The Vivid Vision is a concept pioneered by Cameron Herold as a way to connect the vision of the entrepreneur with his or her team, and he breaks down the whole thing down in an interview with Mark Brower of Mark Brower properties on the Triple Win podcast.
Herold and Brower dive deep into how the Vivid Vision can align your employees, improve hiring hit rates, give a sense of purpose to your team, and help with the overall organization of work in your business. The former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Has immense knowledge to share about the relationships between the visionaries and the doers that make up a company. You won’t want to miss what he has to share.
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Season 3 Episode 19 features Marc Cunningham and Gwenn Aspen
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Episode Transcript
Cameron Herold
Three guys are over in Barcelona 125 years ago. They're sitting on a sidewalk in the dirt. They're making bricks. And you ask the first guy, What are you doing? He said, I'm making bricks. They asked the second guy, What are you doing? He said, We're building a wall, and I get to make the bricks to build the wall. What more purpose in that? They asked the third guy, What are you doing? He said, We're building a cathedral to worship God. It will be called the Sagrada Familia. It's going to be the most incredible cathedral in the world. And I get to build the bricks to make the left wall of the cathedral. Who do you think is more excited about making bricks? The person who has this vivid and the Sagrada Familia. If you've never been, go put it on your bucket list. Go see it. It's incredible. Unbelievable cathedral that they've been still building for 125 years. But because people have purpose of what they're building and they're excited about the vision of what they're building, they find meaning every single day. That's why you need a better vision for your company, is it aligns people, it inspires people. It also is people say, you know what, That sounds like something I don't want to be a part of. Great. Go work it out. Right now. The government is always hiring. Go to the government.
Andrew Smallwood
This well. Hey, everybody, welcome. Andrew Smallwood here from the Second Nature team. we're going to get right to it. I'm going to introduce Mark and Cameron insufficiently here. I could take like 15 minutes introducing, but you'd rather listen. You saw the promotion and everything else in advance. You're you already know this. I don't have to say too much. And I teared up a little bit earlier as well. But one thing I do want to call out, I want to give a special thank you to Mark Brower, not just because it's his birthday, not just because he's hosting Cameron Herold in his physical office here, not just because he so generously gave on a triple win live we had about a month ago talking about building a great investor experience. Mark is consistently looking for opportunities, I would say to share, to learn alongside other property managers and support, you know, other people in the industry. And and whether he's running long distances or building an audience on Twitter or building his business and getting into the nitty gritty, I would say like Mark is somebody we recognize really brings a lot of passion to what he does, brings a lot of excellence. And I think Second Nature is very excited to get out of the way and have a property manager entrepreneur like yourselves. Interviewing Cameron and Mark is market study of he's read the books. I mean, he's prepared for this. And so we really just want to say thank you to Mark for putting in, putting in some great preparation for what's going to be a great conversation. And with that or I think we can pin their video up here and we'll have Mark share a little bit about his experience and why he's excited to interview Cameron and let them go.
Mark Brower
Hey, everybody, I am so, so excited to have Cameron Herald live in my office here and I've been looking forward to this for weeks.
Cameron Herold
Thank you.
Mark Brower
Yeah. So excited to hear about your experience and everything you've learned and apply it to the property management industry. Like to start with a quick story that hopefully connects the audience with the message. I was about seven years ago. I was working until two in the morning, three times a week and I had 180 doors under management and I had a few helper staff and I was absolutely soul crushingly burning out and I didn't realize it and I didn't know what to do. And I felt like I was alone. I was an island and I didn't know what to do. I thought I came to a point where I thought, I mean, they're going to, you know, have some health issue or I'm going to burnout, I'm going to throw in the towel, I'm going to sell and worse, it was really defeating on my confidence because growing up, I always thought I was the smart kid in the class. I always thought I was so capable and and it's almost like that became my liability. And because I thought I should be able to solve all. And I've learned about myself. So I put out an ad.
Cameron Herold
I'll have to explain why it's funny later on, it doesn't sound funny when you're describing it.
Mark Brower
I put out an ad and I found a guy and I remember I was interviewing this guy's name is Rich. He's still with me. He later became my second in command, but I had no idea what that concept. And in that time and I remember in the interview with Rich, I got teary eyed and I just looked at him. I said, I need some help. And graciously he hired on and I had another leader in the company, and my company had grown like this. Rich came on and we started growing like this.
Cameron Herold
Yeah, pretty normal.
Mark Brower
Tell to tell us what I what I was going through. What was that?
Cameron Herold
Well, so as an entrepreneur, we only start a company for one of three reasons. We started a company to give us money, to give us free time, to be able to control our own time and to be able to kind of put a stake in the ground or a flag in the ground to say that we did it, we accomplished something. And at some point we have our company up and running, so we've accomplished it. We know that we're an entrepreneur. We know we're not working for anybody else. At some point, we usually have a ceiling or a satisfaction level on money where we're making enough money to maybe offset what we used to make as a job. We're feeling good about where we are on the money side of things, but we often don't get ourselves more free time in a better life. Sometimes it's because we have lost track of our hobbies, we've lost track of our relationships, we've lost track of ourselves, and we end up pouring everything into the business. And we get the dopamine rush from running our company every day, but we end up burning ourselves out. We end up burning out our adrenals. We end up just not having as much fun. And when we end up hiring the second in command, regardless of what we call that person that could be is as small as an executive assistant, or if you're a one person company or two or three person company, just getting a bunch of the admin off your plate can free up your time to then have a better life. That new energy that you have, you start bringing that new energy and and dualism into the business which fuels growth. When you can start delegating a bunch of stuff to an EPA or a project manager or a director of operations or a VP of operations, or a true CEO, you can now upload all your your business. They can start working on the business and you can work on the business. So you end up getting this multiplication as like one plus one equaling 1133 and you can often start getting these people working on areas of the business that drain you so you can get someone who maybe you're drained with it or you're drained with financier drained with the day to day operations. Somebody else comes in and they love that so much that now you get to work on the areas that fuel you and feed you with energy and you're good at and they get to work all the stuff that drained you of energy and it fuels them up. Now you have two individuals that are excited and enthusiastic about the same work. So you're bringing all that new energy into the business. Right now, the CEO's job is to be the chief energizing officer. So if you're coming in with negative energy and you're drained and you're not enjoying your life, then of course your business is going to flatline for a long time.
