The Scheduling Hack That Saved My Life and My Family

Kevin Rice (00:00)
Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. Our guest today is Cameron Herold

Cameron- COO Alliance (00:03)
Back in 1993, I recruited and hired Elon Musk’s brother Kimball to be a franchise

when I was 20 years old, I had

12 employees. by the time I was 28, I’d already interviewed and hired and trained and coached 120 entrepreneurs

then I joined Brian, who is my best friend.

when we got to the hundred million, 3,000 employees, 240 at the head office, I was pulling my hair out.

Kevin Rice (00:25)
Cameron was the chief operating officer of 1-800 Got Junk, helping to scale the company from $2 million to $106 million. Since then, he’s gone on to write seven best-selling books, speak on stages across the world, and coach the next generation of chief operating officers through his global network, the COO Alliance.

In this conversation, we discuss the importance of building a life outside of your career, the impact of facing your own mortality due to severe stress and burnout.

And how he healed his relationship with his son following years of disconnection.

this is a conversation about adventure and boundaries and business leadership and why kids help you actually build a better company.

Cameron- COO Alliance (01:02)
I don’t ever want my kids to describe me as a coach and an author and a speaker anymore.

I want them to describe me as

Kevin Rice (01:21)
welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. My guest today is Cameron Herold. Cameron, thank you so much for being here.

Cameron- COO Alliance (01:27)
Kevin, you’re so welcome. Really, really looking forward to doing this.

Kevin Rice (01:30)
you were one of the first executive hires at 1-800-got-junk? and you helped scale the company from two million to a hundred and six million. And I imagine life today looks very different than when you were in that hyper growth mode. how are you spending your time both personally and professionally today?

Cameron- COO Alliance (01:46)
I left 1-800-got-junk? 19 years ago now, which is crazy. I can tell you my whole 19-year journey since then. but yeah, that at the time that I was there, I was definitely, two feet in, 100 miles an hour, completely obsessed with the business. And in many ways, I learned some pretty tough lessons while being there, right? On what to do and what not to do, and getting a little bit out of balance. Since then, when I left 1-800-got-junk?, it was May of

2007, I spent four months and didn’t return a single email. I didn’t go for lunch with anybody in the business world except if we were just gonna talk about our hobbies. I did a lot of golfing and hiking and playing tennis and hanging out with my kids who were six and four at the time. And then after four months, I decided to kind of go on my next journey. But in that four months, I journaled every day for 20 minutes. And in that journaling, I made lists. I made lists of everything.

Everything I was good at and everything I sucked at. I made lists of every business that I’d ever been in, every business that I’d ever run, every project that I’d ever led, lessons like deep, deep leadership lessons. I journaled about those. I did lifelines of the highs and lows. Literally journaled for four months. And at the end, I realized I loved doing four things. I loved coaching entrepreneurs to help them make their vision come true. I loved speaking. I’ve now been paid to speak in 30 countries, been paid 800 times.

I love the networking and going to mastermind events and being around other entrepreneurs and connecting. And I love talking to the media. Outside of that, there’s stuff that I’m good at, but I don’t love to do. So yeah, 19 years ago, my first business was called the Back Pocket COO. It was before fractional COOs were even a thing. And my basic sales pitch was you can’t afford me, but you can’t afford to not have me in your back pocket.

Kevin Rice (03:34)
That’s great. I love the journaling aspect. I do a lot of journaling myself and I find it just to be the best way for me to do self-reflection. Cause as I get

Cameron- COO Alliance (03:44)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rice (03:45)
pen to paper, thoughts just come to me that I otherwise wouldn’t be conscious of. And so I found it to be such an important part of my process of going from also very much a workaholic to more of a well-rounded individual. And today, I travel, I have personal hobbies and interests.

And I know you travel a lot. You’re in London right now. how are you

enjoying life today?

Cameron- COO Alliance (04:08)
Well, it’s interesting you talk about journaling and self-reflection. I think it also allows the entrepreneur to get his mind or her mind clear so that we can relax. But if all of the ideas, because we’re so ADD and we’ve got all these ideas and we’re seeing everything and all the possibility, if all that’s swirling around in our mind, it never allows us to chill and decompress. And sometimes just journaling and writing it down and getting it out of our head frees us up. I was just telling my son, who’s running his own business, he’s 23, I said, if you’re ever upset at anybody, write them a letter.

Letter and then burn it. Don’t send it, but like handwrite the letter to get it out of your mind and really get the feelings and the frustration out and then burn it and set it free. what am I doing now? My wife and I decided five years ago, we’re one month short of five years, to sell everything and just to travel around the world and be nomads. So we sold our home in in the US, got rid of the home in Canada, sold our cars, sold our furniture, gave stuff away. We’re down to two carry-on suitcases each.

I’ve been to 80 countries, some of them seven or eight times. And we’re just traveling the world doing bucket list items. So last week I wanted to go to Georgia. That was on my bucket list. Two weeks ago when I was in the UK, I went to Wimbledon. I crossed that one off my list because I hadn’t been to Wimbledon yet. So I’ve now done the Australia and the US and Wimbledon. Next summer I’ll do the French. So it’s just bucket list after bucket list after bucket list. I just went and did a week long ayahuasca journey in Costa Rica. I bought my Rolex this week. it’s just literally bucket list.

list items is is what we’re doing and most of it is experiences. You know, most of it is like today I did the hop on, hop off bus in London with my 23 year old son. I’ve been to London 15 times. But I was like just for fun, let’s just sit on the bus and go and see the whole city again and get immersed back in it again.

