Scale Your Business 100X with Mr. $100 Million, Cameron Herold

Hey, fastlaners, Ryan, Daniel Moran here. I've got good news for you and I've got bad news for you. The bad news is the Indians couldn't close it out. You know, at the end of 2015, in my year end predictions, I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series. I predicted that they would beat the Houston Astros. So in the grand scheme of things, I'm very glad that I was wrong about Houston and that my Cleveland Indians were the American League champions. That's the bad news. The good news is that I have a bomb diggity episode for you today. We're gonna be joined by Cameron Herald. And Cameron I have marketed in terms of when we're promoting Freedom Fast Lane Live. I've called him 100 Million Dollar Man. One of the first questions I asked him is, is it appropriate to call you that? I walked of this conversation with Cameron with one of those moments or I just, I did. One of that was the sound of me hitting myself in the forehead. I felt like I've been doing it all wrong my entire life. Cameron is very clarifying. He is a how to thinker. He gives you the strategy to reverse engineer what you want and to go after it in terms of building a successful business. And that's why I wanted him to speak at Freedom Fast Lane Live, because I knew he would give. Those of you who sell on Amazon or have e commerce businesses or lead audiences or are Internet entrepreneurs and you have a proven concept, you're taking sales, you know what you're doing, you're in business, but you want to scale that ten or a hundred fold. Cameron is the guy to do that. And in fact, he talks a little bit about one of his Amazon clients that does about $30 million a year and how he advises them on how they're scaling even bigger than that. So this is just a bomb diggity interview. You're gonna really love this. And I knew that not many in my audience were familiar with Cameron's work, but they need to be familiar with Cameron's work. If they want to build a business that is more than just, you know, something little that you do on the side. If you want to build and sell a company, if you want to have a company that's bigger than yourself, Cameron's the guy that you need to talk to. So I'm very proud to introduce you to Cameron Herald. CAMERON Herald, the $100 million man. Welcome to Freedom Fastline. Thanks for hanging out.

Hey, Ryan, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Cameron, is it an appropriate thing I've called you the $100 million man quite a few times publicly. Is that an appropriate way to describe you?

Yeah, I'm pretty much known that way. I've built a number of companies. The first one or the one that I'm most known for is probably building 1,800got junk from the 2 million to 120 million mark. And I'm certainly coaching a lot of companies in those zones. But yeah, that would probably be a good moniker for me.

So I have described you as somebody, and we talked about this as somebody who really has the expertise of helping a business who's at 1 to 5 go to 50 to 100. But you said something interesting about those small businesses aren't really hard to build anymore. Those million to, you know, small multimillion dollar companies. Would you explain to me what you meant by that before we talk into going to the next level from there?

Sure. I guess the best example is I joined an organization 20 odd years ago that was called the Entrepreneurs Organization. And you used to have to do a million dollars in revenue to get into that group. And back in 1995 that was a lot of money. A million dollars. It's the same qualification today. A million dollars to get in. And you know you can run a million dollar business in a much easier way than you used to. You don't need as many employees. You can leverage technology more. And we've had inflation. Money just doesn't go as far as it used to. So stuff is just, it's easier to bring in a million. So nowadays I'd say my typical client is probably around 3 to 5 million in revenue is what I like starting with them, probably 25 or 30 employees. And even if we use the employee benchmark, that's probably my Cutoff is around 25 employees where I typically start to help companies grow.

That's interesting because from my perspective, a company of 25 people that's only doing a few million dollars is a pretty bloated company.

Got it? Yep.

Yeah. Would you, would you comment on that?

Yeah. A lot of the companies still haven't quite figured out how to leverage technology or they don't actually know how to get their pricing correct. So they can often be stuck in their the past in terms of their pricing model and their legacy. In the way of their thinking, they're adding too many employees instead of optimizing, instead of outsourcing, instead of automating. They're still stuck in the old school way of I need to get stuff done so I'll hire A full time person. Yeah, it's, it's a bad part of the business cycle.

But you also, I know you have e commerce clients and physical product sellers. So that has to create kind of a weird dichotomy if you've got both old school businesses and new e commerce businesses that sell on Amazon and have very lean teams. So how do you manage both styles?

