446. The CEO Whisperer – The Secrets to Massive Business Growth

Nikki Miller:

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The ONE Thing Podcast. I'm Nikki Miller.

Chris Dixon:

And I'm Chris Dixon.

Nikki Miller:

And today we have the privilege of getting to speak with Cameron Herold. Cameron is the Founder of the COO Alliance and Invest In Your Leaders course, author of Vivid Vision, and The Second in Command, and the mastermind behind the exponential growth of literally hundreds of companies. As the founder of the COO Alliance, The Ops Spot, and the Invest In Your Leaders course, Cameron is a dynamic consultant who has coached some of the biggest names in business, including Sprint Telecom and a monarchy in the Middle East.

Known as the CEO whisperer, Cameron has a reputation for guiding his clients to double their profits and revenue in just three years or less. Cameron's entrepreneurial journey began at a young age, and by 35, he had helped build his first $200 million companies. But his greatest achievement came as a COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, where he engineered the company's spectacular growth from 2 million to 106 million in revenue and from 14 to 3,100 employees in just six years. He's not just a successful business leader, but he is also a captivating speaker. And it was such a pleasure to get to learn from Cameron today.

Chris, I could have kept him here all day and he already is invited to come back. But this was probably one of the absolutely coolest conversations we've had on here, to watch Cameron who was unscripted, just talking from experience about how to scale and grow these incredible organizations that he's been a part of, and giving advice to a lot of the business owners that I know are going to be listening to this to scale and grow their leadership too.

Chris Dixon:

Yeah. He's not just a long, impressive resume, he's got a world of experience. And he makes it easy to relate to his experience and knowledge.

And I think you guys will really enjoyed this conversation. We talked a lot about the distinction between what you want to accomplish and who you really need to grow into and become. And what I love about the way he approaches his training and his philosophy is he's focused on who you need to become and be proactive about developing your team, your leaders, yourself to grow into the direction you're headed so that you're equipped for the future. Instead of simply focusing on training that needs to happen today for the skills that you need today or the tasks that you do today, think about where you're going and where you're growing, and I think that's really powerful.

Nikki Miller:

And I think what was so powerful for me about this conversation, Chris, is that I think so often when we hear people talk about leadership or talk about scale or talk about growing companies, a lot of it feels esoteric or it feels theoretical. And Cameron is giving real life examples and also very tactical examples on how to use some of the tools, when to use them, and talking about things that actually get us hung up. And we talked even a little bit about email and Slack management, which for those listening know that that's the bane of my existence. But this is something that affects a lot of leaders. It's how do we manage this huge thing that's important and yet distracts usually from the most important? And having a real tactical conversation with someone around that, I think, is so important because not enough people are talking about sort of the real day-to-day things that take us off track.

Chris Dixon:

Yeah, from productivity to developing leaders to casting a vision for your organization, there's all kinds of stuff in this conversation. So, what do you say we go jump in?

Nikki Miller:

Let's go listen to Cameron.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The ONE Thing Podcast. We are here with the Cameron Herold today. We're so excited to have you. Cameron is known as the CEO whisperer. You have managed, run, grown, operated, world dominated many a company. But I think my favorite fun fact about you is you being known as the CEO whisperer. What does that actually mean? It sounds cool. I want to be the CEO whisperer.

Cameron Herold:

That was actually a moniker that was given to me by the publisher of Forbes magazine, Rich Karlgaard who has been the publisher of Forbes for about 20 years, the main Forbes magazine itself and the online is all under his control. He had seen me speak three or four times at large groups of entrepreneurs, these large group events. And he was introducing me one day at another large speaking event, and he just somehow off the cuff said that Cameron is kind of like the CEO whisperer. And what he meant by that was I'm usually whispering in their ears and giving them the shortcuts and the systems on how to scale their companies and how to make their visions come true. So, yeah, that just kind of stuck.

Nikki Miller:

I think this is such an important way to start because I hear this so often in business that I think this sort of age of entrepreneurialism - Cameron, I'd love your perspective on this - it has come with this idea that I hear from a lot of business owners - we consult many, I run my own business,

I'm in a community of a lot of business owners - they sort of glorify this idea of being the CEO or the person who sets the vision. And I'm often push back on that a little bit because that's an important skill. You got to know where you're going. Of course, you don't ship with no direction and doesn't care which way the wind blows. And yet you have to also have the ability to actually operate on the way to that vision. And I think not enough people talk about that. So, I want your insight on that as the CEO whisperer.

Cameron Herold:

All right. And for anybody who's not watching, I was just doing like a fist pump in the air and getting excited. So, I have been kind of manically talking about this for just about a month now. It's been bugging me for a few years and I know where it started.