Mark Brower
So I think it's there. There's lots of thought. There's so many things I want to unpack there. One of the things that I'm resonating with immediately is that our industry, there's a lot of accounting. We're doing trust accounting. We're doing triple reconciliations required by the Department of Real Estate in Arizona and other states, and we're doing corporate accounting, a visionary sales minded individual. I mean, if you asked me to do a like, no thanks, not only no thanks, not only will it zap my energy, but I'm going to mess it up and it just like absolutely soul crushing.
Cameron Herold
And here's why I was laughing when you were talking about some of your past and what got you to hire the second commander. Reason I said it was funny was I was not the smart person in school. So I struggled in high school. I got into the only university that accepted me in Canada and it was a very average university. And I graduated from that with probably a 2.3 GPA, 2.4 GPA. But I was on the university ski team. I was running my own company while I was in university. I 12 full time employees. While I was in university for three years, I started a fraternity. I was president of a fraternity, and then I had all this money from running my business. I was dating like crazy, so I was too busy to study, but I also couldn't study in that environment. So one of the things I remember calling my dad up the night before an accounting exam, So you're talking about like how accounting drains you. And I said, Dad, I'm going to fail accounting. And he goes, Well, why? What were your midterms? Like? I said, my midterm sucked, but I did really well in all my assignments. He said, How come you've done really well on your assignments? I said, We had 12 assignments. I did very well in all those, and I almost failed the midterm. And he said, Well, what do you need to pass? I said, I need 52% on the final two pass. And he said, Why did you do so on your assignments? But you didn't do on midterm? I said, I hired somebody. And so I was I was running a bar on campus and one of the guys in my class was really into accounting. I think he's probably a CPA today. He's probably an accountant. And so I paid him a case of beer every week to write my weekly accounting assignments for me. So of course I got like an A-plus in every accounting assignment. Yes, I cheated in accounting. And my dad said, Well, you learn something. He said, What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be an accountant? I'm like, you know, like, that would be the last thing I'd want to be. I want to be an entrepreneur. He said, What you just learned was how to hire your first accountant. So for me, the lesson at university in accounting was how to understand the basics and how to hire someone to do the stuff that drains me of energy that they're really good at. So for me, that lesson in accounting was more powerful than learning all the accounting skills. And that's really the way I've treated being an entrepreneur ever since, is I have to be good at two or three things and I delegate everything except genius. I hire people even if they're outsourced or freelance people. 30 years ago, it was different. Everyone that we hired had to be a full time employee. They pretty much had to come to a company office because there was no Wi-Fi, there was no Internet, there was no laptops. So everyone had to come here and they pretty much had to be full time because no one's going to work for six companies. Now you can hire freelancers and fractional people and you can have a researcher in Karachi, Pakistan. You can have a marketer based in Eastern Europe. You can have an executive assistant based in, you know, Columbia, and they can all be 12 hours a week. So it's almost irresponsible to not start outsourcing parts of your business, even if it's part time people.
Mark Brower
Absolutely. So, lot's there to unpack, too. I'm just going to go with one of the threads a lot of this in Property Manager had to realize, wow, there's plentiful, abundant, low cost labor, worldwide. And so we're like, Yeah, okay, let's hire, you know, remote team professionals or start leveraging ourselves if we can't afford a second in command yet, we've got to do something to get what you talk about getting the 80% on your plate. Yeah. And so we're trying to tap into this resource resources readily available technology makes it possible, but then we end up having a misfire or we end up thinking, Well, I could have just done that easier than the time it took me to explain it. Or, you know, I've noticed I'm not getting consistent output. I'll just take this back.
Cameron Herold
Yeah. So that that whole radical self-reliance actually slows down your company. If we're the only person who's good enough to do something, it means because we're not good at training and coaching and delegating to others. So I launched a course years ago called Invest in Your Leaders. It has 12 core modules in the course. One of them is delegation, one of them is project management. One of the modules is coaching. One of the modules is one on one coaching. Those are all the core skills to get stuff off your plate and onto someone else's place so that you can coach and grow them. So what I like doing is a system that I learned from Dan Sullivan, who owns Strategic Coach. So the idea is called an activity inventory, and it's almost like someone follows you around with a video camera for an entire month. So if someone followed me around with a video camera and they videoed everything I do for 30 days, and then I rewatched the video and I write down everything I do, what I do is I open up a spreadsheet and in column A are all the tasks that I do. Over the course of a month, I open email, I reply to emails, I show up at meetings, I prep for meetings, I book flights, I book hotels, I coach people, I do sporting events. I might have 80 things on my spreadsheet of things that I do over the course of a month. In column B, I categorize all those tasks in one of four ways. Either I for incompetent, meaning I suck at it. C for competent meaning I'm okay at it. E For excellent meaning I'm really, really good at it, but I don't love doing it. And then you for unique ability is the stuff I'm really, really good at and I love to do. Like I would do it for free except my kids act it right in columns C I put an hourly rate down if someone's job was just to do that right, just to clean toilets or just to reply to emails or just to do speaking or just to book flights, what would I pay them 40 hours a week or their hourly rate? B to do that task all year long. So now I drop with an hourly rate for those things. Then I decide for each of those tasks, can I stop doing it? Because sometimes we do stuff just out of habit that we don't even need to do anymore, or can I optimize it and then can I actually outsource it or delegated to someone else? What I'm looking at doing is delegating everything that doesn't feed me with energy and then I'm not really, really good at. And that's below my effective hourly rate. So the other thing I like to do, so by earning $1,000,000 a year, my effective hourly rates, $500 an hour, that means if I'm doing a $12 an hour task, someone should fire me. Why am I being paid $500 an hour to $12 an hour work or $20 an hour work or $100 an hour work? So the first is to understand your effective hourly rate and delegate everything below that or give yourself a buffer and say take your effective hourly rate of $500 an hour, cut it by four, call it 125 bucks an hour, at least delegate everything below that. So for me, I look at anything in my business, it's below $125 an hour, which is below at $250,000 your salary. I should not be doing any of it unless I love doing it. So that's podcast interviews, speaking, coaching and networking. Those are the four things I love to do in my business. Outside of that, I try to delegate all of it.
Mark Brower
Because those things give you energy.
