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Travis Makes Money
INTERVIEW | Make Money with a Vivid Vision: Cameron Herold on Scaling and Clarity
00:35:05
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- [00:01]
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- [00:29]
Travis
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel. Com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you beautiful people out there listening make more money. Today on the show, I have a new friend of mine, Cameron Herold. Cameron is the mastermind behind the exponential growth of hundreds of companies globally. He's the founder of the CEO, the CEO COO Alliance. Excuse me. And invest in your leaders training. Cameron is known as the CEO whisperer and is also the former COO of 1-800-GOT Junk, where he engineered the company's spectacular growth from just 2 million to 106 million in revenue in just six years. Not to mention he's written several books, a couple of which I'm a big fan of, and so excited to have him on the show today. Cameron, what's up?
- [01:24]
Cameron Herold
Welcome. Hey Travis, good to see you. Thanks for having me.
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Travis
Of course. I want to start off back in time if you'll allow me. Let's go back to when the first time that you made a dollar and you were really excited about it. So not necessarily first job type of thing, but where you sort of had this realization like, oh my gosh, this is what making money feels like.
- [01:44]
Cameron Herold
Well, yeah. And I actually had more businesses before I was 18 than I ever had jobs for sure.
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Travis
Oh, great.
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Cameron Herold
Yeah, I'd say the first time that I ever made a dollar was I would have been seven years old. I was living in Winnipeg, Canada, and I had my first little business venture. I was in a dry cleaner with my mom and I saw on the wall of the dry cleaner, it said a recycling fee for coat hangers. And back in the day you could bring your coat hangers back in and they would pay you 2 cents per coat hanger. So I went home and I grabbed the yellow pages and I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom with a long extension cord phone and I was phoning all the dry cleaners and negotiating because I didn't want 2 cents a coat hanger, I wanted 4 cents a coat hanger. And I was determined I was going to get four and the dry cleaner was only going to give me three. So finally I said, how about three and a half cents a coat hanger? And he started laughing and he said, how old are you? And I said, I'm seven. How about three and a half cents a coat hanger?
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Travis
Yeah, I fail to see how that's relevant.
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Cameron Herold
Exactly. Yeah. And so he started to laugh and he goes, fine, I'll give you three and a half cents a coat hanger. So my mom had heard the whole phone call and I was literally writing prices down beside all the dry cleaners in the yellow pages. And so she said, where are you going to get coat hangers? And I started to cry and I opened my closet and it was filled with coat hangers. And I had been going door to door in the neighborhood over the last week asking people for their old coat hangers, telling them that I had a little business to recycle them. So that was the first time my mom drove me off to the dry cleaner and I gave them piles of and I made a few dollars. And that was in 1972. And that was a lot of money for a seven year old in 1972.
- [03:30]
Travis
Did your parents encourage this type of thinking? Was this something that was innate in you? Where did this come from?
- [03:34]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, my dad was an entrepreneur and then both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs. And then so they raised my brother, my sister and myself to all be entrepreneurs or certainly to be entrepreneurial. And to this day the three of us have all run our own companies.
- [03:47]
Travis
Oh really? Wow. All the kids?
- [03:48]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, yeah, we all do. That's all we've ever done. My whole, my whole world is entrepreneurs. I just came off a cat skiing trip with Dan Martell and 46 CEOs or CEOs in call at Bald Face. And my whole world is entrepreneurs. That's all I know. I don't, I don't know people that have jobs.
- [04:05]
Travis
Did you. I guess this is a selfish question. So allow me the selfish question here. I have a six year old and a five year old and of course we're constantly thinking about education. We're constantly thinking about the type of person they're going to be when they grow up. I've, I've sort of shied away from things that I want them to do because I like doing it or I want to do it. With them. You know what I mean?
- [04:32]
Cameron Herold
Yeah.
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Travis
But I also know that especially with entrepreneurship, the type of thinking that's required to become an entrepreneur is still extremely helpful, even if you don't end up running or starting your own business.
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Cameron Herold
Yeah.
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Travis
So how. How do you, how do you raise entrepreneurs? Like the kids in that is crazy.