Kevin Rice (05:52)
That’s great. I think a lot of people, at least just people I’ve talked to, kind of aspire to have that sort of lifestyle, maybe not being a nomad, but having a bucket list and checking items off, just creating all these big memories. But they always say, I’m gonna wait until later, once I’m established, once I’m financially secure. Do you think that that’s just the natural process of you have your working years and then you build financial freedom and you can go out and enjoy life?

Or should people

be thinking about doing these sort of things earlier?

Cameron- COO Alliance (06:23)
People should be doing it earlier and not making the excuses that I either don’t have the time or I don’t have the money. I’ll give you an example of some stuff that you can do in your own city that costs you nothing. During COVID, I downloaded the geocaching app. Geocaching is like this digital scavenger hunt. And you follow these clues and you run around the city and through parks and biking, and you find these little buried treasures, and then you leave a note and you bury the treasure again and off you go. And I was doing that by myself, I was doing that with my

kids it was just fun to go explore the city. Hiking or walking, there’s so many different routes that you can take in your city. people always take the same road. Why don’t you just do every road? I was telling my son two days ago when we’re in London, one of my goals is to get off at every subway stop in London.

imagine coming here for a few months and just getting off at Piccadilly Circus and walking around and getting off at Oxford. Like it would be so cool that doesn’t really cost you anything, right? going to the top 10 burger restaurants in your city

Learn how to play guitar, volunteer at a soup kitchen. There’s so many things that you can do that don’t cost money, that don’t also take a lot of time, or you can bring your kids with you or do it with your spouse. Say, hey, guess what, honey? Date night tonight is we’re going down to the food bank and we’re serving food to the homeless. It’ll probably be one of the best date nights you ever have.

Kevin Rice (07:45)
Yeah, and so enriching. And especially when you’re in the throes of building a company or you’re an executive and you have so much pressure, having that sort of release and decompression to just enjoy the moments of life in between all the stress is so important.

Cameron- COO Alliance (08:00)
Totally. And you need to have that release valve. I was lucky that I was modelled

being an entrepreneur by my dad and my two grandparents. Both my grandparents were very active. one of my grandfathers retired at 52 years old, and then day traded stocks for 41 years until he passed away at 96. He was not sitting at home watching TV. he’d watched the Blue Jays baseball, but he was hunting, he was fishing, he was golfing, he was active, he was reading, he was gardening, he was walking to the market every day to buy

fresh produce so I I saw that as that’s what life is. my dad, who ran his own business my whole life, was at home every single day at 5:30 for family dinner, except Wednesday.

During the summer, which is when men’s night was at the golf course. And he played golf every Wednesday afternoon and also every Saturday morning at 7:30 in the morning. He’d come home from golf at 10:30 or 11 o’clock, and we’re just watching cartoons, and he’d already played his 18 holes. So when you get modeled that, I think you realize that business is not your hobby. Business is what you do that allows you to spend time and money on your hobbies.

Kevin Rice (09:06)
Well, take us back to those kind of earlier days at 1-800- got junk. You were, an executive in your early thirties. That’s a big

role for somebody that’s still very young in your career. How were you prepared for that role at such a young age?

Cameron- COO Alliance (09:19)
Yeah, I guess what a lot of people don’t realize is that was the third company or fourth company that I built. So when I was 20 years old, you and I have a similar backstory, I was awarded a franchise of a group called College Pro Painters, which at the time was the largest and first student painting franchise in the world. we’d had 850 franchisees every summer. And when I was first there, I think we were only getting about 350 franchisees. But I was given a franchise, and then for three summers I ran that business. So when I was 20 years old, I had

12 employees. Leaving College Pro, I then went and worked for the head office for four years. So I was recruiting, interviewing, and training entrepreneurs, franchisees, for four full years. So by the time I was 28, I’d already interviewed and hired and trained and coached 120 entrepreneurs before business coaching was a thing. Back in 1993, one of my famous hires was I recruited and hired Elon Musk’s brother Kimball to be a franchise

For me in Toronto with College Pro, and then also his cousin, Peter Reeve, who went on to build Solar City. I hired them both out of Queens University in 93, trained them, coached them, led them the whole summer. So I was already really good at running entrepreneurial companies in my 20s. Then I joined a family friend and we built up what is now called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States and Boyd Autobody in Canada. It’s now the largest collision repair chain in the world. That’s a multi billion dollar revenue

business. It’s a huge, huge business, probably 600 auto-body locations around North America. But when we took that company public in ’98, I then left that business and I was hired as president of a private currency business. So again, I had lots of employees, fast growth tech company. We sold to a US public company during the dot-com era. And then I was on a senior leadership team of a 900-person internet company, which we built and then the Nasdaq crashed and the the stock market fell

Apart

and the internet boom collapsed. So then I became the garbage man. So I’d already had a very strong career for 15 years running businesses or leading companies or coaching people. And then I joined Brian, who is my best friend. we were in a mastermind together for four years. We were both in the entrepreneurs organization. And then in that period of time, he watched me growing the companies, and I watched him kind of struggling along with

what was called the rubbish boys. I went into the college pro office in Vancouver and told Paul Guy to quit. Paul became the first franchisee. Paul’s now doing $50 million a year in junk removal and he owns all of Australia, all of Manhattan and all of Toronto. So yeah, it really wasn’t hard for me for the first four or five years at 1-800 Got Junk. When we got to about 60 million and when

we had about 150-ish employees, then it was getting difficult. Operating in our third country, then all of a sudden, when we got to the hundred million, 3,000 employees, 240 at the head office, I was pulling my hair out. I was way out of my comfort zone. It was big, their politics were coming in, you had to be more strategic. We’d started hiring these very, very senior, seasoned executives to run sales and finance

and the call center and a couple were reporting to me and I did not even understand how solid they were. It was incredible.

Kevin Rice (12:36)
That’s

fun that we

have that kind of common commodality. I had such a great experience with College Works painting. I feel like it gave

Cameron- COO Alliance (12:42)
Hm.

