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Attention is power and creators harness it better than anyone else.
But they’re not using that attention to create the biggest impact possible and are vastly under monetized.
Host’s Rachel Rodgers and Nathan Barry believe you can be a Billion Dollar Creator.
Sounds impossible?
Over the last 10 years they’ve followed each other on their quests to build billion dollar companies. They’ve studied creators and seen how entrepreneurs build traditional audiences and use them as a launching pad for a massive business.
And it got them thinking – if it can happen for them, it can happen for us. And if it can happen for us, then why not you?
Billion Dollar Creator is a show teaching creators how to capture attention and turn it into real wealth. They'll deep dive into brands, celebrities, and entrepreneurs who have done it before and show you how you can apply it to your business as an everyday creator.
Join them weekly as they learn from both the wild successes and the missed opportunities, the grand gestures and the integral mistakes, and through that help you become an expert at building your audience on your journey as a Billion Dollar Creator.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:15:11
Unknown
You watch these creators trying so hard, kind of like Fly is trying to get out a window, but there's an easier path that they would just do this, They could grow. I always wanted to share the cheat sheet system playbook to make each of our companies successful. In this episode, I talked to Cameron Herold, who is just a phenomenal leader and executive.
00:00:15:11 - 00:00:32:08
Unknown
I knew that the money that I could actually make was my name being attached to the brand as we scale. If I could do speaking events, starting to talk about it on social media, that's what built my brand. No one to this day could name, sadly, the other four people of the leadership team. The number one metric that every company creator included has.
00:00:32:10 - 00:00:52:09
Unknown
It's not views, it's not lights, it's not impressions. It's none of the you think it is. Your number one metric is you need to understand all this stuff. And if you don't, you're dead. You're the first person and your audience is now the first group who ever knows the full story. If you enjoyed the show, then definitely leave a comment on the YouTube episode.
00:00:52:10 - 00:01:18:00
Unknown
Make sure to subscribe. I appreciate you. We'll talk soon. Cameron, welcome to the show. Hey, Nathan, Good to see you. You and I were just riffing before a hit record about, like this intersection of personal brand and building substantial businesses. Just to set the stage, maybe let's go back and just just start with, at a high level, your approach to personal brand and how you've applied that at, you know, a handful of different companies that you've scaled to your massive levels.
00:01:18:02 - 00:01:40:04
Unknown
Yeah. So I got fortunate with the rise of social media, so I got very well known for building the fourth company that I built was called the one 800 Got Junk. I did three companies prior and then I was the chief operating officer for one 800. Got junk from 2000 until 2007 right as I was leaving the organization, I had the first the Facebook account in the company.
00:01:40:04 - 00:02:06:15
Unknown
Everyone was laughing at me. People thought I was crazy. It's for college students. What are you doing? Well, no one knew what I didn't even know what it was. But I was very intrigued. I was hearing a buzz from the college crowd, and then I got on to Twitter very early. I was one of the first 200,000 people in the world on LinkedIn and right at the intersection of me leaving one 800 got junk and starting off as a coach, basically coaching CEOs, you know, And then I've written six books and I've been paid to speak now in 28 countries.
00:02:06:17 - 00:02:28:01
Unknown
But it was the rise of Facebook, the rise of Twitter, the rise of LinkedIn, where I started to share my information and I was a bit of a self-promotion machine. But really I learned that, gosh, in 1986 so that I'm going to be 38 years ago, Jesus, like I was I was I was 20 years old. I'm really dating myself.
00:02:28:01 - 00:02:50:01
Unknown
I was 20 years old. And I landed the first newspaper article with a photo of me. And I realized how easy it was to get press coverage and also how powerful the press coverage was versus marketing and advertising. And I realized that I could use that newspaper article and show all of these homeowners that I had credibility as a house painter, and they hired me to paint their homes.
00:02:50:06 - 00:03:07:11
Unknown
And that started the rise of my first real company. I had 12 employees when I was 20 years old, and I started landing a lot of press. And then for every company that I built, I landed press. Now I'll go back to the wanting to junk again around this. When we were building that company, there were five members of the leadership team.
00:03:07:13 - 00:03:26:16
Unknown
Of the five members of the leadership team, I cared about one thing more than the other. Four I wanted to be known for building the brand. I knew from the day I joined Brian. Brian was my best man at my wedding. Three months before I started with him. We had he watched me grow to other companies prior to me starting work with him, but I knew that it was never going to be about the money.
00:03:26:18 - 00:03:56:05
Unknown
I knew that the money that I could actually make was my name being attached to the brand, so that as we scale, if I could do speaking events for the company, if I could be a thought leader for the company, if I could be an external voice for the company, much like Harley Finkelstein is for Shopify as their CFO, if I could be an author and talk about what I'd done for the company, if I could speak to the press about wanting to got junk, my brand equity would be worth way more than any money that I would be making in the actual organization.
00:03:56:05 - 00:04:14:16
Unknown
So I was paid 300 grand a year to be CEO, 1718 years ago. But my real leverage came off of the fact that I could attach my name to that and then leaving the company starting to talk about it on social media, that really was really powerful for me. And that's what built my brand. No one to this day.
00:04:14:18 - 00:04:37:12
Unknown
I mean, no one could name, sadly, the other four people of the leadership team. They were all very critical in getting us there, but they never really cared about having their name attached to the brand. So to this day, nobody knows they even existed yet. So talk about them more. What are the different habits that you'd go through, right, with these four other people that like?
00:04:37:14 - 00:05:02:04
Unknown
Often I find that it's a relatively small difference between someone who's building the audience and like teaching about what they learned and sharing the story. Like two people are both doing the work and then one goes, call it 25% further and teaches and shares it. For me, it was. And that's that's actually exactly what it was. I've been notoriously horrible at selling from the stage.
00:05:02:04 - 00:05:25:14
Unknown
I've left millions of dollars on all those stages that I've been paid to speak on because I was really bad at selling my course or selling the other services that I had. But I was very good at delivering content and helping the people in the audience. So I always wanted to share. And I think for me, I started coaching CEOs back in 1989 and way before business coaching was even the thing I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs by 1993.
00:05:25:16 - 00:05:46:00
Unknown
And I've always seen entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies kind of like Fly is trying to get out a window, probably like you're doing with creators. You watch these creators trying so hard and banging their head on the window, but there's an easier path. If they would just do this, they could. They could grow. So I always wanted to share the cheat sheets or the systems or the playbooks or what we were doing to make each of our companies successful.
00:05:46:01 - 00:05:59:00
Unknown
And because I did that and talked to the media about it or I talked to on stages about it, and then I started talking on social media about it, people kept turning to me as a thought leader and an expert, like, I'm not an expert, I'm just telling you what I'm doing. Nobody else is really talking about what they're doing, right.
00:05:59:00 - 00:06:21:02
Unknown
I think if I'd known about the creator community now, if I'd known about it back in 2007, my brand would have been 100 X bigger than it is today because I would have actually paid some people to be behind the scenes helping me. So I'll give you an interesting nugget that not almost anybody knows. Lewis Howes, who I've known since 2007, the year that I left when he got drunk, he did not build his brand.
00:06:21:04 - 00:06:43:09
Unknown
There was a guy behind the scenes, almost like The Wizard of Oz, behind the curtain, whose name was Shawn Malarkey, and Shawn ran the entire business of the Lewis Howes LinkedIn program for about six or seven years from 2007 to 2013. During that time, that's what really got Lewis to be really well known. And then he was able to continue to grow off of his brand being there.
00:06:43:15 - 00:07:01:16
Unknown
But it was someone else. He didn't have the skills to build his brand. Someone did it for him. I really missed that opportunity. I think I understood the value of being on social media, the value of sharing that. But I didn't pay someone to help me build my brand properly, helped me gather all the email addresses and monetize them, help me grow my list properly.
00:07:01:18 - 00:07:15:03
Unknown
I didn't know how to leverage that and I thought I was, but I was more of like the street kid hustler, and I think my ego got in the way. I think the fact that I was smart in so many areas of business, I didn't realize that I was dumb in some others, and I should deliver some of that help, right?