- [04:52]
Cameron Herold
Yeah. I was asked to do a one of the very first TEDx talks back in 2010, I think it was 2009 or 2010. And it was called let's Raise Kids to be Entrepreneurs. And it was all about how I was groomed to be an entrepreneur. And the argument that I made in the talk was that we don't need to raise our kids to be entrepreneurs, but we need to raise them to be entrepreneurial. And especially now, fast forward 16 years later, people that are going to go out into the workforce are probably going to be doing their role for five or six different companies at the same time concurrently. You're not going to have one job with one company. You'll probably end up being a specialist or you'll certainly make a lot more money if you can be a specialist working for multiple firms in that niche. So kids need to spot opportunities. They need to learn how to negotiate, they need to learn how to problem solve. They need to learn how to manage time. They need to learn how to be strong leaders. They need to learn how to sell. Those are all skills that kids need to have to be entrepreneurial. The DNA traits that people have that show you're probably predicated to be an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs are very far right on the spectrum for bipolar disorder, and most entrepreneurs are very far right on the spectrum for attention deficit disorder. It's a very, very high correlation between those two. So something about 94% or 95% of all entreprene are ADD and bipolar. I've actually got the data around that stuff. I'm writing my final book around it. Wow. But that. So you can't. You can identify kids that are entrepreneurial. They just don't fit into the mold. They think outside of the box. They recognize there's no box in the first place. You know, they can't sit still in classrooms. They're bored with teachers. Those are the kids that tend to be entrepreneurial. And then you need to give them the skill sets to actually go out and do it.
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Travis
What is the first one? Is there a first one? Is it like you mentioned five or six things just then, like sales and leadership?
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Cameron Herold
For sure.
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Travis
Okay.
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Cameron Herold
Because you need to be able to lead yourself, lead others, lead Suppliers, lead bankers, you know, it's, it's all leadership. And then I think sales would be a very high correlation there as well, because you're constantly selling. You're selling people to come and join your company. You're selling people to invest in you. You're selling people to be suppliers or be customers. You're constantly in selling mode, selling people on working harder, working longer. Right. Living the core values. So I think sales and leadership are probably very high correlations with entrepreneurship.
- [07:19]
Travis
So if you got a kid at home, you know, let's call it 10 to 16.
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Cameron Herold
Yeah.
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Travis
How do you, how do you put.
- [07:27]
Cameron Herold
Door to door, go door to door doing anything? And it's safer going door to door than we think it is. Stop being a helicopter parent. Your kids are going to be just fine. So, like let them go door to door and shovel snow or door to door and rake, you know, lawns or door to door and, and do odd jobs or door to door and, you know, whatever they want to do numbers on curbs. You can get the 10 stencils of 1 through 10, paint like white on the curb and paint numbers on curbs just fine. But the other part is let your kids run their business for a day or for a week or a month. And don't helicopter parent. Your kids don't need a darn website for their lemonade stand. Don't buy them a lemonade stand on Amazon. Don't stand at the edge of the curb and wave to traffic and tell them to come in. Let your kid go out there and do it on their own with their crappy sign. Let them struggle. Let them come in and say nobody's coming. Coach them, send them back out again. Right. So you're constantly. But, but if you're, if you're standing on the curb doing it for them, go run your own lemonade stand.
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Travis
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not actually learning the problem solving piece of it. If you're stepping in and solving all.
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Cameron Herold
The problems, they're not learning anything. And they're also not gaining the confidence from their success. The kid is going to get so excited when they wave to a car, the car stops, the Kai comes over, buys a lemonade, gives them a tip, they're going to come running in going, mom, I just sold, like. But if you're standing there doing it, they know it's not them. Yeah, yeah.
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Travis
And it will always require you to be involved if that's the method that you use.
