Personal Branding Expert: The Bad Habit That’s Costing You Millions of Dollars

You watch these creators trying so hard, kind of like flies trying to get out a window, but there's an easier path. If they would just do this, they could grow. So I always wanted to share the cheat sheets, system, playbook to make each of our companies successful.

In this episode, I talked to Cameron Herold, who is just a phenomenal leader and executive.

I knew that the money that I could actually make was my name being attached to the brand. As we scaled, if I could do speaking events, starting to talk about it on social media, and that's what built my brand. No one to this day could name, sadly, the other 4 people of the leadership team. The number one metric that every company, creator included, has— it's not views, it's not likes, it's not impressions, it's none of the shit that you think it is. Your number one metric is how much money you make. You need to understand all this stuff, and if you don't, you're dead. You're the first person, and your audience is now the first group who ever knows the full story.

If you enjoy this show, then definitely leave a comment on the YouTube episode. Make sure to subscribe. I appreciate you. We'll talk soon. Cameron, welcome to the show.

Hey, Nathan, good to see you.

You and I were just riffing before we hit record about like this intersection of personal brand and building substantial businesses. Just to set the stage, maybe let's go back and just, just start with at a high level your approach to personal brand and how you've applied that at, you know, a handful of different companies that you've scaled to massive levels.

Yeah. So I got fortunate with the rise of social media. So I was, I got very well known for building the fourth company that I built was called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I did three companies prior. And then I was the chief operating officer for 1-800-GOT-JUNK from 2000 until 2007. Right as I was leaving the organization, I had the first Facebook account in the company. Everyone was laughing at me. People thought I was crazy.

It's for college students. What are you doing?

Well, and no one knew. I didn't even know what it was, but I was very intrigued. I was hearing a buzz from the college crowd. And then I got onto Twitter very early. I was one of the first 200,000 people in the world on LinkedIn. And right at the intersection of me leaving 1800 Got Junk and starting off as a coach, basically coaching CEOs, and then I've written 6 books and I've been paid to speak now in 28 countries. But it was the rise of Facebook, the rise of Twitter, the rise of LinkedIn where I started to share my information and I was a bit of a self-promotion machine. But really, I learned that, oh, gosh, in 1986. So, that might be 38 years ago. Jesus. I was 20 years old. I'm really dating myself. I was 20 years old and I landed the first newspaper article with a photo of me. And I realized how easy it was to get press coverage and also how powerful the press coverage was versus marketing and advertising. And I realized that I could use that newspaper article and show all of these homeowners that I had credibility as a house painter. And they hired me to paint their homes. And that started the rise of my first real company. I had 12 employees when I was 20 years old. And I started landing a lot of press. And then for every company that I've built, I landed press. Now, I'll go back to the 1-800-GOT-JUNK again around this. When we were building that company, there were 5 members of the leadership team. Of the 5 members of the leadership team, I cared about one thing more than the other 4. I wanted to be known for building the brand. I knew from the day I joined Brian— Brian was my best man at my wedding 3 months before I started with him. He watched me grow 2 other companies. Prior to me starting working with him, but I knew that it was never going to be about the money. I knew that the money that I could actually make was my name being attached to the brand so that as we scaled, if I could do speaking events for the company, if I could be a thought leader for the company, if I could be an external voice for the company, much like Harley Finkelstein is for Shopify as their COO, if I could be an author and talk about what I'd done for the company, if I could speak to the press about running Thunder God Junk, my brand equity would be worth way more than any money that I would be making in the actual organization. So, I was paid $300,000 a year to be COO 17, 18 years ago, but my real leverage came off of the fact that I could attach my name to that. And then, leaving the company, starting to talk about it on social media, that really was really powerful for me. And that's what built my brand. No one to this day I mean, no one could name, sadly, the other 4 people of the leadership team. They were all very critical in getting us there, but they never really cared about having their name attached to the brand. So to this day, nobody knows they even existed.

Yeah. So talk about that more. What are the different habits that you'd go through, right, with these 4 other people that, like, often I find that it's a relatively small difference between someone who's building the audience and like teaching about what they learned and sharing the story. Like two people are both doing the work and then one goes, call it 25% further and teaches and shares.

For me, it was— and that's, that's actually exactly what it was. I've been notoriously horrible at selling from the stage. I've left millions of dollars on all those stages that I've been paid to speak on because I was really bad at selling my course or selling the other services that I had, but I was very good at delivering content and helping the people in the audience. So, I always wanted to share. And I think for me, I started coaching CEOs back in 1989, way before business coaching was even a thing. I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs by 1993. And I've always seen entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies kind of like flies trying to get out a window, probably like you're doing with creators. You watch these creators trying so hard and banging their head on the window, but there's an easier path. If they would just do this, they could grow. So, I always wanted to share the cheat sheets or the systems or the playbooks or what we were doing to make each of our companies successful. And because I did that and talked to the media about it or I talked on stages about it or then I started talking on social media about it, people kept turning to me as a thought leader and an expert. I'm like, I'm not an expert. I'm just telling you what I'm doing. Nobody else is really talking about what they're doing. I think if I'd known about the creator community now, If I'd known about it back in 2007, my brand would've been 100x bigger than it is today because I would've actually paid some people to be behind the scenes helping me. So, I'll give you an interesting nugget that not almost anybody knows. Lewis Howes, who I've known since 2007, the year that I left 1800 Got Junk, he did not build his brand. There was a guy behind the scenes, almost like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, whose name was Sean Malarkey. And Sean ran the entire business of the Lewis Howes LinkedIn program for about 6 or 7 years, from 2007 till about 2013. During that time, that's what really got Lewis to be really well known, and then he was able to continue to grow off of his brand being there. But it was someone else. He didn't have the skills to build his brand. Someone did it for him. I really missed that opportunity. I think I understood the value of being on social media, the value of sharing, but I didn't pay someone to help me build my brand properly. Help me gather all the email addresses and monetize them, help me grow my list properly. I didn't know how to leverage that. And I thought I was, but I was more of like the street kid hustler. And I think my ego got in the way. I think the fact that I was smart in so many areas of business, I didn't realize that I was dumb in some others and I should have leveraged some of that help, right? I should have leveraged it.

Well, and that's interesting because in our companies, right? And you've run a bunch of companies and especially scaling like 1-800-GOT-JUNK or as I'm scaling ConvertKit, I think about these things in terms of, okay, who am I going to put in place to accomplish these goals? And then for whatever reason, on my personal brand, I'm like, and I'm going to do it, right? I would never, you know, in the business, I would never be like, cool, I'm going to be the head of engineering and the head of product. And you know what, I'm going to run marketing at the same time. Like, that would be crazy. But in the personal brand, it sounds like, you know, you and I both fell into the same trap of like, yeah, but that I have to do all of, you Well, and I'm seeing it today.