Cameron Herold
I get energy from it. I'm really, really good at it. And there's other people out there that love doing the stuff that I suck at. There's people out there who love accounting. I don't understand why, but they don't like speaking. They like they're like, Why would you like speaking on that? Because it's amazing. And they're like, my God, I would die if I had to speak. I'm like, So you see what I mean? Yes. There's there's people out there that love doing copywriting. I'm terrible at copywriting. Like I've even got it using charge CBT for copywriting. But there's people out there that are so good at that. There's people out there that are great house painters, they love painting houses. I owned a house painting company. I 220 people painting houses. I'm okay at painting houses, but I don't like it. But I love to hire the people, line them and get out of their way.
Mark Brower
So when you stay in the activities, the dance hold and calls unique ability, yeah, Then you're building momentum just by staying in positive energy.
Cameron Herold
And hiring people. Even if there are only 2 hours a week or 2 hours a month or 40 hours a month, and they're doing their unique ability. So I might have a copywriter who's based in Bulgaria, I might have a researcher who's based in Karachi, Pakistan. I might have a my executive assistant who's been with me for eight years. We now hired her in the UK to get all the true minimum wage stuff off her plate. And we have a woman in the Philippines, $4,000 a month, 40 hours a week. That's $6 an hour. She's full time. We pay her three weeks full time vacation, which is more than anybody the Philippines gets blows her mind and she takes all the real admin off my. Yeah. To free up my year to work on the higher impact operational things for me.
Mark Brower
I can read some thoughts of people watching this and they're saying, Yeah, but Cameron, you lost me at writing down tasks in an Excel spreadsheet you had. You lost me. I like some of that detailed stuff that's required to make to create the system where somebody else can offload for me. Like, like what do you what do you say to the visionary that's just like, starts getting bogged down, just even thinking about that type of work, do it any way or like, is there a who that can help you structure your life? At a certain point you have to start somewhere.
Cameron Herold
Yeah, most, most often. I mean, pretty much anybody who's watching us right now, we're listening to us right now. I'm pretty sure you have someone to clean your home on a weekly basis or every two week basis. Most of us stop cleaning toilets. That was one of the first things we stopped doing. Or we hire someone to cut our lawn or someone to clean our pool so we get rid of these minimum wage jobs to those people, and we find people who know how to do it already. The key for us is to find one or two projects at a time and find the people. So go on Upwork, go on fiber, find it An executive assistant who can help you network. Ask on social media. You have to get good at interviewing and hiring, but you really shouldn't be running your own business unless you're going to be dedicated to learning those things. So, you know, that's another reason why my Invest in your leaders courses and interviewing module that teaches you how to find people, how to select people. Most of us as entrepreneurs have never been trained on how to be an entrepreneur. We quit our job because we didn't like what we're doing and now we end up running this business. You need to start learning the business skills as well. You need to start dedicating yourself to that. And it's not so much the business of property management, it's the business of being in business. It's the business of running meetings, hiring people, delegating projects, coaching people, inspiring people. You have to learn to be a leader and that's what people really need to plug into.
Mark Brower
You also talk about how as a leader, one of the things that we have to learn is to gain enough self-awareness about what we suck at and actually be honest with ourselves. Like, what's that journey like? And also tell us about that's connected to this other idea of the yin and the yang between the entrepreneur and the and their second in command?
Cameron Herold
Yeah. So the school system messed up. We grew up in an era where going to school we were told we had to be the smartest person in the room or we weren't worthy. Right? And even the students, like my wife, was a 4.2 GPA. I didn't even know you could get anything above a four. I had no idea you could get more than a 4.0. I had no idea. And she was a 4.3 GPA, but she still struggled. If she got a B-minus on something, it really emotionally beat her up. I was so dumb in class that I got used to being very average. But I also found there were a couple of things I was really, really good at. I've been now paid to do speaking events by groups in 28 countries. I've been paid to speak in every single continent, including getting paid to speak in Antarctica. I was handed a check in Antarctica to speak, but I won a citywide speaking competition when I was in grade two. It was a unique ability for me at a very young age. I was recording radio ads for local businesses when I was in Grade four, so I've always been good at recording and speaking at kind of shooting from the hip. But right. I knew that that was a unique ability early. My math skills were very unique abilities. I could could run numbers in my head very quickly, but I was really bad at a lot of other stuff. Spreadsheets. Yeah, the details of spreadsheets I was bad with, right. But what I realized was because I got okay with being bad at something in the school system, they say if you're bad at something, go get a tutor. Right now, you become horribly average and frustrated on something. You'll never be good at it. So what I got good at was saying, I'm never going to be good at that. I'm going to hire somebody to do my accounting. I'm going to hire somebody. This I'm just going to five and go, Just let me get out of here. I became okay with the fact that momentum created the momentum and I didn't have to be perfect at everything. But if you still feel like you need to be perfect in everything, you'll probably never be successful. There's not a single entrepreneur on the planet who hasn't hired other people to do things that are stronger than them.
Mark Brower
So you're saying that we can look back over our history, even starting in grade school, and see glimpses or clues of what our unique abilities are manifested already throughout our lives?
Cameron Herold
And, you know, like if you look at your business, you know that there's areas you're strong. And often the things that that were really, really strong and are unique ability we dismiss. But anyone can do that. Yes, it has come so naturally, right. So I think that that being interviewed on a podcast is so simple or being interviewed by the media is so simple or networking is so simple, or speaking on a stage is so simple. It is simple for me, but then I realize for everybody else, it's really, really hard. That's how you start to know what your unique ability is because it's unique to you. It's fascinating. And there's other people that have, they're really good at marketing and they're like, Why isn't everybody good at copywriting? I don't know, because I've spent 10000 hours practicing it like you have, or I don't see it the same way you do, right?
Mark Brower
Interesting. So we don't need to spend our time beating ourselves up thinking, I need to go work on all my weaknesses so I have the awareness of what my unique ability is. Go all in on that. And then how does that help us? Fire the second in command.
Cameron Herold
Think about a professional athlete. Let's think about a football team. Right? If you're the kicker on a football team, actually, there's two kickers on the football team, there's the punter and then there's the field goal kicker and they probably suck. At the other part of kicking. The punter doesn't have the same way to kick a ball, right? And the quarterback, even though we might be the best quarterback in the world, probably sucks as a punter, right or the left tackle could be the best. So they know what they're really good at in their industry, but they're really bad at other things in their industry. They're okay with that. They're not trying to the kicker is not trying to be a good defensive lineman and a good quarterback. You just let those people do that. That's the way we need to think in a approach set in.
