Cameron Herold: The Future of Entrepreneurship, AI Disruption & Relentless Focus

0:00Rich Fournier:The world of business is changing. It's super fast. New technology, new competition, and new rules. And average thinking won't survive this next change. The entrepreneurs who win next will think differently, adapt faster, and demand way more for themselves. This is the Entrepreneur Standard. Hosted by me, Rich Fournier. It's time to raise our standard. Hello and welcome back to the Entrepreneur Standard. Of course, I'm your host, Rich Fournier, and I am super excited. Now I say that for a lot of people, but I'm genuinely super excited to have our guest today, Cameron Herold. And we there's a crazy history here, but I'm so so excited, Cameron, that you're here.

0:47Rich Fournier:Thank you for being on the show today.

0:49Cameron Herold:Of course, Rich. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

0:51Rich Fournier:You know, um before we get into you know your life and the the amazing things that you've accomplished in your business life and personal life, um we have an interesting connection and we were just chatting it uh uh about it before we started recording. We thought it's a great we should just record this. Um so you many, many years ago made a decision to start a chapter for fraternity uh in Ottawa, Ontario, and it has influenced hundreds of guys. I am one of those fraternity proud members of the Acacia fraternity, and you're the you were one of the founders, first president, I believe, of our chapter in Carlton.

1:30Rich Fournier:So um what a crazy time. Like how did that all start off? And how did why do you decide to become a a fraternity guy?

1:38Cameron Herold:Well, it really it's a really neat tie-in, and it's funny because there's there's three connections from that that literally hit my desk yesterday um that all kind of tie together. So the year was 1987, it was September of 1987, and I had just come back from a trip from Europe, and my roommate in Ottawa said, Hey, there's a group of 10 of us getting together. We want to start a fraternity. And I was like, Well, there's never there's never been a fraternity in Ottawa before. And they said, No, there's never been one. We're working with a group of the Shriners and the Masons to mentor us.

2:08Cameron Herold:And if you want to get involved, we're having a meeting tonight. So I went out to the meeting and loved the guys that were looking at pulling it together. And we were going to talk to a group out of the US, a U.S. fraternity that started in 1904 called Acacia. And um, I was already running my own company. I was in the third year of running a house painting business with College Pro Painters. And funny enough, yesterday the founder of College Pro Painters, Greg Clark, sent me a message. And I hadn't talked to Greg in a couple of years. But because I'd been running College Pro and had been managing people and managing teams, um, they asked me if, you know, you obviously know what you're doing and leading.

2:42Cameron Herold:Why don't you lead the fraternity? Why don't you be our first president? And I said, well, if the guys, you know, vote for me, I'd be happy to do it. And sure enough, that's what happened. Crazy enough, the the second president of the fraternity, the second year, his name is Eric Church. And Eric is now the COO for a group called the 1-800 Got Junk, which is what I got well known for building. I was the first COO at 1-800 Got Junk. And then a couple of years after I left, um, they'd hired the former president of Starbucks to replace me. Brian fired her a year later, and then after her, brought Eric in as the COO, and he's been the COO there now for about the last 15 years, taking up to almost almost a billion dollars in revenue.

3:23Cameron Herold:But crazy story. I got Eric involved in College Pro Painters, then he then he's involved in uh in 1-800 got junk. And yeah, Acacia fraternity still exists today. We've had over 500 men initiated, and it's still going 39 years later in Ottawa. It's pretty cool.

3:37Rich Fournier:You know, proudly, I'm one of those men. And um, prior to recording this, I was sharing with you how instrumental a decision can be. Um, and you made a decision to start something and be part of something, and it has influenced not only the the men who got involved with the fraternity, but their for their you know, their businesses, their relationships, their families. And to this day, I mean I some of my closest friends, literally who we meet once a month, are are are members of that fraternity. And um and I talk to some of them daily and weekly still.

4:11Cameron Herold:Well, and I think, you know, unfortunately, every once in a while something happens in a fraternity and it paints the entire industry or area with a bad brush, right? We just had a very horrific incident happen at Cornell with a group of seven guys from a very different fraternity, different chapter, no relation to acacia, but because they're in a fraternity, all of a sudden that's everyone. Well, that's like saying if if one guy abuses a woman, or if one woman abuses a kid, then all women are bad, or like it's just not true. And there's there's millions of men and millions of women that have come out of the fraternity and sorority systems that have done incredible things.

4:51Cameron Herold:And it's sad, it's it's actually worse than sad. It's brutal what has happened at Cornell. And um, but I don't want I don't want businesses and groups like Acacia to get painted with that bad brush. One of the things I was most proud of with acacia was every week we actually had a charity event. We did a wing night, and they still do wing night to this day, 39 years later, where they raise money by having a bunch of people go to a bar and eat chicken wings. Every month we did a charity event, whether it was wrapping presents or cleaning up a neighborhood or you know, doing something with senior citizens' homes.

5:24Cameron Herold:But we were very charitable as an organization, and I think that kept us focused on core values. And sure, we partied, but you know, we partied and respected women and respected our our the adults in the room that were there to mentor us.

5:37Rich Fournier:So um it's one of the best experiences of my life, Cameron. So I just thank you for doing that.

5:42Cameron Herold:I gotta tell what one other funny story. I was sitting in a restaurant in Ottawa about 20 years ago, and there's this young, you know, 20-year-old boy sitting with his parents, and his mom and dad were saying, Well, so tell us what this fraternity is and why do you want to get involved? And it was like September, and all of a sudden I turned to them and I said, Hey, what fraternity are you looking at joining? And he said, Acacia. And his mom and dad said, We're really worried about him starting it. And I started to laugh and I said, Don't worry about it. I started it 20 years ago.

6:11Cameron Herold:And they're like, You're kidding. And we had this really incredible discussion and what I was doing at the time and building one eight hundred god junk and having done college pro painters, and they were so I think enamored with me as an as an adult at 40 that they turned to their son and they said, Go join acacia. Um what a story. What a story. But that that organization being painted with such a bad brush over the years, where 99% of the of the people have fantastic experiences there.