So, you and I both know Dan Martell. I think you've met Dan probably through Mastermind Talks. I first met Dan in 2000 and, gosh, 2012 at the first MMT, first Mastermind Talks is where Dan and I met. He was running Clarity. And Dan was running his businesses, then hired people to run SaaS Academy for him, Matt Berlocki. But over 2 years ago, he started hiring people to run his brand, to help build his profile. He's now spending about $1 million a year. He's given me the real numbers behind the scenes on the filming, the video, the uploads, the captioning, all the graphics. And yeah, Dan talks on video, but don't kid yourself. He's not the one sitting down, putting the captions up, uploading it, putting in the tags, making sure it goes out at the right times. He's literally using something where he's doing the video, it's uploading via Dropbox, and then Zapier is pushing it out to the team who's making it all happen. He's hired the machine behind him so he can be the thought leader. But yeah, I don't know why I haven't done that stuff yet. And that's what I'm starting to work on now. Finally.

Yeah. I mean, that's the exact place that I'm in as well, where it's very similar to how you found that your personal brand grew. 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I realized that like ConvertKit has its own marketing machine. There's a whole team working on growing that, but I can go on podcasts, I can create all this content, curriculum and everything else. That reaches a whole other audience. But I'm like trying to do that me and one, one person. And the exact conversation I'm going to a mastermind with, uh, some friends, uh, on Thursday this week. And the thing, the topic that I'm bringing to the mastermind is, okay, what, how do I need to staff and build this org for my personal brand rather than, you know, in addition to, you know, the 75 people I have at ConvertKit?

Well, by the way, if you ever want to reach out to me, I'm happy to give you some help. I'll do a shameless plug. This is my newest book, The Second in Command, but this is my first of 6 books, Double Double. I keep them right beside me because when I do interviews like this, I can actually refer to them. One of the things that I'm working on right now is actually getting my business brand outside of the business mastermind community and into a few other mastermind communities for exactly what you said. I can get my name and my brand out into another person's community. So, this year, I've gone to all the mastermind groups, Mastermind Talks, Genius Network, Strategic Coach, Baby Bathwater, War Room, Entrepreneurs Organization, YPO, Vistage. I've been, for probably 15 years, business masterminds all over the place, investing, paying, et cetera. The only time I've ever gone outside of the business world for masterminds was the TED Conference. I went to the main 5-day TED Conference 11 years in a row. This year, my wife and I made a pivot. I hate that word. We shifted and we're starting to go to these large mastermind events that will have lots of entrepreneurs there, but they're really around biohacking. They're around health. So, we're going to the Health Optimization Summit in the UK. We're going to Dave Asprey's biohacking conference in Dallas. We're going to Intelligent Change, which is Mimi and Alex Ikonn's event in Ibiza. We're going to Ondalinda in Montenegro. We're pushing ourselves out to these other events And then I'm actually getting lined up as a speaker at these things because my brand was strong enough and I'm able to talk about something that works for kind of a subset of the people in those communities. But it's a whole different community than kind of the incestuous business mastermind one tended to be, you know, where we were bumping into the same people all the time.

That reminds me of something that I did where I really early in my career, I merged two worlds. One was the like direct response marketing and all of that where you had great copywriting, long-form sales pages, all of that. But then I also grew up in like the startup ecosystem, the, you know, uh, building apps for the iPad the day it was released where great design mattered. And I just combined those two things and like in one great design in the startup ecosystem, it's like, yeah, of course it's table stakes and great copywriting was table stakes in the direct response world. But you could show up, you know, bring something from one world into another and all of a sudden it's novel and people are like, wow, your long-form sales pages are beautifully designed. Like, this is phenomenal. I've never seen anything like it. And you're like, I just pulled things from two different worlds. And it sounds like you're taking things where it's become common in the business community. People are like, hey, yeah, I've read that book. Great. You know, I loved it. That was super helpful, but I know all of that, but you're showing up in this other world and it's really, really novel.

Yeah, well, I'm trying to bring my kind of expertise and IP into these other communities. But here's something that's interesting. What you just said, though, Nathan, is that you're taking two things that you take for granted, right? The design. Well, of course, that's kind of table stakes. It's like playing jazz in a coffee shop. Like, you have a coffee shop, you have to play jazz. Like, duh. And then, you know, long-form sales pages and copywriting. The way that I actually met Jason Gaynor from Mastermind Talks was through Yannick Silver. Yannick was one of my very first coaching clients back in 2008. Janik was like an expert on these copywriting and the sales letters and all this stuff. I still never learned that and never actually learned the value of outsourcing that until a year ago. I finally hired a really good copywriter. I was fucking MacGyvering shit and putting it up on my website. And again, trying to say I was being Pennywise pound foolish basically. And I really wish that I had either listened to the people like you that I would have met at the events and realized that I could have tapped into some of their expertise or that I could have started to merge some of these skill sets from other industries into mine. In 2000, I kind of roll the camera back 23 years, we used to talk about that somebody had a kind of like an internet business and then someone had a business and then somebody had a business and they were leveraging internet marketing. Well, now it's all one, like every business, right? Every business has a Part of them are on the internet. Every business uses digital marketing. Every business is using all this. Like, you need to understand all this stuff, and if you don't, you're dead. Um, but it's, it's amazing to me that even people like me that are a thought leader are still missing on some of these opportunities.

I'm gonna go back to something you said. You're talking about the difference between the you and the other people on the executive team, um, like the perception of expertise. I have a line that I've said for a long time of people don't teach because they're experts. They're perceived as experts because they teach. Like, there's actually a fairly small difference between—

it's really good.

Like, you know, your, your, your peers on that executive team are just as talented as you are.

Oh, fuck, way more, way more, way more. Roman, Roman, the head of IT, was way smarter than I was. Hendra, our head of finance, way smarter than I was. Shirley Quinn, who ran our call center, was unbelievable. Lori Baggio, like, in running franchise sales, and Wayne Pryor. Like, these are really, really smart, talented people. I'm not that smart. If I showed you my resume, like, or my— sorry, my, um, CV, my, my report card from university, my grades are horrifying. It was C-, D+, C, C-, Bs. I got one A, and it was with a French tutor. Like, it was terrible. Um, Yeah, I'm not the smart guy in the room, and I've never actually even felt like the smart guy in the room. I feel like an imposter at every single speaking event that I do. I feel like I'd not qualify. Every time I went to MMT when Jason would ask me to talk, I was happy because I'm actually quite introverted. The only way for me to meet people at MMT was because I was speaking and other people would come up and talk to me, but I didn't know how to connect. I didn't know how to meet people. So, I was often perceived as having like an ego? Not at all, man. I was the insecure— In fact, Jason knows this. And well, it's the reason I haven't been back at MMT is I overused alcohol. I misused alcohol to the extent that I was struggling with going through a very painful divorce. I was struggling with massive insecurity and I was drinking a lot to overcome that stuff. And I wasn't behaving very well at MMT. And Jason asked me not to return. So you're the first person and your audience is now the first group who ever knows the full story. I've hinted around it. Jason clearly knows the story. Yeah, Jason and I are still very good friends to this day, but that's why I'm not back at MMT, is because I didn't have the confidence of being the smart person in the room and I had to use alcohol or speaking as a way to meet people. I'm not sure why I'm telling that story right now, but it felt— yeah, it felt very authentic to tell.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for sharing that. I think that there's so many—

I'm not the smart person in the room wanting to teach. I got perceived as being the smart one because I was sharing.