Yeah, for me it's actually quite interesting. I actually don't worry or know too much about what my companies or clients do in terms of their product or service. So as an example, I mentor and have mentored now for two and a half years, someone who's doing about $30 million a year selling on Amazon. He's got about 40 employees. He's scaling his company quite rapidly, very, very profitable. But I don't know anything about selling on Amazon. I mean, I couldn't tell you how the technical side of his business works. He is, he's amazing at it, but I'm not so strong. His company is called Viva Labs. But what I know is how to grow teams, how to grow people, everything related to execution, operations, culture, you know, the hiring, interviewing, selection process, how to get people doing more stuff faster, leveraging technology. I'm also coaching the second in command at Sprint, the 82nd largest company in America. They're the fourth largest telco. I don't know anything about the cell phone business, nothing. But I know how to change culture and how to teach them the entrepreneurial systems to grow. So in almost every single case, I don't know anything about my customers business, but I know the business of business.

Last year at Freedom Fast Lane Live, Gary Vaynerchuk was giving us his plan of buying the New York jets. And he had just crossed the $100 million mark at VaynerMedia. And he said very distinctly, if you want to go from 1 to 110 to 100 or whatever jump you want to make, it's all about people. Would you agree with his statement?

A thousand percent agree. In fact, one of my clients, Elite SEM, does all the digital marketing for VaynerMedia. They actually power the marketing side of Gary's media business, which is pretty amazing. A thousand percent culture trumps strategy. It really, truly is all about people. And people or businesses tend to compromise. They tend to hire a lot of B players, they tend to hire a lot of keen employees instead of really hiring someone who's done it before. And the best analogy I use is if you were hiring someone who is a swimmer now you could say that you Want a fast swimmer and someone who's strong and someone who's competitive, someone who knows all the strokes. Or you can go out and hire someone who's won the gold and who's broken world records and has set individual and team records. And if you're hiring someone who's done it before, that's very different from hiring someone who knows how to do it. I know how to do the butterfly, but I'm not very fast. But if you hire someone who's won the Olympic gold at butterfly, you're going to get better results. So when people say it's all about people, it's truly all about hiring the A players. And there's really systems for that. There's systems to attract them, there's systems to interview them. I had a client recently, he said it takes about 90 days to truly know whether you have the right employee after you've hired them. And I said, bullshit. You really know day one. If you've done the proper interviewing, the proper top rating, the proper reference checks, you know, before they walk in the door, if they're not the COVID off the ball, it's only the people that don't know how to bring in the right people that it takes 90 days to figure out if they're the right fit.

Would you go into that a little bit further? Because this seems to be a common kind of failure of entrepreneurs, kind of at my size, at that $10 million point within their businesses where we know that's the case, but it's kind of like telling somebody, I know you're overweight. Okay, what do I do with that? And this seems to be a common trend among entre. Among my peer group of. Well, it's really hard to find good people. Finding good people is hard. Yeah. I got a team of B players. What do you do with that? When you come in and Dr. Cameron comes in with his prescription, what does the prescription look like?

Well, you're actually identifying a really key point. And it's actually been identified in the learning world. So in the learning world, that the learner controls the environment. So every teacher knows that they can't teach a kid who doesn't want to learn. And it's the same with teaching adults who are CEOs. Until the CEO has tripped and fallen and bumped and gotten a few bruises, they're not willing to turn to learning. They're still a little bit stubborn. They're still a little bit narcissistic. They need to be right. They need to have all those strengths to battle. When Everyone else's, it can't work. But until they're ready to learn, they're not going to learn a better way. So sometimes it's being around peer groups, you know, going to a Freedom Fast Lane event, or joining a genius network, or getting a coach or a mentor. Until you're in those groups and you're surrounded by people that are seeing that there's a better way, you may not be ready to learn. And by the way, it's not just your peer group. This goes all the way up to the top level executives, top level CEOs. Until they're ready to learn, they won't learn. In fact, the reason that I wrote my new book, Meetings Suck is I got so tired of CEOs saying meetings suck. And the reality is they don't suck at all. It's just that most people have never had any training on how to run meetings, how to attend meetings, what meetings to even run. So of course meetings suck. How could they be good if you don't know how to run them?

You talked about B team players and you talked about having a group of people who have not done it before. That leads me to conclude that your way of hiring and going out and building teams is to look at the area where you want to grow. Going out and hiring a leader that has a track record of doing that and allowing them to build the team under them. But I'm making that up because you didn't say that, but it might.