Mark Brower
Business and then talk target. Talk to us about that yin and yang. And I know you have this fantastic example of one 800 yard junk, which I'd love you to tell us about it. What after we have that self awareness and we've decided we've committed to stay in our unique ability, how does that inform how we hire that second in command or women?
Cameron Herold
Let's say you're looking to hire your first key person to come in and help you scale your company, and they're going to be your second in command, whatever you're going to call them, maybe a director of operations or a vice president of operations or a CEO. That title is based on their roles, responsibilities, the amount of autonomy that they'll have, the amount of responsibility that you give them, the amount of strategic insight they can bring. So don't give out a big title to somebody right away. You're looking for a person to be your yin and yang, the person to take all the stuff off your plate that drain you of energy. So it's first by understanding what drains me of energy, what am I not good at, and how do I find somebody who's good at the stuff that I'm not and who loves to do the stuff that I don't? You'll then craft the job description around those roles and responsibilities. I also like to make it very polarizing. When I write my job description, I write me. I'm a very manic A.D.D., slightly probably very bipolar, you know, CEO who swears a little bit too much. I might even drop an F bomb into my job posting. And I've done that in the past with people like, I can't believe you sworn to lead. I don't like that, I swear. But I swear once in a while. So if you're really against the fact that I swear once in a while, you probably don't want to work with me, right? Or if you need somebody who's so professional and polished, probably not me. I go to burning Man. I'm this Canadian kid, you know? So. So if I describe me, there's someone out there who's going to read this and go, Wow, you sound kind of like the kind of person I like to hang with. And you sound like the crazy individual that I can help, like clean up border and all the stuff that you described. I'm really good at it and I love doing it. And I don't want to do the stuff you're good at because I don't like networking and I don't like speaking. So like, I don't even want to do what you do. That's, you know, you've got that kind of imagine you don't have a name right?
Mark Brower
And it exists totally. That was the when I'm reading your books, I'm thinking like, my gosh, I've found pieces of this. And the fact that this exists and this is a this is a forgive me so much. I got so excited because if you can and you even admit this, you said that of the companies, other successful companies out there, and you get approached all the time to be CEO or companies and you admit 95% of them, you wouldn't be great.
Cameron Herold
Horrible. Yeah. Tell us why. So I was the chief operating officer for one 800 job. I took. I joined as employee number 14. When I left six and a half years later, we had 3100 employees system wide. We went from 2 million to 106 million of revenue from 12 cities to 330 cities. So I was very good as a chief operating officer of that company with that particular CEO at the stage of growth, that company was in. Right. Which was entrepreneurial to scale. Their new CEO, Eric Church, has been their CFO for 12 years. So when I left the company at 106,000,002 years later, it was doing 78 with a global financial crisis. A CFO who was the wrong person, Ryan fired her after a year. Eric then came in, start running the operation. He took it from 70 million to 450 million. Eric is working with the same CEO for the same company. He would have been a horrible CFO for the first six and a half years because he's a more corporate person. Eric and I have known each other since 1987. We started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada. I was president year one. He was president year two. He would have been a horrible president in year one because he wasn't that entrepreneurial. Figure it out, start it up. But once we built it and got it to scale in that first year, he was amazing at scale.
Mark Brower
You kidding me? You guys follow each other?
Cameron Herold
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's there's there's not like, there's. There's some reasons why we found each other, right? Like when Brian was looking for my replacement that second time, he was interviewing somebody, and I mentioned Eric and a couple other people had mentioned Eric. And because Brian knew me and knew Eric's past, it was at least get him in for an interview.
Mark Brower
You said that that Brian was so good. And I want to kind of segway into the division here. He he was so good at describing his need and being clear about that. But multiple people mentioned.
Cameron Herold
Eric Yeah, Yeah. So, so we actually they first actually mentioned Eric because Brian pushed out the job description to his network and I'm trying remember Jeff's last name. He was the CEO, of Monster.com, and the CEO of Monster. Eric was working or had worked with him. He saw it and mentioned Eric. I saw the job posting and knew Eric was kind of frustrated with the business he was running and said mentioned Eric, and then someone else in the YPO world had mentioned Eric. So yeah, it was just when all things kind of pointed to that same person. Now again, Eric would have been horrible in the first six years because he was the wrong style and the wrong skillset for a very different season of the company. So and then likewise, just because I was so good at wanting to undercut junk in an entrepreneurial stage, I would have been horrible for most entrepreneurial companies because I didn't match the CEO or because they needed me to run. Like I'd say, 30% of our CEO alliance members run finance and I.T.. I suck at finance and I.T. So it was an entrepreneurial company that even Brian was running that he wanted me to oversee i.t. And finance. I would have been horrible, but because the roles and responsibilities matched me, the size of the company matched me time, the time of the company, and then the person. And Brian was my best man at my wedding three months before I started working with him. So we were already best friends. So we knew each other. We liked each other. He'd watched me build two other companies. We had a bit of an unfair advantage there, and I'd done it twice before. I'd already built two other franchise companies, so that's hiring the right person, describing the company in the right way. And when I saw the vision Brian had for what he wanted to build, I pretty much said Move out of the way. Let me do this. I know. I know how to do what you know.
Mark Brower
Those are the those are the most golden words that a visionary wants to hear.
Cameron Herold
But I'll tell you one of the other words that an entrepreneur wants to hear is you're messing this up, you're doing it wrong, you're screwing up, you're making a mistake, because no one tells the entrepreneur that there's an art to the CEO being able to tell the entrepreneur they're making a mistake. We have to do it privately. You have to do it one on one. You never do it in front of the board. You never do it in front of the leadership team. You never do it in front of customers or other employees, and you make sure that you kind of cloak it by saying, I'm telling you this because I love you and I care about you, and I believe it's for the good of the company, You call me a dumb ass. No. And I'm even putting my you're doing something wrong. You're acting like the dumb ass, right? But I'm telling you this because I care about you and your company and I might even be putting my job at risk by telling you this, by me framing it that way, I've actually solidified my job because the CEO finally knows someone is willing to tell me the truth. It's like the emperor's new suit. It's like you are actually naked. You're not wearing a beautiful magic suit that, you know.