Because you're sharing. And there's that small pivot. You referenced Harley Finkelstein from Shopify.

Yeah.

And just thinking about—

I met them when they had 40 employees. I was— one of my former coaching clients of mine from Ottawa, Adrian Salaminovich. Adrian and I wrote a book called Free PR. But I coached him 10 years before we wrote the book. He was really good friends with Harley and was offered the VP of marketing that year for Shopify. And I went and did a speaking event at the Shopify head office for the Shopify employees. There were 40 and about 15 local Ottawa entrepreneurs. So, that's the end. So, Harley was the, I think, the first or the second guest on my Second in Command podcast. And he's a brilliant, brilliant leader, fantastic leader.

If you think about the shift that you made, that Harley made, anyone else that comes to mind who's done that of being, you know, really public and out there with their work as an executive at a company, what type of, you know, what would you give as tips or ideas that you'd share with someone else who's like, hey, I'm a VP of product, or I'm a chief revenue officer, you know, thinking about that?

Okay, so there is someone out there who every single person listening or watching knows their name. And I'm going to give you the full backstory. So his name is Guy Kawasaki. Guy Kawasaki worked for Apple back in, I think it was 1986 to 1989. And in that period of time, at a meeting one day, Steve Jobs told all of the employees, all of you are technical evangelists for Apple. All of you are technical evangelists for Apple. Okay. And then he kept talking. Guy Kawasaki went out and got business cards made up that day. That said Guy Kawasaki, product developer or whatever, and technical evangelist for Apple. And he fucking started handing them out to people. He literally built his brand pre-internet because the internet really didn't start off until like '98, '99, right? Guy Kawasaki's entire brand got elevated because people started talking to him as a technical evangelist. He started speaking on behalf of the company as a technical evangelist because his CEO, Steve, said, you're all technical evangelists. Everybody at 1-800-GOT-JUNK or at all the brands I've built, whether it be Gerber Auto Collision or Boyd Autobody in Canada or uBartender.com or College Pro Painters, we all had a chance to speak to the media, to speak on stages, to share our stories. Most people didn't. And I wasn't doing it again to be the smart person. I was doing it because it was a way for me to meet people and it was a way for me to help people. And it was cheaper than spending money on marketing and advertising for me. I also, by the way, I also think, I don't know if this is good or bad, I'd love your thought on this. I, I'm sharing like a lot of Instagram Reels, right? And a lot of Facebook Stories and a lot of YouTube videos, but 99% of them are me riffing on an idea as I'm walking back from getting coffee. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? Like, should I just riff on a topic and post it, or should I be more thoughtful or scripted or strategic, do you think?

I think it depends on, on two different aspects of it. One is riffing on content and sharing it, you often don't know what's going to hit. And so it's absolutely worth doing that. So I would keep doing that. But then also in trying to put out that amount of content, we can— like, often the quality isn't as good. So something that a lot of creators are doing, you know, if you look at Dan Martell, Cody Sanchez, other people like that who have dialed in the teams, the production, everything, often what they're doing is re-recording things that was a good idea with the wrong hook. So for example, let's say you and I are talking on this podcast and then you, um, say something that's brilliant and your team or my team is trying to cut it up and it like just doesn't quite fit in 60 seconds.

Yeah.

You know, it was phrased wrong. It took a little too long to get to the point or whatever. What happens is behind the scenes afterwards, the team who cut that up would be like, okay, that was good, but not great. And they might run it, but then they'll add it to the list of things. They're like, okay, next time we sit down with Cameron, this is what we're going to re-record.

Oh, I like that.

And then we'll give you, you know, like your producer would sit down opposite you and it looks like a podcast, you know, we're in the studio, all of that. It's not, it's the producer or the video guy being like, all right, Cameron, tell me the guy with Kawasaki's story again.

You know, let's run it up. Yeah.

And I want this hook.

That makes sense. That's interesting.

And so it ends up being you have to either on the podcast or the, you know, the walk and talk idea, right? You have to produce the ideas and get it out there and get those reps in.

But then find somebody who's looking for those nuggets to then expand on and hook them.

Yep. And that's the thing that you can rerecord it.

That's cool.

And I didn't realize that.

I'll show you something. I'll show you something that I am doing right now that's kind of cool.

Yeah.

I have, um, a DJI Pocket 3 camera being set up that I'm actually running a recording separate from what you and I are working on. So this is separate from the one that I'm recording you. I've got my iPhone camera set up on my laptop to record for you, and then I have the secondary camera set up for my team so that I have B-roll or additional kind of footage that they can then use. That's not something that— well, again, I don't know if it's good or bad or whatever, but it's just— it's a way that I can leverage I try to have in a very entrepreneurial way, right, without spending— I don't have like Gary Vaynerchuk having his guy off in the corner with videos and cameras. I don't have that team sitting here doing stuff, but I figure if I'm going to do something, I may as well get additional leverage. So, when your episodes go live, my team will share it on Facebook, they'll share it on LinkedIn, they'll share it on Twitter, they'll share it on Instagram. We'll take it and slice it up. We'll email it to our list. And I'll do that multiple times a year with the one episode. For me, it's never about— I learned this with the media, even when we were on Oprah for When Tinder Got Junk. It's not about that one press hit that you get. It's not about that one episode that you're on. It's what you do with it. And I think that we're missing a lot of opportunities there as well, that I think we kind of feel like we have to keep shooting videos where most of our audience never saw that one video that we shot last year. We can share that video 3 more times this year. And they're not going to remember they saw it, or other parts of the audience will see it that I think we can actually reuse a lot more of our content more frequently than we do.

Reuse is a huge thing because if you think about it, let's say that, you know, the Instagram account was 10,000 followers at the stage. 2 years later, it's 100,000 followers. Well, guess what? There's 90,000 people that I'm pretty much guaranteed did not scroll back and be like, what was the earlier stuff? And you might look at the production quality of your earlier stuff and be like, oh, that was before I had the studio or that. And so then just go back and rerecord them, you know, in the new studio.

Yeah, I like that idea too. Go find the ones that actually hit and rerecord them or the ones that were close and rerecord them. There's some really big gold in there for sure.