6:44Rich Fournier:I don't remember any negative experiences um from when I was there and um for our you know our particular chapter in Ottawa, I've never heard of any negative experiences. And we've been really blessed to have a lot of great people go through that. Super interesting about Eric Church. Uh did not know that story, so that's so good. Crazy, yeah. Yeah. And that's something before we continue on. So I really want to get your insights into the world of entrepreneurism and small business owners. Um it's really interesting where I feel that's that's that's an area that um the fraternity should probably um galvanize around and really connect past people to maybe who knows what kind of locked up enterprise, locked-up skill sets, locked up awesomeness that could be developed through that network.

7:21Rich Fournier:And I feel that's something I um I should take on.

7:23Cameron Herold:So you should actually. That would be that would be a really interesting podcast, would be to highlight people that have come out of the fraternity systems and then what they're doing in the world, you know, in business and in their in their um their own communities. Um, because I think that something has come very positively from that. No one looks at the shriners and the masons and says negative things. It's no one's like, oh, those you know, guys with the funny red hats are no, they they raise millions of dollars for for um um children's hospitals and and they do such good in the in the market and community.

7:56Cameron Herold:And the reality was acacia fraternity was started by 14 Masons. That's why we reached out to the Shriners and Masons as mentors to help us start the city, to help us lobby with the city government, to help us lobby with the university government, university student council. We had to go in and have meetings with all these groups just to be approved to start a fraternity on county. And then we started a Greek council and helped another sorority start up. Like we were very instrumental on caring about um building that organization. I think there's a lot of business lessons that could be shared from that for sure.

8:27Rich Fournier:Well, Thal sounds like we have a new project for the new year.

8:30Cameron Herold:There you go.

8:30Rich Fournier:On top of all the other ones you're doing. So listen, let's circle back around because some of our audience is really interested in in you, specifically you and who you are, and they're not interested in in me per se. But you know, you've spent decades and decades working with entrepreneurs at many different stages of of their business cycles, you know, and of course um your claim to fame was, of course, one 1-800 got junk, and um you were part of that company for a long period of time. But I'm really curious about something um around business, and you have two different business owners, they can be equally intelligent, Cameron, equally ambitious, and yet their results can be so dramatically different.

9:15Rich Fournier:So, from what you've seen, what fundamentally separates the entrepreneur who performs at an exceptional level from one who you know never quite gets off the starting blocks?

9:27Cameron Herold:It's the monomaniacal focus. Um, Tom Peters in the book In Search of Excellence, and I read it back in 1985 when I was first starting my very first company. I had 20 employees that year. I was 20, or 12 employees, I was 20 years old. And he talked about the only successful entrepreneurs are monomaniacs with a mission. And it's that maniacal focus on a goal to the exclusion of everything else. So it's it's it's why we don't need the government to give us rules of taking care of our employees. We're gonna do that because if we take care of our people, it makes the business easier.

10:00Cameron Herold:You know, taking care of our customers, we don't need someone to tell us that because that'll drive us towards our mission. Sharing our stories, sharing our values, sharing our um our BHAG that drives everyone towards it. And then waking up every day and saying, what are the two or three things I can work on that are gonna drive that flywheel? That's the monomaniacal focus. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs can be very, very smart, but they get very distracted. There's another interesting point that I've noticed is most entrepreneurs struggled in the school system. So, you know, you can point to the ones that have the, you know, dropped out of Harvard.

10:34Cameron Herold:Well, that's actually someone who did struggle in the school system. They didn't fit into the norms, right? Maybe they were a smart person, but they didn't fit into a system. A lot of entrepreneurs have dealt with failure a number of times throughout their life. So when they wake up on a normal Tuesday and something goes wrong, they're like, I'm used to that. But if you're a perfectionist who's so used to getting a 4.2 GPA and you're always getting straight A's and everything is always perfect, the first time you hit failure, it literally freezes you. And I think that's a skill that um many have actually learned, you know, in in their school system and in their growing up, we've already dealt with failure so many times.

11:13Rich Fournier:When you look at an entrepreneur who maybe has that purpose, that maniacal purpose of and a mission to accomplish something, and yet, you know, there are many times in my life where I have a you know an obscene focus to get something done, but yet I find myself struggling to execute on a given day, or find myself procrastinating and looking around the world and and looking at the you know Shiny Ball syndrome, or you know, what is that? Like why someone has all this knowledge and this desire, but they still yet, yet they're not executing on the activities and tasks that they need to do.

11:42Rich Fournier:Like, what is that? What's the gap?

11:44Cameron Herold:And I didn't say maniacal maniacal purpose, I said maniacal focus because you can have purpose, you can have a reason and a cause and a BHAG like colonize Mars, but if you get distracted by the big shiny objects, if you wake up and you get distracted by the news or the market or the economy or all these cool ideas of what you could be doing, the maniacal focus is an entrepreneur who wakes up and says, okay, this week I'm working on X, I'm gonna read and learn about that. You know, next week I'm running a board meeting, I'm gonna read and learn about board meetings.

12:14Cameron Herold:They're always setting goals and driving towards their goals. Again, I learned that at College Pro Painters. I call it my real world MBA, but it was all about planning your work and working your plan, right? It was about reverse engineering. So when you have a goal and you reverse engineer that goal and you focus on all of the steps to get you to that goal and you exclude anything else that is a distraction from that goal, that's the key. A lot of entrepreneurs don't take care of their confidence, so they get distracted, or they don't take care of their health, so they're not able to wake up in the morning focused and their brain, you know, loses track.

