It was interesting when I was sitting back listening to John and thinking back to the event when we were in Las Vegas and speaking at that event. I pulled up an email from John from March of 2017, related to MDRT and Top of the Table. The email said to me, “What if we sent them a gift from you, comped, plants a good seed for both of us.”

That was an email where we were both trying to speak at this conference. I ended up speaking last year in October and we were trying to get back in. And we didn’t quite know how to get back in. But the email prior to that was us being rejected to speak at the conference because the calendar was full. So, if you don’t think gifting works, trust me. This year it works. And we’re not here for free. They paid us, too. So, what’s the ROI? Right? We sent a knife set for a couple hundred bucks. That’s a good ROI.

I want to do a quick poll of the audience. I need to see how truly entrepreneurial we are in the room. I’m going to read to you a list of traits that describe entrepreneurs. I know you’re all running your own companies. There are 11 traits. When you hear five of these traits that describe you, I’d like you to stand up.

Where are the traits? Here we go.

Are you often filled with energy? Does your mind get flooded with ideas? Are you driven? We’re not even at five and someone is standing. I love you. Are you restless? Are you unable to keep still? That’s five. Remember. Stand when you hear five traits that describe you. Do you often work on little sleep? Do you get euphoric? Do you get easily irritated by minor obstacles? Do you burn out periodically? Do you act out sexually, which would include flirting? Do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision? Don’t sit down yet. Take a look around the room for a quick second. Every one of you stood up to list of traits that, yes, describe entrepreneurs. But those are actually the clinically diagnosed traits for bipolar disorder.

Now I bring this up for a good reason. My core purpose is helping entrepreneurs make their dreams happen, and entrepreneurs are different. We’re hardwired differently. We ride a rollercoaster. In fact, I cover a lot of that content in my first book, “Double Double,” where I talk about the highs and lows of CEOs and why we’re all clinically diagnosed as bipolar.

Bipolar disorder is nicknamed by the medical community as the CEO disease. Only 3 percent of the population is truly clinically bipolar. Entrepreneurs make up about 3 percent of the population. It’s not a joke, and I’m not saying that we treat it lightly, but we are wired differently. Most entrepreneurs are ADD or bipolar and they’re often on the spectrum for Tourette’s, which includes thinking out loud. In fact, this guy here, Richard Branson, has my first book, “Double Double,” in his library on Necker Island. Actually, Necker no longer really exists. It’s probably floating somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean now. But Richard is classic entrepreneur.

I taught the content I’m going to cover today to this guy around 12 years ago. A guy named John Ratliff. John, at the time, was running a $3 million company. Four years later, he had done 21 acquisitions, got his company to a topline of $32 million and sold it the year after for $107 million. He got $100 million in cash, and a note for $7 million. He now owns property on Mosquito Island with Richard Branson, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison and a couple others. There’s 10 of them who own property together.

This content works. The content I want to share with you today is what I call “Letters to My 16-Year-Old Self.” Who here has heard of the company, 1-800 Got Junk? So, almost all of you. I came into that company in October 2000 as the 14th employee. When I left six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees, system wide. We’d gone to become the number two company to work for in all of Canada. We’re operating in four countries. I was the chief operating officer and had to engineer that growth. But, when I left I really wanted to understand what I’d learned. I really wanted to internalize what I had learned.

So, these are the lessons that I recorded for myself over three and a half months of just decompressing and journaling. And these are the lessons I wish I had known when I was 16, that I kind of learned throughout all my years of running companies.

Most of them are based on failure. I had a woman who worked for me, Jillian Boxer. She walked up to me one day and said, “You’re boring.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “You have nothing to talk about. All you ever talk about is work. All you ever talk about is your industry. All you ever talk about is your 1-800 Got Junk.” Or in our case, insurance.

We don’t really care about that. But do we really actually care about insurance or do we want to know about our passions and our insecurities and our fears and our joys, where we’re traveling, and what’s happening with our kids?

I was sitting with Devang. Where’s Devang Patel? I was sitting with Devang and his wife at breakfast this morning. I said, “What’s one of the most interesting discussions you’ve had with your children lately?” I’m not asking about insurance products. We have to remain interested to remain interesting.

And I would really challenge all of us to start rediscovering our 16-year-old selves. What did we do when we were kids? What did we do for fun when we were kids, because that’s really the stuff that matters.

I learned that balance is almost impossible. We all talk about career-life balance. It’s impossible to balance. How can you possibly balance all of the things in your life if you think about friends, family, fitness, faith, finance. Right? Spirituality. Learning. How do you all? You can’t. So, what I try to do is take areas that I obsess about for three months. I let the others slide a little bit. And then next quarter I pick two more areas and I obsess hard about them for three more months. I try to balance a little bit, but I also give myself a little bit of, I guess, slide.