- [08:55]
Cameron Herold
Yeah. The other part, and I think this is really important, entrepreneurship has become too Fashionable too trendy over the last 15 years, really since Facebook came out in 2007. I guess that's 19 years now since the Facebook came out. And then Instagram and social media, entrepreneurship has become very trendy and very cool. Prior to 1995, there were no books ever written where the entrepreneur was the hero. The only book ever written prior to that was Atlas Shrugged. But entrepreneurship became very trendy with the rise of the dot com era, where all of a sudden entrepreneurs were flashy. The cool kids, the kind of the geeks became successful. And then with social media there became this like, rise of entrepreneurs as being cool. And the hero, the Tony Hawks. Right. And I think it's dangerous for the 97% who don't have the traits, who are not hardwired to be entrepreneurs to try to be one. It'd be like me trying to be a lawyer or a doctor. I just wouldn't fit in. Right. And I think that the world, you know, as Chevy Chase said, the world needs ditch diggers too. The world needs a lot of really good employees to work for those few people that have the DNA to be a true entrepreneur. But everybody can be entrepreneurial.
- [10:11]
Travis
Entrepreneurial.
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Cameron Herold
Yeah. Yeah.
- [10:14]
Travis
There's so many, so many things that you've done now in your career, Cameron. There's one book in particular we heard you.
- [10:22]
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- [10:35]
Travis
You can though, that I'd love to talk to you a little bit about. I know this was quite some time ago, but Vivid Vision was I picked up when I was first raising money for a software company a few years back. I picked up basically any book I could find on vision because I had a mentor, basically. Tell me, like, the CEO's job is to, is to constantly make sure there's enough money in the bank account to recruit and retain the best talent and then, and then lastly to create and constantly communicate a compelling vision to all stakeholders in the company. And so I was like, I don't know what that means. Because all I ever hear people talk about vision, it's always just like some, you know, they throw it out as like mission vision values. And there's no clear, you know, discrepancy between any of these things. And I read Vivid Vision among a couple other Vision Vision books and I loved the analogy that you used. I believe it was about building a house, like building A custom home where it's like, you're not the one in there framing. So can, can you, can you talk a little bit about the importance of vision in the entrepreneurial journey?
- [11:39]
Cameron Herold
Sure. So most people have a mission statement. You know, they might get a bunch of their favorite words and they mash them up into one sentence and they're like, here's our, you know, our vision statement of what we're doing. Go team. That doesn't work. That doesn't align anyone. The vivid vision concept is a four or five page description of what every single aspect of your company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. Almost as if you went into a time machine and you went out to December 31, 2029, and you walked around your company. You could describe your office environment, you could describe the energy, you could describe the culture, you could describe the meeting rhythms. You could talk about sales and IT and marketing and finance and, you know, legal and hr. You could describe what the employees are writing about you and what your customers are saying. So it becomes this vivid description of every single aspect of your company. And then the leadership team's job is to figure out how to make every sentence come true. The analogy that I talked about in the book Vivid Vision was when we're building, if someone was building a house, building a home, the homeowner is really the CEO of that project, right? They know what they want built, they've got the money, they say, go build my dream home. But they have to be very descriptive. So the contractor knows what kind of a home to build. And the. The CEO of the job, the homeowner keeps describing the home, showing pictures, showing drawings, talking about the family, talking about how they live, talking about what's important. And the contractor then goes away and comes back with these blueprints or drawings that represent the vivid vision. The blueprints are essentially the plan to make the vision come true. And the homeowner signs off on the plan, the contractor signs off on the vision, and then the contractor hands the blueprints and the vision to the employees who build the dream home without ever talking to the homeowner. And this is the way the homeowner can get the home built without knowing how to do any of it. Right. When I was getting our homes built, I didn't know how to do electrical or plumbing. I didn't know how to do drywall, I didn't know how to put floors in, but I knew what I wanted it to look like. And that was where the power of that Vivid Vision really came to life. So we've used that in comp. I think there's Companies now in 29 countries are using the Vivid Vision concept. Yeah.
- [14:00]
Travis
Yeah, I loved it. I thought it was, I thought it was fascinating read. And the core takeaway was basically like, you're, you're, you're, you're. You have this abstract concept or idea that you can see very clearly in your mind.
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Cameron Herold
Yeah.
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Travis
But if you don't consistently over communicate what that picture looks like, nobody else is ever going to see the picture.
