Cameron Herold: There's no entrepreneur out there that will tell the truth. When you're going through that time, you're not gonna tell the story. At the leadership team level, we're going, holy fuck. We're gonna go bankrupt if we don't get this thing fixed. We're the number two company in Canada to work for.
We've been on Oprah. Look at all this crazy growth. Well, we almost bankrupted the company at about 60 to 80,000,000. When you're 248 people at the head office, you have to meet payroll for 420,000. You don't have it.
We'll just go to the bank and borrow money. And they said, well, we can't loan to you. I'm like, why? You guys don't know how to run a company. Like, yeah, we do.
Look at us. They're like, no. You don't understand the financials of a company. You have to call your mom to borrow $420.
Steve Trang: Oh, so legitimately, where he went to his mom.
Cameron: That was real. That was to meet payroll. I wasn't talking about how hard it was in the moment. Mhmm. Because everyone needs to see me with confidence, a game face on, making decisions.
Yeah. Don't go on social media and go, oh my god. I'm I think I'm gonna go bankrupt, and I'm really worried. Like, you don't say it. Mhmm.
So what happens is people that are starting a company think it's all here I am on my laptop flying private at the beach. I want that. Mhmm. Because we're not telling you about the time that we're literally losing our mind.
Steve: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's episode of disruptors where millionaires are made. Today, we have Cameron Herold with COO Alliance. And Cameron drove in from Scotts, Arizona to share how he's built three different $100,000,000 companies. Now, guys, I'm gonna make sure to get a 100 millionaires. The information on this show alone is enough to help you become a millionaire.
In the next five to seven years, if you'll take consistent action, you'll become one. And, guys, if you're ready to millionaire, we wanna recognize you here. Please scan the QR code on the screen. And if you're not a millionaire yet and you want some help getting there, please scan that same QR code. And before we jump in, if you're here to learn how real entrepreneurs are building real empires, make sure you hit that subscribe button because every week, you might be learning a lesson that could help you create your first or next million.
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Cameron: You ready? Nice. I'm gonna try that too.
Steve: Alright. Well, please, I I would love to get your input on it.
Cameron: I'll be all over it.
Steve: Yeah. So before we get into all this
Cameron: Yeah.
Steve: You didn't quite just drive in from Scottsdale.
Cameron: That'd be too simple.
Steve: Yeah. So, technically, where do you live?
Cameron: Technically, I live out of my suitcases, and my home is when my kids FaceTime me.
Steve: When you kids FaceTime?
Cameron: Yeah. That's what I've been telling my my friends now is when my kids FaceTime me, that's home. Uh-huh. My house is my two suitcases. I, sold everything fifteen months ago.
Fifteen months ago? Yeah. Okay. Fifth five zero. So just just over four years ago, my youngest son decided to go away to school in Montreal, Canada.
Mhmm. I always had a home in Vancouver outside of the home in Scottsdale. I'm like, wait. You're gonna be living almost as close to Europe as you are to Vancouver. What am I gonna sit in Vancouver waiting for you to come home?
Your brother's off at school in Victoria. I think I'm gonna go to Europe. And they said, great. So we get it. And during the year, I came and visited them.
They came and visited me and decided to keep it going. So then I sold the place there, sold the place here, sold the cars, sold furniture, and I've literally been living out of two carry ons. Been in in the last four years, I've been to 59 countries, but some of them are six, seven times.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And then 79 countries overall so far. They own no cars? No. So no furniture? No.
Nothing.
Steve: How's that?
Cameron: It's very freeing.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So it's like anything. There's a glass half full, and there's a glass half empty. The half full, every day I'm taking photos. Every day something's new. Every day is a new coffee shop, a new trainer, a new gym, a new experience, a new restaurant, a new taco shop.
Everything is is kinda fun. Right? There's no mundane. There's no boring. The half empty is about every week or so, I have to find a new gym, find a new trainer, find a new yoga studio, find a new grocery store, find my way around the grocery store, figure out like, meet a couple people that I like, and then I gotta pack up and and go again.
So as an example, tomorrow, I do laundry. Mhmm. And then the next day, I pack my stuff up, and I'm flying off to Nepal. I'm gonna go hiking in Nepal for two weeks. Okay.
Then I pack up and go to Dubai for three weeks. I'm gonna stay in two Airbnbs to try out two more areas even though I've been to Dubai nine times in the last four years. Really? That's technically my residence. Alright.
And then I go from there to New Zealand. I'm gonna be in eight places in New Zealand in four weeks.
Steve: That's remarkable.
Cameron: Crazy life.
Steve: Very, very fortunate to catch you here while you're in Arizona.
Cameron: Amazing timing.
Steve: Yeah. So we're gonna have to get into how you're living that life. Before we get into that, I'll talk just dial back. You know? But do you
Cameron: know why I'm living that life? It's actually really tied to the reason I became an entrepreneur. Okay. So when I was 15, my dad took me to the golf club, and he said, let's go play golf. Mhmm.
And I wanna teach you some stuff about business today. So I said, great. My dad was an entrepreneur. Both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs. By 15, I'd already had a few different entrepreneurial ventures.
So lessons from my dad about entrepreneurship was just called Tuesday. This happened to be a Wednesday. Yeah. So we went and played golf, and, we came back at about 05:00, and we were sitting on the balcony. I'm eating my fries and gravy and drinking my cherry Coke.
My dad's eating his whatever. And he shows me all the people that we just played golf with. That's Bruce McCullough. He owns a car dealership. That's this guy.
He owns that. That's this woman. She owns that. And all the people he pointed out were entrepreneurs. Mhmm.
Then he said, look who's walking in right now. That guy's getting ready to go golf. He works for Bruce McCullough. That person's walking in right now. He works for Tedco, and he started showing me all the employees showing up at 05:30.
Mhmm. He said, do you know what the benefit an entrepreneur has? I said, yeah. They can play golf whenever they want. Mhmm.
He said, exactly. So my dad's lesson was being an entrepreneur gives you the time Mhmm. And the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, and the money comes later.
Steve: Right.
Cameron: And the money has come later. The money's definitely come.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: But I I did the entrepreneur thing so that I could have this life. Yeah. So the fact that I can live and travel, I'm still running my own company. Mhmm. My employees are all over the world, but I've built everything by design to give me that freedom and built around the freedom that I've always wanted.
Steve: And the intention? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we're gonna talk more about that.
But okay. So let's go to the beginning. So 15, you said you already started multiple companies? Yeah. Ventures by the by the age of 15?
Cameron: Yeah. So I did a talk that was on the main TED website years ago. It was on the main the homepage of the TED website for a couple years about raising kids to be entrepreneurs. Mhmm. And I talked about about 12 different business ventures I'd had by the time I was 18.
So the first business venture I had, I was seven. Mhmm. And, this was 1972. And I was in my bedroom, and I had you were too young to remember this, but the old phones had a long extension cord.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And you could take it into your room as kind of the Like anywhere. Yes. Yeah. It was like a remote phone, but it was on a long cord. Mhmm.
So I took the cord into my room and closed the door, and I was in there, and I was phoning dry cleaners. I had the yellow pages in front of me, and I was phoning the dry cleaners. And I was negotiating how much they would pay me to recycle coat hangers with them. So back in the day, if you took coat hangers in, they would pay you 2¢ per coat hanger as a recycling fee because then they would use that coat hanger with new whatever. Nowadays, I don't even know why they don't do that anymore, but Mhmm.
Maybe it's too cheaper. So my mom came in, and she said, well, she heard me negotiating. First off, I was saying to the guy, I don't care. I don't want or I'm not gonna do it for 3¢ or 2¢. I want 3¢.
And finally, he goes, I don't care. I'm not doing it for 2¢. I said, how about 2 and a half? And he said, how old are you? And I said, I'm seven.
How about two and a half? He said, fine. Fine. We'll do it for two and a half. So my so then my mom looked at me.
She's like, where are you gonna get the coat hangers? And I burst into tears because I'd been lying to my mom for about a week. When I said I was going out to play, I was going door to door in the neighborhood collecting coat hangers from everyone. My closet was filled with coat hangers. Under my bed was filled with coat hangers.
And so my first little business hustle was taking coat hangers and recycling them. But what I learned was negotiating. Yeah. Seven. I learned about negotiating.
I learned that you can split the difference. I learned that there's always a way to kinda get more than the other person's offering. Right? I learned tenacity. I learned about cold calling.
I was literally writing. I remember it so clearly. Like, I was literally writing the price that each of the coat or the dry cleaners would pay me in the yellow pages as I phoned them all. Mhmm. And then I did I made pin cushions and sold them door to door.
I sold license plate protectors door to door. I collected golf balls out of the three ponds at our golf course and separated them into three groups. I used to caddy, and I hated that. And then I realized that if I sat on the on the, thirteenth hole, it had a big hill, and people would pay me a buck or 2 just to carry their golf clubs up to the top of the hill. So instead of, like, doing four and a half hours, he maximized.
Huge. Right? I had a newspaper route when I was about 10, but I hired a neighborhood kid to deliver a lot of the newspapers. So I had twice the territory. And then I said, I'll just deal with collecting them collecting every week, and I'll just pay you.
But I was collecting the tips. Mhmm. And I could scrape the tips and pay him away. I had my first employee when I was 10. Gosh.
What else did I do? There's a bunch. I do I lawn lawn lawn business. Got it. So, you know, I
Steve: forgot to mention this. For those of you guys who are watching, you know, you guys have always been following my story. Cameron's the reason why I quit real estate. So we're gonna quit we're gonna go into that later on as a I think that's an important point. Right.
Okay. So, all these businesses, by the time you're 10
Cameron: So then Well, you know what you like, something that I've talked about recently is I get very frustrated when I see a kid running a lemonade stand Mhmm. And their parents are right behind them waving for the cars to come in. Mhmm.
Steve: Your
Cameron: kid's not learning anything. Run your own darned lemonade stand. Right. Let your kid fail. Let them come in and say nobody's coming.
Coach them. Mhmm. Send them back out. Right? Let them create their own signage.
Mhmm. Coach them. Right? But but to sit there and do it for them doesn't teach the kid. And then to try to turn it into a whole summer business when they wanna do something else next week, be okay that the business venture is one week long.
Mhmm. Right? It doesn't or run your own business if you need something bigger.
Steve: Yeah. Well, this I've gone through this recently with my kid. You know, the oldest, she's 14. So, you know, teenage girl. I've learned in the last few years, took a while to figure this out, is to stop giving her advice.
Mhmm. Because it's pointless. Because she'll do just about anything but the advice.
Cameron: The advice. Yeah.
Steve: Right? And so now what I do and I also learned to be a better listener and, like, be the emotional support. And so, like, when she says something, I just listen, and I that's it. I just shut up. A letter I'll ask her questions for her to figure out the best ways to move forward, but I don't say anything.
Mhmm. And the other night, she actually she said, dad, I don't need you to listen to me right now. I need answers. Nice.
Cameron: So then
Steve: I said, okay.
Cameron: That's cool.
Steve: But I can I can give you answers, but I didn't I've been not I've been intentionally not giving answers to solutions for a while with her just asking questions for her to figure this out?
Cameron: Interesting.
Steve: But, anyway, going back to this, when did you know that working the corporate world then was not for you?
Cameron: In grade school.
Steve: In grade school. Yeah. But you went to college.
Cameron: Well, I went to kind of.
Steve: Okay.
Cameron: So I I graduated high school, but when I was 16, I started day trading socks stocks. So this was And
Steve: where were you living here?
Cameron: Sudbury, Canada. So I was in a small town. So when I was 16, my dad sent me to meet with his stockbroker. His name was Jim Wilkinson.
Steve: Okay.
Cameron: He worked for a group called the Richardson Green Shields. Mhmm. Jim later went on to run all of The Caribbean for for this big stock group. Anyway, so my dad said, if you go down and meet with Jim Wilkinson at his office and he teaches you about stocks, I will match whatever you invest
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: As long as you keep it there for one year. And if you go below zero, I'll make you whole. Right? So if you put in 2,000, I'll put 2,000 in as well. If it's worth less than the 4,000, I'll make sure you have at least 4,000 at the end of the year as long as you go learn from Jim.
So I took the bus downtown, walked to his office, sat with him. He showed me how the ticker worked. He showed me how to read it out of the newspapers. And and back in those days, you were buying stocks at, like, five and an eighth, five and a quarter, five and three eighths, five and a half. Right?
And and you couldn't, like there was no Robinhood or anywhere to buy. You literally had to phone or they had to phone. There was no email. Mhmm. And, so I I started buying some mining stocks and started investing in stocks.
And I remember, like, calling him every day or two asking what the price was of the stock, and he would just laugh. Like, it was so tiny, but it was also cute for him. Right? Yeah. I don't remember where the question was, but that was right.
What did you figure out tonight? You were never Oh, so I I knew right away. I knew I was different from all the other kids right away. I was I was selling sunglasses to all the kids. I found a guy who had bought a bunch of sunglasses to sell to retail.
He failed. So I negotiated to take all of his retail or his sunglasses and pay them later. After I sold them, I had them on consignment, and I started selling sunglasses to all the kids. That was in grade 11. I was I always had a hustle going.
So I always knew that I was never gonna be an employee. I was never gonna go and work in the corporate world. So When I went to university, I decided to study business Mhmm. To learn how to run my own business, but I didn't qualify. I couldn't get in.
So I took
Steve: You you weren't qualified to go into business?
Cameron: Yeah. Because they focus on grades. And I was so I I have attention deficit disorder, 17 of the 18 science clinically diagnosed.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: I'm on the spectrum for bipolar disorder, 11 of the 11 traits of bipolar. And I have something called dyscalculia where I flip my numbers around. Mhmm.
Steve: So
Cameron: when I write down a string of numbers, I flip them. Mhmm. So So so school is Kinda
Steve: like dyslexia?
Cameron: It's like dyslexia. It's it's dyslexia with numbers. Interesting. Yeah.
Steve: I never heard of that.