I coauthored the book, “The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs,” with Hal Elrod. I felt like a fraud at times. Most often my miracle morning is hugging the pillow. But the days that I do it right are pretty powerful. So, let yourself off the hook a little bit once in a while.

I had to learn that when I showed up at the end of the day, if I showed up as leftovers, that’s what I was giving my family. And I can’t bring my problems back to the house. I need to find a way to put them into a box.

I learned this device from a memory coach. He talked to me about almost pretending I was putting my company into a box. I was putting my box onto a shelf. I would walk out of the room that the shelf was in, I would close the door, and I would walk away.

So I try to do that. I try to picture myself closing my laptop and putting it behind me. And you won’t notice me working at nights. I won’t take my phones to restaurants. I try to disconnect from work to really allow myself to just recharge.

I had to learn that stress really builds up in me. That I carry it with me and I carry it with me and I carry it with me. And that residual stress is dangerous to myself and to my company and to my relationships.

Why do we feel so guilty about plugging ourselves in? We all plug our phones in at night. We plug our laptops in before we get on the plane. But why this kind of pressure to recharge ourselves?

I had to learn that nights are for recharging myself. I had to learn that it’s OK to say no to people. I don’t want to go out and talk about business at night. I want to go and talk about other stuff at night. I want to go and actually have real relationships with real people. Or I just want to reconnect with myself and my friends and my family. The reality is, you’re never going to get it all done.

Anyone in this room who is thinking to themselves, “I’ll just work tonight to catch up,” you’re lying to yourself. You’re avoiding something. You’re avoiding pain or loneliness or some frustration. You’re avoiding something and you’re filling it with a dopamine rush of work. But you’re lonely inside and you know that. The reality is you won’t catch up. I could never catch up. I’m never going to get it all done, because the next day I’m just going to set more goals.

We’ve doubled the size of our company, doubled our revenue six consecutive years. When was I possibly going to catch up? It’s like, ‘If I get to the horizon, I’m going to be happy.” You can’t catch up. What do you do, sneak up on it at night? The horizon keeps moving. You have to give yourself a little bit of a break and allow yourself to recharge. You have to learn as I did, to set boundaries.

I have CEOs all over the world that I coach. I have second in commands in a group that started called the COO Alliance, who call me all the time. I have the press calling and podcasters who want to interview. And people who just want to pick my brain or, “I just read your book. Can I ask you a couple questions?”

I had to learn that it’s OK to say, “no.” Or that it’s OK to bring them into certain areas where it’s OK to say, “yes.”

So, I don’t do any business calls with anyone on weekends. Period. I don’t do business calls with coaching clients after 6:00 at night. Ever. And if I’m with my kids, I don’t do any coaching calls until 8:30 in the morning, because they leave for school at 8:30 in the morning.

I coach the second in command and the CEO at Sprint for a while, the 82nd largest company in the United States. The guy’s clearly busy. Right? But Marcello had the very same patterns as I did. Friends and family. Fitness. That stuff comes first and then the business fits in around that.

Those boundaries, learning how to say, “no,” are what allow you to start pushing and delegating.

Jim Collins in his book, “Good to Great,” talks about getting the right stuff on the bus, the wrong stuff off the bus, and everybody in the right seats. That famous phrase. He also talks about the “stop-doing list.” Now I think a lot of us have heard about the bucket list. The other, the “stop-doing list,” is kind of your f-it list. I’m supposed to not swear after John, because John doesn’t swear on stage. I’m trying my hardest.

What I do is prioritize. At the end of the day, I think about: What are the top five things I’m going to get done tomorrow? In fact, I no longer even think about the top five. I use an app called Commit to Three. Every day, at the end of the day, I commit to the top three things I’m going to do the next day. And they tie into nothing, but it focuses me on the three big things I have to get done. In fact, I have the app on my phone and I have a daily accountability partner, Joe Polish. Joe sets his daily goals as well. We see each other’s goals and, at the end of the day, we click off on whether we got them done or not.

My goals today are: Meet with Davang and John Ruhlin. Done. Got those done already. Because I had breakfast with Davang and I talked to John earlier. Connect in person with Vanessa Van Edwards. I’ve got to meet with her today.

I mentioned the podcast. Also I have to mention the second-in-command podcast, the COO Alliance and also book-in-a-box, from stage. I’ll talk about all those things later. But I will get my three things done today. Yes, I’ll do all my other emails. Yes, I’ll do talk from stage. Yes, I’ll do other stuff. But the three big, high impact things I need to do today, I’ll make sure I get those done.

