The Secret of $100M CEOs – Cameron Herold

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Cameron Herold. Cameron built two $100 million-plus businesses by age 35, and later went on to drive 1-800-JUNK from two million in revenue to over 106 million in revenue. He now is known as the CEO Whisperer and runs the COO Alliance, helping some of the biggest names in tech and in business create massive growth, create cultures that are self-fulfilling. You are gonna absolutely love this conversation, I promise.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we are joined by Cameron Herold. Cameron, by the age of 35, had already built two $100-plus million businesses. He later went on to take 1-800-JUNK from two million in revenue to 106 million in revenue, 14 employees to over 3,100 employees. He is known as the CEO Whisperer.

If you are in a leadership position, if you're an entrepreneur, a founder, if you love business, buckle up, get your notebook, you are going to absolutely love this episode. Let's get on to Cameron Herold. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Cameron, dude, appreciate you taking the time, man. I'm glad we've finally got a chance to hook up.

I'm, I'm so excited to have this conversation. Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. Looking forward to it. Yeah.

So dude, a- as it would happen, like two hours before we recorded, you put this video out on Instagram, and, and it's where I wanna start, right? Sure. Like, break down, break down DOGE and, and what is happening, and, and kinda just let's, let's start to go there. I wanna start with DOGE because I'm so intrigued by this. But there are...

If you're a, if you're just a business guy or gal and you're trying to run your business and you occasionally pop your head up into the conversation, there is almost no way to dissect what's really happening, what's truth, what's not. So let's- Yeah ... let's start there and help people. Okay, so there's a couple interesting points here. O- one is, you know, I've been following Trump since probably 1989 as a business person and a negotiator and, you know, the way he operates and works with the press. I think I first read The Art of the Deal back in 1988 or '89.

And then secondly is Elon. I've known Elon since 1995. Elon Musk's younger brother worked for me in 1993. I was a reference for Elon and Kimbal in their first round of funding for Zip2 in January of '95. Wow.

So I've known him as a business person before, you know, most people on the planet knew that he existed, and it's just 'cause his brother worked for me at College Pro Painters, and his cousin, Peter Rive, who built SolarCity. So I'm, I'm particularly interested in what Trump is doing right now on the business side of politics. And look, I'm, I'm not necessarily a, a fan of him as a person. I'm Canadian. I, I'm, I'm a little, little less glossy.

I'm a little more aw gee, shucks. I'm... You know Canadians, we apologize before we can even hit on a girl, like, "Sorry, I think you're beautiful." So I don't like the ego behind a lot of Trump, I never did. I don't like the gold faucets.

I don't like the fancy, ostentatious. Put all that stuff aside, he's doing something that absolutely needs to be done in politics and it needs to be done in every business, and there's a lot of waste, and I think a lot of business people miss how much waste there is inside of our company. So when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, I was the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, took it from 14 people to 3,100 employees in six years. We had at the leadership team a financial review meeting every three months, and the leadership team reviewed the general ledger, which is every expense on the P&L. So we looked at every expense in entertainment, every expense in travel, every...

We looked at all the credit card bills. And as a team, we discussed stuff that kinda jumped out at us. We looked at software licenses 24 years ago. So there's so much waste that they're cutting right now that I think both the left and the right have to look at that and go, "Yeah, it's pretty hard to argue 95% of that waste is really waste." You know, we don't need a new embassy in South Sudan.

And I think there's a good lesson in there for entrepreneurs i- is to be very ruthless and to inspect what you expect, and I think it's very hard for an entrepreneur to go out to their company and keep saying, "Oh, we need to get more revenue." The only reason you need to get more revenue is to pay for all the stupid expenses that you don't really need in your company. And in government to say, "We need more taxes," no, we don't need any more taxes. In fact, if we operated properly, if we operated efficiently, we could probably reduce the taxes. So one of the big reasons why I l- I exited Canada 10 years ago and then left the US four years ago, I'm now a resident of Dubai, my company is based in Dubai, is 'cause the royal family that owns the country doesn't allow for any waste, right?

They don't allow for the, the, the, the, the frivolous spending. And I think there's something that's really good that's happening there. Anyways, a, a rambling answer. No, I... No, it's a perfect answer.

I, and I... Where I get frustrated is so I live in New York State, born and raised here. You know, my early years, I'll be 44 in a couple days, as I said. Early days were George Pataki. It was very much s- the Empire State still at that time, right?

It was you come to this state regardless of where you are, and everyone discounts upstate, which is where I live. But- You know, it, the entire state had this mentality of like regardless of where you sit, whether it's New York City, Buffalo, Albany, this is, this is a place where, where people work and grow and things happen. And, you know, it has been, it has been kind of cannibalized by... I'm not gonna say Democrats, there's plenty of Democrats that I like. I'm gonna say more of a leftist mentality that, that I think has, has become pervasive.

And our current governor, Hochul, said something about DOGE that I found very intriguing, which was, was that... I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna paraphrase 'cause I don't have the exact words, but the essence of her argument was, you are going to pay for these things either way. Which was these programs, like you're either paying them through taxes or we're getting the money from you a different way. Right. You're still paying, right?

Yeah. So, like these cuts are meaningless because we're still-- we still have to have the programs. And I think where people get misunderstand is that you don't need the programs, right? The, like, it's this, this constant idea that, that we need to spend more and have our fingers in more things. And I'm interested from a business perspective, how do we marry- Mm. ... if we're in a state like New York, right?

Yeah. So if you're in Texas or you're in South Carolina, different setup. But- Well, let me... Yeah, let me speak to that. Yeah.

So I... And, and I have a lot of ties to New York State. My grandmother is from Peekskill. I used to go down to Cornell at Ithaca all the time. My, my school that I was at was in Ottawa.

You know, lived across the border from Buffalo, so I have a lot of ties into New York State. Again, I'm gonna go back to College Pro Painters, which was the first business that I helped build and scale. It's where I hired Kimball and he, and his Peter, or cousin Peter. The f- the founder of College Pro Painters said, "A leader has to say no more often than they say yes." And it's very difficult to say no.