00:07:15:04 - 00:07:43:12
Unknown
I should have leveraged it. Well, that's interesting because in our companies write in, you run a bunch of companies and especially scaling like one 800 guy Junker As I'm scaling ConvertKit, I think about these things in terms of, okay, who am I going to put in place to accomplish these goals? And then for whatever reason on my personal brand and I'm going to do it right, I would, you know, in the business, I would never be like, cool, I'm going to be the head of engineering and the head of product and you know, I'm going to run marketing at the same time.
00:07:43:17 - 00:08:06:02
Unknown
Like that would be crazy. But in the personal brand, it sounds like, you know, you and I both fell into the same trap of like, yeah, but that I have to do all of what I am seeing today. So you and I both know Dan Martell. I think you've known Dan probably three mastermind talks. I first met Dan in 2000 and gosh, 2012 at the first my first mastermind talks is where Dan and I met.
00:08:06:02 - 00:08:29:07
Unknown
He was running clarity and Dan was running his businesses and hired people to run SAS Academy for him, not for Locky, but over two years ago he started hiring people to run his brand to help build his profile. He's now spending about $1,000,000 a year. He's giving me the real numbers behind the scenes on the filming, the video, the uploads, the captioning, all the graphics and yeah, Dan like talks on video.
00:08:29:09 - 00:08:48:15
Unknown
But don't kid yourself. He's not the one sitting down. Like putting the captions up, uploading it, putting in the tags, making sure it goes out at the right times. He's literally using something where he's doing the video, it's uploading via Dropbox and then Zapier is like pushing it out to the team who's making it all happen. He's hired the machine behind him so he can be the thought leader.
00:08:48:20 - 00:09:06:23
Unknown
But yeah, I don't know why I haven't done that stuff yet and that's what I'm starting to work on now. Finally. Yeah, I mean, that's the exact place that I'm in as well. Where it's very similar to how you found that your personal brand grew one 800 got junk. I realized that, like ConvertKit has its own marketing machine.
00:09:06:23 - 00:09:40:16
Unknown
There's a whole team working on growing that. But I can go on podcasts, I can create all this content curriculum and everything else that reaches a whole other audience. But I'm like trying to do that. Me and one one person and the exact conversation that I'm going to mastermind with some friends on Thursday this week and the thing the topic that I'm bringing to the mastermind is, okay, what how do I need to staff and build this org for my personal brand rather than you in addition to, you know, the 75 people I have at ConvertKit?
00:09:40:18 - 00:10:04:10
Unknown
Well, by the way, if you ever want to reach out to me, I'm happy to give you some help. I'll do a shameless plug. This is my second in command, but this is my first of six books. Double, double. I keep them right beside me because when I do interviews like this, I can actually refer to them. One of the things that I'm working on right now is actually getting my business brand outside of the business mastermind community and into a few other mastermind communities for exactly what you said.
00:10:04:10 - 00:10:30:07
Unknown
I can get my my name and my brand kind of out into another person's community. So this year, like, I've gone to all the mastermind groups, right? Mastermind talks, Genius Network, Strategic Coach, Baby Bathwater, War Room Entrepreneurs, Organization, YPO Visage. I've been like for for probably 15 years business masterminds all over the place, investing, paying, etc. The only time I've ever gotten outside of the business world for Masterminds was the TED Conference.
00:10:30:07 - 00:10:48:02
Unknown
I went to the main five day TED conference 11 years in a row. This year my wife and I made a pivot. I hate that word. We shifted and we're starting to go to these large mastermind events that will have lots of entrepreneurs there. But they're really around biohacking. They're around health. So we're going to the health optimization summit in the UK.
00:10:48:04 - 00:11:11:12
Unknown
We're going to Dave Osprey's Biohacking Conference in Dallas. We're going to Intelligent Change, which is me, me and Alex Icons event in Ibiza. We're going to on to Linda in Montenegro. We're pushing ourselves out to these other events. And then I'm actually getting lined up as a speaker at these things because my brand was strong enough and I'm able to talk about something that works for kind of a subset of the people in those communities.
00:11:11:18 - 00:11:34:21
Unknown
But it's a whole different community than kind of the incestuous business mastermind. One reason to be real, where we were bumping into the same people all the time, that reminds me of something that I did where I really early in my career, I merged two worlds. One was the like direct response marketing and all of that, where you had great copywriting, long form sales pages, all the.
00:11:34:23 - 00:11:56:14
Unknown
But then I also grew up in like the startup ecosystem that, you know, building apps for the iPad the day it was released where great design mattered. And I just combined those two things in like in one great design in the startup ecosystem. Like yet of course it's table stakes and great copywriting was table stakes in the direct response world.
00:11:56:16 - 00:12:15:12
Unknown
But you could show up, you know, bring something from one world into another and all of a sudden it's novel and people are like, Wow, your longform sales pages are beautifully designed. Like, This is phenomenal. I've never seen anything like it. And you're like, I just pulled things in two different worlds and it sounds like you're taking things where it's become common in the business community.
00:12:15:12 - 00:12:33:20
Unknown
People are like, Yeah, I've read that book. I loved it. That was super helpful. But I know all of that. But you're showing up in this other world and it's really, really novel. Yeah, well, I'm trying to bring my kind of expertise and IP into these other communities. But here's something interesting. What you just said, though, Nathan, is that you're taking two things that you take for granted, right?
00:12:33:23 - 00:12:51:21
Unknown
The design? Well, of course, that's kind of table stakes. It's like playing jazz in a coffee shop. Like you have a coffee shop, you have to play jazz, like duh. And then, you know, longform sales pages and copywriting. The way that I actually met Jason Gainer from Mastermind Talks was through YONNET Silver. Onyx was one of my very first coaching clients back in 2008.
00:12:51:23 - 00:13:11:02
Unknown
Yannick was like an expert on these copyrighting and the sales letters and all this stuff. I still never learned that and never actually learned the value of outsourcing that. Until a year ago, I finally hired a really good copywriter. I thought I was fucking MacGyver ing shit and putting it up on my website and again trying to say I was being pennywise pound foolish basically.
00:13:11:04 - 00:13:29:05
Unknown
And I really wish that I had either listened to the people like you that I would have met at the events and realized that I could have tapped into some of their expertise or that I could have started to merge some of these skill sets from other industries into to mine too. In 2000, I kind of roll the camera back 23 years.
00:13:29:07 - 00:13:48:22
Unknown
We used to talk about that somebody had a kind of like an Internet business and then someone had a business and then somebody had a business and they were leveraging Internet marketing. Well, now it's all one like every business, right? Every business has a part of them are on the Internet. Every business uses digital marketing. Every business is using all this.
00:13:49:00 - 00:14:10:05
Unknown
Like you need to understand all this stuff. And if you don't, you're dead. But it's amazing to me that even people like me that are a thought leader are still missing on some of these opportunities. I think about some of the you said you're talking about the difference between the you and the other people on the executive team and like the perception of expertise.
00:14:10:09 - 00:14:33:00
Unknown
I have a line that I've said for a long time of people don't teach because they're experts. They're perceived as experts because they teach. Like there's actually a fairly small difference between really, really good like, you know, your your peers on the executive team are just as talented as you are. You are way more, way, more, way. Roman.
00:14:33:00 - 00:14:56:03
Unknown
Roman, the head of I.t. Was way smarter than I was. Hendy, our head of finance. Way smarter than I was. Shirley Quinn, who ran our call center, was fucking unbelievable. Laurie Baggio like in running franchise sales. And Wayne, like, these are really, really smart, talented people. I'm not that smart. If I showed you my resume or my sorry, my CV, my my report card from university, my grades are horrifying.
00:14:56:05 - 00:15:14:14
Unknown
It was C minus D-plus, C, C, minus BS. I got one A and it was with a friends too. Like, it was terrible. Yeah. I'm not the smart guy in the room, and I. And I've never actually even felt like the smart guy in the room. I feel like an imposter at every single speaking event that I do.