Imagine if, on the 250 business days you have in a year, you committed to doing three big things per day, three things that would move the business forward. That’s 750 high impact things. In the absence of doing that, you end up being busy. It’s now about, “Getting the,” as Jim Collins says, “critical few things done versus the important many.” This device of setting my top three or top five goals on a daily basis, is really powerful.

I learned about something called the 80 percent rule. This is not the Pareto Principle. It’s not that 20 percent of the things get you 80 percent of the results. It’s that I can do some things very quickly and get them 80 percent perfect and then pass them off to somebody else who can make them a little bit more perfect. It kind of looks like this: Anything I’m working on has the potential to be 100 percent perfect, but the reality is most people in the world are pretty good with an 80 percent result.

Let’s say I was going to write an email to my list of CEOs around the world who want to hear from me on a weekly basis, I will then audio record my email. I send it to my assistant. If it’s a long one, she gets it transcribed on rev.com or she types it up. She then wordsmiths it a little bit and passes it to a copy writer who makes it pop off the page. All of a sudden, within two passes, it’s gone from 80 percent to 96 percent and then to 99.2 percent perfect. But, if I was to try to write that perfect email, I’d be sitting there all week long trying to actually edit some darn thing.

It’s not about us being perfect. It’s about quickly passing things to other experts to get them off our page because momentum creates momentum. It’s perfectionism that’s slowing down and crushing our businesses. No one cares about perfect. Do you know that no one has actually asked for your university transcripts since the day you graduated? Those A’s actually didn’t matter. What are A’s, exactly? I hear you. I still think A is spelled E-H, because I’m Canadian. So, who knows.

The stop-doing list. We talked about. I want you to think about all the stuff that’s on your list. Imagine if you could video record yourself for an entire month. Then, at the end of the month, you wrote down everything you saw yourself doing. Then you categorized all the stuff that you do during a month in one of four ways, either I for incompetent, C for competent, E for excellent, or U for unique ability. “Incompetent” means you suck at it. “Competent” means you’re OK at it. “Excellent” means you’re really, really good at it, but you don’t love doing it. “Unique ability” is the stuff that you’re really, really good at and you love doing. You get energized from doing it and you would do it for free except your kids have to eat.

Imagine if you can get all the stuff off your plate that you’re only incompetent and competent at and, eventually, you can get the stuff off your plate that you’re excellent at. The purpose of the stop-doing list is to get you solely focused on the few things that give you energy and that you can become the best in the world at.

John Ruhlin is truly one of the best in the world at gifting. I would urge all of you to get every single one of your employees to read the book, “Giftology.” Just go on Amazon. Buy seven, buy 50, whatever you need. It’s a rounding error in the terms of the cost to your business. Have them all read it to understand it. This guy studies it. Lives it. Thinks about it. Talks about it. But he delegates everything else because he sucks at a whole bunch of other parts of his business. So do I. I’m really, really bad at lots of parts of my business.

We learned to outsource.

I’ll tell you, if you’re not into outsourcing around the world, you better get used to it quickly.

I use sites like Upwork and oDesk and HireMyMom. I’ve got freelancers in Pakistan, in the Philippines. I’ve got a freelancer in Sweden who does work for me for a fraction of what they would normally do. I have a woman who’s raising her kids at home and between 9:30 and 2:30 she does copy writing for me. She used to make $120,000 a year as a really high-end copy writer. She charges me $20 an hour. I don’t need her full time. But I need her outsourced expertise when I need her.

I learned that deadlines are useless. When you have an employee tell you they’ll get something done by Friday, they’re probably not going to get it done by Friday. It’s not because the deadline was wrong, it’s because they didn’t plan out how long the actual project was going to take. So, what I want you to do is tell me the steps to that project, how long will each of the steps take, when in your calendar will you be doing each of the steps. Don’t tell me when you’re going to get it done by, tell me when you’re going to do it.

Your calendar is actually the best to-do list in the world. You don’t need a list. Put every project or every task right into your calendar for how long it’s going to take you. You’ll realize you have too many things that you want to do. It forces you to say, “no,” to stop doing, to outsource, to delegate, to automate or to optimize.

I was riding up in an elevator one day at 1-800 Got Junk. I had the title “chief operating officer.” We had about 240 employees at the head office, about 3,000 system-wide. I was on some kind of a rant, a manic rant about customer engagement and how we were really messing up our customer service. I said, “We really have to fix it. We’ve really got to dig in and figure out what’s wrong and fix it all.”

The next day, one of my employees came up to me and said, “I figured out how to fix customer service.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

He said, “Yesterday you said we had to fix it all.”