It's very difficult when we're trying to be inclusive, we're trying to let people's ideas matter. But I think good companies have learned the skill of being able to say, "No, because we can't afford it. No, because it's not attached to our strategy. No, because it's not aligned with our core values. No, because it's not aligned with our current cash flow," and we're good at handling conflict.

Government has said yes to everything. They've said yes because it's easier to say yes, they don't piss anyone off. It's easier to say yes because they don't have to pay the bills. It's easier to say yes 'cause somebody else is constantly giving them more money. It's easier to say yes 'cause they buy themselves votes.

It's easier to say yes... A- a- and the top 2% are only making $300,000 a year or more, which means 98% of the people basically are kind of middle class or lower class. Like, so it's easy for 98% of people to say tax the rich. There's not more money to get. In a business, you can't say, "Well, just go get more revenue."

It's really hard to get revenue. So business people and homeowners, if you're, if you're a normal homeowner, you can't say, "Well, let's just go borrow more money." The bank won't loan to you, right? So you have to live within your means. So I've taught my kids to save 50% of all the money they ever make when they're living at home has to get invested.

When they move out, 20% of all the money they have to, to make has to get invested. I'm teaching them that mentality, teaching them as a business, right? Take a portion of your money, invest in growth. Take a portion of your money, invest in savings. Take a portion of your money and decide where to spend it.

Use zero-based budgeting. So if a business operated the way government does, we'd be bankrupt every single year. So good businesses operate with a level of rigor that is very different, and I think that's why Trump, it's why David Sacks, it's why Elon Musk, these people that are involved now in, in DOGE and in the crypto and in, in making big decisions for government are able to identify a lot of the waste, is they're not approaching government like typical bureaucrats will. They're approaching it with like, "We're bankrupt. We gotta make some tough decisions right now."

And sadly, we're gonna go through another period of about 12 to 18 months of stagflation, which is recession plus inflation at the same time. Hasn't happened since 1974. No, the government is not gonna be lowering interest rates. You're completely dreaming and on crack thinking that we can keep printing money. We can't keep printing money.

It's no different than a, a business can't go out and say, "Well, I'll just raise another million dollars in revenue." It's hard to get that revenue. You can't just go out and borrow money from the bank because you gotta pay that money back. So I think we're gonna go through a period of tough times, and I think businesses have to recognize that and have to operate that way. One of the things business people have to do is teach their management team how to say no, and most early stage managers, first time, second time managers, their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people.

That's really never the solution to the problem. It's being able to look at the budget and saying, "Wait, what does this idea do? Does it make our employees happier? Does it make our customers happier? Does it drive more gross margin?

Does it drive more revenue? Is it making our vivid vision come true? If it's not, why are we doing it, right? Or why are we doing it now?" And I think that's where government has gotten so lazy, is they just say yes to everything.

They're spending all this money that isn't even theirs, and then they're printing more money to pay it all back, and most humans don't even understand the difference between a debt and a deficit, right? We... The interest right now on our debt takes up about 40% of the revenue. If you were a homeowner, that means let's say you're paid $100,000 a year, $40,000 a year is just to pay your interest on your credit cards, and then you gotta live on this... You'd all be bankrupt.

So we, we need to recognize that these costs that they're cutting in government are very good, and I think we need to go look at our businesses in a very similar way, right? What are the critical few expenses we need? What are the critical few employees that we need? Most of our companies can produce 50% of the output with the square root of our number of employees. If you're running with 100 employees, it's really 10 people are producing 50% of your output.

Or even the Pareto principle of 20% of your people, so let's say 20 employees out of the 100 are producing 80% of your output. You can look at that other 80% and go Why are we even doing it? Do we need to do this work? Are we just busy being busy? Are we, are we busy doing work that isn't producing any gross margin, right?

And I, I think that's the stuff that I've always been really kind of maniacal about. Yeah. I've seen... It, it feels to me like many business owners have allowed their feelings on a topic to drive decisions versus the facts. And, you know, I, I, this is a term that's been popularized, you know, you bring the receipts, right?

And I, I look at the philosophies of certain individuals, this comes a lot out of the political class, but it is very much, I think, kind of soaked into the business class as well, is we start managing on our feelings of, you know, "I don't wanna be seen as this," or, "I don't wanna hurt these people's feelings," or, you know, God forbid, you let someone go, and we've lost this, this end game of, like, at the end of the day, like, we have to make a profit. Like, no one has a job if we're not making a profit, you know, at some point here. Yeah. So how do you... If you've...

Say you're a, a leader and, you know, you've f- maybe fallen prey to some of the influence of the last 10 years of, say, the, the more emotion-driven decision-making or, or kind of woke philosophy, how do we turn that course? If you find yourself- Sure ... in that place and you wanna get back, how do you make that transition? Well, there's a couple parts to that. The first off is it doesn't even have to be the woke kind of part bringing into the business world. It can also just be a desire of an entrepreneur to build a great company, right?

I wanna build a nice place. I want my employees to be happy. I wanna live our core values. I wanna do good in the environment. That's not woke.

That's just being a good human being- Yeah ... running a good business. That's fair. Right? Very fair. So let's say, like, we built the number two company in all of Canada to work for.

One 800 GOT JUNK ranked as number two in the entire country. Out of 1.4 million companies, we ranked number two. So we were just... It wasn't woke, it was just we were a really good place to work. Now, in doing that, it's hard to say no to employees 'cause you don't wanna hurt their feelings.

You don't wanna, you don't wanna be an autocratic, dictatorial leader. So the lessons that I learned was to be able to say no because of these things, right? I can say to my child who's, like, when my kids were seven and five, "No, you can't have cookies right now because we're eating dinner in 20 minutes. After we eat dinner, you can have one cookie," right? "No, you can't have seven cookies because you'll end up fat and obese, and then you'll end up with diabetes, and you'll, like...

