Cameron Herold

Cameron Herold is a top business consultant best-selling author of multiple books and a world-renowned speaker he’s the driving force behind hundreds of companies exponential growth and he’s directly influenced numerous businesses through his expertise he’s the founder of coo alliance author of double double reading suck vivid vision free pr the miracle morning for entrepreneurs and no doubt many more in the future he’s also the mastermind behind one eight hundred scotch 1-800 got junks amazing growth as their ceo today he’s the advisor to several large companies including a big four wireless carrier and a monarchy welcome to pivot me cameron hey april thanks very much for having me appreciate it so i think what’s on everyone’s mind uh cameron is how does one become the advisor to a monarchy like is that a right place right time thing is it a linkedin post i’m just curious about that piece a little bit of both it’s it’s right time right place by design though so something i noticed years ago was i i ended up flying in business toss one day and then i met this business guy and i ended up coaching him i’m like that was random like and then i thought about i’m like no everyone sitting in business class is usually running a company or a senior executive and most of the people sitting in economy aren’t and i realize that the the the return on investment of paying to be sitting in business versus paying to be sitting in economy if i chatted with people randomly not the whole flight but just got to know them i would get a return on investment so i’ve never flown economy in the last 10 years i only stood in business closer first so i was on a flight from vancouver to scottsdale i have a home in each city and i was sitting beside this woman and i said so um what do you do and she goes well she goes i’m i’m the second in command for a large group of companies that’s owned by we could call she goes we could call it a sovereign wealth fund and i’m like okay that’s huge and she goes how about you and i said i’m i’ve worked with entrepreneurial companies all over the world i’ve written a bunch of books and um she said wait a second she goes did you just say wendy under got junk and i said yeah she goes is your name cameron and i said yeah she goes i heard about you the other day up in whistler she was is one of your books called double double and i said yes and she goes well we should talk so we started talking a little bit more turns out she’s the second command to the monarchy the family that owns the company of qatar so qatar is this is an owned it’s an absolute monarchy they own everything so they own so she wanted me to come over and coach them and i didn’t really want to go over to the middle east because it’s a long way i’ve been over before and i didn’t really want to fly so i doubled my daily rates and then said you know if you want to pay me um and it was a hundred grand for three days i said if you want to pay me a hundred grand fly me over first class pay my hotels pay my food i’ll do it and she said okay she goes can we wire you 50 next week and then we’ll pay you the rest the day before you come and i’m like [ __ ] i should have doubled it again there’s just so much money over there it’s obscene yeah and anyway that’s that’s how it started so yeah i went over and did some work with them over there wow and so was it like business coaching is it uh i was working with them on in the in that case i was working with them on core values culture and some of the people systems and really getting them to think about across all their businesses

some of the north american systems on on people and culture and and kind of aligning people with a greater purpose instead of just saying you have to do this yeah and then spring was the same thing i was sitting on a flight from chicago to miami and i was sitting beside this massive entrepreneur and we were sitting talking i diagnosed him as having add bipolar and being on the spectrum for tourette’s and he kind of looked at me and goes how do you know that about me and i said i just know entrepreneurs better than anyone on the planet i started drawing these diagrams turns out he was just getting ready to sell his first company for just over a billion dollars to spread to softbank and it was marcelo claray who ended up being worth over a billion dollars and then being appointed the ceo of sprint he turned around sprints that’s when i coached him in his second command for 18 months and he’s now the ceo of wework trying to turn around wework so wow yeah wow so you weren’t kidding about where you sit on the plane really mattered yeah totally well i could go on and on about the number of speaking events i’ve landed or people that have bought 400 copies of meetings suck or just from sitting in business no i’m reminded of a bob hope quote that says um of course i was at the right place at the right time i put myself there yeah my dad used to say you got to be good to be lucky and lucky to be good that’s good that’s good i like it you know one thing um so kind of just taking a different direction i’m curious on this so when when you’re sitting next to the person um from the monarchy and it’s not something you’ve done before right so you have a framework that works for businesses but was there at all like a hesitation i love kind of pulling on the thread of okay you just did something completely different than you had was there any hesitation about okay i have this framework will it still apply for a country yeah see i don’t apply it as a framework and it’s why i will never try to template myself and replicate myself like i don’t want to have a group of people coaching cameron systems or it’s very much an art of understanding and it’s why i can charge what i charge but it’s it’s very much an art on me understanding businesses understanding the idiosyncrasies of the entrepreneurs and being very careful with who i say yes to i don’t work with government i don’t work with boring blue collar manufacturing i have to be in as my criteria is young fun entrepreneurial high viral high growth republic the monarchy was a one-off opportunity and then sprint i just became really really good friends with the ceo and his wife i’ve stayed at both their homes in kansas city and miami i just became good friends with them and that happened to me doing some coaching with the ceo and then also a year and a half coaching his second in command but most of my clients would be probably in the five to two hundred million dollar range okay um is that common thing that you become friends with your clients i’ve noticed that as kind of a theme oh yeah for sure yeah i don’t think about it i don’t wanna coach somebody that i can’t be friends with because i’m very much an open like the way i’m talking to you now is the way i talk on stage the way i talked with marcelo it’s just i’m just me and i don’t really in fact i’ve got a bracelet that i wear that says authentic i just don’t so i have to be friends with them because they’re going to get to know me right away anyway i want to get to know them like i actually want to i’m kind of doing this for fun yeah well because you get enjoy it obviously and i get paid for it which is kind of cool sure that’s amazing um yeah it’s interesting because a lot of people from the coaching world will say no you can’t be there if you’re going to be the coach you can’t be their friend so i love that that’s a deviation of i’m spending a lot of time with these people i get real and vulnerable i gotta like them i’m also less of a coach and more of a mentor okay if you think about the consulting kind of spectrum you’ve got on the one end coaching where you use the socratic method to ask a lot of questions to get them to figure out for themselves therapist you know a therapist can’t be friends with their client but then on the other end you’ve got the consultants who you’re going to hire to do work for you i kind of sit in the middle and i think more as the mentor you you can be good friends with your mentor right they are going to call you on your [ __ ] but they’re also going to be there to support you and help you and hold your hand and they’re going to be there for you so i’m very much that kind of trusted advisor who’s been there before them but i’m i don’t need to keep an unbiased approach to it yeah no i love it i love it so let’s let’s jump into your back story a little bit so one thing that was really fascinating to me is that you were we were groomed as an entrepreneur and i that’s that’s again a little bit of a deviation for me because most of the entrepreneurs i talked to weren’t groomed they were groomed to be really really good employees um and so i love that you were groomed but i’m curious talk through what that was like how you were specifically groomed to be an entrepreneur well it’s funny i i hired elon musk’s brother kimball in 1993 and i remember him telling me that he was told in his business class at queen’s university that he was being groomed as a middle manager at a corporation