I said, “Dude, that was just ranting.”

He said, “You can’t rant. When you have a title, like COO, people take it seriously.”

Think about the titles you’re giving out in your organization and take them very seriously, for a few reasons. Number one is everyone else in the organization will. I had a CEO say one day, oh I don’t really care what we call people. They can use whatever title they want. That’s really stupid because everyone else in the world takes the title seriously. And we’re over-titling a lot of people.

Your head of finance could be a finance manager, a controller, a VP of finance, a director of finance or a CFO. The head of marketing could be a director of marketing, a marketing manager, a VP of marketing or a CMO.

Now we’ve got a CRO, a chief revenue officer. I thought, “Give me a break.” Do you know why we have that title? Because the head of sales couldn’t get a C-level title because one didn’t exist. So we created one for them. That’s all it is. Twenty years ago, to have a C-level title you had to be a major player at a major company. Now we’ve got companies with 12 employees with six C-level people who have very, very exaggerated feelings about what they’re worth.

They actually want more money now as well. They go out on Indeed and Monster and say, “Well, chief marketing officers make $200,000 a year.” So we start having to pay them more. But, if we actually gave them the title marketing manager and they went on Monster, they’d realize marketing managers make $65,000. Oh, exactly what they were making. Be very careful with titles because they do matter.

I read one time that God gave us two ears and one mouth and we need to listen twice as much as we talk. It was a huge lesson for me to just actually listen to what’s really happening. So, I put a rule in place that the CEO speaks last, or the most senior person in the room speaks last. You get the most junior person to speak first and then the most senior ideas don’t sway the rest of the group.

This is one of the most impactful lessons I’ve ever learned. It’s about being a thought leader.

John Ruhlin’s book is on here, bottom right-hand corner, “Giftology.” Two of my books are on this slide. You can’t be a thought leader today or an influencer today if you don’t have a book. The reason I say that is, it’s so easy to write good books now because you can outsource all of it. People will pull all of the ideas out of your head. They’ll interview you for it. You can have a book out the door in under 20 to 25 hours of your time. If you’re in the space that you’re in and you want to influence and gain customers, I would urge you to get a book written. In fact, if you want, I can introduce you to my publisher who’s now got my third one coming out in December on free PR. It’s called “Book in a Box.” It’s now called “Scribe.” If you give me your business card and write “book” on it, give it to me later out in the hall or afterwards, bring it up to the stage, whatever, I’ll introduce you to them. Book in a Box will interview you six times. They’ll do up to about 14 hours of interviews with you. They will take all your ideas out of your head and transcribe it all. They go through around seven rounds of editing. They do the design and publishing. They get it all ready to post on Amazon. The entire process is done for you and now you can give that out to clients. And your cost-per-book is about $1.60. It’s cheaper than any other form of marketing you’ll ever do. I think the total cost of getting a book done is around $25,000. Think about the number of clients who will now take you more seriously because you’re standing out from everyone else in your industry. It’s a huge opportunity to be a thought leader.

I had to learn to slow down and be less manic. I’m bipolar. Mania is why people follow me and listen to me, but it also can create disastrous results. I was working with someone recently who is an expert on DiSC personality profiling and he said something to the effect of, “I’m running at 31 miles an hour with 30 feet of vision.” I’m running faster than I can even see. I need to just slow down and take time to think, take time to plan and take time to actually see what’s happening. I need to slow down and think before speaking, “Why am I about to say what I’m about to say? Why am I going to say what I’m going to say? What am I trying to influence with the group? What message am I trying to get across?” It’s about trying to be a little bit more intentional without completely filtering all of my comments.

But that was a huge lesson for me to think about that in a business environment or in a board meeting. Was I arguing to be right? Was I trying to influence a group? Was I leading them in a way? Or was I just saying my opinion? And to really start to think about that. Even if I start thinking after I speak, if I can debrief with myself, that even helps me before I speak the next time.

The ripple effect was a big one for me. We often think when we’re hiring senior people into our company that these people are going to help us to grow the business. But, they often cause unseen ripples. We brought in a head of finance from Business Objects and Crystal Decisions. They’d taken a big company and really grown it. This woman, Trish, was going to be fantastic for us in our finance group. But there were unintended consequences of someone so senior from a completely different culture coming into our business. Again, we ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for, so we had a really strong culture. But when you dropped Trish into our pond, it created all these ripples. We spent so much time worried that she was going to be OK that we missed all the ripples. Some were really good. Some were really bad. But, because we weren’t watching for the ripple effects, we were so focused on getting her successful, we missed all the ripple effects.