Cameron: Yeah. It's called dyscalculia. Okay. So I actually won an award given to one person a year by the International Dyslexia Association for someone who's overcome severe learning disabilities and done well in their career. 2014, I won what's called the Pinnacle Award Mhmm.
For someone who's over. And they gave it to Bruce Jenner, I think, back in 2007. Barbara Corcoran got it one year. I got it one year. So, basically, I'm a disaster.
So true story.
Steve: And the the deck was stacked against me.
Cameron: Way against me. Yeah. The classic deck. Right? Right.
But my dad always said life's not getting all the good cards. It's playing a poor hand well. Mhmm. So I understood that I was never gonna be a good student, but I could go and learn what I could learn. So they had an undergraduate degree in law.
So So I got a bachelor's degree with a law major. Now I can't be a lawyer Mhmm. But all the law courses I took were real estate law, banking law, corporate law, contract law, international import export law, landlord and tenant relations, employment law. So I understood how to from a legal perspective, I got a different lens into business. Well,
Steve: I'm hearing a lot of intentionality Yeah. In the classes you took.
Cameron: Back in those days, you had to go to school. If I was advising today to a kid who wanted to be in business, I would say do not go to university under any circumstance, especially in The United States. It's not worth it. There's no ROI. Mhmm.
I would say go find a great company, talk your way in, work for minimum wage, apprentice, learn, do that for six months or a year, go to another company, do that for three or four companies, Learn from being there, doing grunt work, doing anything at any cool companies, and that'll be you're gonna learn way more than going to get a degree. Yeah. And you're gonna be 20. So you're gonna be meeting lots of other 20 year olds regardless of where you're going to school. You don't need to go to ASU for that.
Yeah. So yeah. So when I went to school, I then started running my own business in second year. I was given a franchise of a house painting company called College Pro Painters. I was on the university ski team, and then I coached the ski team for a year.
And then when I was in fourth year university, we started the first fraternity in the city ever. And I was president that very first year. Strangely enough, the the next year, the president, he's now the COO for one eight hundred Got Junk, which I'm sure we'll talk about Yes. Company that I'd help build. So we always started a fraternity together thirty seven years ago, and now we've both been COOs for the same company.
Steve: So you go there. Mhmm. You graduated college?
Cameron: I did. Not like, if you look at my grades, I did 2.7 GPA.
Steve: Yeah. But then from there, did you start the your first company like, your first, like, you I think you said, like, 14 employees. So, like, your first significant company? Well, I
Cameron: had I had to run a house painting company in first year or second year university. I did it for second, third, and fourth year. So each summer, I ran that business. During the winter, I would do marketing and hiring and training of my team. Mhmm.
And then I would do operations through the summer. And then I also did some you know, I sold wineskins door to door in university and made $88,000.
Steve: Of what?
Cameron: So I'm such an asshole. You know when you go to a university sport Mhmm. And you wanna sneak alcohol into the game? Yeah. Well, in Europe, they have these wineskins.
They're like a a horn shaped Mhmm. Fabric thing that you put wine or Oh, yeah. Yeah. Into. Okay.
Yeah. Well, I could put a 40 ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of Coke into one of these things.
Steve: Okay.
Cameron: And then I would shove it down my pants. And no and I'd walk, and I'd knock on the door in residence. I'm like, hey. Do you wanna buy one of these? I'd have one around my neck.
And they'd be like, no. And it had the university logo. It was called the panda trophy. And I'd be like, do you wanna buy one of these? They're $20.
And they'd be like, no. I don't want one. I'm like, you can sneak a 40 ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of Coke into the game. They're like, I don't believe you. And then I would literally pull it out of my pants.
They're like, I'll take two. I sold I sold hundreds of these things. Yeah. I think I made $8,000 one year. But university tuition back in 1985 was 2,000 in Canada.
Mhmm.
Steve: So I
Cameron: was making four times my university tuition just selling wineskins.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And then I made $16,000 running my first business that first summer.
Steve: So So talk to me about
Cameron: in cash. Like, 85.
Steve: So talk about this painting company. Yeah. What what was the, why did you start a painting company?
Cameron: So I was walking through the university, and I saw a flyer on the ground, and I picked it up to throw it out. It just seemed like the thing to do. And the flyer said earn $10,000 and run your own business. I'm like, well, that's interesting. That's a lot of money back in 1985.
Running my own business is something I've always wanted to do, and it was for a company called College Pro Painters Mhmm. Which was a student franchise company in the house painting space. So I went for an interview. Wasn't quite sure. Anyway, a couple couple months later, I was awarded a franchise in this city.
And so I was trained on how to actually start up a business. So we had a 300 page operating manual. We went through two, three day sessions, training sessions. We had weekly coaching sessions with their general managers, and I started up this house painting business. And that first summer, I did $70,000 in house painting, made $15,000 in profit Mhmm.
And had 14 employees. And, again, university tuition was $2,000, so I paid for my university tuition seven times over Mhmm. My summer job. I was like, that's pretty awesome. So the next year, I became a campus recruiter trying to find other students to become franchisees, and I ran the business that second summer, made about 25,000.
Second, third year of my last year in university, again, I was a campus recruiter. I was also president of fraternity, and I ran my business that summer. I made about $30,000 that summer. Mhmm. So when I graduated from university, I had no debt.
I'd paid for all my own education, and I bought a house on my first rental property. This terrible place, but whatever, it was a good rental. Rented it to some nurses Mhmm. As they don't trash the place, and that was my start. And then I went to work for the head office of College Pro Painters to recruit, hire, and coach franchisees.
Steve: So once you graduated college Yep. You went to go work for this company to take this to the next take your I guess, grow this to the next level.
Cameron: Correct. And they were already doing pretty well. They had about 300 franchises a year.
Steve: Four years franchise mean?
Cameron: Franchise is, you know, like a McDonald's franchise or a like, any anything that's multiple units where you're paying the head office a fee for the location and a percentage of sales, that's what they did in the student painting industry.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. Would get kids to become franchisees?
Cameron: They would get yeah. University students were the franchisees. You were granted a a one year franchise for that summer. Mhmm. So every year, in my last couple years there, I was in the top 30 people in the company.
We would recruit, hire, and train 800 university students to become franchisees. And then in one month, month of April, usually mid March to the April, we would help those 800 franchisees recruit, hire, and train 8,000 university students to paint houses. Mhmm. And then between May 1 and August 31, we'd paint $60,000,000 in houses. September 1, 8,800 kids would quit and go back to school.
We'd get rip roaring drunk, wake up September 2, and do it again. Yeah. And back in 1993, I hired Kimbal Musk, Elon's younger brother Mhmm. And his cousin Peter Reeve who built SolarCity. They're both franchisees that I hired Oh, really?
And trained and and coached back in '93.
Steve: So hire 8,000 kids. What was
Cameron: that in 8800.
Steve: '80 oh, but I'm saying that the 800 kids franchisees, that was what what time
Cameron: of the year? Usually, the recruiting would start in September, but we would would recruit them all before the December. Mhmm. And then we would train them starting in January. So the franchisees got trained January through April.
Steve: January through April. And then from there, another 8,000 kids. Yep. 8,000. Eight you give them you train them in one month?
Cameron: And you wanna talk about a cash flow crisis. We had all of our revenue happening in four months, zero revenue happening in eight months.
Steve: Mhmm. Gotta be really good with cash management.
Cameron: But we became operationally world class at budgeting, at reverse engineering
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: At recruiting, interviewing, and hiring, and leadership development. Mhmm. There's not many companies on the planet that hire 8,800 people a year. Yeah. We did it every year.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So when you're a part of that, that was my real world MBA. I was actually learning that, and I was so terrified of failing as a 20 year old that I literally I think I memorized the operations manual. Mhmm. I probably I probably learned more in that one manual in those training sessions than I learned in four years of university because I was so scared of failing.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: That, like, if if it if it said yellow key chain, I did yellow key chains. Like, I was like, no. It it said that. I have to do that. Right?
Mhmm. And but what I learned was there is a simple system for everything. And if you can put a simple system in place, that scales. Right? Very similar similar to what Michael Gerber talks about in the e myth.
Mhmm. I think that was my life.
Steve: Yeah. So you worked there for a few years.
Cameron: Yeah.
Steve: Incredible. Right? To onboard 8,000 Yeah. Contract subcontractors Yeah. Every year.
Yeah. Like clockwork is is is incredible. I mean, a lot of us have a hard time hiring one or two Yeah. Employees to onboard 8,000. I guess let's talk about that.
Cameron: And we had we had to do it because if we missed by a week, that was six and a half percent of our year. Right? Right? We were doing a 100% of our revenue in seventeen weeks. Mhmm.
So 6% times seventeen weeks. Right? Mhmm. 100%. So you you can't be off by a week.
Steve: Mhmm. How do you get 8,000 college kids to become proficient painters in a month?
Cameron: You turn the business into a little more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. Mhmm. Make house painting sexy. Okay. Fun.
Steve: How do you do a cult? How do you do how do you do that?
Cameron: Beer. Back in those days, beer. We had fun. We we didn't hire people that wanted to be house painters. Mhmm.
We hired athletes, and we hired all their friends. We hired fraternity guys, and we hired their friends. We hired sorority girls. We hired their friends. So we just hired people that wanted to work out in the sun, have a great job.
We brought them lots of Dairy Queens. We brought them pizza and beer during the week. We we learned how to run a fun culture and care about people. We just turned it into that. And then we paid them well.
So So we paid them based on what we called piece rate. So let's say that I estimated that it was gonna take forty hours to paint a house. I would take the two guys, Mike and Steve, and I'd say, you're getting forty hours to paint this house. If it takes you twenty hours, I'll pay you for forty. If it takes you fifty hours, I'm paying you forty.
So they hustled. Mhmm. And then they they they learned how to do it. If I missed on the estimate, I at least guaranteed the minimum wage. Yeah.
But they didn't want minimum wage. So you hire these hustlers, these greedy kids, these little right? Mhmm. And and they would they would They
Steve: think they're gaming the system.
Cameron: Correct. And really, it's it's it's rigged in the favor of both. Yeah. It's rigged in the favor for me because they'll produce more. Mhmm.
It's also rigged in the favor for them. So what I learned there was if my employees are really happy, business is easy. Mhmm. Yeah. And then build enough gross margin into the business that I'm taking care of too.
Steve: Right.
Cameron: So we were 30% more expensive than the pros. You know, the the 30 year old thirty years in business Italian guy that's been painting houses his whole life, I was about 20 to 30% more expensive than he was. Mhmm. But because I came in with a brand, came in with good marketing, came in understanding how to sell, came in wearing my chinos and my college pro golf shirt, Game over. Yeah.
And I learned how to sell. I learned how to connect with the customer. I learned how to walk them around. I had my client binder. And the the Italian guy, who's way better at painting houses, walks in covered in paint, cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
It's gonna be, like, $1,200. I'm like, no. No. No. I'll spend, like, thirty minutes.
Right? Mhmm. We just learned that. We we are trained in that.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. So then what happened after was it College Pro Painters?
Cameron: Yeah. So when I left College Pro Painters, I opened the West Coast Of The United States for them. So I flew out and opened up Washington and Oregon, put all the franchisees out on the ground there, hired a couple 100 people that summer. And then, I left there, and a friend of of our family, friend of my dad's, was starting up a chain of auto body collision repair shops. He had seven locations, and he wanted to franchise that business.
Mhmm. So I joined him. I was given a minority, equity position in the company. It was called Boyd Auto Body and Glass in Canada. It's now called Gerber Auto Collision in The United States.
Okay. We built that up into the largest collision repair chain in the world, took that company public, and now they've gone to the moon. I left right when the company went public, but Gerber is now a massive, massive organization. But my former business partner is the CEO there. And, yeah, that we did that.
And I learned there what I learned there was we're all just kids trapped in adult bodies. Because all these franchisees that I was working with, there were 50 year old men running auto body shops, had the same 15 year old idiosyncrasies, same fears, same insecurities, same doubts. They still didn't know how to run a business.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So we put in place the systems to help them scale. Same thing.
Steve: How did you do that?
Cameron: I kinda dumbing it down. I learned that probably because that was the way that I could be taught was to simplify everything. Mhmm. But if, like, a system was so complicated, no one would follow it. Right.
So everything was, like, on a Post it note. You know, I can simplify it down to, like, three or four sentences. Mhmm. So just doing it that way.
Steve: So simplifying, like, the repair. Right? Because, like, let's talk about the complexities.
Cameron: Well, the repair part, I wasn't involved in. I was involved in, like, the operations and the branding and the buying programs and So some of
Steve: the complexities of things that you simplify.
Cameron: Sure.
Steve: So walk me through, like, what were, like, the parts the scope of work or what you were responsible for or all the things that you had to simplify.
Cameron: So one one big one is really understanding the kind of psychodemographic of the of the customer. Mhmm. Right? When someone walks into an auto body shop or to a any kind of a repair shop, it's usually dirty. It's usually greasy.
It's usually a bunch of guys talking rough and being gruff and smelling of smoke. Mhmm. And you just don't feel comfortable. So we painted the floors in gray epoxy. We painted the walls white to make sure that we had to take care of them.
We told our guys to not wear ties and to wear golf shirts. We branded them. We made it female friendly. We put a playroom in the actual lobby. So when you walked in, there was a playroom for the kids to sit and play.
So because we made the space female friendly, women felt comfortable there, and the guys felt comfortable there. Mhmm.
Steve: So
Cameron: we just taught, like, that kind of stuff. You know, that Yeah. To me seems just common sense, but to do that in the auto body sector was was very different. Yeah. Like what Starbucks did with coffee.
Right. We've had coffee forever.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: But when they did the original chain of coffee shops back in, like, '98 or '88 to '93, that was a really different thing to come into a space that had jazz and had food and served coffee. Right. Doing those things. Marketing and branding. Right?
Another thing is marketing and branding. Consist consistency around marketing and branding.
Steve: Were you in operations, at Gerber?
Cameron: Oh, here's another one. Courtesy cars. Mhmm. So when you go get your car fixed Mhmm. Most auto body shops will say, thank you for for sending your car in to get repaired.
