's different types of COOs in very different companies. Some COOs run finance, so I didn't. Some COOs run it. I didn't. Some COOsn run marketing, Eric Church doesn't. But what you do is you're the yin and yang to the CEO.

And then as someone hires in a coo, what are some of the things that they need to prepare or plan for to make sure that that COO can be successful in that new role. Because, let me say this, I see a lot of entrepreneurs that are hesitant to give things up or still get involved. And I think if you're bringing someone in at that level, that can, that can be a challenge. So any tips there on, like, how to make that work?

Well, so the first is really focusing always on the relationship. Secondly is almost like a mom and dad raising kids. You're allowed to fight and argue, but you never do it in front of the kids. You have a place that you can go, and so the CEO and COO can have strong discussions, but if there's strong arguments, don't do it in front of the leadership team. Right. Have a space, a container where you can go to have that out so that you come back in as that kind of force together. Third is the CEO's job is to shine the spotlight on the COO to make them look good internally, and the CEO's job is to shine THE spotlight on the CEO to make them iconic. It's really making each other look good. The fourth would be to not get in each other's lanes, to let each other do their jobs. And almost like Navy Seals, that if I'm not uber focused on just my job and I'm worried about something else over here, we all get killed. Right? I need to trust that Bob's got my back and Kelly's got my front and somebody else is watching my flank so that I can just do my job. And it's that trust and focus that I think makes you successful.

You've mentioned the idea of trust in that relationship you talked about in the question I asked before. How if you're hiring a person new, how do you try and identify that? Or is it more of a. Would you encourage, take one of our advisors who feels like they need to hire that, Would you encourage them more to go look in their own network of people that they know and have that relationship with? They could bring in if you can.

Find somebody who you already know, who has the skill set and the core values, and you can train them on some, some, you know, expertise in your industry. I would do that 99 times out of 100. When I joined Brian at 1-800-got junk. I came in as the 14th employee. When I left six and a half years later, we had 3100 employees system wide. I joined as his second in command three months before joining him. He was best man at my wedding. Brian and I had been in a forum group for four and a half years in the entrepreneurs organization. We knew each other really well. He'd watched me build two other companies. I'd covered his ass when we were out drinking together a number of times. We knew each other really, really well. So yeah, I would do that 99 times out of 100. The only time it gets really difficult is when you're in an industry where you have deep, deep kind of ip, like an engineering type of kind of company. But look, if you're in the financial advising space, you could hire somebody that's in the insurance space or somebody who's in the wealth management space or somebody who's in the crypto space. The key is you want somebody who can do all the stuff that you're.

Not good at, you know, Mike Miller, our COO Mike had no background in this industry at all, but had it in manufacturing. And of the stuff that we do has some similarities in that, you know, from process. And he's just been incredible. He learned the industry pretty quick. Smart guy, so. But he brought a whole skill set that we actually didn't have at all in our kind of our business at the time. And it's just been a valuable ad here for sure.

I've laughed about that over the years. And I've said, you know, when I started at 1-800-got junk. Brian had been in the industry for 10 years. He got it to 2 million in revenue. And I went out in the trucks my first week and came back at lunch and started changing into my street clothes. He goes, what are you doing? I go, I'm done. He goes, you've only spent four hours in the trucks. He goes, you don't know the business. I'm like, yeah, I do. We pick stuff up, we put it in a truck, we dump it out. We're good. I said, that's not what we're in. We're about customer engagement, we're about brand, we're about culture. And I went off for about a half hour, but all the stuff we had to do. And he's like, holy. I'm like, yeah, dude, this is not about junk removal.

Yep, that's good. Okay, I want to pivot a little bit. So I mentioned this book, Vivid Vision, and I mentioned it specifically because it within the AE community, it's the one thing as soon as I say Cameron Herald, everyone's like, oh, Vivid Vision. So you've talked about that at a journey. I've seen so many of our advisors who have taken and built this just great Vivid Vision. So one people should read this. I still gift it all the time. I sent out three last week. But for those that aren't familiar with the concept, what's the difference between setting a vision for your company versus a vivid vision for your company?