Because we're gonna be a healthy family." So our core value... So when you attach a no to a core values, or no to a core purpose, or no to your vivid vision, or no to your strategy, or no to your budget, people understand. But if you haven't grown the skills of your employees, right? One of the core skills in my Invest in Your Leaders online training program is managing conflict.

If you haven't trained your managers in saying no, they end up saying yes 'cause they feel like they have to be nice to people. Being firm but fair is better than being nice and having to fire people two years later because you've built a company with a lot of waste. That's number one. Number two, you talked about the facts and feelings. I love Google's mentality here.

You know, in the last 25 years, I guess 30, 'cause they started around 1997, one of the top companies ever built, Google, has a very famous mantra inside of their meetings, and it says, "I don't care what you think," or, "I don't care what you feel. Show me what the data says." And I think that's really interesting is people that come in with, "Oh, I think we should do this." Cool, but show me what the data says. Why do you think?

What's the ROI gonna be of that decision? So I always go back to everything that we wanna do as a company, will it make our employees happier? Will it make our customers happier? Will it increase gross margin? Will it drive revenue?

Will it make our vivid vision come true? In that order, by the way. I always build everything with will it make my employees happier, more than profit, more than revenue, everything else. If I have really happy employees, 'cause they don't have to work with the jerks, they don't have to deal with waste, they get to work on important shit, they get to work with people that are producing results, they get to p- work with people that are living core values, if I get to work with those critical few people, they're going to take care of my customers. And if my customers are being taken care of by really happy people, my customers will pay more.

So what I end up doing is by obsessing about my employee net promoter score, it drives my customer net promoter score, which allows me to charge more and everybody makes more. Yeah. We... So I had a startup that I exited from in 2023, and, uh, we had our, our internal ph- I completely agree with what you said about happy employees, and our, our internal, an internal philosophy of ours was in service of. We are all in service of someone else, right?

Like, I as the, as the CEO and founder, I was in service of my employees. My ser- my, my managers were in service of the people that they, that reported to them. The, the, you know, maybe the, the, the entry-level layer was in service of the customers that they touched or the processes that they touched. And, and this idea of instead of, like, I govern what you do or I manage you is in service of you. Like, it's like these little mindset turns can, can really, can really drive how we interact with each other.

Totally. So I, I've always said that I wanna flip the org chart upside down, right? Turn it upside down so the CEO's at the bottom- Mm-hmm ... supporting the VPs, who are supporting the managers, who are supporting the frontline staff, who are supporting the customers, like an inverted pyramid. Everyone can see the vivid vision of where we're going. The customers, suppliers, partners, employees can all see where we're going, and then you build your company inside your core values and your core purpose, right?

Then it's very easy to be in service, 'cause my job as a leader... I was asked by Fortune magazine in 2003, in the actual physical print magazine, "How do you hold employees accountable?" I said, "I don't. I hire accountable people." I hire people who are gonna do what we need them to do, who have done what we need them to do already, and then my job is to remove obstacles, to coach them, to praise them, to problem solve for them, to help them, to, to care about them, but not to drive them and manage them, right?

Yeah. If I inspire them and I'm in service of helping them, if I grow their skills, their confidence, and their connections, that's all they really need of us.Yeah. I, I think of that, I completely agree with your pyramid as well. I think of it as like if you're, if you have the standard pyramid with the CEO on top, you're trying to, i- it's almost as if you're trying to pull the team along. Where if you flip it on its head and now the, now the, the CEO's on the bottom in the inverted pyramid, you're actually pushing behind them and working with them, and it's, it, it, you know, just philosophically feels like a, like a more supportive role, and it, and it drives the mindset of what we're trying to do.

It's, it's exactly... Like, I bring a lot of analogies back to traditional marriage, like a husband and wife or raising a family. My job as a dad is not to tell my kids what to do. It's not to manage them all the time. It's not to show them what their chores are every day.

It's to show them our v- our values as a com- as a family. It's to show them and inspire them to become better adults. It's to grow their confidence to be better adults. It's to grow their skills to become adults. It's to help kick them out of the house to be confident, to, to make sure they've got hobbies and passions and friends.

That's easy. Well, if I, if I grow my kids that way, why would I not grow my team that way? Yeah. It's the same thing. And sadly, most entrepreneurs have never had any training on leading and coaching and delegating and, and, you know, leveraging situational leadership.

So most managers revert to, "I'm gonna hold people accountable and tell them what to do." It's 'cause they're bad at interviewing, they're bad at hiring, and they're bad at kind of working in support of people. When you're good at that, business gets very easy. Yeah. I, I think another part of that, and actually, uh, Andy Frisella, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.

Mm-hmm. He, he's the founder of 1st Phorm. It's a supplement company. He was talking about this topic and he said, you know, the, the issue, the pr- uh, one of the problems that entrepreneurs face is it's their vision, their passion to build this thing and, you know, they're willing to put 20 hours a day into this business. And then they expect and try to drag along and will browbe and will put pressure on their team to do the exact same thing.

And his point was you can't hold someone to the same standard that you as the founder and the entrepreneur may be willing to do, right? You wanna get out of them- Well, yeah, because- Yeah ... yeah, because there's not a single employee has equity in the company. Yeah. So they're not gonna care, right? At the end of the day, in fact, I even have a tattoo on my arm that I got back, um, about four months ago, and it says, "Walking each other home," in Hindi, and it's just a reminder that none of this shit matters.

Like, we're all... I've, I've been joking recently that we're all gonna end up as a kebab. We're just meat on a stick, right? At the end of the day, we're all gonna die. And our employees have lives.

They have hobbies. They have insecurities. They have fears. They have families. They're, they're just here to make a paycheck.

Now, they wanna do great work. They wanna be a part of a cause. They wanna build something with meaning. But when you own the company, that's why you have a bigger stake in the outcome than they're going to ever have. You can't expect them to care like you're ever gonna care because you're not giving them the same as, nor am I saying you should.