Mark Brower
Cameron is an absolute expert, not only at the CEO role that he's had, but also in coaching CEOs. And that's why you you pointed out there is all of these support groups for CEOs. There's all these networks, there's all this coaching, everything's focused around the CEO, CEO. There had been no community for CEOs and you started that. Tell us why.
Cameron Herold
Well, because there was nowhere for them. So it's almost like if a bunch of guys got together or let's let's say a bunch of women were getting together for a baby shower, guys don't really fit the baby shower then, like even in the modern day where we're trying to be the sensitive guy and we're trying to be like, they're with family. Like we still don't fit at the baby shower. We know we don't. They know we don't do the baby shower. We just need to go do a bunch of stuff with guys. They need to do a bunch of stuff with women. Men are not hairy versions of women. We see the world differently, perceive the world differently, while entrepreneurs see and perceive businesses differently from their second in command. We actually profiled all of our CEO alliance members using a few different executive profiles. One was the Colby profile, which talks about how you start and initiate projects. Almost every single CEO has the same personality profile, and all of their CEOs have a very different profile. They were very entrepreneurial. So by understanding that we're different, we needed to give them a space to think and be and work with each other the way that each other thing can be and not get distracted with all these entrepreneurs who are usually a little bit louder, a little bit faster, a little bit more high level, a little A.D.D., Right. And they think it's funny, right? And it is funny, but it makes like the A.D.D. of the entrepreneur is a superpower. It's not a disease. It allows you to see the customer, the supplier, the market, the economy, your metrics, the numbers. Read the pulse of what's happening with your employees, oversee all the projects. You can sort stuff quickly in our mind because we can see what's important when the CEO needs to be much more methodical, much more focused with the systems in place, much more grounded, they need to be the break to our guys. They need to be the leash to our dragon. And that's where that real symbiotic is. Why the cover of my book is that that yin and yang, right? They need to be that yin and yang relationship with us.
Mark Brower
Okay, I want to get into the division because I think this is super powerful. So we we've all heard for years about missions statement and vision statement is a little pithy, 3 to 3 sentence things that fall way short.
Cameron Herold
Totally. Well, the mission statement originally came about from getting a leadership team back in the seventies and eighties. Together you'd get your six or seven members of your leadership team together. You'd all put all your favorite words that describe your company up on a whiteboard. You'd all vote on your favorite words. You'd be left with six or seven words. You'd mash them up into one sentence, and that became your mission statement, right? Go, team. Nobody bought into it. Nobody really. It didn't really resonate with us. It sounded to we all felt like it was crap when we put it together. Box, we did check the box, but it also doesn't explain our company. The one sentence mission statement doesn't explain your relationship with your customers, doesn't explain your relationship with your employees, doesn't explain your company culture or your office space. Doesn't explain your meetings, your meeting rhythms. It doesn't talk about the way you make decisions, the way you hire, the way that you build teams and consensus, the way that you manage conflict. It doesn't describe marketing and sales and operations, and it the vivid vision is a four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future.
Mark Brower
Looks like, acts like and feels like, Yeah.
Cameron Herold
So it's almost like if I walked around your office space and described what it felt like. If I describe the energy walking in, if I describe the feeling of the rooms, if I describe that the way that people are interacting with each other, that can't be written in a one sentence mission statement. So it's just a different tool.
Mark Brower
And I think this is really powerful because sometimes as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, I know it doesn't make sense, but I just assume people can read my mind. Like, isn't it obvious that this the vision of where we're going? Seems clear to me. Don't you guys get it like, But have I spent the time and the energy in the work?
Cameron Herold
I saw this as an analogy years ago when I was describing a movie to someone and I was describing a scene in the movie The Sound of Music. Yeah. Julie Andrews. If you've seen the movie The Sound of Music, there's one very famous scene in the movie where Julie Andrews is up in the hills in Austria. The kids are there, they're singing and dancing. They're having a picnic lunch and it's The hills are Alive with the Sound of Music and they're dancing. It's a very, very, very famous scene. And if you've seen the movie, if I said to you, recreate the picnic scene, you could do it in your mind. Yes. But if you've never seen the movie And I said, recreate the picnic scene from The Sound of Music, you might have the picnic at a lake or at a park. You might have, you know, the lunch was catered instead of in the picnic basket. And the kids are playing baseball. That would be a great picnic. Yeah, but that's not the picnic scene from The Sound of Music. They're in Austria. They're not playing baseball there. They're dancing, and they're in the mountains of Austria. They're not at a park or at a lake. So you could try your best to create a picnic scene. But if you've never seen the movie, you can't do it. The power of the vivid vision is everyone can finally see what the entrepreneur can see. We also write them for our marriages. Like my wife and I wrote a vivid vision for our life together as a couple. I wrote my version of our relationships, our friendships, our fitness, our finances, our spirituality, our use of substances, what we do for fun, our vacation time, our our growth, like mental growth, how we connect with each other. And it's a four page description. And she did the same. And then we merged all of those points together. The reason couples grow apart is they're not intentional about growing together. So we have a very intentional document describing our relationship together and we reread it constantly. We share it with the world, and we are constantly trying to make each sentence come true.
Mark Brower
That's really powerful. You say that even after you have this really vivid vision and you're really you've got to clear yourself and you've gotten it written down that it's like a three year picture. Yeah, usually. And then you reverse engineer what you need to be doing today.
Cameron Herold
Yeah, almost like if we were building a home. So if I was going to build the dream home, I would describe in vivid detail what I wanted my home to look like. I would describe each of the rooms, I would describe the finishing, I would describe the kitchens, the bathrooms, the flooring, the paint colors, what the windows would look like. I would describe how we entertain and hang out with family, what our family unit is like, so that the contractor could help me create the plans to make my vision come true. I wouldn't just hand a 2 million bucks to a contractor and say, build me my dream home because he might build me an amazing home that looks nothing like what I want. So the contractor needs to understand what I want in a home, what it looks like, how we use it, everything I can explain to him the vivid vision of a home. He can then create the blueprints and the elevation drawings and the sketches to make my vision come true. I sign off on his plans. He signs off on my vision. We hand that to the employees. The employees can build my home without ever speaking to me. So that's the power of the vision. The reason we're constantly have to organize our employees and hold them accountable is they're not all aligned with our vision. We're hiring the wrong people who aren't aligned with the vision. We're hiring people. They don't have the skills to make our vision come true. And then we're having to manage an account. You know, we're just doing it wrong. And it's like.