he’s like ah get me out of here and he really wanted to be an entrepreneur so i gave him his first entrepreneurial venture i hired him as a franchisee for college pro painters uh i also hired his cousin who built solar city but the um so the grooming wasn’t in the school system in fact far from it the school system nearly destroyed me my father and mother groomed the three of us kids to be entrepreneurs okay both of my grandfathers one one said my grandmother and grandfather were an entrepreneur they owned their own resort together my other grandfather was the ceo of a big pharmaceutical company so so we only ever knew business in our family and then my dad ran his own company for years and and um they groomed us so that the three my brother and my sister and myself have all owned our own companies for between 15 and 25 years today that’s all we’ve ever done i had my first company when i was 21 i had 12 employees when i was 21. so for three years in university i had a business while i was in university i graduated with no debt bought a house and paid my own way through school but we were set up that way but what my dad taught us i think the most about being an entrepreneur was you control your time it’s not about money and he showed us at a very very early age that the biggest benefit of being an entrepreneur was you can do whatever you want whenever you want and i think a lot of people today unfortunately are trying to become entrepreneurs to make the money and they think they’re missing the point the money will be there but if you don’t enjoy the free time along the way you’ve missed the entire journey so i don’t work nights and i don’t work weekends and i very rarely work fridays this is a pretty rare i’ve got a half day today but i pretty because i took last two and a half weeks off but i’m very very careful with my time it is the most precious non-renewable resource right well it’s also it’s also like we’re all going to die like none of this actually matters like we may as well have some fun along the way enjoy it i imagine that plays into the kind of people that you pick to work with as well yeah like i mentioned to you before we started that i was in lake tahoe and um i hung out with um tony lilios who was a great entrepreneur lives in incline and but for me to meet up with him in coffee i had to wait for him to get off his hoverboarding he was out on enough surfing foil out on lake tahoe yeah and like how often he do that he’s like five days a week and he’s like a successful entrepreneur but the most important thing for him is that being out spending time with his kids or his hobbies right i think a lot of entrepreneurs miss that yeah it’s so true it’s so true um there’s so many things that pull us into believing the reverse model right and we forget to put those big rocks in first and just you know to use the steven covey concept you end up filling up your base with the sand yeah it makes no point like no sense you got to work on the important things versus the urgent things you gotta as jim collins also said work on the um the critical few things versus many yeah yeah and the critical few don’t usually bark the loudest that’s the trick is that they’re hard to hear because all the other things are barking so loud that we forget to go oh yeah that’s right these things actually don’t really matter it’s these things over here that sit quietly in the corner that if you don’t address them is a huge lost opportunity yeah i’ll give you a system that i learned years ago from strangely enough from napoleon hills think and grow rich um we we used it at 1 800 god junk so i’ve learned it 20 years ago now the basic idea is at the end of every day think about the five biggest things you need to do tomorrow and make a list of those five big things you need to get done put them in order of impact one through five and then first thing in the morning start working on item one then work on item two work on item three etcetera and don’t get into your email and the rest of your business until you get your five critical things done yeah i then told that story to a group of entrepreneurs at eo one time and one of them literally created an app called commit to three because i said i know that well that was based on me telling the story i said i don’t like five i like three so he created an app called commit to three so that’s what i now use as my daily accountability for me to figure out what’s important so here’s my daily top three right there yeah that’s amazing i’m familiar with that app yeah it’s great and it’s so simple because you have an accountability partner and whoever sets their goals first it kind of nudges you to go oh [ __ ] i should stop working on the busy work and i may as well work on those as you called it the things hiding in the corner so um i have to tell you i do the same thing and here’s my three things right here this is i follow this uh checklist every single day for the same right so i’m right there with you cameron um one thing i want to talk about so we’re talking about the entrepreneurs and and um being groomed as one uh i saw your i think it was a ted talk on raising your kids to be an entrepreneur and i want to talk about that because i think that people think about that in the theoretical but what does that actually look like raising your kids to be an entrepreneur um so shifting gears a little bit so i’ve i’ve two girls i have a seven and nine year old and they very much have the entrepreneur flare um but then when you actually try to facilitate that your kids what does it look like so it started out as lemonade stands for us and now it’s evolved cameron into them taking dragging a table out to our front yard and taking the toys usually the ones that i bought most recently for like 30 bucks and sticking three dollar price tags on it trying to sell them to you know random strangers in our neighborhood and then i then i i find myself in a situation where i’m going okay do i support their entrepreneur endeavors but also be present so they don’t you know get kidnapped or something terrible like that what does it actually look like to encourage entrepreneurism in in kids yeah you just touched on it and it’s my biggest pet peeve with today’s set of parents who are trying to encourage entrepreneurship is if you want your kid to run the lemonade stand go back in your house and do your own freaking hobby in your own life do your own [ __ ] even if you have to just sit and play candy crush all day but let your kids sit out at the end of your driveway and sell lemonade and come back in every half hour ago nobody’s buying coach them from inside let them go back but you do your kid no service by standing out behind them waving people in because then the kids like run your own damn lemonade stand sure sure what i what my lessons from all so in my tedx talk that i did 10 or 11 years ago it’s still on the main ted.com website but raising entrepreneurial kids i learned from every business venture that i ever had because i was doing it but the way i learned was my dad would sit down and say how did it go what did you learn so i’d be like well i’ll give you an example i was selling license plate protectors they would slip in behind the license plate to hold the license plate straight now we get them from the car dealer but back in those days we didn’t have them so everybody’s license plate’s all crinkled up from parking into whatever so i remember knocking on this door and the guy said i don’t need one and i said well i saw your car out front is all crimpled this will keep it straight and he looked at me and smiled and he said well i don’t need two and i said well you’ve got a license plate on the front of your car a license plate on the back and you’ve got your wife’s car so really you need four and he starts laughing he goes i’ll tell you what how about i take one and in two weeks you can come back i said let’s do this i’ll put one on your car right now and i’ll come back in one week and if it’s still straight you buy the other three and he starts laughing he goes okay great negotiation i learned how to negotiate yeah i learned how to kind of find a middle ground i learned how to move the deadline up but my dad made me a 12 or 11 years old think about those lessons so the way you raise your kids as entrepreneurs is let them do and because your kid’s not going to be selling stuffed animals for the rest of their lives but if they are maybe they’ll become like a big st you know maybe they’ll understand right but my dad would when all of a sudden with my lemonade stand if it was every weekend he would start charging me for the for the kool-aid he would charge me for the sugar he would rent me the table i’d have to pay him so so i’m like wait you didn’t rent me last time he goes yeah last time was your first time now you need to understand costs of goods sold so i come back i made five bucks you go well the sugar costs 30 cents the kool-aid cost 20 cents the table i’m like and i realized it would be gone but i learned he didn’t ever stand outside i went in and made the kool-aid i spilled it over the counter i cleaned it up i brought it outside i made the shitty little sign i mean nobody’s buying he’d go well what’s your sign look like can you come out he goes do you think that’s the best you can do i’m like no so then i’d go back and i’d make a better sign but nowadays moms are sitting in the garage with their kid for six days assembling some cool lemonade stand they bought on [ __ ] amazon like yeah you’re not doing anything yeah makes total sense makes a little sense so the people people learn four there’s four different parts of the life cycle of learning the first is the abstract conceptualization you’re going to learn the concept then you’re going to learn by concrete experience sorry by active experimentation that’s the role play okay so so what’s a lemonade stand how does it work you talk to your kid about that they go okay i get it let’s look online okay what what might you say when a customer comes how do you so that’s the active experimentation let’s practice in the house then concrete experiences let them go out and do it and then reflective observation is when they come back in