What's up and welcome to another episode of the Action Academy podcast corporate America's least favorite podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a treat for you today. We just finished our week long Dominican Republic event for our action Academy members. We had 102 people fly out a $300,000 weekend in one of our lead keynote speakers that we had was Mr. Cameron Harold. You guys have heard him twice here on the podcast and he came in hot to speak to our members. And so as always with every single event, I always post the keynotes for free for you guys that you guys get a glimpse in the room. You get a seat in the room so you can hear the lessons that we're teaching because I believe that education should be free and the people that went to the event, the value that you get from the event is being in the room, having the connections, having the 101 conversations and having the group coaching. So if you guys want to be in the room, you can check out actionacademy.com. We're going to show description as always to click the link. We're going to show you a book, a call with our team. And if you want to hear what it's like to be in the room, check out today's episode with Mr. Cameron Harold on the 12 laws of leadership. Let's get to it. Show of hands who here knows of Cameron Harold, vivid vision, the books. All right. We got 99% of the room right now with their hands up. They've read vivid vision. They've created vivid visions themselves. But for people that are maybe not familiar with you and I'll let you give you an introduction and get into your presentation and then I'll come back on here for the final 30 minutes of Q&A. Who is Cameron Harold and what have you accomplished over your decades of career? Wow. Who is Cameron Harold? I grew up as an entrepreneur. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs where my father, both such as grandparents, raised the three kids in our family to be entrepreneurs. We've all run our own companies now for pretty much our whole lives. My sister's celebrating 30 years in business. I've been running my own company for the last 19 years since leaving 1-800-GUNK and having built a few companies. I got well known for building 1-800-GUNK from 14 employees up to 3,100 employees over 6 years to come from 2,206 million. But that was the fourth company that I'd built. And then the last 19 years since exiting, I've written seven books. I've been paid to speak to audiences now in 30 countries and on every single continent. And then I own a mastermind community similar to what you've got with the Action Academy that I have a mastermind that is exclusively for the second in command. So there's no entrepreneurs allowed in the room. It's only for COOs. Everybody here is laughing because it's the opposite. So just for reference, Brandon actually just went to that event and that's where we got the referral thing. Cameron did the same kind of challenge for his room at the COO Alliance and we were able to just use it with you guys. So that's an example of just taking one thing away from an event like this, can fundamentally change everything. So as Cameron's about to speak to you guys, he's got 30 minutes to actually present. He's got a presentation. He's got a run through and then we have 30 minutes of Q and a. So number one, thinking about what questions you guys have for Cameron. It could be about the topic of the presentation. It could also be about vivid vision and what you guys have created with your own for your business and for your personal lives, but also be looking for that one nugget that you're going to take away from Cameron or from this room or from this event in general. That will be that 100,000 to $1 million thing for you. So be paying attention. It's just one thing, not 10. Cameron with that, I think you're going to be clear for take off, buddy. Sounds good. Show some slides just so that people can actually get a little bit of a visual from what I'm talking about. Just confirm that you can see my slides and then I'll drive right in. Confirmed and then I'm going to have Brandon come to my seat, right here. And I'll be right back. Sounds good. All right. So what I want to be covering off today is some stuff related to what's really important in terms of scaling up our companies right now. And right now, you are your own biggest threat to your business, not AI. And the reason I say that is AI is going to be a tool that you can use inside of your company that your employees will be able to use inside of your company. But if you don't have the right leadership skills to lead yourself, to lead your employees, to lead the managers that you started hiring, to lead the bank, to lead investors, to lead your customers, you literally are out of business no matter how strong AI is. So we're going to dive into some stuff related to leadership. Right now, if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. So I know that AI is actually giving us some tools and also giving us some stress. But I want you to also, at the time, that stuff is happening and changing on the tech side of the business, to really get grounded in what's going to help you scale up your company. And that's your ability to get results through others and the ability to lead people. The problem number one that we have is we don't even know the core leadership skills that people need. That's the big problem that all of you are facing right now. Number two is we tend to grow ourselves, but we don't grow our leaders and managers. Right? We all read books. We join mastermind communities. Maybe we listen to podcasts. Maybe we work with a coach. But you're only part of the puzzle in scaling up your business. As Brian just mentioned, he had his CRO brand and pay to come to Vancouver and spend three days with me and a group of other CROs. So he's working on growing the skills of at least one of the people on his team. The key though is to make sure that you grow the skills of everyone who manages people inside of your company. So that's problem number two. Problem number three is that small to medium-sized companies don't have training departments. When you get to be a larger enterprise level, you tend to have a learning development department. You've got learning management systems and online platforms. You've got book clubs. You've got internal mentors and coaches and certification programs. When you're a small company, we don't have that skill. So that means at the end of the day, it often is the blind leading the blind. We're trying to figure that out as we go along. We're not sure what to teach them. We're not sure how to teach them. So we're stuck. And then number four is you're so buried in the day to day that you don't have time to grow people. Because when you're a small company, you're so busy running the business and doing things that you actually don't really have time to actually sit back and grow the skills and the confidence and the connections of your people. And those are the four big problems that all of us are facing today. By the end of this presentation, you're going to know the skills that you need. You're going to understand how you and how adults learn. You'll also learn how to become more of a self-driven learner and build that kind of a mantra and that kind of a theme inside of your organization that all of your people become self-driven learners. And then you're also going to understand a concept that I coined called just in time learning, instead of just in case learning. So I'm going to talk about those for you. At the end of the day, there's 12 core skills that all of us as entrepreneurs need to get good at and that anyone managing people for us, any managers or VPs, directors, C level people really need to be good at as well. And we all need to get to a bronze or a silver level of competency in these 