What Really Makes Entrepreneurs Stand Out From The Crowd?

None of this matters, man. We're all just walking each other home, which is Ram Dass. But, like, I really want people to think about that, like, to really, really realize that, like, this is just what we do to make money. What really matters is, like, connecting with the people, everybody that we meet. As a human, I think that's something that's part of my legacy, is to remember that we can build the best companies in the world, but we can still have a really good human connection with everybody.

So, Cameron, before we start, I have a question. What can we promise them today that they will gain if they gave us their time?

I guess the real truth, I think so many people give the Instagram version of business, the Instagram version of life. I went and I did a video a couple days ago from the mall, the Emirates, and I just said, you know what? 99% of people should never be an entrepreneur. Don't sign up to be an entrepreneur. You're crazy to want to be an entrepreneur. You don't have the DNA to be an entrepreneur. So I think I'll give the real. At least my real perspective.

As you said, like, the Instagram version is totally different from reality.

Yeah. The Instagram version is that being an entrepreneur is amazing. You make all this money, you fly private. Great. I've done all that.

True.

But to go through the ups and downs, I'm dealing with some. Some employee theft. I'm dealing with potential insurance claim. I'm dealing with global clients. I'm dealing with, like, cash flow issues. I'm dealing with moving companies to different countries. That's crazy, right? True. And then there's no, there's no manual for half of this stuff. And. And all the good stuff too.

So let's say, let me start. How are you today? How do you feel? Good.

Feeling good. Had a great day.

So who's Cameron in a nutshell, from your perspective?

I'm a Canadian kid trapped in an adult body. I was raised as an entrepreneur. My dad groomed my brother and sister and I to be an entrepreneur. It's all we've ever really known is either building our own companies or helping others build companies.

So you were not good at school?

I was terrible in school. I was very distracted. I was as early as grade five, I was selling stuff in classes, but getting in trouble because when I was in school, being an entrepreneur wasn't cool. Yet now entrepreneurs in school are very cool. Right. Back when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, entrepreneurship wasn't cool. Probably wasn't cool until the late 80s, late 90s. So I was selling stuff to other kids. I was very distracted, I couldn't sit still. I had the traits of bipolar and addiction and I didn't see the point. Like so many of these things, I just didn't see the point of learning it. What I wanted to do was different than what was being taught in the class. And that continued through high school and it even continued through university. While I was in university, I had 12 full time employees in my company when I was in second year. So again, I just didn't see the point. So for me, that style of learning didn't serve me and I think it hurt me.

But what inspired you then to become an entrepreneur? Not taking the normal route that everybody. You mean your family or no?

Well, yes, my family for sure. My dad and grandparents groomed the three of us to be entrepreneurs, so that was formative. But then one day I was walking through the university and I saw a flyer on the ground and I picked it up to throw it in the garbage and it said, earn $10,000 and run your own business. And that was 1985 and I thought $10,000 in 1985, that's a lot of money for a 20 year old kid. So I was like, what's this about? So I read it and there was an information session that night. I went to the session and. And they were selling franchises to university students to run house painting businesses. So I got involved and got excited about it and my dad said, there's no better time in your life to go bankrupt. If it doesn't work out, you have nothing to lose and if it does work out, you're on your path. So I did it and it worked out and I was hooked.

I want to talk about 1-800-got junk.

Sure.

How did you manage to turn growth or have a growth of from 2 million to over 100m? Sorry for this. How did you join it?

I was in a mastermind community called eo, the Entrepreneurs. And I had built two companies and in my forum, one of the other guys was building a company called the Rubbish boys which became 1-800-got-JUNK. He'd seen me grow two other companies and when we sold the one company that I was running, he asked me if I would coach him. So I started coaching him and six weeks later he said, I can't afford the coaching. Can you come and work for me? And I said, well, I'll work for you for a little bit, but not full time. And then six and a half years later I was still there. But I got excited with the vision of what he had. And then I also knew how to execute against the vision. The core things I focused on in the early days, the first three things. The first one was, and I said this to him in the very early days, no one here is making enough money. You're not making enough money. The franchisees aren't making enough money. The guys in the trucks aren't making enough money. We have to raise our prices by 40% right away so that everybody has a chance and then we can actually deliver on our promises, deliver on our quality focus day every areas. So everyone thought I was crazy. And they said, we're going to go bankrupt if we raise our prices. I said, we're going to go bankrupt if we don't. So we raised our prices, no one blinked. And then we had the cash flow to buy talent and to pay for marketing. And that was number one. Number two was I said, if we're going to build a fast growing company, we have to be a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. We have to be in the zone of a cult and we have to build that culture. That was something very formative from the early days was I had already studied cults and how to bring that kind of cult like environment into a company without crossing the line. Right. Without getting, you know, sleazy. But how do you create that environment that people will go through brick walls to build the company? So we created that. And then number three, and you asked about it before we went live was around pr. We had no money for marketing, but I understood how to leverage the press and how to actually get the press to talk about the future of what we were building. And so we started reaching out to them and we landed 5,600 stories about the company in six years. Before social media even existed.

Exactly. If I want to tell you to ask you a question, like you talked about the cult, you talk about the tribe.

Yeah.

Can you give some pointers?

Sure.

What do you do to create a cult or like a tribe?