You're exactly right. I also am a firm believer that A players are not going to join average companies. So you have to build an incredible culture. You have to have complete alignment. The CEO has to have the vivid vision that they've rolled out to the whole company so everyone can see what the company looks like three years from now. You have to get rid of all your C players. I've always said that your A players are your racehorses, your B players are your workhorses, and your C players have to go to the glue factory. And most companies won't get rid of their average players. You also don't need full time employees. So you can have very strong, fractional outsourced part time people who are deep experts in their space. And those people might cost you more on an hourly basis, but when you factor over the fact that you're only paying them 10 hours or 20 hours a month, it's way better than hiring a bee who's only actually performing 30% of the time and the rest of their day is getting reply all and cc'd all day.

Of course, the pushback on this is I can't afford to hire someone at that level. What do you say to someone who says that?

It's mostly that you can't afford not to and that most people make the excuse that they can't afford to hire somebody, but they haven't really thought about the outputs for the role. So yes, of course you could hire a great director of marketing who used to be the chief marketing officer for Apple, but they're going to be the wrong fit. What you need to do is make a list. Make a list for everything that needs to get done and then kind of categorize those into a role and say, okay, I have enough stuff for one person to do. It looks like this stuff makes up this title. Put a title in place that's commensurate for what's really being done and then hire someone who's done it before. We also need to stop over titling everybody. We can't keep giving out C level titles and VP titles to people that are really directors and managers. 20 years ago to have a C level title, you had to be a major, major, major sen for a major, major company. And now we've got these 25 person companies that have got C level execs. It's ridiculous. So of course they want $200,000 because they're the chief Marketing officer. The reality is they're a director of marketing and they only deserve 80. But if you call them director of Marketing, they'd be comparing themselves against director of marketing.

That's really interesting.

We're over titling, we're overpaying and we're actually giving out equity when we don't need to as well. The whole idea of giving out equity is something that only happened in the last 16 years. I mean, I was a reference for Elon and Kimbal Musk in their first round of funding in 1995 for their very first company. When Elon had one employee, Kimball, his brother worked for me. They weren't giving out equity to people back then. That only happened around 98, 99. It never happened prior to that. And we've gotten away from the fact now. Now we're giving equity to everybody and we're paying them top dollar. It's insane. We've forgotten how to say no.

Well, if that's the case, and if most people are overpaying and there's equity on the table for good people, how is it that you're empowering CEOs to go out and find Good talent because.

It'S about culture first. So people will walk away from more pay to go to a better company. In fact, when I left as the chief operating officer at 1-800-GETJUNK. About 12 months later they hired my replacement. She'd been the head of or she was the president of Starbucks North America and she moved over to 1800, got junk for less money, no long term incentive package because she really wanted to build an amazing culture. And we just ranked as the number two company in all of Canada to work for. So it's not always about money. Sometimes it's about more visibility with the board or more autonomy or more responsibility or more visibility or working in an environment of a players, people will often go somewhere for less money. But we've gotten sloppy, or I shouldn't say we. Many companies have gotten sloppy.

Of course, when you start hiring, there is the fear of management taking over your life. And I have. I was speaking with my business partner this week, even said, do you feel like you're on the phone and in meetings all day long? He's like, oh, that, that's all I do with my time. And this seems to be a bit of a bottleneck that we don't know how to break out of. You've just written a book on this, so help me out.

Yeah. So the leader's job is to grow people. If you think that if you flip the org chart upside down so the CEO is at the bottom, supporting the VPs who support the managers, who support the frontline staff, who support the customers, kind of like an inverted pyramid. Your job is to grow the people that you're supporting. It's not to hold them accountable, hire accountable people. It's not to manage people. You hire people who manage themselves. What you want to do is to grow people, to give them skill development, to align them, to help remove their obstacles. So the role of the leader is always about coaching and development, removing obstacles and aligning. And if you do it right, there's nothing wrong with meetings. If the point of the meeting is you've got clear purpose and clear outcomes and you've got clear communication protocols, meetings can be highly effective. You know, think about an American football team. They would never, ever, ever go into a play without having a huddle before the play. They plan, brief, execute, debrief, they go back to huddle, plan, brief, execute, debrief, they go back to huddle. There's nothing wrong with meetings except most people don't know how to run meetings.

So when you're advising these companies that are at 25, 30 people. What does that structure end up looking like in terms of those huddles and the meetings that you're encouraging them to keep? I'm imagining you're paring down the amount of communication they're having. That's wasteful and I imagine there's a lot of that. Is that the case?