Kevin Rice (12:42)
me all the confidence in the world to start my own company, pretty much straight out of college. I hadn’t interviewed for a job at all. I was never in a corporate setting. I didn’t work at an agency, but for whatever reason, probably a lot stemming from that experience, I had the confidence to start a company. And

Doing that sort of they called it an internship. I wouldn’t necessarily call it an internship, but that experience for me in college, I learned more about being a business professional than I ever could have at university. And I would go home for the weekends because I drove up to Northern California where I would run my local area. And like you said, I would

do canvassing, I’d knock on doors, I’d hire painters, I’d be doing the marketing, I’d be doing the sales, I’d be working with finance to be doing my accounting every two weeks. And then I’d come back and I’d have a managerial accounting class. And this stuff

Cameron- COO Alliance (13:37)
Right.

Kevin Rice (13:37)
was child’s play because I was actually doing it and living it. So like it wasn’t just theory. It was reinforcing the practices I had already been spending my time doing.

Cameron- COO Alliance (13:47)
Well that that was one of the life’s most embarrassing moments for me in university was I was in an organizational behavior class, third year university, and we were talking about interviewing and hiring people and how the interview process worked and what companies looked for and the kinds of questions they would ask. And I put my hand up and said to the professor, and I was literally asking to understand if he had experience or if it was just theory. No judgment. It was literally I I just wanted and I said, Have you ever hired anybody? And he said, No, but have you?

And I went, yeah, I’ve hired 25 employees over the last three summers. Like I that wasn’t my point. And everyone turned and I’m like, fuck. I became that guy. I became that guy. You know, there’s something about

learning that I I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, and you haven’t truly learned a skill.

Whether it’s coaching or delegation or priority management or running interviews or running meetings, like any business skill that a leader needs to be good at, I don’t think you’ve ever truly learned the skill until you’re able to teach it. Because something happens in the adult learning style that you learned the abstract concept.

And then you learn the kind of act of experimentation, the practicing and trying it out. And then you learn from doing it. And then you kind of think about it in the reflective observation. But when you start to teach it, you really have to get into that reflective observation. You really have to ensure that you’re thinking about the skill from an auditory, visual, and kinesthetic perspective. You really have to ensure that you’re managing what you’re

you know, expecting. And I think more companies need to think of that. When you’ve got employees that you say are good at something, just ask yourself, could they teach it?

Kevin Rice (15:32)
There’s there’s some built-in accountability there too, right? If if if you know that you need to learn something, but on top of that, you need to teach somebody else, you take it more seriously because it’s not just like understanding it yourself, but it’s understanding at a deeper level in which you could actually help somebody else learn it too.

Cameron- COO Alliance (15:50)
Yeah. with our COO alliance members, I run a community right now of second in commands members from 17 countries. One of the things I do with them at the end of our monthly masterminds or at any of our in-person events, I’m like, when you go back to the office on Monday, I want you to take the top three things you’ve learned from today or from this event, and I want you to teach them to your CEO.

Not waiting for everything to be delegated to

you, but you’re showing up with ideas, with enthusiasm, with potential projects that will drive some ROI. And if you teach that to the CEO, they’re gonna start to have more confidence in you and delegate more to you and it just strengthens the partnership.

Kevin Rice (16:25)
And that’s a very different skill of, teaching a team downward versus managing and educating upward.

Cameron- COO Alliance (16:31)
Yeah, yeah, completely. Especially

because often we try to teach people the way we learn. So if we’re someone that

learns from listening, like a good classical student in a university education is most often an auditory learner. But I’m a very visual learner and I’m a very kinesthetic learner. I learn from watching and I learn from doing. There’s not a lot of that in the classroom setting.

one of my best classes that I really enjoyed that I really excelled at in university was collective agreements, where we had to negotiate an agreement with a union. And I was originally put on the union team and I’m like, no, I can’t, I can’t be on a union team. So they they moved me to the management team. But the sheer act of over six weeks negotiating a collective agreement for this mock company, knowing it was worth half our grade, man, I learned more doing that than sitting I don’t remember anything about the classroom.

I barely remember being in the classroom actually, which is really weird. So I think we have to be cognizant of that with our people too, is make sure that we’re giving them, bring in an expert to teach them, have them do role practice, find some videos they can watch, give them a chapter of a book that they can read, sign them up for an online course like my invest in your leaders training. figure out a multifaceted approach to train them, and then some

Way certify them that they’re able to then go and do their job. Remember when you were doing college works and I was doing College Pro, you were certified in paint failures and paint systems. Like you were certified in knowing why the house is painting. Otherwise, we were dangerous. You were certified in sales. They had some kind of a 10-step sales process, I’m sure, and you had people watch you doing sales and coaching you in sales. So they knew to train us in stuff and then make sure that we could do

it and then they still coached us every week for the whole summer to make sure that we were successful and to give us confidence and kick us in the ass. and those are skills that most companies don’t don’t do or don’t know how to do.

Kevin Rice (18:46)
at some point along the way, while you were at one eight hundred got junk, you got married and you had your first child. What was that experience like for you and how did it kind

of change your relationship with work?

Cameron- COO Alliance (18:57)
So I actually got married before joining 1-800 Got Junk. I got married in July of that summer, and then I joined Brian in October. And Brian was actually the best man at my wedding. So he and I had a bit of an unfair advantage that we knew each other, we were really good friends, we’d been friends for four years, we’d been in this entrepreneurial mastermind for four years, and then I joined him to start working with him and helping him scale. By having a child before I did that, it did reprioritize for me.

I had really burned out the year before running the internet company in the US. I was actually written up in the Wall Street Journal as one of four supernovas, people whose careers flew up really high and then flamed out with stress.