and you talk to them about it but you need to let your kids go through and as adults you need to go through those four parts of the cycle and then continually loop the learning yeah makes complete sense and i think especially in today’s day and age we do it’s easy to hop in and do it for them right it’s so easy it’s almost more work in some regards to let them just do it like let them go out and fail and get up again it’s almost more work i was talking to ceo about this the other day and i said you know when was the last time you wrote shotgun with one of your sales guys he goes oh i went out six weeks ago we were seven minutes into the call he was screwing it up so i took it over i’m like dude you missed the opportunity like let him screw up the entire one-hour call take notes go do a second call let him screw that one up too then talk to him after you’ve watched two full one-hour calls and he screwed up seven times like but to take it over he doesn’t learn and and you’ve missed all the other things he’s screwing up that when you’re not there he’s gonna keep screwing up yeah so leadership at times is like zipping it keeping our our eyes open and then getting the learner to say all right we just did a sales call what went well what didn’t go well what can we do next time okay and here’s what i saw now listen yeah right that’s the same with growing your kids that’s really good language the learner i like that instead of saying the sales rep that he was training it’s the learner because that’s the position right yeah in every coaching relationship right you’ve got the mentor and the learner or the mentor the mentee yeah no i love that i love that so one of the things that we talk about switching gears a little bit um one of the things we talk about a lot in pivot me um as is the name is sort of on your trajectory here so where you are today that usually there is a pivot point if not many so in el language a lot of times we refer to them as inflection points but um usually in business sometimes it’s personal where everything changed for us like sometimes it’s i was in the corporate world and then i became an entrepreneur do you have can you tell us about a time where you had this pivotal moment where everything changed or you’re like this is what i’m supposed to be doing or this is not what i’m supposed to be doing yeah i’d say i have three or four and i’ll make them short the first one was getting involved with college pro painters when i was in university i bought a franchise i started running a house painting business at 21 years old that got me deep into entrepreneurship very quickly probably one of the best executive learning programs in the world right up there with xerox and procter and gamble it was spectacular really really because every year we hired 800 university students to be franchisees they then hired 8 000 students to be painters and in four months we’d do 64 million in house painting and then we would do it again and then i went on to the head office team i was in the top 30 people coaching and training and recruiting franchisees so for me it was a seven year amazing journey the second one was getting involved in the entrepreneurs organization so that was when i was building out a chain of auto body shops in the u.s it’s called gerber auto collision in canada it was boyd auto body i was in command there and we took that company public and i left there and in that time i was involved in the entrepreneurs organization meeting with all these other really smart under 40 entrepreneurs and that was my first mastermind it was when i learned about vulnerability and i didn’t have to be strong at everything so that got me into the whole mastermind world 1-800 got junk for sure um you know because we built such a massive brand and got all the pr that we got we landed 5200 stories in six years so being on oprah like that was a real kind of massive i guess inflection point and then lastly was meeting a guy named um yannick silver slash joe polish who really those two introduced me to a massive massive world of connectors and influencers and um yeah yeah it’s um um and i figured you were very familiar with the inflection point exercise so it would be an easy one to tackle and it’s interesting how we can have these experiences have the conversation or have the meeting with someone and it sends us on a totally different trajectory but we’ve got to be open to it right

the new key is once you know that concept is there how do you put yourself into those situations to that launch so like i’m i’m involved in four mastermind groups a year right now i pay 25 000 a year to go to be in the genius network i pay 10 000 every year to go to the main ted conference i’ve gone for nine years um i’ve been i’ve gone to five baby bathwater events i’ve gone to seven years of strategic coach i’ve gone to war room i’ve gone to like i’m plugged in and every time i invest in myself by going to i go to abundance 360. every time i go to one of those events my trajectory changes in retrospect you might go oh your trajectory changed because you were there it’s like no i went there on purpose i went there to change my trajectory because i don’t like groups i’m really nervous in groups okay yeah i would rather stand on a stage of a thousand people than go to a networking group and yet you do it all the time so because i know that every time i put myself there i get a 10 to a 100x return wow like by when i invest 25 000 in the genius network i easily get 250 000 either in new business or or ideas easy when you go to those events do you have a really clear goal on okay i’m going to this event and my intention is to get x amount of business or make x amount of connections i go in with three i go in with three things who are the three new people i want to meet who are the three current people that i know that i want to spend time with and what are the three needs like areas that i want to get better at that i can enter into a conversation so like right now i’m working on building out an online model so i’m talking to lots of people about online models continuity programs landing page like um so so i go into those three intentions who knew who current and what can i learn about yeah you know you mentioned uh in there when you’re talking about the events that you’re going to um vulnerability and i remember watching a talk that you did uh recently well you did the talk probably a while ago but i saw it recently and it was hey i’ve got this event and i think it was a group of ceos and one guy wasn’t showing up to the conference because he had imposter syndrome and we talk about imposter syndrome a lot on the show so people are very familiar with it um and i love that you said okay who else has feel who else is struggling with it who else is struggling with am i ready for this role do am i worthy to be in this room i love that you tackled that um talking about embracing vulnerability and this is something that um we’ve talked about in the past how do you balance i mean you probably know where i’m going with this how how how vulnerable should a leader be because people want to follow the guy with the plan right they got to be the guy with the plan but then how much vulnerability you bring to the table that with your team and so that there’s trust and there’s they’re identifying with your humanness but they also have confidence in your ability to lead and have the plan yeah so the leader has to be strong on the vision but doesn’t have to be strong on how to get there when you explain if you give that to your team though just like that then they think you might be weak so you give it to them in an analogy they see the strength in it so for me the analogy is this i’m a homeowner i want to build a home i know what i want my home to look like i know how i want it to feel i know what the kitchen needs to look like but i don’t know how nor do i want to learn how to do the electrical the plumbing put up walls and build a foundation and put in the roof sure i don’t want to learn it i don’t know how to do it but i want to hire a bunch of really smart people who know how to make my vision come true the leaders that are the most scary are the ones that have no idea where they’re going and they’re running around barking orders and nobody knows what we’re building it’s like are we building a house are we building a tree fort are we are we just practicing cart construction like what the hell are we doing here sure i don’t know we’re and they’re always flitting around so that’s the scarier part so i think you can be vulnerable with i don’t know how to do this as long as you’re very very clear on where you’re going and what it looks like and how you’re going to get there so that’s why i created that concept of the vivid vision that four or five page written document describing the future of your company i covered in three of my books and if you can describe what your company looks like acts like and feels like three years from today that gives your team a lot of confidence that yeah you’re not supposed to know how to do all of it i’m going to delegate everything except genius so i love the i love the concept of the vivid vision and can you expand on that a little bit and also how often you’re communicating that to your team sure so the idea of the vivid vision is based on science of visualization that athletes use where they visualize themselves performing the event or like a homeowner who can see what the home will look like but the contractor understands the vision well enough to create the plans and then plans to be employees and the employees can build the home