Yeah. The most wasteful communication, frankly, is written communication. And I'll give you a really good example. And I'm a big fan of Slack, big fan of SMS and big fan of email when it's used correctly. But if our listener wrote down a six word sentence, I didn't say you were beautiful. And they read that six word sentence by putting the emphasis on the first word, it would read, I didn't say you were beautiful. Now if they changed it and put the emphasis on the second word, it would say, I didn't say you were beautiful. Or they could put it on the third word and say, I didn't say you were beautiful. In fact, you can put the emphasis on all six words. And that six word sentence means six completely different things. Most of the problems that happen in the company are because of miscommunication, misinterpretation, and the fact that we're all going so fast that we misread stuff even with our best intention. So if you have highly functioning meetings, meetings don't have to be two hours long, they can be six minutes. Meetings don't have to involve 15 people. Meetings should only be with the people that are most needed. And we should tell the other people, look, it's not like I don't respect you or don't want you, I want you doing something else. And you have to trust that we're doing our best work in this part of the meeting. And we have to trust you're doing it. It's like the Navy seals, they don't all get to go bust into the room. Somebody's got somebody else's back. And you have to trust everybody. But we've gotten away from this and everything's become this big kumbaya group hub.

When you walk into one of those companies that has a team that you're probably going to say is oversized, how much do you think is wasted in meetings that are unnecessary? And what do you do to kind of unravel that and to create more efficiency?

I've actually done the numbers on this with about 20 case studies. I worked with about 20 different companies and we talked to their leadership team, their frontline staff and their executive. And we calculated that between one and a half and two hours a day per person tend to be wasted in meetings. So we're talking about somewhere between 12 and 25% of the employees time and ways wasted in meetings. Then when you consider the amount of time that's wasted with email communication being cc'd and reply all and group distribution lists and the amount of stuff people waste time on, most employees are only spending 25 to 30% of their day actually working on the critical things and the other 70% of the time is being wasted. Which is why I'm a big fan of elite high performance teams outsourcing to specialists and working kind of the way the military does. The elite military with that plan brief execute debrief. So business truly is actually extraordinarily simple. We overcomplicate it. We hire average people, we don't give them the skills, we try to manage them. We're selling products or services that are adequate, that aren't great. I heard a great saying one time that the only reason we even have a customer service department is our product or service sucks. We've overset expectations with our customers and we don't have really good FAQs on our website. Solve those four things and you don't need a customer service department, period. Which is true. When was the last time you phoned Amazon?

I sell on Amazon, so I feel like I do it all the time, but as a customer.

So Cameron, almost everyone who listens to Freedom Fast Lane is running an Internet business. So we're very, very guilty of over utilizing textual communication because we're trying to maintain some sense of freedom in our lives while at the same time we're not seeing our team members face to face all the time. And more and more of our in person teams are becoming virtual. So how are you creating an atmosphere or encouraging people to meet on a regular basis efficiently utilizing the tools that we have without running into this trap where we're not really effectively communicating?

Sure. So four of the 18 CEOs that I mentor run 100% virtual teams and about a third of my clients in the COO alliance are all virtual teams. So one thing is we leverage video conferencing. They always use Zoom. I've moved everyone off Skype and over to Zoom. Really high definition video. It's a free platform, it's easy to set up and you can have a multi person chat, you can share your screen, share documents. Perfect, perfect platform. So I can literally have, I could do a group interview of eight potential candidates at the same time, have four of them in front of me and have four of them on the video screen and everybody in the room can be seeing each other. So leverage video is number one. Number two is leverage the communication tools that allow you to stay on the same page. So things like Asana, Basecamp, Slack, Trello, leverage that kind of communication, leverage the best of breed tools, and then start teaching your employees it's okay to say no. They don't need to be involved in everything, but they'll feel connected because you're having face to face communication over video. So I really try to eliminate as much written and verbal communication or phone communication and move as much of that to a video platform where we can talk face to face because stuff gets done way faster and we have that human connection. And then lastly, once a quarter or twice a year, get your teams together. Either a team of teams or leadership teams or business areas, get them to come into a city. And I like doing retreats in secondary markets and secondary states or countries at secondary resorts. And people have a great time. You can cut the cost by a third. So as an example, you have your retreat in Phoenix, not in la, and you have your retreat at an Airbnb that sleeps 10 people versus putting them up at a hotel. But you get a little bit of FaceTime with people.

So you have kind of your quarterly meetings and then do you break it down more frequently from there using daily huddles or weekly check ins? How do you structure those? Sure.