Yeah. So one thing is you have to bring in people that, that it's called, they're high in affiliation, people that want to be a part of a group. So people that were a part of a religion, people that were part of scouting, people that were in student government, they played on sports teams, they hang out with a lot of friends, people that tend to be kind of gregarious energy. But they want to belong. Right. That's number one.

So have it in Their character.

It's in their character already. Right. So I was a part of all those things. So that's. That's one thing you do. Number two is you start to get people aligned with the vision and the core values and the core purpose and your bhag. So if they're very aligned and excited, where they're going, they'll serve a greater purpose. It's like the story of the three guys making bricks in Barcelona 100 years ago. Yes. The first guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm making bricks. Second guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm building a wall, and I get to make bricks to build a wall. Third guy, what are you doing? He said, we're building a cathedral to worship God. It's called the Sagrada Familia. And I get to make the bricks to build the left wall of the cathedral. Who's more excited? Well, the guy who's building a cathedral. Right. So you sell them on the vision. You get them aligned with the vision, with the core values, with the bhag, with the core purpose, and that kind of creates that cult like momentum. And then third is you fire the. You have to get rid of the toxic negative energy. And we've seen this. If we go to a club or we go to a restaurant, we go to a cocktail party. When you walk into a party and there's really good energy and a good buzz, and then some negative, toxic person walks in, the vibe just changes. So you have to get rid of those people that will be. They're like a cultural cancer. So it's about bringing the right people in, but it's getting rid of the cultural cancer. Yeah. And those grandmotherisms, by the way, they're so one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. Everything Grandma told us is true in business. Everything.

If I move to COO alliance, I love the idea, but can you tell us how this idea came to you? What inspired you to create this kind of CEO alliance?

Yeah.

And what does it do?

It actually wasn't my idea. It was my clients. So I was coaching a number. I was coaching 16 different companies. They were all doing 30, 40 million in revenue. One of my COOs said, Can you get a group of your other clients second in commands together so we can brainstorm or mastermind? I said, I don't really work with other COOs. And he said, well, you're coaching Matt Wolf from Acceleration Partners. You're coaching Zach Obrant from Book in a Box. I'm like, how do you know them? He said, well, you've been mentioning them on, you know, our coaching calls. So I reached out and found out who their second in command was, and we're already talking, so I said, okay. So I put up a one page, landing page, and I said, the first 10 people to pay $6,700 to come and spend two days with me in this mansion in Scottsdale, Arizona. We'll do it. 25 hours later, 10 people had paid. So I said, wow, we have a model at that two and a half day event. We had no agenda. I got the 10 people to all present something that they were strong on to everybody in the room. And then I had them on the next day present an area they were struggling with. And they got feedback from the group. At the end of the two days, nine of the 10 people wanted to commit to paying for a whole year of that continuation. So that was the start of the CEO alliance. What I recognized was there was a demand for it. There wasn't anything like it. And I also had the ip. Like, I knew the role because I played it a couple times. But yeah, it wasn't my idea. It was my clients.

But you can join. So you don't take the first person in command, you take the second person.

Yeah, we don't. There's so many groups for entrepreneurs, right? If we think about the global landscape, we've got the Entrepreneurs Organization, we have ypo, Young President's Organization. There's dozens and dozens of communities for entrepreneurs. And then there's groups for marketers and engineers and lawyers and accountants. There's lots of associations, but there was never a group for that second in command. And what we recognized was, it's almost like if you and I were invited to a baby shower with a bunch of women that just had a baby. We don't fit. We're not supposed to be there. And we try to fit in, but we don't really fit in. Well, when you get a bunch of entrepreneurs in a room, they're a different DNA than the second in command are. It's almost like the old book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. We're not hairy versions of women. True, right. We see the world differently, we perceive differently, the same as the second in command. And the entrepreneur, they see and perceive the employees, the market, the consumers, the systems very differently. And if you put them in the same room, the CEOs tend to shut up and the entrepreneurs tend to light up. So by moving the entrepreneurs out, it gives the CEOs a chance to actually be vulnerable. To work on their skills and to work on their companies.

Because majority of people or majority of entrepreneurs or kind of movements like this or companies or whatever communities, they focus on the entrepreneurs and CEOs. So by nature, a lot of people that we meet around, they think that the CEO is the most important person in the organization due to ignorance, lack of knowledge. They don't know how important the role of CEO, sorry, in an organization. Can you tell us about this?

Yeah, and I'm going to show you. Not for marketing purposes, but this logo on my book is a yin and yang, right? It's dark and light. It's male and female. It's the two parts that make the whole. It's almost like a traditional marriage with a husband and wife. The husband isn't more important than the wife, the wife isn't more important than the husband. Together, they become a very strong family unit. Together, if they have the same vision, together, if they have the same core values, together, if they have the same plans, together, if they have good communication, together, if they have good trust, they can build something that's the same as the COO and their second in command. Whether it's a COO or VP ops, it's all about how do we get the bond really strong between the two.

Can you share with us a success story from CO alliance from one of the members or clients or a success story?

