Uncovering Your “Why’s” To Build A Life And Business You Love With Cameron Herold [Episode 156]

Uncovering Your “Why’s” To Build A Life And Business You Love With Cameron Herold

I’ve got Mr. Cameron Herold and we’re going to talk about something which I personally feel is one of the most important things that you can get clarity on which is two points. Why are you building your business? What are the reasons for it? Why are you building your life? If you are and if you’re not, why aren’t you doing so? The reason I say this is one of the most important things is I have so many people who we work with and who have come here and they’re always asking the same questions: “How do I work smarter, not harder?” “How do I have more financial abundance, or be more than financially comfortable, but not lose my life in the process?”

“I want to work hard, but I want to work smart, but I want to have time for other priorities in my life family, personal priorities,” etc. What seems to happen most of the time is the business seems to get the full priority and so family is suffering, relationships are suffering, personal health is suffering, and personal gratification or happiness scores are suffering. All of this is happening because we never define those two points up front. What do you want in the business and why? What do you want in your personal life and why? How about we design the business around the personal life versus the personal life around the business because when we do that now we’re in alignment with what’s going on?

If we get our business to say $10 million, $15 million, $20 million, or even $5 million – wherever we want it to be – or even $1 million, for some people, you can live the life that you want to live and you can wake up every single day and be happy knowing that you’re doing what you want on your personal side as well as the business side. Here’s the bottom line, someday all this ends, we all die, and when we do we don’t want to be there at the end regretting that we didn’t do this or do that when we could have. We’re going to discuss this in length with Cameron. He’s an expert on this. Let’s go talk to him right now.

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Cameron, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Doug, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

I’m so excited about the subject matter we’re going to get into. Can you give people your background? I want to set the frame on where you’ve been and what you’re doing now.

About Cameron

I was groomed as an entrepreneur. I was raised by a father who was an entrepreneur and two sets of grandparents who were entrepreneurs. My brother, my sister, and myself have all run our own companies between 17 and 25 years. I had always thought of entrepreneurship as a journey that I should be going after and that we were always taught that having a job was a bad idea. I’m a dad, I’m a global nomad.

My wife and I have been traveling around the world. I run an organization called the COO Alliance, which is a large mastermind community for the second in command. I have a course that I launched called Invest in Your Leaders, which is how you grow your leadership team skills. I’ve written six books and I’ve also been paid to speak in 28 countries, soon to be 29. I’ve been paid to speak on every continent, including Antarctica.

That must have been one cold speech.

It was fun. It was a group of 65 CEOs. I got handed a check in front of all of them to prove that I got paid to speak there.

Now, you’ve also built some very, I would say, famous companies or companies that have been well noted. 1-800-GOT-JUNK is one of them, College Pro Painters if I remember correctly.

Yeah, I opened the West Coast of the United States for College Pro Painters. In fact, I was down there. I opened up Washington and Oregon for College Pro Painters and did some recruiting in Idaho as well. I was then a partner in the franchising group for what is now called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States and Boyd Auto Body in Canada. We built that company up and took it public. I was also hired as the president of a private currency company that we built and sold back in 2000. I joined my best friend, Brian. He was building out what was called the Rubbish Boys.

I joined him and he’s changed the name over to 1-800-GOT-JUNK and I joined him as employee number 14. I was the second in command, his chief operating officer. We grew the company out to $106 million in revenue in six and a half years, with 3,100 employees system-wide. We were operating in four countries, and 330 cities. I left that company 17 years ago. I’ve been working behind the scenes with clients now in about 25, to 26 countries all over the world.

It’s amazing. I know that particular company now has gone on to at least five times its size or more from what I know.

I chat with Brian every month or so, but the last he gave me an update was about $450 million. I’m sure they’re over the $500 million mark now. I’ll give you a funny story about this. The current COO, Eric Church has been with them now as the COO for thirteen years. Eric and I started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada in 1987. I was president the year one, Eric was president in the second year.