00:15:14:16 - 00:15:30:02
Unknown
I feel like I did not call every time I went to MMT. When Jason would ask me to talk, I was happy because I'm actually quite introverted. The only way for me to meet people at MMT was because I was speaking and other people would come up and talk to me. But I didn't know how to connect. I didn't know how to meet people.
00:15:30:02 - 00:15:58:19
Unknown
So I was often perceived as having like an ego. Not at all, man. I was this the the insecure. In fact, Jason knows this. And while it's the reason I haven't been back at MMT is I overused alcohol. I misused alcohol to the extent that I was struggling with going through a very painful divorce. I was struggling with massive insecurity and I was drinking a lot to overcome that stuff.
00:15:58:19 - 00:16:24:21
Unknown
And I wasn't behaving very well at MMT, and Jason asked me not to return. So you're the first person and your audience is now the first group who ever knows the full story. I've hinted around it. Jason clearly knows the story. Yeah, Jason and I are still very good friends to this day, but that's why I'm not back at MMT is because I didn't have the confidence of being the smart person in the room and I had to use alcohol or speaking as a way to meet people.
00:16:24:23 - 00:16:44:07
Unknown
I'm not sure why I'm telling that story right now, but it felt yeah, it felt very authentic to tell. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for sharing that. I think that there's something I'm not I'm not the smart person in the room wanting to teach. I'm I got perceived as being the smart one because I was sharing because you're sharing And there's that that small pivot.
00:16:44:09 - 00:17:13:20
Unknown
You referenced Harley Finklestein from, from Shopify. Yeah. And just thinking about I met them when they had 40 employees. I was, I was one of my former a former coaching client of mine from Ottawa, Adrian Solomon, about Adrian. I wrote a book called Free PR, but I coached him ten years before we wrote the book. He was really good friends with Harley and was offered the VP of Marketing that year for Shopify, and I went and did a speaking event at the Shopify head office for the Shopify employees.
00:17:13:20 - 00:17:38:04
Unknown
There were 40 and about 15 local auto entrepreneurs. So that's yeah. And so Harley was the, I think the first or the second guest on my Second in Command podcast. And he's a brilliant, brilliant leader, fantastic debater. If you think about the shift that you made that Harley made, anyone else that comes to mind who's done that of being, you know, really public and out there with their work as an executive at a company.
00:17:38:06 - 00:17:56:00
Unknown
And what what type of you know, what would you give his tips or ideas you share with someone else who's like, Hey, I'm a VP of product or I'm a chief revenue officer? You know, this is great. Okay, so there is someone out there who every single person listening or watching knows their name. And I'm going to give you the full back story.
00:17:56:00 - 00:18:27:03
Unknown
So his name is Guy Kawasaki. Guy Kaminsky worked for Apple back in, I think it was 1986 to 1989. And in that period of time at a meeting one day, Steve Jobs told all of the employees, all of you are technical evangelists for Apple. All of you are technical evangelists for Apple. And then he kept talking. Guy Kawasaki went out and got business cards made up that day that said Guy Kawasaki product developer or whatever, and technical evangelist for Apple.
00:18:27:05 - 00:18:56:20
Unknown
And he fucking started handing them out to people. He literally built his brand pre-internet because the internet really didn't start off until like 98, 99, right? Guy Kawasaki's entire brand got elevated because people started talking him as the technical evangelist. He started speaking on behalf of the company as a technical evangelist because his CEO, Steve, said, You're all technical evangelists, everybody at 100 got junk or at all the brands I built, whether it be Gerber Auto Collision or Boy Auto body in Canada or Uber dot com or college pro painters.
00:18:57:01 - 00:19:12:15
Unknown
We all had a chance to speak to the media, to speak on stages, to share our stories. Most people didn't and I wasn't doing it again to be the smart person. I was doing it because it was a way for me to meet people and as a way for me to help people. And it was cheaper than spending money on marketing and advertising for me.
00:19:12:17 - 00:19:31:14
Unknown
I also, by the way, I also think this is going to be I love your thought on this. I'm sharing like a lot of Instagram reels and a lot of Facebook stories and a lot of YouTube videos, but 99% of them are me riffing on an idea as I'm walking back from getting coffee. Is that a good idea about it?
00:19:31:14 - 00:19:52:02
Unknown
Yeah. Like, should I just riff on a topic and post it? Or should I be more thoughtful or scripted or strategic, do you think? I think it depends on on two different aspects of it. One is riffing on content and sharing it. You often don't know what's going to hit, and so it's absolutely worth doing that. So I would keep doing that.
00:19:52:04 - 00:20:12:13
Unknown
But then also in trying to put out that amount of content, we can like, often the quality isn't as good. So something that a lot of creators are doing, you know, if you look at Dan Martell or Cody Sanchez, other people like that who have dialed in the teams, the production, everything, often what they're doing is rerecording things.
00:20:12:15 - 00:20:31:03
Unknown
That was a good idea with the wrong hook. So, for example, let's say you and I are talking this podcast and then you say something that's brilliant and your team or my team is trying to cut it up and it like just doesn't quite fit in. 60 seconds. Yeah, it was phrased wrong. It took a little too long to get to the point or whatever.
00:20:31:05 - 00:20:51:02
Unknown
What happens is behind the scenes afterwards, the team who cut that off would be like, okay, that was good, but not great. And they might run it, but then they'll added to the list of things. They're like, Okay, next time we sit down with Cameron, this is what we're going to rerecord and we'll give you, you know, like your producer would sit down opposite you and it looks like a podcast.
00:20:51:06 - 00:21:10:17
Unknown
You know, we're in the studio, all of that. It's not. It's the producer of the video guy being like, All right, Cameron, tell me the Guy Kawasaki story again. Let's run it. Yeah. And I want this hook that makes sense. That's interesting. And so it ends up being you have to either on the podcast or the, you know, the walk and talk idea.
00:21:10:17 - 00:21:26:13
Unknown
But you have to produce the ideas and get it out there and get those reps in. But then they find somebody who's looking for those nuggets to then expand on and hook them. Yep. And that's the thing that you can rerecord it. That's cool. And I didn't realize that. I'll show you something. I'll tell you something that I am doing right now.
00:21:26:13 - 00:21:49:17
Unknown
That's kind of cool. Yeah, I have a DJI pocket three camera being set up that I'm actually running a recording separate from what you and I are working on. So this is separate from the one that I'm recording you. I've got my iPhone camera set up on my laptop to record for you, and then I have the secondary camera set up for my teams that I have B-roll or additional kind of footage that they can then use.
00:21:49:19 - 00:22:12:02
Unknown
That's not something that well, again, I don't know if it's good or bad or whatever, but it's just it's a way that I can leverage. I try to have in a very entrepreneurial way. Right. Without spending. You know, I don't have like Gary Vaynerchuk having his guy off in the corner with videos and cameras. Like, I don't have that team sitting here doing stuff, but I figure if I'm going to do something, I may as well get additional leverage.
00:22:12:02 - 00:22:30:02
Unknown
So when you're episodes go live. My team will share it on Facebook, they'll share it on LinkedIn, they'll shared on Twitter, they'll shared on Instagram. We'll take it like slice it up, we'll email it to our list, and I'll do that multiple times a year with the one episode. For me, it's never about I learned this with the media even when we were on Oprah for wanting to record junk.
00:22:30:04 - 00:22:47:13
Unknown
It's not about that one press hit that you get. It's not about that one episode that you're on, it's what you do with it. And I think that we're missing a lot of opportunities there as well that I think we've kind of feel like we have to keep shooting videos where most of our audience never saw that one video that we shot last year.
00:22:47:13 - 00:23:07:01
Unknown
We can share that video three more times this year and they're not going to remember they saw it or other parts of the audience will see it that I think we can actually reuse a lot more of our content more frequently than we do reuse is a huge thing because if you think about it, let's say that, you know, the Instagram account was 10,000 followers at this stage.