Yeah. So there's a whole thing on how do we build the, um, the audience as a, as a founder. Is there anyone else that, that you follow? Um, or you know who's done a really good job, like along the lines of a Guy Kawasaki or what you did or Harley, someone who you're like, oh, that grew the business substantially because they took the personal brand approach?

It's interesting. There's a, there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have done it. The reason I started my, my podcast called the Second in Command podcast is I want the rest of the story. I was speaking with Guy Raz at the main TED conference about 7 years ago, and He was interviewing all these CEOs who were really good at sharing their story. Kendra Scott from her jewelry business. I've known Kendra since she was $2 million in revenue. She's now a billion-dollar company. I've heard Kendra's story so often, I wanted the rest of the story. But yeah, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have done it. I haven't seen a lot of executives inside of companies doing it. And I think they're the ones that are missing massive opportunities. They have a voice. They have ideas to share. It's almost like if I was to ask your mom and dad, How did you raise Nathan Barry? Your mom would have a very true story. Your dad would have a very true story. They'd be very different stories, but they're both very worth hearing. And I think we have a lot more of potential creators that are not the entrepreneur inside of their company. I think there's a lot of people out there that are doing amazing things in business that should be sharing that, or that are just doing amazing things in life and should be sharing it. Right. You don't have to be like my wife right now has a YouTube channel and she shares videos of all of our travels. We sold everything 3 years ago. And we travel— we've been traveling around the world for 3 years. Every single country we go to, she produces another video and sharing it, not to monetize it, not to pay bills, merely to actually inspire people to live better lives and have more fun and to cross off their bucket list items. But I think there's a lot more people that can do that inside of their, you know, their normal day-to-day. And sometimes something catches something. I think people will either catch a spark of inspiration or it'll help them grow in their career, or they might actually stumble into the fact that maybe they're more of an entrepreneur than they thought they were too. But to answer your question, no, I can't think of any specific names. Well, Sam Parr from My First Million. I think Sam and Sean Perry have done an incredible job building a brand around the hustle and then around their podcast and around each of the businesses. And they're leveraging— it's incredible to watch. I talked to Sam the other day about this, that they're actually leveraging their podcast, My First Million, to really leverage all of these other businesses because they're non-compete. Is coming up with HubSpot, and I can pretty clearly see that they're going to detach themselves from the brand. They're going to run something else off because they're really using their podcast as a way to market their other businesses. I think there's something pretty solid there too. I'm even doing it with my Second in Command podcast. I've been approached lots of times to run advertisements on my podcast. I'm like, no, I'm going to advertise my Invest in Your Leaders course and I'm going to, you know, I'll advertise my COO Alliance. I'm going to use my own audience of 100,000 listeners to market my things. Right. But yeah, that's a rambling answer, I guess.

Well, the, the focusing on the other executives is really interesting. It made me think of Charlie Prangley, who was the previous, previous guest on my podcast, because she, she's the creative director at ConvertKit. And she has a 250,000 subscriber YouTube channel. And like she has her own massive following and it's so, so valuable.

Totally.

But if you can get—

And it's good for the company. What's that? It's really good for the company. We missed that opportunity back at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I'll tell an interesting story here. There were 3 women who worked with us, Katie Dunsworth, Andrea Baxter, and Sandra, shoot, she's going to kill me. I can't remember her name. All 3 of them were my direct reports and they went off and wrote a book. With two other girls that we're friends with called The Smart Cookies. And it was a woman's guide to investing. And they got their book so well known while they worked for us that they got on Oprah for themselves. This was after our company, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, had already been on Oprah. Katie and Sandra and Andrea and the two other girls were on Oprah with their book, talking to Oprah, sitting on the stage. And Brian, the CEO, got pissed off at them. And he got frustrated with them because he felt like they were leveraging off of his brand or spending time in a side hustle. And I was like, fucking go, girls, like, do more, better. If we could have supported them and encouraged them and helped them more, they would have done really well and it would have helped the brand. But instead, Brian kind of severed ties. I'm actually still really close friends with all of them. In fact, I saw Katie about 3 days ago. She now runs a 100-person PR company, like a really solid, legit amazing business here in Vancouver called Talkshop Media. But I think if we had helped our employees go off and do stuff, Christopher Bennett owns his own agency right now. So many of our former employees started, Melissa McAfee owns her own business. I think if we had helped our employees have a voice and do more with social media or do more with creating brands, our brand would have grown because it would have been more than just the Cameron Herold spokesperson or Brian spokesperson. We would have had 15 or 20. And then I think we would have had, you know, those people doing better in their careers too. So I think a lot of companies could help people find their voice and share their voice for both sides to help the employee. And then also it's like you said, it's, it's helping, um, ConvertKit, right?

Yep. Yeah, exactly. And, and we're trying to do that a lot more intentionally inside the company. I'm realizing I'm thinking of examples of companies that have done it really well, but they didn't end well. And the two that come to mind. Um, are Fast, uh, which was like the one-click checkout company. I felt like all of their executives did a really good job, particularly on Twitter, of building audiences, sharing things, especially on these platforms where engagement matters. And so if you build like your own pod of internal creators at the same time, it feeds off of each other. Yeah, unfortunately I think Fast didn't succeed as a company, but that strategy worked really well. And then the other one was Pipe, where they were like lending on monthly recurring revenue.

Okay.

And I think they're still doing fine, but the executive has left. But I felt like their executive team did a good job, you know, building that out.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of some examples, and the ones that I kind of came back to were, were MLMs and cults.

Yeah, exactly. How do we apply this in a good business model?

That's my point. So I actually really love cults and culture and something that's culty. In fact, I was a guest on a podcast called A Little Bit Culty with Sarah Edmondson and Nippy. I'm actually really close friends with Sarah and Nippy. They used to live here in Vancouver. And I approached her when the show The Vow came out and talking about NXIVM, the sex cult, and found out there were 17,000 people in this. And I was like, I want you to come and recruit for the SEAL Alliance. Like, you're an amazing recruiter. But I was talking about when does company culture go too far? And at College Pro Painters, my mentor, Greg Clark, said that an amazing company has to be a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. It has to get into that zone of a cult. And I think companies that have done very, very well in getting their employees to be thought leaders and promoters and spokespeople are cults and are MLMs. Scientology, right, as an example, like they've got Tom Cruise and they've got John Travolta, right? Like, you've got these, these amazing— and, and I don't necessarily like those businesses. I, I don't run an MLM, but I think there's something there that they actually recognized. If they can get their employees passionate and sharing, um, and have a stake in the outcome, you know, affiliates are another big one where affiliates actually are out there promoting and marketing.

So it's interesting. I want to spend more time on company culture, but maybe before we go there Thinking about, like, we're talking about the businesses that then take this thought leader approach. What about going to the thought leaders who then build, you know, or the creators or people with a big audience who then build substantial businesses off of that? Is there anyone that comes to mind where you're like, you see the audience and then there was a really great flip from that into, you know, like a $10 or $100 million business?