Sure. And really quickly. Two of my other books that all of your advisors should look at. One is called Free pr, and all of the advisors would benefit from understanding how to build their brand and how to leverage free press coverage in their market in their community. Online. Really, really easy tools on how to. And we did it for years with every business I built. And then the other one I co authored is the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. And I think it would be amazing for the advisors on that one as well. So the concept of Vivid Vision, I actually learned this 24 years ago. From an Olympic coach. And he was talking to a group of entrepreneurs here in Vancouver about how athletes use visualization to see themselves performing the event. And they would literally play the event over in their mind hundreds of times so that when they were performing the event, it was almost as if they could perform on instinct. And he said, in the business world, the entrepreneur knows what they're building, but no one else can read our mind. We put together a one sentence mission statement and say, go, team. Well, if we were building a house and I said to the best contractor in Vancouver, build me my dream home. Here's 2 million bucks. I'll see you in a year. I would come back a year later and he'd have built something, but it might not look anything like I wanted. There's not enough there in that one sentence. Build me my dream home. So you have to give them pictures and drawings and sketches and, and explain stuff and how I entertain and how my family works and how I like the flow to be. And once, sooner or later, the contractor starts to understand my vision, he can create blueprints or the plans to make my vision come true. He can sign off on my vision, I can sign off on his blueprints. He can then hand the vision and the blueprints to the workers, and they can build the dream home. So the vivid vision concept is like enough of a description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future so that the management team can figure out the plans to make that come true. And then the entrepreneur can then support everyone on the plans, can coach them on the skills needed for each of the projects to make all the parts of the plans happen, and everyone's completely aligned. That's where the concept kind of came from.

You were talking about construction. You have a TED talk that talks about this like you're. I think it's called your vision statement sucks, I think is what I wrote down. But you tell the story about remodeling your home and your fireplace. Maybe tell that story. Because I thought that was just like the perfect analogy of how this works.

It was crazy. So this was 12 years ago. My ex and I were building a beautiful home in Vancouver. This gorgeous craftsman style, three and a half story view of the mountains. And I had this feeling of what I wanted the fireplace to look like. You know, I could see the Christmas stockings hanging and I could see where the chairs would be. And I've always loved the warm fire. And I grew up in northern Canada. We always had a fire going in the home. And I just knew what I wanted it to feel like. And I was trying to describe it to the contractor, and he didn't quite get it. So I started flipping through all these magazines, and I found a picture, and I brought it in. I'm like, this is what I want. He goes, oh, I totally get it now. So he goes, I got it. I got it. I'm like, he didn't need anything else from me. And I don't know when. It was like, about six, eight months later, I walked into the home one day, and I walked in the front door. I turned and looked into the living room, and I froze. And all I could see in front of me was this fireplace, exactly what I'd imagined. And I walked over to the fireplace, and I looked at the worker, and he said, is this what you wanted? And I go, this is amazing. And he pointed at a picture that he had taped beside the fireplace. And that's what he was using to create all the. I was like, oh, it makes sense. Like you. I don't even know what this worker's name was. I've. I've never learned his name since. But because he could read my mind, he could make it come true. But that's the case of anybody. Whether you're trying to make them understand your, you know, a sales training session you're running, or an event you're hosting for clients, or a dinner you're having with prospects, or a marketing campaign you're doing, if they can't see the whole thing, right? If they don't understand how the meetings are going to work, or they can't recreate it. And that's why we spend all of our time trying to manage people and hold them accountable, is they can't see the full picture. And they're also not inspired because they don't know what they're doing. They don't know why they're doing it.

So if someone's sitting down to start their vivid vision and, you know, key is pick a date three to five years into the future, imagining what your business looks like. If they're struggling with really understanding, okay, what could happen? What's it going to look like? Any advice on how to get started with this?