A good friend of mine, his name is Gino Wickman, wrote a book called Traction. And Gino rolled out what's called EOS, which is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And he created this idea of a visionary and the integrator, which is really the CEO and the COO. And in Gino's world and description, it's usually small business companies. He has the visionary as being the person who rolls out the vision and kind of delegates everything else.

And that's not what actually happens. In almost no case does the visionary just go, "Well, make it all happen and I'm just going to keep thinking vision." They need to care about culture. They need to care about people. They need to care about strategy. They need to care about the P&L and the operating budgets. They need to have some vision into the rest of it. Otherwise, what tends to happen is they're abdicating. They're walking away from far too much control and they're really setting their business up to be mismanaged.

So, yes, the visionary or the CEO has to have vision as one core part of what they do, but it is by far not everything they do.

Very similar to like a husband and wife in a traditional family. You know, one person does laundry, one person cuts the grass, but that's not everything they do. There's 100 jobs that they have to do and they kind of divide and conquer based on who does what best and who loves what.

So, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because the CEO, or now there's this term the visionary and integrator, it is not all they do by far.

Nikki Miller:

And I also think that CEOs can find themselves in trouble, to your point, when they go too far down that direction. Because if you don't care about how it's operating, you also can't hold it accountable. So, I think that there's no way to actually find your way to the greater vision if you're not checking in along the way to ensure that how people are operating is taking you along that direction. And not to say that a CEO needs to be into the most minuscule day-to-day details. But maybe sometimes they do, maybe that's relevant to how that vision comes to fruition.

Cameron Herold:

Well, let me speak to kind of the podcast and the theme of everything, is, the one key thing that a CEO has to care about is vision, but not in the absence of all the other important things. There's a lot of other important, very key things that the CEO needs to care about. Those would be things like culture, strategy, the brand, the market, the people, legal. They need to care about those areas and not completely walk away from them. But, yes, the one thing they need to obsess about is for sure vision, but they need to absolutely care about the rest of the business.

And if they don't, there's going to be a bit of a feeling throughout the organization that, well, if the CEO doesn't really care, then why should we really care? And then, it becomes almost like a mom and dad issue where they're splitting things up. And it's only the COO who cares, but the CEO doesn't, so why should we?

Chris Dixon:

How impactful is it or how important is it that the vision is also informed by more than just the CEO? And how much DNA he gets from his or her leadership team kind of on the other side of that coin?

Cameron Herold:

Yeah, great question. So, I wrote a book called Vivid Vision, and I codified this concept where the CEO articulates and crafts a four or five page written document that describes their company and how it looks, acts and feels three years in the future. And it's the CEO that needs to craft that document and roll that document out. And then, the leadership team figures out how to make it come true.

Now, the CEO is not going to, absent of getting people's feedback, just say this is all we're doing and I don't care about you. But the CEO can't completely water down the vision by getting everybody's input and taking all of their input, because then it just gets so watered down that they lose sight of where they really go.

You know, if Steve Jobs, when he rolled out the iPhone 15 years ago, 17 years ago now, if he wasn't completely obsessed with rolling out something that didn't have a keyboard, Apple wouldn't be what it is today. So, if he listened to everybody and they were all saying no, it needs to have a keyboard, the whole direction of the organization would have shifted.

So, there needs to be that kind of North Star that the CEO is always pointing towards, but they're absolutely going to listen to the market, their customers, their suppliers, their leadership team for ideas. But they need to really feel every aspect of that vivid vision. It really needs to kind of articulate everything that they're seeing in their mind. And then, the people need to decide, Do I want to build that company? Is that the vision I want to dedicate the next three years of my life and my business life to? If yes, let's do it. If no, go find a different company. And so, it's a balancing act, I'd say.

Chris Dixon:

What my experience has been seeing them search for and/or find that balance is the challenge of how much, you know, do you take that input without watering it down versus kind of set the direction without setting the expectation that their input is not valuable.

Cameron Herold:

You just don't want it to become that kumbaya group hug, where it's kind of like how a mission statement is written back 40 years ago, you got all your leadership team into a room, and everybody picked their favorite words, and you put a whole bunch of words up on a whiteboard, and then everybody voted. You ended up with seven important words that everybody loved. And you mashed those seven words together. That was your mission statement, right? Go team.

And we all read those things and it's like, it's so horrible and so watered down and so useless that it means nothing. They have to be cautious that they don't do the same thing with their vivid vision document or with the vision of the organization. It has to be slightly polarizing. They have to write it in such a way that there's a good chunk of people that say, "You know what? I don't like what the future stores for us."