without ever talking to the homeowner the entrepreneur usually has a vision of what they want their company to look like so the basic idea is to lean out into the future three years out so let’s say you go december 31st three years from today and you’re looking at almost as if you’re walking around your company virtual and in person you describe the meetings maybe three or four bullet points you describe a leadership team maybe three or four bullet points you describe what your customers are saying about you what the media is writing about you what your suppliers say about you you describe i.t and finance and engineering and operations and sales you describe your core values and the culture and you describe it without knowing how it happened but you describe your company as if it’s this living breathing organism three years from today that ends up becoming a four or five page rough document that you hand to a copywriter and a copywriter can polish it and make it pop off the page sure then you add some graphic design elements to it so it looks and feels like your brand it becomes a four or five six page maximum pdf that you hand to every employee and then you walk all the employees through it and get them reading it and thinking about what sentence are they most inspired about making come true and then over time you build the plans to make it unfold what i like doing is having every customer every supplier um all of my employees read it every quarter so okay yeah that way we’re always thinking about the future but executing on today and when you communicate that i imagine uh if you start to get out of alignment with that you probably got a few people that will remind you hey i thought this is where we were going yeah you’ll also get a few people that’ll go i don’t like what the future looks like i’m going to be perfect it’s the right time to go because that is what we’re building yeah and then everybody else all of a sudden goes oh now i understand why we’re doing this project and now i understand why you’re so obsessed about core values or now i understand where this strategically fits like they see the bigger picture for all stuff that we’re doing and it becomes like a home that gets built up from the ground up sure you get the buy-in you know and it’s interesting because at this size business that we typically deal with people have multiple they’re wearing multiple hats they’re really focused on just the day-to-day and sometimes it’s hard to schedule you know off-site meetings and really get clarity on where you’re going because you’re so busy with the day-to-day and it’s just a reminder of um that can be the kiss of death you you can be so busy that you run yourself right out of business when you get a clear vision a lot of these entrepreneurial companies you know when you’re small when you’re like the 30 to 60 70 employees you can get very distracted by stuff that seems important or seems urgent but it’s almost like installing the cabinets in your kitchen before the electrical and the plumbing and walls have been put up sure we’ll get to the worst oh but let’s get the foundation built right let’s get the walls put up let’s get the electrical and plumbing put in and we always want to look at the kitchen but we’re not ready to get to the kitchen yet like it’ll come yeah yeah so in that same vein so what are you seeing if you’re looking at the things that people are doing entrepreneurs are doing and you’re going man they i wish they would do this they keep working on x and they need to be focused on y what what is that i’ll give you what i call the secret formula and it’s f times f times e equals success the first f is focus and it’s how focused are you how focused your team how focused is your strategy so let’s say that you decide to give yourself a percentage rating of somewhere between one and a hundred percent focused okay for the month for the month or the quarter of the week it focused on your on your right psycho demographic profile are we on the plan am i making up focusing on my goals or am i getting distracted with social media am i just getting distracted with what i just read in some random book am i getting distracted by you know the news so you give yourself a percentage rating on focus okay the second f is faith it’s how much faith do you have in yourself your team your marketing your strategy your product your business your coach etc and you have to protect your confidence you have to protect your team’s confidence so that we’re going like it’s almost like in the in the military where they go hell yeah and they just start running forward like you can’t have any any wavering or you die yeah so you give yourself a percentage score there on faith how much between one and 100 on faith and then the e is effort and it’s how much effort are you putting in like are you really working you know is it and it’s effort isn’t the number of hours but it’s that i will approach to really really putting the effort into the things that matter that are going to create momentum and giving yourself or your company a rating on effort well let’s say you came up with 50 focused times 50 faith times 50 effort that only yields a 12.5 percent chance of success if you go 0.5 times 0.5 times 0.5 is 12.5 percent chance of success those are shitty odds yeah even if you get to eighty percent focus times eighty percent faith times eighty percent effort that’s a fifty one point two percent chance of success that’s 50 50. you might as well take all your cash and go to vegas and put it on red or black yeah right so to most people go like oh i’m doing well i’m 90 focused times 90 faith times 90 effort that’s a 72.8 percent chance of success 25 chance of blowing up the reason we built 1-800 got junk was we were obsessively focused we had map we turned the company into a cult so the faith was super high you were cranking everybody we were about 98 if we if you’re 98 focused times 98 faith times 98 effort or it’s a 94 chance of success yeah so that that’s where most entrepreneurs go go off the rails is they’re missing on those three areas yeah it’s deceptively simple isn’t it well business is simple like i i have a set of rules called the grandmotherisms on a book that i’m working on right now but it’s like everything grandmother told us is true you know don’t put all your eggs in one basket treat people how you want to be treated you know like every every rule is simple yeah yeah buyers are like a fly they’re all trying to get out the window and they’re going to work harder until they get out but there’s a door it’s open just turn go out the door it’s a good analogy [ __ ] simple flies right here they’re dead every day we’re entrepreneurs with great ideas that didn’t execute effectively what you’re doing there so you know what um let me ask you this what are you seeing out there that’s total [ __ ] what whether that’s advice or practices where do you go god why are people doing this one is the world is littered with coaches who have never run a business or built a business and have no business telling other people how to do theirs there’s a lot of including lifestyle there’s a lot of like oh i’m a lifestyle coach [ __ ] you’re 26 years old you’ve done [ __ ] you don’t even have a kid yet like i don’t think you have any right to coach anybody on on their life until you’ve had a family or some tragedy like you’ve never like it’s so easy to have the perfect day when it’s just you and your boyfriend you’re living in san diego it’s like come on stop so i think it’s very it’s very dangerous for people to get pulled into a coaching model or a coaching program or a mastermind group with people that have never done it before sure

there’s a there’s a lot of people getting into the kind of flip business where they’re not really adding value

there’s a low shelf life on opportunistic okay you constantly have to be iterating you know you have to sell what your customers are buying sure so i guess that would be another one yeah i’m a little i’m a little frustrated for people with the amount of of content out there and the amount of random learning people are doing without applying it as well you’re talking about that at the beginning i have a good friend of mine i won’t say his name who tells you to read a book a week and i’m like i disagree i vehemently disagree okay no time to put all those ideas in place hey it’s taking up your time it’s taking your six hours to listen to it or read it b you don’t have time to put it all in place see when you read all those cool things that then adds more stress to your life because you’re worried you’re not doing all those things most of that learning isn’t even attached to what you want to be learning about so what you want to do is learn about what you’re working on this quarter so think about your quarters goals think about your projects and then listen to podcasts read books go to masterminds about those things that at least focuses your learning but just reading more business books for the sake of reading business books unless you’re a kid really wanting to just expand your universe i think is a very big waste of time for most entrepreneurs yeah you know as you said that cameron what i thought of is instead of i emphatically agree we were just talking about before we went live um i think a good way to flip that is instead of read a book a week apply a book a month yeah like take a simple switch yeah like i i’ve had people like oh i’ve seen you speak three times your stuff is so great i’m like do you have a baby vision no not yet i’m like i was blocking my stuff yeah like when do you understand why you got so