I’d encourage you to spend time looking for the ripple effects instead of focusing on the obvious. The boulder is going to drop to the bottom of the pond. Yes. She’ll be fine. She was fine. She was amazing. But we missed the ripples.

I still, to this day, don’t understand why all the confrontations in myself. What am I fighting? Why do I have my back up? Is it because I’m not getting enough exercise? Am I too edgy? Is it like the 13-year-old kid inside of me is still pushing to say I’m doing something right? Why do I always feel the need to argue? I still battle with that one.

This morning I was told by a guy who’s here working and doing his best, that I couldn’t have my Podcast name and my Facebook group and my email address on the slides, and I got all upset about it. But the reality is it doesn’t matter. I even said to him, “I’m going to stand on stage and say it’s called the ‘Second in Command podcast’ on iTunes. It’s the COO Alliance Group on Facebook. And my email is Cameron@cameronherold.com.”

He said, “That’s cool.”

So I just did it. There you go.

But why was I getting my back up and getting so confrontational? Right. Even me. I don’t really give a shit. Like I don’t care if you go to the podcast. Why? I don’t understand. But I have to work on that and it’s a lesson of minds that I have to keep working on.

You see, we go to these industry events to learn. I urge you to not spend any time over the next two or three days talking about insurance products. Seriously. Ask questions about leadership. Ask questions about where you’re screwing up as a leader, where you’re not managing people well, where you’re harming your customers or harming yourself or harming your family. Ask those questions. Let’s put all the product aside for the next couple of days and just dig in around all the soft skills stuff that we don’t spend enough time about because we’re worried that somebody is going to judge us. If you allow yourself to truly be vulnerable and to open up, your growth is really going to happen.

I had to learn that loose lips sink ships. If you have a secret that you’re not supposed to be telling, if you have a business opportunity or something you don’t want to share because you don’t want it to leak out, don’t tell anyone. The reality is, if I told Marc a secret, if I’m going to do this acquisition I’m working on and I tell Marc, Marc leaves thankful that I told him the secret. But he has this weird need to tell someone else so that he doesn’t feel so alone with my secret. So, Marc will then tell Barbara. Right? Like it was pillow talk. Right? And it’s pillow talk. Well, hopefully it’s pillow talk. Barbara’s like, no it’s not. Well it is now. So, Barbara and Marc are chatting. And then guess what Barbara. She leaves and, all of a sudden, she has to tell Sarah, because she needs somebody to tell. All of a sudden what I thought was a secret has now leaked out throughout the whole organization. It’s really powerful to remember this lesson of loose lips sink ships.

I also had to learn that when you’re going to cut people, when you’re firing people, you cut deep and you cut once. We had a 900-person company that we’d grown from about 200 people to 900, that I was running around 18 years ago. We got a note from the finance department that said, “Stack all of your employees from highest impact to lowest impact.” So we stacked them all. We sent the list back and they said, “Tomorrow at 1:30 you need the bottom 150 people to come down to the lunchroom. They’re all being terminated.” We thought, “Wow.” So we did it.

One of the girls, Jennifer, said, “Why can’t I go to the meeting?”

I said, “Shut up, sit down. This is the one meeting you don’t want to go to.”

Three weeks later we had meeting number two. “Please rank all your employees.”

“Why do we have to do it three weeks in a row? Why couldn’t we have done all 300 people all at once?”

What happened was like the aftershocks from the earthquake. The major earthquake isn’t what drives people crazy. It’s all the tremors afterwards that really get people. That’s where the post-traumatic stress comes up.

So, if you know you’re going to fire one, look across the organization to see if there’s more and do it all at once.

I was in a restaurant one night with a CEO that I was going to be coaching. My spider senses were telling me this was a guy that I really didn’t want to coach. I liked his business, I liked his brand, but there was something off on the personality. I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to coach him. My criteria are: They have to be young, fun, entrepreneurial, high viral, high growth, pre-public. And there was something off with this guy that he just wasn’t the right fit for me culturally, core values-wise.

We’re talking and eating our food and the waiter walked up and said, “Sir, can we grab you something.”

H said, “We’re good. Thank you.” He didn’t even look up at the person. Just “We’re good.”

I thought, “Who are you?”

That was it. Done. It’s not worth it. Nice people are always nice. Use the restaurant test. Trust your gut. Trust your spider senses. We’ve been on this planet for a long time. What we don’t realize is that our human computer is right. Women have learned to trust their intuition. Guys have to start learning to trust their intuition. Stop trying to think through anything. Just trust it. You know it.

I learned about leadership questions. One of my mentors was being groomed as the second in command at Starbucks. He reported to Howard Schultz, Howard Behar and Oren Smith. The three different CEOs. At one point, Howard Schultz called my mentor, Greg, and said, “Why is the letter B on the sign at 50th and Wallingford in Seattle not working?”