We'll put you into a car rental because the insurance company will pay for a car rental while your car is getting repaired. Cool. What we did is we bought a bunch of cars.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: We put our logo on the sides of the cars, and we build the insurance company through our car rental agency that we set up and owned. Mhmm. So that we got paid for the car, and the customer drove away in a Boyd Auto Body or Gerber Auto Collision branded vehicle, driving all over the city marketing our stuff. Right. Right?
So one of the one of the partners said, well, what happens if they don't wanna be in a wrapped vehicle? And Terry, my partner, goes, we'll rent them a Lexus. Like but for the 99% that are okay with it, they're marketing. Yeah. So it's those kinds of things that we did that I think, we just didn't overthink it.
Steve: Well, you say you didn't overthink it.
Cameron: Well, maybe we thought about
Steve: You you revolutionized industry.
Cameron: Yeah. We revolutionized but we because we are hustlers. Yeah. We always like, early to bed, early to rise work like Helen advertised. Mhmm.
So we just how do you advertise? What are what are the simple things? What are the things that don't cost money? Mhmm. That kind of stuff.
Steve: So going back to so you were saying your old partner is now the CEO. Yeah. So, like, were you, like, the COO?
Cameron: I was the vice president operations of the franchising group.
Steve: Got it. Okay. And so then what was your what were your responsibilities?
Cameron: Recruiting franchisees, branding the franchisees, running the marketing program, organizing the buying programs, and I did some acquisitions.
Steve: So it sounds like For corporate what you were doing at the college marketing or painting pros, but then you added some more responsibilities to it.
Cameron: Yeah. The stuff that I probably added were the buying programs and acquisitions. I'd never done gone out and bought companies before or negotiated or at least found ones that we would buy. Mhmm. So I was responsible for doing some of that Yeah.
Which was fun.
Steve: Okay. So then for what what were the biggest because you kinda talked about the sum of the wins. What were your biggest big
Cameron: one was I hated the industry. There was nothing about auto body that I liked.
Steve: Or I'm passionate about. You weren't waking up thinking about that. Zero.
Cameron: I didn't like the industry. I didn't really like the people that I was working with in the industry. I didn't like going into the auto body shops even they were clean. Like so I realized that I if I'm gonna be around something, I have to have some kind of affinity for it. You know, I have to to like it in some way.
Steve: Was that showing up at all in health, in dragging yourself out of bed?
Cameron: No. I don't think it was showing up in health. I think the health stuff definitely started to show up later.
Steve: Okay. Alright. So biggest lessons for someone that I was listening, biggest takeaways from your experience then at, Boyd slash Gerber?
Cameron: Well, one is that I thought I knew house painting. What I realized was I knew business.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So then when I was doing auto body, it didn't matter that it was auto body at all. It was business. Mhmm. I started to understand that my skills were transferable from industry to industry. Mhmm.
I think people sometimes get caught up that they only know real estate or they only know house painting. Right? Or as you learn leadership, you learn negotiations, you learn time management, priority management, interviewing, hiring, running meetings. There's lots that I learned that I was good at.
Steve: Gotcha. And then is Boyd Gerber your first $100,000,000?
Cameron: Yeah. College Pro no. College Pro is only 60,000,000 a year. Okay. So Boyd Boyd was the yeah.
Well, that was that was back in in, like, '94 too. So it was that would be a So Boyd's the first Boyd would have been the first 100,000,000. Yeah.
Steve: Okay. Alright. So then what would you do next after that?
Cameron: Then I was hired as the president of a private currency company. Now this one's gonna melt your brain. Private currency. Yeah. Kinda like what Bitcoin is doing today.
Mhmm. We had 30,000 companies in The United States and Canada accepting our digital currency instead of the US dollar. So we created a a currency called a barter dollar, and we would give businesses a credit line Mhmm. To allow them to spend first into a negative, a deficit, and then they had to sell their services to members of our community and accept barter dollars in return to get back to zero. For every transaction, we took a 5% commission from the buyer and the seller.
And then every month, we took a small fee that we scraped back to control the deficit, to bring the amount of money that was loaned back down to control the economy. We had Bose stereo, Hard Rock Cafe, Avis Rent a Car, Budget Really? Are all accepting our currency with the Olympics, all accepting our currency instead of the US dollar. So they were It's a public company now. It's called iText.
Steve: IText. Yeah. So we had the Diner's Card. I think that was the first one.
Cameron: Yeah. Diner's Card is different. So but
Steve: they were, like, the first credit card.
Cameron: Yeah. Right? Again, this is not backed by the US dollar.
Steve: Okay.
Cameron: So so let's say that you came in with a junk removal business. Yeah. I would say to you, go spend $5,000, barter dollars. Mhmm. Go to the restaurants.
Go buy some advertising. Go play golf. Go buy some wine, and you'll go negative 5,000 barter dollars.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And then I'll have some other people come, and they'll pay you in barter dollars to get you back to zero.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: You can't take those barter dollars and go cash them out for cash.
Steve: Alright.
Cameron: It's a closed loop economy. It's kinda like when you go to, The Seychelles and and The Seychelles, the country, and they give you dollars. You can't take Seychelles dollars and convert them anywhere else. Right. You can buy them with US dollars, but then you're you're kinda screwed.
You gotta spend them before you leave the country. So we were meeting with Goldman Sachs at one point to do a raise, and and Goldman said, so the I think we had about $30,000,000 of our currency out in our market, right, with all these businesses with the combination of credit lines and balances. And they said, so that 30,000,000, what's it backed by? And we went, well, it's backed by the promise that other people will accept it. And he goes, no.
But is it backed by dollars or by gold or we went, no. It's backed by the promise that other people will accept it. And he went or they went, you're like a country. Yeah. Like, what do you mean?
He goes, well, you actually issue you you create your own currency. We're like our sovereign nation. Your own sovereign nation. And it was legal, above board. We had to issue a ten ninety nine b to all of our, customers, companies.
So they had to account for it as revenue, but we were a closed loop private economy.
Steve: Who do you clear that with? And government.
Cameron: There's a bunch of loops. So I was the I was the president of the of their, banker, their West Coast operation in Canada. We got acquired by a US company, and then I was the vice president of corporate development for a public company, which we then sold in March 2000. We sold for 64,000,000, but we sold right as the market was starting to crash. We weren't able to close until around June or July.
Mhmm. Our $64,000,000 valuation was worth about 6 by the time the Nasdaq had crashed by 78%.
Steve: What was this?
Cameron: The fall summer and 2000. Okay.
Steve: So this is a.com.
Cameron: This was a .com bust. We were called ubarter.com. So we were an online e commerce
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Online private currency. Yeah. It's now called iTux.
Steve: How did you even get into that? Pardon? How did you even get into a own private currency?
Cameron: So I'm I was a part of I always believed in investing in myself Mhmm. By joining mastermind communities, getting involved in coaching, reading books, I was always like, if I grow myself, I can that's where my real return on investment's gonna be. So I was I was a part of a group called YEO, which was the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. It's now called EEO. They got rid of the y.
And one of the guys in my forum group was a guy named Robin Manny. Robin was the founder of this group in Toronto. He was looking for somebody to run their West Coast operation, their West Coast company. Mhmm. And I got it.
Like, I instantly got it. And, he wanted me to run it. So I quit my job with the auto body group and went in and ran it and built it. And then when we ended up we ended up buying him out Mhmm. And sold the company.
Then I was just on the executive team of the yeah. So how do
Steve: you get Avis to agree to BarterDollars?
Cameron: You give them a credit line. Mhmm. You let them buy advertising first. So it's all about talking people into spending first. Mhmm.
None of them believe that they can sell it. No fucking problem selling it because I got all these other companies that wanna get rid of their barter dollars. Yeah. Right? So the key is get them into a deficit position.
Mhmm. So then they'll sell up, and then it's just this all the time. Mhmm. Help them spend. So our job was to help them spend.
There was no problem finding them in business.
Steve: Getting people to spend was easy.
Cameron: No. Getting them to spend was hard.
Steve: Oh, it's hard.
Cameron: Getting them to because well, yeah, there were hard parts because there were certain things that they only wanted to spend on.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Right? So if they didn't wanna advertise, they wanna wine and dine their clients, they didn't wanna get printing done. They were like, it was you can do my legal advice. You had to find the things that they would have normally spent Mhmm. So they could offset it, and they're basically buying at their cost of goods sold.
Steve: Right. Find the things that they would normally buy.
Cameron: Yeah. So let's say let's say as an example that you're a restaurant and you're operating with a 30% margin, 30% cost of goods sold. If you go and spend $10,000 on marketing, you're really buying it with $3,000 of your food Mhmm. That you charge $10,000 for.
Steve: So you're
Cameron: gonna get $10,000 of marketing for $3,000 of hard cost. Mhmm. Make sense?
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So our job was to help them spend it, then we could flood them with business later.
Steve: Got it. So this is kinda like, so I did a I had a an app for a while, which is basically, like, you post a property and then people would buy it. Right? It was a wholesaling app. And, eventually, we got acquired by another company, InvestorLift.
But the challenge we had there was to get the buyers and the sellers to agree to
Cameron: use it. Right. You're a two sided marketplace.
Steve: Yeah. If we didn't get the buyers to want to use the app, why would the sellers put the properties on it? Right.
Cameron: If
Steve: I couldn't get the sellers on it, why would the buyers look at it? So that we had
Cameron: So our salespeople would literally go out and say, okay, mister radio station. If I if you join, I know I can get you a $100,000 in business. The radio station is like, great. I need to help you spend a 100,000 now. What would you wanna spend 25,000 on now?
They'd be like, well, I've got a Christmas party. Great. If I can find you a venue for your Christmas party, good. How about we give a bunch of wine out to your clients? Cool.
So we'd we'd come up with a whole bunch of things that they would want to spend money on. We'd then go out to those companies and say, hey. I've got somebody that wants to buy $3,000 worth of your wine. Why don't you join our economy? Mhmm.
We'll help you spend. So it was constantly helping them spend with a promise of dollars coming in, and that that was the game. Yeah. And then once we got big enough and had some critical mass, you know, we were funding the build outs of restaurants. And I I remember doing a deal with Funding build outs.
Yeah. Getting contractors and house painters and signage. Oh, yeah. We did we did all of it. You know the Robb Report?
Remember remember remember the magazine, the Robb Report?
Steve: Yeah. The most ex
Cameron: The high end exclusive magazine? So the the owner of the Rob Report was a guy named Dave Giesland. Mhmm. And when Dave Dave Giesland no. I I don't even know what Rob stood for.
But we had $80,000 worth of leather coats that this leather coat manufacturer had excess inventory of anyone to dump. So we contacted the Rob Report, and we're like, how about we give you $80,000 worth of coats and you give us four pages of advertising in the Rob Report? $20,000 a page. Mhmm. It's just paper.
Yeah. So he said, sure. So now we had four pages to go and sell to somebody. Mhmm. Remember, we're getting a transaction fee on both sides.
Yeah. Then Dave took the $80,000 of the coats and liquidated them in his market and got $40,000 in cash. Mhmm. He didn't care. He got $40,000 in cash for four pieces of paper.
Steve: Right. He
Cameron: was constantly playing that game.
Steve: Now the On a big scale. Massive scale. The funny thing about market about bartering is that it's generally not taxable income.
Cameron: Correct. And it's also generally one person bartering with another person. What we did is created a multi lateral economy.
Steve: So was that still flexible revenue?
Cameron: Well, because if I'm a lawyer, but I wanna go to your restaurant, but you don't want my legal services, there's no trade. Mhmm. So now what happens is I go to your restaurant. I pay you in barter dollars. You go and buy advertising from this guy.
He buys stereo from both stereo. Do you follow? By creating a currency, we got everyone inside of that market to trade with each other.
Steve: My question is Yeah. Did you avoid taxes this way? No.
Cameron: We we we put it through as a ten ninety nine b, so they had to declare it as
Steve: So the still declared the revenue.
Cameron: Got it. I did it one time where one of my clients paid me in wine every single month to coach them. I was a dangerous slippery slope.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. So then you you build that up, and then it eventually, sold after the dot com bust.
Cameron: Yeah. We sold before we sold in March 2000, but we couldn't close until June. Mhmm. So the market started to crash as our transaction was closing. But it's still closed?
It closed. At 66. It's not at 64,000,000. More like 6 is when we could actually exit. We were able to sell 35% of our stock right at the transaction date to pay our taxes.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: I chose to sell. Some people wanted to hold for twelve months because then they don't have to pay 25%. They got burned. They were underwater and had to pay tax on money they didn't have. Yeah.
It's awful. Yeah. It was awful.
Steve: So then what happened after that? What were the what was the next stop?
Cameron: So after that, I I that's when I was clinically redlining. I was burned out. I had a nervous breakdown. I weighed heavier than I do today. I was drinking a lot.
I was smoking. I'm really unhealthy. And, I moved back to Canada. I was getting married, and, I didn't know what I was gonna do. I met with a bunch of guys in my forum group from EO, and I talked to them about not being sure of what to do.
And Brian, who was the founder of what was called the Rubbish Boys at the time, later became one eight hundred Got Junk. Those are the Rubbish Boys? Yeah. It was called the Rubbish. And the term Rubbish Boys didn't make any sense in North in US.
It made sense in Canada, but no one understood what rubbish was. It's junk.
Steve: Yeah. I mean, I think of that as, like, an English term.
Cameron: Correct. But Canada was part of the English component also. So it made sense for us. We under like, I could give you a bunch of Canadian phrases. You have no idea.
Chesterfield and Touque and, you know Yeah. Great, yeah. Downspout. You have no idea. Yeah.
So we're different. So we had to he so he had to change the name of that company to market into The US. Anyway, so I sat down with four or five of the guys in my forum and said, here's my case. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I don't know what I should do.
I don't know what I love. And they said, you should coach entrepreneurs. And I'm like, all I know is barter and house painting. I hate auto body. Brian said, well, you know how to hire people, and you know how to train people.
I said, why don't you train franchisors? Mhmm.
Steve: I'm like,
Cameron: I don't even know any franchisors. And he goes, I'm starting a franchise. You could coach me. And I'm like, you could never franchise junk removal. Like, it's a dumb idea.