Oh, sure. One of the big ones is that. And this is common across them all. But I'll talk about a company called College Hunks Hauling Junk. Their COO came in very quiet, almost with an imposter syndrome. He felt like he shouldn't really be in the role. Everyone in the room was smarter than him. It was also really hard for him because he saw me as the biggest in the industry, coming from 1, 800, got junk and they were a much smaller, smaller competitor in the space. So he had this. This feeling like he didn't belong in the room. The reality was he really belonged in the room. He was very sharp, he was very charismatic. He had good ideas and good systems. But when we shed that imposter syndrome, he went to the next level and their company went to the next level. He was already there feeling like he was broken when there was nothing wrong with him. But because he was now in a room filled with other people like him, he saw his own strengths and his own weaknesses and he realized that his weaknesses weren't anything to worry about anymore.

The CEO alliance is like it. They meet regularly and off site, like offline locations.

We do both. And we have members from 17 countries. So we actually have a member from the UAE, we have a member from Cairo, from Egypt, we have a member from a bunch of members in Europe. But we have one event every month online via Zoom. So a two hour event and then we have two events a year in person. One's held at mit, one is held in Vancouver, Canada, and we alternate between those two, Boston and Canada.

And you're very strict in getting members in. Like if you're an entrepreneur or a CEO, you're out. A CEO is in.

And you have to do at least 5 million or greater in revenue to qualify. Because I want to have real businesses, right? I don't want to have someone who is running a smaller company or a startup that doesn't have the same problems that a real second in command will have. They don't have to have the COO title. It could be a vice president of operations, it could be a general manager, maybe it's a president, but it's whoever is the second in command to the.

CEO if we move to opsport.

So the OPS Spot, that was an idea that I had about a year ago where I got frustrated for another whole cohort of people, another whole group of people, because there was nowhere for them and it was anyone who works in operations roles. So I was a part of a couple of different online communities that were focused on marketing. One was the trends community on Facebook that Sam Parr and Sean Puri started. And it was a really incredible hub of people sharing ideas around marketing and biz dev. But then I recognize where do people like managers and directors and VPs, where do they go? Because they can't come to the CEO alliance, they really don't fit in the entrepreneur groups. So we started an online community for them called the OP Spot. And it's just an online mastermind community for them to share resources and ideas with each other. But everything I do helps the entrepreneur, right? If I grow their managers and directors in the OP spot, that helps the entrepreneur, right? If I help the CEO grow, that helps the entrepreneur. My books help the entrepreneur. Everything's aligned with my core purpose. So my core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. Do you know the name Simon Sinek?

Of course.

So Simon used to sleep on my couch back in 2004, four years before he wrote his book Start with why he was on our board of advisors at 1-800-got junk. There was one night at dinner at my home, we were making dinner together and Simon helped me understand my core purpose. And it's always been to help entrepreneurs. Back in 1989, I started coaching 16 entrepreneurs 34 years ago. So I was always helping entrepreneurs. So everything, my speaking, my books, my coaching, my course, like everything helps entrepreneurs. But I don't have to work just with the entrepreneur to help them. In fact, I think it's dangerous to only help the entrepreneur. I was coaching. This is a good case study. I was coaching a company in Florida in the United states, go from 40 employees up to 600 employees over four years. And Bobby Harris, the CEO and I were talking one day and I taught him one of the systems that's in my course. And he goes, that's going to change my company. I'm like, nope, it's going to change you. It's going to change your productivity. What will change your company is teaching anyone who manages people that system. And that's when he realized, well, like, I have to grow my people. That's what's going to grow the business.

You know, a couple of days back I was looking at your Instagram page and then you said one of the most important skills that you have to develop is situational leadership. Yeah, very interesting. Can you define what.

And my Instagram page is very bipolar. It's just like, like, who's this guy going to festivals? And then who's this guy as a leaders? My. That's an example of me just being real, right? I have no game face. I have no, like, I'm. If you don't like me, you don't like me. I shouldn't swear in the uae, but like, it's just me, right? Situational leadership is a system I've spent dozens and dozens of hours learning. It's the idea that when you coach an employee, you have to change your leadership style based on the actual project or situation that they're working on. So as an example, if I was coaching you on marketing, I wouldn't touch it at all. Because you're an expert in marketing, you're a former CMO in marketing. But if I was coaching you on maybe growing people and that maybe, maybe you found out you weren't, you were weaker in that area. I would change my style. If I was coaching you on hiring a second in command and maybe you've never done that before, I would have a very different style again. Much like. Do you have kids?

No.

Okay, so I have, I have two boys. They're coming over to the UAE in like two weeks. One's 20, one's 22. When my 20 year old was two years old. I used to coach him differently than I do today. I would praise him when he was walking. Good job. Walking. If I praise him when he starts walking at 20, he's going to think I've lost my mind. Right when he was pouring orange juice, I had to very much micromanage him on how to pour a big jug of orange juice or all over the floor. I don't micromanage him on pouring orange juice now, but I'm more micromanaging him now on finding the next stage of his career. I'm being very direct on that. So the style that you have of leadership changes on a situation by situation basis, even with the same person. Most leaders mess it up because they lead everyone the same way or they lead the one person the same way in all situations. Or thirdly, they hire a very seasoned executive and they assume just because this person is so strong in their role that they can do everything perfectly. And then all of a sudden, that executive feels like they're drowning in certain areas. And it's critical to teach our employees that. Right. That's where the growth comes. If we can grow our people around situational leadership, delegation, coaching, running 100, emotional intelligence as well. It's emotional intelligence. Yeah. The EQ to understand, and then also the ability to ask questions. So if I said to you, how are you feeling about this project? What's your commitment level? Are you scared? Are you overwhelmed? Are you overworked this week? Are you freaking excited about the project? Are you nervous about screwing up? Then I understand your commitment. And then I say, like, have you ever done this before? Like, here's an example. I had a guy running my call center. We had 80 employees in the call center. We just hired him. He used to run a call center of a big technology company, Business Objects. And I said, he was really struggling with recruiting. We had to hire 30 people over the next month. I'm like, why are you missing on this recruiting thing? Have you ever done it before? He goes, not really. I'm like, but you ran a big call center. He goes, yeah, I used to call HR and say, I need six more people. And they'd show up the next day. I'm like, you've never done recruiting? You've never done interviewing? He goes, nope. No wonder he's screwing up. He was a vice president with a lot of skills. Skills, but not in that one specific area. So then I micromanaged him on the coaching. I cheered him on, I praised him. But not on running a call center. Right. If I praised him on running a call center, he'd think I'm patronizing him. That's how you just need to be very aware, and that's by asking questions and not being afraid you're going to hurt the person's feelings if they feel like you're there. Not coming down on them, but to care about them, to help them, to remove obstacles. They'll open up to you.

