AI, Leadership & Next-Level Growth: Cameron Herold’s Playbook for Contractors

Most contractors are either ignoring AI or getting distracted by flashy tools they don’t actually need. In this episode, Jennifer Bagley talks with Cameron Herold, the operational expert who helped build 1-800-GOT-JUNK and mentored industry leaders like Tommy Mello.

They discuss why the "old-school" basics—like answering the phone and having branded trucks—matter more than ever in an automated world. You will learn how to identify which AI tools actually increase your profit margins, how to hire a team that embraces technology, and why your leadership style is the one thing that can't be replaced by a bot.

What You’ll Learn

• The Revenue Filter: Why you should only use AI for tasks that directly increase sales or gross margins.
• The 3-Tier Growth Path: Why a small shop shouldn’t try to use the same automation as a $50M company.
• Hiring for the Future: A simple "Laptop Test" to make sure your next hire can actually use technology to save you time.
• Beating "Price Shopping": How to use ChatGPT in the house with the customer to upsell maintenance agreements and air purification.
• The Leadership Gap: Why delegating AI is smart, but "abdicating" (ignoring it and hoping someone else handles it) will kill your business.

Timestamps

• 00:00 – Jennifer’s experience: Moving from a 320-person team to a 47-person AI-first company.
• 04:10 – Cameron’s background: Scaling residential painting and junk removal to billion-dollar levels.
• 08:27 – The Danger Zone: Why moving too slow—or too fast—with AI can hurt your business.
• 11:00 – The Interview Secret: How to see if a candidate is actually tech-savvy in 5 minutes.
• 18:44 – Customer Savvy: How to stop clients from using AI to talk you down on price.
• 21:20 – Bronze, Silver, Gold: A realistic roadmap for contractor technology.
• 33:16 – Easy Wins: Automating Google reviews to win more local jobs.
• 40:03 – Performance Reviews: Using AI agents to give your team unbiased feedback.
• 51:14 – Soft Skills: Why being a good boss is still your most valuable skill.
• 56:38 – The Big Picture: Taking care of your people and your customers first.

About Cameron Herold

Cameron Herold is a world-renowned business coach and the founder of the COO Alliance. He specializes in helping "second-in-command" executives run the day-to-day operations of high-growth companies. He has authored seven business books and has a deep history in the home services industry.

• Free AI Mentor: AskCameron.ai
• Website: CameronHerold.com
• Training: InvestInYourLeaders.com

Next Steps

1. Organize Your Tech: Visit Cameron’s websites and bookmark them for your next leadership meeting.
2. Review Your Reviews: If you aren't using an automated system to get Google reviews, make that your priority this week.
3. Subscribe: Follow Catalyst for the Trades on your favorite podcast app for more interviews with industry experts.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to "The Catalyst for Trades" on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform. Share this episode with aspiring and established leaders, and stay tuned for more insights on driving business success and personal leadership growth.

Transcript

Jennifer Bagley [00:00:01]:
Good afternoon, everyone. I am so excited to be with you today. I have— look, and take care of my lips right here. All right, so you guys, um, first off, we've had a little bit of a break in between our last podcast. We've been deep in the trenches launching our new, uh, AI-first operating system, Hydra, uh, and so I took a little break from podcast, but I also took a break because I wanted to come back with this amazing gentleman who's joined for today's session, Mr. Cameron from COO Alliance. Thank you so much for being with me today.

Cameron Herold [00:00:39]:
You're welcome, Jennifer. Great to see you.

Jennifer Bagley [00:00:41]:
Great to see you again. So you guys, I feel like this is the moment in time where this is going to be the perfect conversation for many of you that are kind of sitting in this awkward space, right? We're living in this era of We understand now that we need to become the most AI-enabled companies that we possibly can in order to gain the benefits of being able to do more faster, be more effective, be more efficient, reducing headcount, being able to increase margins. There's all of these amazing things. Having said that, I'm just going to disclose for a moment, my own agency started this journey of becoming not just AI-enabled but an AI-first company back literally the day my kids called and said, holy crap, you've got to look at this website. It just launched and it happened to be ChatGPT. I was sitting in Kauai. I just got done speaking for Dyken and Darren Dixon, Whitney Dixon, his wife, and my husband and I were sitting on the lanai having cocktails and my kids were like stalker calling me like they just had their wallet stolen, freaking out. And so I answered and they were like, you have to check this out.