Yeah, there's a couple. So, Dave Asprey, I guess Dave is kind of in that route. So, Dave is another former client of mine. I coached Dave for a year, helped him hire his former COO. It's about 7 years ago. Dave Asprey was really the godfather or the grandfather, kind of the— I think he might have even coined the term biohacking. I think that was actually a Dave Asprey term. So, Dave Asprey kind of created this whole biohacking movement. And then from that, created a brand called Bulletproof Coffee. It was just like this geeky thing that he did and created a brand around that. A lot of people think Dave's brand is because of Bulletproof, not so. His brand or he kind of was the creator or the thought leader that created a brand around that. But then someone who's in that space who's done extraordinarily well, and I'm pretty fucking impressed actually, is a woman named Aggie. And I don't know Aggie's last name, but she is this, I think, Polish girl who has built— she just came out with a book called Biohack Like a Woman. And every time I see her on social media and her fiancé, Jacob, I think is his name, she's kind of blowing me away with her courses and her thought leadership and her leveraging of a book. And now she's doing products. And all she was was this pretty girl on Instagram kind of attached to this guy who was doing Instagram, but she's done a good job with turning that into a legit business and a brand and a voice. She's kind of blown me away is one. Cody Chancer, who you mentioned, for sure has done a great job. Christian LeBlanc, Lost LeBlanc, I think he's done a great job with being a thought leader and a voice around social media and around travel and now creating some pretty cool real estate ventures, I guess you call it, in Bali. I'm impressed with what he's doing.

Yeah, there's— I think it's fascinating when people make that shift. But a lot of our listeners are people who are at that, you know, say $500,000 in revenue as a creator or a couple million in revenue and are looking to make that shift. And so they're looking for examples. But then if we talk more about the team side, like what kind of advice would you give or stories, you know, of people really from the audience side now saying, okay, I need to build a team and make those first core hires, you know, a COO, a chief of staff, along those lines?

First off is you're very, very lucky because you're doing it at a time when hiring people is cheaper than it's ever been before. And I'll explain what I mean by that because you might think I'm nuts because of inflation. It's cheaper because you can hire people that are overseas in Eastern Europe, in Colombia, in Latin America, in the Philippines, in India. I have a researcher in Karachi, Pakistan. So, you can hire people who are very, very skilled that in North America might cost you $150,000 a year, but based in Latvia or based in Lithuania or based in Colombia, you're paying $24,000 a year for the same person, the same level of candidate. Second thing is because of the internet, because of Wi-Fi, because of video, you don't need to have full-time employees coming to a company. When I was building companies originally, You had to hire them. They had to come Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. There was no other way to do work, right? I remember walking into my company in 1989 with a computer and my VP going, why do you have a computer? Scott's got one. You can borrow it. You guys can share a computer. And he was serious. Like, we only needed a computer once every 3 or 4 days. So now, because of technology, because like, it seems kind of silly to say this, but you can hire fractional people to work for you a day a week or 6 hours a week. So, you can start to build out your team with fractional experts who are remote, who are global, who can actually work on a project-by-project or a task-by-task basis. You don't need to hire full-time people. So, if you're a creator, you don't need a full-time copywriter. You might need a copywriter for 6 hours a month. So, find that great expert. The key is to plug yourself into communities where your network is getting stronger. So, now you're one degree away from people as my friends Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, who wrote the book Who Not How, you don't have to know how to do everything. You have to know the whos that you can reach out to that can help you figure out how to do things. Second thing is leverage everything except genius. So, get all the stuff off your plate that you suck at or that you are drained of energy from. Dan Martell, who we've talked about, wrote the book Buy Back Your Time. And it's a concept that I learned probably 20 years ago where you figure out your effective hourly rate. So, let's say that you're a creator and you're making $500,000 a year. And off of that $500,000 a year, maybe you're making $300,000 a year in profit. Okay? So, if you're making $300,000 a year in profit, that's $150 an hour times 40 hours a week times 50 weeks a year. So, if you make $150 an hour and you're working on anything that's a minimum wage job, I would fire you if you worked for me, right? If I was paying you $150 an hour, why are you doing a $20 an hour task? So start delegating all those tasks off your plate, but don't go hire a full-time person for it. If you only need somebody to do check your email once a day, hire somebody for 30 minutes a day to check your email or an hour a day to check your email and then be good with it. And I think that's a big opportunity for creators is you don't need to have these full-time people. My wife has a part-time person doing video production. I think he's in Eastern Europe somewhere. And she's a part-time woman doing content production and content management on all the social platforms. She's based in South Africa. She's got a full-time person in South Africa for $20,000 a year. That's incredible. So I think creators have got a big opportunity to, to kind of leverage that.

Yeah, I think that's fantastic. What, what are some of those first hires you're talking about?

Let's see. Great, great question. So the other thing is don't give out big titles to people. The chief of staff title is a title that came out of government. The Chief of Staff used to be the person who reported to the President of the United States and they managed that person's calendar and communications. If you're a 20-person company, you don't need a Chief of Staff. You need an executive assistant and an operations manager. That's what you need. So, don't give out big titles to people too early. Don't give out a COO title to a person who's merely a Vice President of Operations or Director of Operations or an Ops Manager. Because they're going to have an inflated sense of value. They're going to have an inflated sense of worth. They're going to be on Indeed and Glassdoor checking to see what other CEOs get paid. They're going to be working on being this big executive instead of rolling their sleeves up and getting dirty. So give out titles that match the person's pay and their roles and responsibilities and the amount of strategic insight and P&L responsibility they have. That's one part.

Second part, just to dive into that a second, Also to match the company size, like the number of times I see an 8-person company with a COO, right?

It's crazy.

It's not a founder, right? I'm like, what are you doing? That was one thing that I felt like I made a lot of mistakes in the early days of ConvertKit, but I got that one correct where my early leader hires were all directors. And then that allowed me, you know, at times it allowed me to hire above someone. And they were an amazing director, but I really needed a VP.

Correct.

And it allowed me to promote director to senior director to VP, you know, and allow them to chase down a title too, right?

They had to earn the next title versus giving it away. Entrepreneurs got sloppy in the last 15 years giving away titles thinking they didn't matter. And we were giving away titles as a marketing tool. We were thinking, oh, well, because they have an email address, because they're on social media, if I call them a chief marketing officer, it's going to help them get noticed more. Yeah, but it also costs you more. So there's a bit of an ROI kind of calculation we need to take into consideration there too.

Yeah. Okay. I threw you off. Do you remember?

That's okay.

Yeah.