And before we dig into the books, can you tell us, why did you start writing? It was bad in school.

Horrible. And worse in English. I was terrible in English class.

Six books. Best selling.

Yeah.

So why did you decide to do that and did you achieve the goal?

Yes. So in 2005 or 6? 2006, I had a speaker bureau that was going to sign me to start speaking. They said if you had a book, we could charge more. And I said, well, I'm only charging three to five grand now. What could you get for me? And they said, we could get you ten grand easy. So I did the math and I was like, well, if you can get me ten grand to write a book, I can probably get a book done in the next six months. That was the purpose was doing. And then I figured out a way to write books that was very efficient. That was me getting all of my ideas out. And I also didn't want to write crappy books. Like, they had to be perfectly written. They had to have good grammar, good spelling, good punctuation. No, no typos. They had to be filled with really good content, no fluff. So I worked really hard at that. So. So my first book I did back in 2009, and I used something called Dragon Dictation back in the day, which would be like Siri today, but I put a Bluetooth headset on, I walked around my home, I had the table of contents for my book, and then for each chapter, I had five to seven bullet points I wanted to cover in each chapter. So chapter one, five to seven points. So I walked around three looking at those five points on a post it note and just talked to myself, just rambling stuff off the top of my head as much as I could think about with those five points. Then I got an editor to take all those rough notes that I'd transcribed and they formed it into a working document of a chapter. Then I sent each chapter one at a time to about three to four different entrepreneurs. And I said, what's confusing? What am I missing? What should I add color to? What sucks? And they gave me all their ideas. And then I walked around and Talked about those. The editor pulled those in. That was the starting point for the book. And that's kind of how I wrote each of my books since.

Well, so the whole. The six books. Yeah.

But I used. I used a group that actually did the interviewing for me.

Okay.

So they. But it was the same process where I just sat and talked. I actually never really sat because entrepreneurs like to walk around and pace. We think better. So if I would just pace with a headset on and talk to them. And they were just transcribing it all and asking me questions, like we're doing now.

True. The first book was Double Double.

Yeah.

Correct.

Yeah. You know where I got the title?

Yeah. Tell me about it.

So it was originally going to be called Double, and it was how to double your revenue and profit in three years or less. And I sent it out to a few friends and Seth Godin, a big marketer. Seth came back to me and said, I love the idea, but it should be a double double because you're doubling revenue and doubling profit. I'm like, seth, if you're going to give me the name for my book, will you put a quote on my book? And he said yes. So he did the front cover endorsement of Double Double. And I'm like, if Seth wants to, I'll call it whatever you want. You want me to call it French Fries. My book should be called French Fries. Right. Because I was a nobody back then. But I'd met Seth at a couple of conferences and just had a connection. And, yeah, he was really good to me back then.

You have a book also called Free pr.

Yeah.

Very interesting. Because everybody thinks that PR is expensive.

Yeah.

To have a good PR coverage, you need to throw loads of money.

Yeah.

But you do it differently. And you've been everywhere.

Yeah.

Like, Google didn't stop when I typed your name.

Well, and I've been in the real stuff. Like, I've been in the real print edition of Fortune, Forbes, Inc. Success, Entrepreneur. Like, I've been in the American Airlines, the actual magazines, as well as on lots of the websites. So here's what I learned about pr. And I got my first story in the News back in 1986. I called a local newspaper and I basically used the same pitch. Hey, do you have two minutes? I think I have a story for you. They go, sure, because they're looking for a quick story. I tell them my story and then I ask questions and listen. I just get them to, like, open up to me about what they like and don't like about it.

And you used all these tactics. Yeah, everywhere.

All of them. So if I could land a story, like if you, if you challenged me tomorrow in the UAE to land one newspaper, one magazine, one podcast and one TV show within eight hours, I could land one of each in the uae. I could probably land the top five, like in the top five of each of them. Top five radio, top five tv, top five magazine, top five newspaper. Because it, because every one of those outlets, and this isn't bragging, I'm just. The system works for everybody. It's worked all over the world. Every media outlet makes money from one thing, advertising, not from circulation. Like, nobody buys the news, nobody buys the radio, nobody buys our podcast. Right. So we want advertisers or we want lots of circulation. To get lots of circulation, to get lots of people listening or watching or reading, we need good content. So what I'm doing is giving them a favor. I'm giving them a good story. That's how I approach it and how.