Talk about limiting beliefs. Very, very, very limiting belief. Anyway, short long story short, he hired me to coach him and to coach his head of operations at the time, a guy named Jesse Korzen. So I started coaching them and doing some consulting work for them by the hour. Mhmm.
I was billing them a $120 an hour. This was back in 2000. Mhmm. And, but I was stacking fifteen hour days. You know, I was just cranking it because I needed the cash to come through, and I was a workaholic.
And and then he's like, I can't afford to pay you these crazy hourly wait. I'm like, well, you need to get all this stuff done. He goes, I know. Why don't you come full time? So I joined him full time.
Mhmm. His head of operations quit because he couldn't do the job. We're still friends. And, I then became the the chief operating officer of the business, and we went from that was I was employee number 14. Mhmm.
When I left six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees system wide. We were operating in 330 cities, 13 corporate locations, four countries, and, yeah, I scaled it from 2,000,000 to a 106,000,000.
Steve: So it's pretty good. 106,000,000. Yeah. So employee 14, you said? Yeah.
And it's over 3,000.
Cameron: 3,100 system wide.
Steve: So I imagine you learned a lot while
Cameron: working there. A little bit. So Failed a lot too.
Steve: Okay. So let's start there then. Let's talk about some of the biggest failures while you're there.
Cameron: Not delegating fast enough. It was amazing how that was not something that I'd learned yet. Mhmm. I was still pretty radically self reliant, and I would still try to crank through things and brute force my way through stuff. I was often like a fly trying to bang my head against the window.
If I tried harder, I'd get out the window. Mhmm. I I learned how to delegate finally at one hundred and thirty one Junk, but I think I needed to But you already
Steve: had all these people reporting to you prior to this.
Cameron: You had a lot
Steve: of relevant experience. Did too much. I see.
Cameron: And I think I because we doubled the revenue of our company six years in a row. So this was the first true hypergrowth company that I did.
Steve: Doubled. Yeah. Six years in a row.
Cameron: Yeah. From 2,000,000 to a 106,000,000.
Steve: I think there are a lot of people that would kill for those numbers to double six years in a row.
Cameron: Yeah. To double to double to double once every three years is is, 27 growth a year. You double every three years. That's what people would think is good growth.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: We doubled every year.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, your major It
Cameron: was actually by design because we went from 2,000,000 to 6,000,000 in year one. And Brian and I were meeting with our lawyer, Andrew Sherman, and he said, where do you guys wanna be in five years? And I said a 100,000,000, and Brian said a 100,000,000. And we kinda looked at each other, and we're like, I don't know. I don't know where I came up with that number.
And he's like, me neither. And And Andrew goes, well, that's the number. Mhmm. Okay. So that night, we sat down and reverse engineered in rough.
We then did it very formally. Mhmm. But we reverse engineered a 100,000,000 back to 6,000,000 in the five years. And we did it. We got to a 106.
Steve: Mhmm. Okay. So it
Cameron: was by plan. Yeah.
Steve: I think there are a lot of engine a lot of entrepreneurs have plans, hopes and plans. There's still a lot of They're different. Discipline.
Cameron: Hopes and plans are different. Yeah. So with a plan, you have to have a lot of rigor around focusing on the critical few things versus the important many.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: You have to really understand your skills and your weaknesses. You have to really understand kinda where to deploy people and cash and time. You have to reverse engineer everything Mhmm. And stick to that. It's like a lot of plan your work and work your plan.
Steve: Mhmm. We used
Cameron: to have a at 100 got junk over our whiteboards, a saying up on the wall that said plan, brief, execute, debrief. We learned that from the from the Air Force. So there was a lot of rigor around our plans and around execution. Mhmm. I think a lot of people have goals.
They don't break it down. They don't reverse engineer it. And then or they set some that are so big and so lofty that there's no possible way they're gonna get there.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Right? We had we definitely had possibility around every goal. We we really agonized over making sure it was possible. Got it. We even decided, like, that week or two after that we said that we do the 100,000,000, we said, like, what what are we willing to compromise?
Will we compromise our core values? No. Would we kill someone to get there? No. Would we steal to get there?
No. Will we compromise our health? To a point, not really. No. Right?
So there was all these, like we we figured out what our boundaries were gonna be. And then it was just a series of, okay, well, what do we need to do to get there? One of the things I did is I raised our prices 40 percent.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Like, we won't be able to get there. We're not gonna be able to be profitable charging what you're charging right now. So I rate and everyone is like, we're gonna go bankrupt. I'm like, you're going bankrupt anyway. So those kinds of things were things that we executed.
Steve: What was it you said? Plan? Brief. Plan. Brief.
Alright. Can you dive deep real well, at least in the brief?
Cameron: Sure. Well, so the plan is the leadership or the or the manager coming up with some kind of a plan that needs to be executed. Then it's sitting down with the people that are gonna do the work Mhmm. And briefing them on that work, walking them through it, explaining it, making sure they have the skills, the confidence, and the connections to execute on that plan.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Right? And then kind of stepping back and coaching them. And then it's the execute. Right? So plan, brief, execute, letting them do it.
Again, sitting back observing. And then the debrief is coaching what went well, what didn't go well. So it's stuff that I even cover at my invest in your leaders training. It's like it's it's these skills around growing and developing people, around execution, around priority management, time management, time blocking. So I will say I learned all that at College Pro Painters.
That's really where I learned to do that. Like, there's no way you can build a 9,000 person company from scratch Mhmm. Without reverse engineering every single aspect of it.
Steve: So I would say that the part I would definitely I definitely struggle with is debriefing.
Cameron: Yeah. So Often, entrepreneurs do. Because we have it in our mind, and we dump it on people's laps when they want Right.
Steve: Go do it. Right.
Cameron: They don't understand why, what it looks like, what finish is like, how much time you want them to spend, how little money you want them to spend. There's a skill around delegation that people
Steve: So let's dive deeper into that. So we got this plan. Mhmm. 100,000,000 in five years. Yep.
How do you brief your company about this?
Cameron: K. So let's say that let's say that there is a plan and I need to get something done. I'm gonna decide what are all the steps of the things that we need done. How many hours will each of those steps take? Who will do each of those steps on the project plan?
Step one is gonna get done by Kelly. It's gonna take three hours. Do they have the skill to do it? Do they have the confidence to do it? And then I'm gonna use situational leadership to apply the right style on that.
Mhmm. Step number two is gonna be done by Bob. It takes eight hours. Does he have the skill or the confidence? I'm gonna apply situational leadership.
Mhmm. So you you come up with a plan, who's gonna do it, you assess the style, then you coach and develop them. Stuff that, again, comes off so easy for me, but it's stuff that I learned at College Pro Painters. It was the rigor of it was my real world MBA. Mhmm.
I'll give a really good example of this. My first summer at College Pro Painters, they said to me, how much money do you wanna make this summer? I said, well, the flyer said 10,000. They said, what would you wanna make? I'm like, 15?
And they go, do you wanna make a goal of 15? I'm like, yeah. Let's do 15. They go, do you know how to get there? I'm like, I have no idea.
They said, do you want me to show you how much revenue you need to do to end up at 15,000 in profit? I went, sure. So they showed me the math. I'm like, okay. I'm gonna do 70,000 in revenue.
They said, do you know how many houses you need to do seven I'm like, I have no idea. They said, well, your average job size in this area is about 748. True number. So you have to do about 90 jobs to end up at $70,000 in revenue. I'm like, then I'm gonna do 90 jobs.
They go, do you know how many estimates you need to do to land 90 jobs? I'm like, I got no idea. They go, well, the average franchisee lands 50% of the jobs. I'm like, then put me down for 50. They go, what if you miss 50?
I'm like, then I'm screwed. Put me down for 45%. But coach me just closed 60%.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: We budgeted on 45. They coached me to get to 60. Well, where are you gonna get a 180 estimates? I'm like, I got no idea. Here's the marketing you'll do.
So we backed it all the way up to all the mark and then every week, I knew how much marketing I needed to do to get how many estimates to land the jobs. I maniacally focused around those critical few things. And at the end of the summer, I ended up making 15,000 in profit doing $69,600 in revenue.
Steve: So you have a plan? Brief. Brief. Execute. Debrief.
Fascinating.
Cameron: The debrief is coaching. Mhmm. Right? The debrief is consulting. The debrief is cheering them on.
Steve: It sounds so simple.
Cameron: It is.
Steve: And it's, it's when you put it this way, I mean, it's kinda how we have goal planning with our salespeople.
Cameron: Correct.
Steve: What do you wanna accomplish this year?
Cameron: Oh, let me give you one on there.
Steve: Oh, go ahead.
Cameron: Do you know that if you have 10 salespeople Mhmm. And you ask them what their goals are, as a company, you'll end up at 87% of the sum of their goals. Right? So if you've got 10 salespeople and they're all a million dollar goal, you're gonna end up at that's that's 10,000,000 in total. You'll end up at 8.7.
I don't know why. It's called the 87% rule. I haven't heard of that. The way I was and and it's true. If you go back and look at all your data, you add up your employees' goals for a week, for a month, or whatever, you always end up at 87% of the sum of their goals.
The way I was explained to it back in 1986 at College Pro Painters was you need coverage. You need buffer. If I'm a high jumper and I wanna clear six foot six, I gotta get most of my body at six foot eight, six foot ten so that my butt just grazes the bar. Mhmm.
Steve: But if
Cameron: I aim to hit six foot six, I'm gonna knock it off with my shoulders. Right. You always have to have a little bit more. So you have a budgeted number, and then you have a goal, and then you have a stretch goal. Mhmm.
So the budget is what we're going to freaking hit. Mhmm. The goal is what we're gonna drive towards. You need your salespeople's goals to be higher than your company's budget because you're gonna end up at 87 percent of what their goals are.
Steve: It's it's fascinating because I was actually doing a coaching call earlier today, and we're talking about, like, standards and this and that. And, it was the the coaching client's a vendor, And then they have their their, clients or people that buy buy houses. Right? And they were talking about, like, you know, the challenges that their clients were having. And then what I was saying is, like, well, the problem is they have these standards that just aren't enough because they're expecting that their clients are ex they're expecting their salespeople to hit their numbers all the time.
I was like, well, that is a lousy expectation. Correct. You can't run a business Correct. Assuming all your salespeople are gonna do everything. Exactly.
Cameron: So that's why you committed to 7%. So I took that idea, and I figured out at College Pro Painters, they had the goals of all the franchisees Mhmm. Stretched to be a bit higher. Yeah. So the reason that I came in at $10,000 and they thought, what about 15?
He then had coverage. Mhmm. Because his budget was 10.
Steve: Right? He He was doing.
Cameron: Bingo. And so when I became a general manager and had to go out and recruit, hire, and train Mhmm. When I sat down with Kimbal Musk the first day, I'm like, how much money do you wanna make this summer? And he said, 15,000. I go, what would your year be like next year if you made 19?
He goes, game changing. I go, you wanna do 19?
Steve: Mhmm. Talk about that.
Cameron: But you learn those skills. Right? So I think that's what people need to remember is that if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, your success is gonna be accumulative, like, this accumulation of all the list lessons you learn along the way. So go apprentice for some company for six months and and take a bunch of ideas. Go apprentice for another company, take a bunch of ideas.
Just keep learning the ideas. Yeah.
Steve: So going back to, like, your your your your briefing is kinda like when we go with our salespeople. Like, what are your goals? Alright. For for you accomplish those goals, how much money do you need to make? Mhmm.
Alright. To make that much money, like, make that much take home, how much how many do you have to do in sales? Correct. And then appointments. Right.
Alright. So closed sales, contracts, appointments Correct. Conversations, and backwards.
Cameron: And then you and then you can coach them at every level where the gears are biggest. Yeah. Right? So one of the big gears is are you talking to enough people? Mhmm.
Another big gear is are you saying the right things to the people? Mhmm. Are you learning how to handle objections? Right? Yeah.
Sometimes we focus on the wrong things. Focus on the biggest gears that, like, turn the biggest numbers. Mhmm. So I had I had an opportunity with when my success ratio or my closing ratio, when I was starting to close 65% of everybody I did estimates for, I raised my prices. Because I knew I couldn't really probably go from 65 to 70.
Mhmm. But if I charge 20% more, right, that was easier than than lending 20% more clients. Right. So all all that it is is plan, brief, execute, debrief. And then on the leadership side is making sure that when you're coaching people, that you're helping remove their obstacles, give them the confidence, give them the connections, give them the skills so they can do
Steve: more. Mhmm. Okay. So amazing. Yeah.
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Cameron: Well, we almost bankrupted the company at about 60 to 80,000,000. In the last year that I was there, we had a very quiet, very amiable, very analytical head of finance. He'd been with us since the early days and very good at his job, but very quiet. As you can already tell, I've I'm fairly high energy. You're not quiet.
I'm a 98 I in disk. Okay. So I basically like, I'm running a 100 miles an hour, and I can only see 50 feet in front of me. I plan later. I I I start now and plan afterwards, or I change the wheel in the car while I'm driving it.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So our head of finance kept saying, are you sure we're not going too quickly? Are you sure we should, you know, open more of those corporate locations? Are you sure we should open up The UK right now? And I was like, yeah. Yeah.
We got this.
Steve: All the confidence in the world.
Cameron: All the and we've been doing it for so long and growing this fast, and how could we possibly fail? I didn't hear him because I wasn't ready to listen to him.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: I also didn't understand the numbers to run a business of that size. So remember when you were four years old and your dad tossed a penny into the swimming pool, and you you go down to get the penny and you come up gasping for air Mhmm. You're not gonna die. Yeah. Like like, shut up, kid.
Mhmm. And then when you go scuba diving for the first time, you go down to 80 feet, you run out of air. You're probably not gonna die, but you're gonna get kinda sick. Mhmm. You get down to a 140 feet and you run out of air, you will die.
Right? Because you have to come to the surface too quickly. You die. Mhmm. So cash is like oxygen.