He said, “Pardon?”

He said, “Well, why is the letter B not working at this specific location?”

Greg said, “That’s not a leadership question.”

Howard said, “OK. What is a leadership question?”

Greg said, “What system do we have in place to ensure that every letter on every sign at all locations are always working? That’s a leadership question.”

Look for the missing systems. Don’t blame people. As Michael Gerber said, “People don’t fail. Systems fail.”

Start asking the systems questions. If you’re worried about a person, then what interviewing system did we have that let them come in? What was our top grading system? What was our records check system that allowed this person to get in the door? What was the training system, the onboarding? I mean, you hired them. Don’t blame the person for screwing up. How did they end up with so many balls on their plate? So, start looking for those leadership questions. Allow yourself time to think.

A few years ago, I decided that I was going to start running again. I was training for a marathon and I decided to run without any headphones on, without listening to any music, without listening to books or podcasts. It’s amazing when you go for a three-hour run, how much time you have to just think. Yes, I know, three-hour runs really suck. I finished this one run one morning when I ran around Camelback Mountain once. Then I thought, “That was really good,” and then I ran from Camelback out to Talking Stick and back to Camelback. If anyone has ever been to Phoenix, you know. Then I thought, “When I do the actual marathon, I have another eight miles left.” It sucks. I did it. But you get a lot of time to think.

I had to learn to embrace criticism. This is one that I learned from Tim Ferriss. Tim and I have been really good friends for a long time. Tim wrote the book, “The 4-Hour Workweek.” We’re really close personal friends outside of the business world.

I did a TED talk years ago called “Raising Kids as Entrepreneurs.” It’s on the main TED.com website. And if you watch it, you’ll see that if you love entrepreneurship, you’ll think my TED talk is amazing. Right? Raising kids to be entrepreneurs. Awesome. To be self-starters, not rely on government, etc. But if you’re on the left or you’re a teacher or work for a charity, you’ll think I’m the antichrist.

So, he said, “Don’t take the criticism so seriously, but listen to it and learn from it.” He also said, “Don’t take all the praise so seriously.”

He said, “Anybody who has so much time to say, ‘Oh, you’re so wonderful,’ is just as crazy as the ones who say, ‘Oh, you’re a jerk.’ But listen to both and see what you can grow from.”

So I had to learn that it’s just constructive criticism, it’s not a negative.

The negatives I had to worry about were the ones that came out of my mouth. When I stood on stage in front of an entire company and chastised them for something. Or I rode hard because we were missing on something. I would completely destroy the energy and the culture in the company for three months because I hadn’t thought in advance about what my purpose of being there was. Our role as the CEO or COO is to be the chief energizing officer. Or it’s to store the Kool-Aid and to raise the energy in the group. Any negative public comments you make destroy culture. This whole thing about “it’s my way or the highway.” That whole like 1970s way of running a company. It never worked then. And it’s definitely not working now. You really have to think about why we’re saying what we’re saying.

I also learned that telling secrets destroys trust. When I would take into confidence someone who worked for me and tell her a secret about someone else in the company that I was thinking about, she then worried who I was talking about her to.

Talk to a peer group. Join a master mind. Get into coaching. But don’t talk to key employees about other employees. Because it destroys trust in the organization.

I want you to inspect what you expect. If you think something is happening, dig in and look. If you think your sales program is running the way you intended, listen in on sales calls. We had a guy, Jack Daly, one of the best in the world at sales. If you never had Jack come and speak, get him to come and speak. Filter for language if you have to, but he’s one of the best in the world at speaking on sales. Jack came into work with us in our call center and told Brian and me he was going to be there for five days.

We said, “We’ll meet you Monday morning at eight o’clock.”

“Great.”

So Brian and I got there, as always, five minutes early. We got there at 7:55. Jack was standing at the front door, mad.

We said, “What’s up?”

He said, “I’ve been here since 5:00.”

We said, “Dude, you said 8:00.”

He said, “I know. I’ve been here since 5:00. I have 17 pages of notes.”

“OK. On what?”

He said, “I’ve been listening in on phone calls in your call center. Your sales system sucks. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

We had never listened in on any calls in our sales center. Here was a guy who went into our call center and sat for three hours, actually two hours and 50 minutes, and took 17 pages of notes on areas we could improve. When was the last time you listened in on any of your sales calls? Or sat in on any of your sales meetings? Or watched some of the pitches? Or watched accounting? Or watched finance? Or actually got out of your corner office and sat on the floor with all the employees so you were connected? Do you know that Sam Walton never had a private office? Michael Bloomberg never had a private office. Elon Musk, who I was a reference for in his first round of funding in January of ’95, has never had a private office? Elon’s brother, Kimball Musk, used to work for me.