12 skills. A gold level skill means that you could certify others, you could teach people, you could stand on stages, maybe you could write books on the content. I'm not expecting any of us to get to a gold level of competence on any of these skills, but we certainly have to get to the basic level. And most of us, when I show you what the 12 skills are, don't have a basic level of competence. That best maybe we've read a book, but that's not even really getting us to bronze. So I got my real world MBA and scaling up a company called College Pro Painters. College Pro went on to become the largest residential house painting company on the planet. Every year we had to recruit higher and train 800 university students to become franchisees. And then in one month we had to train the 800 franchisees to hire 8,000 university students to paint houses. So imagine building an 8,800 person company every year. I was in the top 30 people of that company globally and I was part of the senior leadership team of scaling that up. And in fact, back by leaning back 23 or 33 years ago, back in 1993, I hired and trained Elon Musk's younger brother Kimball Musk to be a franchisee for me in Toronto, Canada. I also hired his cousin Peter Reeve who went on later with his brother Lyndon to build Solar City. So I've been coaching and growing people on these skills for well over 30 years. And then I became the chief operating officer of a brand that I'm sure most of you have seen or heard of called the 1-800-GOT-Junk. I looked at my core responsibility there as growing people. So I focused on growing people in two core areas. I worked on growing their skills and I worked on growing their confidence. And now when I think about growing this people that work with me or the people leading companies or even clients that I coach, I'm working on growing three things. They're skills, they're confidence and they're connections so that they know more of the who's that can help them actually scale up their company. In fact, a couple of friends of mine, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, who I'm in a couple of different masterminds with, I sit in the room with them, wrote the book called Who Not How, and it's all around finding the right who's to level up and sit in beside your confidence and your skills. So solution number one is to know the skills that your managers need. And let me walk you through what those skills are. When I was out 1-800-GOT-Junk, I trained and certified everyone on the senior leadership team, the mid-level management team, and our franchisees. And again, not only did I train them on the skills, but then I would watch them in the field and we put models in place to ensure that they could demonstrate their use of the skills so that we could certify them at least as a bronze or a silver level of certification. These are the 12 skills. I would take a screenshot of this.
But these are the 12 skills that every single one of you and everyone managing people in your company need to be really good at. So there's situational leadership. That's the ability to adapt your leadership style on a situation by situation basis for each individual person you're coaching. So let's say as an example, I was coaching Brian. I wouldn't necessarily coach Brian on digital marketing. He seems to be pretty good at it. I wouldn't coach him on running a podcast. He's great at it. I would not coach him on running a mastermind community. He's really good at it. But I might get very specific on coaching him on interviewing. I don't know what his skills are around interviewing and hiring people. Or maybe I coach him on running financial review meetings. Or maybe I coach him more specifically on the skill of delegation. But I adapt my style very differently. Similar to raising a child, right? You don't coach your kid on exactly the same thing. Once they've given the ability to ride a bicycle, you don't keep coaching them the way that you did when they were very early on on learning how to ride the bicycle. So it's the number one skill that all of us need to be good at. It's called situational leadership. Number two is coaching. And actually coaching people day to day. Coaching them to do better in their role. Coaching them through some of the problems. Coaching them on some of the areas to continue working on. Coaching them to raise their confidence so they can take on more responsibility. Coaching is the ability to actually teach multiple people via Zoom or in a group setting where you're actually trying to get skills out to more than one person. Maybe it's a sales team of eight people or maybe it's a team of seven people that are working in AI. The key is to be able to actually drive training to a group of people so that you can actually move that whole group forward. Then you've got the ability to run meetings, whether it's annual meetings, quarterly meetings, financial review meetings, daily huddles, L10 meetings. Maybe it's business area reviews. Maybe it's strategy meetings. There's actually skills that you need to understand how to run highly effective meetings. In fact, about six years ago Elon Musk sent out a famous tweet and a memo to all of his employees and he said, "If you're ever in a shitty meeting, stand up and leave the meeting." Now, as I mentioned, his brother used to work with me. So I actually had Elon sell number. I sent him a text message and I said, "Don't tell your employees to leave shitty meetings. Go back to first principles and fix the meetings." So they're never in a shitty meeting in the first place. But that's a skill that most of us have had no training in and then we have people out there wasting time, driving people crazy, not involving the people that they're bringing into meetings. It's because we've never been trained in meetings. In fact, one of my books was called Meeting Suck. But the reality is meetings don't suck. We suck at running meetings. Then you've got one-on-one coaching. It's the ability to actually coach one of your direct reports on a weekly basis. A lot of people run one-on-ones, but they've never had any proper training and have a run-of-proper one-on-one meeting. So the employees are feeling micro-managed. Are they feeling like you're always doing the same thing? Are you feeling like you're not love-bombing them? Or you're not helping them solve problems? It's because most of us of leaders have no idea how to do any one-on-one coaching. I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs before 1993. The whole business world of coaching only started in 1993 with the invention of coach you and the International Federation of Coaches. I'd already coached 120 entrepreneurs one-on-one for four years when the business coaching world was just starting. Then you've got stuff like time management, priority management, doing interviews. I was coaching a CEO recently. I said, "Have you ever had any training on interviewing?" He said, "No, but I read the book. Who?" I'm like, reading a book is not training. Have you ever done any role play? Have you done any practice? Have you ever had anyone video you doing interviews and give you feedback afterwards? Have you ever done any self-reflection on the interviewing you've done?" He goes, "No, but I've interviewed a hundred people." I said, "Maybe you've done it wrong every single time." He started laughing and he said, "That's probably why I've also had turnover from the hundred people that I've interviewed." Then you get down into skills like delegation. We are always delegating projects, but it never comes stuff. Never comes back on time. We never get back to work that we're expecting. It's take too long or go over budget. It's because we actually don't have proper skills. One of those skills is the delegation skill. Handling conflict, email management, you get the draft. These