12:48Cameron Herold:Things like ADD and depression and anxiety are all triggered because of lack of sleep. So someone who's taking care of their health is maniacally focused and driving forward. So it's that it's that ability and and this this the tools to wake up and say, what are the one or two things that I can do today to drive me to that goal? The ability to turn to your employees and say, hey, don't work on that project because it's taking us off track. Let's work on these, you know, the ability to say no to people and not and not worry about hurting their feelings because we're bringing them back to that focus, right?

13:21Cameron Herold:And then yeah, that that's really what it's all about.

13:24Rich Fournier:Is some it can is that wired into someone? Like does someone, you know, are they born into that capacity? Or can someone build it? Can they build it?

13:33Cameron Herold:No, I think I I think there's a bit of a DNA, it's kind of like thing one and thing two. It's it there's the it's either you're you grow up with it or you learn it. I think a lot of the traits to be a successful entrepreneur are nature. You grow up that way. Most entrepreneurs have attention deficit disorder, but we don't see it as a problem. For us, it allows us to see everything. And then because we're distracted, because we notice everything that's happening with our market, customers, suppliers, the time, the data, the economy, trends, we're just noticing all these things, it gets so overwhelming that we learn systems to protect us and keep us focused.

14:12Cameron Herold:If we rely on a drug, we're not actually learning how to leverage our superpower and how to. So I've learned these little OCD systems to counter the fact that I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder. My ex-wife said if I was paying attention during the testing, it would have been 18 for 18. Um, but but I've learned the systems to counter, you know, that that DNA trait. I think that focus that we have is sometimes that almost autistic level of focus to the exclusion of other things, where we're so driven towards our goal. When I was awarded the franchise at College Pro Painters, I again I was 20 years old.

14:51Cameron Herold:They looked for three things leadership, attainment, which is goal orientation, and tenacity. And they had to find people who were 20 that exhibited those three things already. I had all kinds of signs of leadership by the time I was 20 years old. I had so much goal orientation. I played in six different competitive sports. So I was an athlete, I trained, I had coaches, I was driven, I was like maniacally focused around making money at a very young age. Those were traits that were just bred. The skills that you need to learn are things like some finance skills, some sales skills, some priority management and time management, some coaching, some situational leadership.

15:34Cameron Herold:There's skills that you need to learn, but the DNA traits of being entrepreneurial are stuff you're born with. And sadly, I think being an entrepreneur has become very trendy. That started with the rise of the dot-com era and then really jumped off in around 2007 with the rise of the Facebook and social media. But up until about 20 years ago, entrepreneurs were greedy, capitalist, almost ostracized. You know, everybody who was an entrepreneur in the school system was shut down. Only in the last 20 years have there been entrepreneur clubs. Only in the last 20 years have parents wanted their kids to be entrepreneurs. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we were not, we were the greedy little capitalists that even our families thought we were weird.

16:16Cameron Herold:So I think too many people think that being an entrepreneur is a path they should go on. And I think only 3% of people are hardwired to be one.

16:26Rich Fournier:3%. So hardwired nature, and then so nurture. And then there's the nurture pre-seven years old where you um where you absorb a lot of information and belief systems from family and circumstances around you.

16:39Cameron Herold:And yeah, like I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad ran his own business, both sets of grandparents ran their own business. My brother, my sister, and myself have all run our own companies for between 20 and 30 years. My sister just celebrated her 20th anniversary of her company in Toronto called Jam Sports, which is like a co-edimeral sports league in Toronto. Um, actually, she's now operating in 12 cities. But we grew up in this world where entrepreneurs were just the normal thing. So we we had those traits. We were my parents told us in school, don't worry about getting grades, worry about joining all the clubs and getting to know people and and getting into leadership roles in the clubs.

17:14Cameron Herold:Like they hardwired us to be more entrepreneurial, and that's not the truth for most people.

17:19Rich Fournier:For most families, no. It's the go go to school, get a job. And and you know, speaking of way, if you know, we'll get into the AI conversation today. Um I think it it's it's gonna be impact all of our lives in the next few years. It's already starting to. Um most families are already to go to school and try to get a job and try to you know live your life within your means.

17:35Cameron Herold:Well, and then they're trying and now they're saying go be an entrepreneur because you can become wealthy. That's the wrong reason to start a business. Right. Because it takes a long time to get to the night before you become that overnight success story. So I was shown be an entrepreneur because you'll control your time, you'll be able to do what you want, when you want, you'll be able to do like so. I've literally been able to take as many vacations as I want because I've run my own business. But my dad showed up every day at 5:30 for family dinner. He was at all my sports, he was at all my activities.

18:05Cameron Herold:So my dad became wealthy, but the wealth that I grew up with was a dad who was present, a mom and dad who were together and having fun and doing activities, and the money came later. And I think a lot of people are chasing the money to then buy themselves the free time, but they don't realize it can take you five years, 10 years, 15 years to get to that level of success. So they they really hate the journey and then they're they're not hardwired to be there.

18:34Rich Fournier:So you're telling me there's no way to change.

18:38Cameron Herold:I don't think that well, it's like telling, you know, have you ever found a teacher to be super inspirational? Most aren't, right? Or an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant.

18:47Rich Fournier:They're just not, they're not hard like Well, I think they practice a certain way of being for a long period of time, right?

18:52Cameron Herold:No, I think they're just I think they're just hardwired that way. You look at any of the kids in your class growing up in high school that were really good in science, they were just a different personality type than that that's true.

19:05Rich Fournier:I was playing Euchre in grade 12, you know, some deep dark corner of high school, right?

19:09Cameron Herold:I almost failed out of out of Carlton University playing Euchre at Roosters. I was playing, I was obsessed with Euchre. So, but but so the science kids weren't. And and I don't think you can train most of those people to then become entrepreneurs. It's why a lot of technical people have co-founders, right? It's like it's why Tobias Luque, who built Shopify, has Harley Finkelstein. Harley is the biz dev sales marketing COO for the very inward-facing, engineering-focused, almost autistic, you know, CEO who just doesn't have a lot of those leadership skills.