You, you asked about like, who are some of the first people you need to hire? If I was an early stage creator, the first people I want to be hiring as like the freelancers are the jack of all trades, master of none. So somebody to help me manage projects, somebody to help me manage freelancers. Somebody who can help me get stuff done. That would be number one. Secondly is a virtual assistant, somebody who I can delegate all of the admin, all the minimum wage work. My, my executive assistant who's been with me for 8 years is now heading up operations and sales as well as the whole admin area. But in the 8 years she's been with me, a year ago I made her hire a virtual assistant to offload a bunch of the real admin off her plate. So she could work on higher impact things for me. We have a full-time virtual assistant, 40 hours a week based in the Philippines for $1,800 a month. So that's $20,000 a year and she's a full-time employee.

So that's a nominal salary in the Philippines.

That's right. We're overpaying by about 20% to handcuff this person. We don't want her ever to quit. We were giving her swag. We're giving her our company logo and stuff. We're making her feel part of the team. But yeah, we're going to overpay in the Philippines to keep them. But if I was a creator, I would be getting all the admin off my plate that frees me up to think, that frees me up to create, that frees me up to network, that frees me up to be strategic, that frees me up to market my brand. And I would be spending all of my time and energy around growing revenue. There's not a single problem that exists inside of your creator company that writing a check can't solve. So if you focus on the backend and the systems and the processes, that just creates overhead for you. It creates expenses, it creates stress. But if you focus on revenue, if you focus on money coming in, if you focus on more gross margin, you can use all that money to pay for people to do all that other stuff for you. So yeah, I would get all the admin off first and then I would drive everything towards creating more revenue and then I would create the better backend third.

Yep, I like it. And I think that jack of all trades person is really important because otherwise you end up spending so much of your time coordinating between the designer and the video editor and the EA and whoever else. And so having someone to run that is—

The other part is to make sure that everybody that you hire can actually manage projects and manage time and manage conflict and manage communication on their own. I was asked by Fortune magazine in 2003, how do you hold your employees accountable? I said, I don't, I hire accountable people. And I think we have to remember that if you're hiring someone to manage other people's projects, you should be hiring freelancers who can manage their own projects, can deliver on time, can deliver the result you want. So it's all about kind of stepping back and getting better at interviewing, better at recruiting, better at selecting, better at onboarding people so that you don't need babysitters to manage people, right? So yeah, the project manager I'm thinking of is less about managing other people and more hiring them, finding them, managing traffic, coordinating it all so that I don't have to do that. But we're getting the right people who can deliver on those things. We don't have to babysit them.

There's something that I've told people of like, look, if I have to check in on your goals or all of that, like, you don't have a place here. Like, you do not belong at this company if you need someone else to check in and say, hey, did you do the thing that you said you were going to do?

Let me add to that. That's perfect, by the way. Yeah, you're one foot out the door, both feet are out the door. Don't let it hit your ass on the way out. The second part of that is Don't come to me and say, hey, I did a great job this year. Can I get a bonus? No, you did a great job this year. You get to keep your job. I hired you to do a great job. I paid you well to do a great job. The only way you get a bonus is if I'm giving you more responsibility, probably a title increase. If you're able to work more autonomously, you're bringing in more kind of strategy into the business. You've got more P&L responsibility. I might pay you more, but I'm not going to pay you more to do a good job. I hired you to do a good job. And we need to get more companies kind of thinking along that route because it's kind of like when my kids come to me and they go, oh, I, I cleaned the house, can I get an allowance? No, you're part of the family. You cleaned the house because you live in the house. Like, you took out garbage because you helped create the garbage. I don't give you an allowance to do the stuff that is part of being in this family. And I think we need to think of our companies a little bit more that way too.

Culture is something that you and I both spend a lot of time thinking about What are some of your favorite things that you've implemented that impact like the team culture?

Yeah, and I've coached companies in 4 countries that have gone on to rank as number 1 in their company to work for. I've gotten— I could give you a list of dozens of clients, a bunch that you actually know that are MMTers that I coached that went on to rank very, very high. Culture is not about the free massages and the free lunch and the— those are perks, right? So, forget about all the perks. Culture is in alignment with 4 things. If you think of a jigsaw puzzle, the 4 corners of the jigsaw puzzle, the first is your vivid vision. It's in alignment with a 4 or 5-page vision of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like in the future so that all of your employees, all of your customers, all of your suppliers, all of your stakeholders are completely aligned with where the CEO wants to take the company. So, that's number 1, that culture is that massive alignment there. Secondly is in its alignment with core values. And the core values are things that you're going to hire people based on. They already live them. And you're going to fire people who are breaking the core values, much like you talked about, right? So, you can't have a good company culture if you have these toxic negative energy people that are showing up breaking core values every day. So, you have to live and obsess about and thank people and praise and celebrate core values. Number 3 is in its alignment with your BHAG, that big hairy audacious goal. Culture is like that massive push. It's where the SpaceX employees want to colonize Mars. That's a BHAG. Or back in 1972, Nike wanted to crush Adidas. That's a BHAG. My BHAG is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. So, it's an obsession with that long 20 or 30-year push. Apple's BHAG is to create insanely great products that challenge the status quo and change the human race. That's a BHAG. And then fourth is it's an obsession with a core purpose where every employee knows why we're showing up and what we're building towards, and they can say no to those things. It's kind of like the three guys who are making bricks 100 years ago in Barcelona. They're all sitting out in the dirt making bricks. Said to the first guy, "What are you doing?" He goes, "I'm making bricks." No alignment with anything. They asked the second guy, "What are you doing?" He goes, "I'm building a wall. I get to make bricks to build this wall." Okay, he's got some alignment with something. He's not super inspired. They asked the third guy, "What are you doing?" He said, "We're building the Sagrada Familia. It's going to be one of the most incredible cathedrals in the world to worship God. And I get to make bricks to build the left wall of the Sagrada Familia." Who do you think is completely massively aligned with core purpose? It's the guy who actually sees the vision and is aligned with that. I got lucky of being exposed to core purpose because Simon Sinek, who wrote the book Start With Why, Simon was on our board of advisors 5 years before he wrote that book. Flew out to Vancouver and used— oh, did you know? Yeah, Simon used to sleep on my couch in Vancouver. He was on our board. We hired him. We did some branding and marketing for us. He flew out to meet Brian and I because he read about it in Fortune Small Business where Justin Martin said that we were building this cult-like environment, and Simon wanted to see if it was true. He was running a 6-person marketing agency, so he flew out to meet with us. Yeah, that, that's where I believe culture comes from. It is an obsession around those things. And then it kind of emerges from there.

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's phenomenal. Is there someone that more in the creator business, that world, that has implemented those things in a way that you think is remarkable? Like, I think we see that at, you know, these much bigger companies, but I'm trying to say like who's done it at the, you know, 5 to 25 person scale.