00:23:07:01 - 00:23:27:16
Unknown
Two years later, it's 100,000 followers. Well, guess what? There's 90,000 people that I love pretty much guaranteed did not go back and be like, what was the earlier stuff? And you might look at the production quality of your earlier stuff, like, that was before I had the studio or that. And so then just go back and rerecord them in the new studio.
00:23:27:20 - 00:23:59:22
Unknown
Yeah, I like that idea to go find the ones that actually hit and rerecord them or the ones that were closed and rerecord them. There's some really big gold in there for sure. Yeah. So there's a whole thing on how do we build the, the audience as a, as a founder, Is there anyone else that you follow or you know who's done a really good job, like along the lines of a guy Kawasaki or what you did or Harley, Someone who you're like, that grew the business substantially because they took the personal brand approach.
00:24:00:00 - 00:24:17:06
Unknown
It's interesting. There's a there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have done it. The reason I started my my podcast called the Second in Command Podcast is I want the rest of the story. I was speaking with Guy RAZ at the main TED conference about seven years ago, and he was interviewing all these CEOs who were really, you know, really good at sharing their story.
00:24:17:06 - 00:24:35:17
Unknown
You know, Kendra Scott from her jewelry business. I've known Kendra since she was 2 million in revenue. She's now $1,000,000,000 company. I've heard Kendra's story so often. I wanted the rest of the story. But yeah, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs who have done it. I haven't seen a lot of executives inside of companies doing it, and I think they're the ones that are missing massive opportunities.
00:24:35:19 - 00:24:55:04
Unknown
They have a voice, they have ideas to share. It's almost like if I was to ask your mum and dad, how did you raise Nathan, Your mom would have a very true story. Your dad would have a very true story. They'd be very different stories, but they're both very worth hearing. And I think we have a lot more of potential creators that are not the entrepreneurial side of their company.
00:24:55:09 - 00:25:11:20
Unknown
I think there's a lot of people out there that are doing amazing things in business that should be sharing that or that are just doing amazing things in life and should be sharing it right. You don't have to be like my wife right now has a YouTube channel and she shares videos of all of our travels. We sold everything three years ago and we travel it.
00:25:11:21 - 00:25:29:21
Unknown
We've been traveling around the world for three years. Every single country we go to, she produces another video and sharing it not to monetize it, not to pay bills, merely to actually inspire people to live better lives and have more fun and to cross off their bucket list items. But I think there's a lot more people that can do that inside of their, you know, their normal day to day.
00:25:29:21 - 00:25:56:15
Unknown
And sometimes something catches something. People will will either catch a spark of inspiration or it'll help them grow in their career, or they might actually stumble into the fact that maybe they're more of an entrepreneur than they thought they were, too. But to answer your question, no, I can't think of any specific names. Well, Sam Parr from my first million, Sam and Sean Perry have done an incredible job in building a brand around, you know, around the hustle and then around their podcast around each of the businesses and their leveraging.
00:25:56:17 - 00:26:20:22
Unknown
It's incredible to watch. I talked to Sam the other day about this, that they're actually leveraging their podcast, my first Million, to really leverage all of these other businesses because their non-compete is coming up with HubSpot. And I can pretty clearly see that they're going to detach themselves from the brand, they're going to run something else off because they're really using their podcast as a way to market their other businesses.
00:26:21:00 - 00:26:40:00
Unknown
I think there's something pretty solid there too. I'm even doing it with my Second in Command podcast. I've been approached lots of times to run advertisements on my podcast. I'm like, No, I'm going to advertise my invest in your leader's course and I'm going to, you know, I'll advertise my SEO alliance, I'm going to use my own audience of 100,000 listeners to market my things.
00:26:40:01 - 00:27:04:08
Unknown
But yeah, that's a rambling answer, I guess. Well, the the focusing on the other executives is really interesting. It made me think of Charlie, frankly, who was the previous outfit's previous guest on my podcast because she she's the creative director at ConvertKit and she has a 250,000 subscriber YouTube channel and she has her own, you know, massive following.
00:27:04:08 - 00:27:26:17
Unknown
And it's so, so valuable. Totally. But if you can get away, which is good, it's really good for the company. We missed that opportunity back at 100 got junk. I'll tell you an interesting story here there were three women who worked with us, Katie Unsworth, Andrea Baxter and Sandra. Shoot, She's going to kill me. I can't remember all three of them, which were my direct reports.
00:27:26:18 - 00:27:49:16
Unknown
And they went off and wrote a book with two other girls that we're friends with called The Smart Cookies, and it was a woman's Guide to Investing, and they got their book. So well known while they worked for us that they got on Oprah for themselves. This was after our company won the tender, got junket already, been on Oprah, Katie and Sandra and Andrea and the two other girls were on Oprah with their book, talking to Oprah, sitting on the stage.
00:27:49:18 - 00:28:10:23
Unknown
And Brian, the CEO, got pissed off at them and he got frustrated with them because he felt like they were leveraging off of his brand or spending time in a side hustle. And I was like, fucking go girls, like, do more better. If we could have supported them and encouraged them and helped them more, they would have done really well and it would have helped the brand.
00:28:10:23 - 00:28:29:19
Unknown
But instead Brian kind of severed ties. I'm actually still really close friends with all of them in fact, I saw Katie about three days ago. She now runs a 100 person PR company, like a really solid, legit, amazing business here in Vancouver called Talk Shop Media. But I think if we had helped our employees go off and do stuff, Christopher Bennett owns his own agency right now.
00:28:30:01 - 00:28:52:11
Unknown
So many of our former employees started more or less. McAfee owns their own business. I think if we had helped our employees have a voice and do more with social media or do more with creating brands, our brand would have grown because it would have been more than just a Cameron Herald spokesperson or Bryan spokesperson. We were had 15 or 20, and then I think we would have had, you know, those people doing better in their careers to us.
00:28:52:11 - 00:29:20:17
Unknown
I think a lot of companies could help people find their voice and share their voice for both sides to help the employee. And then also, it's like you said, it's helping ConvertKit, right? Yep. Yeah, exactly. And we're trying to do that a lot more intentionally inside the company and realizing I'm thinking of examples of companies that have done it really well, but they didn't end well and the two that come to mind are fast, which was like the one click check out company.
00:29:20:19 - 00:29:42:16
Unknown
I felt like all of their executives did a really good job, particularly on Twitter, of building audiences, sharing things, especially on these platforms where engagement matters. And so if you build like your own pod of internal creators, at the same time, it feeds off of each other. Yeah, I think Fast didn't succeed as a company, but that strategy worked really well.
00:29:42:18 - 00:30:06:22
Unknown
And then the other one was Piper, where they were like lending on Monday recurring revenue and I think they're still doing fine. But the executives left. But I feel like their executive team did a good job, you know, building that out. Yeah, I'm trying to think of of some examples. And the ones that I kind of came back to were were MLMs and Cult.
00:30:07:00 - 00:30:32:14
Unknown
Yeah. But very real clients and a good business model. That's my point. So I actually really love cults and culture and something that's culty. In fact I was a guest on a podcast called The Little Bit Culty with Sarah Edmondson and Nippy. I'm actually really close friends with Sarah, and they used to live here in Vancouver and I approached her when, when the show The Vow came out and talking about next to them the sex cult and found out there were 17,000 people in this.
00:30:32:14 - 00:30:47:11
Unknown
And I was like, I want you to come and recruit for the SEAL Alliance, like you're an amazing recruiter. But I was talking about when does company culture go too far, right? And at college propane tours, my mentor Greg Clark, said that amazing company has to be a little bit more than a business and a little bit less than a religion.
00:30:47:11 - 00:31:15:11
Unknown
It has to get into that zone of a cult. And I think companies that have done very, very well in getting their employees to be thought leaders and promoters and spokespeople are cults. And our MLMs Scientology. Right. As an example, they've got Tom Cruise and they've got John Travolta. Right. You've got these these amazing and and I don't necessarily like those businesses.