So the whole company is aligned around this concept of a vivid vision, which I cover in chapter one of my first book, Double Double. It's essentially a five page document that describes the company in vivid detail. From there you run your annual retreat. So your one or two day annual retreat where you get away from the company usually three months prior to the start of the next fiscal year. And it's the leadership team coming up with the core goals for the company. So your revenue, profit, customer, employee and strategic goals. And then you come up with a core plan to make those goals happen. And then also a little bit of skill development and a little bit of team building that happens because you're working together off site, quarterly, you have the same strategic planning meeting. It's really more of a strategic thinking planning meeting. And that's done three weeks prior to the start of every quarter. You only need a half a day to a full day. So you can do it in the same city, rent a big airbnb or breathe space and just get off site together and press reset on the plan and recommit as a team as to what everybody's going to get done. And then I have every quarter, each business area committed in writing to the top three things they're going to get done. And every employee commits in writing to the top three things they're going to get done on that quarterly basis. We then have a monthly strategy meeting where the leadership team meets every month for three hours to talk about stuff at least six to 12 months out on the calendar. So we're always thinking about the future but executing on today. So just time in your calendar every month to be strategic. Strategic thinking. It's not strategic planning. There's no such thing as strategic planning. It's strategic thinking and business planning are separate things. And then I do a financial review every month where the leadership team goes through the GF general ledger and the profit loss statement and the cash flow pro formas and reviews them together as a team so they can all see the numbers and they can make decisions based on the numbers together as a team. That's usually a one or two hour meeting. We have the leadership team meets every week for 60 to 90 minutes. Each person on the leadership team does their updates. What's going well, what's not going well, what are you working on? Where are you stuck? That's for about 20 minutes. Then you review the dashboard, you look at the KPIs and metrics for 20 to 30 minutes as a team and then you help unstick people in an area that they're stuck. The leadership team works together to help unstick people. And then right after that meeting, each business area has their own what I call the weekly action review meeting. And then other than that, it's just your one on one meetings where you're coaching your team. So the CEO is coaching the VPs and that's typically a half hour to one hour a week. One on one coaching, where there's no task follow up but you're helping to grow the people, helping to grow them as leaders, helping to remove obstacles. And then the last one as you mentioned, is the daily huddle idea. That's an all company meeting for seven minutes, usually held at 11 o' clock or at 2 o', clock, which are the two points in the day where the energy level drops and it's a 7 minute all company stand up meeting, either video or in person.

So Cameron, I've got a good feeling that I know how you're going to answer this question, but I still need to ask this.

That's a lot of meetings.

Well, my brain immediately goes To I'm thinking about man, I am. So my brain just does not go in that direction. That's why I have SEO. It's why I have other people. My brain as a leader just does not go there. I'm sure you've got stubborn clients like me who just naturally don't think to create that type of a structure. So how do you support someone like that?

Yeah, well, you don't as the CEO, don't need to be the one doing it, but your CEO needs to be the one putting the structure in place. Your CEO needs to have the network and the exposure to these types of systems so that they understand how to build the business, allowing you to be the visionary and they kind of be the more implementer. So they need to be the one who are being exposed to these ideas and free you up for your time. So as a CEO, here are the meetings you should be involved in. You should be involved in strategy, right? It's three hours a month. You can handle it. There's no numbers. It's just blue sky. It's just brainstorming. It's just talking about, fuck, what happens if? What happens if? Wonder what we could. It's just brainstorming. That's the fun idea generation. So CEOs love the strategy. The planning sessions, you have to be at them, you have to be involved in it. In an annual retreat, it's one or two days a year, you can handle it. Out of the 240 business days, you can handle one or two where you work really hard. Maybe you get a facilitator to help you run it, but you dive in as a team and you figure out the plan. Then you get to walk away and let the team figure out how to make the plan happen. Other than that, reviewing your numbers, if you've got a good solid CFO and they're giving you some insights and questions, that's okay. But I would never, as an entrepreneur or CEO, abdicate the financials. I would always want to have a little bit of visibility to those outside of that. You don't have to be involved.

I know you work with a lot of COOs and your COO alliance. I've sent my COO there. What point do you think a founder or a CEO needs to bring on.