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Cameron Herold
So, you know, I use an analogy in many of my speaking events. I talk about a movie called the Sound of Music. Have you ever seen the movie the Sound of Music? Yeah. So there's a very, very famous scene in the movie the Sound of Music where they're having a picnic. Now, if you've never seen the movie, you might think the picnic's at a park and maybe the kids are playing baseball. But in the Sound of Music, they're in the Austrian Alps and the kids are singing and dancing as Julie Andrews plays guitar and she's singing the song the Hills are Alive. Well, if you've never seen the movie, you have no idea what that picnic scene looks like. But if you've seen the movie, you could recreate it perfectly. And that's the problem that happens in so many of our businesses, is the entrepreneur has a vision for what they're building, but no one can read your mind. As soon as you get that whole vision out of your mind and into a four or five page description and you add some, some of your design elements to it and you share it with everyone, all of a sudden, your employees, your partners, your suppliers, your customers, if they can all read that four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like they can start making it come true for you.
- [15:34]
Travis
What if you are a founder and let's say you, you had a, you had this clear vision and you put together, you know, vision doc, you've communicated it clearly. You're on month 28 of building this company and you're starting to realize that the initial vision that you created is now no longer a reality. Maybe you've lost touch with what the clear vision looks like. What's your advice for somebody who's like, I'm trying to communicate it, but I can't even really see it very clearly right now myself.
- [16:04]
Cameron Herold
Okay, so there's a few parts to that. The first is if you're a couple years out and you're losing sight of what the vivid vision looks like. Reread your four or five page description again. Right. Like everyone in the company has to reread that document every quarter. All of your customers, all of your suppliers, all of your partners, all of your employees. Everyone rereads that four or five page description of your company. So no one will ever lose sight of what it looks like. Now, let's say that you get a couple years out or a year out, and Covid hits. Oops. Now, everything we've ever imagined, like my sister was running a company prior to Covid. For 20 years, she had about 70 employees and she ran co ed sports leagues in seven cities throughout Canada, the United States. Ooh. She went from a million dollars a month in revenue to zero. So her vivid vision was completely gone. She had to literally go in a completely 90 degree direction. So if that happens, at least you've got everybody lined with one direction. And now you can say, okay, team, we have to quickly pivot. Here's the new vivid vision. Let's go in that direction. And they all say, okay, we get it, we understand, let's go. Let's bulldoze the old house and let's build a new one. Here's what it's going to look like. Okay, great. The second thing that could happen is you get partway through that year and you realize I was too aggressive, I was too crazy. I leaned out too far into the future, and I was a little bit too. I was a little too high.
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Travis
Idealistic.
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Cameron Herold
Yeah, yeah, A little too idealistic. Right. I just didn't have my thinking cap on. I wasn't realistic enough. It's okay. You can still go back to the team and say, hey, a couple of these sentences are never going to come true, but maybe the other 84 sentences can. You know, there's only going to be a couple parts you'll be off on. Your culture is probably the same. Living the core values and how you do that is probably the same. The way you run meetings is the same. But there might be a couple of sentences. But that's where you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Right? You don't say, oh, well, it's all crap. No, you just. You just change the living room. But the bedrooms and the family room and the kitchens and the bathrooms are all going to stay exactly the same. But the living room might just look a little different.
- [18:16]
Travis
What if you. What if you yourself, as the founder, are just having trouble reimagining what the new vision is like? Like, let's Say in the context of a pivot, right. Like you, you're true, you're. You have this idea, you're going for product market fit, you're 18 months in. You realize like this, this, this idea presented in this fashion will probably not be accepted by the market to the degree that I thought it was originally. We're gonna have to take this massive pivot and move in this brand new direction. But I'm having trouble as the founder even piecing together what this new direction is.
- [18:46]
Cameron Herold
Of course.
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Travis
How do you, how do you get back in touch with that like, visionary version of yourself if you've sort of lost it?