lucky no we had a 2000 2003 2006 and 2009 vivid vision that i was executing like we didn’t get lucky we made that happen luck wasn’t any part of it um so you know what let me thinking about our current environment right now let’s quickly touch on the current environment related to covid right related to what what’s going on right now and i don’t want to necessarily immerse ourselves in either the politics of the practices or anything like that more around which it’s sad that i have to separate out politics but that’s for another conversation more around what are you telling the businesses that you work with on how best to navigate this season so is it hey if there is some more space you know this is a time to change your systems or retrain your staff or launch a learning management system change your crm is it around that is it hey this is the time to push ahead because while others are kind of yeah see game you got to push ahead what advice are you giving to businesses in this season well it’s funny i’ve actually been doing a lot of zoom events recently groups are booking me to speak over zoom on how to grow when it’s slow and all of the best systems that i use to navigate the 8788 recession the 2000 um stock market meltdown and then 2008 global financial crisis i was running companies through all of those packaged up the best systems to grow when it’s slow or grow during an economic downturn or grow during uncertainty and so i’ll give you a few off the top one is the speed of the leader speed of the group the leader has to decide where they’re going because followers are dying to follow someone right now that it’s a good plan violently executed now is better than the perfect plan next week right just say violently executed that’s my favorite phrase i love it that’s a general pattern quote yeah it’s literally like have a [ __ ] plan and roll it out and we’ll follow you we use it all the time that’s literally that i just love that you said that because someone’s like can we get shirts to say violent execution i’m like i feel like it’s gonna have a different connotation but anyways yes i love it the next one is that if you think about an average right the i had a client say well the average company in my space is going to is going to go down by 30 percent this year but i said to be average i said you know your income level is in the top 1 percent of all in the u.s your health is in the top one percent and you’re in the top five percent of all businesses in your industry you’re already in the top five stop talking about average so to be average you could be down 70 down 50 down 30 up by 10 or up by 30 where do you want to be to create the average he goes oh we should be up by 30. we literally shifted the discussion they were making plans to be down by 30 a 50 million dollar company making plans to drop by 30 now they’re making plans to be up by 30. i did a check-in with them yesterday they’re currently on trend for up 26 for the year we’ve got two other acquisitions that we’re working on that’ll put us way over the top so he’s trying to buy a bunch of businesses right now that are slow so you know really focusing on your growth deciding to be ahead of that curve um investing in marketing and sales right now because no one else is when everyone pulls back marketing is cheaper than it’s ever been right now oh yeah certainly cheaper than it’s been in the last five years so when you can start buying it or renegotiating those kinds of things yeah that’s great that’s a great point um and don’t do the wait and see game well also like the reality is for most of us a global crisis is you’re not you’re not general electric for god’s sakes you’re not a global company you’re selling in in dallas or you’re selling in you know kansas city or you’re selling in vancouver like get off your ass and go tell people your product or service is good and they’ll use you yeah but stop reading social media and worried about all the worry yeah absolutely yeah i totally agree um one thing you mentioned earlier um about the guy that you’re sitting next on the plane and being able to identify um i think it was bipolar and adhd talk to me about how that’s a yeah talk to me about how that’s a superpower you referenced it as your superpower and how common it is among c-suite right so the so first off bipolar disorder bipolar disorder has been nicknamed by the medical community as the ceo disease so most entrepreneurial ceos are on the spectrum for bipolar in um in my book double double in chapter 12 i talk about the traits of bipolar disorder there’s 11 core traits if you if you end up with five of them you’re on the spectrum 10 or 11 of the trades you’re clinically diagnosed as bipolar i have ten i probably i probably have 11 but i certainly have 10. um so the mania is the energy of why people follow us right the manic depression of bipolar well you don’t find a lot of engineers and accountants and lawyers and teachers that are exciting they’re kind of they’re kind of flat when they see these entrepreneurial kids they think something’s he’s too wired he’s too crazy he’s too energetic [ __ ] that’s a leader everybody’s following him he’s distracting people so the mania is that high energy the stress and depression is simply us burning out right and what happens to entrepreneurs we can’t tell our employees that we’re scared we can’t tell our spouse that we’ve mortgaged the house to get the business to the next quarter we can’t tell us that we’re not taking payroll we can’t tell our employees that we don’t know what we’re doing we’re recruiting some amazing star from another company meanwhile we’re trying to figure out how to meet payroll the next thursday yeah that’s a magnitude and none of our friends understand what the [ __ ] we’re doing like why is he always in business because you have a job and i don’t like yeah the magnitude of stress that we’re under really kind of exasperates the mania the depression or stress yeah so it’s understanding how to ride that roller coaster because you can’t get off of it it’s key second big entrepreneurial trait so the mania is a superpower because we can get sales teams and marketing people and pr people to follow us and do what we want we can get them fired up too right they’ll invest our ideas um the next one is attention deficit disorder okay the reason these are all told called disorders is because we’re not like doctors doctors have labeled them a disorder because it’s different from them sure i’ve never found a doctor who’s very inspiring i’ve never found a doctor who’s very energetic i’ve never found a doctor who sees everything that’s going on because they’re so myopically focused on the one or two things all you have is more like an attention deficit strength i see everything i see what time it is i see what’s happening with the economy the market my suppliers my customers i kind of see the trends i see the patterns i notice the mistakes and i and because i’m seeing everything i can’t focus on it for very long so to get it fixed because it bugs me because i’m seeing it it bugs me sure you have to delegate it quickly well that causes growth but the teachers don’t want you to delegate stuff they want you to do it all yourself but you can’t do it all yourself to have a business you can’t scale it but what they see as a disorder is actually a superpower and how do you help um people recognize that both in themselves and in their kids well the first one i try to get them to do is to recognize they have the traits and it’s okay and if they see oh shoot you mean like richard branson and mel uh steve jobs and henry ford and and two of the founders of netscape are bipolar uh-huh and have adv oh so ted turner uh-huh so maybe they’re not disastrous uh-huh like would you have ever wanted steve jobs not to be hypomanic yeah he never created it right yeah and he had to be like so driving and so stubborn to get through all the adversity teachers would be like no you should stop now yeah because there’s a right there is no right there’s no box they thought about get out of the box we’re fighters i don’t i haven’t found the box yet i don’t want that’s all that also speaks to your peer group and how important it is to get be around the right kinds of people because everyone will be looking at you and this is a conversation we have in the mastermind a lot is that if you’re a business owner for god’s eggs hang out with other business owners because a w-2 in the u.s they’re not going to understand the way your brain works i talk about business all the time why i love business i eat breathe and sleep business i love other things too but i love business and so if i’m sitting at a party where i’m sitting next to a good friend who’s an accountant you’re mentioning accountants and the next is a vet and the next one’s a pharmacist my friend who’s a veterinarian he makes a mistake all the time ago how’s business and i go i let him go two questions deep and then i just unleash because oh it’s good he’s like oh anything new happening and then i just turn well andy let me tell you about it and i just start going off on because i’m pumped and i’m fired up about business you need to and he’s great like he asks all the right questions and i appreciate that but i need to be around other business owners because they get how your brain works well and let me qualify that we need to be around the other business owners that are positive top five percent that are investing in their own growth in their businesses because there’s a lot of business owners out there that are on the bottom half of that average sure i just want to commiserate you’re