When you're a small company, one person, 10 people, you run out of cash, you don't pay yourself for a week or two. You don't submit some expenses. No big deal. Or you don't pay a vendor for a week.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: When you're a twenty, thirty, 100 person company, yeah, you max out a couple credit cards. You don't pay a couple people, but it's a little bit more of a stretch. When you're 248 people at the head office and you have to meet payroll for 420,000, you don't have it. You have to call your mom to borrow $420 because the bank won't loan to you. That's where we were.
And we were there because a month before, we had 5,000,000 in cash in the bank. We spent $2,000,000 on an office renovation and an office move, $800,000 on a glass stairway to connect all three floors, spent $600,000 in taxes and $800,000 in in employee bonuses. We've pretty much drained all of our cash position. We, Ryan and I, were so proud of how we built the company without any debt and any credit line and no, like yeah. No credit facility at all.
We built it always off cash flow that we're like, we'll just go to the bank and borrow money. Why wouldn't they loan to us? We are the number two company in Canada to work for. We've been on Oprah. Look at all this crazy growth.
And they we we went in, and they said, well, we can't loan to you. And they're like, why? Like, because you don't have any money. And we're like, yeah. We just spent it.
We did all these things. And they're like, you guys don't know how to run a company. Like, yeah. We do. Look at us.
They're like, no. You don't understand the financials of a company. So the lesson that I learned was if you're not willing to listen to people, hire people you're willing to listen to. Mhmm. And then God gave us two ears and one mouth.
Right. Use them in that ratio.
Steve: How'd you get out of that mess?
Cameron: We borrowed $420,000 from Brian's mom.
Steve: Oh, so legitimately? He went to his mom.
Cameron: To his mom? I thought
Steve: that was an exaggeration or No.
Cameron: That was real. That was to meet payroll. I started phoning all of our suppliers and told them we weren't paying them for thirty to sixty days. Mhmm. The ones that yelled at me, I said, if you keep yelling, your name's not even gonna go into the lottery to see if you get paid in month three.
So you've been with us for six years. We kinda fucked things up. We're gonna be fine.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: But we need you to give us a break. Mhmm. We fired 30 employees. We delayed expenses. None of the leadership team submitted expenses for about a month or two.
We gave some pay cuts to the leadership team that were to a point, and then we would pay them back when we were whole again. We sold franchises like Monomaniacs. We put in place a 10 plan that was called back to the basics, and we found 10 things that we could do to drive revenue, 10 things that we could do to drive gross margin, and 10 things that we could do to cut costs. We had every member of the leadership team review the general ledger and look for waste. We reviewed all the credit all of us reviewed all the credit card bills and looked for waste.
Going back eighteen years, but that was a bunch that we did. It was terrifying.
Steve: We got say that's a really difficult time.
Cameron: Oh, fuck. It was brutal. We got cash flow projections every four hours for three weeks. We got our new cash flow every three weeks. So we knew what our cash position was gonna be for the next ninety days.
Every four hours, we get updates. Yeah.
Steve: It was brutal. I know that we had, a tough stretch in '22, and there was, like, every day, we're checking our cash balances.
Cameron: Yeah. And so you know what the danger is? Is anybody who's looking to start a business, there's no entrepreneur out there that will tell the truth. What I mean is when you're going through that time Mhmm. You're not gonna tell the story.
You will two years later.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: I wasn't talking about how hard it was in the moment. Mhmm. Because everyone needs to see me with confidence, my game face on, making decisions. At the leadership team level, we're going, holy fuck. We're gonna go bankrupt if we don't get this thing fixed.
Yeah. You don't go on social media and go, oh my god. I'm I think I'm gonna go bankrupt, and I'm really worried. Like, you don't say it.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So what happens is people that are starting a company think it's all here I am on my laptop flying private at the beach. I want that. Mhmm. Because we're not telling you about the time that we're literally losing our mind.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Crying at crying at night.
Steve: I can't imagine the crying at night. But I will say, when I was going through that stretch, I was totally open and transparent. Everyone was watching, like, here's what I'm going through. And it's tough. It's hard.
Cameron: But you're not on social media telling your customers and telling you you're not like, you're not public about it. I was. Okay.
Steve: And here's what the reward was for that.
Cameron: K. Well, vulnerability builds trust.
Steve: Yes. But also coaching revenue went down. K. Because
Cameron: they're like,
Steve: if this guy can't figure it out, why would I give him money? So that was the was kind of this double punch. Like, hey. Here's what I'm going through.
Cameron: That's why you don't talk about it, by the way. So the What do
Steve: you learn?
Cameron: So here's here's the big lesson I got from it. I needed to have a community of people I could talk to. Mhmm. Other entrepreneurs, other COOs. Yeah.
I needed to have other executives that I could open the kimono and go, I'm scared. Mhmm. I don't know what I'm doing. I need help. Yeah.
What have you done? Who can I talk to? Mhmm. And and when I opened up that kimono, they were like, I've been there. I've gone through this.
Here's what I did. Here's my connections. Let me help. Yeah. Right?
But you need that safe space as entrepreneurs. And, sadly, I think social media has made entrepreneurship too cool. I grew up in an era where entrepreneurship wasn't cool. Like, all those business ventures that I talk about from, like, '72, my first venture selling coat hangers or recycling them, until, you know, College Pro was 9085. Mhmm.
Entrepreneurship only became cool in 1997, '98, ninety nine, two thousand. The rise of the first.com era. Mhmm. Prior to that, every kid was greedy, capitalist. I would go to school with a briefcase.
I was vilified. I was laughed at. I was made fun of. Teachers didn't want me selling stuff. Nowadays, they teach entrepreneurship in school.
That was not the case back in the day.
Steve: I remember getting in trouble for selling candy at school.
Cameron: Yeah. Nowadays, you're like, they have a spot in the school for kids to do that. Yeah. For real? Really?
Yeah. Yeah. Schools now have literally, like, little stalls set up for kids to do all their thing. Entrepreneurship has become a thing that kids are supposed to be doing now.
Steve: Yeah. Well, I think social media has definitely amplified that.
Cameron: Right. And so and the the first rise was presocial media was the rise of the .com era from '96 to 2000 was when like, when when Kimball and and Elon I I was a reference for them for their first company, Zip two, in 1995. Zip two is an online mapping company. They sold it three years later for 318,000,000 in cash to Compaq. That's when it was cool.
Mhmm. Right? When when all of a sudden these .com millionaires were coming up.
Steve: Well, it's it's it's fascinating. It's kind of like a detour, but you look at, like, what's going on with the the views of capitalism and and and socialism, this and that. But, like, right now, what it's not Gen z. It's Gen Alpha thing right now? Yeah.
It's Alpha. Right? And, like, they're saying, like, Gen Alpha is, like, the most capitalistic because entrepreneurship is cool now
Cameron: Right.
Steve: On social media.
Cameron: Yeah. And Gen z as well.
Steve: Yeah. So alright. So going back to this. So, scary time, but you got through it. So what what what year was this?
Or I guess 2006. It was when I say what year, it's part of your five year plan. Where were you in your five year plan when you almost bankrupted the company?
Cameron: We were we were finishing the $106,000,000 year.
Steve: So you're you're approaching your best year ever.
Cameron: Yeah. Well, no. We were in it. It was it was in the tail end of our best year ever.
Steve: Tail end of your best year ever. So a 100,000,000 in revenue. Yep. Like, holy crap. What did we just do to ourselves?
Yeah.
Cameron: And that's because cash is your oxygen. Right? You need more cash to run a bigger business.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: You need you need credit facilities. You need I I was speaking with the CEO from Scottsdale about two weeks ago, and he was talking about some legal bills that he has. Couple million dollars in legal bills. I said, do you remember talking to me on the golf course about five years ago when I told you to to increase by 10 x your legal every year? Because I said, as you scale, your legal gets to be ballooning.
Right? It it grows your legal bills grow disproportionately as your revenue scales because people take shots at you. Right? If you're if you're bigger, they'll sue you. Your employees will go after you.
Competitors will go after you. The the the big competitors will come after you. So he's like, yeah. I totally freaking remember. So I haven't heard this before.
To be $50, and now they're 2,000,000.
Steve: So I haven't heard this before. So Oh, yeah. Where do I need to when and how much?
Cameron: So there's some inflection points as a company goes from a 100,000 in revenue to 300,000 in revenue to to a million to 3,000,000 to 10,000,000 to 30,000,000 to a 100,000,000, the ones and the threes, or from one employee to three to 10 to 30 to a 100 to 300, the inflection points around legal are kind of in the 10 to 30, but mostly the 30 to 100,000,000 zone. Okay. The death zone for a company is 10 to 30,000,000. The reason it's the death zone is that you tend to have a management team that's green. They're keen.
They've got some some knowledge, but they've never done it before, most of them. Mhmm. And their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And that's really never the answer to the problem. More often than not, it's saying no or not now or optimizing it or automating it or outsourcing it. Mhmm. But it's often not hire more people.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: What happens is you end up building all this bloat and overhead inside of the organization that then gets more complicated. Right? It's why it's why people like, I got so much done when I had four of us. Why do we need 30 people? Mhmm.
Steve: That's why. Yeah. But this you go back to And
Cameron: you get politics. When you get, like, from a 100 people to 300 people, the politics starts creeping in.
Steve: Got it. Alright. So we're those are pretty big, crazy, scary stories. Yeah. Anything else?
Cameron: We had a franchisee that committed suicide. That was a big one that we had to go through. Mhmm. We were a smaller company. We were, I think, about 30 franchisees.
And I got a phone call, and it was, the general manager from the franchise. And I was talking to him, and I heard that Phil Martin just killed himself. I turned to Brian, and Brian was on the phone. And he turned to me, and he had tears in his eyes, and he was talking to the franchisee's wife. So we both got off the phone at the same time.
I waved Brian into the to the meeting room. He and I went in. Brian broke down in tears. I'm like, you go home. I got this.
I'll figure out the plan. I was not as emotional because I didn't know him as well at the time. Brian, because he'd recruited him, was one of the earliest franchisees. I knew him quite well. So I just went in and we I went into damage control mode, and I put in place, basically, like, a five point plan to, save the business and save the family and help the wife.
And so we just I just went into execution mode. That was tough.
Steve: So you say you go a 100 miles an hour, but you can't see 50 feet in front of you. But you're also this great, like, come here superhero and, like, rescue and fix things with a plan.
Cameron: Well, because I put a simple plan. Right? Like, I don't overthink it. I I don't have an MBA on how somebody kills themselves. Mhmm.
Just like and I've talked about this a lot since that if somebody if you had a phone call right now that Bob was hit by a truck and killed, what would you do to replace Bob? You'd come up with a quick list, and you do the list. Mhmm. Well, then if Bob's the wrong person, fire Bob today. Stop making excuses and start on the list.
So with Phil, I I I couldn't afford to be emotional. Right. We had a business to take care of. And I also, thankfully, didn't know him that well, so I didn't have to be emotional on that one. Mhmm.
Steve: But I've
Cameron: been able to fire people out that way. They have to get fired. Well, I I love that they can do it in the right way where they still care about me, but they have to they have to leave. So talk about that. How do you do that?
One is to remember that my job is to take care of the a players and the b players, not the c players.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And if I'm constantly taking care of the underperformers or the toxic people or the cultural misfits, then I'm not spending time with my a players. Mhmm. What if I just spend time with my a players? So a players are free. Yeah.
I was I was doing a speaking event in Dubai in January, a group called Mindvalley. I was did the opening keynote to 2,500 people. Came off the stage. I was talking to this guy. He's six foot seven.
I'm six foot three. And I'm like, what do you do for fun? He's like, I play volleyball. Like, do you still play? He goes, yeah.
I play pro. Like, wow. Pro volleyball. Like, beach volleyball? He goes, yeah.
I'm like, that's two on two. He goes, yeah. I said, so if it was me and five of my high school friends or university friends that we used to compete, he goes, we'd beat you every game. Like, I didn't even have a chance to ask the question.
Steve: Like, him and one other person against the five.
Cameron: Him two of them against the six of us, he would beat us every game. Mhmm. So I realized that if I paid two people $200,000 each, a players, they're gonna destroy six c players getting paid a 100,000 each.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: 400,000 beats 600,000. Yeah. A players are free. But if I'm spending all my time coaching and developing and aligning and helping these c players, what if I coach the a's? Mhmm.
That's where you go from good to great. Right? 80% of your results is produced by 20% of your people, but so often leaders and managers spend all their time with the c's at the exclusion of the a's. And then you know what happens? The a player walks in Tuesday morning, he goes, I'm leaving.
Why? Found a company that loves me more. Found a company that'll take care of me more. Found a company that'll develop me more. And I don't have to work with c players anymore.
Steve: You've had probably a few of those conversations?
Cameron: Mhmm. And they're not easy. No. But if I do it with the approach that my job is to take care of the a's, and my job is to make sure that I treat this person as if I'm firing my mom. Like, treat them with integrity.
Treat them like they have feelings. Do you know, confront the issue, not the person. Yeah.
Steve: So then going back then, I love the exercise of, like, oh, if they got hit by a bus, what would you do? So you have no excuse. So what is that conversation today?
Cameron: It's either, I'm sorry it's not working out because there's no cultural fit anymore, or I'm sorry it's not working out because the results aren't there.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And then they'll start to debate you, and you go back and say, I'm sorry. It's just not working out. The results aren't there. And they'll continue to debate. You go, Bob, the results just aren't there.
Mhmm. I just don't get into the discussion. Mhmm. So it's either results or culture fit. That's it.
End of story. Yeah. I have their letter, their termination letter. I have their check. That's it.
Yeah. There's no good day. No. It's not like Monday's better than Friday or the day before vacation is better. Like, you just have to get them out.
The data says the cost of the wrong person is 15 times their annual salary. So if you're paying them a $100,000 a year, it's costing you 1,500,000.0
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Because of the mistakes, because the opportunity of not working with the a's, because the a's that quit, customers won't give you the business. So it's easier to get rid of them quickly Mhmm. And to play with a shorthanded team than it is to play with them.