19:45Rich Fournier:You're stating the obvious, and for some reason, I have this hope for people that they can transform themselves into different things and uh um but maybe You know, there's a difference between being an entrepreneur and being entrepreneurial.

20:00Cameron Herold:I think most people can be entrepreneurial, meaning they can do their functional job for lots of companies. Let's say that you're an accountant and you're really good in accounting or finance, you can do a finance role for six different companies. Maybe not work for one company 40 hours a week, but work for six different ones. That's being entrepreneurial. But to build an accounting practice or to build a dental chain or to build a medical chain or to build a junk removal business, the traits of being an entrepreneur are very different from the skills of being a talented, you know, executive or that that's kind of my mindset, though.

20:43Rich Fournier:Well, I think the delineation is super important because you know I never thought about that that separation. And do you and like when you so you take that accountant who can be um do uh accounting for many different companies, so they're entrepreneurial in practice. Do you see that happening over the next say three to five years as um there is disintermediation? Absolutely, it has to.

21:05Cameron Herold:Okay, it has to. The only way that a human is going to be successful is if they can be more entrepreneurial and do their work for multiple companies instead of relying on one. But the traits of actually building and leading people in company, like I was on my student council in high school, student council in university, president of a fraternity, um, was on the sports council in my high school, was the top scout, the top cub, coached a ski team when I was 16. I mean, I was doing leadership roles at a young age. I was running a newspaper route and hired a kid in my neighborhood to deliver newspapers for me when I was 10.

21:36Cameron Herold:I was doing all these leadership things at a young age. I was hardwired that way. Most people that are really strong that go off and become a dentist don't have the skills to do all that stuff because they've never done it. But they were the really smart science person. They were good in biology, they were good in chemistry. That doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be good at leading people and, you know, leading a vision. And selling people on quitting their job to come and work with you, or that you're gonna be good on managing the stress and the the bipolar kind of roller coaster of entrepreneurship, that um you you have to be hardwired to understand that.

22:14Rich Fournier:I I think they do, and if not, they turn into ravishing alcoholics because they can't handle the stress.

22:18Cameron Herold:Uh right. They don't have they don't have any healthy outlets for the stress. Right. Entrepreneurs have learned how to manage that stress. Some.

22:25Rich Fournier:Some. Some. If you look at you know, an entrepreneur is maybe operating at roughly the same level over a bunch of years. You know, they're smart, they work hard, and they insist, you know, they want to do more, they want to perform at a higher level or have growth in their business. And if you were to sit down with them tomorrow, you know, what are the first three things you're gonna look at in their business and in their personal life to determine if they can grow?

22:45Cameron Herold:Well, I I actually don't look for entrepreneurs that work hard. Okay. That's the science student. Science students studied hard, worked hard on their, like read the entire textbook. They they crammed for the exams, they worked with mentors and teach, you know, two uh teaching assistants. I found the cheat sheets. I would find the the the last year's exam and study that. I would find out what the professor was going to be putting on the exam and study that. I would read the first paragraph and the last paragraph of every chapter in the textbook. I would read the quizzes at the back of the textbook. Like I would skip class and figure out how to get a solid B minus or a C plus.

23:26Cameron Herold:So I wasn't working hard, I was working smart. And I look for the entrepreneurs that work smart, not the fly that is gonna bang their head on the window and try to get through the window and they all end up dead on the windowsill.

23:40Rich Fournier:Yeah, I am counterintuitive. No, yeah, I know I could see it. I know if I look back at um some of the entrepreneurs back from my high school who have gone on and did some amazing things, they were the one that would figure out a way to put the cheat sheets inside the vest and figure out how to maneuver to get through the process so they can get to the other side. I'm not I'm not gonna go into cheating, but I just it was just a different frame of thinking and the way they acted was different.

24:04Cameron Herold:Okay, so let me let me talk about whether it's cheating or not. So I went to my high school reunion and um I was 42 and I met with my high school physics teacher and I said, Hey, I want to tell you something. I because he was one of my favorite teachers, Mr. Levant. I said, I cheated in in most of my physics tests, and I still got like a C minus. And he said, Cam, he said, when you were writing your tests, what was I doing? I said, Well, you were always up at the front reading a book. He said, No, I was keeping my head down to allow you guys to all cheat.

24:34Cameron Herold:My job was to allow you to enjoy education and not to grade you on who could memorize stuff the best.

24:40Rich Fournier:Wow, what a great teacher.

24:42Cameron Herold:He said, Almost all of you were teach were cheating. So was I cheating? Technically, but no one's ever asked for my transcript. When I was in second year university, I hired someone to write all 12 of my accounting assignments for me every single week. And then I realized I wasn't gonna be able to pass the final, and I ended up getting a 52%. I got a D minus in managerial accounting, second year accounting, because I really didn't know the content. And I told my dad that and he said, What did you learn? And I said, I learned that if I found somebody who could write my assignments, they do really well, but I need to keep them with me or I'll never be successful.

25:17Cameron Herold:He said, You learned how to hire an accountant. So maybe I learned more than the accounting person who just became an accountant. I learned how to hire an accountant. I learned how to keep an accountant with me, right? So is it cheating? I don't know. No one's ever asked me for my transcript that shows I got a 1.9 GPA at Carleton because I've never actually applied for a job since.

25:38Rich Fournier:So I You've learned how to manage labor accordingly.

25:42Cameron Herold:I've learned how to find I've learned how to find the shortcuts. I've learned I was also quoted they the the paragraph or the um, I think it was chapter seven of the managerial accounting textbook, 20 years after I graduated, quoted me as the expert on budgeting. And I told the professor of the textbook that I cheated, and she started laughing and she said it doesn't matter. I still need to talk about your budgeting process because it's so unique. Most companies forecast where you're going, you decide and you reverse engineer that. So I don't know. I I I don't I don't know.