You pitch it as well.

Yeah. I don't say right about me. I say here's a good story. One of the best examples of a story, like, here's an example for you with your podcast. How has your podcast transformed someone's life? How has it transformed an entrepreneur's life? And if you do that and find somebody, it's transformed their life in Cairo, you'll get all the business media in Cairo, but you can have the same story now in Vancouver, Canada, the same story in Dallas, Texas, just a different human. Because it's the same lesson that everybody's looking for, yearning for.

I go back to PR because I believe that PR is very important for.

Personal success or company success and personal branding.

Yeah, absolutely. If an entrepreneur comes to you and tell you, do you suggest that I hire a PR agency or I do it in house? What will be your take on that?

I would start doing it on your own so you understand it first. When you truly understand it, then you'll be able to manage an agency later. Agencies can be very good if you have the budget and you can actually kind of defer to them and let them run with it. But agencies can also be very, very expensive. So as an example, if I was even, let's say I was a $50 million company and I had the budget, or I was a high net worth individual and I had the budget, I would probably hire someone and pay them 65, $70,000 a year to do it in house for me and have them sit near me, be vibrating with my energy, feeling my Energy and me be able to coach them and help them. I think you would get way more for that. The problem with an agency is they put one person on your account one and a half days a week because just to cover the cost of that full time person, they have to work for four or five different clients. So you're not really getting them full time. Now. PR has changed a little bit since my day. There's a lot more now in the digital landscape than existed when I was actually leveraging pr.

That's the second question, but the next question.

So now that there's a lot more there on the digital side of things, there's a different approach. You can also reach out to journalists via DMs, which is actually quite effective. But again, you're doing them a favor. You're not asking them to pitch. The one thing I don't like about the new digital landscape is a lot of people buying pr. The problem with it is it feels good at the very outset. But all of a sudden your clients, your tribe start to realize that there's some paid stuff there and then it can actually diminish your brand versus help your brand.

If we're talking about entrepreneurship in general, you started off saying it's challenging, challenging, challenging, right. And it's correct. So if we talk about it's challenging, can you give us like tell the audience what do you mean challenging and what skills do they need?

Here's why I think it's challenging. Most entrepreneurs are on the spectrum for bipolar disorder. Most of us have the mania, which is why people will quit their jobs and follow us. They'll invest in our companies, they'll say yes, they'll follow our ideas. It gives us the perpetual motion machine to get the energy going, the stress and depression that we sometimes feel. And sometimes it can be daily, sometimes it can be weekly, sometimes it can be monthly. But we go through this crash. The reason we go through it is we can't tell everybody how hard it is at those times. We can't tell our employees, we can't really tell our spouse because they that'll freak them out. Our friends don't understand because they're not entrepreneurs. We can't tell our board, we can't tell our investors, we can't tell our banker. So what happens is we end up imploding with all of this stress and we tend to hurt ourselves because we don't take care of ourselves. You're in good physical shape, so you actually take care of yourself. But a lot of entrepreneurs turn to alcohol or drugs or sex, or they tend to pour themselves back into work to get the feeling of something good, but that drives the burnout.

How people can help themselves if they.

Have this phase one is by getting vulnerable and realizing it is okay to talk about it, to get into a mastermind community of entrepreneurs where you can talk about it. Thankfully, I was involved in the entrepreneurs organization so many years ago and I've worked with them in 28 countries that I'm okay with saying as you and I even opened up hard at times. Right. And being okay with that, like not having to pretend that it's an Instagram life now. I also have the great days when it is up slow.

Absolutely.

The Instagram life.

The second two questions.

Yeah.

Somebody just finished university.

Yeah.

And came to you and said, like, should I start. Start now with I have an idea. Should I start it and become an entrepreneur or should I have a normal job learning something? That's a question everybody has.

I think it really depends. I think if you have the entrepreneurial traits, like, you're good in leadership, you have the goal orientation, you're good tenacity, you are good idea generator, you can think on your feet, you're good in sales, you might have the DNA to get going and get started. There's a natural DNA that all entrepreneurs have. You have had your entrepreneurial traits since you were three years old. Now you've learned entrepreneurial skills. But the entrepreneurial DNA you either have or you don't. The problem right now is a lot of people are trying to become entrepreneurs instead of becoming entrepreneurial. There's a difference between having a good skill and doing it for five or seven clients versus building a company and having employees and payrolls and banks and budgets and stuff, Right. It's different. I think many entrepreneurs or many entrepreneurs in the making, right, when they're graduating school, should go and work for a couple of amazing companies, even if they apprentice, even if they work for free for four to six months at a time, just to be inside of these entrepreneurial organizations and to get it right, to watch it and to see it. Because when you start on your path right away, and all of a sudden, like, I was interviewing somebody or coaching someone about a week ago, he's got 100 employees. And I said, have you ever had any training on hiring and interviewing? He said, no, but I've hired 100 people. I said, maybe you've done it wrong every time. And he went, oh. I'm like, that's why we have turnovers, because we never had the Training. So I think there's something to be said for being inside of entrepreneurial companies where you can get trained in some of the skills or you can at least see it, but don't feel like you need to be there for years and years and years.

What will be the skills? The main skills that.