Steve: Yeah. No. That's that's incredibly powerful. So we talked about the failures. What were the biggest successes at 01/1980
Cameron: got junk? Gazillions. Right? Building a brand in an industry that had never had a brand Mhmm. Was a big success.
There was no SIC code, standard in, standard, classification code. I forgot what SIC stands for. There was no yellow pages category for junk removal. So we had to lobby with the yellow pages and lobby with this industry to get an SIC code. Junk removal didn't exist.
There were 17,000 independent people with trucks hauling junk. Mhmm. But to build a brand in the industry was a big success.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Getting on Oprah was a big success. Landing 5,200 media placements about our company in six years with no budget, no PR firm was a big success. Who drove that? Pardon me? Who drove that?
I did. You drove that? I I hired our first PR person, built out the PR team of six, seven people, taught PR to the whole group. Brian was good at it, but I that was one of the seven divisions that I ran. Gotcha.
I wrote a book. One of my seven books or six soon to be seven books. It's called Free PR. Okay. Well, I'm
Steve: looking forward to that. So I wanna hit, actually, before we get into, while I quit real estate, how about Kimball Musk? So he was a college kid?
Cameron: Yeah. Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario 1993. It was probably January '93.
Steve: Mhmm. What do
Cameron: you wanna ask?
Steve: So, I guess, at that time, he was just another kid. Did you see something in him that was different?
Cameron: Kimball was so he's six four. Mhmm. He has a big energy, a big smile, a big laugh. He was smart. He was in business.
He was taking his commerce, like, undergraduate degree in business. He was goal oriented. That that was what I saw.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So the the the the charisma and the charm is leadership. Mhmm.
Steve: It's the
Cameron: ability to lead others, the ability to sell. Right? The goal oriented was he was hungry and wanted to do something. He was smart. He was taking business.
So he had, like, the general aptitude to do something.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Then what I had to do was just show him that we could we could teach him this business and let him run. Yeah. And then also in that in that first interview, I always ask who else you know, who are you friends with? What do you what do you like about your friends? And I found out that his cousin, Peter, Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity, Peter was was his cousin, so I hired Peter too.
Yeah. I bumped into Peter this past summer. I was at an entrepreneur conference in, Turkey, and Pete walked up to me. And he's bald, and he's got a beard, and, you know, he's a man. Right?
And he goes, are you Cam Harold? And I said, yeah. He goes, I think we used to work together. I'm like, dude, I got nothing. He goes, Pete Rive.
I'm like, woah. And he's got this South African accent. I'm like, oh, like, I haven't seen you. And he goes, yeah. 1993.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So we talked. He he had a really hard summer. He was he was a very different cat from than Kimball. Mhmm. And I've been made a bit probably a bit of a mistake and actually ordering him a franchise.
Yeah. But it worked out well for him later because he got business skills.
Steve: And then did you work with Elon at any point?
Cameron: No. I never worked with Elon. I took a group down. So so Kimball called me in in January 1995. They had one employee.
Mhmm. Company was called Zip2, and they were gonna do online mapping. And he wanted me to be a reference with a venture capital firm that was funding them. And I'm like, so what's this online mapping thing? He said, well, it's an Internet company.
I said, what's the Internet? Because I didn't even have an email address. Didn't know what the Internet was. And this is January. No one knew.
And, so he started explaining the Internet. He goes, forget it. You don't have to explain the Internet. I go, okay. What about online mapping?
Is it, like, the map books? He goes, no. It's gonna be on your computer. I said, yeah. But where's the map?
He goes, on your computer. I'm like, I don't understand. He goes, Cameron, it's like if you're reading the newspaper and you need to, like, see an address, it'll give you a map to that location, like, what MapQuest became and Google Maps. Right? I'm like, where's the newspaper?
He goes, on your computer. I'm like, I didn't I couldn't even he's like, look. You he's like, you don't have to explain the Internet or online newspapers or mapping. They'll understand. You have to explain house painting.
I'm like, I can do that. Yeah. So I did a call with Tom Kleiner, Kleiner Perkins, and, explained why they should invest in Kimbal and Elon Musk. Kimbal called me that night, and he said, I don't know what you told them. I'm like, did I screw up?
He goes, no. We asked for 600,000. They gave us $3,000,000. And that was the initial funding round for what was Zip two. They had one employee.
They were showering next door at the gym. They were working and sleeping in their office in Palo Alto. And, they sold the company, I think it was three years later, for 318 or 320,000,000 in an all cash acquisition to Compaq, the largest all cash acquisition in history. And at the time, I think they owned 19% of the company. So then Kimball went off and went to chef school and, became a chef.
Now he owns the kitchen and a bunch of restaurants and vertical farming business, lives in Boulder. And then his brother, rolled his cash into PayPal Mhmm. With Peter Thiel and did an early stage investment in, I guess, Tesla came a little bit later. Mhmm. But, yeah, PayPal was the next one.
Yeah. So then I took a group down. Like, I I knew Elon's assistant, Marybeth, and I would I would text him and talk to him at events. So I took a group of 12 CEOs from Vancouver for a tour of SpaceX in 2011 Mhmm. When they were I think it was 2011, 2012.
2011, they were just rolling out the model s. Whenever the model s came out, we were in the Tesla factory, and the model s was at the back of the building. And he took the drop sheet, a painter drop sheet off the top of the model s, and we got to see it. The media saw it the next day. Mhmm.
Wow. He made us put all of our phones down to see it. Yeah. We did a private q and a with Elon, and then his head of, marketing took us for a tour of SpaceX. We ran a meeting in their offices for the day.
Wow. He he had no office. He worked on the floor with everybody else.
Steve: We talking about Tesla.
Cameron: No. This is SpaceX. This is SpaceX. Tesla the model s was being rolled out at, out of the SpaceX office is where the press came.
Steve: Wow. I didn't know that.
Cameron: Yeah. That was '2 I think it was 2011. I have to check my dates, but Yeah. We were there the day before the press saw the model s. We saw it first.
That's cool. It was fucking badass. It was insane.
Steve: I can I can only imagine? Yeah. As a giant Elon fanboy, like, I I always,
Cameron: You know what I learned from him recently? There's two big things that I've pulled. First, he's massively under he's massively misunderstood.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: He's just maniacally focused. He's not a dick. Mhmm. Right? And and by the way, he doesn't need the money.
Someone someone said, well, he's only doing it for the money. I'm like, do you know that with the $400,000,000,000 he has, this this number you can fact check this number with Grok. If he made $500,000 a day, every day since Jesus was born until now, he has more than that. So every day for February times $365, days a year times 500,000 the he's not doing this for the money, folks. No.
Right? He's got the cash. Yeah. But the things he the things he focuses on is every week picking the one big problem facing the company and obsessing about that until it's done is huge. And then he also said recently, if you don't know what the one big problem facing your company is, you're the problem.
And that was really insightful for me. Yeah. The maniacal focus around one thing every week.
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Click the link in the description and book a call with my team to see how we can help you install a self managing sales team this week. Wow. That's powerful. Mhmm. So you've written a handful of books.
Six. Six. Seven. But the one I wanna hit so, the I talked about. Right?
I quit real estate. So this was, like, a whole, like, identity shift for me. Because, like, I bought my first property in o five.
Cameron: K. Right?
Steve: I quit real I quit engineering to become a realtor in o seven. That was a mistake. Should've just gone straight into buying houses. But right. I I was a realtor.
Still, technically, I'm a realtor. But, you know, I did the real estate thing. I did the short sales. I listed properties for banks. Started a brokerage.
I did, I had a real estate title company. We've done mortgages. We've flipped. Done all these things real estate, and then I've mentored people in real estate.
Cameron: Right.
Steve: And then, I read Vivid Vision. And there's a friend of mine, Felipe, Philip Besson. He's like, you need to read this book because your vision is unclear. Like, when I talk to you, you have a pretty good idea of what you wanna do, but it's not crystal clear.
Cameron: It's not crystal clear. Sure.
Steve: Right. So I want you to do me a favor. Read this book. Wow. I read it.
And this is December of, of, '23. Right? So November 23, I'm reading it. December 23 is, like, alright. I got because this is quiet time in December.
Right? Things are slower. It's like, I'm gonna go ahead and just write out my vision. And at this time, I'm coaching.
Cameron: December 2023. December '23. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. So I've got my podcast, which we still have. Right? I've got, a sales training organization. I'm still, wholesaling, flipping, doing the real estate deal.
I already, shut down my brokerage, but I've got you know, you still have was it still got two I'm still serving two masters. Right? And I've had my accountability partners since 2011. Like, say, just focus, do one thing. I'm in Collective Genius who we had a chance to interact.
I was on I wasn't in person when you spoke. But, like, the founder, he's been in my ear, and then I got multiple people in my ear, but it wasn't until I actually sat down and did the exercise Right. That's, like, when I finished, real estate's nowhere in this vision.
Cameron: Have you ever heard me say that if you try to sit on more than one toilet, it gets kinda messy?
Steve: No. You
Cameron: can only sit on one toilet at a time. Yeah. And what happens is that people try to start multiple businesses, and nothing gets their focus. Nothing gets their time. Nothing gets their financial resources, so it gets kinda messy.
Yeah. The only time you can have multiple businesses, if you have the vision, the people, and the cash, and the plan in place for them to execute so that you can focus on the next one.
Steve: Mhmm. Right? Yeah. Yeah. But so
Cameron: Well, Vivid Vision helped you clarify that.
Steve: Vivid Vision gave me clarity. So the problem is this is poor leadership. Right? Is that I wrote down my Vivid Vision. I said, okay.
Cool. It's done. Let me share it with my leadership team. Right? Right.
Because it's important. Yep. This is where the company's going. Yep. Problem is I still have a real estate guy in my vision in my leadership team.
And so he reads it, and he's kinda quiet. And he says, hey. Where do I fit? Where do I fit in this vision? Like, I didn't think this all the way through.
Should've rolled this out a little bit more delicately. Yep. So he eventually, left his own, like, good terms. Sure. Right?
Cameron: But I
Steve: was like, hey. Look. Like, for me, there was always a place for you. It just wouldn't be in the real estate side. It would be on the sales training side.
Yep. But he's like, look. That's not for me. Yep. I'm gonna do my own thing.
So we we left on good terms, but I was like, man, what a failure in leadership. You know? This isn't quite change management.
Cameron: No. I was coaching a CEO one time in Vancouver, and he had about 85 employees. And we took all the employees off-site for a day, and I ran a training session for them around leadership, around operations, around planning, all the skills that you need to scale up their company. And, at the end of the eight hours, Dean, who I've been working with behind the scenes coaching him for about six months, decided to roll out his Vivid Vision to the whole company. Not decided.
That was part of the plan. So he so we stopped the presentations. He hands out a four page document to everybody, and they all read it together out loud. And at the end of reading it out loud, he says to the group of 85, around 15% of you hate what you just heard. There's about 12 of you in this room that don't like what the future looks like.
He said today is probably the right time for you to quit because this is absolutely what our company is gonna look like in the future, and I only want the people here that are vibrating in their seats like I am. And then he clicked to the next slide. He said tomorrow, there's an address up on the screen. Tomorrow when you go to work, I want you to go to this address. Because today, well, we've been off-site, and then he started clicking pictures.
A moving company came and packed up our office and moved us into our new space. Got it. If you're if you're, like, an entrepreneurial person, you're like, fuck. This is awesome. Right?
You're vibrating. Like, I wanna do this. This is great. There were 12 people that were so terrified that within about three weeks, they had quit. Two years later, he ranked as the number two company to work for in Western Canada.
The company that ranked number one was another client of mine, a company called Nurse Next Door. Mhmm. This stuff does change people. Mhmm. And sometimes they're not aligned.
Yeah. We can be a little bit more delicate at times, but it's about taking care of our a's and b's Mhmm. And making sure that they're aligned and excited and inspired Yeah. And not having somebody get dragged through the mud for a year only to find out a year later when we've now wasted a full year of his life. Mhmm.
Steve: Yeah.
Cameron: Maybe you could have rolled it slightly differently, but it was the right time for him to go.
Steve: Yeah. And then the other thing too is I went through your program, investment leaders. And there were a lot of things I took from it. So I wanted you to share a a a a I want you to share about it or talk about some of the things about it. But I'll share the thing the the the one that made the biggest impact for me was budgeting time.
Cameron: Okay. Priority management.
Steve: Yeah. Because, I'll go ahead.
Cameron: Yeah. So the invest in your leaders training is the 12 core skills that anyone who manages people or anyone running a company needs to be good at that we never get trained in. Mhmm. So it's changing your leadership style so that you can apply it properly. It's coaching, delegation, time management, priority management, project management, delegation, one on one coaching, email management, handling conflict, reverse engineering a vision.
It's the skills that everybody in an executive function, and we never get trained in that stuff. Mhmm. So priority management, I learned this again where? College Pro Painters. College Pro Painters.
Yeah. Right? Is all my real world MBA was College Pro Painters. So at College Pro Painters, they had to teach us what we learned was called priority management. Right?
Time management is part of priority management. So what it sits down with is on Sunday night, make a list of all the stuff that you have to do for the week, and then take that long list and prioritize it into a's and b's. Just go down the list. A b b a b, whatever. Right?
Mhmm. And take a look at your six a's or eight a's, whatever you've got, and number them in order of impact. Highest impact aid through the lowest. And you'll have a one, a two, a three. Right?
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And do the same with your b's. So now I know what I've got. I'm prioritizing them in order of impact. Then I'm gonna go back, and I'm gonna look at a one. How much time is that gonna take me?
How many hours or days will it take me to do? Let's say it's twelve hours. Twelve hours. A two, four hours. A three, thirty minutes.
Right? Then Then you come up with a total list of time for your a's. You come up with a total list of time for your b's, and you realize, I have way more hours that I've committed to needing to get done than I have in my week. Mhmm. Because I already have meetings and interruptions and emails and all the other stuff.
Right? You probably only have fourteen hours, sixteen hours of project time in a week that you can actually do project work. So you need to delegate everything except genius. And what I like people to then do is take a look at what they've got and put it into their calendar. Put a one in your calendars to when you're gonna do the work.