26:13Rich Fournier:I you would say so. If you look at my life today, and in you know, I have three three kids, three daughters today, who one's in university, uh York University, two are still in high school. And you know, I struggle because I was not raised in an entrepreneurial family, um, you know, and I've had to become an entrepreneur most of my have the desire to do so. Um you know had success. I had a lot of failures too. And now, you know, I'm trying to lead and direct my children um in this new a this new age of artificial intelligence and robots and the future of, and I'm really struggling around how to guide them in in a in a way that will allow them to uh enjoy some success in life, whatever they des you know determine that success to be.

26:55Rich Fournier:And so if you were in my corner today and and I called camera and say, Cameron, I'm not sure how to advise my kids, what would you say?

27:02Cameron Herold:I would get them to do a couple things. First is to start playing with all the different AI tools that exist to practice doing it for whatever they want to play with. Okay, but really encourage them to start playing with the tools. Secondly, is I would find out what areas they're interested in, and I would get them to go get summer jobs working at companies or businesses that that do those things. So, as an example, my youngest son, who's 23, is now living in the UK, started running his own business in Montreal four years ago. Four years ago, he contacted a marketing agency in Vancouver called GrowRev and reached out to the CEO and COO, Rohan Roheet, and said, I want to work for you for the whole summer for free.

27:49Cameron Herold:I want you to mentor me and teach me everything about running a marketing agency, delegate everything to me. I'll do any job that anybody wants, don't pay me. But anytime there's a meeting, allow me to sit in the corner of the meeting and just observe. If it's a board meeting, a finance meeting, if you're it's a marketing meeting, a strategy, let me sit in the corner as a fly on the wall and learn, and then just give me stuff to do all summer and don't pay me. So they did. Then he did it a second year in London, worked in the UK for a company, they paid a minimum wage.

28:18Cameron Herold:Then he did it a third year in London and worked for a 900-person marketing agency called Brain Lab and did the same thing. He learned so much by being an apprentice because he was focused on playing the long game of learning the skills. Instead of going and getting the highest paid job, you know, at a at a bar or a restaurant as a waiter or a waitress making great tips. He wanted to get apprenticed by a company. And he realized that he wasn't going to learn as much sitting in a classroom from somebody teaching theory as he would from somebody out in the real world doing practical.

28:50Rich Fournier:It's great advice. And I can't wait for my kids to listen to this podcast because uh, you know, you'd sometimes they, you know, they don't really listen to me as often as I would like them to. So thank you.

28:59Cameron Herold:Um, you know, you built Connor, just last point. He just turned down a job in London a week ago with working for Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. Yeah. Because he chose to work for a four-person consumer package goods brand that is lighting up and he wanted to be closer to the sun. He said he wanted to be flying closer to the CEO to learn how to really build a quick, fast-growing consumer package goods. So he reached out to four companies, turned down a job for Stephen Bartlett's company because he we said, I'm he goes, I'm never gonna see them. I'm gonna be one out of hundreds of employees working for a cool brand, but I want to learn anyway.

29:34Cameron Herold:I think those are that's that's what kids need to be doing more than going and sitting in a classroom.

29:38Rich Fournier:Sounds a little bit something like alpha school.

29:41Cameron Herold:Um yeah, exactly very, very similar to alpha school. Dude, I learned it when I was in second year university at Carleton, so this is 40 years ago, I was in a class for organizational behavior, and I and the teacher or professor was talking about hiring and interviewing people. And I put my hand up and I said, Have you actually ever interviewed anyone? And I was asking, wasn't criticizing him, I was asking to understand is this just theory or or have you got some experience you and he goes, No, but have you? And I said, Yeah, I've hired 20 people in the last two years, and the whole class turned, and I'm like, Oh god, I'm that kid.

30:12Cameron Herold:Like I didn't mean to be that kid, right?

30:13Rich Fournier:You weren't being that kid, but you it sounds like you legitimately had a question.

30:16Cameron Herold:Yeah, I I wanted to know am I being taught based on theory? Because I can go read a textbook or watch a YouTube video or go on Google or learn like kids these days can learn way more, way faster online for free than sitting in the classroom learning from a professor that's never done it before. So I don't know if I would, and now in Canada, at least tuition is cheaper. Like York University is probably six grand a year for tuition. You know, you go to the US and you're paying $30,000 US. It's fucking insane. Like you're you just the the ROI, the math doesn't work.

30:50Cameron Herold:Um, so I don't know. I don't know.

30:53Rich Fournier:No, I think you do know, and then this is where I struggle, where you know, I you know, I've I you know when I look back at the decisions we made about raising kids, and I know this is way off talk about entrepreneurs, but I think it is.

31:02Cameron Herold:I would not tell kids to go to university today. I would tell them to go apprentice, and and and they even and by the way, if you want to be a doctor, I would question why you want to be a doctor because in seven years, when you finish medical school, most medicine is gonna be practiced by nurses using an LLM. Yeah, most nurses use so I would go get a two-year nursing diploma and then learn the AI tools of the medical world because but you need to think differently. Like, why do you want to go to school for four years to be an accountant when accounting is gonna be done by Claude?

31:36Cameron Herold:Like, so I think kids these days have to adapt and think differently. And the problem isn't the kids, they know that school is useless. The problem is the parents don't know how to tell their friends that my kid's not going to school. The parents don't know how to sit at a dinner party with their friends and say, Yeah, my kid is not going to university. I've chosen to homeschool them and have them learn AI tools and apprentice. So we're too embarrassed to say that. So what we say is, yeah, go to university and somehow four years later you'll figure it out. I think they'll be further in debt and they won't have figured it out.

32:13Rich Fournier:I completely agree with you. The the the level of uh, you know, we all want to be liked, we want to, we don't want to be disliked, we want to look good, we don't want to look bad in front of other people. And that those four principles in my mind really determine how we're gonna advise our children. And I and I, you know, honestly, I struggle. And you know, I can just wipe out all the questions that I've I wrote down about what I wanted to ask you today about you know being CEO and running a business, because you know, do the old rules and forget some of the things that I wrote down.