00:31:15:12 - 00:31:41:21
Unknown
I don't run an MLM, but I think there's something there that they actually recognized if they can get their employees passionate and sharing and have a stake in the outcome. You know, affiliates are another big one where affiliates actually are out there promoting and marketing. So it's interesting. I want to spend more time on company culture, but maybe before we go, they're thinking about what we're talking about, the businesses that then take this thought leader approach.
00:31:41:23 - 00:32:00:06
Unknown
What about going to the thought leaders who then Bill, you know, are the creators of people with a big audience who then build substantial businesses off of that? Is there one that comes to mind where you're like, you see the audience? And then there was a really great flip from that into, you know, like a ten or $100 million business.
00:32:00:08 - 00:32:18:08
Unknown
Yeah, there's a couple. So Dave Asprey I guess Dave is, is kind of in that route. So Dave is another former client of mine. I coached Dave for a year, helped him hire his former CEO, about seven years ago. Dave Asprey was really the the godfather of the grandfather kind of he I think he might have even coined the term biohacking.
00:32:18:08 - 00:32:39:15
Unknown
I think that was actually the term. So Dave Asprey kind of created this whole biohacking movement and then from that created a brand called Bulletproof Coffee. It was just like this geeky thing that he did and created a brand around that a lot of people think Dave's brand is because of Bulletproof. Not so his his brand or he kind of was the creator or the thought leader that created a brand around that.
00:32:39:17 - 00:33:10:19
Unknown
But then someone who's in that space who's done extraordinarily well and I'm I'm actually I'm pretty fucking impressed, actually is a woman named Aggie and I don't know Aggies last name, but she is this Polish girl who has built she just came out with a book called BioShock Like a Woman. And every time I see her on social media and her her fiance, a Jacob I think is his name, she's kind of blowing me away with her courses and her thought leadership and her leveraging of a book.
00:33:10:19 - 00:33:29:08
Unknown
And now she's doing products and all she was was this pretty girl on Instagram kind of attached to this guy who was doing Instagram. But she's done a good job with turning that into a legit business and a brand and a voice, and she's kind of blow me away is one conscience, as you mentioned for sure, has done a great job.
00:33:29:10 - 00:33:57:05
Unknown
Christian LeBlanc lost LeBlanc. I think he's done a great job with being a thought leader and a voice around social media and around travel and now creating some pretty cool real estate ventures, I guess you call it in Bali. I'm impressed with what he's doing. Yeah, there's I think it's fascinating when people make that shift, but a lot of our listeners are people who are at that, you know, say 500,000 in revenue.
00:33:57:05 - 00:34:19:21
Unknown
As a creator or a couple million in revenue and are looking to make that shift and they're looking for examples. But then if we talk more about the team side, like what kind of advice would you give or stories, you know, of people really from the audience side now saying, okay, I need to build a team and make those first core hires, You know, a CEO, a chief of staff.
00:34:20:02 - 00:34:40:22
Unknown
Yeah. Along those lines. So first off is you're very, very lucky because you're doing it at a time when hiring people is cheaper than it's ever been before. And I'll explain what I mean by that, because you might think I'm nuts because of inflation. It's cheaper because you can either hire people that are overseas in Eastern Europe, in Colombia, in Latin America, in the Philippines, in India.
00:34:41:04 - 00:35:09:19
Unknown
I have a researcher in Karachi, Pakistan. So you can hire people who are very, very skilled that in North America might cost you 150 grand a year, but based in Latvia or based in Lithuania or based in Colombia, you're paying $24,000 a year for the same person at the same level of candidate. Second thing is because of the Internet, because of wi fi, because of a video, you don't need to have full time employees coming to a company.
00:35:09:21 - 00:35:24:18
Unknown
When I was building companies originally, you had to hire them. They had to come Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. There was no other way to do work, right. I remember walking into my company in 1989 with a computer and my VP going, Why do you the computer, Scott, Scott, when you can borrow it, you guys can share a computer.
00:35:25:00 - 00:35:50:08
Unknown
And he was serious like we only need to get one, three, three or four days. So now because of technology like it, it seems kind of silly to say this, but you can hire fractional people to work for you out a day, a week or 6 hours a week so you can start to build out your team with fractional experts who are remote, who are global, who can actually work on a project by project or task by task basis.
00:35:50:10 - 00:36:11:20
Unknown
You don't need to hire full time people. So if you're a creator, you don't need a full time copywriter. You might need a copywriter for 6 hours a month. So find that great expert. The key is to plug yourself into communities where your network is getting stronger. So now you're one degree away from people is my friends Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, who wrote the book, Who Not How You Don't Have to Know How to do Everything.
00:36:11:20 - 00:36:31:23
Unknown
You have to know the Who's that you can reach out to that can help you figure out how to do things. Second thing is leverage everything except genius. So get all the stuff off your plate that you suck at or that you are drained of energy from. Dan Martell, who we've talked about, wrote the book Buy Back Your Time.
00:36:32:01 - 00:36:52:19
Unknown
And it's a concept that I learned probably 20 years ago where you figure out your effective hourly rate. So let's say that you're a creator and you're making $500,000 a year, and off of that $500,000 a year, maybe you're making $300,000 a year in profit. So if you're making $300,000 a year in profit, that's $150 an hour times 40 hours a week, times 50 weeks a year.
00:36:52:21 - 00:37:10:14
Unknown
So if you make $150 an hour and you're working on anything that's a minimum wage job, I would fire you if you worked for me, right. If I was paying you $150 an hour, why are you doing a $20 an hour task? So start delegating all those tasks off your plate, but don't go hire a full time person for it.
00:37:10:16 - 00:37:29:00
Unknown
If you only need somebody to do, check your email once a day. Hire somebody for 30 minutes a day to check your email or an hour a day to check your email and then be good with it and think that's a big opportunity for creators is you don't need to have these full time people. My wife has a part time person doing video production.
00:37:29:00 - 00:37:49:02
Unknown
I think he's in Eastern Europe somewhere and she's a part time woman doing content production and content management on all the social platforms. She's based in South Africa. She's a full time person in South Africa for $20,000 a year. That's incredible. So I think creators have got a big opportunity to to kind of leverage that. Yeah, I think that's fantastic.
00:37:49:04 - 00:38:11:00
Unknown
What what are some of those first hires you're talking about? Let's see. Great, great question. So the other thing is don't give out big titles to people. The chief of staff title is a title that came out of government. The chief of staff used to be the person who reported to the president of the United States, and they manage that person's calendar and communications.
00:38:11:02 - 00:38:30:01
Unknown
If you're a 20 company, you don't need a chief of staff, you need an executive assistant and an operations manager. That's what you need. So don't give out big titles to people too early. Don't give out a CEO title to a person who's merely a vice president of operations or a director of operations or an ops manager, because they're going to have an inflated sense of value.
00:38:30:06 - 00:38:48:08
Unknown
They're going to have an inflated sense of worth. They're going to be on, indeed, Glassdoor checking to see what other CEOs get paid. They're going to be working on being this big executive instead of rolling your sleeves up and getting dirty. So give out titles that match the person's pay and their roles and responsibilities and the amount of strategic insight and responsibility they have.
00:38:48:10 - 00:39:14:13
Unknown
That's one part. Second part is to dive into the second. Also to match the company size like the number of times a an eight person company with zero, right. It's not a founder, right. I'm like, what are you doing? There's one thing that I felt like I that I made a lot of mistakes in the early days of ConvertKit, but I got that one correct hit where my early leader, her hires were a world, all directors.
00:39:14:15 - 00:39:31:22
Unknown
And then that allowed me, you know, at times it allowed me to hire above someone and they were an amazing director, but I really needed a VP of product and it allowed me to promote director to senior director, to VP, you know, allowed them to chase down her title to right. They had to earn the next title versus giving it away.