I, I can't speak to that, Nathan. I don't know. I don't know the community well enough to say who's doing it in, but But here's what's interesting around those 4 things. You don't have to be a location-based business to care about those things. Vivid vision, core purpose, core values, and BHAG transcend whether it's virtual, online, global. All of my clients in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, I coached the royal family in Qatar around culture. In fact, I fired them after starting to work with them because they wouldn't care about core values enough about the people side of the business. So, I stopped working with them. I was working behind the scenes coaching the monarchy. The idea of culture transcends every single size of business. If you think it's about showing up into a physical office, you're starting to make excuses of why culture doesn't matter, right? So, I coached Bob Glaser, Rob Glaser's company, Acceleration Partners. I coached Bob from 40 employees up to 200. I got them to number 2 in the United States to work for on Glassdoor. And when Bob's company, Matt Wool, was one of the original founding members of the CEO Alliance 7 years ago, Their obsession around core values, core purpose, BHAG, and vivid vision transcended the fact that not a single office was created for Acceleration Partners ever. They all worked remote. Bobby used to work in his attic. Matt was in the basement. None of the employees came into a physical space, but they recognized that culture was attached to those 4 things. That's where it emerges from. And then yes, if you've got a physical office, sure, you can layer into that. You can spend more time together. You can have lunches. My sister, Christy, her company in Toronto is great because they have potluck lunches and family stuff and they play games together. But you can also do that online. You can do social events online with your teams. You can connect with people better and have meaningful discussions with them on Zoom for 5 minutes instead of just dropping straight into the meeting. So, you can think about those and you can also celebrate things more than we tend to celebrate. I don't think any CEO, whether they're creator or a CEO of a major organization like Sprint, who I used to coach, I don't think that any CEO spends enough time saying thank you, showing praise, showing gratitude, and celebrating the core values. The one who I think has done it best of any CEO I've ever seen was a guy named Howard Behar, who was the CEO at Starbucks for about 7 years. When Howard Behar would spend 2 hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes, he was spending 5 hours of his time every single week saying thank you and showing praise and showing gratitude and celebrating core values. That's kind of the only CEO who I've ever encountered who I think truly gets the power of that in terms of culture.

Are there— I love the spending time on thank you notes and like I spend time. It's gotten harder as the team's gotten bigger, but no, but okay.

Hey, but, but, but they had 14,500 locations. So here's Howard. You can't use this fucking excuse.

You can't use that excuse. I've got 75 people.

Right, exactly. But let me give you the system because it was a really cool— so I was being groomed. His COO, a guy named Greg Johnson, was mentoring me for 2 years. So, I used to go down to Starbucks head office every quarter. They would come up to my office every quarter. And then I did a 1-hour call every month for 2 years with Greg Johnson. So, Greg told me Howard Behar's system. Every Friday, Howard would come into his desk and there would be a spreadsheet on his desk and a stack of thank you notes pre-addressed. And the spreadsheet would say, Store number 1207, Frappuccino record. Hey, store number 1202, congrats on the Frappuccino record. Can't wait to see you when I'm out in the field. Howard. Kelly Smith, Seattle, 7 years. Kelly, congrats on your 7-year anniversary. Can't wait to see you when I'm in Seattle next. Howard. And that's what he did for 2 hours. He didn't know who to thank, but there was a system in place. But are we as a leader, like sending out videos, sending out Slack messages? Again, I was coaching Marcelo Claret, who is the CEO of Sprint. Sprint and his second-in-command, Jamie Jones, for 18 months. Jamie's salary was $2.7 million. I was working with Marcelo at being more of a heart-centered entrepreneur, more of a heart-centered CEO of Sprint, to actually say thank you to his team, to humanize things. Marcelo was such a hardcore driver, driver, driver. He was on the board of Google, the board of SoftBank, but he wouldn't slow down enough to go, "Thank you. You're fucking amazing." He's got this incredible smile. So, we got Marcello starting to send video messages to his employees and his leaders all over Sprint globally just to humanize this really hardcore driver. That's something that everybody, whether you got 75 employees or if you're a 10-person creator company, if you say thank you, if you celebrate the core values, if you praise people twice as often as you give them new projects, twice as often as you show them stuff to fix, twice as often as you You know, create 3 new goals. Like, if you set 3 new goals, celebrate 6 projects you just completed. That doesn't take a lot of work. And if we can show up as a chief energizing officer, our creator businesses go to the moon.

These creators, so many of them are like great people, very heart-centered, lead really well, but they also can fall into a trap of like, oh, I'm the talent in this situation.

No, you are front stage, backstage, man. Have you heard that concept of front stage, backstage?

No, tell me more.

So, if you ever go to a theater production, let's say you go to, I don't know, Phantom of the Opera or Hamilton's a bad example because there's a lot of people on stage. But if you ever go to a big theater production where there's 3 or 4 people on a stage or you go to the Taylor Swift conference, Taylor Swift is one person, but there are thousands of people behind the scenes making that thing happen. There's lighting, There's costumes, there's set design, there's makeup, people selling tickets, marketing, there's grips, there's people setting up stages, there's sound people, there's lighting people, there's people selling popcorn and beer. She's front stage. Everyone else is backstage. Now, if Taylor Swift doesn't go on stage, everybody else loses their job. But if everybody else doesn't perform, Taylor Swift doesn't perform. And I think we need to remember that in our company. If we're the creator, We are merely the front stage for the rest of our team, but our back team are the ones we have to obsess about. So, the number one metric I've had, and I got this in Bob Glaser's company, I got this in Sprint, every company that I've coached behind the scenes, the number one metric that every company, creator included, has is not the one that you're measuring today. The number one metric you have is your employee net promoter score. It's not views, it's not likes, it's not impressions, it's not shares, it's not watch time, it's none of the shit that you think it is. It's not revenue. It's not gross margin. Your number one metric is how happy are your employees? So, every 3 to 6 months, you should do a survey of your 6 employees, 60 employees, whatever. On a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend ConvertKit as a place to work? Take the percentage of people that give you a 9 or a 10. Those are your promoters. Subtract the percentage of people that give you a 1 through 6. Those are your detractors. You end up with a result of somewhere between negative 100% and positive 100%. Your goal is to get over positive 50 or 60, and that's considered world-class. Where I got Acceleration Partners, Tenuity, EliteSEM was over positive 90% net promoter score on the employee side. When your employees are that happy, they're going to go through brick walls for you. You don't need as many employees. Your revenue per employee increases. Your salaries as a percentage of revenue decreases. You literally are not losing employees. You have no turnover. Recruiting is easy, and you can actually get super happy customers because your employees love you so much that they take care of the customers. Which means your customer net promoter score is high, which means you can charge more and you earn more. So, it's about flipping it upside down. And I think when CEOs come in and they care about their customers so much, Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines got it right. They said, "Why do you say your customer is number 2?" He said, "Because if I care about my employees so much, they'll care about my customers. But if I care about my customers so much, my employees are going to feel burned out, not loved." stressed, overworked. It's a really, really interesting way to perceive and see your businesses. And yeah, the thought leader, the creator, the front stage person has to care about the backup stage more than they care about the audience that we're speaking to.