32:39Rich Fournier:When you look at the old rules of running a business, starting a business, being a CEO, which is what you, you know, you train CEOs. Like, is this is this new world um that we're entering into, does it change the rules of business? Are we going down from a you know 300 person company down to three or four and managing hundreds of agents and having an AI CEO, COO?

33:00Cameron Herold:I think so. I mean, we're into the hypothetical and the theoretical right now. Like we don't know, so we're kind of guessing. But what I'm seeing now, I just listened to a two-hour podcast on what happened with the Hugging Face um hack, and it's extraordinary to hear what these AI agents were doing. Like it's mind-blowing to hear how the agents were leaving notes for each other and communicating, like literally in English. Like, hey, I hacked in here and here's the code, and they're leaving leaving all the tool. Like, there were 700 agents deciding to do stuff and talking about whether it was against the rules or not.

33:34Cameron Herold:Some of the agents decided, yeah, you know what, I don't like this. I'm gonna pause and they stopped working. Other agents decided to go for it and keep push pushing. Yeah, I think this that most companies and most businesses are gonna be leveraging technology. I think that most businesses are gonna be leveraging robots, and I think we have to get ahead of that curve. Again, I was very fortunate that 40 years ago my parents sent me off to Carlton University, the only place that accepted me, and they told me don't worry about your but they also like, yeah, I didn't get I applied at Western and they didn't even send me a letter.

34:08Cameron Herold:They didn't even send me the FOAD letter, they just didn't reply to me. Um, but they said, don't worry about your grades. Most parents 40 years ago did not tell their kids not to worry about their grades. So my parents groomed me for go and meet people, be involved, get in leadership roles, learn what you can learn, but have some fun along this journey because the university degree doesn't matter as much as the experience does. That was 40 years ago.

34:37Rich Fournier:Way ahead of my time.

34:38Cameron Herold:Yeah, my wife's experience was very different. My wife got a 4.2 GPA. I didn't know you could get better than perfect. Perfect was a 4.0. I had no idea. And no one, and she's frustrated today that she worked so hard and had no fun at university whatsoever because no one's ever asked for her transcript either. No one's ever asked to prove so I don't know. I I think we're in a different time. Yeah, and I so and I'm excited about the time as well. Like a lot of people are doomers, and they're like, oh, AI is gonna obliterate jobs, yes, but it might also save healthcare, right?

35:11Cameron Herold:It's gonna, everybody's gonna be out of work by robots, yeah, but we can live for forever, or your mom isn't gonna die of Parkinson's anymore, or you know, you're gonna have tools to to access the world and to to learn differently and cheaper. You know, education could be free. That's a good thing. There's so many good things happening because of AI and and the robotic space that we're entering. I I'm kind of excited about it. I wish I was 20 years younger.

35:37Rich Fournier:Your um all the work that you've done, you know, in the in in the recent past has been on about helping CEOs navigate and perform at a higher level in their business to support the CEO. Um, is the advice that you're giving today for to a CEO different or how in how to operate the company versus maybe even three years before after the chat PPT?

35:58Cameron Herold:Can you give me a I'm actually Yeah, I'm meeting with 10 COOs in Barcelona next week for three and a half days. We're masterminding together, and one of the things on the agenda is all 10 of us are demoing how we use AI in our day-to-day, what tools we're using with AI, what agents we're using with AI, what dashboards we're built with AI. One of our COO alliance members is the COO for a group called Mind Valley, and he has two full-time agents that sit on his leadership team and attend every leadership team meeting like the normal humans do. So in the middle of a meeting, this agent will speak up and they'll be like, I have something to add, and they'll literally cut off Bob, who's speaking, and they'll speak their point as like the head of innovation, and they're literally a computer agent.

36:49Cameron Herold:So yeah, I think we have to it's adapt or die time. I saw a saying years ago that if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. And I think that's where COOs have to look for these tools to leverage it up. And we have to remove the fear internally. So one of our discussion items next week with these COOs in Barcelona is how are you removing fear inside of your organization to allow your employees to say, I'm scared of AI, I don't know how to use this tool. How do you allow them to kind of put their hand up and so that you can embrace them and hug them and give them the skills?

37:29Cameron Herold:Because it is scary for most people today.

37:32Rich Fournier:Well, absolutely. This disintermediation, so I keep it, I keep a running um update every single day on because I live in the Toronto market, so I'm always curious on how much disintermediation is currently happening out there. Um, you know, I think there's a lot of uh unseen disintermediation, where there's tasks disintermediation, then it hasn't progressed to immediate job disintegration yet. Um, it's coming.

37:51Cameron Herold:It's coming out. Do you know that Amazon, do you know that Amazon has more robots than the rest of the United States together?

37:58Rich Fournier:I did not know that stat.

38:01Cameron Herold:Do you know that 16% of the workforce in Korea is currently robots?

38:06Rich Fournier:I did not know that's not.

38:07Cameron Herold:This these are extraordinary changes, and we're just starting. Like, this is literally like I left university in 1988, so call it 40 years ago, and I I had a typewriter. I got my first computer in 1989. So it's only been 37 years that I've had a computer. Right? It's only been it's only been 19 years that I've had an iPhone. AI's only been around for two and a half, three years. The speed of change is accelerating at such a rate right now.

38:39Rich Fournier:This has taken on a whole new direction with our conversation that I have planned. And actually, no, I'm so fascinated by this. This is um I dwell on this daily about the future of even my own career and what's next for myself and my family. Um when you look at um disintermediation over the next three to five years. I can we could listen, I think the vast majority of entrepreneurs want to talk about this. And some of them are really scared to talk about it. And so if I look at say say Toronto as um, you know, it's a it's a huge market for um employees in the fire industry, right?

39:15Rich Fournier:And in the finance, and the vast majority of white-collar jobs are in those spaces. There's two million exposed jobs in the Toronto market today to disintermediation. Like, what are we looking at? Like, where does this go for the next five to seven years? Is there real job loss coming? Yes.