And I actually had a CEO in Vancouver years ago write the vivid vision, roll it out to his 100 employees. And at the end of him rolling out this four page document, he said about 15 percent of you are going to hate what you just heard, and that's okay. It's the right time for you to quit because the rest of us are absolutely going to make it happen. Two weeks later, 15 percent of his company had quit. But two years later, he ranked as the number two company in Western Canada to work for. So, it was the people that were obsessed and aligned with that vision that said, hell yeah, let's figure that out. And the other people can always go work for a different company where they're more aligned with what that vision looks like.

Nikki Miller:

Cameron, I think this is such an important talking point because I think sometimes people get this mixed up and there's a lot of sort of vitriol of good and bad that goes on when people quit or when visions don't align. And I think it's such a gift as a company and as a CEO to give the gift of clarity and vision this is where we're going, and give the employees a choice, give the team members a choice as to whether this feels like it's in alignment with what they want to do, otherwise they could feel fraudulent while they're there.

Cameron Herold:

I totally agree. And I'll give an analogy that I think everyone will resonate with. It's almost like a married couple who have kids and they decide they want to get a divorce. For a lot of those marriages that are going to divorce, it's probably the absolute correct thing to do. They should get divorced. They're not in love. They're fighting. They're arguing. It's toxic for everybody. Nobody's happy. It's causing problems inside the family and for kids. It's way better if they split up and they can probably split up and have a great relationship co-parenting children together, just not being in the same home. Now there's other group that they could probably get some counseling and some mediation. They could probably work really hard and they could figure it out and they could make it work, and those ones should.

Very similar to business, there's some employees when you sit down and you really understand the vision, you might go, "You know what? I get it now. I I like this. Let's go for it" or "There's a couple sentences I don't like but I'm not going to throw the baby with the bathwater. I'll make 98 percent of this thing my vision and there's a couple things I won't worry about and someone else will." And then, there's others who just read it and they go, "Wow. It just really doesn't sound like me." It's better that they leave now than have three years of misery trying to work something that they just aren't that excited about.

Nikki Miller:

I'd be curious, Cameron, on what your perspective is, and forgive me if I don't articulate this question well, but do we think this focus on vision is the symptom or the problem? And what I mean by that is, the symptom of focusing on vision actually coming from the problem that a lot of these CEOs or people starting companies don't actually know what to do, so they don't want to focus on it.

Cameron Herold:

I think, well, the idea of the vivid vision and then the idea, even, a visionary is something very new for companies. It's really only kind of a 15 year old trend in most businesses, even going back as far as Apple 15 20 years ago. Prior to that, companies focused on the Jim Collins idea of who then what, who are then where. So, it was all getting the right people. Companies weren't growing as quickly so they weren't being attacked from 75 different directions. The world wasn't changing as quickly.

And now more than ever, because we have these hybrid teams or remote teams, you really need to keep people aligned and focused on something because we don't have them in the office day-to-day to connect all those dots together. Vision used to be more about a core purpose, which Simon popularized in his book Start With Why. Simon used to be on our board of advisors five years before he wrote that book. But they were popularized with a core purpose or they were really focused on maybe a BHAG, that Jim Collins term, that Big Hairy Audacious Goal. They aligned around product or they aligned around core values. But there was so much more that was left out that employees never really understood.

So, I think the idea of vision now is becoming much clearer and companies are realizing if I can actually craft, again, this four or five page description of what every business area looks and feels like, how our leadership team operates, how we measure things with metrics, how we obsess and live over our core values, how we support our customers and employees, if you describe all of that so every employee can see what the CEO can see, you're no longer trying to herd cats. It just gets easier. So, I think this concept of vision is something that is just much newer in businesses that a lot of people just never really learned before because it never really existed.

Chris Dixon:

Another balance to consider with vision is how big you cast that vision. And do you find that that is something that's challenging as well, where you're trying to find that, well, let's set it just past that point of what we feel is possible so that it drives us to change the organization and grow, but not be so discouraging that people can't even connect to it or

see the path to achieving it.

Cameron Herold:

So, there's a couple of components to vision here. The one that I really focus on and get companies to use globally is this vivid vision, which again is that three year push. I find if you push out more than three years, it's too far out and people don't really attach to it. It seems too esoteric. It's too hard to make any plans around. But if it's only one year out, it just seems like the company looks too much like it does today. So that when you're crafting the entire vision for the company, three years seems like the perfect number.