Now here we are, many years later, and he’s the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK and I was there in the early days. What’s amazing is he would have been horrible in the first seven years. I would have been horrible from the hundred million to the 450 million. We were there with the right CEO match, but we are there for the right season of the organization for our skillsets to match up.

Why Of Business

I love that you brought up the season. I want to get into that if we can a little bit. You and I were talking and I thought this was an amazing episode for everybody to read because you and I work with sometimes hundreds, thousands of businesses a year at times, collectively anyway. I find this challenge going on like, why are you building your business? It’s like a question. I think I asked CEOs or owners of companies or if they’re CEO owners or whatever position they’re in, I’m like, “Why are you doing this?”

Why are you building? Some of them come to me and they go, “I want to double my business.” It’s like, “Why?” I have no idea. I want whatever. When we’re building a business and you’ve built so many of them and so successfully, you set yourself up for this fantastic life where you could do whatever the heck you want, wherever you want, whenever you want for the most part. I want to go back to that question. Why is it so important for people to understand why they’re building their business?

We only build a company for 1 out of 3 reasons, either to put a stake in the ground or a flag in the ground to say that we’ve accomplished something. 1) We’re trying to get praise finally, we’re trying to prove that we’re not stupid because we were told we were stupid in school. We’re trying to do something and say that we accomplished it. That’s number one. 2) To give us money. At some point, we’ve built it big enough that we’ve got enough money coming in.

3) To give us free time. To allow us to do what we want, when we want, wherever we want. That was actually the core reason for me starting a company was so that I could control my time. It was a lesson my dad taught me at a very young age. What happens to most entrepreneurs or many entrepreneurs is they lose sight of who they are as a person. They don’t have any hobbies. They don’t have any things that they’re chasing. They’re not trying to learn anything. They keep telling themselves, “My business is my hobby.”

Your hobby sucks because I don’t want to hear about your hobby. No more would you want to hear about my hobby if I were a lawyer, a dentist, an accountant, or an insurance salesman. You wouldn’t want to hear about what I do to make money. I don’t want to hear about what you do to make money but because many entrepreneurs lose sight of their hobbies, lose sight of self, lose sight of their relationships with themselves, their spouse, their kids, and their friends, they end up having nothing left other than their business, which is sad.

What happens to many is we get to a stage in our career or in our life where we’ve got the business, it’s up and running. We’ve got enough cash and now we’re like, “If I actually hire a second in command, or if I build the company for the right reason, I can have my life back.” When they decide to have their life back, their companies often go to the next level very quickly because they start delegating everything except genius. They start building out the right teams. They start building the business for the right reason at that point.

What is the right reason?

I think it’s the combination of all three. I don’t think it is for the one thing anymore. At some point, you have enough money. I had memberships at two amazing golf clubs and an amazing tennis club. I was flying private. I had two unbelievable cars. I was traveling all over the world. How much more money do you need? Years ago, we sold everything. Clearly, I didn’t need that much money. Now it’s like, “I only own two pairs of jeans and a pair of beige pants.” I used to have closets filled with stuff. I got rid of the golf club memberships.

I got rid of the cars and sold all the furniture. What I need now is experience. What I crave now is relationships. What I want now is growth as a person, as a friend, as a husband, as a lover, as a dad. I’m doing those things and I find those much more meaningful and much more satisfying than stuff. Also at the end of the day, I even avoid the question when I meet people who say like, “What do you do?” I’m like, “I hike and I travel and I love cooking. I go to festivals.” They’re like, “No, what do you do to make money?” I’m like, “I don’t talk about that.”

It messes with them. I’m trying to surround myself with more people who don’t talk about what they do to make money, who do talk about their hobbies and their passions and what they’re learning and what they’re working on and what they’re involved in. What I do to make money is secondary to that. Even if we love our business, it’s not our reason for waking up in the morning. It’s part of what makes us, us and part of what we do with our time.