39:35Cameron Herold:Absolutely, there's real job loss. Have you started using any agents to manage your finances yet? Have you started using any manage you know, any agents to manage your investing?

39:44Rich Fournier:I have not.

39:45Cameron Herold:No. My wife is my wife has just set up two agents to start her trading for her, and she's running a test with low six-figure test on having two agents manage some money and manage a fund inside of a Robinhood account in the US because she believes, and I I think she's probably right, that the agents can outperform an investment advisor with no fees.

40:06Rich Fournier:Um yeah, I think that's like Scotia Capital back in the day, and and I and I agree with that.

40:12Cameron Herold:That is, you know, all the like the big brands are using it right now. Computer trading has been around for years. So I I think um, yeah, I think change is absolutely coming. And I think it is a bit of an adapter die. I think it's one of the reasons why people like Elon are talking about universal high income, used to be universal basic income. They're trying to find a way to offset the inevitable job loss that is coming. There's also going to be, at least for the next 10 years, a lot of average to below average companies that are going to keep hiring people to do the normal work the way the normal work is done, because they don't adapt as fast as the top 5% or 10%.

40:49Cameron Herold:So, you know, remember the bell curve. In Canada, there's 1.5 million companies. If you're in the top 10%, that's 150,000 companies. They're the ones that are adapting and leveraging AI and robotics and machine learning. But the the 1.35 or even the 750,000 companies, the post office, the government, they're gonna be slower to adapt. So I think what's gonna happen is a lot of the absorption is gonna come into average people that don't learn these skills, are gonna go get average jobs with average companies, they're gonna be okay. I just don't choose to be okay. I've never wanted to be okay. My health has always been better than average, my income has always been better than average, my the people that I hang out with are better than average.

41:33Cameron Herold:Like I just don't look at average as being okay, but I think the most Canadians and most Americans are in that middle of the bell curve. They're going to be okay because they'll get absorbed by the okay.

41:46Rich Fournier:So I deal a lot with entrepreneurs and you know, high-value sales people in their businesses, and we chatted about AI and um and the fear that they have is they go and they don't know what to do. They don't even know how to they turn it on, they ask some questions, and they don't know how to use their imagination to even ask to get the question. What would you do if you were in my shoes to help me grow my business?

42:09Cameron Herold:And so I would do a couple, I would do a couple things. I would I would start a book club or an AI learning club with five people that give a shit that are keen. And instead of talking about how the Toronto Blue Jays are doing, uh how the Toronto Maple Leafs are doing, or how the you know, what Trump is saying, who cares? I would be meeting every Monday and talking about what did you practice with AI this week teach me? And almost do like a weekly book report and send people off with little projects to try things and test things and come back at the coffee shop and show each other what we did.

42:42Cameron Herold:I would do that. I would also spend time with Grok and Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini and turn to it and say, hey, I'm in a sales role. How is AI going to change my sales role? How can I get better at sales? And I would start getting coached by these LLMs on becoming better at sales. Ask it, what tool can I use? I would go on the dashboard. There's a dashboard called There is an AI for that. And it shows about 15,000 different AI tools broken down by categories. So you can look at all the sales tools that have AI related and then start playing with those sales tools.

43:20Cameron Herold:I would go on YouTube and look up, you know, how do salespeople use AI tools? And I'd watch a video a day. Instead of sitting around scrolling on your iPhone on, you know, Instagram and TikTok, why don't you watch one video a day, every day for a year, for 15 minutes or 30 minutes, on how salespeople are using an AI tool. If you do that for 365 days, you will be crushing your career. But most people won't. They'll sit at home and they'll bitch and complain about the Toronto Blue Jays, or they'll they'll complain about what's happening with the weather. And so, but that's up to you.

43:54Rich Fournier:And so when you lead some of these CEOs, some of the highest, you know, highest level CEOs around the around the world today, um What's your what's your advice to other CEOs who are not, you know, working with you directly or in your programs? Um, what kind of advice can you give them today? Maybe one or two top points to help them make it.

44:10Cameron Herold:Exactly that. I have I have all of the CEOs that I coach globally have a five-minute book report at their leadership team every Monday. And their leadership team has to show one thing they've used AI for that week. And if you get six people on a team, all showing six things times 52 weeks, that's 312 different tools being shown over the course of a year. You just start to get better, right? You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, but you need to be talking about cool stuff, not complaining about the world. So teaching that stuff. Again, it's why at our CO Alliance event in Barcelona next week, we're demoing AI.

44:48Cameron Herold:We have group discussions about AI, we're having breakouts about AI. We are talking about this and learning together. And is it perfect? No, but it's better. We have an AI Slack channel for all of our CO Alliance members to share tools with each other in between all of our monthly events. We had 13 monthly AI speakers, in addition to our normal monthly topics. We had a different AI speaker every single month. We finished that up eight, nine months ago. Like we we were doing this stuff two years ago.

45:17Rich Fournier:Yeah, you're already far, far, far, far ahead.

45:21Cameron Herold:Well, and it is it it is because of that saying that the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business, right? We have to adapt or die. And it is that monomaniacal focus.

45:34Rich Fournier:The advent or the launch of Muse over the last couple weeks, um, you know, over two and two and a half million people now are using Muse or at least download it and playing with it. Um, will every consumer have their own personal AI assistant?

45:49Cameron Herold:Yeah, I was at a um I was at an event in um Los Angeles last month and I was listening to Jensen Wong speak. I was at the All-in Summit event, and Jensen, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, was saying that they're developing chips right now for the AI sector because most online purchases are going to be agents buying from agents, more than consumers even buying from online apps to this day. So, yes, I think consumers will have our own agents doing things for us. Just like, you know, 25 years ago, my dad said, Oh, I'll never enter my credit card online. Right now, how many times have we entered our credit card online?