Now, in addition to that, you have the concept of the BHAG, that Jim Collins term, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And those are 20 to 30 year pushes that from the outside seem impossible, but from inside the company seem plausible. They're nothing that can be measured, so they're not like a billion whatevers or a million somethings. Examples of great BHAGs that are aligning and visionary are things like putting a computer on every desktop, which was Microsoft's; or to crush Adidas, which was Nike's; or to democratize the world's information, which was Google's; or to colonize Mars, which is SpaceX.

That's a vision, but it's a BHAG vision, which is allowed to be 20 or 30 years out. But you would never describe SpaceX as a company in all aspects 30 years from now, because you'd just be smoking crack. Like it's just so far out there. You have no idea what you're really describing. But you can describe the company SpaceX in three years that is aligned with core values, that is aligned with the core purpose, that is aligned with the BHAG, and those are all parts of a vision.

Chris Dixon:

So, if you use like an interval of time that's far enough out in the future that you can give yourself permission to make those leaps, but then don't get caught in the trap of being too specific about core areas of the business, more about this bigger picture.

Cameron Herold:

Yeah. And that's why I like leadership teams when they're trying to figure out how to make it come true, have the vivid vision for the company three years from now, and then have a one year plan. You don't need a three year plan, because by the time you get out to three years, those plans have changed.

It's almost like building a home. Let's just create the vision for what the home is going to look like and let's get the real good plans for the foundation. Once the foundation is almost done, let's get the really good plans for the walls and the electrical and the plumbing. And you kind of add on to those plans as you go.

But if the team spend so much time on plans and hiring plans and strategics and budgets for something three years away, they've really wasted all that time. The vision has to be clear, but the planning can be much more proximal.

Nikki Miller:

Cameron, it's so helpful, I love this idea of marrying the bigger vision for the company with really a very tactical approach that's clear in your explanations that you have to have in order to get there. What's also interesting is your focus on people skills. And you often mention in your books that this is really the number one way that you're going to be able to grow a company is to have, and I imagine use appropriately, these people skills. Can you expand on what that actually means?

Cameron Herold:

Yeah. So, at the end of the day, most companies obsess about training our employees on what we do. We train them on how to use the software or how to deal with some specific marketing tactic or how to do something on the engineering side of the business. We train them on what we do.

What I obsess around is how do we grow the leadership skills of everyone in the company who manages people, delegating projects, managing time, teaching them how to coach, teaching them about situational leadership, teaching them about managing conflicts, giving them kind of these core executive functioning skills so that they can lead teams and lead themselves and then drive towards that vision so that we no longer have to manage people, they become these self-managing and self-leading teams because we've given them that skill base.

The second thing that happens is when a company grows, let's say that you have a manager right now running a $10 million business or part of a $10 million business, when that company gets to 20 million, they're probably still okay to be managing it. When it gets to 40 million in size, it's really hard for them to stay in their role. And by the time it gets to 80 million, it's impossible.

When I was the COO for a company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK - and I'm sure anyone listening has now heard of 1-800-GOT-JUNK - I took them from 14 employees to 3,100 employees in six years. We went from 2 million to 106 million in revenue. The only way we were able to grow that quickly without giving up a lot of equity was growing the skillset of our people. Had we not grown everyone's skills, we would have been replacing people so quickly that it would have been like herding cats constantly. So, I've always wanted to grow people's skills so that I can keep them because they care about it.

And that's actually the third part is, Gen Y, more than anything, they care about two things in their career. Number one is working for a company that has a core purpose and core values that aligns with them. And then, number two is career growth. They constantly want to grow in their jobs. Baby boomers and Gen X didn't need to because companies didn't really change that much over the ten years that they might've been with a company. You're working for a company now and it's drastically different 12 months from now. So, if your skills don't continue to grow and if your confidence doesn't continue to grow and if your network doesn't continue to grow, you're out of a job and your company is really out of those really good people. So, that's why I'm really obsessed about growing people and really trying to scale them up.

Chris Dixon:

It feels like training people on what to do is a little bit reactive or at that best present state versus training them on who they really need to become is much more proactive.

Cameron Herold:

Yeah. If I was going to train somebody on what they do right now, well, three months from now, what they do has drastically changed because the entire industry has shifted. So, I need to teach them how to think, how to project plan, how to manage time, how to coach people, how to delegate, how to literally think and act more like a leader.

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Cameron, I think the challenge that a lot of people experience in that type of monumental growth you had in a relatively short period of time, it was really over the course of six years, I remember, that you went from 2 million to 106 million, I mean, that is so fast. And I think one of the biggest challenges that people see in that type of expeditious growth is what got you here isn't going to get you there. And to your point, these companies are growing so fast now that it requires people to match the same type of growth trajectory. So, how did you come to terms with that? I mean, I hear you doing it for everybody else, but you had to have done it for yourself in order to be able to do it for everyone. So, what did that journey look like for you?