That right hand person well before the CEO or the entrepreneur needs to hire the second in command? And let's not even call them a COO right away. Let's just call them a second in command because it could be a director of operations or general Manager or a VP of operations. But before you hire that person, you need to hire an executive assistant. You know, if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. And I think too often people hire the second in command, but they don't release themselves from all the minutia that they're involved in that an EA would help free them up. And an EA is only going to be 50,000 a year versus 150 or 200 a year. So that's step one. Step two is when your business has gotten to the point that you're no longer having fun on a lot of the functional aspects that need to get done and you could free up a lot more of your time to work in your unique ability areas that you truly get energized off of that will truly propel the company, that will truly grow you or that will allow you to work on other more interesting things to have someone run the business for you. So that tends to be, you know, as the company not matures, but has already got a good proof of concept. And that's probably where I actually start working with most companies. They know their business works, they know their concept or product works, they know they have traction and now it's like shit, how do we grow it? And that tends to be where I get involved, which is around the 20 employee mark. Okay, everything works. But now let me teach you how to grow companies quickly.

So would you only recommend someone brings on a second command when they have that type of an infrastructure in place, or is it only after they have that baseline of implementers below them bringing them out of the minutia?

Yeah, you need to have a little bit more. Most companies need to have a little bit of traction, a little bit of momentum before they hire the true second in command. Otherwise don't call them a second in command, just hire them a. Hire a project manager or hire a general manager or hire an operations person? I think we tend to over title people that aren't truly CEOs or aren't truly even on the finance side. So many people call their finance person a chief financial officer and the reality is they're a controller. True CFOs are very strategic. They could literally make business decisions that the entrepreneur would be happy with. And a lot of the CFOs are more or less bookkeepers with big titles.

You just mind melded me a little bit, Cameron.

It's just a. See this is for me. You've, you've seen this, you've seen the fly trying to get out a Window before where, you know, your house and flies banging its head on the window.

Yeah.

Yep. And I've always wondered, like, why doesn't the fly turn 90 degrees to the right and just go out the door? Because the door is right beside it and it's wide open. But no, the fly is going to keep banging its head on the window, trying harder. And that's most entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs keep banging their head on the window and they never get out. And I look at it and go, there's just such an easier path. So I just tend to show them the shortcuts and they go, shit. It's so simple. Well, yeah, business is simple.

Would you call that shortcut? Just getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus?

That's one of them. One of them is aligning them with vision. Like, how can you expect everybody to know what you're doing and have the same intuition you have if you're the only one that sees where you're going? All these entrepreneurs are going, oh, I'm so intuitive. No, you're the only one who sees your vision. If you could write down in four pages what your company looks like three years from now, everyone would have the same intuition you have, idiot. But you're the only one who sees it.

Yeah. The example that I've seen you give from stage before is when you ask someone in the audience that had never seen the movie, the Sound of Music, to describe the movie. And you didn't give them any hints. And what came out was this completely convoluted vision of what the movie was. And the reason was is because you just had never seen the same script before.

Right. So, of course, the only guy who. The guy who saw the movie thinks he's so. Oh, I can describe it because I'm so smart. No, you just saw the movie. So why don't you show everybody the movie and then we can all make those decisions. That's exactly the best analogy. You know, here's the other one. If you think about someone who's building a home, the homeowner is really the CEO. They know what the house needs to look like and feel like, and they show pictures and drawings to the contractor. The contractor creates blueprints to make that vision happen. Then the contractor hands the blueprints to the employees who never meet with the homeowner, and the employees can recreate the homeowner's dream because they can read the plan that is there to execute the vision. Now, if you do that in the business world, if you can get the vision down to all the employees so they can all create the plan. You don't have to manage anybody. But most businesses won't do that. And then most businesses get frustrated and it feels like they're herding cats and they're trying to manage people and hold them accountable, control them, because nobody knows where we're going.

Yeah, where do you find that people can find really good A players? Is it by having the culture and just attracting them, or is it going out and pounding pavement to find the right person?

It's a little bit of both and a third area. So the first one is, yeah, you have to create a great company. I was working in the city of Calgary, Alberta a couple years ago and One of the CEOs up there said, you know, there's no great employees in Calgary. I was like, bullshit. It's a city of 2 million people. There's plenty of great employees. They won't work for an average company. And he looked at me and he went, ah, you're right, you're right. So you have to create a great work environment. It doesn't have to be physical, but you have to create a great culture. And culture is not the free vacations and the massage. It starts with alignment, then it goes into working with key people. Then, you know, getting rid of the C players, giving people the technology tools. It's by design. Culture's by design. Secondly, you need to then go out and pound the pavement and find them. Thirdly, you can put a bonus structure in place and teach people how to put an incredible bonus structure in place to hire great people. And then fourth is you need to have the executive search firms out there pounding it for you because they're going to go and poach people. No, a player is ever looking for a job. A players are already working somewhere and you have to poach them and bring them to you.