I don't think you should give them equity in a company that you're starting, but you also can't expect them to do that. Now you also said something else though, you know, employees work or employers, CEOs working like 17 hours a day. I just sat with two very successful entrepreneurs two hours ago for breakfast and I gave them shit for working more than eight hours a day because they're slowly creating problems in their marriage. They're slowly creating habits around their relationship with their kids that the end up, at the end of the day is gonna hurt them. And they tell themself a lie that I'm just doing this to catch up.

I'm just doing this to move this ahead. It's just a stage we're at in the business. No, delegate everything except genius. Find the two or three things that give you energy, that you're amazing at, that, that you're so good at, and delegate everything else off your plate. And one of them said, "Well, I can't.

I don't have the people that can do it." I said, "Good. Learn how to interview. Hire people, and then spend your time coaching them and giving them the skills and the confidence and the connections to do what's on your plate." But your to-do list does not have your name on it, right?

Your, Ryan's to-do list doesn't say Ryan's to-do list. Even if it's does, you don't have to do it. You can delegate 90% of what's on your to-do list to other people and then grow their skills and confidence and connections so they can do that. That's what really gives us scale. So I lived that firsthand.

The first startup that I was part of, I was the chief marketing officer, and I felt like, you know, this being my first true, like, just high energy startup business, I went in full stack and was, you know, every minute that I wasn't eating or spending a minimal amount of time with my children, I was working, right? And, uh, all hours of the day, all the time, and it just- ... it not only destroyed my relationship with my spouse, but also destroyed my health, my, my mental health. I had this manic personality that, that was- Yeah ... like super highs, super lows. And then ultimately, after a period of time, my work product started to be affected. Yeah.

And it wasn't until I pulled the brakes back and started operating like a, in a rational way, much closer to what you said, that I, my work product then ramped way back up 'cause now I had the space. And- You know, if, if you look at a sports team or a professional athlete or the Cirque du Soleil, none of those performers or athletes are performing in their peak, you know, sport 60 hours a week. There's not a baseball player, a basketball player, a soccer player, an out like football player. There's no professional athlete that is performing in their sport 60 hours a week. You know, they might do four hours and then they're off.

They might do 30 minutes and then they're off. You know, like a tennis player playing tennis for three hours, they might be practicing the rest of the week, but that's not high performance perform, perform. And when entrepreneurs think that they have to be performing 60 hours a week, they forget that some of their time would be better spent thinking, connecting, praising people, showing up as the chief energizing officer, right? To, to, to bring good energy into the group. But if we're drained and stressed, we're bringing in that drained, stressed, negative energy, and that's what we're throwing into our organization.

So sometimes it's about doing less, praising people more- Showing up with positive energy more, thinking strategically more. You know, it's about the, the two guys cl- you know, they were told to go clear-cut forests, and you got manager one and manager two, and they're both clear-cutting the forest, and they're both, like, being super efficient and, and the one manager climbs up to the tallest tree and looks around and says, "Holy shit, we're in the wrong forest." Well, if a leader doesn't have time to be strategic, to be in mastermind communities, to be spending time with coaches, to be just spending time observing, disconnecting, inspecting what you expect, yeah, you might be productive, but you might be productive on the wrong stuff, and I think a lot of businesses are very guilty of that. I was talking to a founder the other day, and he shared with me that... You know, we were talking about a similar topic, right?

He's stressed out, he's struggling with his board, you know, and he's asking me all these questions. And he, he talked to me about how much he was working, and I asked him a similar question 'cause, you know, at this point in my career, I've made a lot of these corrections that I, that, mistakes that I made early in my career. And I was talking to him about this, this, this similar topic. I'm like, "How much time do you have baked into your day for, for nothing but just serendipitous activity," right? It could be thought experiments.

It could be writing an article that allows you, you know, that's, that, that allows you to get your brain out. It could be, you know, whatever, just random activities associated to your business that aren't a task. Like, how much, how much of that time do you have baked in? And he said, "Zero." And I s- and I asked him why, and he said, "Because I wanna set the example for how hard I want my team to work."

That's stupid. Well, there's two parts to that. Working hard is like a fly trying to get out a window. That fly is working really hard, and most of those flies end up dead on the windowsill. If the fly would stop and look around a little bit and go, "Oh, shit, there's a door over here.

Maybe I'll go out the door," that path is easier. Working hard is kind of a very kinda 1970s Protestant work ethic, right? Work hard. Keep your nose to the grindstone. Instead of saying work smart.

Find the cheat sheets. Find the hacks. Find the shortcuts. Find as, as two of my friends, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, wrote in their book, "Who Not How," find the people that know how to do that so that you can get them plugged in so that they can actually get your how. But th- this whole, like, work harder, work harder, work harder doesn't scale any company.

You know, even Elon Musk said the other day, and I thought this was really insightful, if you don't know the one big thing, the one big problem facing your company today, you're the problem. And if leaders are so focused on busy, right? Jim Collins in the book "Good to Great" said it's about working on the critical few things versus the important many things. Being busy doesn't necessarily mean being productive. Working hard doesn't necessarily get you the same results of working smart.

S- taking pause and saying, "Maybe I can sharpen the saw. Maybe I can work on the flywheel approach. Maybe I can get a little more focused. Maybe I can say no to 80% of our projects that aren't driving gross revenue." I worked with a, a, a CEO in Austria a few years ago that I was coaching.

They've got a, about a $60 million company. They had 960 outstanding customer service requests, and she was really nervous because they were gonna go from four full-time people to eight in customer service over the next 12 months 'cause they were doubling the company. And I said, "I want you to set a goal that you're gonna go from four full-time people to one." She goes, "That could never happen." I'm like, "Well, why don't we look at what all the customer service requests are?"

90% of them were the same seven problems. So we spent 50 grand, and we fixed five of the seven problems. Spent another 100 grand and s- fixed the other two. She was spending $200,000 a year for four people. She went from four down to one, so she's now saving $150,000 a year.