Jennifer Bagley [00:01:58]:
And it was that moment of— I knew AI existed, we've been using it from, you know, ETL pipelines and behind the scenes, but it was the thought of, oh crap, they're about to put AI in the hands of every human in the United States and the world. We need to move and we need to move really quick. And there were a sequence of things that through this journey of going from a 320-person company to now a 47-staffed company that I wish I would have known, considered, and thought about the impacts on the human element. And I wish I would have been tougher faster. Like, I feel like now I can lay down the law and I can make the decisions. And I'm saying, look, we're a flat organization. We're now tiny team. This is not about titles.

Jennifer Bagley [00:02:54]:
This is about effort and results. And I feel like it took me too long to get to that. Like, I almost ripped off a piece of duct tape really slow and ripped out every hair on my arm. So Cameron, I feel like, is the perfect, perfect mentor for all of us that had we had had your advice and your impact, your, your guidance up front, it wouldn't have been— it wouldn't have felt like duct tape on my head, literally, not even my arm. So before we get into that, um, I want to know who you are. Let's tell the audience a little bit about your experience in the trades. That's the majority of, of our listeners here.

Cameron Herold [00:03:41]:
Yeah.

Jennifer Bagley [00:03:42]:
Um, talk to me a little bit about kind of your, your path, your journey.

Cameron Herold [00:03:45]:
Sure. Um, thank you for having me. I have been running my own company pretty much my entire life. I was 20 years old. I started my first real company and I had 12 full-time employees. We were painting houses in Sudbury, Canada, painting 6 simultaneous homes at the same time. Painted 78 houses over the course of the first 4 months running my company. So I was right in the home services space right from the get-go.

Cameron Herold [00:04:10]:
Ended up joining the senior leadership team of what became the largest residential house painting company on the planet. That became College Pro Painters. And every year we had to recruit, hire, and train 800 university students to become franchisees. And then they had to train 8,000 students in one month to paint houses. And we would paint $64 million in houses between May 1st and August 31st. And then the 8,800 students would quit and go back to school and we would do it again. I was in the top 30 people of that 9,000-person company for 4 years. One of the franchisees that I hired back in 1993, so dating myself, was Kimbal Musk.

Cameron Herold [00:04:52]:
So I hired Elon Musk's younger brother to run a franchise for me in Toronto. I also hired his cousin Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity, and I coached them and trained them on how to run their first operational companies. I was a reference for Elon in his first round of funding for Zip2 in January of 1995. So I've been around the home services space for a long time. Opened the West Coast of the United States for College Pro Painters. Left that company and joined a family friend, and we built up what is now called Gerber Auto Collision in the United States, Boyd Autobody in Canada. It became the largest collision repair chain in the world. It's now about a $2 billion revenue company, publicly traded, hundreds of locations all over the US and Canada.

Cameron Herold [00:05:35]:
Left there in '98 and was hired as the president of a private currency business. Built that company up to help take it public, sold it. And then I joined my best friend to become a garbage man. And I joined, I was in a YEO, it's now called EO. I was in a mastermind forum with my best friend and he was building a company called The Rubbish Boys, was just changing over the company name to 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And he asked him if I would coach and mentor him and train him on how to scale 1-800-GOT-JUNK. So, I joined Brian. As his Chief Operating Officer.

Cameron Herold [00:06:09]:
I was his 14th employee. When I left 6.5 years later, we had 3,100 employees system-wide. We'd gone from 12 locations to 330. 4 companies ranked as the number 2 company in all of Canada to work for. And then, I left there 19 years ago. And in the last 19 years, I've been paid to speak over 800 times in 29 countries. I've written 7 books on business. I've coached some high-tech companies.