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Cameron Herold
Yeah, this one's really easy. I have over the last 25 years invested probably a million dollars. And that's not. There's no exaggeration there in joining Mastermind communities where I'm no longer the smartest person in the room. I literally just came back from an event at Baldface Cat Skiing up in the mountains in British Columbia with Dan Martell and 46 other CEOs, where I was definitely not the smartest dog in the room. There were guys there that have had multi billion or multi hundred million dollar exits. One of the guys there was raising $2 billion for his company right now. Like legit, legit companies. Right. Of some of them, of brands that we know well. I was a member of the Genius Network for nine years. I was in the entrepreneur's organization for five years. I've been to five Mastermind Talks events. I was in Strategic Coach for seven years. I've gone to five Baby Bathwater events. The founder of Baby Bathwater was on that event with me. So when I plug myself into all of these communities, my network is now vibrating at a resonance that is different from the average human. Right. I'm spending time with these very productive, very focused entrepreneurs. I don't know if you've heard of the book who Not How. I'm friends with the two authors. Right. Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan are both members of Dan Sullivan Strategic Coach.
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Travis
Right. And then.
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Cameron Herold
Yeah, and I was also. And I also attended Abundance360 with Dan Sullivan and Dan's also in the Genius Network and Ben Hardy was in Genius Network. So when you're spending time with these thought leaders, you vibrate at a different level and you no longer have to be know how to do it, you know, who can help you do it. So if you've lost your way, you reach out to people in your network that are really good at strategy, or you reach out to people in your network. That have created multiple brands or multiple ideas. I'm friends with one of the founders of Skype, Morten lund. He has 86 companies up and running. Well, if I was ever struggling for a new business idea, I'm going to call Morton because I'm sure he's got 10 that he's thinking about, right?
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Travis
Yeah.
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Cameron Herold
It's insane. There's no exaggeration. He has 86 companies up and running that he has equity in all 86 and he doesn't oversee any of it. It's crazy town.
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Travis
That's wild. So relationships essentially. Can you talk for a second about.
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- [21:15]
Travis
Is there a difference in your mind between networking and making friends?
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Cameron Herold
Of course.
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Travis
And what are those differences?
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Cameron Herold
Networking is the 1980s sleazy insurance.
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- [21:59]
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- [22:24]
Cameron Herold
Improving is easy at Lowe's Salesman Going to an event and trying to hand out as many business cards as possible and leaving the event feeling like I gave out 43 business cards. That was successful.
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Travis
Check. Yeah.
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Cameron Herold
Whereas what I'm trying to do is put myself into the room. Here's where I learned it. When I was 16, my dad took me to the golf club that we were members of. And then I ended up getting a job at the golf club for a couple of summers and I got to know all these high net worth individuals and all these entrepreneurs and I realized my social Network as an 18 year old was all of these business owners. So I realized by putting myself into the room and playing golf with these people and having burgers with them and being around them and caddying for them, I got to know them and they got to know me and like me and trust me. That's what helped me launch my house painting business was all of a sudden, the summer when I was 20 and I had 12 employees and we were painting houses, I started painting houses of all the members of the golf club. But I was never networking. I was just in a network and building relationships with those people. So I think the reason for joining a mastermind community is to not be the smartest person in the room. Right. So you can absorb from others and be there to contribute. Right. As Joe Polish always says, life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. So when I go to these mastermind events, I'm trying to find people that I can help and I'm trying to learn. So I'm very curious of what they're doing and I'm very curious of where they're struggling so that I can try to contribute and learn. And then the other part is if I can just show up and be vulnerable and just show up and be human, I'm going to end up building relationships with people and getting to like them. That's kind of. Yeah, that's, I guess, my thought process behind it.
- [24:17]
Travis
The reason I started laughing almost maniacally when you started describing this was the show. This show used to be called build your network. And so for a long time we were studying, you know, networking and relationships and stuff. Then we ended up rebranding it and separating it off into a new show where my other show is now called Travis makes friends. Because I started realizing that this was exactly the effect that was happening. It was like, well, it seems to me that all the people who are doing this, like, quote unquote, networking activity are not getting the results that I would want to have gotten had I been doing all of these activities, because they're just doing it the wrong way. Yet all the people that I really want to know who are building these amazing things, they're still. They all know each other. Like, there's some way that they're connecting with each other that I am unaware of, apparently, because it's not at, like, the cocktail mixer down the street. It's usually not the chamber meeting or at the place where everybody's exchanging, you know, the business speed dating stuff where, you know, you throw business cards and pitch people, then move on. So it was clear to me that, like, something was happening that I was not privy to. And it was, well, you know, instead.