And instead of having 900 outstanding requests, they were down to 30. So their business got simpler. Their customers were happier, but they spent time on the right stuff instead of just working harder. Most companies would just go out and hire more people and hire more people and hire more people instead of fixing the problem. Right?

At the end of the day, we only have a customer service problem because, or one of four... Sorry, customer service department because of four reasons: either our customer was overset with expectations, right? We promised them more than we can deliver. The product sucks, our service sucks, or the FAQs on the website aren't clean enough and clear enough for people to solve their own problem, right? If you can actually make your FAQs on your website two sentences each in 20-point font and very visible with no phone number and no email address, people will solve their problem.

If you fix the actual problem, if you fix the actual product, if you pro... Like, I had a customer that I was coaching, and they told all their clients, "Phone us 24 hours a day. Here's our cell number." I'm like, "That's terrible." They're like, "No, it's great.

We're giving them 24..." I'm like, "You're not gonna pick up the phone if you're sleeping. You're not gonna pick up the phone if you're going to the bathroom. You're not gonna pick up the phone if you're having sex. So you're literally, there's going to be times that you're gonna miss that expectation.

Why don't you say, 'Here's how to solve your own problem,' and fix all the problems so they don't have problems, and then maybe say, 'If you email us, we promise to get back to you within 24 hours,' which is pretty darn good, and then live that promise by wowing them and getting back to them within six?" So the industry that I've worked in for the last 20 years is the insurance industry, specifically property casualty on the independent side, both as a agency owner, salesman, and on the technology side, which is where I live today. And the problem that you just articulated is something that is pervasive in our space- Sure ... is that the agency owner, like the core, you know, vision, leader, all the things we've just discussed, will literally hand out their cell phone number to thousands of clients, and then they become stressed out, overworked, burned out, bitter, resentful because they're getting tasked with all these things that could easily either be solved on their website or routed to, to an employee. And what I've found is, in, in speaking to so many of them, is usually I, I find it to be one of two things. It's either ego or insecurity, right?

They're either... So, you know- I wanna handle all these things. I'm the one that knows the answer. These are my clients. My name is on the box."

Or they're so insecure that they're gonna lose people that they want that. So if, if I'm sitting here and I'm listening to this and I found myself in a place that you just described, right? My cell phone number, I'm getting pinged all hours of the day. I'm starting to become burnt out- ... resentful, bitter. How do we...

May- is it awareness? Like, how do we start to... How do we, one, rationalize that we're n- maybe not doing the right thing and that we are in a place that's hurting ourselves, and then what are, what's the path to start to fix that? One is to, to recognize that more often than not, entrepreneurs that are saying that, "My business is my hobby," they don't actually have any hobbies. And the reality is no one wants to hear about your hobby.

You know, if you went to a, a cocktail party and somebody who's a lawyer says, "Well, being a lawyer is my hobby," I don't wanna hear them talk about law. I don't wanna hear an insurance guy that happens to love insurance talk about insurance. No one wants to hear about whatever your business is either. So it isn't a hobby, it's a business. It's what you do to make money.

Hobbies are hobbies. More often than not, most of the people that have business as their hobby are getting a dopamine rush. They're getting a hit, they're getting a boost from that, 'cause they have nothing else in their life that they're getting it from. Their relationships aren't very strong. Their relationship with their spouse isn't very strong.

They don't have any really good hobbies or relationships with their kids. They don't have any good kinda spiritual relationship with themself. So what they end up doing is defaulting to the one thing that gives them energy and a rush. It's something that they're in control in. So recognizing that that's a problem is part of the solution.

And then the second part is just s- kind of saying, well, we only start a company for one of three reasons: to give us money, to give us free time, and to have that feeling of accomplishment that we did something. Well, once your business is up and running and it's successful, okay, you've got the accomplishment, at some point you've got enough money. I mean, you can have F you money, you can have generational wealth, whatever, but at some point you got enough money. You can go on all the trips. You can buy the nice cars.

Like, the rest is just bonus. The third one is to buying your time, right? D- a really good friend of mine, Dan Martell, uh, we've been friends for 15 years, wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time, and it's all about identifying the stuff that is within your business that is below your effective hourly rate that you can actually hire someone else to do to give you time. But if you have no hobbies and friends and relationships, you have no incentive to wanna do that. So what I like people to do is to write a bucket list, write a personal vivid vision for what they want their life to look like and feel like three years from now, and start living that, and then realizing that business is something to serve us.

I was very lucky. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My dad was an entrepreneur. Both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs. My dad took me to the golf club when I was 15 and showed me all these people coming in to play golf at 12 o'clock on a Wednesday, which is when we were playing.

And he's like, "That guy owns a car dealership. He owns a clothing store." I remember the people. Like, Bruce McCullough owns a car dealership. Jim Wilkinson owns a clothing store.

Freddy owns a, owned this other accounting place. So he was showing me all these entrepreneurs, and we went out and played golf. You know, 5:00, we're sitting on the balcony eating our fries and gravy. I'm drinking my Cherry Coke, and he's like, "See that guy? He's a teacher.

He works for the mine. He works for the car dealership. He works for Freddy." He said, "Do you notice the difference between who played golf at 12 o'clock and who plays golf at 5:00 o'clock?" And I said, "Yeah, entrepreneurs play golf in the middle of the day."

He said, "Entrepreneurs can do whatever they want, whenever they want, and when you're an employee, you have to work for somebody else." So for me, being an entrepreneur was about having the free time, and I've never lost sight of that, that I've always wanted to have my business to be there to serve me versus me being there to serve it, right? If I'm working 18 hours a day, I have a shitty boss. Well, and if I'm the entrepreneur, I'm a shitty entrepreneur. Yeah.

I wanna come back to this, and this, we're gonna go all the way back to, to stagflation. You gave a very brief definition, but I, I'd love for you to dig into it a little more. Sure. And then I'd like to spend some time talking about how we position our businesses and what we need to be thinking about as leaders or entrepreneurs, uh, with this, you know, with this idea coming down the pipe. Sure.