Cameron Herold:

So, I'd help build these three other companies, and I understood what growth could be. And the way to fuel it was (A) growing your people. Again, I codified all that in my course called Invest In Your Leaders. But secondly, was by creating a cult. I always wanted every business to be a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion. I wanted it to be in that zone where culture permeated, where everyone either wanted to work for us or they didn't want to have anything to do with us, because I really wanted the people that were there to be so obsessed about our vivid vision, and our BHAG, and our core values, and helping each other that it just kind of got easy.

So, if I flipped the org chart upside down where I was at the bottom of the org chart, supporting people, aligning people, growing their confidence, growing their skills, growing their network, business got really easy.

Nikki Miller:

Give me some tactical ways to actually do that. Because if I'm a business owner listening to this, I'm like, "Yeah. That sounds great. And what does that actually mean?"

Cameron Herold:

I'll give you a very, very specific tactical example. I was speaking to a CEO the other day and I said, "How much training have you had on doing job interviews? Like on interviewing candidates to come and work for your company, how much training have you had?" He said, "Not really any. I've read a book or two, and I've probably interviewed 100 people, so I've done it lots." And I said, "Maybe you've done it wrong every single one of those 100 times." And he went, "Oh, my gosh. But you're totally right." Like, he just realized that maybe there was a better way. And I said, "Imagine if you and all of the people in your company that do job interviews had been trained and certified on how to do proper interviews, do you think you would probably be hiring better people, retaining better people, not having to go through the process of firing and hurting your culture and onboarding new people constantly reducing the cost of training?" And he's like, "Yeah. It just makes sense."

Or how often do you run meetings? And have you ever been trained on how to run a proper meeting, how to run a proper leadership team meeting, how to run a financial review meeting, how to run an annual strategy meeting, how to run a one-on-one coaching meeting? Or as an employee, have you ever been trained on how to participate in those meetings, how to talk when your CEO is overpowering you, or how to speak when your boss is in the room? And if you trained people on how to run meetings, wouldn't they be more effective?

That's just two very brief examples of the 12 that I cover in my Invest In Your Leaders course. And for me, it's kind of like if I sent a kid off to play little league baseball and I didn't teach him how to hold the bat and how to toss the ball and how to catch a ball, the kid would come home from little league and say, "Daddy, baseball sucks." I'd be like, "No. You kind of suck at baseball." We would never send our kid off for that failure. And yet every day entrepreneurs are like, "Business is hard." I'm like, "No. Business is really easy, but you're not getting the core skills to make it easy."

And then, I see them all like flies trying to get out a window, right? We've all seen that fly banging its head on the window and it's going to keep trying until it ends up dead on the windowsill. But there's a better way, and the better way is to have the skills and the shortcuts to actually lead people and grow people so that you don't have to hold anyone accountable because you know how to hire the right people, align the right people, support the right people, make the right decisions. It just gets simple. That's how we grew the fast growing companies.

Chris Dixon:

How much time do you think on average or rough estimate like as a ratio percentage that we should be investing in our leaders of their time into training and development? Because you think about some of the high-end operators and like SOCOM and they're like ten times more experienced training than they do actually execution, so maybe that's an extreme end, but what do you think is a good split for this kind of thing?

Cameron Herold:

Well, I'll give you a good starting indication here. Most CEOs and executives are so busy doing work with the excuse that I can't delegate it to someone because they don't have the skills to do it so they're stuck. What I like to do is delegate everything except genius. And I'll say I need to delegate this to somebody. I don't have anybody who has the skills. I'm going to grow someone's skills and grow their confidence because I'm not doing it anymore. If it's below my effective hourly rate or if I'm looking at one of my team, let's say I pay an employee $120,000 a year, their effective hourly rate is $60 an hour. If I find out that they have tasks on their plate that are below that hourly rate, I want to delegate it to someone else. Or if they're doing jobs that drain them of energy, that they don't love, that they kind of suck at, I'm going to try to get those off their plate to someone else who might even be paid more but who loves that work because they're going to be able to knock that cover off the ball.

Leaders need to step back from the day-to-day to be able to watch people and observe and figure out how do I grow their confidence and skills. So, I would say that leaders should be growing people kind of 50 percent of the time and not doing work because most of the work they do could be done by someone else.

Nikki Miller:

Cameron, you talked about this idea of having some of these core and critical skills that leaders and managers have to have. What are those?