Cameron, what do you find the infrastructure needs to look like or how it needs to change in order to make that leap from 3 to 5 to 50 to 100. What is that plan? What is that timeline of that type of a plan? And what does the infrastructure usually look like in terms of number of people?

So it usually starts. Most businesses grow the same way. They sit down and they go, okay, my revenues this year are 3 million. How much do I think I can do next year? What I do is I say, forget about that. If your revenues this year are 3 million, how much do you want to do three years from now? Lean out and put a big goal in place. Now let's say you say Your goal is 30 million and you're at 3 million today. Let's reverse engineer that. What does your company look like three years out? What's your org chart look like three years out? What are your people? What are your customers? And you start reverse engineering the future. Very similar to building a jigsaw puzzle. Nobody sits down with the jigsaw puzzle and starts building it without knowing what the picture on the front of the box looks like. Well, most companies unfortunately don't lean out into the future and design it. Here's a great example. Again I mentioned I've known Elon for 20 years, 22 years. The only reason that the Model S, the Tesla Model S has the seven seat option, you know, underneath the back you can have the two seater flip up to have seven seats. The only reason it has the seven seat option, do you know what it is?

I have no idea. That's why I don't have the seven seat option.

Okay, right, because you don't need it. But Elon has five boys, he's got five kids. If you had five kids, you would want the seven seat option in the car that you're building. So he just said, I want a car that competes with McLaren F1, which was his old car. It has to be sexy as hell, just like the rest of my stuff. I mean, the guy's got a private MiG, it's one of his planes. So it has to be like super sleek, super fast. And if I'm going to build a car company around this one car right away, it better seat my whole family. When he bought the company, it had the two seater roadster. The next car he built was one he could take all of his kids for a drive in. And he then turned to the team and said, who's with me? So most companies don't lean out far enough and create the vision and work it backwards. So that's number one. Number two is then describe what your company looks like in vivid detail three years out so everyone can see it. Step three is start hiring or contracting the people who can build the foundational parts of the business first. So it's like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You do the corners first and then you do the sides. You have to think of your business in that very strategic way and build from the foundation up and then you build all the cool fun stuff afterwards. And then number four would be find a couple of things that the more you work on them, the faster they spin. Kind of flywheel, right? What is it that's going to constantly propel you. One of them for me is media. The more that I focus on talking to the media. I did a three hour, four hour media interview yesterday with cnn. Today I'm doing a podcast interview with you. Tomorrow I've got a meeting with a journalist up in Canada. I will talk to the media all day long, every day because it will propel my vision. So you just find something that will be your flywheel for us at 1-800-grad-JUNK. It was culture NPR.

Cameron, I want to talk about meeting suck and a little bit about why you wrote that now. But first I kind of want to tease out what we'll be talking about at Freedom Fast Lane Live. For a lot of people who listen, they.

They haven't met you yet. So this is their first date with you. What does date two look like when we meet you in person on December? You're Speaking on the 10th, I think. When you come to Austin in December. What is, what's date two gonna look like?

I'm gonna sound and feel exactly like I do right now. I'm just the normal guy. I, I sound like this when I talk to my wife and my kids are my friends. So I'm gonna sound the same. I'm gonna be talking about the same. I'll be giving them very easy to implement systems to put in place to their business. Nothing that I talk about, not a single system that I use requires an MBA to figure it out. They're very easy to implement systems. Again, business is simple. So they're going to get, they'll be drinking from a fire hose. They're going to walk away with pages and pages of really good, easy to put in place ideas. What I want them to do is focus on the critical few things versus the important many.

One of the things that I really admire about your style is you have this ability of showing entrepreneurs and CEOs how to do more through elimination rather than overstimulation. There is like this freed up energy that happens when you start removing those blocks that come as the result of simple systems. You are probably the only person with that ability that I've seen besides Dan Sullivan of. Besides simplifying the process of simplifying the process so that new stuff happens rather than adding more to a fire that's already burning too hot. And that is a very unique ability that I think is sorely missing in our marketplace. So I just wanted to acknowledge you for that.