Okay, so stagflation ha- the last time it happened was 1974, and it happened up until around 1982. It was a painful eight period, eight-year period. It was a recession plus inflation at the same time, which is exactly what's happening right now. We're pretending we're not in a recession, but the reality is because the government kept printing money, it gave companies a boost with all the, the COVID spending that happened, individuals getting money that happened, low interest rates. People kind of lived beyond their means.

We lived with money that we didn't really even have. 1974, most people weren't living off credit cards. Master Charge, which was now... or Chargex, which became MasterCard, and Visa were just starting around then. So the whole debt cycle and borrowing and living beyond your means started in that period of time. Right now, companies have been so used to, over the last 15 years, low interest rates.

Those were artificially low. 6.5% to 7% as a normal interest rate for a company to borrow money was normal. In '82, '83, it was 18% interest rates. So where we're facing right now is interest rates are probably gonna stay where they are. Government cannot afford to lower interest rates anymore, 'cause if they do, they continue to cause more inflation, right?

If they're printing more money, they're devaluing the currency. Everything just starts costing more 'cause there's more, so they can't afford to do that. They wa- what they have to do is get rid of waste. They have to get rid of some of the jobs. And we have AI coming in way faster than we're anticipating.

And anybody who's out there saying, "Oh, well, you know, it, it, the jobs are gonna get absorbed," no, it's happening way faster than it did. When we went from farming to industry and from industry to computers, you know, it, it didn't happen overnight. We're gonna lose, in a period of about the next four years, five years, we're gonna lose every taxi driver, every limo driver, every car driver, every shuttle driver, every bus driver, all the parking lots, insurance companies, auto body- None of the-- When, when autonomous vehicles come in, all that stuff is gone. When c- right now 14% of the workforce in Korea is robots, right? When, when AI and robotics come in, that replaces stuff too quickly.

So I think what's coming right now is we're going to have more inflation, we're going to have more layoffs, we're gonna have companies cutting back. We've got taxation right now happening globally where-- with these Trump tariffs coming in, which there's arguments for it being good, but most of it is gonna be bad for the individual because companies are just going to charge more. When we have to import all of our goods and services, we're going to have to charge more. So yeah, we might bring back manufacturing to North America, but not fast enough to make a difference where costs are ever gonna go down. So inflation is gonna continue, recession is gonna happen, which means for companies, be very careful.

Debt is good when interest rates are really low. But if you can't keep borrowing money to pay for your business, that means your business have to pay for your business. So you've gotta make your cuts, you've gotta get rid of the waste, you've gotta say no more often than you say yes. You've gotta work on the critical few projects with the critical few people. You've gotta stay focused on strategy.

You've gotta grow your leadership team's skills and your management team's skills so they can get more done with less people. So it's, it's the better run companies that will do well. But if you're the average company who is able to borrow money to get there, or you're working on thin margins, you're pretty much out of business. You know, there's a saying that I heard years ago, "If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business." And I think for many businesses we're gonna go through that pain, but that's okay because the good ones are gonna be able to do very, very well.

So I think it's right now about making sure that we rightsize our organization, get rid of the wrong people, stay focused on the right stuff, make sure that we raise our prices where we can, keep our margins under control and, and business can be very good. So it's-- this is a time for operational leadership to really shine- Yeah ... versus, say, your wartime growth generals that you might bring in. You know, this is, this is, this is operational leadership. This is where, this is where those individuals who have the ability to say no, who can look at these projects and, and, and determine where, you know, you-- the one thing, right? Another Dan Sullivan, Ben Hardy book is 10X is Easier than 2X- Yeah ... which was, you know, incredible for the idea of focus, et cetera.

Yeah. This is, this is their time to shine. This is what you need to be working on. Yeah. And, and it's about being ruthless.

Like you need to come in and be a leader who's willing to make the cuts and say, "I, I need to." Like, "We can't afford it." You know, when Elon went into Twitter he did it in the wrong way. He didn't-- shouldn't go in with this callous kind of jokingly firing 80% of the people, fuck them attitude. But yes, fire 80% of the people.

They're not needed. They weren't doing any work. They weren't doing anything meaningful. But you have to remember these are human beings with lives and families. You can do it in a nicer way.

Government getting rid of the waste. Yes, we should be getting rid of the waste. We can't afford, nor should we be spending $780 million to build a new embassy in South Sudan. What the fuck? We don't need a new embassy in South Sudan. $780 million, what are you building?

So stop that insanity inside of your businesses. Saying no, being more ruthless, focusing on the core projects that drive ROI and your business will be very good. But if you have a management team whose answer to every problem is hire more people, if you're a leader who's trying to be very inclusive and make sure everybody's liked, you're gonna be out of business and, and that's happening faster than we think. And then if you're an employee who is worried about AI, AI is not gonna replace you. But an employee who uses AI will replace you.

So you as an employee need to be really good at AI, you need to be learning AI. Even our COO Alliance members, any of the, the COOs who are members of the COO Alliance, not only do they get the normal two-hour call every month with a different thought leader, we also have a one-hour AI expert call every month. We have a different AI expert every single month presenting to our COO Alliance members so they can actually get more skills to bring into their company and to grow themselves. Those are the companies that are gonna do well are the ones that are investing in their leaders, growing their people, getting rid of the waste, making the tough decisions. They'll do quite well or they'll, they'll certainly survive this tougher time.

But the ones that are expecting stuff to go back to artificially low rates, you're gonna get a wake-up call. It ain't happening. It ain't coming. And sometimes there are seasons of your business where survival is the best path, right? Well- You just have to weather the storm.

Well, and this is maybe where some of the wisdom of, of age comes in as well. It's very hard for a 35-year-old to understand that interest rates are not gonna drop again because in their lifetime interest rates have always been low. So now that interest rates are going up they're like scared. Interest rates are going back to very normal, right? I went through three major economic downturns.