When you get the best in the world running companies actually sitting on the floor with the rest of their employees, that’s because they can inspect what they expect. They can also mentor while they work. They can actually be doing their jobs and other people can watch them and listen and learn. They can hear them making calls. If something’s so confidential, you walk into your old office, which has now been turned into a small meeting room, and make your quick private phone call.

I had to learn to stop doing and start leading. Yes, it needs to be done, but not by me. My job is to grow people. The more than I can grow people, the more they can grow the business. I flipped the org chart upside down at 1-800-Got Junk so the CEO is at the bottom supporting the VPs, supporting the managers, supporting the employees and the customers. And everyone can see the vivid vision for where we were building the organization.

Technology should not drive you crazy. If you have IT groups that are telling you to build something, challenge them that for 12 months they’re not allowed to build anything, they’re not allowed to code anything, they have to plug in free solutions to replace expenses. Technology should be simple. If it’s overcomplicating things, you want to strip it out of the organization.

I have a really close friend who is the CEO of Infusionsoft. Everyone calls Infusionsoft, “Confusionsoft,” for a good reason. Most of them shouldn’t be using it in the first place. It’s way too big of an operational tool for small companies.

I had to learn to not micromanage. One of my employees said, “Don’t major in the minors.”

I used to care so much about the small little details like when someone’s email signature was wrong and think, “Our branding is off because of the email signature.”

A franchisee said, “We have 200 franchisees and none of them has a marketing plan or a marketing calendar or a marketing budget, and you’re worried about an email signature.”

Don’t major in the minors.

Make decisions and roll them out. People want to follow a leader. Make a decision. Roll it out. Get some advice quickly. But roll out decisions. Again, momentum creates momentum. A whole bunch of really good decisions, that will create more momentum. Perfect doesn’t exist. The longer you wait, the more you’re slowing down your company.

Start looking around at what’s missing. Look for the gaps in the system. Look for the gaps in your process. Look at the time in between stages of a process.

Someone might say, “It takes four months to land a client.” No, it takes about an hour and a half to land a client, but of the six steps in your process, you’ve got two days between step one and two, a week between step two and three, four days between step three and four. If you do it properly, you can land every client in six hours if you needed to. Try to shrink the time in between the steps of the process and watch what happens to your business’s growth.

This age group, at least, has heard of this TV show, but some people have never heard of “60 Minutes.” I’m now starting to date myself. 60 Minutes-proof your entire company. If “60 Minutes” came to investigate the facts, your claims, your marketing, your bios, would it check out? Is it real? Because if it’s not real, change it. because everyone in your company knows that you’re full of it. I urge you to 60 Minutes-proof it. And if it’s not good enough, then make it better. Raise the bar. Really raise the bar in terms of who you’re bringing into your organization as well. Every time you hire another employee, I want you to think about raising the average of the group. If you’ve got six people in marketing, the next person should raise the average up a little bit. Raise the bar. Think of yourself like a sports team.

And cut the “happy talk” on your website. If you look at Apple’s website or Dell’s website, Dell is filled with a whole bunch of stuff. Apple chooses every specific word carefully. There are so few words in their marketing because they agonize over what should be there. You could probably go to your website and cut 50 percent of your wording tomorrow and no one would notice it’s gone. And, they would have more time to read the stuff you really want them to read.

Think about your emails. If you write long, long, long emails, no one’s reading them. They don’t have time to read them. Instead, write maybe five sentences, maximum, in your emails. Cut the happy talk and please stop cc-ing and blind cc-ing everybody in the organization. In the old days, you had to actually pass a carbon copy and put it into people’s pigeon holes, so you only copied four people because it didn’t create more work for you. If you’re cc-ing more than four or five people, ask why. Because you’re creating more work and more problems and more miscommunication inside the organization.

I want you to think about outcome over process. I’m a huge process person. I’m a huge systems person. Because of scaling multiple franchise companies, I’ve often cared about systems and growth. But I will stop worrying about a system and I’ll pick up a diamond in the rough if I see it. If I know I’ve got the right potential employee, my gut just knows, I’ll hire that person and I will short-circuit the entire interviewing process. Or if I know I can get a certain client in, forget about all the rules and regulations because nobody’s going to see you anyway. Get the right clients in the door.

If your gut says, “Join a Master Mind,” or, “Get involved in a course,” do it. If your gut says, “Hire a coach,” do it. Or, “Buy this book,” do it. But don’t worry about the process all the time.