Entrepreneurship, a lot of the people stuff, project management, people skills like communication, managing conflict, delegation, running meetings, strategy, collaboration. What's amazing right now about the Gen Y, Gen Z.

You didn't see sales. Everybody asks like, you have to sell.

No, I think, I think leaders have to be good in sales, like any CEO has to be good in sales because you have to sell the bank, sell your employees, sell for clients. You're constantly selling, selling your bankers, you're selling everybody. So you have to be good in that. But that's a skill, right? But I think to be someone, if they're inside of a company, it's a lot of the interpersonal stuff, a lot of the. The soft skills of leadership that they're not going to learn kind of from a book or from a course.

If I ask you, what's your favorite failure?

We almost bankrupted 1-800-got junk. When we were about $60 million in revenue, we were approaching 100 million that year, from 60 to 100 in one year. And we were growing very quickly. We had no debt, we had no outside shareholders. We were growing very Fast. We had $5 million in cash in the bank. And our CFO, who's actually our vice president of finance, kept saying to us, are you sure we're not growing too quickly? Are you sure we shouldn't be more careful? Do we really need to open up all these corporate locations all at once? And I kept saying, and Brian, our CEO, kept saying, yeah, yeah, we got this. Yeah, yeah, we got this. Because we didn't understand the cash flow of a big business. And cash is your oxygen. When you were four years old and you jumped into a swimming pool and you swam down to get the coin at the bottom and you come up gasping for air, you're not going to die. When you go scuba diving to 80ft, if you run out of air, you might die, but probably not. But you'll get sick. You go scuba diving to 140ft, you run out of air, you're dead. What happened to us at the 60 million mark is we ran out of oxygen. We spent our 5 million on things that we shouldn't have. We should have gone to the bank to get loans and credit lines, but we didn't understand how to run $100 million company. The big lesson that I got was because our VP of finance was very quiet. He was Indonesian, he was very humble. He was very kind of analytical, very amiable, very soft spoken. We were. We kind of just steamrolled over top of him. And the lesson I got from that was if you're not willing to listen to your people, hire people you're willing to listen to. And then God gave us two ears and one mouth. We used need to use him in that ratio. We need to listen twice as often as we speak.

First of all, hold their horses not to grow very fast. And because it has consequences. Yeah, how can they know that?

One of the core roles of the second in command is to be the brakes to the entrepreneur's gas or to be a leash to the entrepreneur's dragon. Right. To hold them back in a safe way. I don't like slowing down. I like saying yes to the things that are obvious. Saying yes to momentum. You've heard of the concept minimum viable product. I call it minimum viable everything. Like get it done and get it out the door. Anything that we do can be better. But how much time and energy and money do we want to spend on making everything product perfect when perfect doesn't scale? So I think for hyper growth, you have to be okay with momentum. You also have to be okay with realizing that you can perfect things later. We're on. What are we on version 14 of the iPhone now? I think the first version of the iPhone didn't even have copy and paste. If they waited to have copy and paste, they would have been six months or a year later. It's about realizing that you can go fast and not slow it down, but you also need to slow down, I think, on the complexity of projects. Often entrepreneurs will take on the big hairy complex like the CRM integrations. They can say no to some of those.

True. Especially for. I passed through this especially for CRM. Super complex.

Yeah.

Didn't work. Lost a lot of money and time.

And energy and the employees get upset. Whereas if you work on what I call the low PETA projects, the low pain in the projects, the thing that are easy to put in place, they don't require a lot of time, they don't require a lot of money. And it's almost like launching a satellite into orbit. Right. It takes a lot of energy to get a satellite in orbit, but once it's there, it's free forever. What are the easy things you can do now that will pay dividends for 10 years? Do those.

If I ask you, that was the, I would say favorite failure. What is your biggest accomplishment?

Having a really good relationship with my two boys. After building all these businesses. I think I've seen so many. Well, I know I've seen and I had it role modeled. My dad was a very, very good father to us and was building companies and my grandparents as well. But I've seen so many entrepreneurs that don't have a relationship with themselves or their spouse or their kids. And I don't know what they're waiting for because none of this matters. Right where none of us are getting out of this alive. This is just what we're doing to make money. And I think that I'm very proud that I have a good relationship with my kids. And I don't think my kids would any longer describe. If they said, what does your dad do? I don't think they would talk about my businesses. I think they would say, my dad travels, my dad loves entertaining, my dad loves hiking, my dad loves golfing, my dad loves skiing. And then they might talk about my businesses. But I think years ago, 20 years ago, I was so obsessed with building one company that I lost touch of what really matters. And my young kids changed that in me. I had a five year old boy, six year old in 2007 when I had my iPhone and I was looking at it sitting on the couch and he came up to me and he swiped it away to get my attention.

Yeah, like it's enough.

And I was like, wow, like that. That's not the relationship I want. I don't want my kid having to fight for my attention because of work, because of money, like none of this matters. So I became very focused on waking up in the morning and having a good morning with my kids and with my spouse and with myself. And then as soon as I walked them to school, I instantly flipped the switch and I was hardcore on business. And at 3:30 it got turned off again and I didn't work nights and I didn't work weekends. I got very good at delegating, very good at saying no, but very good at staying massively engaged in what I was focused on. And. And that's just always stayed true. Yeah.

If there is one message now, your kids are coming to Dubai. Yeah, there's one message now you want.