00:39:32:00 - 00:39:49:06
Unknown
Entrepreneurs got sloppy in the last 15 years, giving away titles, thinking they didn't matter, and we were giving away titles as a marketing tool. We were thinking, well, because they have an email address, because they're on social media. If I call them a chief marketing officer, it's going to help them get noticed more. Yeah, but it also costs more.
00:39:49:07 - 00:40:07:11
Unknown
So there's a bit of an ROI kind of calculation we need to take into consideration there too. Yeah. Okay. Do you do you remember you asked about like who are some of the first people you need to hire? If I was an early stage creator, the first people I want to be hiring as like the freelancers are the jack of all trades, master of none.
00:40:07:11 - 00:40:29:21
Unknown
So somebody to help me manage projects, somebody help me manage freelancers, somebody who can help me get stuff done that would be number one. Secondly, as a virtual assistant, somebody who I can delegate all of the admin, all the minimum wage work. My my executive assistant who's been with me for eight years, is now heading up operations and sales as well as the whole admin area.
00:40:29:23 - 00:40:52:06
Unknown
But in the eight years she's been with me, a year ago, I made her hire a virtual assistant to offload a bunch of the real admin off her plate so she could work on higher impact things. For me, we have a full time virtual assistant 40 hours a week based in the Philippines for 1800 dollars a month so that's $20,000 a year and she's a full time employee.
00:40:52:08 - 00:41:09:17
Unknown
So that's a nominal salary in the Philippines. That's right. We're overpaying by about 20% to handcuff this person. We don't want her ever to quit. We are giving her swag. We're giving our company logo and stuff. We're making her feel part of the team. But yeah, we're going to overpay in the Philippines to keep them. But if I was a creator, I would be getting all the admin off my plate.
00:41:09:23 - 00:41:27:06
Unknown
That frees me up to think. That frees me up to create, that frees me up to network, that frees me up to be strategic, that frees me up to market my brand. And I would be spending all of my time and energy around growing revenue. There's not a single problem that exists inside of your creator company that writing a check can't solve.
00:41:27:08 - 00:41:43:10
Unknown
So if you focus on the back end and the systems and the processes that just creates overhead for you, it creates expenses, it creates stress. But if you focus on revenue, if you focus on money coming in and focus on more gross margin, you can use all that money to pay for people to do all that other stuff for you.
00:41:43:12 - 00:42:03:05
Unknown
So I would get all the admin off first and then I would drive everything towards creating more revenue and then I would create the better back end third. Yeah, I like it. And I think that Jack of all trades person is really important because otherwise you end up spending so much of your time coordinating between the designer and the video editor and the and, and whoever else.
00:42:03:09 - 00:42:33:16
Unknown
And so having someone to run that is the other part is to make sure that everybody that you hire can actually manage projects and manage time and manage conflict and manage communication on their. I was asked by Fortune magazine in 2003, How do you hold your employees accountable? I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. And I think we have to remember that if you're hiring someone to manage other people's projects, you should be hiring freelancers who can manage their own projects, can deliver on time, can deliver the result you want.
00:42:33:18 - 00:42:54:03
Unknown
So it's all about kind of stepping back and getting better at interviewing, better at recruiting, better at selecting, better at onboarding people so that you don't need babysitters to manage people, right? So yeah, the project manager I'm thinking of is less about managing other people and more hiring them, finding them, managing traffic, coordinating it all so that I don't have to do that.
00:42:54:05 - 00:43:13:00
Unknown
But we're getting the right people who can deliver on those things. We don't have to babysit them. There's something that I've told people of, like, Look, if I have to check in on your goals or all of that, like, you don't have a place here. Like you do not belong in this company. If you need someone else to check and say, Hey, did you do the thing that you said you were going to do?
00:43:13:02 - 00:43:27:08
Unknown
Let me add to that. That's perfect, by the way. Yeah. You're one foot out the door. Both feet are out the door. Don't let it hit your ass on the way out. The second part of that is don't come to me and say, Hey, I did a great job this year. Can I get a bonus now? You did a great job this year.
00:43:27:10 - 00:43:43:19
Unknown
You get to keep your job. I hired you to do a great job. I paid you well to do a great job. The only way you get a bonus is if I'm giving you more responsibility. Probably a title increase. If you're able to work more autonomously, you're bringing in more kind of strategy into the business. You've got more responsibility.
00:43:43:21 - 00:43:58:18
Unknown
I might pay you more, but I'm not going to pay you more to do a good job. I hired you to do a good job and we need to get more companies kind of thinking along that route because it's kind of like when my kids come to me and they go, I, I clean the house. Can I get an allowance?
00:43:58:19 - 00:44:15:21
Unknown
No. You're part of the family. You clean the house because you live in the house like you took out garbage because you helped create the garbage. I don't give you an allowance to do the stuff that is part of being in this family. And I think we need to think of our companies a little bit more that way to culture something that you and I both spend a lot of time thinking about.
00:44:15:22 - 00:44:41:01
Unknown
What are some of your favorite things that you've implemented that impact, like the team culture? Yeah, and I've coached companies in four countries that have gone on to rank as number one in their company to work for. I've gotten I can give you a list of dozens of clients, a bunch that you actually know that are home tears that I coached that went on to rank very, very high culture is not about the free massages and the free lunch and those those are perks, right?
00:44:41:01 - 00:45:07:07
Unknown
So forget about all the perks. Culture is in alignment with four things. If you think of a jigsaw puzzle, the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle, the first is your vivid vision. It's an alignment with a four or five page vision of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future so that all of your employees, all of your customers all of your suppliers, all of your stakeholders are completely aligned with where the CEO wants to take the company.
00:45:07:09 - 00:45:26:11
Unknown
So that's number one. That culture is that massive alignment. There. Secondly, is in its alignment with core values. And the core values are things that you're going to hire people based on. They already live them and you're going to fire people who are breaking the core values much like you talked about, right? So you can't have a good company culture if you have these toxic negative energy.
00:45:26:11 - 00:45:46:12
Unknown
People that are showing up breaking core values every day. So you have to live an obsessed about and thank people and praise and celebrate core values. Number three is in it's alignment with your bag. That big, hairy, audacious goal culture is like that massive like push it's where the space X employees want to colonize Mars. That's a that's a B hag.
00:45:46:12 - 00:46:04:23
Unknown
Or back in 1972, Nike wanted to crush Adidas. That's a B hag. My B hag is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. So it's an obsession with with that long 20 or 30 year push. Apple's B hag is to create insanely great products that challenge the status quo and change the human race. That's a B hag.
00:46:05:00 - 00:46:22:01
Unknown
And then fourth is it's an obsession with a core purpose where every employee knows why we're showing up and what we're building towards and they can say no to those things. It's kind of like the three guys who are making bricks 100 years ago in Barcelona. They're all sitting in the dirt making bricks, said to the first guy, What are you doing yours?
00:46:22:01 - 00:46:40:07
Unknown
I'm making bricks. No alignment with anything. Ask the second guy, What are you doing? Because I'm building a wall. I get to make, you know, bricks to build this wall. Okay, He's got some alignment with something. We're not super inspired. They ask the third guy, What are you doing? He said, We're building the the Sagrada Familia. It's going to be one of the most incredible cathedrals in the world to worship God.
00:46:40:09 - 00:47:04:00
Unknown
And I get to make bricks to build the left wall of the Sagrada Familia. Like who do you think is completely, massively aligned with core purpose? It's the guy who sees the vision and is aligned with that. I got lucky of being exposed to core purpose because Simon Sinek, who wrote the book start with why Simon was on our Board of Advisors five years before he wrote that book, and we flew out to Vancouver and yeah, Simon used to sit on my couch in Vancouver.
00:47:04:01 - 00:47:20:12
Unknown
He was on our board. We hired him. He did some branding and marketing for us. He flew out to meet Brian and I because he read about a Fortune small business where Justin Martin said that we were building this cult like environment, and Simon wanted to see if it was true. He was running a six person marketing agency, so he flew up to meet with us.