So I I definitely learned how to become more balanced and be a better executive, even though it was a big company. It was also a change for the company because I had to start to show them that we couldn’t keep running meetings late at night and we couldn’t keep doing early morning meetings because, I had a life. Well, they were all single or they they hadn’t had kids yet. but once each of the members of our leadership team had a child, then everybody got it, right? But it was a bit of a learning curve for people to realize that.

so yeah, you have to change.

As an executive, I think having kids helped me in a big way. Plus, I really wanted them. Like

Kevin Rice (20:11)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (20:12)
I was excited to be a dad, I was excited to spend time with them.

Kevin Rice (20:17)
you mentioned having a period of burnout. how did that show up for you? Cause for me, burnout wasn’t crashing and not being able to continue. It was disconnecting from myself and my emotions so that I could continue to be hyper productive when I was totally burned out. But how did it show up for you?

Cameron- COO Alliance (20:34)
Well, it’s interesting. I was in an elevator with somebody from the internet company and he tapped me on the shoulder and he goes, You okay? And I turned around to say yes, and I collapsed on the floor of the elevator and I was crying. And I was really stressed.

And so then I just went home and had a couple drinks, smoked a couple cigarettes like I did 20 years ago, and got up the next day and kept kept charging. And then about a month later, I was at the doctor and I needed to have a physical to be able to get home insurance. I guess they don’t want to loan you money if they if you’re gonna die. So anyway, I was going in for the physical and the doctor said, What’s up? I’m like, nah, everything’s good. I said, I have this weird kind of metallic taste at the back of my

neck it’s almost like I’m chewing on tin foil or I’m very stiff and it feels like aluminum foil or tin foil or something. He goes that’s interesting and then he took out this sheet of paper and there were a whole bunch of questions and I had to fill it out and if you have 150 points you have a 50% chance of a heart attack. If you have 250 points you have a 90% chance of a heart attack. I had 435 points. I was clinically redlining.

My mom was dying. She was stage three B with cancer. We just had a child. I realized I didn’t want to be married. I knew that I was in the wrong relationship. The Nasdaq had fallen by 78%. The $64 million valuation that we had for our company when we sold it was worth $3.2 million when we could get out because of the fall of the market. I was leaving Seattle and moving back to Canada. Like, I was a disaster. In my head, I thought I was fine.

I was waking up early, grinding it, going out for Grand Marni and red wine and steak at night. I was not balanced. I was playing ultimate frisbee, but like not healthy. What I realized from that was I start to now catch myself in these manic moments.

Am I grabbing for too many espresso? Or am I drinking water throughout the day more? Am I getting exercise? am I meditating? how rushed are my words and my thoughts, or am I present? am I reacting versus responding? do I feel any tension in the back of my neck? and then doing lots of stuff around biohacking, like we just went for blood washing, we’ve had a full-body MRI scan here in London last week

we do a lot of vitamin drips and NAD drips and red light therapy and saunas, so like proactively taking care of myself so that I don’t notice the stuff. I don’t want to wait to notice the problems, I guess, is where I’m going.

Kevin Rice (22:56)
Yeah, when you’re kind of faced with your own mortality, you have to take stock of what’s important. I remember when I was running my company, there was another agency executive who passed away very young, clearly from stress. And I remember thinking, I don’t want to end up that same way. I don’t want to be 45 and passing away from a heart attack and

recognizing that life needed to change. because it was a lot of stress. It was a lot of pressure. my company went from

6 million in 2015 to 42 million and an exit in 2021. So our own version of hypergrowth. And it was

a ton of stress and a ton of pressure. Like you, I became a single parent, COVID happened. So it felt like the world was crashing down around me. And,

thankfully, we had a pretty supportive environment. it was demanding, it was definitely a hustle culture.

But at the same time, people understood if you had kids. Now you mentioned you were one of the first people at your company, if not the first, to have children. And then things

started to change when other executives had kids. what did

that look like when things started to change? And would you have any advice for somebody who’s maybe the first person in their office to have kids?

Cameron- COO Alliance (24:07)
I think it’s that you’re gonna build a better company, right? So kids for me were something that I always wanted, which means I wanted to be at their activities. I wanted to be at home with them. I wanted to walk them to school. I wanted to be with them. I wanted to know them. I wanted them to know me. And I I really didn’t

I didn’t have any delusions that career was my thing, right? And again, I’d already done it a couple times. Like I’d already had the feeling of running my own business at 20. I I wasn’t searching for that. but I guess that what what I would tell you is make those the big rocks for your calendar. make the big priorities, time with your spouse, time with yourself, time with your kids, and

Delegate more, grow your people more. at the end of the day, everybody who’s watching, everybody who’s listening, your to-do list does not have your name on it. It just says to-do list. And there’s a bunch of stuff on there that you can delegate or you can optimize, or you can automate, or you can outsource, or you or frankly, you can actually look at it and say, I’m just not doing it anymore. Like I’m just stopping. so yeah, doing that.

Kevin Rice (25:08)
I think going

into like a a parental leave period, unfortunately a lot of people don’t take enough time when they have children.

Cameron- COO Alliance (25:14)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (25:15)
But I think that becomes a really nice or it becomes a great forcing function because

Cameron- COO Alliance (25:20)
Well

Kevin Rice (25:20)
exactly what you said, it forces you to like take stock. Okay, if I’m out for two weeks or four weeks or six weeks, whatever it is, business still continues and you can look back and see, okay, what on my typical to-do list?

Could I now delegate what really didn’t need to be happening? So when you come back, like there’s a lot of things that I don’t actually need to be doing so that I can have more free time for my family and kids and personal interests.