Thank you. And then thank you for putting me in the group with Dan Sullivan. He's I'm in his 10x program and strategic coach. My fifth year of working with Dan and he is. I've always said that my network is my net worth. The groups that I'm involved in are really what are going to propel me. It's why I started the COO alliance is to get a group of second in command so they can scale. But I'm involved in the genius network, mastermind talks, Strategic coach and Maverick and those four groups really propel me. And thank you on the simplification. Let me give you, give our listener another idea on simplification. Stop reading so many fucking business books. It's crazy. You're over reading and over learning and it's too random. What I'd like them to do is sit down and say, what am I working on over the next 90 days? And what business books can I read that are going to help me with those core projects? Don't read stuff at random. Don't just read another book, another book, another book. Read stuff that's going to help you with what you're working on. So if you've got a retreat coming up in two weeks, read a couple books about retreats. If you've got a planning meeting coming up, read about planning. If you're doing job interviews, read about interviews. But don't read business books at random because it causes too much stress and it adds too much random stuff to your to do list. Read about the stuff that you're working on and that's where your skill set will come from.

Cameron, you mentioned Dan's group 10x. I am in the 10x ambition program as well, but I missed our last meeting because one of my free days was when the Indians were in the World Series. That took precedence over everything. Tell us a little bit about meetings suck and how that is going to help remove some of the bottlenecks that we're talking about to create that new.

Yeah. So the impetus for writing meetings. I was talking to one of my clients one day. He's got a couple of kids like I do. I've got four kids. He said, you know, he was complaining about meetings. And I said, look, have you trained all of your employees on how to run meetings? He said, no. I said, have you and the executive team ever had at least an hour training on running meetings? He said, no. I'm like, well, would you ever send your kid off to a little league baseball game, you know, 10 years old? Would you ever let him go to little League without teaching him how to hold the bat? Or catch a ball or throw the ball. He said, of course not. It would embarrass them. I said, then why do we allow our employees to go into meetings or attend meetings or to run meetings or why do we let them do that without having any training? Of course they're shitty because they have no skills. So I wrote the book Meeting Suck because I wanted all employees at all companies to finally have the base level training on how to run meetings, how to attend them, on the types of meetings to hold. It's literally like a two hour read. I wrote it and condensed it to keep it simple and it's now people literally buying it by the hundreds for all their employees because they want it to finally change. I just finally got fed up with listening to people complain when meetings are actually amazing if you know how to run them.

Well, the book is Amazing Suck. I'm guessing you can get it on Amazon and everywhere else. Cameron, if this helps as many entrepreneurs as Double Double did, then we're in for a new era of entrepreneurship. So, like, I can't wait to feature you this December at Freedom Fast Lane Live. I think we are in a unique time in our little circle where as you mentioned at the beginning of our chat, there seems to be some ease over getting to the million or two million dollar mark. But then there's this ceiling we hit that we don't know how to break out of and we need help with that. And this 40 minute chat will certainly take us one step, but we'll really step on the gas in person this December and I can't wait to give that gift to the audience.

Thank you. One last thing, I'll give our listener right now before anybody else knows, I'm co authoring the book the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. And that will help every listener. I'm co authoring it with Hal Elrod who wrote the Miracle Morning and it's coming out on November 14th. So literally in 10 days, my book number three is coming out.

Well, we'll look forward to it. Thanks so much for hanging out with us, cameras. See you in December.

You're welcome, Ryan. See you in a few weeks. Bye. Bye.

So how do you make the jump from 1 million to 10 or 5 to 50 or 10 to 100? That is the theme of Freedom Fast Lane Live 2016. That's why we've invited Cameron Harold to join us there and to speak at the event. He's also on the $100 million panel along with Mike Dillard, our Aubrey Marcus, Josh Bazzoni, and Ron lynch. Talking about what it looks like to sell $100 million in products or to have a business that's worth $100 million. What does it take to get there? So whether you're just starting out, you're going from zero to one, or you've got your concept in the marketplace and you're going from 1 to 10, or you are scaling from 10 to 100, Freedom Fast Lane LIVE is a place where you will be in an environment with people who have done it before and will come back and show you the way. It's the thing I am most proud of that we do round these parts. It is also the most expensive thing that we do. We do it because it's the event that I think entrepreneurs need in this time. I believe entrepreneurship and capitalism is the way that we create change and move forward in the world and solve all the world's problems. Thank you for being one of those change makers. I hope to see you and serve you this December 9th, 10th and 11th in Austin, Texas for Freedom Fast Lane Live. You can get tickets at freedomfastlanelive.com where you will meet Cameron, Peter Diamandis, Sean Stevenson, Jesse Itzler, John Mackey, Alicia Silverstone and the rest of the lineup on Freedom Fast Lane. Hope to see you there. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next show.