- [25:21]
Cameron Herold
Of networking, what I've seen here is that from. From all the events I go to and now, even with my global travels, living on the road, I've been traveling all over the world for the last five, almost five years. I try to figure out who are the people that I've now met that I can help and that they can help me, but that I like spending time with. Because, you know, on, let's say on this cat skiing trip, again, I only bring it up because it was just came back from a testimony I literally just got back. So it's very top of mind to me. So I have the 12 guys that were in my cat, and then I have the other 36 that I got to know over breakfast, lunch and dinner or breakfast and dinner. The 12 in my cat, there's about four or five that I really resonated with. Of the four or five, there's probably two or three that I could probably be very good lifelong friends with. We have very good hobbies, very similar shared values. They're in the similar economic zone that I am. I'm in. Two of them have even said, dude, if you ever put on an event in Dubai, I'll be there tomorrow morning. I'll write the check and come. Like, let's go hang in Dubai. Because I'm now a resident in Dubai. So I'm trying to figure out from this event, I come back and I shortlist who are the people that I met, who are the people that I really like, and then I'll add those people on social media so I can stay in touch with them. But I don't try to just add all 48. Right, right. There was, in fact, there was this one guy who I was kind of intrigued with. Couldn't really figure out his deal. We ended up at this A and W restaurant on the five hour drive home. And he didn't say anything and then he went and sat at another table and I kind of crossed him off my list as just not my vibe. He either doesn't like me or maybe he's too insecure or shy, but there was no vibe there. But there was this other guy who we didn't know who came over and I'm like, that guy. That's the guy who I want to hang with. Right. So, yeah, I think that's a way to shortlist your network because there's something called the Dunbar number. Yep. That you can only actually build relationships and stay friends with a maximum of 150 people, which is why I think Facebook is useless. I would love someone to build a very stripped down version of Facebook where every person can only have a maximum of 150 friends, period. No. No other likes, no other followers. It's like 150. And that's it. Because then I would truly stay in touch with 150 people that I'm closest to that I really like, that I want to spend time with, you know?
- [27:44]
Travis
Yeah. And, and it forces you to think when you try to go add somebody else to that group, it sort of puts you through the mental exercise of like, but is that worth replacing this valuable relationship that requires time and effort and sacrifice to build it over time? Maybe, maybe not, you know, but it forces you to do the thought exercise.
- [28:04]
Cameron Herold
I even think back to the golf club, and There were about 480 men that were members of the golf club, about 120 women. I got to know most of the men because I worked there in the pro shop for three years. But my dad, even though he was president of the golf club for one year, my dad probably knew 80% of the 480 men, there were 20 or 30 that he was tight with. They played every Wednesday. And I could probably given about five or 10 minutes, I'll bet you I could write down 25 of the 30 names that my dad was the closest to at that golf club 40 years ago. Wow. Because their names are so prevalent. Right? Craig McDermott, Ted Ko, Vince Palladino, Chucker Ross. Like I, I could, I could go on and on and on and on with the names and probably get, get like. Because that was my dad's true friendships from a network.
- [28:58]
Travis
Sure, sure. Yeah. There's a. I mean, that's a whole different podcast conversation I'd may have with you sometime, but I do, I know we're running short on time here. I want to make sure that we touch a little bit of this, the, the media conversation. Because you also wrote a book, I believe it's called Free pr. Is that right?
- [29:12]
Cameron Herold
Free pr. Yeah.
- [29:13]
Travis
And I also read that one when I was starting to build the company out. I'm curious on your perspective because you obviously leveraged media multiple times for large moments of growth within your own companies. Have you seen a change in the media landscape as it relates to getting featured in publications versus getting featured on podcasts? Do you view them as being sort of a similar activity? Are different activities in your mind?