Cameron Herold:

By no coincidence, they're the 12 core skills that are in my Invest In Your Leaders course. So, off the top of my head, I'll see if I can rhyme a bunch of them, situational leadership, coaching, delegation, time management, interviewing, running effective meetings, classroom teaching, one-on-one meetings, email management, executing on vision, handling conflict, and delegation. Those would be kind of the 12 off the top of my head. I might have repeated one, but those are the core.

And when you train people on those skills, it gets very easy for them because they can support people, they can grow people, they can align people, they can make decisions faster, they can make decisions in the absence of needing another stupid meeting. Meetings don't take an hour. They take seven minutes. Everything just gets easier, right?

And I had to learn this at College Pro Painters. So, what people don't realize about College Pro, it went on to become the largest house painting company on the planet. I interviewed and hired a guy named Kimbal Musk, Elon's brother, 30 years ago. I trained Kimbal Musk. I, also that same summer, trained his cousin, Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity.

I trained them in those 12 skills.

So, College Pro in a four month period had to go out and recruit, hire, and train 800 university students to run a business. And then, in one month, we had to train those 800 people to hire 8,000 university students to paint houses. So, in five months we had to hire and train 8,800 people. And then, in four months, we'd do $60 million of house painting, 8,800 kids would quit and go back to school, we'd get drunk, and then September 2nd, we'd start it up again.

So, when you're hiring and onboarding 8,800 people, you become operationally world class at the area of recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and leadership, development of people. For me, that just became normal. It's as normal as someone who became an expert on Facebook marketing. I just became a world expert at the growing of people and growing leadership skills of people, so I see it all as very simple now.

Chris Dixon:

There's something that - go ahead, Nikki. I apologize.

Nikki Miller:

I was just going to say it's funny and I'm glad you mentioned it, I heard you say email management, which I bet some people are specifically focused around growing leadership skills or email management. I'm like, no, that's real. That is a real thing that you have to learn to manage so that it doesn't take you off track. I'd love for you to expand on it a little bit.

This is my own selfish question because I drown in emails.

Cameron Herold:

Let's say we have email management and Slack management, and then also anything on the SMS and social media, like all that management. So, the way that I manage it all. I have inbox zero every day. So, at the end of every day, there's not a single email left in my inbox. Period.

Nikki Miller:

You're my hero, Cameron.

Cameron Herold:

And I'm not talking about unread. I'm talking about there's none in my inbox. So, the way that I deal with it is the same as I deal with my physical mail at the house. Once or twice a day, I go to the mailbox, I grab all the mail, and I bring it back towards the kitchen. As I'm walking towards the kitchen, I grab the junk mail. And when I get to the kitchen, it goes in the garbage. Then, I look for the bills. They go into a pile. I pay bills once a month, so I don't need to think about those. Then, I look for stuff that's for my wife or for my kids, and those go into a pile for each of them. And then, I take mine, and I either read it now or I deal with it later.

With email, it's the same thing. I either delete it, I delegate it to someone, I deal with it right away, or I drag it to either my end of day or end of week folder. My end of day folder is at 4:00 - and I'm just able to be going into mine later on today after the gym - I'll go into my end of day folder and I'll bash through really quickly 10 or 15 emails that are there. My end of week folder, I'll look at on Thursday or Friday, and I just won't touch those until Thursday or Friday. And that allows me to completely triage everything so there's nothing left.

It's a real simple system, and I learned that from the COO at Starbucks, who was my mentor 20 years ago. He was getting 600 emails a day and his assistant was able to help him triage so he had inbox zero every single day.

So, anybody who doesn't manage it that way, they're missing opportunities, they're causing frustration, people having to come back to them all the time. They're breaking core values, missing on promises they're making. So, anyway, I just found that system to be very simple.

Chris Dixon:

It sounded like the 4 or 5D's of email inbox zero management.

Cameron Herold:

Yeah. Deal with, delete, delegate, and then end of day, end of week.

Nikki Miller:

That's the next book.

Chris Dixon:

Yeah. Just go way deep on email inbox management.

Cameron Herold:

That's one of the 12 topics of my Invest In Your Leaders course, so I teach with video and written content. And everybody gets certified in those 12 skills too. They get the LinkedIn certification badge when they finish.

Chris Dixon:

That's pretty cool. You mentioned earlier that you guys were doing this high volume training and you're doing 8,000 people, and thinking through the process of managing that and having some kind of consistency on the output side of we're getting these people to this place to get quality, et cetera, I think about how do you do that?

And it comes to mind, we always talk about the 80/20 principle. It's the backbone of our ONE Thing philosophy, like kind of extreme 80/20, The ONE Thing, what's that ONE Thing? And I wonder, did you see intentionally or subconsciously, did you go through and have to just look at here's the kind of two or three things these people have to do and we're just going to do those really well to be able to control volume at scale and training.