Mark Brower
So, yeah. So you talk about the clarity of the vision and the communication of the vision in and of itself in roles and enables and empowers people. Yeah. To make it come to you. You're not driving them, they're enrolling because it connects with them.
Cameron Herold
Right. And they're sighted about it. You know, we talk about the three guys making bricks. This is 125 years ago. You heard me tell the story. I love it now. So three guys are over in Barcelona, 125 years ago. They're sitting on a sidewalk in the dirt. They're making bricks. And you ask the first guy, What are you doing? He said, I'm making bricks. They asked the second guy, What are you doing? He said, We're building a wall. And I get to make the bricks to build the wall. What more purpose than that? They asked the third guy, What are you doing? He said, We're building a cathedral to worship God. It will be called the Sagrada Familia. It's going to be the most incredible cathedral in the world. And I get to build the bricks to make the left wall of the cathedral. Who do you think is more excited about making bricks? The person who has this vivid and the Sagrada Familia? If you've never been, go put it on your bucket list. Go see it. It's incredible. Unbelievable cathedral that they've been still building for 125 years. But because people have purpose of what they're building and they're excited about the vision of what they're building, they find meaning every single day. That's why you need a better vision for your company, is it aligns people, it inspires people. It also is people say, you know what, That sounds like something I don't want to be a part of. Great. Go work for somebody that's hiring right now. The government is always hiring. Go to the government. But like I make sure that in my business people know it's going to be high pressure, it's going to be high stress, are going to be working hard. We're going to change our minds on a dime. We're going to be entrepreneurial. We're going to be obsessed about employee engagement first and customer second. People are like, my gosh, I want to do that. I want to be there. I mean, this will be the hardest thing you'll ever do. They're like, Great, because players want to work on challenging things. See, players don't want work, so they don't even apply some idea. That vision allows me to screen people out before I even get their resume. And then when I do, when I get a resume, I say, Hey, thanks for your resume. I'm not going to read it. Please read my vivid vision. Send me a 2 to 3 minute video of how you can help make this come true and what parts of my vivid vision you're most excited. If I love your video, then I'll read your resume. Wow. So now I take 100 resumes, I get ten videos. If I like five of the videos, I only read five resumes. I don't bother with the other 95 and the five resumes I've got, they're all vibrating like I'm vibrating because they read my vivid vision. Holy cow. That's super powerful. That's how we built college pro painters. That's how we built one 800 got junk. So we built, you know, all these companies I've worked with all over the world.
Mark Brower
So I'm going to take it back to, like, getting 80% off your plate. Like, I'm like, I think for a lot of us as small business owners, we're caught up in this idea that, yeah, I know I shouldn't be doing X, but I don't have the money to hire somebody right now or I don't have, you know, like roadblock, roadblock, or like, I don't have the time to, like, figure out how to, like, make this perfect, like, set of instructions for somebody else or I don't have the actual cash to hire somebody earlier. You talk about if you don't if you can't afford a C, although we can't afford a second thing, like, like, like how do you start how do you start building momentum on these things?
Cameron Herold
So you're not going to like some of my comment on this. But if you can't figure out how to do it and you don't have the money to do it, you have no business. Being an entrepreneur, You need to actually flip that script a little bit and decide that you're going to figure out how or you're going to learn from somebody who has figured out how. Like it's all on YouTube already right here, 750 bucks you can buy my leadership course.
Mark Brower
I did, it was awesome.
Cameron Herold
Right? The 12 modules are really powerful, but then watch them every three months. Like really get it so that you can get all your employees to go through it so they really get it. It's not a lot of money behind a couple parts of your business that you can just say, You know what, we're not going to do that anymore. Like for most of us, we waste lot of time as well, right? Is working on the critical few things versus the important many things. It's like stop wasting time scrolling on social media or watching like the rest of the stuff on TV that you're watching. Focus in on the critical few things that are going to help you scale and then delegate slowly one thing at a time. You can also learn how to use if you don't know how to use Upwork, go on YouTube and watch some videos of how to watch Upwork or go on Upwork and watch some of their videos of how to use it. I wish I could look at five or Ecom where you can outsource fractional tasks, but if you wake up every day saying, I don't have to know how to do this, I have to find the who who can help me do it right. Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan and good friends of mine. Yeah. Their book who not how beautiful. That's that's a really powerful concept is we no longer have to know how to do everything. We have to find the right who's who can who already know how to do these things.
Mark Brower
I know that you know Vern Harnish, the youth minister and entrepreneur organization. One of my favorite quotes from Vern Harnish book Scaling up is Oakwell, where he talks about it's not an accident that the companies are successful. The best companies have the best routine. So yeah, can you give us, you know.
Cameron Herold
So on that the number one book for everybody who's watching us right now of mine, I've written six books. I would say the number one book you should all read is The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. I coauthored that with Hal Elrod. It's a fantastic bestseller. You'll get all the morning routine Habits of the Miracle Morning. So it's called The Morning for Entrepreneurs. That's the version you want, has all the good Morning routine habits, but then it has the habits for the rest of the day that I wrote, it has all the principles around focus and getting more done with less people faster. And it is a chapter on vivid vision. So I would start with that. Then I would read the book Double double, but I would read chapters 1 to 4, six and 12.
Mark Brower
Double Double is so dense, it's got like all this entrepreneur organization, all the like all these nuggets just all throughout it. It's, it's subject.
Cameron Herold
And it's also a novel. You don't have to read it from front to back, right? Read chapters one, two, four, six and 12. Those five chapters will supercharge anybody who's watching right now because it talks about people, it talks about culture, it talks about language vision. It gives you stuff around recruiting. It also chapter 12 is the highs and lows of entrepreneurs. It's like the emotional roller coaster we go through and it talks about how to ride that.
Mark Brower
You are really big about community and I feel like if somebody stuck, you're like, I was in my story that where we started with I was an Island. I wasn't connecting with people. I wasn't bringing new knowledge and information into my life because I thought, like, I got to figure this out first, I got to get profitable and then I'll go connect with people. And I had it backwards. And I also thought I got to get more customers that I have the money to afford better people. I also had that backwards and I needed to build capacity. I needed to build knowledge now.