Cameron- COO Alliance (25:45)
Well and and two taking two weeks off because you’ve had a child isn’t parental leave. That’s just enjoying two weeks of your eight weeks vacation that you should be taking as an adult. finding a way to build that in. I’m very fortunate that as a Canadian, maternity leave in Canada or paternity leave is six months and it’s usually topped up to full pay by your company. so 40% paid by the government. usually companies will top you up, but you’re allowed to take as long as 12 months.

For just on you get unemployment insurance for the last six months. So most most moms take twelve months off before they go back into their job or as an exec or often even running their own business. So yeah, I think being a parent has been given more priority in Canada, maybe.

Kevin Rice (26:28)
if you reflect back on the relationship that you had between your first or any subsequent children, do you think you showed up differently

in how you carried yourself as a father between your first and and your other kids?

Cameron- COO Alliance (26:42)
Yeah,

it’s actually one of my biggest regrets. And I’ve talked to my second son about it. And now he and I’ve got a fantastic relationship. But until the time when he was around probably six ish, I didn’t spend much time with him.

Because his older brother was just more fun to go do stuff with.

You know, a two-year-old versus a one-month old or a four-year-old versus a two-year-old. Like, you just can’t do much with a two-year-old, but a four-year-old I can go skiing down blue runs at Whistler, so I kept choosing my oldest child to do stuff with to the exclusion of spending any time with my youngest.

and huge regrets around that. When he was around ten or eleven, it was pretty bad where his mom would be dropping off at my house for the time that I would have with them and I had them two weeks a month.

And he’d be standing on the doorstep crying because he just didn’t want to come over. And so we we kind of worked through it. And I started playing some video games with him. And then I found out that he loved basketball. So we went and started playing basketball together. And a real turning point was doing stuff with them without my phone, where I would just go and be present with them,

Go skiing for the day or or take them out for dinner or go for a bike ride. But I was very present and then I went and took them on a trip when they were each 13 by themselves, and they got to pick the place to go to. So my oldest picked San Francisco, and this was 12 years ago, and San Francisco was amazing still. And so, we went for great Italian food and we went to a Giants game and we went out to Alcatraz and we walked through Chinatown and he still talks about it today, still to this day.

Talks about some of the meals that we had, and and then my youngest originally wanted to go to the North Pole, and I was like, So why? He goes, Well, I want to see polar bears, and I’m like, I don’t know if we’re gonna see polar bears, but and then the next weekend he goes, How about New York City? I’m like, that sounds great. So we went to New York City right when Pokemon Go had launched, and he made me download the Pokemon Go game. And for four days in New York City, we played Pokemon Go, like running around the city, and it was just super fun. So those things,

Things I think are what really matter. And I think that’s probably why, my son and I, he’ll be 23 next week. Why he and I are really close friends. We’ve spent all day together. We were at the gym together this morning. He’s off at his girlfriend’s right now. I’m meeting him for dinner in an hour and a half. Tomorrow we’re going to

The Book of Mormon, ’cause he hasn’t been to the theater in London yet. Then we’re going for dinner with his cousin and his girlfriend tomorrow night. my kid likes spending time with me. that’s my biggest success.

Kevin Rice (29:14)
Those are life goals, right? Having kids that are grown and still want to have you in their life when you’re no longer just responsible for getting them food and housing them.

Cameron- COO Alliance (29:26)
no kid out there that is going to want to be friends with someone who doesn’t have hobbies.

Right. if you’re an adult and your entire life is for your kids, at your kids’ activities, spending time with your kids, once you’re not doing that, if you’re just a person who goes to work all the time, that’s not fun for anybody to be around, let alone your kids. So they want to be around an adult who’s interesting and interested in things and doing some cool stuff and and has fun, Wants to go explore. and then yeah, you have to have done the work and

I think be firm but fair, but but transition over to being a mentor and their cheerleader and be their biggest fan, but you know, not give them everything. I still ride my son on doing stuff, yesterday it was come and clean the sink, because we’re in this Airbnb and there was remnants of Indian food in the sink. And then like 20 minutes later, I’m like, hey, come and clean it a second time, dude. clean it properly. And here I could easily clean the sink, but that’s not my job.

But I know that by being firm with him, it gets respect, versus if I’m just his maid, then there isn’t any respect.

Kevin Rice (30:26)
Yeah. And your role evolves, right? As as your kids

get older, the relationship dynamic evolves.

Cameron- COO Alliance (30:33)
That was even a big one for me when they were young is I found a a chore chart from the nineteen fifties and it had all the chores around your home that your kids were able to do by age. And you know, at at six years old they can make their own lunch. So my kids were making lunches five days a week that they took to school and we had a checklist and there had to be healthy things in it, but they made it. I I didn’t make my own lunch when I was six and eight years old, but realized they could do it. And then they started doing laundry and then making beds and prepping dinner and

And you don’t get an allowance for that. That’s called just living in my house for free.

Kevin Rice (31:08)
Sure. Those are your household contributions or

your your personal responsibilities. I’ve got a slightly different take on it. I think there is a big push for teaching kids responsibility through chores at a young age. I’ve waited a little bit longer, so my son’s 10, and now I finally have him doing household contributions. my perspective on it was just.

have your whole life to be responsible. You only have a few years to be a kid. And so I maybe coddled him a little bit too much, but I wanted him to just enjoy being a kid. And now that he’s 10, yes, it’s time to take care of your own responsibilities, clean your room, make your bed, make your lunches. And so what I do is

I have those things that he has to do as just being a member of the household. And then I have other things that are more like little gigs that he can do to earn money like taking out the trash or

doing some gardening, things that are more household contributions.

Cameron- COO Alliance (32:02)
Yeah.