Even if we love our business, it's not our reason for waking up in the morning. It's part of what we do with our time. Share on X

Why is it important for people to actually define this? I can hear some people going, “This sounds great, touchy, a little feely, whatever,” but why is it so important to understand why the hell we’re doing this and putting it on paper?

Because you’re going to die. None of this shit actually matters. This is what you’re doing to make money. At the end of the day, it’s like what Ram Dass said, “We’re all walking each other home.” At the end of the day, if you don’t decide to do other things with your life, at some point it is the end of your life. Like, I’m sorry, regardless of whether you have a plan or not, you are going to die.

You and me, Cameron, and anyone listening or watching, so why not decide to have the best possible life that we can? Why not engage in the best hobbies and have the most fun and connect with the best people instead of getting sucked into the day-to-day of our business or getting sucked into the day-to-day of social media or watching reality TV or being bored? That was one of the reasons why my wife and I decided to sell everything as there’s so much out there to explore.

There’s so much out there to see, there’s so much out there to be excited about and to try and experience. I would rather go through that as my life’s journey than wake up at the end of it. Maybe I’m also finally understanding life. My dad passed away. My mom died many years ago. I was 37 years old and experienced death for the first time when my mom died. I didn’t have a good understanding of how fragile life is and what life was all about until maybe I was approaching middle age.

There are regrets of dying. This lady would go and look and talk to people in hospice. I think the number two thing of the top five things was, “I wish I hadn’t spent so much time working at something that I was working more hours than I wanted to.” Another one is “I wish I had better relationships and connections with friends.”

You know what’s interesting is that’s very European to spend time with friends and family and hobbies. It’s very sadly, very North American to be so obsessed with working and what we do for work. My wife and I have been to 49 countries. We have a very global perspective on life and what life can mean. The rest of the world doesn’t obsess about what they do. They’re, by the way, extraordinarily successful in their careers but they don’t obsess about it. It’s not their reason for waking up in the morning. It’s part of who they are. It’s not their reason for being.

I think they’ve got it dialed in better than we do in North America for sure. As you know, my wife’s Polish. Every time we go over to Europe, especially I was in this place called Luca, Italy, a little medieval town. It’s awesome but the thing is from an American point of view, North American point of view, I walked over there and then it’s 5:00 pm, everybody’s out taking a walk with one another. The old people are holding hands and you can tell they’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s not like, “I think let’s go for a walk. We haven’t had a walk in 40 years.”

It’s one of those things that as a culture we can learn a lot from in this process, and I find here in the United States that or North America in general, whether it’s Canada, even Mexico, actually, I talked to people there, little less so, but certainly, the United States and Canada, that people don’t understand why they’re building what they’re building, and then their lives go by, and somewhere in the area between 35 and 55, but more so on the upper end, they go, “My life is going by or gone by, and now I want quality of life and I got to change how I’m working,” but they don’t even know how to get out of it half the time. Cameron, what would you say?

You know what’s interesting is to observe what a different class or a different group of people, a different cohort of people think of work. It’s the blue-collar working class. They don’t bring homework with them. They don’t work nights. They don’t work weekends. They go to work. They put in a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. They shut the door and they go and have a life and they spend time with friends, spend time with family, with hobbies, with activities, or maybe social media, whatever else they’re doing after hours, but they’re not obsessed with work.

I think this obsession with work and this workaholic thing, I think it’s certainly breaking. I think COVID gave us some of that back where we were forced to be around friends and family a little bit more. A lot of people liked the taste of that, which I think is good. I think the other part is we’re no longer spending time driving to an office and driving back from an office, which for many has given us some of our freedom back to some of our time back.

Seasons Of Life

I would agree with that as well. We’re speaking to Mr. Cameron Herold. He’s at CameronHerold.com. You can learn more about him there and his businesses. Cameron, I have a question, which was, you had success pretty early on in life and you’ve had success throughout your life. Do seasons change not with business, but do they also change throughout life? In other words, maybe we want to work a little harder when we’re younger, or maybe we want to look a little harder when we’re older for whatever reason. Do you find that the seasonality changes with the individual as well as the business?