negative right misery loves company right yeah they don’t want to grow they’re worried they’re panicked they’re negative dude i’ll tell you like in like in the 2008-2009 global financial crisis there’s a lot of companies that made a ton of money and there’s a lot of companies that did poorly so no i don’t really want to just be around other business owners i want to be around other heart centered business owners other fun business owners other positive business owners others that are growing and that are investing in their growth so i tend to follow the ones that are that energy yeah that makes complete sense yeah so being cognizative of who you’re spending your time with um both entrepreneurs it’s like going to a bar like you want to hang out with the people in the bar no i want to hang out i don’t want to hang out with the angry drunk at the bar i want to go with the people that are fun and having a good time at the bar for sure right for sure they’re all there you got to pick which group you’re going to spend time with and it takes a lot of planning i really want to emphasize that for the listeners because most of us spend time with the people we live next to the people we work next to that does not you’re not designing an exceptional life when you do that because those are those are our friends by default that’s a social circle by default you have to seek those out so one thing we talk about here is a future friends list um as cliche as that sounds you we should all have a future friends list of people that we want in our circle um you got to design that i’m laughing because i have a i have a number of lists and my lips i have i have my friends in phoenix dinner party list my tennis playing list my skiing because i forget i’ll be like i’m sitting around one day i’ll be like i wish i could go skiing i’m like oh wait i got to list a whole bunch of people i know that ski oh i should ping so-and-so because i forget the same thing i got a mountain bikers liz so the camera i see why ryan and i said we need to meet because he’s like you gotta meet cameron but i’m looking at mine right now and i’ve got a list of for the same reason so whether that’s business owners whether that’s i love mountain biking i’ve got a list of people that it’s like if i want to go do a trail if i’m going to go up to tahoe and bike there’s my list of people um or you know if you’re doing a new workout program oh i’ve got a friend that is an amazing power lifter how about i spend some time with her that’ll fire me up love it i love it um one thing i want to go back to is uh is great this is such great information um one thing i want to go back to is you were talking about hey i went through these hard times these economic downturns and that is so important because a lot of people can’t speak to that and so when when um kovid first hit we did a bunch of live interviews um one every day for probably two weeks with a bunch of business owners and it was amazing cameron when you’re talking to a business owner i don’t necessarily want to tie it to age but we’ll say younger in the process maybe um if you’re 32 years old as a coach you’ve never been through [ __ ] if you were 21 when the global financial crisis yet well 11 years 11 years ago i was coaching 16 ceos through it 20 years ago when the nasdaq fell by 78 you were 13 not you but like yeah yeah coach were 12 years old i had 300 employees yeah it’s a very different experience that’s why you want a mentor who’s been there through stuff versus a coach who’s going to ask you a bunch of questions and give you a bunch of advice based on nothing it’s a really dangerous time to be taking it by and i also don’t give advice i give experiences like an experience my experience was kind of the gestalt protocol so people can learn from my experiences and take with it what they want versus what i think they should do sure sure yeah you usually get much better results in that regard but i think that that um it’s so important to listen to the people that have been through these economic downturns through these hard times i’m thinking about one of the guys i um interviewed was a client of mine um al klein and he runs an appraisal business and has for 30 years and listening to his perspective of you know it’s very successful he’s grown it a lot and he’s like look we’re still growing real estate’s still going to go ahead and this is very early on where a lot of people are like do we continue to buy do we buy in residential do we buy a commercial everything should just come to a screeching halt now al’s going no it doesn’t i’ve been here i we’ve been through this many many times and just hearing his perspective was so good i heard so many responses from listeners saying we need to hear more owls right now because they’ve they’ve been like they’ve cut their teeth on times like this they’ve navigated teens and businesses through times like this and we get to the other side guys i know it’s scary but we get to the other side and this may not even be the worst of what so many people have seen and those people really need a microphone right now we need to hear from those people yeah i agree yeah it’s good it was good we do hard things we get i heard you know let me give you a random tip that i just thought of while you were speaking that i think is really important right now i heard this saying years ago i think it was jack daley who said it if any of anyone listening right now running a business of you know 5 million or greater or three million or greater let’s say you’ve got like 10 employees or more if you don’t have an executive assistant you are one and think about that for a second if you don’t have an executive assistant you are one the amount of things that are on your plate that somebody could do for a fraction of what you make you got to get all that busy work off your plate so the current one that i’m delegating to my ea who’s been with me for four and a half years she’s my fifth year over 20 years um is email she’s gonna start triaging my entire inbox a system that i talk about inbox zero and how to manage it but i don’t need to be the one going through my inbox deciding who to reply to because she can handle half of them deciding which ones to unsubscribe to she knows those deciding who to delegate stuff to she can figure that out too there’s only probably ten percent of my emails do i even need to think about and then let me which ones i need to think about today and which ones i can look at thursday or friday so the amount of like i don’t even check myself in for flights let alone i don’t sir i haven’t booked travel for years but my boarding partners comes to my phone six hours or 12 hours before my flight because she checks me in she handles all of that yeah that saves the three hours the four hours a day or three three or four minutes but all of those things are huge yeah i think that’s so important i love that line about if you don’t have an ea you are one and it’s cr and it’s critical it’s so critical a lot of times one thing that we’ve talked about on the podcast before is people always say well i can do that myself and i always say no no no you don’t ask can i do this you’re resourceful you can do just about anything should i do that that’s what that’s you can clean your own toilets and wash your own floors too but you don’t yeah yeah totally oh that’s a really really good point one thing uh i was thinking about earlier is um this is kind of in a different direction so less about business owner but just in the positioning yourself um and your business um well in the marketplace i noticed that you have a really strong personal brand did you has it always been that way did you purposely design your personal brand and did you do it yourself did you hire a company talk to us about personal brand a few parts um so when i was at 1-800 got junk we were in about our second year of building the company and brian wouldn’t give equity to anyone i realized that my biggest equity play that i could build there was everyone knowing that i bought the company right it wouldn’t be brian by himself it needed to be brian and cameron and there was more people on the team but i needed people to know what i did yeah i wanted to do pr i wanted to speak to the press i want to do media interviews i want to do speaking events so it was a very cognizant design of me building my brand attached to it and attached to the other three companies that i built and your role in that role that you you were a ceo in that position right okay doesn’t always have a personal brand unless you have a ground up in most cases it doesn’t in fact that’s why i started the second in command podcast that was i’ve heard all the eo the ceo stories i want to interview their ceo sure right i want to hear the rest so we got the ceo ceo of shopify the ceo of bumble we always hear from their ceo but we don’t hear their story so um yeah so my personal brand was starting to get built then by design because i knew when i left it would it would transition the amount of value i could could charge for and then when i started coaching ceos and entrepreneurs i’ve done about 600 speaking of six continents now so just me speaking all over the world and being paid to speak all over the world has really brought my brand up so i needed a website and then my clients wanted a book so i wrote double double and it took off and was really successful so i wrote four others so all of those things were by design and then yes i did pay a company uh who if anybody wants if they look at the cameronherald.com if you like that website i can introduce you to the group that did it