Cameron Herold:

So, it's interesting, when I was trained and I was certified in classroom training - and it's actually again one of the 12 skills in my Invest In Your Leaders course - my coach taught me this, that if you can't design the training program for that concept on a Post-It note, you're not thinking clearly enough.

So, you start with the end of what do I want them to learn, and then what do I need to teach them so that they learn that, and then what's kind of the purpose and outcome of what we're going through. So, that's one thing, is, try to really simplify what we're going to teach people in.

The second part is to remember that people learn in one of three different learning styles, either auditory, visual, or kinesthetic, so they learn from listening, they learn from watching, or they learn from doing. But you need all three of those styles of teaching to be in every training session (A) so that you teach everybody, but (B) we also have a secondary and a tertiary style of learning. So, I'm a visual learner, but I also learn from auditory and I also learn from doing. So, if I only learn from visual, I'm missing 20 or 30 percent. So, when a training session incorporates some video, some learning, some practicing, everyone's going to learn a lot better.

Third, every learner controls the environment. So, you need the student to want to learn the concept, to care about learning the concept. Otherwise, it's just I'm not going to bother learning. It's like the kid in grade four that doesn't want to learn math until you realize, "Oh. You like comic books, do you want to learn the math of making a comic book, the math of selling comic books, the math of how a comic book is produced?" Like you can attach everything to comic books, the kid will learn about the science of comics and the art of comics and how to write comics, the kid will be completely engaged. You have to do the same with training.

So, if I'm going to train someone on situational leadership, I have to show them here's how it's going to help you in your job, here's how it's going to help you in your career, here's how it's help you get promoted, and then they want to learn. And then, what I do is I start with a test, a pretest that they're going to fail. I teach the content with video and written and practice, and then a posttest that they're going to pass. But those are some simple kind of thoughts around classroom teaching.

Nikki Miller:

That's great. So, I'd love for you to walk us through, as you did this inside companies - and maybe you did, so correct me if I'm wrong - obviously you can't have everybody going through this sort of 12 step training. And I imagine that you're sort of situationally leading and training your managers on the fly.

Cameron Herold:

No. Here's how we do it. No one asks this question. I'm glad you asked this question. So, I took the idea of virality. How do you create a virus so that the virus spreads inside of the company? So, if I train one person on time management, I don't want to go train 8,000 people. I don't want me training. So, how could I do that?

Well, what I did is I created a training program where everyone gets certified on a skill, and either get a bronze or a silver or a gold on that skill. So, if someone is certified in time management at a gold level, they can certify anyone else in the company in time management. So, that means a payroll clerk who's a gold in time management could certify the chief marketing officer on time management because she's just that good at time management. So, that's the first part. The second part is one of the core skills is coaching. If you're a gold in coaching, you can certify anyone on any skill that you have at least a bronze in, because you're such a good coach that you can coach on a skill that you have a base level of competency at.

So, what we did was we created this program where we wanted everyone to get good at coaching and everyone to get good at skills that they could then certify in. And then, here's where the rubber really met the road, to get a pay raise or to get a promotion, you had to be certified in a certain number of skills every year at a certain level which made people want to get certified.

So, all of a sudden, you have a vice-president from IT going, "Who can certify me in delegation?" And then, you got a marketing assistant who's like, "I'm great at delegation. I got a gold." Like, "Great." So, you got the VP being certified by a marketing assistant, the virality spread.

Chris Dixon:

That's cool.

Nikki Miller:

What a cool way, too, to cross-build the relationships and sort of shake out top down leadership. I mean, that's amazing.

Cameron Herold:

It's also how you bust through silos, right? The most important team that someone is on is not the functional area that they're running. If you work in marketing, your most important team is not marketing. It's the company as a whole. If you work in IT, your most important business area is not IT.

It's the company as a whole. So, yeah, everyone's in this together. Everyone's getting better together. And then, you build in that kind of gamification product. You know, we did this way before our gamification concept even existed, but it just works.

Chris Dixon:

Yeah, that's cool. And you talked about the generational need for continuous growth and development and advancement. You just have almost like an endless supply of things you can be working towards. And you're always achieving new certifications and ratings. In addition to the gamification side, it's like there's always a new skill that keeps you engaged.

Cameron Herold:

And the most important skill, if we talk about The ONE Thing that I want everyone in every company to get certified in is based on Simon Sinek's Start With Why, it's the core. And the core of a company is it's core values, it's core purpose, it's BHAG, it's vivid vision, it's the history of how we got to where we are. Everyone needs to be indoctrinated in that cult, that culture.