I was running a company during the '08, '09 financial crisis. I was building a big company when the 2000 stock market crashed and the NASDAQ crashed by 78%. I was running another company just before I hired Kimbal Musk when the stock market crashed in 1991 and '92 and we had a major recession. So I've built companies in these slow times already, right? When you've done that already you understand that there's, there's-- it's a different way.

It is kind of what you mentioned, the wartime versus peacetime CEOs. You need to operate a little bit differently. And the companies that are willing to do that and ready to do that will do well. The ones that are fearful and, and kind of restricted or that don't cut fast enough and don't focus on the critical few things are gonna find a wake-up call is coming, right? It's like anybody in North America who right now is saying, "I'm only gonna hire people that are based in the United States," you're out of business.

You literally can't compete. When, when my entire team right now I've got two people based in the Philippines, two people based in Argentina, one person based in Pakistan, one person based in Ukraine, one in Texas and one in Oklahoma. That's a pretty good global team, right? But if I was to say, "No, they all have to be in the United States," I'm paying 80% more, or 70% more, or 60% more than I need to be, which is profit or gross margin that could be mine. So be very careful with how, uh, uh, be very careful with how you're thinking about your business and, and the decisions you're making around, around overhead and margins.

I also think that when you limit yourself to any geographical region, be it community, state, country, you're also limiting the talent pool you can pull from. Oh, for sure. Are you telling me the absolute best people happen to live within 20-minute drive of your office? 'Cause nobody great wants to drive 40 minutes to come to you and 40 minutes back. So it's about 20 minutes. So draw a 20-minute grid around your office.

20 minutes away from you is your talent pool, and you're gonna find the absolute best people who line up with your culture and skillset and behavioral traits and AI expertise? Good luck. It ain't gonna happen. We noticed that at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It was tough to find the great people, and we were the, we were the number two company in all of Canada.

There were only three companies that anyone in Vancouver wanted to work for: us, Lululemon, 'cause this was their head office, and the Vancouver Olympics. Those were the only three businesses anyone wanted to work for, but it's hard to find people a 20-minute drive away. Yeah. Do you think what DOGE is doing is gonna stick? Do you think it's- I hope.

Yeah. I hope so. I hope that the cuts that they're identifying, that both sides realize that 90% of those cuts are good. You know, look, they, they looked at all these software licenses, that there was... I have to make up some numbers, but 15,000 licenses and only 300 were being used.

It's very hard for a Democrat, a, a Republican, a Libertarian, no one can say, "Oh, let's keep the 15,000 licenses," right? That's just waste. So all of those cuts should be okay with... Like, I, I can't comprehend why we should build a, a, an embassy in South Sudan. So I think 90% or 95% of the waste we're identifying, everybody should just see that as wasteful.

Let's argue about the 5% that maybe there's some philosophical differences that, no, we should take care of, you know, single moms living in wherever. Yeah, we probably should more, right? Let's take care of, I don't know, even some of the gender issues maybe. Sure. But let's be more ruthless about that decision-making instead of saying yes to everything.

And I love, I love that they are posting all the waste that they're seeing because then we can really look at it in front of God and our grandmother. We can really look at it in the mirror and go, "Yeah, it's kinda hard to argue that one. That's pretty wasteful." Right? Yeah.

I, I think, you know, I, I tend to be fiscally and s- you know, conservative, but in truth I believe in what, you know, my, my, my belief in what the original American dream was this: You get to do whatever the hell you want, and I get to do whatever the hell I want, and as long as my shit doesn't go on you and your shit doesn't come on me, it's all good, right? And I think that's the way most Americans wanna believe. Yeah. And, and the way that I've looked at this from, like, the gender issues and some of the different things that we see is, like, nobody would fight economic development money going into disaffected communities that have not been given the opportunity if they weren't also seeing that money being spent on s- 780 million being spent on Sudan and, and another 900 million. You know what I mean?

So it's like if, it's, I do believe, I do honestly believe that the argument for some of these things that are actually good, that, that, that do help the social and moral fabric of our, of our communities and of our country, that if we, if this waste is gone, there, no one gives a shit if you spend the mon- They want you to spend the money there. That's where the money... You know, if you told me $800 million was going into, you know, whatever, South D- you know, East, East Detroit to make sure that that community is starting to get propped up, who's gonna fight that? Certainly don't want it being sent to some other country, and I think- Correct ... I think I'm hoping that this is a wake-up call and it sticks because- And it's no different, it's no different than in our normal household, right?

If you're a mom and dad and you're raising three kids, you wanna make sure that you donate to some of the causes that are important to you. Absolutely. And you wanna make sure your kids have food, and your kids have clothes, and your kids have a good education, your kids are taken care of. So we kinda wanna do both. But you don't want to be wasting food at home.

I, I don't wanna be buying a refrigerator full of food and throwing it out every four days 'cause it's going bad, nor do I wanna be donating money to charity and having my kids go starving. So we just have to run the government a little bit more like a business, and there was always this argument that you can't. Well, I think we have to. I think we have to find a way that the bureaucrats don't actually get to stay in control because when all of this waste is being so uncovered and so glaringly brutal, that's where all, that, that's where all the costs are, right? If we get rid of the waste, we don't have to raise taxes for anybody.

For the, for the, for the working class, the middle class, the upper class. Nobody has to pay more. And why should anybody say, "Tax the rich more," before we say, "Get rid of the waste first"? Let's get rid of the obvious waste, and then if we need to tax some people more, sure, let's, let's look at that. But let's not go out as a family and say, "Let's go get three jobs," when we can get rid of some of the waste at home.

Maybe we don't need three jobs, right? Yeah. I wanna finish with one, one more topic that you briefly mentioned, and take this as far as, as you want. Crypto is a major topic, right? Companies are starting to think about putting it on their balance sheet.

For many companies, that's probably not even something they should consider, or maybe. I'd be interested in your take. But then, you know, we're in kind of a tumultuous time. Where do you kinda sit and on crypto, and should, should companies that have, we'll say, gotten past escape velocity, right? Is it, is it a place they should think about storing some value during a time like this if they have the ability to do so?