for me it’s called influx they’re amazing to work with they definitely did a really really good job at really understanding who i was and and how to communicate that to connect with my clients sure sure cameron i have a couple follow-up questions but i want to be cognizant of our time do you have a few for a few minutes i actually have a buffer that i’m okay on right now okay perfect so um we were just talking about your role in the co um the role of a ceo let’s clarify exactly what that is um what the role is and um also at what size if it’s a size standard at what point does someone need to consider bringing on a co if they don’t already have one right size doesn’t matter right so um so so harvard wrote an article i know right you just like you you threw it there so i know i wanted to say guys always say that then cut that out of the podcast so i think it was about 17 years ago harvard wrote an article called the misunderstood role of the coo okay they identified seven distinct types of chief operating officers so you have kind of the heir apparent or you have the mvp or you have the change agent or you have the most valuable you have the partner it’s very different so at 1-800 got junk as an example i came in as really the one who knew how to franchise a company i was i really had the domain expertise of franchising so brian had no idea how to do any of it now he does but back then he would and he would publicly say he’s like i had no idea how to do anything cameron wanted to do so that was the partner was he got to do the stuff that that he needed to do and i got to do what he didn’t know how to do it was a partnership um in other cases you’ve got kind of the technical founder right or you might have someone to oversee you know finance because you suck at finance so it’s really the yin and yang with the ceo it’s the person who can do everything the ceo doesn’t want to do and sucks at really really high trust and relationship that’s the best way to describe what a co is now a co is just the biggest title for the second in command role because it could be a general manager it could be an operations manager it could be a vp of operations right so let’s say that you’re a 10 person company you shouldn’t have any ce of c-level titles you shouldn’t have a chief marketing officer you shouldn’t have a chief financial officer you shouldn’t have a chief technology officer god forbid you have a chief revenue officer which is now the c-level title for the head of sales i got to point out most smaller companies do that they over title to compensate for lesser salaries so i just gotta point that out here’s what happens they put a big title in to compensate for lesser salaries but then everybody wants more and they show all the demands so you end up paying more than you should sure second thing is you end up creating like creep where they think that they’re more valuable they are they think you’re supposed to be good more than they are and third there’s nowhere for them to grow to so i don’t even like giving out vp ty if i’m a 10 person company everybody gets director titles or manager titles to the 30 or 100 at the 100 person mark we can give out vp titles at the 300 person mark you can give out the c level titles that’s that’s really good because again i want to point out that’s not what most people do with small companies and then on salary.com saying well hey cmo’s supposed to be making xyz and to your point then they want more money baby boomers have really really wanted to be liked by their kids and they really want to be liked by their employees and the baby boomers in jenna so the oldest baby boomer is currently 73 and they are 74 and then the youngest baby boomer is 56 so that group is starving to be liked and and we’re also worried about getting kicked out of our company so we really want so we’ll give away whatever we want we’ve learned we’ve forgotten how to say no but yeah you want six cookies before dinner yes as long as you love me like you need a bmw okay have that so then gen y has gotten very very good at asking for stuff even equity like 20 years ago to get equity in the company you had to buy it on the stock market but from 97 to 2000 companies gave away equity in lieu of compensation because we didn’t have all the investment in the dot com they attracted a whole bunch of good talent for and then when the market blew up in march of 2000 through october yeah all of a sudden employees needed to get paid as well because equity wasn’t worth anything but they still wanted equity too so then we started giving them salaries and equity and now it’s happened over the last 17 years we’re giving salaries equity and titles to a very entitled group of people that often don’t have the experience to wipe their ass but they have the confidence that that have somehow sold us on oh they’re really confident i’ll give them a vp title but they don’t know what they’re doing they haven’t done it yeah it’s really dangerous yeah i could see that and expensive sure sure so that was uh i love how you broke it down 10 person director level you know you have to be at this level to get the vp level um this many employees i think that’s a really great guy i see transition points at the ones and threes from one employee to three employees to ten to thirty two hundred to three hundred or a hundred thousand three hundred thousand a million three million ten million thirty million hundred million tend to be natural inflection points on the kind of maturity of a business in the evolution of a business and the complexity of the business sure so what i just heard is size does matter camera that’s what i heard all right make sure i want to get it on record and leave that in that loop i just want to come back to original um one thing about being an entrepreneur that i one question i love to ask is um we talked a little bit about this i think before we came on which is what does being an entrepreneur allow you to do so a lot of times people talk about the struggle but um there’s much more than struggle and if you design it well there’s much more than struggle what do you get to do i take eight to ten weeks vacation every year i haven’t worked i haven’t worked a weekend in ten years i don’t work nights i shut down at five o’clock because i’m never going to get it all done and i can delegate it so it gives me my free time it gives me control of my time if i want to take off time in the middle of the day to go hang out with people or golf i just do i just tell my like i don’t have to ask with a lot of power and fun in that i mean you get to write off a lot of stuff through the business so you get additional write-ups and expenses um it gives you control of your own destiny yeah you get to decide no one delegates to you yeah yeah cameron have you always had this good balance or uh did you have to teach yourself that i had to burn out twice to get it so i’m not kidding 20 years ago 20 years ago next month i was written up in the wall street journal as one of four supernovas whose careers went really really high during the dot-com and crashed um and i burned out with grass i weighed i can show you a picture i weighed uh 39 pounds heavier than i do right now 20 years ago this is a photo of me 10 years ago where you won’t even recognize it’s disgusting um yeah i was drinking i wasn’t getting any exercise i was eating like [ __ ] wow yeah that’s just like a different human being but i thought i was successful but i was in complete burnout so and then the other one was my kids one one time one of my kids kind of went like i had my phone up and i was talking to him he went like this moved my phone away like he wanted attention those little things were the ones that made me realize like and then my mom dying there’s been a number of things right you just realize like none of this matters this is just what we do to make money those sound like pivot points yeah yeah big time yeah just recognize it because i was going to say when when it comes to balance that’s something that’s not inherent in entrepreneurs um the hustle is is tend to be inherent and the hustle is celebrated right and what you’re talking about is something very different and much more balanced it is and that is where a coach or a mentor can shake them a little bit or crisis can shake them a little bit but the sad thing is like no one actually wants to hear about your work either like if i’m at a cocktail party nobody wants to hear about my coaching or my speaking or my books or the ceo alliance and i don’t want to hear about their accounting practice or their teaching i don’t give a [ __ ] what what i want to hear about is what are your passions where did you go mountain biking hey i just tried mountain biking downhill for the first time at park city i was scared it was fun like you want to talk about that more than you want to talk to me about who i coached yeah so if that’s all we have as ours and do you really want your child when you’re dying or when the ch when somebody said to your kid what’s your dad do or what’s your mom do and your kid described work that’s horrible i would love my kids if somebody said what’s your dad do i’d like my kids to say he golfs he plays tennis he hikes he hangs out with friends he cooks dinners he drinks wine oh what does he do to make money oh he does speaking in books and but yeah he’s all about golf and teach like wow that’s a big shift from what most people are doing most people aren’t designing their lives they’re waking up and then they’re gonna die it’s sad responding to triggers i’m also very very european in my mindset you know last year i went to 