Cameron Herold
So one of the ways that we can build knowledge, your community can be online, so you can find Facebook groups that are online that are free. You can join mastermind communities, you can join a local B'nai group that is super cheap to join, and it's like probably $200 above charity.
Mark Brower
And they love property managers because we get a lot of referrals.
Cameron Herold
Oh do they? Groups are great because they're surrounded with other smaller, younger entrepreneurs that are all there trying to help each other. But then you can also get on to YouTube channels like there's so much information that is available online right now for free that you can devour that content. Like if you watched one of my YouTube videos, if you go on the Cameron Herald YouTube, it's free. There's hundreds of videos on there. If you just watch one of those videos a day for the next year, you'll triple the size of your company like that and you don't spend a penny. But stop spending time scrolling news feeds or reading the newspaper or watching all the sports that we watch or all the crap that we watch on TV dedicate like a half hour or even 15 minutes a day to learning. And there's a lot of information out there.
Mark Brower
That's really important. Is that how important is the dedicated like big rocks put in the jar first? Like how important is making sure like you to rank the routines? Miracle Morning. I've read that one. Yeah. I'm going to go and get it. What are what are the top three like? If you're a small entrepreneur, you know, do these two or three things every day or every week.
Cameron Herold
Taking care of your health right? So fitness, diet, sleep, mindset, like taking care of your health is first and foremost. I mean, I'll show you a photo that people will laugh if they can see this that you're going to and you're really going to laugh when you see this photo. So really taking care of your health. I mean, if I go back and think of my health, this is a photo of me.
Mark Brower
Whoa!
Cameron Herold
Yeah, I'm 40. You can't see this. I mean, if you can zoom your camera. I'm 42 Lbs heavier back here. I was not healthy. That was 12 years ago. But now I'm definitely taking care of my diet. I'm definitely going to the gym. I'm walking constantly.
Mark Brower
I carry my camelback around all the time.
Cameron Herold
Yeah, I quit drinking six months ago. I haven't had a drink once. I just decided to just have a much more intentional. My wife is healthy, so taking care of yourself, taking care of your mindset, that's number one. Surround yourself with positive driven people, right? There's that old adage that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Your income is the average of the five people. Your reality is the average. Your mindset is the average. Like if you spend time with a bunch of people that smoke and drink, you're not out trail running. You probably spend time with a lot of trail runners, all doing greatest people right. And they're probably healthy. They're not eating crap. They probably don't drink very much at all. So and they're probably successful in their life in some way because on their or even if they're not like successful in making money, they're at least because their endorphins are going and they're taking care of their health, they at least have a positive mindset, right? So fire the negative people in your life. Don't spend time with the negative grumpy people even on this call, there's going to be negative grumpy people on this in this group. Don't spend time with them. Fire those people from your life. Spend time with the people that are driven, that are focused, that are growing, that are enthusiastic.
Mark Brower
It's osmoses.
Cameron Herold
Yeah, you just you absorb that.
Mark Brower
Health, your mindset your emotions.
Cameron Herold
Yeah and then and then the network your community would be number two and then I think number three would just be the ability to say no and to focus. Right. It's about focusing on the critical few things. So I'll give you what I called the formula to building one. I got drunk. It was F times. F times equals success. I write this down, F times F times, E equals success. The first F was focused. I want you to give yourself a rating. You can do this for yourself or for your business. Right now. Anybody who's watching can do this as well. On a scale of 1 to 100%, how focused were you in the last quarter, in the last month, in the last week? How were you on the plan, on your budget, on your goals, on working on the critical few things? Let's say that you were 50% focused and 50% of the time you were all over the place. And then the next one is faith. So it's focus times faith, and it's not faith in God, it's faith in yourself. How much faith do you have in yourself, in your planning, your team in your confidence? Are you protecting your own confidence? Are you spending time with people that are building you up? Are you working on your skills? Are you learning which protects your faith in yourself? Are you kind of showing up as that strong, rugged individualist who who knows you can do it in spite of everybody saying no or how hard it is? So that's the faith. Give yourself a percentage score on faith. Maybe you're 50% on faith and then e is for effort. So it's focus times faith, times effort equals success. So how much effort are you really putting in? Like are you really working hard or you've hardly working when you're working because it doesn't have to be a five in the morning till 9 p.m. job. This can still be 4 hours a day. But you really are working hard on this 4 hours a day. Like, are you maniacal around your effort? Are you really giving it your all? Are you really making sure your employees are giving it your all? Let's see. You're 50% on effort. Well, 50% point five times 0.5 times point five is a 12.5% chance of success. That's an 88% odd that you're going bankrupt. Right. You may as well shut it down even. If your formula is 80% focus, time is 80%, faith times, 80% effort, that multiplies out to 51.2%. That's 5050. Yeah, but that's still still 93% chance of going bankrupt. You might as well go to the closest casino, but all of your money on black or red because that's the odds you've got. If you can get to 90% focus time is 90% face time is 90% effort. That's only a 72.8% chance of success. Point nine times 2.9 times, what, 90, 72.8%? You still have a 25% chance of going bankrupt. I don't like this. The reason we were six to I don't like those odds at all. The reason we were successful at 100, not because we were maniacal around, 98% focused times, 98% faith times, 98% effort, which gave us a 96% chance of success. That's why we were successful. So it's about working on the critical few things, spending time with the right people, staying hyper focused, the ability to say no, really working hard like it took a long time to get to the night before we became the overnight success story. Right? But that was the formula used.
Mark Brower
So to me, when you this is brilliant. Thank you for sharing this. The focus, the faith and the effort. To me, that all connects back to staying in my unique ability, saying no to a lot of things.
Cameron Herold
And getting your employees and their unique ability right. Protecting your employees confidence, growing their confidence. Like so many entrepreneurs. Delegate more tasks, delegate more projects, show people the areas to improve on, but we don't praise them and say thank you and show gratitude and celebrate all the stuff.
Mark Brower
Chief Energizing Office...
Cameron Herold
Yeah, so if I give somebody three projects to do next month, I'm going to celebrate and praise three things they just got done. If I say, Hey, we need to do better at this, I'm going to say what we're doing. Amazing at that. Not necessarily in the same sentence, but I'm trying to praise people and show gratitude and show thanks twice as often as I'm showing areas to improve the same way that we work with our kids. Right? You can't constantly spank your kids and show them where they're screwing up and get mad at them for doing the wrong things. You need to also be hugging them and showing them you love them and praising and building your kids confidence to try more and do more. But we need to show up thinking that way. As entrepreneurs, we often don't.