00:47:20:13 - 00:47:46:01
Unknown
Yeah, that's where I believe culture comes from. It is an obsession around those things, and then it kind of emerges from there. Yeah, I mean, that's that's phenomenal. Is there someone that more in the creator business, that world that has implemented those things in a way that you think is remarkable? Like, I think we see that at these much bigger companies, but I'm trying to see who's done it at the, you know, 5 to 25 person scale.
00:47:46:02 - 00:48:10:10
Unknown
I can't speak to that. Nathan. I don't know. I don't know the community well enough to say who's doing it. But but here's what's interesting around those four things. You don't have to be a location based business to care about those things. Vivid vision, core purpose, core values, and B hag transcend, whether it's virtual, online, global. All of my clients in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, I coached the royal family in Qatar around culture.
00:48:10:10 - 00:48:31:01
Unknown
In fact, I fired them after starting to work with them because they wouldn't care about core values enough about the people side of the business. So I stopped working with them. I was working behind the scenes, coaching the monarchy. The the idea of culture transcends every single size of business. If you think it's about showing up into a physical office, you're starting to make excuses of why culture doesn't matter, right?
00:48:31:01 - 00:48:54:02
Unknown
So I coached Bob Glazer, Rob Glazer's company, Acceleration Partners. I coached Bob from 40 employees up to 200. I got them to number two in the United States to work for on Glassdoor. And when Bob's company, Not Wall, was one of the original founding members of the CEO Alliance seven years ago, they're obsession around core values, core purpose behind vivid vision transcended the fact that not a single office was created for acceleration partners ever.
00:48:54:06 - 00:49:12:12
Unknown
They all worked remote. Bob used to work his attic. Matt was in the basement. None of the employees came into a physical space, but they recognized that culture was attached to those four things. That's where it emerges from and then, yes, if you've got a physical office, sure, you can layer into that. You can spend more time together, you can have lunches like my sister Christie.
00:49:12:12 - 00:49:29:21
Unknown
Her company in Toronto is great because they have like potluck lunches and family stuff and they play games together. But you can also do that online, right? You can you can do social events online with your teams. You can connect with people better and have meaningful discussions with them on Zoom for 5 minutes instead of just dropping straight into the meeting.
00:49:29:21 - 00:50:05:17
Unknown
So you can think about those and you can also celebrate things more than we tend to celebrate. I don't any CEO, whether they're creator or a CEO of a major organization like Sprint, who I used to coach, I don't think that any CEO spends enough time saying thank you, showing praise, showing gratitude and celebrating the core values. The one who I think has done it best of any CEO I've ever seen was a guy named Howard Béhar, who was the CEO at Starbucks for about seven years when Howard Béhar would spend 2 hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes.
00:50:05:18 - 00:50:27:16
Unknown
He was spending 5 hours of his time every single week saying thank you and showing praise and showing gratitude and celebrating core values. That's kind of the only CEO who I've ever encountered who I think truly gets the power of that in terms of culture. Are there. I love the spending time. I take notes and like I spend time, it's gotten harder as the team's gotten bigger.
00:50:27:18 - 00:50:46:07
Unknown
But hey, but but they had 14,500 locations, so here's how I got you here. You can't use this fucking excuse. Can't use that. Excuse me. I've got 75 people. Right, But let me give you the system, because it was a really. So I was being groomed. His CEO, a guy named Greg Johnson, was mentoring me for two years.
00:50:46:12 - 00:51:08:17
Unknown
So I used to go down to Starbucks head office every quarter. They would come up to my office every quarter. And then I did a one hour call every month for two years with Greg Johnson. So Greg told me how it'd be our system. Every Friday, Howard would come into his desk and there would be a spreadsheet on his desk and a stack of thank you notes pre addressed, and the spreadsheet would say, Store number 1207 Frappuccino record.
00:51:08:18 - 00:51:27:03
Unknown
Hey, store number 12. Second, congrats on the Frappuccino record. Can't wait to see you. And I wrote in the field Howard Kelly Smith Seattle seven years Kelly congrats on your seven year anniversary Can't wait to see you And I'm in Seattle next Howard and that's what he did for two he didn't know who to thank, but there was a system in place.
00:51:27:05 - 00:51:49:06
Unknown
But are we as a leader like sending out videos, sending out Slack messages? Again, I was coaching Marcello Correia, who is the CEO of Sprint and his second in command, Jamie Jones. For 18 months Jamie's salary was 2.7 million. I was working with Marcello at being more of a heart centered entrepreneur or more of a heart centered CEO of Sprint to actually say thank you to his team, to humanize things.
00:51:49:06 - 00:52:10:04
Unknown
Marcello is such a hardcore driver. Driver, driver who's on the board of Google, the board of SoftBank, but he wouldn't slow down enough to go. Thank you. You're fucking amazing. He's got this incredible smile. So we got we got Marcello starting to send video messages to his employees and his leaders all over Sprint globally just to humanize this really hardcore driver.
00:52:10:06 - 00:52:28:02
Unknown
That's something that everybody, whether you got 75 employees or if you're a ten person creator company, if you say thank you, if you celebrate the core values, if you praise people twice as often as you give them new projects, twice as often as you show them stuff to fix, twice as often as you as you, you know, create three new goals.
00:52:28:02 - 00:52:51:18
Unknown
Like if you set three new goals, celebrate six projects you just completed, That doesn't take a lot of work. And if we can show up as the chief energizing officer, our creator businesses go to the moon. These creators, so many of them are like great people, very heart centered, lead really well, but they also can fall into a trap of like, I'm the talent in this situation.
00:52:51:20 - 00:53:19:01
Unknown
You know, you are stage rock, stage man. Have you heard that concept of front stage backstage? No. Tell me more. So if you ever go to a theater production, let's say you go, I don't know Phantom of the Opera or, you know, Hamilton's about example because there's a lot of people on stage. But if you ever go to a big theater production where there's three or four people on the stage or you go to the Taylor Swift conference, Taylor Swift is one person, but there are thousands of people behind the scenes making that thing happen.
00:53:19:01 - 00:53:42:06
Unknown
There's lighting, there's costumes, there's set design, there's makeup people selling tickets, marketing, there's grips, there's people setting up stages, there's sound people, there's lighting people, there's people selling popcorn and beer. She's front stage. Everyone else is backstage. Now, if Taylor Swift doesn't go on stage, everybody else loses their job. But if everybody else doesn't perform, Taylor Swift doesn't perform.
00:53:42:07 - 00:54:02:07
Unknown
And I think we need to remember that in our company, if we're the creator, we are merely the front stage for the rest of our team. But our back team are the ones we have to obsess about. So the number one metric I've had and I got this in Bob Glazer's company, I got this in Sprint, every company that I've coached behind the scenes, the number one metric that every company creator included, has is not the one that you're measuring today.
00:54:02:09 - 00:54:21:08
Unknown
The number one metric you have is your employee net promoter score. It's not views, it's not likes, it's not impressions, it's not shares, it's not the watch time, it's none of the shit that you think it is. It's not revenue, it's not gross margin. Your number one metric is how happy are your employees. So every 3 to 6 months you should do a survey of your six employees, 60 employees, whatever.
00:54:21:10 - 00:54:37:03
Unknown
On a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend ConvertKit as a place to work? Take the percentage of people that give you a nine or ten. Those are your promoters. Subtract the percentage of people that give you a one, three, six. As your detractors, you end up with the result of someone watching -100% positive hundred percent.
00:54:37:05 - 00:54:57:15
Unknown
Your goal is to get over positive 50 or 60, and that's considered world class where I got acceleration Partners Genuity, a lead US team was over positive 90% net promoter score on the employee side when your employees are that happy, they're going to go through brick walls for you. You don't need as many employees. Your revenue per employee increases your salaries, the percentage of revenue decreases.
00:54:57:20 - 00:55:14:22
Unknown
You literally are not losing employees. You have no turnover. Recruiting is easy and you can actually get super happy customers because your employees love you so much that they take care of the customers, which means your customer net promoter score is high, which means you can charge more and you earn more. So it's about flipping it upside down.