At the same time, put processes in place that are simple to follow so that your company can scale and be replicable.

This movie, “The Secret.” Who’s seen the movie? Kind of cheesy, kind of materialistic. I urge you to go watch it again. We showed this to every single franchisee at 1-800 Got Junk, twice. We showed this to all of our internal employees, twice. We had people from “The Secret” come in and talk to us about the laws of quantum mechanics and quantum physics, and how to take energy and transfer that inside of your organization. The laws of physics actually apply. And, if you forget about all the cheesy, materialistic stuff that they talk, if you can take those simple systems and bring them into your business, that stuff transfers.

I want you to make sure the roles are clear inside of your company. We learned this the hard way, years ago, when nobody in the company really knew what anybody’s job was, even at the senior team level, because we were all involved in everything, all the time. That’s where the conflicts started. That’s where people were overstepping boundaries. That’s where miscommunication started. So, a proper org chart, flip it upside down with the CEO at the bottom, your team at the top, but clarify roles, goals, responsibilities and any KPI’s or metrics for each of the people in the organization.

Then communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate. If you have something you want to get across to your team, communicate to the point that they’re making fun of you. When your team is teasing you about something, they finally get it. Your job is to communicate it over and over and over again until it’s clear.

I’m going to leave you with something called “rule number six.” Rule number six is something I learned about 30 years ago when Reagan was meeting with Gorbachev. They were in the Soviet Union. They were both listening on the translation devices and having their all-day summit meetings trying to figure out how to change the world for the better. Throughout the day, somebody kept running in and screaming and yelling. And Gorbachev laughed and said he remembered rule number six. The guy smiled, calmed down and walked out of the room.

At the end of the meeting, Reagan turned to Gorbachev and said, “You know, three times today you mentioned something called rule number six. What’s rule number six?”

Gorbachev said, ‘Rule number six is don’t take yourself so f-ing seriously.”

And Reagan said, “OK. But what are the first five rules?”

Gorbachev said, “There aren’t any.”

What I want all of us to remember is none of this actually matters. This is just what we do to make money. Not a single one of us is getting out of this alive. We are all just walking each other home. If we can have fun and live a little and smile a little and maybe hug instead of shaking hands, and maybe open up and be truthful and honest and have a good time with all this stuff, then we can make money but enjoy the process as well.

This last slide I’m going to finish with, before I get off the stage, is something that MDRT and the Top of the Table asked me to do. This is not me pitching from the stage. First, if you will, grab your cellphones and text as one word “vividvision.” No spaces.” Text “vividvision” to the number 44222, I can send you all the emails related to this content, any information on any of my systems, stuff on the podcast, any of the handouts I would normally be sharing. It will ask you for your email address and your name and then we’ll send all that out to you. It’s not to put you into a marketing list.

They asked me to provide you with this. It’s something called the Fast Track. It’s only available to 50 people. This has never been offered outside of this room to any group, anywhere ever. Nothing even close to it. For $1,200 you will get a copy of “Double Double.” You will get a copy of “Meetings Suck.” You will get free online access to my four-course speaking videos that you and your team can all watch. Those are normally for $1,297. Then you also get to participate in a quarterly group coaching call with the other 50 members from this group where I will be actually coaching you. 90-minute calls. My normal coaching time is $2,200 an hour. My coaching clients pay me $6,500 per month for three hours total per month and they sign up for a whole year. So, for $1,200 you’re getting a whole lot of value for that. I don’t even know how you’re supposed to sign up for this. I don’t know if they’re sending you something. You’re supposed to give me a business card. But they told me to give this to you, so give me a business card and write $1,200 on it and I’ll make sure that they somehow get you your order form. And outside of that if you want to write a book, let me know about that as well. Thanks for having me up.

Cameron Herold is known around the world as “The Business Growth Guru.” He is the mastermind behind hundreds of companies’ exponential growth, helping to guide organizations to double their profit in three years or less. Herold speaks not from theory, but from experience, providing tactical and tangible lessons for all audiences. He was even called “the best speaker I’ve ever heard”, by Rich Karlgaaard, publisher of Forbes magazine. Herold was an entrepreneur from youth. At 21, he had 14 employees; by 35, he had helped build his first two $100-million companies. By 42, he had engineered 1-800-GOT-JUNK?’s spectacular growth from $2 million to $106 million in revenue, boasting 3,100 employees. His companies landed more than 5,200 media placements during that time. He is also the founder of the COO Alliance, a business with one simple goal in mind: to provide chief operating officers with the same professional development and growth opportunities CEOs have enjoyed for many years. He is also the author of the global bestselling business book, “Double Double,” now in its seventh printing and in multiple translations around the world.