Mark Brower
Beautiful. We got like 90 seconds left.
Cameron Herold
Let me give you my one big thing. None of this matters. What? Nothing that we've actually talked about today. It matters. We're all just walking each other home. None of us are getting out of this alive. This is just what we do to make money. You make me cry. What matters is the relationships we have with our spouse and our kids and ourselves and our employees. What matters is remembering that every single person that we meet up with on a day to day basis is struggling with something. Every human that works for you or that you interact with, or a customer or a tenant or a supplier or a contractor are struggling with the relationship or money or help or something. And if we care more about the people, they'll care more about our business.
Mark Brower
Wow. I think we got to end it there. And that's beautiful Thank you. we sincerely thank you for being here.
Cameron Herold
You're welcome.
Andrew Smallwood
Awesome! Hey, everybody. First off, Mark, Cameron, thank you. That was a pleasure to do. Sit back and participate in. I would love to hear actually a couple of folks, you know, who are listening in will bring people up to the zoom stage here. And here's a question we'll invite you to answer as you're looking at your notes, whether they're in the Zoom chat or on a piece of paper on your computer at home, you know, picking out one or two ideas that you heard shared today or one or two action stuff, something that you're thinking about implementing from what you just heard today that were of meaningful value, what were one or two of the greatest gifts that Mark and Cameron's conversation offered you today? And we what we want to invite that back and actually kind of having that reflection, sharing that out again with the rest of the audience here. And Lauren Mac, so good she's asking raise your zoom hands, if you would. That way it's easy for us to to find you and and pull you up. I'm actually going to get kicked off just to buy people a moment to do that. Cameron I love what you shared about the activity inventory in that framework you gave for that and apply the value of your time and figuring out how do we get into that unique and unique ability and and help put other things into, into other people's ability and build build a great team. That was really, really great.
Cameron Herold
Thank you. I people with my executive assistant and each of my members of my team, I help them do their activity inventory every six months so we can help get stuff off their plate and onto other people's plates. Do right. It's always about like we always have to grow our skills, but we have to grow the skills of our people to love that, love that.
Andrew Smallwood
Angela Bailey I see your Zoom hand raised. We will call you up here. Greatest gift that Mark and Cameron gave you today.
Angela
Hi. Wow! That was amazing. So I actually have the book The Morning for Entrepreneurs. Whatever miracle worker entrepreneurs, I haven't read it yet. So that's exciting. So I think the biggest thing that I got out is I was making some kind of jokes in that chat because you were saying some great things I thought were really funny. But I loved the part where you came in about. None of it matters. None of this matters because word none of us are getting out of this alive. What's really the most important is the relationships you have with people, whether that's your spouse, your employees, your family, your kids, your clients, your tenants. And if you care about people, don't care about you and your business more. And that's something that my company has really tried to do and has. It's well for us as a company and it is why why we've had the success that we've had over the last few years. So thank you so much.
Cameron Herold
You're welcome. I think it's important as well for everybody who's running a company to remember that the customer is not number one. The customer is number two. Your employees are number one. And the reason for this is if we obsess about making sure our employees are happy, if we obsess about helping our employees, that every single day our employees are going to be so happy and so engaged. They're going to go through brick walls to help our customers. But if our employees feel like the customer is number one, the employees are going to feel underwear or underappreciated and overworked and stressed and unloved, they'll be like, Why do we care so much about the customer? What about me? So that's why I always obsess about the employees first, and by default my customers end up getting loud.
Andrew Smallwood
Yeah, that's a point of insight. You you don't always hear. That's great.
Cameron Herold
Well I do a lot of this in my I do a group coaching call with CEOs and COOs all the time and I'm always around this like employee engagement employee engagement stuff and that's why it's really powerful and we to get on that anybody can join. really. Yeah. Yeah I've got CEOs from all over the world that are members. Yeah, I do a monthly I do a monthly group coaching call with CEOs and entrepreneurs from all over. And I have a three month, six month and 12 month options for it as well.
Andrew Smallwood
Very cool. Hey, we've got some more in the chat. I'm just going to read them off here. But we had we had the focused efforts and gosh, what's this middle F for Faith? That's right. Focus, faith, effort, you know, formula here, which was which was a great share. I got a lot of people reflecting reflecting back what they were just hearing. Just really great. Hey, we're coming up on our time for a break here, but I just want to invite folks, any other words of appreciation they'd love to throw in the chat? We'll make sure that makes its way back to Cameron and Mark. And just want to say thanks to both of you again, giving of your time and and your energy and wisdom here for this conversation to really help elevate a lot of people who are looking to improve their businesses and have a real impact. So just want to say thank you guys again much.
Cameron Herold
Appreciate it and share these ideas on social media. I take some of my soundbites and clips and share them like just I, I see so many entrepreneurs like Fly is trying to get out the window. They're going to keep trying hard, but they end up dead on the windowsill. Right? There is a shortcut. And these systems can help everybody, so don't don't hoard them.
Laura Mac & Carol Housel
And that wraps up another episode of the Triple-Win Property Management podcast. Thank you for pressing play. We hope you've gained valuable insights and inspiration.
The Triple-Win Property Management Podcast is proudly produced and distributed by Second Nature, where we believe in a Triple-Win, building winning experiences for your residents, investors and your teams with the only fully managed resident benefits package. Visit SecondNature.com to learn more and talk to an RBP expert in your area. If you have any questions or comments or want to weigh in on the conversation, we'd love to hear from you. Email TripleWin@SecondNature.com. That's TripleWin@SecondNature.com. Stay connected with us beyond the podcast. Visit our website at SecondNature.com to stay updated with upcoming property management events and articles. And don't forget, you can keep the conversation going in the Triple-Win Property Management Facebook group. It's exclusively for property managers. To receive even more valuable insights and updates, subscribe to our newsletter. You can find the link to that and much more in the show notes. On behalf of the Triple-Win community, this is Laura Mac, thanking you for tuning. And on behalf of Second Nature, this is Carol Housel. Check back soon for another exciting episode. Until then, keep striving for that Triple-Win.