I think it does, but I think we can learn a lot of the lessons if we’re open to learning at a younger age. I had the younger age lessons of having balance. When I was 20 years old, I had 12 full-time employees. I was running my own company at twenty. My dad got me to re-engage with some of my hobbies and activities when I was 22, in the third year of running my business. I started playing more golf and windsurfing and spending more time out in the lake and with friends and a little more time delegating and getting the business to run itself.

I also developed some very bad habits of becoming and getting more energy from work. I found that having connections with friends was hard. Instead of learning that and working on that, I defaulted back to work. I think I’ve gone through those migrations. I think I told myself some of the lies earlier on that I needed to work hard. I had a stage in my career in business when I was building companies. In fact, it was even in the first couple of years of 1-800-GOT-JUNK and the three companies prior that I was playing a lot of intramural sports.

I was playing rollerblade hockey, ultimate frisbee on a couple of teams, and beach volleyball. I was playing sports a few days a week. I was running more. I was hiking more. I think I was definitely more engaged in activities, but that was pre-internet, pre-cell phone, and pre-being tethered to our business. I think we’re having to relearn some of that. I think the truly addictive nature of technology has pulled some of us even back further into that abyss or into that dark hole more than we are aware.

I remember both of my grandparents’ fathers were entrepreneurs and they were able to go play golf, but they didn’t have a cell phone to check in on work. They disconnected for five hours and hung out with their friends and they were very present. I think we’re lying to ourselves about the work hard part because we can go back a generation and they certainly worked hard, but I think they had more balanced lives than we do now, probably because of technology. We need to learn that skill.

I had a friend, Jim. Jim’s brother got in trouble with the government. Jim’s brother was a gentleman who used to build a lot of Walmarts and big buildings for big companies. Frankly, he didn’t do anything illegal. He just got in trouble. It was one of those in-between things but I remember Jim saying, “They want me to testify,” because Jim happened to be the president of the Realtors’ Association. There’s a point to this story, folks.

The only way Jim could avoid testifying against his brother was to leave the country. He went to Canada, went way up country and all his technology wouldn’t work whatsoever. He’s like, “I was here, nobody called me, etc.” It all worked out for everybody, including his brother. He came back and told me it was the most freeing thing he’s ever done in his life, not having a cell phone tethered to him, not having technology tethered to him.

It’s incredible. I’m going into that. My wife and I are off to a one-week plan where we’re doing a full body cleanse. We’re working on all this nutritional stuff. We’re doing yoga and meditation and mindfulness stuff. Lots of dietary stuff but we’re also going on a full technology cleanse for seven days. No laptops, no iPhones, no tech, no televisions at all for seven days. That’s going to be intriguing to see how that full detox goes with everything but I think it’s needed.

I think you’re right about whether that technology and I think you’re doing that is going to maybe be a little different in the mind as you start going through it. I remember on vacation, one time we went to an island, cell phones didn’t work on that island. It was out of my country. We had to shut things off for three or four days. First two days, I was paranoid. What am I missing? What’s going to be in this?” On the third day, it was like, “This is nice.” It was like when I was a kid.

I think that’s one of the reasons why we run companies to give ourselves that free time, but we forget that it’s then about us taking that free time. It’s about allowing our employees to run the company for us and delegating everything except genius and giving them the freedom to actually scale and to work on themselves and even to delegate more to them and spend time growing their skills and growing their confidence so that we don’t feel we need to be as involved in the day to day.

We, as an owner of the business, we’re responsible for understanding why we’re building the business and the reasons we’re doing it. Usually, we’re supposed to do it to build a lifestyle for us that we want if we don’t lose sight. But employees, people who are employees, should they write down why they are doing this and what they want out of it as well?