14 countries um just as part of my normal travel and vacation time i went to 14 countries last year yeah when you look at the north americans north americans are all waking up and working waking up and working europeans wake up and live and then they fit work into that a little bit but they live they work to live they don’t live to work for sure it’s a big difference yeah so i think that’s that’s been a big part of it for me as well sure so let me ask you this best movie of all time what do we got uh sound of music as always yeah i know i’m a guy see that comment we did say the european thing so maybe i’ve always loved the music i’ve always loved the story i’ve always loved the um yeah i’ve always loved it i probably think i really like moulin rouge as well because i think the artistry and the costumes and the songs and the story you’re amazing in that but no it’s definitely sound of music i’ll be darned did not see that one coming all right all right so what’s next for you what’s next on the docket for cameron so building the co alliance for sure that’s the working on an online component of it right now an online model for the co alliance is a big one but really life my youngest son goes away to university in 13 months my oldest son is there now so i’m i’m actually preparing to start living globally i’ll probably tax base out of either estonia or portugal because i’m canadian so i don’t have the us all over my worldwide income so i’ll go to a tax zone where i can have 10 total total tax um i have about 40 countries that i want to live one to three months per city in so i have a list of all these cities where i’m just going to start hopping around for about do do that for about five years and figure out after that what i want to do where you settle after that i love it settle i’m not sure that i really want to settle i think i actually want to live globally and just decouple from stuff but really kind of attach to experiences like i want to go live in these cities you know bars i’ll bring up barcelona or amsterdam i love amsterdam i want to live in amsterdam but i want to know the coffee shops i want to know the cafes i want to walk into the restaurant and have them call me by name i want to know the winding streets around the canal areas and know exactly where i’m turning in the jordan and i want to know the other neighborhoods and and i want to be so familiar that i go i know the city and then after three months i want to pack up i want to go do it in barcelona and then i want to go do it in prague and then i want to go do it and you know like i really want to live i want to go live in shamani i want to go live in kitzbuhel i want to go live in these places will you write about them will that be part of this or just experience them i’ll definitely speak in all of them because i can i’m lucky that i’ve got these networks with eo and ypo globally that i can pretty much guarantee myself a speaking event in every city that i live in which really if i do it right can pay for the entire journey um so i really want to slow down you know the other parts of my businesses as well a lot more passive income this is just for selfish purposes because i’m a big traveler myself and i struggle every time people ask that question but i’m gonna ask it to you anyhow favorite place it’s okay to pick a couple thailand uh spent seven weeks there and it blew end a long time ago and it blew my mind i loved all loved the um the water love the food love the view the sun sets yeah just [ __ ] spectacular and then new zealand i think it was probably because it’s so similar to british columbia and i hadn’t lived in bc yet but new zealand like i moved to british columbia two years after going to new zealand i spent a month in new zealand um north island or south island i spent three weeks on the south island and doing some hiking and then a week on the north island love it all friends joseph glacier i did friends joseph place with the apple or abel tasman hike and i did the root burn hike

ones yeah it was good and then if it was cities amsterdam barcelona um really really grabbed me

yeah bonus no i wouldn’t put ba i would say barcelona amsterdam would be like the holy shits and but then i really want to i want to i really want to explore italy a lot more and i really oh and i’ll give you an island last one in greece i met all these wealthy not wealthy i met all these business owners in greece and i asked them where their summer homes were this was 30 years ago and they told me their summer homes were on a little island in the back cyclonics called pophanisia it was near morgos it was near eos it was near santorini like in around that region it was like four to five hour boat from those ones but it’s called cofinisios like k-o-f-e-n-n-i-s-i-a or something like that it when i got there there were three trucks and a motorbike on the island it took four about four hours to walk around the entire island there were only four or five restaurants and i went back to it 25 years later and there were only 30 trucks on the island and about 20 motorbikes but it’s where the greeks have their vacation homes

that’s where you go that sounds amazing like why go to mykonos or santorini where it’s touristy like go where the go where the locals go on vacation for sure i’ve never heard of it that sounds beautiful well and what’s interesting is every country has those right like like why go to lake tahoe where you live where do people in lake tahoe go for their vacation yeah yeah where did you go where i just the same place i just was a couple weeks ago wait don’t say that you don’t want to give up that little lake area right it’s a secret spot yeah we didn’t say it specifically for that no that’s great that’s great my husband’s actually from madrid so we’ve spent a lot of time in spain too i mean all over but love the southwest i love madrid it’s a great city it’s a very underrated city i really like the whole i did a crazy pub crawl there jesus about 13 hours me and this australian guy i was like 45 we ended up at a rave and getting kicked out of a rave at three in the morning and madrid’s a great city i love that you did this at 45 i love that age i love that i might have been 44 but you’re 43 but i was i was too old to know better i was on a this white couch that had wheels on it and and i was surfing and he was pushing me through this rave and they they finally kicked us both out and um yeah it was fun i love it i love it were you actually holding glow sticks did you have them like around your neck

i started going to burning man in 2007 so i would have i would have been whatever i could have grabbed when i was there i was where we go yeah it’s a great place it’s cancelled obviously this year unfortunately i have my tickets hopefully next year hopefully next year so oh yeah oh yeah where do you cab oh god i don’t remember it’s been a long time um yeah it’s been a while so i started like way back when i don’t even know if there were camps i mean there were camps but i don’t even remember the names of them and you would just drive around in the jeep cherokee that was my sister’s and we would just sleep in the back so um like late late 90s early 2000s when you could go in and barter for your ticket so since it’s gotten much bigger i haven’t gone which is funny the last years i was going to go um i know eo has a camp there um don’t do the eo chem but if you want there’s a guy who lives in um not truckee what’s the yeah maybe it’s truckee okay about 45 minutes west what’s right on the border of california nevada like exit number two uh

verdict yeah verdi and his his office is in reno but he lives in verdi but john john and i camp together he’s a big part of a group called spanky’s wine bar which is a really fun kind of tongue-in-cheek s m theme camp bar it’s super super fun frankie’s wine bar he was one of the guys that he was one of the guys that helped get the eo camp up but they you walk in they shake your hand it’s like oh it’s good to see you and they all talk business all day it’s like oh [ __ ] no this is the rest of my life i’m not coming here to live my normal life i’m like oh there’s an eo or let me run the other way sorry i’m just gonna ride my bike this way all right good advice that’s good because everyone’s like oh you should do the eo camp and i’m like well you know i’m one of those old timer i’m like i did burning man way back in the day and yeah did you do you know christina harbridge she was an old-time eo or two she or an old-time burner too she was a um anyway blah blah blah okay i gotta wrap it up this is good we got three or four minutes real quick where uh where does where do people go to connect with you cameron when they want a whole lot more where do they go so the second in command podcast for sure they should all download listen to subscribe etc um all all of my books my five books are on amazon audible and itunes they should check those out for this audience i would suggest checking out double double okay the miracle morning for entrepreneurs and free pr those would probably be the top three books for this audience okay um and then you know my cameronharold.com website has all the rest of the information in the coo alliance website as well perfect okay we’ll link it in the show notes and then social and exactly where to go so cameron thanks for this this is awesome i’m so glad we connected i’m so glad ryan um unofficially connected us and i feel like this is not going to be our last conversation no for sure thanks so much really appreciate it send me the link when this goes live too we’ll do take care have a good day thanks april bye