Yeah. The first part is that you can't write your vivid vision sitting in your office and with your laptop. You need to grab a notepad, grab a good old school notepad and a pen and paper and get out of your office. Go somewhere where you're inspired. Go up into the mountains, go sit down at the lake. Go to a five star hotel and sit in the lobby by the fireplace. But get out of your office and allow your mind to just dream and pretend that you literally hop into the DeLorean time machine with Michael J. Fox and the Doc and you blast off to December 31st, three years from now, and walk around your company and describe what you see. Describe the office, describe the meeting rooms, describe the culture. Don't worry about how it came true. Like, I don't know how to do electrical, but I can talk about what I want the lighting to look like. I don't know how to hang cabinets, but I can describe what I want the cabinets to look like. I have no idea how to do a fireplace, but I know what I want it to look like. So don't worry about how they're going to build the home. Describe what you want it to look like. And that's one of the reasons why you have to get out of the office is that tends to be where we figure out the how to do everything. We get stuck in how pies.

Right. So let me ask the opposite side of that question. Someone writes out their vivid vision and then the next day they look at it and they're like, holy crap. Like, that kind of scares me. That's big. There's a lot of work to do. My team's gonna freak out. What's your advice for that person on maybe one for themselves? How to get with, like, no, this is possible. But then also, how do they get the team bought into this big growth? That may look like a lot of work.

Great question. Well, it probably is a lot of work, but it doesn't have to be done. It doesn't have to be done by you. Right. And as my friends Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy wrote in their book who not how, now we have to figure out the who's. We have to find the people to make the plan happen. Right. Again, if I have the vision for what my home's going to look like and I have the blueprints to build my home, I'm not going to start throwing hammers and hanging windows. I don't know how to do that, but I know how to find the people that can make that plan happen. So I'm not going to worry about how to do it. I'm going to worry about who can do it full time, fractional, outsourced, freelance. I don't manage my own wealth. I buy some stocks on my own. But I have a wealth manager. I've got one that runs all My Barbados stuff, I have one that runs my stuffing North America. And I don't know how they manage what they do. I just give them goals and they manage towards that. But if I had to sit down and figure out all of what they do, I'd be paralyzed.

Is there any advice on how to roll it out to their team first?

Roll it out to your leadership team first. Right? You need to get the leadership team to buy in. Roll it out to your spouse, roll it out to your advisors, your lawyer, your accountant, your banker. Make sure that your advisors and your family and your team, your leadership team get it and buy into it. And they know some of it won't happen until three years from now. Some won't happen till two years from now. Some won't happen until next quarter. Kind of like building a home. Right? Don't worry about how we're going to hang the cabinets. We still have to pour the foundation. Don't worry about putting in the wolf stove and the sub zero fridge. We still have to put in the electrical and the plumbing. Right. So don't worry about the stuff for three years from now and two years from now. We'll figure out how to do those things when we get closer. Let's figure out the foundational stuff first. When the leadership team buys in, then you can roll it out to your employees and get them to just be excited about one or two sentences that they can help make happen.

And then, final question, I ask around vivid vision. Then I want to jump into some lightning round questions. How often do you bring it back up to discuss with your team, to look at, to revisit it, Maybe even to tweak a little? Just any final thoughts around that?

Yeah. So everyone rereads it every quarter. Your customers, your suppliers, your employees, potential employees. Everyone rereads it every quarter. But you only tweak it every three years. You don't unless there's been like a massive shift in the world, like Covid hits, oh, we can't have a physical office. Yeah, we may want to revise that component. Right. But otherwise you don't change the vision. You keep everyone aligned with that vision, and then three years later, you write the next three year out, Vivid vision.

So everyone create that for your business. It's been amazing. The advisors who did that, I think you spoke to that group probably back in 2016 or 2017, somewhere in there the first time. Just the advisors that did that to see what their business has done is nothing short of remarkable.

Awesome.

Okay. Are you good for like five quick Lightning round questions I ask everyone for sure. Okay, first one. What lesson did you learn over the past two years that you think you'll carry forward the rest of your career or life?

I think it was that people are more nervous and more insecure and more fearful than I thought. Everyone's scared about something, everyone's struggling with something. Right. Everyone has their insecurities, their family issues. And I think I'm much more in tune to the human condition than I might have been pre Covid. I think I was fairly insulated as the, you know, white male from North America and you know, upper middle class family. And now. And I thought, you know, but now I get it. I just like you're struggling with something. I'm sure you know, the guys who helped us set up the AV before struggle like. And I'm just very in tune to that that everybody has going on in their personal life. Excuse my language, but everyone's struggling with stuff and we need to be cognizant of that.