That’s actually something that I did is I wrote a four-page description of my life three years from now. I call that my personal vivid vision. My wife and I wrote a four or five-page description of our relationship together, every aspect of how we wanted to show up three years from now. We’re reverse engineering that. I think employees need to do that as well. Employees need to decide who they want to be as a dad, as a friend, as a lover, as a person, and what hobbies they want to be engaged in. Start thinking about their lives more intentionally. I think we’re often going through this journey and we wake up one day and go, “I got old.” No one’s forcing you to do that.

I think if we can slow it down and say like, begin with that end in mind as Stephen Covey talked about. Decide where we’re going and reverse engineer that. I was shown at a very young age to build your plan and work your plan or plan your work and work your plan. It’s the same thing. It’s like planning your life and then reverse engineer that and figuring out how to make that come true. It’s also more exciting to be able to do that. It also allows you to be much more focused and much more intentional in your work if you don’t give yourself 80 hours a week to do it.

That’s a good point. If we are intentional about what we’re doing, we can get far more done within a shorter period of time than when we’re scattered all over the place. It’s like trying to build nine businesses at one time versus building something meaningful to us because that’s another trait that I find a lot of entrepreneurs do. They come in and they brag, “I’ve got thirteen companies.” It’s like, “How many are running efficiently?”

If we are intentional about what we're doing, we can get far more done within a shorter period of time than when we're scattered all over the place. Share on X

You can only sit on one toilet at a time. If you try to sit on more than one toilet, it gets messy. There are actually some systems in place to run multiple companies. If entrepreneurs follow those core systems, you can have multiple companies up and running and run them successfully, but you need to make sure that you have that systematic approach for each of them.

A lot of entrepreneurs are so focused on, “I’ve got thirteen operating companies.” Great, but how’s your relationship with your wife? How’s your relationship with your kids? What are your hobbies? What are you doing for fun? What are you doing for charity? What are you doing to build the city or country that you live in? What are you doing to enjoy life? Their eyes will glaze over. They’ve completely lost sight of that. I think it’s the rare individuals who are highly successful and run companies and have balanced lives. It’s the same as anyone who’s highly successful in their career. If that’s all you do, you’re going to miss out.

Enjoy Your Life

I would also encourage everybody to heed your advice because when we miss out, we start living in fear at that point.

You’re now missing out, then you start using things to counter that. You end up using drugs or alcohol or sex or some form of addiction. Or work becomes some of that addiction too.

There was a time in my life when I was making $500,000 a year, had $500,000 in the bank, had the house, the cars, and everything paid off. I was about 40. I remember being so scared because all I did was work. I was working and working, but at the same time, my marriage was falling apart. I had no hobbies. I would go to the gym every once in a while. I was disconnected from my friends except for business conversations.

I thought those were friends at that point. The reason I thought this subject was so important for us to talk about, Cameron, is you’ve done what most people would dream of doing in life. You’ve come back to, what I would call yourself and focusing on your own happiness and your own truth throughout the process. We could all argue a little bit with money, that’s a lot easier. We’re always not in this place.

No, I talked to my son about this a couple of days ago. I said that someone living in Vancouver can have a very good life with no money. You can go hiking for free and go to tons of great hikes. You can take the bus there, you can drive there. You don’t have base money to cover basic needs, but you don’t need to have millions of dollars to go traveling around the world. You can go travel around British Columbia. You can go explore in your own city. You can go to the galleries and the museums and theater and go watch the performances and go check out all the street art. You can go explore the food in different parts of the city.

You can go check out all the street food in different parts of the city. You can go take a class. There’s so much that you can learn on YouTube, Google, and Wikipedia that you can actually decide to learn hobbies. Most people don’t do that. They end up getting sucked back into the day-to-day or they get sucked back into social media. I think we have to decide what we want our life to be like and we have to make that happen. Also try to find people that are already doing it that you’re inspired by. It’s like a person says, “I cannot climb Mount Everest.” What about the guy who climbed Mount Everest and had one leg?