- [29:37]
Cameron Herold
It's the same every morning. Every single journalist, TV host, magazine writer, blogger, podcaster, editor, everybody wakes up in the morning and goes, what am I going to cover today? No matter how big our show, I've been doing a podcast called the Second in Command. Podcast. I've interviewed 540 cos of companies and every couple weeks I'm like, I need the next wave of really great brands to interview. So we're always looking for great guests. I have PR firms contact me all the time and they go, oh, by the way, would you like to have. I'm interviewing on February 8th or February 11th, the former president of Tesla and the former COO of Lyft. Because I only interview the coo, I never interview the entrepreneur. So I have PR firms reaching out, going, hey, would you like this guy? Yes, I would love that person, of course. So I don't think the landscape has changed. I think podcasting is just another very, very, very high profile, very solid outlet to get covered in. But here's where most companies and most entrepreneurs make a huge mistake. It's not about what podcast you're on, it's not about what magazine you're in. We've been on Oprah. I personally have been in the actual physical magazines, not just the online version, but the physical print versions of Fortune, Forbes, Entrepreneur Success, Inc, Fortune, Small Business. I've been in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, the actual Boston Globe, the actual papers, right. But it doesn't matter. What matters is what I do with those. So in the book Free pr, I talk about the digital trifecta, and that's your owned media. Sorry, your earned media, your owned media and your paid media. The earned media is all the press coverage you get. And then what you do with them is you put them on your website, you share them on social media, you have a media page on your website, you pixel those, so you're getting remarketing ads with those, and then you drive traffic to them and you boost them and you push eyeballs in front of those and you share the same episode multiple times. So when I get the video of our podcast, I'll share it three times a year on Facebook, three times on LinkedIn, three times on X, three times on Instagram, I'll email it out to my list. And then every quarter I send out a summary of all the press that I'm getting. And it'll be in that quarterly summary as well. And it'll be on the media page of my Cameron Herald website and my CEO alliance website. And I'll drive traffic to it. So it's not that I'm on the Travis Chappelle show, it's what I do with that show.
- [32:15]
Travis
Media is only as good as what you do with it afterwards.
- [32:18]
Cameron Herold
Yeah. I talk about every media hit that you get or every show that you're on or every magazine you're on and et cetera, Like a bunch of logs. So if I was on five podcasts now, I've got five logs just sitting in a pile. You gotta light the logs on fire. But when you and I were 13 year olds and we lit a bunch of logs on fire, what did we like to do with it then? Pour gas on the fire.
- [32:39]
Travis
Pour some fuel on it.
- [32:41]
Cameron Herold
Yep. And that's driving traffic to it. Yeah. But the people that think, oh, I need to be on a podcast so I can then generate more revenue are missing the huge, biggest opportunities. The fact that we were on Oprah back in 2003 was great, but the fact that we could talk about it for 23 years is where we got.
- [32:57]
Travis
Like, exactly for 23 years. Yeah, right, man, there's so much more I'd love to talk to you about sometime, man. Maybe we can do that in person. But we gotta get you. Get you running off to the next thing. So I appreciate you taking the time here with us today. Cameron, where should people go to connect with you a little bit more, learn more from you, get more from what you got going on?
- [33:14]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, the easiest way is go to CameronHerald.com and it's H E R O L D. So CameronHerold.com it has links to all my books, my co alliance, my investor in your leaders course. It's all there.
- [33:25]
Travis
So, Cameron, herald.com and if you're obviously listening to this, so you are somewhat a fan of podcasting, go check out his podcast, Second in command. They do a lot of really great work over there. And if you're, if you're a founder and you're going like, oh, well, that's for coos. Don't. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you will not learn a tremendous amount by listening to that podcast because it has been very, very fruitful for me and for a lot of other people as well. So, Cameron, appreciate you taking the time. I know it's extremely valuable, so I do not take that for granted. Everybody else listening, remember, only solves your money problems, but it's a little bit easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got money in the bank. So let's solve that one first here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace out.