are the 12 skills that almost every one of you has never had any training in. If you've got your first managers or leadership team people, they've had no training in this stuff. Of course, business is difficult. The reality is business is actually quite easy if you actually have these core skills. Imagine having those skills inside of your organization and the kind of leverage that you can get from that. You have less people getting more done without the conflict. You have less people getting over-involved and stuff they don't need to be involved in. You have the right people working on the critical few things versus the important many. You actually don't need to have as much AI being put inside of your company when you have the core critical few people getting the right shit done. AI is not going to replace you, but someone using AI will. Companies that have better leadership skills will actually outperform you as well. Leadership skills are as important as any other part of the business, including AI. Solution number two is to understand how your managers learn. We've heard about stuff like auditory and visual and kinesthetic learners, but here's the actual cycle of learning that everyone goes through. The first thing is you learn about a concept. Maybe you're learning about the idea of interviews and someone's reading to you about interviews or you're watching some videos about interviewing or you're watching a speaker talk about doing job interviews. That's learning the abstract conceptualization. Then you're going to practice the skills. You're going to role-play it. You're going to try it out. You're going to maybe ask questions into the mirror. You're going to run the ideas through your mind. That's the practicing. That's called active experimentation. Then you go down to the concrete experience. That's when you're actually using the skill in your day to day and you start learning from actually doing. You're learning from writing the bicycle or you're learning from doing the job interviews. Afterwards, you debrief with yourself and you have a little bit of reflective observation and you learn from thinking about what you'd learned before you learn from thinking about the practice you learn from thinking about what you were doing and the cycle continues. It's why you need to actually do more than just reading a book or watching a video to get to a bronze or a silver level of competency in these skills is because you go through this cycle three or four or five times. I've probably gone through about 60 hours of training that might even be low on the skill of situational leadership. I've had at least 50 or 60 hours of training, role play, practice. People observing me do job interviews. People watching me do videos of my job interviews. I've had so much training around these skills that I have a very high level of competency in them, which makes business quite easy for me to actually scale. The training that you can build inside of your company can be books. It can be videos. It can be podcasts. You can build training programs that include hiring consultants to commit over Zoom or in person to teach your employees. Maybe you send people off to conferences. Maybe you send them off to conferences that have leadership skills being taught so you can leverage that. Maybe you hire refined mentors that you plug in to mentor some of your direct reports on some of these specific skills to help them grow better. There's all those different ways that you can build a training program to help your people gain those 12 skills that I asked you to screenshot. Training number three is how to be a self-driven learner. This is where it's all about hiring people that already like to learn. It's like Brandon, who works with Brian, comes to the COO Alliance events. This is our event that we hold at MIT in September every year. We have really keen COOs that like to come to the events, like to learn from these events, want to grow their skills. They're not being told to come here by their CEO. They're coming here because they want to learn. What's the culture that you need to build inside of your company is hire people that already like to learn because then when you start putting them into courses and sending them to events, they're going to actually gain a lot more than the people that are pushing back, feeling like they already know everything. You're going to be learning content and relearning content. Stage one is you have this unconscious incompetence. You don't even know that you suck at something. Stage two is you start to know that you suck at that skill. Stage three is you know that you're gaining some skills and you know that you're getting okay at those skills. Stage four is you're using those skills without even thinking about it. A really good example of that is when we were all younger, much, much younger, around a year to two years old, we were all learning to walk. Our little tiny baby brains were going, oh my God, I don't know how to do this. I'm watching mum and dad walking and I don't know how to walk. I know I suck at this. And then all of a sudden you stand up and you're holding onto the table. I call it table surfing and the kid takes a couple of steps and falls over. The little kid brain is going, I really don't know how to do this. I know I don't know how to do this and I want to do this. And then all of a sudden, I'm getting daddy or helping you and they're holding your hands and you're walking a little bit and you start knowing that you now know how to walk, but you know that you're not super good at it.
And then now as adults, we walk without even thinking, right? We walk and talk, we walk and chew gum, we walk and listen to podcasts, we walk and do 17 other things because we've gone through this learning cycle. The key as managers and leaders inside of companies to truly be at a bronze or silver level, you really need to get to that stage four. Silver is when you're at unconscious competence. Stage five is probably when you're able to demonstrate the skill, train other people in the skill, certify other people in that skill because you really know the depth of your learning in those exact skills. So reading books is a good idea, but reading a book multiple times is better. One of my books is called Meeting Suck. I would have every single one of your employees read the book Meeting Suck two or three times over the course of the next 12 months and watch the learning that they have. If you have a second and command inside of your company, like a COO or a VP of operations, have them read the book the second and command two or three times because you're going to read it in the content. Reading a book every single week, a different book every single week does nothing. It just causes stress, it's just noise, it adds a bunch of random stuff to your to-do list. True learning is about studying the content until you get to that conscious competence stage. So what I like doing is a little bit of a book report. Anytime I learn something, I share it with others. If I was Brandon coming back from the COO Alliance event, I would make sure that this week, I'm starting to teach other people inside of the company skills that I learned there. An example of that would be he learned about running referral programs. He comes back into action academy, runs a referral program, and you guys have generated 91 leads because he taught something that he just learned. When the student becomes the teacher, the content starts to get deeper and deeper engrained inside of you. But if you're just reading a book every week, reading another book every week, you don't have time to let it sink in, you don't have time to get to a level of competence, and you're certainly not gaining any clarity in helping others get better inside of your company. So there's a famous