Or can you delegate it to someone, chunk it down for them, and spend a little bit of time so they can do the work for you so you can get it done. Mhmm. But it's prioritizing the work you're doing, figuring out when you're gonna do the work, or who can you delegate it to so that you can grow those people.
Steve: Yeah.
Cameron: And then the next phase now is, can we finally get some AI in place to do some of this work for us, or can we optimize or automate that work?
Steve: Yeah. Well, we're definitely moving there. Quickly. Yeah. Yeah.
But, the other thing I wanna add to that was where I was getting frustrated was as a camera, and I wanted to take care of this, but I wouldn't tell you how much time I want you to spend time on it.
Cameron: K. So this is delegation. Yeah. So what where leaders fall short in delegating, oh, I delegate all the time. Do you get back what you wanted?
No. Is it on time? Never. Is it over budget? Always.
Right? Well, then you didn't delegate well. Mhmm. Okay. Teach me.
So when you delegate something to someone, don't say how long you think it's going to take. Don't say it's gonna take you two hours to paint that wall.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Say, I only want you to spend two hours painting the wall. I only want you to spend thirty minutes writing that memo. I only want you to spend twenty minutes doing that whatever. Mhmm. So compress time because Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the space that we give it.
Steve: Right.
Cameron: The other thing is give them a budget, how little money you want them to spend on something. Mhmm. If I said to my assistant, hey. Steve and I are going for dinner. Can you organize a working dinner for us?
She'd be like, great. I'll book Maestro City Hall. I'll get a, you know, a nice bottle of wine decanted. Right? Exactly.
Right? What I meant but now it's a $400 dinner. Mhmm. And it takes two hours. What I should have said was, hey.
Steve and I are gonna have a working dinner. Can you order us some healthy food that can get delivered by DoorDash? And don't spend more than $60.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Done. Yeah. Super healthy. Farm and craft, $60. We're both healthy.
We sit down. We get our work done easy. But I didn't delegate it properly to her. It's it's not her fault she picked Mastro's.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: So that's what happens with all of our projects. So so managers need to learn how to delegate. And when you delegate to somebody, do they have the skill and the confidence to do what you're delegating to them? Yeah.
Steve: So I wanna touch on that in a second. But, before you do that, the part where you say, hey. Here's I want you to spend two hours on this. But where that saves me so much headache is, like, if I give you a deadline, do we hit the deadline? Do we not hit the deadline?
It's, like, fifty fifty.
Cameron: Correct. Right?
Steve: But it's, like, here's how much time I would just spend on it. Whatever you get done in those two hours, that's just gonna have to be good enough.
Cameron: And here's where it really meets the road. I only want you to spend two hours on this. Show me in your calendar when you can block that two hours off. Yeah. So I'm delegating it to you, and you're gonna tell me right now when you're gonna do the work.
Not by Friday. Mhmm. Show me in your calendar when you're gonna do it. Mhmm. I was coaching a woman run time around a ViviVision.
And I was like, when are you gonna have it done? She goes, I'll have it done by Monday. I'm like, bullshit. She go, what do you mean? I'm like, how many hours are gonna take you to write a mind map?
About two hours. How much time is it gonna take you to write the first draft? Two hours. How much time are you gonna take you to write the second draft? Pre hour?
When in your calendar are you gonna do the mind map? I got time on Thursday. When in the she's like, I don't have any time left. Mhmm. So that's where delegation really meets the road properly is prioritizing it and making sure they have time in their calendar to do it.
But don't tell me when you're gonna get it done by. Tell me when you're gonna do it. Mhmm. That's proper delegation.
Steve: Another one
Cameron: So that's how you that's that's how you can scale to a 100,000,000 and hit it on time is because everything is reverse engineered, planned through, scheduled out, and then you apply your leadership to help the people do what they need to do.
Steve: Yeah. So, yeah, the the I would say dollar for dollar, the investor leader program was the cheapest, best.
Cameron: Yeah. And now I think it's $347 per manager. It's it's a fraction of, like, free.
Steve: It's less than what I was it's what I paid.
Cameron: Yeah. I think you're probably 6 $7.50 probably. I think so.
Steve: But it's fine. It was well worth it. Right? Like, it was incredible, like, so for $3.50 or whatever it is.
Cameron: I put I put anyone on the management team through it. The entrepreneur has to go through it Mhmm. First. And then go through it again. Like, you'll learn more now going through the second time Mhmm.
Because you've been practicing it, thinking about it. So it goes through the adult learning cycle. Right? Yeah. Abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, concrete experience, reflective observation.
You have to go through that cycle. You should go through that content three times in one year. Mhmm. Then you really grow. And then after the management team and leadership team goes through it the first or second time, then get anyone in your company who manages people to go through it second.
Mhmm. And then after they've gone through it a couple times, identify any emerging leaders. Who are the people that might go into a management role? I just want like, give them the course for $350. Mhmm.
They go, oh my god. You care about me. Yeah. And they get more productive.
Steve: Absolutely. And then, so I wanna talk about skills in the conference before I do that. Yeah. The other one is COO. The the, Second in Command.
I'm sorry. Yeah. Second in Command, which is another powerful book. So I have a coach, Amanda Dean. I have to shout her out because she listens to the show.
And she was the one that was saying, like, hey. Like, you're struggling in this department, this area, and the reason why is because you don't actually know how to be a COO. Have your COO read the book and have him report back, right, the lessons he took from it. Because you're a visionary Yep. Which is great.
Cameron: Yep. There are a lot of
Steve: books written written for visionaries. Fun. Not so many books written for
Cameron: And there's also a lot of books written for visionaries that teach them one very bad thing, and the one I'll call out is traction. I'm friends with Gino Wickman. I love Gino. I love his book Traction. The biggest detriment he's done to the entrepreneurial world, sadly, is not saying to the visionaries, just because you have an integrator doesn't mean you don't have to care about the stuff that they're doing.
Mhmm. Doesn't mean you just drop it on their plate and walk away from it. Doesn't mean that now you just get to go play golf every day.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: That's called abdicating. Yeah. And we have a lot of visionaries like, oh, I can't do that. I'm the visionary. Well, then you better know for sure that they can do it Mhmm.
Whether they have a coach or a mentor that can help them do it or a community like the CO Alliance that can help them do it. But if you just push them off into a vacuum, I guarantee you in six months, you're pointing your finger going, that COO is screwing up,
Steve: but
Cameron: there's three fingers pointing back at you. Yeah. Right? So it's often I think the visionary integrator model can be very detrimental.
Steve: It's funny. Definitely an unintended unintended consequence. Correct. But it's true. I've heard so many people's like, oh, I'm just a visionary.
Yeah. Or I'm a visionary. I don't have to worry about that.
Cameron: Yeah. Exactly. Because it it gives them this unintended hall pass that's not what they meant.
Steve: Yeah. So, but the other one so we really jumped at me because I know you talked about it when, you spoke at Collective Genius, the skill and confidence leader.
Cameron: Mhmm.
Steve: Our skill and confidence that they're two different,
Cameron: Yeah. So I I visualize I'll use up a house painting analogy. I visualize that every leader in a company is climbing up two ladders. Mhmm. Two long 40 foot ladders right beside each other.
And their left hand and left foot is climbing up the skills ladder, and their right hand and right foot is climbing up the confidence ladder. Our job is to grow people's skills and grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their confidence and grow their skills. Right? Mhmm. And if at any point their confidence is shaking, they're not gonna be able to learn any more skills.
They're gonna freeze. If at any point their skills are shaky, they're gonna lose confidence. So our job is to grow them. Mhmm. Always growing them.
As the company doubles in size, we have to keep growing them. You can bring in the most senior person from outside of your company when you double your revenue twice. If you haven't been focusing on growing their skills and confidence and connections, you're gonna have to replace them again. Mhmm.
Steve: Closing this, though, I I didn't mean I I didn't ask this earlier. You were talking about having, an account that you would listen to. Yeah. So what was you said that that was a lesson you learned. Yeah.
So did you become a better listener, or did you replace the guy?
Cameron: Both. We replaced him with, the woman who actually helped ring the fire alarm and say we're going bankrupt. It was Trish Saltes. She was a former She
Steve: was someone else in the organization?
Cameron: She we hired her. She was a former head of finance for Business Objects.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: We brought her in as our CFO. And literally in the first week or two, she rang the fire alarm and said, you we're going bankrupt. Like, you guys are running out of cash. Mhmm.
Steve: And
Cameron: we're like, what are you talking about? And she showed us the truth. She was also very strong, like, a very strong strong leader. So we were willing to listen because she was and we knew that we needed some help. We knew we were we we'd gotten big.
Like, I was very aware in the last four or five months that I was there. I was very aware that it had gotten big. You know, we had 13 operating p and l's, 13 operating companies. We were operating in four countries, 330 cities, 248 people at the head office. Like, it was just it was a big business.
What's what what do you
Steve: have 13 operating P and Ls for?
Cameron: Well, it could be because we had Australia company. We had a US company. We had a UK company. We had the Canadian company. We had our call center, which was a separate organization.
Our our advertising phone was a separate organization. We had some corporate locations that we owned. Yeah. Got it.
Steve: Alright. So I'm gonna ask you another question about how
Cameron: you run out of money. I don't know. Freaking do that.
Steve: But let me read this real quick.
Cameron: Yeah. Big thanks
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Cameron: Well, you know what else is interesting about this? Is this a fractional CFO firm or the Yeah. You know what's amazing? When you're a small company, you can't afford a CFO. But you can't afford not to have a company like Beck CFO.
I don't even know their company, but you can't afford not to have them looking at your financials, looking at your budget, giving you feedback, coaching your controller. Yeah. It's like it it's it's almost irresponsible to not have somebody like that looking in. When I started my company after leaving one eight hundred Got Junk, my original company name was BackPocket COO because you couldn't afford me as a full time COO Mhmm. But you couldn't afford to have me to not have me in your back pocket.
Right. Right. So that's why I became this fractional coach and fractional COO for all these companies.
Steve: Which makes sense. That's what
Cameron: I started eighteen years ago. Okay. Got it. So Yeah. Good company to use.
Steve: Yeah. Definitely. So I think the question then is, how do you Got more for your
Cameron: ad dollars on that one, didn't you? It's true though.
Steve: How do you run out of money at a $106,000,000
Cameron: in the Did you spend $5,000,000 on office reno and leases and glass stairways and taxes and bonuses? But was it like, I guess the question here is you're still profitable. Correct. 106,000,000.
Steve: Correct. So this is just really bad cash management.
Cameron: Correct. Bad cash management.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. Because I remember, I can't remember who it was.
Cameron: But do if you'd asked Brian and I that morning how much money is payroll next week, we're like, I don't know.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Why would we need to know? We always had money for payroll. Mhmm. We had no idea. Yeah.
I knew what revenue needed to be. I knew how many franchisees I needed. I knew what, like I knew the metrics. Mhmm. But I didn't I never worried about it.
Steve: Right. So
Cameron: And we actually looked at our p and l monthly, but it was never, like, a thing that we had to worry about.
Steve: Well, p and l is what you learn about when you first get in the business. But there's this whole other thing called a balance sheet.
Cameron: And then budget and cash flow as well.
Steve: Cash and cash flow management. That stuff that stuff sucks.
Cameron: Yeah. It's confusing. Yeah. So if you have an interim CFO
Steve: Mhmm. They'll
Cameron: look at your financials with you and help make sure that you're set up for success. As you mentioned, to, like, control the amount of tax you're spending. Mhmm. Right? So optimize for tax.
Yeah. They're all important issues.
Steve: So, and then going back to I guess, we got the second command. We've got, invest in your leaders. Right? That's what it's, yeah, invest in your leaders. An excellent program.
Like I said, I've gone through invest in your leaders. I've digested the the second command. ViviVision, obviously, dramatic impact on my business. But you also have the COO Alliance. Yeah.
What is that?
Cameron: The COO Alliance is a network for second in commands. Mhmm. So there's a lot of groups for entrepreneurs. You've got Collective Genius. You've got EO.
You've got the Genius Network. You've got YPO. You've got Vistage. There's so many groups of entrepreneurs. Mhmm.
And then there's groups for lawyers and accountants and CFOs, lots of those industry groups. There was never an organization for the second in command. If I was to retitle it today, I would probably call it the second in command society or something Mhmm. Because we have members that are presidents and VP ops, but it's the person that is the second in command to the CEO. Mhmm.
Like, whoever is your second in command should be in the COO Alliance Mhmm. Because it gives them the skills. It gives them the resources. It it helps them shed the imposter syndrome. It takes away their loneliness being in the role.
So that was the the purpose for it. We have members from 18 countries. Our average size member is about 34,000,000 in revenue. Mhmm. You need 2,000,000 in revenue just to qualify, 5,000,000 in revenue to come to the in person events.
Got it. Where are
Steve: the in person events?
Cameron: One's at MIT in Boston, and then the other's in Vancouver, Canada. And we're holding a third next year in Dubai. We're gonna do three a year now. Dubai. I'm resident in Dubai now.
My company's based there, and I'm a resident there.
Steve: For tax reasons?
Cameron: I'm Canadian, so I'm not taxed on worldwide income. Boom. Mic drop.
Steve: Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic.
Cameron: Legally. Yeah.
Steve: So then, so we talked about, you know, being a nomad. Yeah. So you said, you know, like, you got into business so that you can control your time. You control do go wherever you wanna go. Do whatever you wanna do.
So it's been four years now. Yeah. You've been a nomad.
Cameron: Four years and two months.
Steve: So let's talk about some of the lessons here of, like, the biggest things that you didn't expect.
Cameron: On the business side? Or
Steve: Just just Personal? Personal.
Cameron: We're so similar. If you take a look at the global landscape of people Mhmm. We're so similar. The cultures of humans that we're struggling, that we have our fears and our insecurities and family issues and health issues and parents' issues and spouses' issues, and we're so similar. Whether you're in Bhutan or Korea or Japan or Saudi Arabia or like, we're all the same.
That's been beautifully it's been incredible to see.