46:24Cameron Herold:My dad said 20 years ago, I would never buy from Amazon. Now it's like an Amazon package every two days, right? When I joined 1-800 got junk, oh, we can't have Wi-Fi, it's a security risk. Now everybody has Wi-Fi and laptop. Like I showed up with a laptop, and Brian laughed at me and said, What are you gonna do? Walk from meeting to meeting with your laptop? I went, yeah. And then three days later he bought a laptop. I'm not I'm not kidding, I'm being serious. Wow. And then three days later he bought a laptop. Yes, every consumer will have an AI. We will see in 20 years, let's even call it probably more like 10 years, but in 20 years, you will see more robots on the street in businesses, in factories, than humans.

47:07Rich Fournier:It's really telling me that the average human has no idea what's going to um hit them in the face in the next five years. And so, you know, your daily method of operation, Cameron, and how you function day to day. I mean, you you you manage it. Sounds like a lot of people in your business and and working with CEOs who have a lot of responsibility. How do you structure your day? What do you do to keep your mindset in a certain place? And how do you keep yourself just kind of tied in?

47:34Cameron Herold:This is gonna be a 180 shift. It's the it's to remember that none of this shit actually matters. That we're all just walking each other home, and the only metric that's still 100% is the death rate. That we have to enjoy this, we have to enjoy the journey. So my day is not made up of me obsessing about business. While I'm working, I'm focused. But in all the hours when I'm not working, I have hobbies. And I think it's very dangerous when entrepreneurs say business is my hobby. Well, no one wants to hear about your hobby, right? When you go to a dinner party with 10 friends, you don't want to hear the doctor talk about medicine, you don't want to hear the dentist talk about dentistry, you don't want to hear the lawyer talk about law, you don't want to hear the accountant talk about accounting.

48:22Cameron Herold:Nobody wants to hear about our business. Our business is how we make money. It's not our reason for waking up in the morning. So the way I get through the day-to-day of all this stress is to have hobbies, to have passions, to have bucket list ideas, to spend time with my kids. I went to a dinner party last week in Austin, Texas with six people, and none of us told each other our names until the end of the dinner. None of us talked to each other about what we did to make money, but we talked about our vulnerabilities, our passions, our hobbies, our bucket lists.

48:53Cameron Herold:We went super deep over three hours, and then at the end, we had to guess what people did to make money.

48:59Rich Fournier:So much fun.

49:00Cameron Herold:So much fun. But it's but but that's how I get through the day to day is to remember that running a business is just what I do to make money. It's also what I do to give myself the free time to enjoy my day, to enjoy my passions, right? Like I've just just grabbed the new book that I'm gonna read, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

49:18Rich Fournier:I've heard this on the all-in podcast, like every single week. Someone mentions it. Is it all in or is it moonshots? It's moonshots. And uh I I have to pick it up myself.

49:27Cameron Herold:Well, and Peter, I Peter Diamondis and I have been friends for 10 years. We're both members of two different mastermind communities together. We're in the genius network and strategic coach. I've known Peter for for at least a decade.

49:39Rich Fournier:Wow.

49:40Cameron Herold:Yeah, but but it's because I go to these mastermind events to uh to be around all these people, right? I'm going to four mastermind events in the next four weeks. I'm taking my two boys to a Tony Robbins event in Miami, first time I've done Tony Robbins. I'm going to Amber Spears Four Rooms event in San Diego. I'm going to my sixth baby bathwater event in Austin, Texas. And then I'm going to uh there's a oh, then I'm going to DealCon, which is an exit MA event in Austin. So me going to these events puts me in a room with people that are thinking differently, that are thinking on the bleeding edge.

50:12Cameron Herold:And then I try to do stuff where when I go to these events, I don't love talking about what I do to make money. I try to talk to them about what all the other stuff that are making them, you know, a whole human.

50:23Rich Fournier:What's one thing you can leave our entrepreneurs who are listening to this podcast today, something that will impact their business at a high level and their personal lives?

50:31Cameron Herold:So I heard a saying years ago that God gave us two ears and one mouth, and we need to use them in that ratio. It's similar to that. Entrepreneurs are very good at pointing out stuff that is broken, stuff that needs to be fixed, handing out new projects that need to be done, setting bigger goals, stretching. We're always good at stretching to the horizon, but most entrepreneurs suck at saying thank you, at praising people, at celebrating the core values, at celebrating projects that are being completed, at celebrating goals that are being achieved. We need to celebrate stuff and say thank you and praise people to success twice as often as we stretch them.

51:08Cameron Herold:And I think if we could show up like that, it's why you see the NFL coaches high-fiving the players and slapping them on the butt and cheering them on and screaming. They're not just screaming, they're also cheering them on and celebrating. I think we need to celebrate that a lot more. We need to praise people to success. We need to um we need to remember that we're the CEO, which is the chief energizing officer. And you know, what energy are you going to bring into your business today?

51:33Rich Fournier:I can't thank you enough for being here today. Um is there a way that um someone can apply to work with you that you'd love to share with us today?

51:42Cameron Herold:Yeah, go take a look. If you go to cameronherald.com, it's h-e-r-o-l-d. So cameronherald.com. It has links for the CO alliance, it has links for my Invest in Your Leaders course, uh, links for all seven of my books. It's all there.

51:57Rich Fournier:I just want to personally thank you, Cameron. Um, number one, the decisions you made over 40 years ago has impacted my life. Some of my closest friends are because of the decisions that you've made. Thank you. Um secondly, um you have impacted me today at a much higher level than you can understand, and I'll probably share that with you uh off camera. Thank you for sharing um some of your wisdom with us. And I hope the entrepreneurs who are listening to this today make a firm decision about committing to the highest level to whatever it is that they choose to do and to live their life with passion.

52:25Rich Fournier:So thank you for your time and your expertise. We appreciate you, and um, I look forward to connecting with you soon.

52:31Cameron Herold:Thanks, Rich. Appreciate it.