quote by Peter Drucker, the management consultant. He said, "Show me your calendar and your bank statements and I'll show you what you really value." Most of us don't truly value leadership development for other than ourselves. You don't have time in your calendar every week to grow your people, to coach your people, to run proper one-on-one meetings. You don't put them into courses, online training programs, and make sure they're going through it multiple times. Most of you don't invest anything or anywhere near enough in terms of time or money to growing your people. And a good example of this would be any professional afflites, whether it's a golfer, a tennis player, basketball player, whatever, hockey player, football player, they spend probably 80% of their week practicing and less than 10% of their time doing. But most of our managers spend almost zero percentage of their time growing their skills, growing their confidence and growing their connections, which is why all of you are saying that business is difficult, because you're not spending the time and you're not spending the dollars to actually grow your people. And it doesn't take that much to really do it. So solution number four is to understand what I call just in time learning. Just in time learning means that you learn a concept for something that you're working on today or this week. So if you know that you're gonna be doing interviews next week, dive into and learn stuff about running better interviews so that you can practice it and try it out. If you have a leadership team retreat, study and learn about running leadership retreats. But if you're just reading a random business book about something random, that's called just in case learning. But you're learning it just in case maybe you need that in the future. So I like trying to get people to think about what are the core projects I'm working on over the next month, over the next quarter. And what are the things that I can read and study and watch and learn so that I get better at that? And a bit of a shortcut here is those 12 skills that are on that slide they told you are stuff that every one of your managers will be using this week. They will all run interviews, they will all do meetings, they will all coach people, they'll delegate people, they'll all handle projects and time management. So all of those skills or stuff that they need right now don't miss that opportunity. The cost of inaction is a lot higher than the cost of actually training some people. So I call it just in time learning instead of just in case learning. I also would have you and anyone inside of your company develop your own personal development plan. If this is where you wanna be in a month or a year what are all the things you need to get better at? And I would again start with those 12 core skills because we know that those are 12 core skills that everyone who manages people will be using on a daily weekly monthly basis. So again, imagine having these 12 skills not only for yourself, but for everybody inside of your company. Imagine if anyone managing people were really good at these skills and how much more effective they would be and how much happier your team would be and how much more productive your team would be if they were actually good at the soft skills of leadership. So case study number one, I did a coach this guy here, Bobby Harris, I also coached a group of his management leadership team. I coached them from 40 employees up to 700 employees and they ended up raising $255 million from a venture or a private equity firm called Warburg Pinkas. So these guys were a legit, huge company now. They ranked as the number one company to work for in the state of Florida. They won the Ernst & Young entrepreneur the year in the state of Florida. And again, when you vote and raise $255 million, you're raising it not only because you're underlying business is strong, but because your leadership team is strong. And that's the case study of where I really help to grow them. Case study number two is I actually was coaching a company called Ilyda C.M. They had about 20 employees at the time and I taught them the 12 core skills. They now have around 2,200 employees. The company is now called Tannuity. And they ended up ranking as the number two company to work for on indeed. On the bottom left hand corner, the guy with the striped shirt and the sunglasses on is Zach Morrison. Zach was the COO of Tannuity. He was also the very first member of the COO Alliance 10 years ago, but I coached them from about 40 employees up to 300. They now have again 2,200 employees. And it was all because of the leadership skills and the ability to get results through others. And then case study number three, a couple of our early stage members of the COO Alliance ended up becoming promoted to CEO because their leadership skills were so strong that their CEOs were able to move more into a chairman role. And these guys have both really scaled up their businesses. So you can choose messy, right? You can choose to do it the way you've always done it. You can choose to just focus on the eye. And you can choose to be the person that's saying business is difficult or trying to hold people accountable or manage people. But if you're really good at the leadership skills, you're going to be a lot more effective. My recommendation is that you all but benchmark or budget to spend 1% of any employees total comp or $750, whatever is greater per year. So if you have $100,000 employee, budget to spend at least $1,000 a year on training them. If you have a $200,000 employee, spend $2,000. And you can actually organize that where you have one coach come in and train seven people, where you can put a bunch of people through a leadership course. It's a lot cheaper. But that's a good guideline for you to be spending is at least $750 or 1% of their total comp. So somebody asked me one time, what if I spend money on coaching them and they leave? My answer was, what if you don't grow their management skills and they stay? How much pain and suffering and problems are your people causing for your company today because they don't have the basic skills that you know they actually need to do their job? So the big question is, are you ready to grow or are you ready to get replaced? I think all of you need to focus not just on AI, but on growing the leadership skills of your people. That's my core. If you want to go and look at that QR code in the bottom right hand corner, that's actually an online leadership course that I launched about three years ago. We have thousands of people going through it. And it is the 12 course skills that I outlined with video content from me, written content from me, pre and post tests from me, and then a certification model at the end. So it's an easy way for you to plug people into that course. It only costs $347 per manager. So that is a shortcut. If you want to use that versus building your own content. But there you go. [APPLAUSE] First go. [INAUDIBLE] How many of you said also camera can actually see everybody? With the cables. I don't know. All right. Say what's up, Karen. All right, it's all blurry. Yeah, that's good enough. All right, cool. Fucking visionaries coming to mess everything up. [LAUGHS] All right, cool, cool. All right, Karen, you see me? Yeah. Wonderful, dude. First off, amazing presentation. You can't see this, but we got a full-packed house that absolutely was like hanging onto every single word. So now what we're going to do for the next 30 minutes, I believe, correct? Do you got 30 minutes for this? Yeah. We're going to do Q&A. So guys, how we're going to do this is just show of hands. I'm just going to call first hands that I see. And then just ask a question. I'm going to repeat it in the microphone so that camera can hear it. and that's it.