Is there anything that you think you've changed in how you either approach your business or people because of that?

I definitely have slowed it down more and tried to slow it down more in my connections with people. I don't try to get off the zoom call right away. I try to connect with them more. Just as on the stuff that really matters, I try to. I think I just am more cognizant of that.

Yeah, it is. I think that awareness has come to a lot of us over the last few years. Second question, what is the one thing that you did that graduated you from being a good, a good entrepreneur to a great entrepreneur?

I used to say that it was growing my skills. The more that I grew my skills that grew me as an entrepreneur. Now it's the more that I'm growing my employees skills. It's really why I started that invest in your leaders course I guess was the more that I grow my people, the more they grow the business. So what I've done more and more over the last four or five years is really, really work hard at growing my employees skills. The leadership skills are not just on how to do the day to day job they do, but how to manage time better manage people better, coach better, delegate more, hire more, interview like all the executive functioning skills is just growing them.

That's great. Third question, Is there something that you're doing this year to drive your own personal growth that you're excited about?

Yeah. One is because I'm traveling so much, living globally now it's really spending time with different entrepreneurs and COOs from around the world. I was in the Barbados and spending time with a COO in the Barbados. I was in the Grenadines and spending time with an entrepreneur. Two entrepreneurs in the Grenadines. You know, I was just down in Antarctica in Chile, and I spent time with 60 COOs CEOs on. On a boat in Antarctica and then traveled with another. So it's really spending time with all these more global business people, I think has really been enriching because we're definitely in a bubble in North America.

That's very cool. Okay, fourth question. What is the one book can't be one of yours that you've recommended the most to other entrepreneurs?

Well, and it's not a business book, but I think it's still the best book of all time. It's the reason I went to Antarctica. There's a ton of business leadership lessons in it. It's called Endurance. It's about Ernest Shackleton. Amazingly, it's the hundredth year since he was wrecked in Antarctica and rescued. And it's an incredible true story of how these men survived these ridiculous conditions for over a year and a half in the Antarctic. It's. It's by Albert Lansing. Fantastic read.

That's cool. I know we were talking a little bit even before the podcast. I asked you why you went to Antarctica, and you said that book from like, 25 years ago is. Is you've always wanted to go there.

I've bought hundreds of copies of that book. I gave it to every single franchise partner at 1-800-GOT junk. It's a spectacular. It's. It. There's so many business lessons from it. But it's also just an incredible story. And I wait whenever I, like, find myself complaining about something. I'm like, boy, like, I'm not on an ice floe in the Antarctic living off seal blubber. No idea if a ship's ever going to find me wearing, like, really, like, I'm good. We're good.

It always reminds me of. I said this during COVID One of the best books I read was called the Splendid Navile. And it was kind of a documentary ish of Winston Churchill when London was being bombed. Like crazy. Right? And you read that and it just gave you a different perspective of, like, we think the world's going to end. And here they are, like, during the day, seeking shelter because bombs are dropping all around, going about their life the next day.

So my life is so rough. Let me go grab another espresso coffee from my coffee maker and hop in my Tesla and go grab lunch with friends.

Okay, final question. What is the best piece of advice you've ever received?

That I'll never be smart enough to figure it out for myself. And my R and D should stand for rip off and duplicate that really, really smart people have done the work to figure it out. Just do what they're doing. Again, if I was an advisor with advisory and this is not a pitch for advisors excel, but if I was, I would just do everything you tell me. I'm sure you have a manual in systems. Dude, if it said the keychain has to be green, I would have green keychains. I would be down to just because then it's just easier.

Yeah, well, it's a big part of what we've tried to do is let them learn from other people. I've said that all the time. If I can accelerate my success by just learning and copying what someone else has already done, why wouldn't I do that?

So rtfm, right? Read the F and manual. We don't have an obligation to take care of our people, but we have an opportunity to take care of our people, right? If we really, really care about our employees, if we care about their skills, if we care about their confidence, if we care about their home life, if we care about their careers, if we really help them, they'll go through brick walls for us to build the company.