I th I think the opportunity though is to get the kids to remember that once they turn ten they can still be a kid. And once they’re twenty they

Kevin Rice (32:12)
Mm.

Cameron- COO Alliance (32:12)
can still be a kid. life is about having responsibilities, making contribution, and making time for fun, enjoying the journey, making a game out of it, putting some music on while you’re cleaning

it’s the whole soft men produce soft times and soft times produce hard hard times. kids with these participation ribbons and kids need to learn to learn how to fail once in a while. I

Kevin Rice (32:32)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (32:34)
don’t know what your grades were like in college, but mine were not good. I had a two point seven GPA. Yeah.

Kevin Rice (32:40)
Yeah, I was

a B student.

Cameron- COO Alliance (32:42)
One, because we were okay with failure once in a while, we could fail a little bit in running our own business. My wife has a four point two GPA. I didn’t know you could get better than perfect. I had no idea. So whenever she bumps into failure, she freezes. She has these childhood traumas because failure was such a not used to it and and so to be avoided and ashamed of. And me, I was like

if I ever got an A, I would have been embarrassed in class. I must have been cheating to get an A. I never got an A. For real.

Kevin Rice (33:11)
Yeah, I do agree with your point. It’s a great point, by the way, of teaching responsibility at the same time allowing kids to just have fun. because that’s something I lost as I started to get older. I lost that kind of playfulness

and I it took a lot for me to try and figure out how to get it back. And it really is the best parenting hack that there possibly is is just to make everything a game. So, my son

wanted a glass of water before bed the other night. He’s six. And I was like, gosh, if he gets out of bed, he’s gonna end up downstairs and he’s gonna be doing other things and I’m never gonna get him back up here. So I was just like, all right, you can go get a glass of water, but I’m gonna time you and I’m gonna see if you can get it done and back in here in bed in 60 seconds. And instead of pushing back, he looks at me, he’s like, Done. I’m gonna do it.

And he sprints downstairs, gets the water. He’s back. It took him like a minute and 10 seconds.

But it was like, that works really well.

Cameron- COO Alliance (34:07)
Right. And so many parents are like, No, you can’t have water, go back to sleep. I mean, wait, this is a fucking human being that knows they need water. And then and yeah, I love your approach

to gamify it.

Kevin Rice (34:17)
You mentioned earlier that things really change for you when you set your phone away. And a lot of our listeners have shared that they struggle to transition from professional mode to parent mode. And so

along with putting your phone away to be present, did you have any sort of approach or rituals that helped you turn off work and be more present

when you walk through the front door?

Cameron- COO Alliance (34:36)
I did. So the first one was I actually pictured when I closed my laptop that I was putting it in the drawer and putting it in an office and closing the door to the office and then walking out of the main office and closing the door to the building. I pictured that happening. So that my laptop was too far behind me.

Even if I brought it home with me, whenever I did the work, I would close it off. Second thing that I did was I stopped doing work at home. Like I really forced myself down to one night a week and one day a month. Now I think it’s it’s probably one day a month because you’re never really going to catch up. All you’re doing is avoiding stuff. You’re getting your only dopamine rush from it. Another one was that I learned that my workouts and my exercise were better in the evening. So a run at 4:30.

Or five o’clock or going to the gym at 4:30 or 5 o’clock would decompress me from the whole day. Going first thing in the morning was fine. I got a jump start, but then I was carrying that residual stress or type A personality back into the home. So that separation was one. And then the last one was when I used to go to a physical office in Vancouver, I would drive home through an area called Shaughnessy, which was these huge mansions with beautiful manicured yards and curvy streets, and there was no

main road through it like you had to be crazy to take that as your path but it was like a driving meditation for me that by the time I got to my home I was decompressed.

Kevin Rice (36:04)
That’s great. I love the visualization.

I love the intentional transitions. Some of the things that I did was I would wear professional attire to the office, even though it was very casual, not

even business casual, but casual. And

I would wear professional attire. So that would get me into the I’m in president mode. And then before I came home, I would change in the bathroom and I would put on my

dad clothes.

Cameron- COO Alliance (36:28)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (36:28)
and my

new balance sneakers and I would get into that attire and mode. And then when I’d come

through the front door, we had created a little secret handshake And

that would be our reentry rituals, okay, dad’s

home now. Phone goes in a bowl up on the counter. We do our handshake and now I’m into parenting mode.

Cameron- COO Alliance (36:47)
I love that. I was excited to be in parenting mode. I really feel bad for and get frustrated with the dads who are like, I have to take care of my kids tonight. Have to? Fucking

Kevin Rice (36:58)
Mm-hmm.

Cameron- COO Alliance (36:59)
A, I get to spend time with kids tonight. are you kidding? Or I’m on dad duty

Kevin Rice (37:03)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (37:03)
tonight. Dad there’s no such thing as dad duty. for me, COVID was amazing.

Because my my youngest

son had gone away to school before COVID started at university and then COVID hit and he had to come home. So now all of a sudden I had my son at home and my youngest son who was in high school. And for that first year of COVID, we had sit-down family dinner six nights a week. with 16 and 18-year-olds. Normally they’re gone, man. They got activities, they got jobs, they got girlfriends, school.

I loved making dinner for my kids. I was excited. I used to get so excited for them to come to the table to taste something that they’d been smelling all day long.

Kevin Rice (37:38)
that reframe, just that simple reframe of I have to to I get to applies to everything in life and it is such a big unlock because if you can think about

that like, I have to do taxes or it’s I get to do taxes because I earned a lot of income this year and it’s you know allowing my family to have financial freedom. So I

Cameron- COO Alliance (37:58)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (37:59)
get to pay the taxes on it. you can reframe anything, and if you do that

It changes your perspective on everything.