Steve: I'm very Human condition.
Cameron: Yeah. I got a new tattoo last year. It's a Ram Doss quote. I put it in Hindi. It's it's walking each other home
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: To remind me that none of this matters. We're all just walking each other home Mhmm. Right, until we die. So that that's been really kind of a good learning for me. I realized that none of this matters.
It's been a big lesson. Mhmm. Like, we can enjoy the journey. We can have fun. We can have hobbies.
North Americans, Americans specifically, are so on tilt Mhmm. With, like, caring about what we do for work. Only work. Only work. Only work.
And then, you know, two weeks vacation. Like, Italy takes five weeks vacation, and they take July off. You know, like, most countries take five or six weeks vacation. And they have hobbies, and they have families, and they have They
Steve: take five weeks and July? And July. Yeah. Who is this?
Cameron: Italy.
Steve: Italy. Got it.
Cameron: And that's normal. And somebody's like, oh, well, they don't like, they're not, you know, there's no good entrepreneurs in Italy. Really? How about Bending Spoons? They just bought AOL this morning.
Mhmm. They're pretty solid company. Right? $1,800,000,000. There's plenty of great companies in Italy.
So I think you have to look for what's happening global. There's lessons. How do you treat your people differently globally? I've learned that. I've learned that in in Thailand, no one's ever gonna tell their boss that they're screwing up.
Mhmm. I I've so I've learned about yeah. I've just been able to learn that stuff around business. I've also been very aware of wonder. Like, I walk around constantly taking pictures and, you know, exploring the world and seeing some cool stuff happening.
Steve: Yeah. It was, I can't remember which book it was. Maybe it was Outliers, but they were talking about, like, the reason why Korean Airlines kept crashing in the mountains. Right? It's because in Korean, it is disrespectful To say.
To say something to the pilot.
Cameron: It was it was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So that's a really important thing to learn.
Right? If if if you're running a company and you have those people that aren't gonna tell you the problem, you have to create a safe space for them to tell you the problem. Mhmm. You have to invite them to tell you the problem. Yeah.
Right? You and that's kind of like when when this Indonesian, who was our head of finance, was so quiet and so amiable, I didn't create a safe space for him to tell us what he saw. Mhmm. He saw it. Mhmm.
Steve: So that's a whole part, like, in the in the in the book where it's like, hey, there's a black spot over there. Hey, it's really dark over there. Hey, it's really dark over there. What he wanted to say was there's a mountain we're about to crash into, but he couldn't say it.
Cameron: Right. So you have to then hire the people that have the confidence to say it and give them the place to say it both.
Steve: Yeah. And that's something that we worked really hard on. Something I'm proud of is that we have a very much safe space here where, like, everyone has psychological safety. Right. No one can get in trouble.
Actually, that's
Cameron: so that's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right? Safety and security is the base layer. Mhmm. Friends and family, and then, like, into to purpose and then meaning and, like, self actualization.
Yeah. Safety and security is at the base of Maslow. You have to give employees that. Yeah. And right now, they're all terrified about their jobs, about AI, about robotics.
Mhmm. You've gotta make sure that they understand they're safe.
Steve: Yeah. It's, it's it's, I had my brother. He just started here, last week. And, he's younger. Twelve years younger.
Right? And we're Asian. Right? So, like, being the oldest of six boys, like
Cameron: Mhmm.
Steve: There's this command. Right? Yeah. Of course. So there was a concern by him working here, but those concerns have been all eliminated.
Because last night, he's like, we need to have
Cameron: a conversation about how you
Steve: roll these things out. Like, awesome. So then looking at, like, your life now, so you were as a kid, you're like, here's the life I'm gonna have. I'm gonna be an entrepreneur so I can do whatever I want, whatever I want.
Cameron: Yeah. How's your how does your life
Steve: right now align with what you what your expectations were?
Cameron: I'm facing a a a decision shortly Mhmm. Of when is enough enough. I think I've hit an economic free zone now where I've hit a number that I'll never spend all the money that I have. Mhmm. So I don't know how much more to keep working for the sake of working Mhmm.
Or for investing, because I I don't I I I understand what my needs and my goal. I have a really great lifestyle, but I also know that I'm I'm painfully aware that we're all gonna die. Mhmm. You know, my mom died at ten days older than I am today. She died at 60, and she was very healthy.
My dad died at 80 just two summer three summers ago. So I'm hitting this kind of stage where I'm like, why why am I doing this? Right? And at what point? Mhmm.
So trying to understand what what will I do when I stop running businesses. Will will it be all of my hobbies? What will fill my need for connection with other entrepreneurs? How will I fill that need for connection with other entrepreneurs? So I'm thinking lots about that right now.
So the Which is maybe different from what I was thinking about in the earlier years. Right?
Steve: Right. Well, you're you're in
Cameron: a fulfillment state. Yeah. I just turned 60 this week.
Steve: Yeah. Happy birthday. Thank you. So as you're thinking about it right? Right, because this is a spot where a lot of us aspire to get to.
Cameron: Mhmm. Right?
Steve: We we get we we hustle. We, long nights, basically just destroying our health. Yeah. We accomplish all these things. You get it?
Cameron: I I I the a couple big lessons from that are I'm very glad that I learned how to invest at 16. Mhmm. And I understood compound growth, and I understood how to how to buy the right core stocks and hold them Mhmm. Keep buying more and more of them and keep holding them, that's proven very well. So for anybody who's watching or listening, like, learn about compound growth.
Start investing today. Don't gamble. Like, I don't go out and speculate. Like, I've if you saw my stock portfolio, I I guarantee you know them. Mhmm.
NVIDIA, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Visa, Tesla, Uber, Palantir. We got a couple, like, that are a little bit more speculative down below, but I have smaller positions in them. But my like, my core is my core. My only crypto that I own is Bitcoin. I have a lot of it.
I've been buying it since 2014, almost every month, dollar cost averaging. I started talking on Facebook in 2014 about Bitcoin Mhmm. Getting completely laughed at. It was 400 to $600 a coin. Started acquiring it in 2017.
But it's a core like, understand investing in compound growth. So as entrepreneurs, it's very dangerous to keep doubling down.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: If you go to Vegas and you bet some money and you win, you put it all on black and you win, you put it all, you're gonna lose at some point. Mhmm. So you always have to pull some chips off the table. And I think as an entrepreneur, no matter what you're doing, pull some chips off the table and invest. Pull some more off the table and invest and keep growing the business.
Mhmm. But don't go all in. That's one. Mhmm. The other one is to take care of the racehorse.
There's a Latin saying about the men sanno and corpore sanno, which means a healthy mind and a healthy body. And I think we have to take care of our body, the racehorses. Mhmm. Right? There's no pro athlete that works sixty hours a week in their sport.
They cross train. They relax. They get massage. They get coaching. They get mindset coaching.
They have nutrition. Right? And then they go out and perform.
Steve: Yeah. There are times where I think, you
Cameron: know Go Blue Jays, by the way. Blue Jays playing some games. Game five.
Steve: There are times where I think about, it'd be nice if I was like LeBron James. I could just spend a million dollars a year on my body. No.
Cameron: Well, you can spend parts of it on. Right? Mhmm. But we can drink water.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Right? We can get exercise every day. We can sleep better. Mhmm. We can eat healthier food.
There's a lot of stuff that we can do that like, we can meditate. Yeah. We can go for walks after dinner. There's lots that we can do that don't cost a lot of money, but most people don't do the basics. It's true.
Right? They make excuses if I was LeBron James I have, but, like, do you go for a walk after every meal? Yeah. Do you drink lots of water during the day? Mhmm.
Right?
Steve: Are you just gonna call me out right now on my own show? Okay. I appreciate that. Fortunately, I haven't I have been because we're in Arizona, the weather's been nice. So we have been walking together after dinners.
Not as much as we should, but we've been doing that now.
Cameron: You also do or deep squats. You do 20 or 30 squats after every meal. The Japanese do it all the time.
Steve: What is this?
Cameron: You do squats. Like, you stand you just do, like Air squats? Yeah. Air squats. Do 25 air squats after every meal.
It actually gets the metabolism going. I've never heard of that. It's a Japanese thing. It's pretty interesting.
Steve: Got it. So what do you want to be remembered for?
Cameron: I I don't really care. Mhmm. I think on the significant side globally Mhmm. I'm not trying to do anything that way. I think I want I really want to make sure my two boys are off and running and good and healthy and happy.
And as adults, that's probably my biggest thing is making sure that I've helped them launch
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: Or that they're they're launched. And then I think it's just living my core purpose. Like, I love helping entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. It's why I said yes to this podcast. Mhmm.
You know, I I feel like everyone's like a fly trying to get out the window, and they bang their head on the window, and they end up dead head on the windowsill.
Steve: Yeah. I'm not sure I
Cameron: need to be known for that, but I'd like to help as many of them as I can to figure out this door right here. Just a shortcut.
Steve: Well, I have three girls. Okay. So this is the same concern of mine. How do I make sure they launch, the right way?
Cameron: Keeps them investing. Mhmm. My 24 year old right now is is approaching a half $1,000,000 invested at 24 years old. And he just works in the film industry, but he invests like crazy. He's the guy that told me about NVIDIA five years ago, just over five years ago.
Mhmm. And we started plowing money in every month. Yeah. Teach them about dollar cost averaging. Teach them to pick stocks.
Teach them to invest. My deal with my kids is while you're at home, 50% of all the money you make has to get invested. As soon as you move out, 20% has to. So build that habit. Mhmm.
Get them into, like, sports and get them into, you know, nutritional things and, like, teach them those things. Make sure they have friends. Gotcha. So Teach them that comparison is the thief of joy. Like, everything they see on the Internet is everybody's best day, but nobody's showing a three hundred sixty five bad days.
Make sure they really understand that. Yeah. Girls, especially.
Steve: We've had those conversations. Who knows if that's if that's sticking, but we've had those conversations.
Cameron: Keep having them until they're making fun of you. Jim Collins said that until you're make until your team is making fun of you, your ideas haven't started to stick.
Steve: That's a great measuring point.
Cameron: Right. When when you start and they go, comparison is the thief of joy, dad Mhmm. They get it.
Steve: Yeah. That's a powerful lesson right there. And then, what is your biggest struggle today?
Cameron: My wife and I are going through some tough times. Mhmm. They're really working on ourselves and our marriage and how to navigate that, how to how to be vulnerable with each other and how to be with each other and how to communicate with each other and take care of each other and, how to talk with our friends about it and talk to coaches and counselors. That's that's the toughest thing I'm going through right now.
Steve: I was gonna say how you're taking care of it, but you're going through it. You're going through counseling. Yep. It's tough. Yeah.
The what I learned was, we use the predictive index. That's what we like for measuring personality measuring behavioral profiles and so on. And my wife took it after I took it. And I was like, oh, I see why we butthead so much. Right.
Like, I'm a driver. But according to this, you're a huge driver. Like, you have to have your way. So then it's like, man, like, how do we like, which battles do we pick?
Cameron: It is it is relationships are about learning about the others, slowing down to care, right, communicate. And then I think it is about working through the tough times too.
Steve: Yeah. And then this is might be a weird question for you.
Cameron: You know what's a really good hack, by the way?
Steve: What's that?
Cameron: If both of you take your predictive index results
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: And put it into chat CPT and say, this is me. I'm the husband. Mhmm. This is my wife's results. Can you teach us how to work better together?
It's been set up. And then say give it to me in grade six language.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: You can do that with disc profiles. You can do that with Colby profiles. You can do that with you and your VP.
Steve: Mhmm.
Cameron: It's a really cool hack of teach me and the other person how to work better together with whatever personality profile we used.
Steve: That's a huge hack. Yeah. Yeah. We use the one that's, like, the PI one. Yep.
It wasn't so great. No. It's like it's like how to be a coworker.
Cameron: Well, they talk to you as a scientist. Yeah. So so just say give it to me in grade six language Mhmm. And say this is me as a husband. This is me and my wife.
Mhmm. Teach us how to be better as our relationship. Yeah. Really powerful.
Steve: I'm definitely gonna do that. I will say the one that was the best so far of all the ones that we've taken was the Enneagram.
Cameron: Well, they're all good. Mhmm. But they only teach you one sliver of that other person. Yeah. So, like, do do one sliver a year.
Mhmm. Do another test next year. Do another test next year. Make it part of your date night or whatever. Right?
Steve: Yeah. No. I think that's great. And then for you, you've got multiple bestsellers. Mhmm.
Right? Like, you've you're an accomplished author. So what book have you gifted more than any other?
Cameron: The book Endurance by, Albert Lansing about Ernest Shackleton's voyage to the Antarctic. I bought I
Steve: have not heard that one. Oh, it's
Cameron: amazing. My favorite book of all time, my grandfather, who is a voracious reader. Mhmm. So the story of have you have you heard the story of of Ernest Shackleton? This was a hundred and five years ago.
He took all the people from The UK to go explore the Antarctic, and their ship ship wrecked. Mhmm. And they had to live on the ice flows. They had to get to this island by rope. It's a fantastic true story
Steve: Okay.
Cameron: And how every person survives. Crazy. Got
Steve: it. Alright.
Cameron: It was Steve Jobs' number two favorite book of all time. His number one was Autobiography of a Yogi. His favorite second was Endurance.
Steve: Yeah. Surprised. I've never heard of that. Mhmm. So I'll have to check that out.
So if someone wants to connect with you, learn more about your program, and so on, what is the best way for them to reach with you?
Cameron: Yeah. Easiest way is goto.com. It's herold.so.com. Mhmm. It has links for the CO Alliance, for my Invest in Your Leaders training, for my Second in Command podcast, my books, my YouTube channels.
It's all there.
Steve: Yeah. So, again, this is an incredible honor. I appreciate you coming out. Like I said, you made a massive impact in my life multiple times, right, through multiple, programs. It was an incredible honor for you to come on.
So thank you very much.
Cameron: Thanks so much. Yeah. Appreciate it.
Steve: Thank you guys for watching. See you guys next time.
Cameron: Shout out to Steve train. Jump on the Steve train. Disrupt us.