Okay. So this is what a lot of people don't know about me. So 1-800-GOT-JUNK was the fourth company that I'd built. The third company that I'd built was a private currency company. So we did what Bitcoin is doing today back in 1998 to 2000.

We had 30,000 companies buying and selling in the United States using our digital currency instead of the US dollar. We had Starwood Hotels, the Olympics, Avis Rent a Car, Bose Stereo, Hard Rock Cafe, all using our digital currency. It was backed by nothing other than the promise that other people would accept it. So I understood alternative forms of payment very early on. In 2014, and all of my posts are still on Facebook today, you can look up Bitcoin and then look up posts by Cameron Herold.

You'll see all my posts, 2014, 2015, that I started accepting payment for Bitcoin back in 2014. I started accepting payment with Ethereum in 2017, and I started acquiring Ethereum and Bitcoin both in 2017. I've been buying more almost every single week since 2017. I bought more three times in the last couple of days because it came b- Bitcoin came back down to 78,000. Me too.

I've been buying. I can show you my transactions. Every, every week I have an auto buy on Bitcoin, and every time there's a big crash, I do another tranche of, of Bitcoin. Um, I still only own two coins. I only own Ethereum and Bitcoin.

I'm slowly converting most of my Ethereum off. The reason I even got into Ethereum was I'm friends with Vitalik's mom and dad, D- Dmitry and Maria. We're a part of a mastermind community together, so I got introduced to Ethereum when it was $200 a coin. But yeah, I've been, I've been in Bitcoin since... When my first post, it was $450 a coin.

So my kids both buy Bitcoin. All my clients are engaged in Bitcoin. Every single week, I think you should be buying some, but I now have a substantial portion of my net worth in Bitcoin and, and it's one of the reasons why I'm also now based in, in the Emirates. I'm, I'm a resident of Dubai. My company's based in Dubai, is they have very favorable tax strategies for a Canadian living overseas, so that's one of the reasons why I'm based there now, too.

Yeah. Do you think that- Um, as a company- Yeah, yeah ... if your company has a lot of cash, then yes, you should put some of your cash into Bitcoin as a strategic reserve and hold there, and hold for five years. Just buy and hold, buy and hold, keep some there, and then invest in other things, too. That's great. I don't think a lot of the countries that are talking about buying Bitcoin should be talking about buying it because they, they should be paying down their debt first.

Like the United States is effectively bankrupt. When you're sitting on $30 trillion in debt, you don't have any money to be buying as a reserve. You should be paying off some of your debt and getting rid of some of your deficit so you're not adding to your debt every year. But if you don't have any money, like, it's like as a homeowner, if I don't have any cash, how can I go buy something? So I think the countries that should be buying, and they will be buying, are the Saudi Arabias, the Dubais.

The, the countries that are actually living within their means, they're gonna do well. I think if you can somehow get away with sadly issuing currency and buying Bitcoin with it, yes, it'll work well for you, but it's still gonna screw the actual, you know, citizens of your country because you're creating more debt. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm with you. I do the same thing.

I invest in Bitcoin every week. The, I do not invest in Ethereum. The only other coin that I have besides Bitcoin is XRP, which is more of a, we'll call that more of a bet. I have my own theories on it, but that's not, that's not a primary holding. That's more of a, you know- Speculative ... double, double zero on the roulette table kinda play- Yeah ... for a couple different reasons.

But yeah, my- And I don't do, I don't do any of that. I don't do any gambling with anything. Yeah. So I'll tell you what my 10 core stocks are, and I buy more of these almost every month. For sure every two months.

Some of them I've been buying now for 20 years. So back in 2003, my dad told me Amazon was too expensive, so almost every one or two months for 20 years I've been buying Amazon. But I buy Nvidia stock. I've been buying it for 49, 50 months, so over four years I've been buying Nvidia stock almost every month. Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, Shopify, Tesla, and Uber.

Those are my core. I bought two tranches of those, of five of the 10 in the last week. I converted some of my safer equity stuff over to those. But almost every one to two months, I buy more of those 10. Buy and hold, buy and hold.

And those stocks are down 20, 30% right now. Awesome. They're on sale. Those are- Yeah ... good quality companies that aren't going away. Very similar to what Warren Buffett did back in kind of the '70s, '80s, '90s with Gillette and the Amazons and Coca-Colas.

They're good, solid companies that are always gonna be there. Those companies that I just rattled off, if you're a, a businessperson, I think you have to have a portion of your money saved. It's very dangerous for an entrepreneur to keep rolling their money over and betting on more growth, right? I mean, to bet on my company, bet on my company. At some point, the house always wins, so I think it's dangerous.

I think that's a wonderful place to put a pin in our conversation, which has been absolutely phenomenal. You have the COO Alliance. Tell us a little bit about how people get deeper into your world- Sure ... because obviously I, I know people are gonna be jacked up to, to get involved if they're not already. Yeah, I'll go... The, the main website is cameronherold.com, and it's H-E-R-O-L-D, so cameronherold.com.

That has links to my six books, which we didn't talk about. It has links to my Invest in Your Leaders course, the COO Alliance. I have a podcast where I've interviewed 475 COOs. It's called The Second in Command podcast. And we've had the COOs of Shopify and Bumble, and name it, we've interviewed most of them on our podcast.

But yeah, it's all there. And then a couple of good YouTube channels, too, with a lot of free content shared. Tremendous. And guys, I'll have all those links, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on Spotify, Apple, wherever, just scroll down in the description and I'll have all that stuff linked up. Uh, Cameron, appreciate you, man.

Tremendous time. Insights are wonderful, and I appreciate your perspective. Thank you. Yeah, if anybody watching, listening have got comments and questions, drop them down into the notes. If there's a lot of questions, maybe we do a part two, and you know, we can answer a lot of the questions from your listeners and viewers, too.

That would be tremendous. Cool. Thank you so much. All right. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

It is 3:00 AM in the confines of his lab. If you liked the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening. Happy holidays.

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