Cameron- COO Alliance (38:07)
I didn’t even understand reframing until a few years ago, and I saw an Instagram meme, and it was a note of ten things that this woman had written for herself. And the first one was, I’m so happy that my husband’s underwear is in the corner of our bedroom. It means we’re still married. Number two

was, I’m so happy to find crumbs under my kitchen table because my kids are still at home.

Kevin Rice (38:31)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (38:32)
My kid yelling at me from the other room makes me happy because it means I’m needed. every one of these things was a reframe. I was like, whoa, this is so good, my

mom died 24 years ago.

I would love to have a shitty rainy day on the golf course with a cart that breaks down, can’t find a ball with my mom. I’d love to have bad Italian food served to me by a grumpy waiter with my mom. nothing else matters to the point that we give it meaning when we forget what’s what’s really important.

Kevin Rice (39:06)
Yeah. I think the one that always stuck with me is a Tony Robbins quote about how life is always happening for you and not to you.

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:15)
I’m taking my two boys to see Tony Robbins this November. My first time going and they’re both coming with me. Super excited.

Kevin Rice (39:20)
You’re going to UPW?

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:22)
Yeah, I’ve never been and I’ve I’ve never been, I’ve always wanted

Kevin Rice (39:24)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:25)
are you gonna be at it?

Kevin Rice (39:26)
I’m gonna go to date with Destiny in December. Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:29)
Cool. Yeah, I’m going, I’m going

to it. Super excited about it. And the fact that I get to bring both my kids with me is really cool too.

Kevin Rice (39:35)
I’ll

certainly be bringing my ten year old pretty soon, probably to a UPW because Date with Destiny is pretty intense. It’s a full week.

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:42)
it yeah.

Kevin Rice (39:44)
but UPW you get to do the firewalking, which will

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:46)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (39:47)
be such a cool experience with you and your kids.

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:49)
Yeah, I’ve d I’ve done it a few

times. They never have, but I’m excited for them too. I’m not telling them it’s coming either. I’m just like, let them get round

Kevin Rice (39:54)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (39:56)
up.

Kevin Rice (39:57)
That’s really special. what I’ve gathered from this conversation and just everything I read is that you are a very intentional person about your life. where does that intentionality come from? And how do you practice it practically in in your day to day life?

Cameron- COO Alliance (40:13)
Well, yeah, like I mean, I’ve written a book about

it about it called Vivid Vision. I’ve taught companies all over the world on the concept of vivid vision. That’s too easy. where I think I learned

Kevin Rice (40:21)
Okay.

Cameron- COO Alliance (40:22)
where I where I think I actually learned it was golfing. I was an obsessive golfer at a young age. I worked at the golf club from 13 to 16. I was playing, a hundred rounds a summer.

And you reverse engineer every hole. you start at the flag, and then you know where you want to leave the chip shot, and then you know where you want your drive to land, and then you you kind of reverse engineer every hole. So I learned about that planning and intentionality. Ski racing, the same thing. and I ski raced until I was 22. and then running my first business with College Pro, they taught me about having a goal and reverse engineering that goal. So the first summer, it’s how much profit do you want to make, and then what do you need to do?

Do in revenue to get you to that profit, and then how much revenue do you need to do every week? And where’s the revenue going to come from? you basically plan your work and work, your plan and reverse engineer everything. So for me, I think I’ve always reverse engineered everything because I’ve learned those skills. So, when I ran my marathon, I reverse engineered it to my goal time. So now I’m reverse engineering my life. I’ve described me as Cameron Herold, December 31st, 2027, and I have a five or six page description of me. What I’m like

Like

as a dad, as a friend, as a father, as a lover, as a confidant, what I do for fun, for vacations, sexuality, personal growth. And I’ve described myself as a human.

And then I’m reverse engineering every sentence. My wife and I have done that for our relationship. We wrote a three or a five-page description of us as a married couple. And then we have bucket lists, and we literally write down, I’ve got about 101 things on my bucket list of stuff that I want to do and try and achieve and experience and things to do around the world. And I’m just being very intentional about knocking it off because frankly, it matters to me.

Kevin Rice (42:05)
If someone was listening and they wanted to kind of sit down and have that much intentionality and actually write it out for their career, for their life, for their family, for their interests, personally, how would you guide them

through that process? Where would you start?

Cameron- COO Alliance (42:20)
I would I would guide them with the first part is thinking about what matters to you. What are the main areas of your life that matter to you? Friends, family, fitness, finance, spirituality, fun, whatever. and then come up with a whole bunch of areas of your life or your business that matter to you.

And then start doing some rough notes. So, what about vacations do you like? What don’t you like about vacations? What kinds of fitness do you like versus you don’t like? Where do you what do you like to do for fun? What do you want to learn? what are your core values? Well, you know, what really matters to you? What really pisses you off and understand who you are, and then start making some commitments around that. That that’s the starting point. Now with AI, you can then take a bunch of those bullet points and you know drop it in and or read the book Vivid Vision. That’s gonna certainly help you.

We’ll give you the full explanation on how to use it and how to roll it out and how to write it and how to reverse engineer it. But that’s the basic starting of it.

Kevin Rice (43:16)
For someone who’s in their building phase right now, putting in long hours, telling themselves I’m gonna live more fully, have this vision once, I achieve the career success, what would you what would you wanna share with them?

Cameron- COO Alliance (43:32)
The the first thing I would want to share is

What if it ends tomorrow? And and really being ruthless about that. I mean, my dad was very healthy. My dad was, playing golf three days a week. He was swimming three days a week. he’d been retired for 15 years, and then he had a double heart attack and was dead two weeks later. my good friend John Rulin

died at 42 years old with four girls under 13 years old. And he was super healthy, and then he was dead.