and we'll just go into Q&A. So this is your shot. You guys have had four years. So I think a question is from Cameron Herald. What questions do we have? All right, Mr. Hickenbotham. - When you're training, I'm just mad at you. My mind's like that is you going and finding a strange and worse and sending them and coming to bed and saying, "Go find, I want you to figure out, I'll learn this deal, find a way to train." And you feel this glinting then time, it would have been excessive. - Yeah, so when he asked, "When you're going into training your managers, what percentage of that is your time going out to find the training program for them versus you inviting your employees to go find the training program and then covering that for them?" - It can be a bit about it. Let me just share something to show you. So again, I mentioned that I'd invest in your leaders training that I launched. I put the 12 core skills in that course. So it is situational leadership, coaching, classroom training, effective meetings. I want to look like I just decided to put it all into a course to make life easy for you. You can go the other way as well and you can say, "Hey, we both identify, let's say you and Mr. Director of Marketing both realize you need to be better at coaching people." And then you can send them out to do it, but they're at the unconscious uncompetence. They don't even know they're not good at it or they now at least are conscious uncompetent. They know they suck at it, but where are they going to go to learn to get better? They just don't have that competency to go there. I think it's really hard. So it's where you need to leverage masterminds. It's where you need to post a question in Facebook, "Hey, I want people to get better at this." "Where would they go?" "I'm giving you a shortcut." And I'm not here to pitch my course. It's not going to change my life, but we'll make it like easier if you plug them into something. Cameron's line, he pays his bills for this course. He's full of shit. That's how he pays the bills. No, man, this is amazing. Thank you so much. We had one in the back. Who was it? Somebody showed? Okay, cool. Jackie. Let me tell you something about that. If an employee came to me and said, "Hey, I found a course that I want to take and I think it'll help me get better in this, I would say go for it." But I don't think I would send them out trying to find stuff if they already know their week at it, because they're just not really going to know where to go. But if they stumble on something and come, I usually say yes. Beautiful. All right, Jackie. Awesome. Yeah, I just want to pick your brain on the best time management tips that you have. Okay, best time management tips that you have. Any more specific contacts for that? No, I don't even need a type. I totally open form so that-- I know where to go. Let's go. He's saying he's handled this a million times. Yeah, because you can't manage time. You can manage priorities. Time just goes at the same pace for all of us. The clock moves. You can't manage the clock. You can't manage time. What you can manage is the stuff that you're working on in the time that you have. So I would say-- and all of you do this exercise quite easily today-- make a list of all of the core projects that you need to work on or get done during April. Make a long list. Maybe there's 10 things. Maybe there's 16 things. What are the core big projects you need to get done between now and the end of April? And then take a look at all those priorities and rank them as either A's or B's. A's are like the most critical. B's would be like the nice to get done. And then go to your A's. Maybe you've got four A's and number them in the order of impact-- A1, A2, A3, A4. So you know which of the most impactful, which ones you want to start on of the A's, and do the same with the B's. So B1, B2. You'll end up with a list of A1s through whatever, and B1s through whatever. Then take a look at every project and think, how many hours or days will it take me to get that project through to completion? Maybe you have to come up with some of the substeps or tasks to get through the project. But you might have, let's say, an hour here, an hour there and come up with a total number of hours for all those projects. Then what I like to do is take project A1 and put it in my calendars to when I'm actually going to do the work. If I know it's going to take four hours, is it two hours here, two hours there, and I'll put two to hour blocks of time into my calendar labeled project A1 in my calendar. And then I'll put project A2 in my calendar. Then I'll put project A3 in my calendar. All of a sudden, I'm going to start to realize I don't have enough hours in the day to work on the projects and priorities that I need to get done, which then forces me to delegate some of that stuff to other people and coach them and grow them on that stuff, or it forces me to say no and only work on the critical few things. So it's not about managing time. It's about managing your priorities. And then it's about learning how to get results through others. One of the first businesses I ever built was the house painting company. In my first summer, we painted 128 homes. And I probably spent a total of seven hours painting. I delegated and hired people and trained people and focused on the critical few things versus actually doing the work. So that would be my answer around time management, is manage your priorities instead. It's actually, it's all covered in the time management section of the industrial leaders training as well. Cameron, can you share the difference between delegation and abdication? Yeah, delegation is making sure that the person has the skills to do it, knows what you need back from them, knows how little time or little money you want them to spend on the project to get it to completion. And they know you're available to coach them or help them or problem solve if they need it. Abdication is saying, hey, I need you to do this and not thinking about any of those things. So, really quick to show off hands. How many of you have done that what he just said and you called a delegation? Every single one of your hands should be up. Mostly you guys, including me, are bad. It's because most people don't know how to delegate. Like most people say, I need you to do this, go do it. And then you wonder why it took 12 hours. It's because Parkinson's loss is that work expands to build a container that we give it. If you don't tell someone, I only want you to spend two hours on this. I only want you to spend $50 on this. This is what completed looks like. Do you need any help? Or you assess their skills and their confidence using situational leadership? Like all of these skills tie together. Situational leadership, delegation, priority and time management, coaching, one-on-one, coaching, sometimes even running effective meetings are all tied together. But that's where business is very simple. Wonderful. Okay, any other questions? I have a few of myself. I'll fill in the silence in between. All right, we got one right here, Mr. Ella. Hey, so my question is similar to the other Alan in the room. We had my CEO, our company, with my father and he also passed away last year. And we've been a little bit like the Wild West. I feel like when it comes to management and leadership and chasing the correct goals in the company. So really what my question is about is trying to hire the next CEO. When I'm not sure that we have the personnel on staff to replace it, we're a company around 300 employees right now. And I think we need some-- all of us could really use more leadership training in our organization as well. To get that Alan? Yeah, I got all that. Alan, first up, I'm sorry about your dad. I've lost my dad three years ago. And he'd been an entrepreneur too. It was funny when my dad was alive. He said, one day, I wish I had all of your books when I was running my company 30 years ago. It goes a wide-- I didn't know all this stuff. So first off, read the book, The Seconding Command. It will teach you what a seconding command is, how to find one, how to interview for them, how to onboard them, how to build a good relationship. Because the key starting point for hiring a really good COO or a VP of operations, which is definitely the size that you're at, is really understanding yourself and the company. Because you're trying to find someone who matches your skills, your weaknesses, your areas that you love to work on, areas that you hate, the size of the organization you're in. So it's all in the book, The Seconding Command. I can't cover it all in a quick answer, but that would be the easy starting point. I can send you some compensation. I'll drop it in the chat. And these guys can share it with you later. But it's a salary survey. And we had a salary survey of approximately 300 seconding commands. And they gave us their title. They gave us the city that they're in. They gave us the size of their company by revenue and number of employees. And then they gave us their base salary, bonuses, long-term incentive packages. So there's a full comp deck there of about 300 to give you some guidance. And then lastly, if you really want a good introduction and executive search firm that can help you poach someone and hire a great Seconding Command, I can introduce you. If you just drop me an email, cammernetcammeranherald.com, I can make an intro to one of our partners, and they're really good in the recruiting space. Great. Thank you, sir. Cameron, can you cover the differences because a lot of people here-- and I know I did, especially-- I was like, I'm the CEO of Action Academy. We need a COO of Action Academy. We need a CFO. And a lot of people here are trying to buy service companies between maybe $500 K to $1 million in EBITDA. So they're doing $3 to $4 million a year. And they think that they need maybe a COO before they need that title. And a lot of the times what you'll do is you'll promote people to a title too fast. Can you share the difference between titles, compensation, when you need an ops manager versus a director versus a COO? Sure. So first off, you're looking for your Seconding Command, or you're looking for someone to come in your organization to get a bunch of stuff off your plate. Based on the stuff that you're giving them and how much money you want to pay them, you can assign the title. 30 years ago, to get a C-level title, whether it's a COO, or a CFO, or a chief marketing officer, You had to be.