“I cannot do that.” What about the guy who has no arms and no legs and is traveling around the world speaking? What about the blind person who ran? We give ourselves all these excuses and then we don’t try. I think it’s a real cop-out to say, “It’s easy for Cameron because he has money.” I was traveling around the world in 1991. I did 18 countries by myself in 1991 with a backpack and I stayed in youth hostels and I see parents now traveling with kids under eight years old staying in hostels and doing it on a budget.

I think it’s an excuse. As it was an excuse when I used to say, “I have to work tonight to catch up.” That was bullshit. I had nothing to catch up on. Whatever work I got done, I was going to have more work tomorrow. I was going to set more goals for another company and spin off a division growth. I always had more to do. What I was doing was avoiding relationships, pain, insecurity, avoiding problems and I was surrounding myself with the one thing that gave me satisfaction, which was the dopamine rush of working.

I think we ought to title this maybe, enjoy your life because the reality is I’ve talked to people. There was one person I was talking to in general, and he kept saying over and over – he was older than I was at the time, I was younger; he said, “I’m going to enjoy my life when I retire. I am now twelve years from retirement.” And every year I talked to this gentleman, it was on the holidays, “I’m waiting for retirement.” He saved all his money. He hoarded things. He never spent a dime or a quarter on things. He got to retirement.

He died.

You need to enjoy the journey.

There’s a concept that a friend of mine, Dan Sullivan, and another friend of mine, Ben Hardy, wrote about, or I think it was Dan, called The Gap in the Gain. Ben might have been a co-author of The Gap in the Gain with Dan Sullivan, but the concept is if you’re always trying to get to the horizon, if you’re only going to be happy when you get to the horizon, you forget to look in the rearview mirror to see how far you’ve come. You forget to enjoy the drive because you’re never going to get to the horizon. It’s going to keep moving.

It’s always going to go further ahead. If it’s always like, I’m going to wait until I’m retired, you’ve missed 60 years of being retired. You missed 60 years of having a great life. You’ve also missed 60 years of being able to delegate to people and grow them and see them excited about their careers because they’re able to work on bigger stuff so that you can have a better life. I’m not saying to put stuff on hold, but I’m saying you can enjoy the journey as much as you enjoy the destination.

You can enjoy the journey as much as you enjoy the destination. Share on X

If you want to work fourteen hours a day, that’s okay. Work twelve and then work two that you like to have for your own enjoyment to better your life or something like that, right?

Yeah. There are a lot of people who may work a lot, but they probably don’t waste time. There are a lot of people who also waste a lot of time. A lot of time getting sucked away on social media, a lot of time for doing around doing nothing, polishing the stone that you can never finally polish. There is something to be said for being productive or proactive with your life and productive with your life versus yes, you have to throw all the work away.

There’s not much on social media. There are some things that will help us evolve as a better human, but the majority of social media, is what I find anyway, and I’m not knocking social media and killing it and all that. Nobody sent me hate emails. The point being is if you look at the amount of stuff that’s on social media, most of it’s negative fear monger, all this type of stuff. There’s a lot of good stuff there too.

If you were to write down at the end of your life, the most important things that you did that gave you joy, the things that you did that made your life worth living, or the things that you did that made you happy that you lived that lived this life. Is it being on TikTok, being on Facebook, or being on Instagram? It’s probably not. Is it being at the office? No, it’s probably not. You are going to die. With absolute 1,000% certainty, you’re going to die. Whoever’s reading, you will die. It’s up to you to decide what are you going to do with this time that you’ve got so that you feel good about the time that you’ve got, not so that anyone else will.

Redesign Your Life

For those of you who are cued in at this moment, I’m going to piggyback on what you said, Cameron. You’re going to die and it might be a lot earlier than one figure. You might as well start. We’re speaking to Cameron Herold, CameronHerold.com. Cameron, last bit here. I’d love to have you come back because I want to learn some lessons that your father taught you. I didn’t know him personally, but he’s impressed me through our conversations. People go, “I got the point, guys. You two guys have done okay in life. I got the point.” How do they start? If they would like to say, “I’m going to start. I’m going to design my life around things that mean priority to me as well as my business.”