I really like that. I'm just thinking about all the examples that we see modeled on, you know, in books and TV and movies of the front stage person being the most important thing by far. And then like, you know, treating the backstage person, you know, all the backstage people really poorly. Okay.

Well, that's— we're talking like the Steve Jobs example, right? The Steve Jobs example. So here's, here's the truth of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is very misunderstood. He was almost like autistic in a way, or so kind of hypomanic in a way. And when he would walk into a meeting and say, why the fuck are you here? He wasn't being a dick. His computer was going, "Hey, why are you here when you have 7 other projects you should be doing? We only need to have 4 people in the meeting." He was so obsessed with simplicity. He was so obsessed with kind of like the core basics that I think he was misunderstood in some ways. He also, because he was aligned with core values, aligned with core purpose, aligned with BHAG, and aligned with like this vision of what he was creating, everyone lined up with that. If he was a complete dick to people, they would have quit and left. They didn't quit and leave because they still bought into that cultural alignment. So yes, he could have been softer and nicer, but the fact that he was aligned with the 4 things that matter most is why people stayed.

That makes a lot of sense. When you're talking about the celebration side, I feel like I do a good job of celebrating my team, but I'm— well, I want to get better at that. And so are there any other habits or systems that you've seen leaders put in place?

Yeah, to really do that well. And I'll do them slowly. So every time that you set a goal for ConvertKit, find one or two goals the company just accomplished to say thank you or to celebrate or to send out a quick video to the team going, hey, just wanted to say thanks. We got these two things accomplished. That's fucking amazing. Every time that you find something wrong, whether it's, hey, there's a problem with our website or there's a problem with this thing, then the same day, find two things to say, hey, I noticed two good things going on. So, in The One Minute Manager, still probably the best book on leadership that exists by Ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Hersey, it's all grounded in the science of what's called situational leadership. It's the first module in my Invest in Your Leaders course. It's all around praising people twice as often as you criticize. It's about praising people to success. So, they used to call it the shit sandwich. You take the bad thing and you kind of sandwich it with two good things. What bad leaders do prop or improperly is they try to go, "Hey, you're doing a good job today, but I wanted to talk to you about what you're really screwing up on. And thanks again for doing a good job." You don't do the shit sandwich in the same 30 seconds. You do the 2 praises at some point during the day and you do the 1 criticism that day. You do the 2 thank-yous during the week and you do the 1 kind of private criticism during the week. You try to praise twice as often as you criticize. You try to celebrate twice as often as you set new goals. It's all around trying to kind of keep count that way. So, I would take a Post-it note and every time you tell somebody 3 things to work on, try to tell people 6 times what they did well. Try to keep count twice as often. It's kind of like God gave us 2 ears and 1 mouth. We need to use them in that same ratio. We need to praise, celebrate, and say thank you twice as often as we ask people to do stuff, show them what's broken, give them more stuff to do, load them up with stuff. It's kind of like your spouse, right? If you're married or you're in a relationship, like, I don't tell my wife once a quarter that I love her because she knows. I don't have to tell her that often. Of course she knows, right? Because there's all the stress that we go through in our normal relationship. I'm telling my wife multiple times a day and showing her multiple times a day that I love her and I care about her so that she feels it, so that she sees it, so that when we have the tough moments, we've built a base of that gratitude that she can kind of live off of. And I think that's something that leaders forget and that the best leaders absolutely work on.

I can absolutely see how you could put that into a system. Just thinking through what we've talked about today of, right, all these people who are the evangelists for your company, you know, if you tie that praise in for those behaviors and telling people, hey, you know, you're an evangelist for ConvertKit, you're an evangelist for, let's say, Ali Abdaal with his YouTube channel, right? He's building up a team of, I don't know, I think he's got 8 or 10 people full-time on his team now, right? They're all evangelists for his brand that he's created, his big goal that he's creating. And then he can really tie the, you know, the praise and the rewards and, and all the, you know, that positive connotation back to, you know, when they exhibit those behaviors.

By the way, MrBeast would be one who is a creator who created a business around it. I don't know why I didn't come up with that one. Like probably one of the smartest business people of our era, by the way. Like, I think we're going to be studying him in 15 years, and we should have been studying him today. He is an extraordinarily smart individual, like way beyond his years. He's put in the hundreds of thousands of hours. But like, when you listen to his podcast, when you read what he writes about, don't forget about like watching all of his YouTube videos. Like, listen to him talk about business and how he's building businesses and teams. He's a very, very, very sharp individual.

Do you see him doing anything on the team or culture side that particularly stands out?

I haven't heard anything about it and haven't looked into it yet, but that's— it's interesting to think about. Don't know.

Yeah, because I— that's something that would be fun to dive into of what is the backstage version of it. Because, you know, like, you look at— if you watch any of the videos, the production is insane.

Crazy. Every one of these companies that he's using the audience to grow has to have, you know, I can, I can actually find out because I'm friends with a childhood friend of his, a friend who's very, very close personal friends, like they hang out and play video games and eat pizza together. And, you know, another, another Gen Z creator. Yeah, but I'll actually reach out to Connor and ask him what's going on.

Yeah, that'll be interesting. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing all the details. I think that it'll really help creators both think in terms of how to, how to scale their audience, but really build the team and the culture around it.

I want to ask one, one thing. Everybody who is a creator, don't take a look at my work. Go check out my wife Everwander Travel, her YouTube channel. Uh, add her, like her, subscribe her, share to it, but also send her some ideas on how she can continue to grow that. Again, she's not doing to monetize, but the fact that we've got a whole audience of creators, I'd love to give a shout out to my wife Ashley with Everwander Travel, her YouTube, because It's kind of cool what she's doing. And Instagram too. Yeah. If you want to find me, just go, go to CameronHarold.com and it's H-E-R-O-L-D.com.

Okay. But the true call to action is Ever Wander Travel and look at that. And as a creator say, oh, here's my best advice on how I'd grow that YouTube channel. Not many people ask for like unsolicited feedback and it's such a great thing when they do. Great.

Yeah. If you, if you send her messages on Instagram or YouTube, she would love it. That'd be super cool.

That sounds good. Well, Cameron, thanks for joining me. This has been a lot of fun.

Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it.

Thank you for watching the episode. If you could do me a couple of favors, I'd appreciate it. First, the links that Cameron talked about with his wife, you can go check out her YouTube channel, give some feedback. I love it when, you know, as a creator community, we can give advice and help build up another creator. The second thing is, if you enjoy this show, then definitely leave a comment on the YouTube episode. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube. YouTube and your podcast player. It's been fun watching the channel grow. So yeah, thanks for watching. I appreciate you. We'll talk soon.