00:55:15:00 - 00:55:35:08
Unknown
And I think when when CEOs come in and they care about their customers so much. Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines got it right. They said, why do you say your customers number two? He said, Because if I care about my employees so much, they'll care about my customers. But if I care about my customers so much, my employees are going to feel burned out, not loved, stressed, overworked.
00:55:35:10 - 00:56:00:20
Unknown
It's a really, really interesting way to perceive and see your businesses. And yeah, the thought leader, the creator, the the front stage person has to care about the back of stage more than they care about their audience that we're speaking to. I really like that. I'm just thinking about all the examples that we see modeled on, you know, in books and TV and movies of the front stage person being the most important thing by far.
00:56:01:02 - 00:56:24:09
Unknown
And then like, you know, treating the backstage person, you know, all the backstage people really poorly feel like the Steve Jobs example, right? The Steve Jobs example. So here's here's the truth of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is very misunderstood. He was almost like autistic in a way or so, kind of hypomanic in a way. And when he would walk into a meeting and say, Why the fuck are you here?
00:56:24:09 - 00:56:48:21
Unknown
He wasn't being a dick. His computer was going, Why are you here? When you have seven other projects you should be doing? We only need to have four people in the meeting. He was so obsessed with simplicity. He was so obsessed with kind of like the core basics that I think he was misunderstood in some ways. He also, because he was aligned with core values, aligned with core purpose, aligned with be happy and aligned with like this vision of what he was creating.
00:56:48:23 - 00:57:08:09
Unknown
Everyone lined up with that. If he was a complete dick to people, they would have quit and left. They didn't quit and leave because they still bought into that cultural alignment. So yes, he could have been softer and nicer, but the fact that he was aligned with the four things that matter most is why people stayed. That makes a lot of sense.
00:57:08:11 - 00:57:38:03
Unknown
We were talking about the celebration, so I feel like I do a good job of celebrating my team, but I'm well, I want to get better at that. And so are there any other habits or systems that you've seen leaders put in place? Yeah. To really that well, I'll do them slowly. So every time that you set a goal for ConvertKit Vine to one or two goals the company just accomplished to say thank you or to celebrate or to send it a quick video to the team going hey just wanted to say thanks we got these two things accomplished.
00:57:38:03 - 00:57:56:01
Unknown
That's fucking amazing. Every time that you find something wrong, whether it's hey, there's a problem with our website or there's a problem with this thing, then the same day, find two things to say, Hey, I noticed two good things going on. So in the one minute manager still probably the best book on leadership that exists by Ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Hershey.
00:57:56:01 - 00:58:11:22
Unknown
It's all grounded in the science of what's called situational leadership. First module in mind, Best in your leader's course. It's all around praising people twice as often as you criticize. It's about praising people to success. So they used to call it the shit sandwich. You take the bad thing and you kind of sandwich it with two good things.
00:58:12:00 - 00:58:30:22
Unknown
What bad leaders do, prompt or improperly, is they try to go, Hey, you're doing a good job today, but I wanted to talk to you about what you're really screwing up on. And thanks again for doing a good job. You don't do the shit sandwich in the same 30 seconds. You do the two praises. At some point during the day and you do the one criticism that day you do the two.
00:58:31:00 - 00:58:57:07
Unknown
Thank you is during the week and you do the one kind of private criticism during the week you try to praise twice as often as you criticize. You try to celebrate twice as often as you set new goals. It's all around trying to kind of keep count that way. So I would take a Post-it note, and every time you tell somebody three things to work on, try to tell people six times what they did well, try to try to keep count twice as often is like God gave us two years in one mouth.
00:58:57:12 - 00:59:16:19
Unknown
We need to use him in that same ratio. We need to praise, celebrate and say thank you twice as often as we ask people to do stuff, show them what's broken, give them more stuff to do, load them up with stuff. It's kind of like your spouse, right? If you're married or you're in a relationship. Like I don't tell my wife once a quarter that I love her because she knows.
00:59:16:19 - 00:59:36:10
Unknown
I love to tell her that often. Of course, you know, right. This is all the stress that we go through in our normal relationship. I'm telling my wife multiple times a day and showing her multiple times a day that I love her and I care about her so that she feels it, so that she sees it, so that when we have the tough moments, we've built a base of that gratitude she can kind of live off of.
00:59:36:10 - 01:00:00:16
Unknown
And I think that's something that leaders forget and that the best leaders absolutely work on. I can see how you could put that into a system just thinking, my God, they have all these people who are the evangelists for your company. You know, if you if you tie that praise in for those behaviors and telling people, hey, you know, you're an evangelist for ConvertKit, you're an evangelist for, let's say, Ali Abdullah with his YouTube channel, right?
01:00:00:16 - 01:00:23:17
Unknown
He's building up a team of I think he's got eight or ten people full time on his team now. Right? They're all evangelists for his brand that he's created his big goal that he's creating and then he can really tie the, you know, the praise and the rewards and end of the, you know, that positive connotation back to, you know, when they exhibit those behaviors.
01:00:23:19 - 01:00:41:13
Unknown
By the way, Mr. Beast would be one who is a creator who created a business around it. And why didn't come up with that one? Probably one thing and probably one of the smartest business people of our era, by the way. Like I think we're going to be studying him in 15 years and we should have been studying him today.
01:00:41:15 - 01:01:02:00
Unknown
He's an extraordinarily smart individual, like way beyond his years. He's put in the hundreds of thousands of hours. But like when you listen to his podcasts, when you when you read what he writes about, don't forget about like watching all of his YouTube videos, like listen to him talk about business and how he's building businesses and teams. He's a very, very, very sharp individual.
01:01:02:02 - 01:01:33:09
Unknown
Do you see him doing anything on the team or culture side? That particular item that I haven't heard anything about it and haven't looked into it yet. But it's interesting to think about, I don't know, because that's something that would be fun to dive into of what is the backstage version of it Because, you know, like you look at if you watch any of the videos, the production is insane, crazy every one of these companies that he's using the audience to grow has to have you know, I can I can actually find out because I'm friends with a childhood friend of his a friend who's very, very close personal friends, like they hang out, play
01:01:33:09 - 01:01:55:06
Unknown
video games and eat pizza together and, you know, another another Gen Z creator. Yeah, but I'll I'll actually reach out to Connor and ask him what's going on. Yeah, that'll be interesting. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing all the details. I think that it will really help creators both think in terms of how to how to scale their audience, but really build the team and the culture around it.
01:01:55:06 - 01:02:19:04
Unknown
I want to ask one one thing. Everybody who is a creator, don't take a look at my work. Go check out my wife ever wonder? Travel her YouTube channel, add her like her subscribers, share to it, but also send her some ideas on how she can continue to grow that again, she's not doing to monetize, but the fact that we've got a whole audience of creators, I'd love to give a shout out to my wife Ashley with ever Wonder travel her YouTube because it's kind of cool what she's doing on Instagram too.
01:02:19:06 - 01:02:38:21
Unknown
Yeah, if you want to find me, just go go to Cameron Herald dot com and it's H.E.R old dot com. Okay. But the true call to action is ever wonder travel and look at that and as a creator say here's my best advice on how I'd go that you know not many people ask for like unsolicited feedback and it's such a great thing when they do so great.
01:02:38:21 - 01:02:53:23
Unknown
Yeah if you send her messages on Instagram or YouTube, she would love it. That'd be super cool. That sounds good. Well, Cameron, thanks for joining me. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching the episode. If you could do me a couple of favors, I appreciate it. First, the links that Cameron talked about with his wife Ski.
01:02:53:23 - 01:03:11:11
Unknown
Go check out her YouTube channel, Get some feedback. I love it when, you know, as a creative community, we can give advice and help build up another creator. The second thing is, if you enjoy the show, then definitely leave a comment on the YouTube episode. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube and your podcast player. It's been fun watching this channel grow.
01:03:11:12 - 01:03:24:21
Unknown
So yeah, thanks for watching. I appreciate you. We'll talk soon.