So, really, it's the CEO that creates the content around that, ideally over video, and going through a number of sessions where you can edit it and make that video perfect. So, now everybody just watches that video, but they write a pretest about that concept, which they'll all fail. Then, they watch the video and they read some information about it, then they talk about it and plan about it and role play around it. Then, they can write a posttest which they're going to pass. But then, three months later, they write an exam on it to make sure that they've retained the information.

You just build that simple process in. And, again, I teach all that in the classroom teaching section. And I feel like I'm pitching the course here. It's irresponsible not to sign up for it, but that's not my intent. It's just, I keep referring to it because that's where it lives. You know, it's not in my books.

Nikki Miller:

Well, it's a lot of time tested and tried and true, clearly, tactics in order to get very large organizations. And I think one of the biggest challenges that people who are scaling really rapidly, I can tell you when I was scaling my own business, this is something I face, it's like all the skills and talents and growth that I had to build, create, and become in order to get to this point are completely different and irrelevant now to whatever is going to get me to the next level. And you need to go out and find resources, people who have done that before, or you're just going to muddle and struggle through.

And I think sometimes when we talk about this, people are like, "Oh. Woe is me. You got everything you wanted and now you have to get to the next level." I'm like, "Yeah. There's a real foundational shift and conversation you have to have with yourself when you get to that big goal or big dream in your company or in your life or whatever it is. And then, you want to go to the next one, you don't really know who you have to be to get there.

Cameron Herold:

And when I touched on it, but I didn't really expand on it at all, I said the three areas that we need to grow our people in are their skills, their confidence, and their connections. So, I started an organization called the COO Alliance, which is this group of second-in-commands from all over the world that people plug their COOs into. I also started an organization called The Ops Spot, and The Ops Spot is an online mastermind community for everyone that manages people or works in operations. No entrepreneurs are allowed. No CEOs are allowed. It's only for ops people.

But you need to plug your people into communities so that they're with like-minded people to share problems and resources with each other and to have this collaboration that happens so that you as a company don't have to have all the answers. I want to grow the skills and the confidence and the connections of my team so that they can actually run 100 miles an hour pointed in the direction of vision with me and I get to step back and kind of make sure that we're all going in the right alignment.

Chris Dixon:

Such a great point.

Nikki Miller:

Cameron, I could keep you here forever, risk of keeping you here forever. I'm going to ask you what we ask all of our guests, which is, if someone's listening to this, what's the one thing that you would want them to take away from this conversation?

Cameron Herold:

Well, let's ask everybody. If they're listening to this, in the comments, write back, bring him back and we'll come back for a part two or part three or whatever.

Nikki Miller:

I would love to have you back.

Cameron Herold:

There are tons more that I'm happy to share. So, yeah, if you like it, say bring me back. Here's the one thing that I would share, and it wasn't what I was going to intend to when we were starting the episode, but none of this matters. None of what we talk about, what we worry about, what we focus on matters because none of us are getting out of this life alive. We're all going to die. So, what really matters is caring about the people we work with, caring about our friends, caring about our family, remembering that everybody is struggling with something. And if we care more about them as humans, they'll go through brick walls to build the company. But it's also to have some fun along the journey. Let's enjoy the journey, enjoy the path, because this is just what we do to make money. It's just what our employees do to make money. It is not our reason for existing. So, I guess that would be the one thing I'd remind us all of, is none of this stuff actually matters.

Nikki Miller:

Cameron, I'm sure you're going to get a lot of positive bring him backs, but I will absolutely have you back. I have so enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

Chris Dixon:

Thank you.

Cameron Herold:

You're welcome. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you, Nikki. Thank you, Chris.

Nikki Miller:

And by the way, Cameron, I know you mentioned the course a few times, where can anyone find it if they want to connect to it or where can they find you?

Cameron Herold:

It's investinyourleaders.com. And for The ONE Thing, I'll give you a promo code. Don't share the promo code other than with your listener. If they use CameronH10, it'll give them 10 percent off the Invest In Your Leaders course. And it's for anybody who manages or works inside of your company.

You should put them through that content. It's a rounding error in terms of the price.

Nikki Miller:

I'm going to get it for my people personally, so thank you.

Cameron Herold:

Yeah, you're welcome.

Chris Dixon:

All right. Bye everybody.

Cameron Herold:

Bye all.

Outro:

Thanks for listening to The ONE Thing podcast. If you're a bold risk taker who wants to dream big and achieve a higher level of success in your life or business, visit the1thing.com. There, you'll find information on one-on-one coaching, our exclusive community membership program, and customized workshops that will help you get your team or organization aligned and rowing in the same direction. That's T-H-E-the number one-.com to start living the life you've always dreamed of today.

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