We can share, if your team wants to send me an email for the link, we’ll share a copy of my personal vivid vision and also the vivid vision that my wife and I wrote for our relationship as a couple. The starting point is to craft a 4 or 5-page description of you. How do you show up as a dad, as a friend, as a lover, as a son, as a spouse, as a person in your society? What do you do for fun? What do you do for learning? What do you do to enjoy life? What are you doing for your hobbies?

What are you doing for fitness? What are you doing related to your diet and health? Describe all of those things and write a description of you three years from now. Work with your spouse and describe together what your relationship looks like three years from now. That’s a great starting point because it gives you something to be excited about that you start chasing down and then you start figuring out how to make each of those sentences come true.

If they don’t all happen in three years, which we hope they do, you can still keep them on your list and adjust them here and there.

At least you’re going in that direction, right?

That’s right.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m going to my trainer again this afternoon. It’s one of the reasons why I quit drinking is these things are aligned. I need to make decisions aligned with where I’m going not out of habit. The fact that I was drinking a bottle of wine every single day for six years was stupid and I was waking up tired. I didn’t have good energy. I wasn’t showing up as a good dad. I wasn’t showing up as a good lover. I wasn’t showing up as a good husband. I was lethargic and that’s not okay. I didn’t like that. I got rid of that. Now I’m making better decisions. Going to a gym, I feel healthier. I’ve got a healthy mind and a healthy body. I’m excited. I look better. I feel better. You start making decisions aligned with that.

Remember folks, we’re not talking about making a 180 makeover here. We’re talking about driving your business in the direction you want it to be, understanding why you’re doing it, but also understanding why you’re building your life at the same time and building the life at the same time that you want. You can enjoy your time here on Earth because we don’t know you’ve got a starting point, you’ve got an ending point.

It’s the starting day, the ending day. We don’t know what the ending date is. We have a line in between. We sometimes can change maybe a few years on the back end of that, but you can certainly take that line in between and make it a heck of a lot fatter. If you make that line fatter, you’re going to have much more enjoyment when that time comes that we all have. Cameron, would it be okay if we put those things, let me email that out to you and we put those in the show notes for people. Would that be okay?

Yeah, for sure. That’s great.

Cameron, I want to thank you for being here on the CEO Sales Strategies Podcast, bringing all this great knowledge, and shaking people up. I know that’s happened, so that’s good. If people want to know more about you, they can go to CameronHerold.com. Any other places that they should?

Take a look at my Invest in Your Leaders course. It’s a great way to grow your skills as a leader so that you can actually do more in your career and with your business is one. All six of my books are available on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. Check out the Second in Command podcast. We interviewed about 360 Second in Commands and it’s a great podcast to check out.

I’ve been reading your free PR book and I have to tell you, I don’t plug books very often, but this one is off the charts worth reading. It’s called free PR folks.

Thank you.

Thanks again for being here, Cameron. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Doug. It was great.

—

Do you have notes? Did you write things down? Maybe this upset you, this whole thing. Maybe you’re like, “Why would you do a subject like this, Doug?” I know that most people are having this challenge and you’re going to irritate people and frustrate them, but maybe I’ll get you to move a little bit too at the same time. If you’re a little angry at this moment because of this subject matter, that’s okay. As long as you get the positive out of this. I’ll accept that. I’ll accept my part in that. I’m sure I’d have to ask Cameron, but I would guess he would accept his part in that, too. Didn’t he have a lot of great things to say? Now this is a guy who’s been very successful.

By all stretch of the imagination, he’s in that position in life where he can work at whatever he wants to because he has the financial ability to do that. For some of us, we have that. For some of us, we don’t have that. Whatever it is for you what I want you to get out of this episode is you can take what you want, define it and within a few years be where you want to be in most cases. The challenge for most people is they overestimate what they can get done in a short period of time. They’ll try to do this in like three months, six months. Guess what happens?