So

I wouldn’t give yourself the time to build your business and then have the fun. I think you have to find a way to be balanced. And I don’t think you can ever be perfectly balanced. I’ve talked about an elephant on a teeter-totter in a way. some days I’m really working hard on my time with my son, because I’m in London with him and I’m not gonna see him now probably till November.

And on on my business.

And then next week I’m with my other son in Vancouver and with my business. And then the following week, I’m gonna be with my wife. So I’m gonna shift over to be fully present with her. The business will let it go for a little bit. But when when I’m with my wife, it’ll probably be fitness and fun and time with her for a week to get reconnected again because she left Europe about 10 days ago. So it’s about understanding what your priorities are and obsessing about a few of them, and then being honest with yourself and holding yourself

accountable to that, get a relationship coach, get a fitness coach, get a spiritual coach, get a dietary coach, get a personal trainer. The amount of coaching and development that I get and that I work on still isn’t because I feel like I’m broken. It’s because I really want to continue to get better.

Kevin Rice (45:06)
When you think about your kids and obviously you’ve had this incredibly successful career, what do you hope that they learn from you as a father? and

how do you hope that they see you? and

what do you hope that they inherit from you as they are now adults and creating their own life?

Cameron- COO Alliance (45:24)
So and and it i I I’m glad you asked this question ’cause I was gonna say something about it earlier and I forgot about

10 years ago, I was at a mastermind event called the Genius Network. They’re the official partner for the CO Alliance. I was a member of the Genius Network for nine years. And I was sitting at one of the events with this guy, Dean Graciosi. He’s one of the other members. Dean’s, you know, very solid internet marketer, real estate sales guy.

Kevin Rice (45:45)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (45:45)
He’s a partner with Tony on a business. You know, we used to live very close to each other And I was talking to Dean. We were in a breakout one-on-one. And I said, How do you want your kids to describe you? And he’s I was successful in business.

Internet marketer, real estate guy, does business with Tony, whatever. And I said, really?

And he goes, why? And I said, I’ve been thinking about it the last month or so, and

I don’t ever want my kids to describe me as a coach and an author and a speaker anymore. I’ve been really out of balance again. And I want my kids to describe me by my hobbies that I go to Burning Man and I love to cook and I have dinner parties with friends and I love to travel and I love hiking and I love skiing and I play pickleball I want them to describe my hobbies and then go, what does my dad do to make money? Yeah, we I don’t know, he’s a business guy.

Or

entrepreneur or whatever. And I was on tilt. So I don’t want my kids to describe me at all in what I do to make money. I want them to describe me as a man, as a dad, as a as a partner. I want them to talk about how I treated my wife and how I treated their mom. And I want them to talk about what I do for fun and my interests. That’s what I want them to take away, is that that’s what life is about. Those are the lessons I want them to have, those are the takeaways. That’s how I want them to describe me.

Kevin Rice (46:58)
Yeah. And your character and your values and how you showed up for them,

once I started integrating more of my personal interests into my life, I realized that work was more of just a function for living.

And I needed to make more time to actually live.

Cameron- COO Alliance (47:16)
You know where that lesson came to me was I had someone come to me at a cocktail party, I was still at 1-800-got-junk, and she said, Cameron, you’re effing boring.

all you talk about is 1-800 got junk. She goes, we wanna talk about our hobbies and what we do for fun. We’re employees. And then I realized you don’t ever wanna hear a lawyer talk about law. I don’t wanna hear a dentist talk about dentistry. I don’t wanna hear a doctor talk about medicine. I don’t wanna talk to a road builder about building roads. So they certainly don’t wanna hear us talk about our business. Our business is not our effing hobby.

and I think we’ve allowed too many entrepreneurs to say that and we’ve believed their bullshit, because What we want to hear about is you as a dad and a human and a friend and a father and like what you’re doing for fun and your activities and what your theme camp was like, a burning man, like what you’re interested in, what movies you saw. I could care less about your company, my company, anybody else’s company. And that’s more true than we believe it to be true.

Kevin Rice (48:12)
Yeah. I was in a conversation once where I was meeting a couple of people and this woman started telling me about the work she does. She was a UX designer and obviously I had an agency, so that was my world and so we were talking and the other person sat down, he goes, what did I miss? And she goes, I was just telling him about my work. He goes, good, I’m glad I missed that. Let’s talk about something interesting.

Cameron- COO Alliance (48:33)
Boom, right? And

Kevin Rice (48:36)
Yeah.

Cameron- COO Alliance (48:37)
I think that’s the lesson I want my kids to have. I just sent my son a text message when you and I were just chatting and I said, let European Connor out to play.

‘Cause he has his serious business Connor who’s running his business already and he’s focused. And I’ve noticed him kind of sliding into that again and he needs to let his little boy out once in a while as I do. So we remind each other to let our fun kid out, our fun side out. Yeah.

Kevin Rice (49:01)
That’s great. Well, Cameron,

I really appreciate this conversation. I thought it was wonderful and

I’m inspired to keep doing more and having a more like robust life. I don’t actually have a bucket list. I’ve got a map of ancient sites in the world that I want to go to and I’ve checked off a few of those.

but I think I need to sit down and write a proper bucket list because there’s a lot in this world to experience.

Cameron- COO Alliance (49:25)
I just shared mine with you You’re welcome to share it with everybody who’s listening too. If it inspires people to write their bucket list, you’re welcome to share it.

Kevin Rice (49:31)
gonna have your bucket list in the show notes. We’re gonna have links to your books. I there’s just so much wonderful information that you have out there to share. So thank you again for joining.

Cameron- COO Alliance (49:40)
Form.

Kevin Rice (49:41)
I really appreciate you being on the podcast.

Cameron- COO Alliance (49:43)
Of course. Thanks Kevin. Appreciate you having me.