To tell them and we're doing everything. We're going skiing, we're doing skydiving, we're doing everything. Yeah, we're doing all of it.

But if you want to say something from your heart to them or an advice what you want to tell them. And here's the camera.

I think it's to remember that everyone is trying, everyone is struggling, everyone is still trying to figure this out, that nobody has it figured out yet. So you have to shed that insecurity and that feeling like you're supposed to know. Nobody knows whether you're 58 or 40 or, you know, we're still all waking up as you are, what type of.

Father you are, that you, you are the one that you have to do this, this and that or you, you let them do what they want and you.

It's evolving now because I'm more their friend at 20. My boys are now 22 and 20 and it's a really interesting transition where I'm becoming their friend. I'm becoming encouraging. I'm trying to inspire. Definitely talking about things like core values, but just trying to be there for them to recognize that it's hard, man. Like, I wouldn't want to be 22 again. Like, I would probably ask the girl out, but. But you know, I would have more confidence that I had now. But I wouldn't want to go through all that again. I think it's hard to figure out your career and hard to figure out where you're going to live and hard to figure out, you know, budgeting and hard. Like it's hard. I wouldn't want to do that.

Wow. If entrepreneurs now they're watching us and they will look at you and ask you what is the most important advice you would like to give to them.

I would. To be a self driven learner. It's one of the things that I hire for now as I really look to hire people that want to learn and they're not being told where to grow, grow. They're always examining like a pro athlete or a professional athlete is always trying to get better. They're getting coaching, they're getting mentoring, they're going through courses, whatever they can do to grow and they're not feeling like growth is bad. Don't wait for your boss to tell you where to improve. Right. Wake up in the morning and think, what can I do to get better today? How can I better confidence? How can I work on my skills? How can I work on, you know, my relationships? Keep working on that stuff. And not with the goal of perfection, but just of enjoying the journey and getting better. Learning for the sake of learning for the sake of growth.

Latest book?

Yeah, it's good.

The second in command.

Yeah.

What message you want from this book?

There were Two parts. I almost wrote it with two sides. I almost wrote side one as the entrepreneur. How to go out and find someone who's to play a second command. How to train them, how to bring them into your company. And then the other side was going to be, if you're an operations person, how do you get to be a CEO? How do you find, find the right company to work with? How do you find the right entrepreneur that you'll mesh with? So the book actually covers all that. Right. How do you build that real yin and yang partnership between the CEO?

I love the ying and yang.

Thank you.

That's what you mean by between a CEO and COO.

That's perfect partnership, light and dark. Because the COO's job is to make the CEO look good. Right. To make them iconic. The CEO's job is to take care of their second in command.

True.

Very similar again to a husband and wife. Husbands and wife can argue and fight, but not in front of the kids. You do that in front of the kids, it destroys the family unit. You got to have a space to get away from the kids, a space to get away from your employees, to debate, to argue. But not in front of the board, not at leadership team. You need to also have time where you have date night, where you spend time away from everybody else, to get to like each other again, to collaborate, to brainstorm, to have fun. I've always worked on that. Yeah. I call the CEO and CEO date night.

No way.

Yeah. Brian and I, when we were building one, 800, got junk. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, we'd go for a 10k run. Every Friday, we spent off site at either his tennis club or my tennis club for four hours, just hanging out, working. We would often go for drinks or go for dinners together. We spent time with each other's families and kids, but we did that not with the other members of our company, just hanging out with each other as friends. We had an unfair advantage though. Brian was my best man at my wedding, three months before I started to work with him. So we knew each other for four years. He had a four year interview with me. Right. He knew me so well that the day that I got there, I had bank account information, passwords for everything. It was full financial statements. It was complete and utter trust. It's hard to hire for that, but you have to, you really have to work hard at finding somebody you could give that much trust to.

What will be the coming projects that you're working on?

One is my course that I launched two years ago. It's called invest in your leaders, and it's the 12 best leadership skills that anyone who manages people needs to be good at. So it's really rolling that out globally. So it's stuff around situational leadership coaching, delegation, running meetings, interviewings, all those. The second is growing the op spot. Really pushing to grow that. And the third is just continuing to travel globally. My wife and I have hit 41 countries in the last two years. We're off to. We. We're calling it our bucket list life. So we're both chasing our bucket lists, and we're just trying to cross off one a month.

You mentioned one thing very, very interesting, and I believe a lot of viewers will want to just get your opinion on that.

Sure.

Delegation.

Yeah.

A lot of entrepreneurs suck totally in delegation.

Yeah. Because they've never had any training in it. There's a couple of key things around delegation. Number one, if I said to my two boys, I need you to clean the house, it'll only take you an hour. Oh, dad, it'll take way longer than we have to do the floors. You have to do this. You have to do this. They'd all argue about how long it would take. Or if I said to them, I need you to clean the house. I have friends coming in 30 minutes. Do absolutely your best and be done in 30 minutes or less. They'd be done in 25 minutes, probably. I give them a smaller container. Parkinson's law says that work expands to give the space that we give it. So when you delegate something, tell them how little time you want them to spend, not how long it'll take, but how little time you want them to spend on it and how little money you want them to spend. Right. If I said to my assistant, book dinner for Shaif and I and four other CEOs in Dubai, she could book us the most unbelievable dinner at the most unbelievable restaurant. We'd have the private table at Zoomer or whatever, eating, like, the best food. But what I really meant was the six of us at my Airbnb and have, you know, bring in some cool food for me for, like, 100 bucks. I didn't delegate properly. So the second thing is, when you delegate is understand the person you're delegating it to, what's their skill level and what's their commitment level on that project at that time. So how do you lead them on the project? If I was delegating a marketing project to you, you could crush it because you're a former cmo. But I also, if I was delegating a marketing project to you and your calendar was full for a month. I wouldn't get it back properly because I didn't understand you or the resources that you were coming with. So it's about understanding situational leadership, understanding time management. Those are some of the basics, how.