You’re pushing, everything’s going fine for the first week let’s say, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, whatever, and then all of a sudden you didn’t make enough space so you didn’t get this done, or didn’t get that done. you’re like, “This doesn’t work.” No, it works. It’s you took on way too much. Maybe you’re taking on long-term strategies and short-term play about taking short medium-term strategies in the short-term play. You won’t be as stressed out. Why are you doing your business? What are the reasons for it? What do you want to do for your life and what are the reasons for it?

What I’m going to ask you to do is take that homework. Feel free to send it to us at YouMatter@SalesStrategies.com and let us know what the purpose of the business is, why you’re doing it, what are the reasons, what you want to do for your life, and what are the reasons. As Cameron said, start with a plan, and get very clear, we’re going to put in the show notes all of that information that he has, that he’s done, and you can copy that into your own likes, and desires and put your information into that. You can start scheduling it one day here, one day there.

Here’s the thing. When you look statistically, I learned this from Mr. Alan Weiss, when it comes to skillsets or anything you want to get better at, if you get 1% better every day for 70 days, you are statistically twice as good. If you take that out all year, over a year, 37 times growth in that year. Now, if that’s too much to bite off on, take 0.1%. You’ll still be in a place three times or four times better than you would in a year. Imagine you have four times the income. Imagine you have four times the health. Imagine you have four times a greater relationship with the people that you care about. Maybe that’s even yourself.

You can do this if you do this and you probably can hear the passion in my voice. The reason that I have this passion is I’ve been in the other place. As I said on this show at one point. I had $500,000 coming in. I had the house paid for. I had $500,000 a year, $500,000 in the bank. I was scared because that was in my identity. In other words, I used to think, “What happens if my income drops? Who am I? What happens if my bank account goes away? I cannot invest in this or invest in that. Guess what? That held me up.”

I don’t want anybody to be in that place because it’s so important not to be because someday you’re going to look back, you’ll be in a rocking chair, maybe taking your last breaths, and you’re going to have to ask your question, “Did I live to my fullest capacity or did I not do that?” It’s too late to change it at that point but it’s not too late to change now. Speaking of change, if you want to get better at selling, you want to get better at prospecting, you want to get better at bringing your mind around to think in a more leveraged way, we are running our university. If you’re interested in that, please reach out to us.

If you want to know who your ideal buyer is and you want to get clear about that, and you should because working smarter, not harder, saves you on your marketing costs, saves you on your time and on your energy. It helps you to have happier relationships and happier conversations with people who want to buy from you versus those who are indifferent or pretending they want to buy. Reach out to us again at YouMatter@CEOStrategies.com and say, “I want to know more about the university, about ideal buyers.” We’ll be happy to communicate with you.

Again, if you don’t hear from us within 24 hours, send a second email please. If your email didn’t get through for whatever reason, we will get back to you. I want to thank Cameron for being here and sharing this great information. I want to thank all of you for listening. If you think this was a great episode, do me a favor and go up and review the podcast. I know it takes a few minutes. Apple doesn’t even always make it that easy, but I’d be forever grateful. Until next time.

Go out and sell something, go out and sell a lot of it, play win-win, help somebody solve a problem, have a better opportunity for a future. You get paid for it. They win, you win, and don’t discount when you don’t have to, because when you discount, you have to make up for it. Sometimes 5 or 10-fold to break even. You’re working harder. Add additional value and get what your worth is. If you don’t know what your value is and your worth again, reach out to us at YouMatter@CEOStrategies.com. We’ll either work with you one-on-one or we’ll work with you in some group format, whatever works for us and for you. Until next time, to your success.

Important Links

• Cameron Herold
• COO Alliance
• Invest in Your Leaders
• 1-800-GOT-JUNK
• The Gap in the Gain
• Second in Command
• YouMatter@CEOStrategies
• The Ops Spot
• Cameron Herold – LinkedIn
• Cameron Herold – Facebook