be a major player at a major company. You need to be a really solid season executive. But then 1995, when email came out, the banks started to give away VP titles to everybody as a marketing tool. And all of a sudden, every 24-year-old person working at an investment banking firm had the title of Vice President of something. Even though there were nine layers below the CEO. Like there was nine people above the them or seven people above them. Everybody should have been there. Then that moved into the.com era from 95 to 2000 with all the internet companies giving away big titles. And they put them on their leadership team pages or about us pages. It became a marketing tool. So the titles got very watered down. A true C level, a true C-O-O, C-M-O, C-T-O, C-F-O, etc. Comes into your company with a level of strategic insight to show you where to go and how to get there, probably better at times than you could do it yourself. They come in with a level of autonomy to be able to do their job where they actually know what to do. They know how to do it. They don't need you telling them and coaching them and developing them because they've done it before. They usually show up at your company with a list of people that they've worked with before, employees that would like to come and work with your company. Partners and suppliers, they've used to another companies that they want to start using with you. They show up at their door like the pipe-piper with a lot of the people that you need. They have really good P&L skills. They actually know how to manage a budget in cash flow. They understand the balance sheet. They understand the financials of actually scaling up a company. And they have the leadership skills to get results through others. Those are the core things that they bring to the table at a true C level. Now, if you're delegating everything to someone, at best, they're a manager or a director. If the two of you are deciding what needs to get done, you're probably a VP. And if they're walking into your company, showing you that everything needs to get done, and for the most part, they're accurate. And you're like, yeah, here's a couple others, but that's truly a C level. Perfect, thank you, right here. - If you can do in the mic, you can hear it better. - Okay, perfect. Okay, so this one's a little bit for my W2, but honestly, probably for myself as well. So I've had the pleasure of hiring a bunch of really talented people over the last year. They're pretty competent, pretty capable. But at the same time, though, not perfectly refined, they definitely have work to do to be at the level where I can really lean on them. - Thinking about your leadership traits that you had outlined the 12 items there, would you suggest focusing in on one or two to really nail that down as they're looking to grow or would you suggest helping them across the board and letting that improve, I guess, just leadership capabilities at large? - Yeah, it only takes about six to seven hours to go through all of those 12 skills for the first time. So I would expose them to all of those skills to start with. And then I would have them work on the ones that they most like first. That's a good starting point for a junior person who is managing people or doesn't really have the skills. But the reality is they're gonna use them all. Like there's not a single one of those 12 skills that anybody managing people won't use this week. Right, they're all gonna have priorities and time management and projects. They're all gonna have people that they're coaching or developing or teaching or problem solving with or trying to use situation leadership, not knowing how to do it. Maybe interviewing, they're not interviewing and hiring somebody right away. They're not gonna need that one tomorrow. They're all gonna be managing stuff like email. So most of those skills are things that they're going to need on the day-to-day basis. Oh, one follow-up from the same. - Sorry about that, yeah. So I think that's super helpful. So the folks that I'm thinking about in particular, they're like true directors, true VPs. Do you feel that the content is at up the right level to help to upskill them and identify what they could or should do better? - Yeah, I trained, like when I was coaching the CEO of Sprint, the 82nd largest company in the United States, there were skills on here that I was training him on. When I was coaching Jamie Jones, the CEO of Sprint, I coached him for 18 months. His base salary was 2.4 million. There were skills that were here that I was training him on. Some of them, like if they're true seasoned executives and they've had some training, it's not gonna hurt them to go through this in another way 'cause it'll just be another, as an example with interviewing. I've read the book top grading. I've read the book who I've gone through two seminars with Jeff Smart on who. I've done role playing and practicing on interviewing with Paul Wolner. I've had videos of me doing job interviews and interviewing. I've watched videos about interviews. So it's not gonna hurt them to go through some content on something they're already pretty good at. It will reinforce. Lastly on that, the senior team at Starbucks, so the senior VPs and C level, this is 20 years ago, but they were going through a training session in the skill of situational leadership every three months. Every three months, the senior team got more training on situational leadership. So even if somebody is skilled, they can always continue to grow and then think about the best athletes on the planet. Do you think that the best golfer or the best swimmer or the best basketball players? Yeah, I don't need to practice. I'm in the NBA. No, they still practice. Like every single one of those pro athletes still practices every day. So I would be more nervous about a senior leader that says, I already know how to do everything. That would make me more nervous than somebody who says, I wanna continue to grow. I wanna continue to get better. Beautiful. All right, we got Daniel right here. Anybody over on the left side of the room? We have time for maybe four to five more questions. So be ready, Ocasio. We'll sit in the lever here. Daniel, hi, Cameron. Thank you so much for the great presentation. He's, I'm going to, to hoping on the last question. What percentage of time should U.S. leader spend on, on, on holding these skills? And how much time should you protect over your leadership team or the people that report to you so they can keep up skilling? Okay, well for a sentence of your time since you contribute to your to this versus them actually leading the team. I would say a really great question. I think if you could get your leadership team and management team working on their skill development, 10% of the time, that would be a pretty good number. And 10% of the time sounds like a lot, but let me just explain. Let's say it's five hours a week. That might be by going to a mastermind event every six months, that's three days. Maybe it's by showing up for a two hour call online with the grip that they're in, two hours a month. Maybe it's reading a book a week while they're sitting at their desk or watching a video a week while they're sitting at their desk. I think if someone was training four to five hours a week to be a better leader, it's that classic sharpening the saw, right? They're just gonna become much more effective. Beautiful, thank you