People can access your courses.

Yeah, it's called investinyourleaders.com I've, I've said about the course content. It's actually irresponsible to not put your key managers through it because if you grow them, they'll grow your company. But we get so upset with our employees. But it's like sending our kid off to play any sport. If you were going to send your kids off to play cricket and you don't teach them how to hold a bat and how to throw the ball and how to catch a ball, they would suck at it and they'd come home and go, daddy, cricket sucks. Like, no, you suck at cricket.

Right, True.

Same thing. The only reason business is difficult is we have so many people running a business without the core skills. They understand the functional skills, but they don't understand the leadership skills.

If I ask you what hidden talent or skill do you have that nobody knows what it.

I don't know. I think I've been so open and, and honest with my skills that I think I've thrown them all out there. I don't think I've got anything that I've ever held back on. I still definitely feel like the 16 year old trapped in adult body. I think there's something there. But how do we help people that struggle with that confidence, how do we help them unlock that and be okay with that? I think I'm, I think that's probably a skill that I have is being vulnerable and being okay with that now, being truly okay with that as a strength.

Yeah, we have a quick fire section.

This is already quick.

So a person who influenced you the.

Most in your life, the founder of what was called College Pro Painters, Greg Clark, was a massive mentor.

A habit that contributed most to your success.

Vision, really understanding and communicating vision has been huge.

What's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?

Sadly, check my phone, which is really a horrible habit. I also have a lot of morning habits because we wrote the book the Miracle morning for Entrepreneurs. So I do have a bunch of morning habits.

If you recommend just one business book and it's not yours, what would it be?

It depends on the size of the company, but across every company, then I would say it's the One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. It was written 35 years ago, but it's cornered around the concept of situational leadership and growing and coaching people. I think fundamentally that's a great book for any company.

And if you'd recommend one book from your books for a starting entrepreneur.

For a starting entrepreneur, I would read Double Double, but I wouldn't read it front to back. I would pick the chapters that most mean something to you today and study those. Here's the problem with most business books. A lot of it's not relevant today. So we spend all of our time reading this stuff that can't help us today on our projects this month and they add stress and they add more to our to do list. So I would say whatever you're working on, let's say you're hiring somebody this week. Read the chapter on people and interviewing. Right? Or if you're struggling with meetings, read this chapter on meetings. But, but, but that might not be till chapter six. So skip the first five.

True favorite podcast besides your own like what's a must listen podcast in your rotation.

The all in podcast is fantastic. Yeah. I also like Sam Parr and Sean Pur's My First Million is is quite good. But yeah, those would be my top two.

Your favorite social media platform, probably Instagram.

I think Instagram gives me a better glimpse for people in their lives and it inspires. The hardest part I have for social media now that I've become so well known, is that I don't have a real place to hang out with my closest friends and family to really see. So I don't have a space to really see what's happening with my family, which sucks. And then for everybody else it sucks that we're all marketing to you. We've all ruined social media.

If I ask you what is your favorite place to think, probably planes.

Strangely, I find I get a lot of. I travel a lot and I'm in first class or business class so I have space to. But I find I get a lot of work done there. Or a coffee shop with a notebook, like a good old fashioned notebook and a pen because it allows me to not get distracted by everything else that's.

Digital in one word. Describe your mindset Positive. If you could summarize the legacy you hope to leave in one sentence.

None of this matters, man. We're all just walking each other home, which is Ram Dass. But like I really want people to think about that, like to really, really realize that like this is just what we do to make money. What really matters is, like, connecting with the people. Everybody that we meet as a human, because you're struggling with something today, your team is struggling. Each of your members, I'm struggling. Every human we meet is struggling with something. It could be their health, their weight, something in family, financial, the economy, something that's troubling them. It's to remember that all this about business doesn't really matter because we're all gonna die. I think that's something that's part of my legacy, is to remember that we can build the best companies in the world, but we can still have a really good human connection with everybody.

So what would be the last message you want to leave the audience with today?

Well, considering I've already said that none of this stuff matters, go explore the world. No matter where you're from, like, this is. And it doesn't. It really doesn't take as much money as you think to go explore the world. Like, go see some cool stuff. Go explore your own city. Like, stop in these ruts and habits that we get in. Like, I just scootered over here to this office. Instead of taking a car, I got to see some cool stuff that I hadn't even know existed, like, on a scooter. Like, go explore. Go see the planet. Because it's fun. It's cool. And people. You know what's really cool? I've been to 69 countries. I've been to every continent, including Antarctica. No matter what country you're in, we're all the same. And it doesn't mean to give up on your goals. What it means is to be cognizant of everything else and then find ways to say no to what doesn't matter so you can focus on what does. Find ways to put your family and your health and your relationships into your calendar first so that you can focus on what matters.