sir. Okay, we had one or two more. And again, we'll look at every single professional athlete. It's still practice practice, and they're already the best in the world. Beautiful, Wilson. Hey, camera, my name is Wilson. I have a question. What is your number one tip for effective interviewing? Just make sure you're making the right higher up front and also just like on job postings to attract the attract talk talent and sometimes like, oh my God job posting you get like 50 applications and things like that. How do you like stuff through that? So get down to make sure you're hiring the best person and make sure you're like, how do you go through the interview to navigate that? What's your best tip to make sure you are making like the right higher? Okay, great, a couple great questions there. First one is every job posting that I do, I make it very polarizing. I make it sound like it's gonna be one of the hardest things this person's ever gonna have to do in their life, but they're gonna get to work with us. I want all the C players to read it and go, there's no fucking way I would wanna work for that company. (laughing) I've even sworn, I've even had the F bomb in a couple of job postings 'cause I needed people who were gonna be so close to me to know maybe I don't like that I swear, but it's gonna come out. And if that really turns you off, I'd rather know now I don't even want you to apply. Second thing that I do is I don't read the resumes when they send them to me. I instantly as soon as a resume gets sent, we get an auto reply that says, thanks for your resume, I'm not gonna look at it yet. Please read this vivid vision that describes what my company looks like, acts like it feels like three years in the future. If this sounds like the kind of company that you wanna help fly to the moon, reply now with a three minute interview video, a three minute video of how you can help us make our vivid vision come true. If I like their videos, then I'll look at the resume and decide who to bring into a group interview. So very polarizing job postings, video screenings number one. And then in the actual interview, I don't want people to tell me what their skills are. I want them to show me the actual examples of what they've done. I'll give you an example of that. If I'm interviewing for AI, and I'm asking people what they do, and oh, I use cloud code, and I use nano bin, and I use bid journey, and I use, I'm like cool, open your laptop, and show me. Open your laptop, and show me the agency you've created. Show me the gems you work with. Show me the props that you're using. The C-Players will run away and hide. The B-Players will stumble through it, but they won't be that great. And the A-Tes will be like, "Fuck, that's cool. Teach me that one." I learned that years ago, when someone was describing time management and priority management to me, and they sounded like they really knew this stuff, like they really knew it. And I said, "Can you go grab your daytime?" This was prior to cell phones being around. They went out to the car to get their daytimeer, and I've never seen them since. Because I know that it was not in their daytimeer. They knew how to do it, but they'd never done it before. Most people will interview and find people that know how to do something, but they've never done it. - Big difference. - As an example, for all of you, and I'll use Brian as a. example, Brian, do you know how to win an Olympic gold medal? Off the top of my head, Cameron. Now you do. You'd be faster or better than everybody else. That's true. But have you ever done it? Unfortunately not. Correct. So would I rather hire someone who walked on my car? I'm not even going back. Let's say that I was hiring a swimmer. Do I want someone who knows how to do backstroke or someone who is competed and broke record records at backstroke? I want someone who's competed in broke records. I want someone who has proven that they can do it. I need them to do track record. I don't want the confidence without the skills and the problem for a lot of general Y and Gen Z is they have so much fucking confidence without any of the skillsets to back that up. And we get enamored with their confidence and their personality, which is great. But I need both. Well said, Tom. Hey, Cameron. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. How to quick question in terms of can you maybe offer some tips or keys, either best practices or what to avoid for effective succession planning? Like what do you normally see? Or do you see a lack of effective succession planning and organizations in the impact and maybe what we could do to improve that or at least you're talking about succession planning, like I'm an executive being replaced by a new executive or a successful or so like if you're to see level, maybe you're next in command behind or if you are the next in command to that like what does there always improve on that or make it more effective? Because I feel like I see a lot of organizations or been a lot where effective succession planning is like an afterthought and then something blows up and there's like and some gets it bypass and there's nobody to fill the gap and it's a major disadvantage. Yeah. So the succession planning starts with having a clear vision of what your company looks like three years out and really looking at what your org chart for your company looks like three years out and looking at what your org chart looks like two years out and really looking at the current skill deficiency and skill gap of the people you have now to know if they're going to be able to have the skills that they're going to need later. That shows you the dealt suffer who you're going to need and who you've got and then it's about building the virtual bench. It's about knowing who the good people are in those markets. I like hiring ahead of the curve. I tried to hire people before I really need them because I need them to be on board learning the company, learning the people getting up to speed so that when I really need them, they're also completely integrated by that point. So I tend to hire people before I need them, but always building a virtual bench, always think about what my needs are going to be and they're always giving people the skills as they continue to scale. Beautiful. Okay. Thank you. Okay. And then we've got two final questions we got Zach and back here. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Three questions. All right. They'll close up. As a someone who is not currently an operator, does not have a business and would be coming into a new business as an operator instead of doing the just in case learning and instead practicing just in time, which out of those 12 skills, would you prioritize and try and get to that silver level quicker? And then maybe hitting the other ones at a later time. Is there anything you would prioritize? Yes. Situation of leadership for sure. Number one with that. In fact, I would probably go through the skills in the order that I've actually listed them. You won through 12. Beautiful. Any follow ups from that or good. Thank you, sir. Zach and then one more. Yeah. It's okay. Thanks for your time, man. Read your book twice before this, before this day. So really appreciate all your efforts and insight today. Kind of wanted to ask a vision question from the guy that wrote the vision. Not to switch momentum and topics, but you knew it was coming. Yeah. He knew it was coming. But what do you find in COOs and founders? What do you find that they do wrong? Or misunderstand about their be hagg or vivid visions as they write them? Behaag is different from a vivid vision. Right? A behaag is a 20 or 30 year stretch that's nonmeasurable. And from the outside, it seems impossible. And inside the company seems plausible. That's a definition of a behaag. A lot of people put in place a big goal. I want to change a million lives. Or I want to do a billion. That's a huge goal. But that's not a behaag. Colonizing Mars is a behaag. Putting a computer on every desktop is a behaag to crush adidas, which was Nike's behaag in 1972. That's a behaag to democratize the world's information. That's Google. That's a behaag. A vivid vision is a description of what your company looks like acts like and feels like three years in the future. So I see companies that try to describe it 10 years out. Not three years out. And it's a description of what it looks like. It's not the plan of how you're going to make it come true. Like I can describe my dream home. But I couldn't give you the blueprint so the plans or the elevation drawings or the budget. To make that happen. Often business owners try to include parts of the plan into the vivid vision. And that's not the point of it. The point of it is to inspire and align every stakeholder and everyone the business touches. So that everyone can see what the entrepreneur can see. And then they can help you figure out how to make that come true. I've also done vivid visions for myself and I've also my wife and I did a vivid vision three years ago for our relationship as a couple. And it doesn't say in our vivid vision as a couple how we're going to make it come true. But every sentence is a finished state that we can reverse engineer. Beautiful. I think we had probably a couple million people look at that after our video with me and that here. All right. Last question. A COO of a Fortune 500 company is going to be compensated and have the completely different caliber than say a CEO of a landscaping company. And so I understand that you get like all the more importance for training and everything else. That's the solution. I have a feeling that you have a nugget and there's information to help on this journey when you're hiring up. You don't have the compensation to give to someone. But it's still a very important piece. It's going to run your business. Correct. It's probably if it's a look how many employees in the landscaping company. That was an example. But I mean, my court was a 10 to 15. My court experience was very large financial company and I was. No, but again, let's use the example. Give me a situation of a landscaping company. What size company are you considering or talking about? So let's use a catering company because this is actually what I'm thinking about. And the catering company has about 50 employees and then a lot of temporary seasonal workers and people that come in on the weekends and cater to parties. Okay. And then what's the revenue of the catering company approximately? 1.5 million. Great. So if it's a 1.5 million dollar company with 50 employees and sometimes at best, it is a vice president of operations. And it's probably a director of operations. It's not a COO because you're also probably not going to pay the person 300 to $400,000 a year, which is what base comp of a small to mid size COO gets paid. So put the right title on the roles and responsibilities of the person. And don't compare the COO of an enterprise company to a director of operations of a small company. Right. If you're going to hire Johnny Ives to be director of the chief marketing officer for Apple, he's making millions of dollars a year. But you're not going to be able to pay him to be the CEO of your company. So don't compare the roles and responsibilities of varied. Like the top that that's the first starting point is most companies put the wrong title on the person. Okay. Compare a director to a director like a director of a big company is probably getting paid the same as a director of a small company. As is the VP. But the problem is that so many entrepreneurs put big titles on small roles. And then the person's the person starts thinking they're a COO and they start comparing and the entrepreneurs. Yeah, but you're not really a COO. Then why do you call them that? It's really hard to reverse too. It's very hard. I had to help Lugra's logistics on one day we retitled every single one of the 400 employees. We retitled all 400 because some of them started as VP's back when they were only 20 people. But now that there's 400, they were really more like a director. And then he was hiring true CLOs coming in. So we retitled all 400 people on a day. Beautiful. And with that, Cameron, we're at time. Thank you so much, brother. I just want to let you know from the bottom of my heart. It's been a really cool journey and a lot of people, a handful of people in this room have seen me go from the journey of reading your book. And a fun fact. When me and Cameron first met, I reached out to him like four years. I think two to four years in a row. I was like, Hey, Cameron, let's just started this podcast. You should check it out. Can you come on and he goes, nope, too small. And then a year later, I said, camera, this is Brian. Now we're at a 10,000 downloads. Can you come in the podcast? He goes, nope, too small. And third time, I was like, Hey, we're at 100,000 downloads. Can you come on? It goes, all right. I'll do it. And now this last time, it's like him and I are now personal friends and we've hung out a couple of times in Austin. We've done a few podcasts. So it's just like, and closing like entrepreneurship is how do you respond to that first message? Because now this relationship we have is really cool. Anything to say in closing? Yeah. One last thing. If by the way, on podcasts, if any of your members want to get on a bunch of podcasts, I have a woman who gets for about $4,000 or $5,000 can get you on five podcasts. And it doesn't matter what podcast you're on. It's what you do with them. So what I would do is you get Courtney to land you five business podcasts. And then you share those podcasts on your press page, share them three times on Facebook, three times on LinkedIn, three times on Instagram. And then you take every podcast and you slice it up into a bunch of shorts and you share the shorts on your channel. And then you take the best shorts and the best videos that are performing and you buy traffic at boost those. It's a really efficient way to have some really good marketing. So if anybody wants to have someone get you onto a bunch of podcasts, if you,
You'd drop me an email to
[email protected]. I can make that intro. I've worked with her twice and she's really good. It's different from what I did with U-Brien, which is just wait for the right timing for the right show. Beautiful. Any last closing piece of advice? Yeah, none of this shit matters. (laughing) This is just what we're doing to make money. Remember to enjoy the journey and that the death rate is still 100%. Have some hobbies, spend some time with your kids and your friends and your family and your spouse, 'cause this is just a journey that we're on. We're all just walking each other home. Beautiful. Cameron, thank you so much, brother. - Bye, everyone. - Bye, everybody.
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