Cameron Herold [00:06:35]:
I've coached the CEO of Sprint. I coached Tommy Mello from A1 Garage and his COO Luke. I've spoken at things like Breakthrough Academy with Igor's group to 900 people in the home services sector. So, I've done a lot all over the world in the space of entrepreneurship and help scaling companies. And then now, I run a group called the COO Alliance, which is a large mastermind community for the second in command of companies. So you wouldn't be able to join, but your COO could be a member. And we have members from 17 countries. And then I also have an online training program called Invest in Your Leaders, which is the core leadership skills that I work to train people like Tommy Mello and Kimball Musk, etc.

Cameron Herold [00:07:17]:
And that's kind of a little bit of my backstory.

Jennifer Bagley [00:07:21]:
I don't— I, I, I'm just wondering when I can have a seat on your couch and a bottle of wine and like 4 hours of time.

Cameron Herold [00:07:27]:
Anytime. That's what CEOs pay me for. I'd be coaching people all over. It's fun.

Jennifer Bagley [00:07:34]:
I, yeah, so, um, and I know the sector, right?

Cameron Herold [00:07:38]:
I know, I know the industry of being at a person's home, and I could go in so many different directions. I can go on leading people, I can go on, you know, working on the job sites, I can go on who the real decision maker is, um, on jobs, because it's not the man of the house, by the way. Um, I can, I can go in any direction you want to go, so I'll let you lead.

Jennifer Bagley [00:07:59]:
My goodness. So, um, well, one, thank you so much for taking time with us on this podcast. I'm, I'm really excited for all of our viewers. So I am curious, um, where do you see things going and where do you see the biggest gaps with the advent of AI in the hands of every human? And Contractors notoriously, the trades notoriously being late bloomers.

Cameron Herold [00:08:27]:
Yeah. And yeah, they actually might be to their advantage right now. There's two parts that I see happening globally with AI. The first is if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business, right? So if you don't adapt and start leveraging AI across your organization, you will die. Someone will take you out of the space very, very quickly because they'll be able to do more, they'll be able to make more, they'll be able to hire better people. However, there's always been a saying of the early bird gets the worm. I've always believed that the early cat gets the bird. And sometimes you can get very distracted with the new, new thing, the big shiny object, and spend all of your time trying to learn and leverage AI But you forget about the core business that you have to run today.

Cameron Herold [00:09:15]:
You have to get results through your current people. You have to deal with your customers on site. And if you lose sight of the day-to-day business and your customers and the happiness of your employees and the productivity of your employees and the proper marketing, if you lose sight of the main thing because you're distracted with what is really important, you'll actually destroy your entire company too. So it's that how do you balance both right now, I think, is the critical part. For the contractors and for small business.

Jennifer Bagley [00:09:43]:
Yeah, I 100% agree. So where do they start? Just chicken or the egg?

Cameron Herold [00:09:47]:
I start with— it's funny, I just did a post on Facebook the other day. I said I just ordered a chicken and an egg on Amazon. I'll let you know which comes first. Where I always start is revenue. I drive all of my focus around increasing revenue and increasing gross margin. Because there's not a single problem that exists in our company today that writing a check can't solve. So if you have more money coming in the door and more gross margin coming in the door, you can buy your way out of every problem. You can hire people to help you with AI.

Cameron Herold [00:10:20]:
You can hire consultants and hire better people. But if you're always building the better mousetrap, you can spend your way into a cash flow crisis. So I would start leveraging AI to generate better sales, better marketing, better margins. Every single new person I hire to come into my company, regardless of the role that they're in, has to be someone that can open their laptop and show me how they're using AI today, some way, somehow. I don't want them to talk about it. I don't want them to explain it. I want them to open their freaking laptop and show me what they're doing. And if they're not doing that, they don't even get to come and paint a house.

Cameron Herold [00:11:00]:
I want everybody walking in my door to raise the average of the group. So one by one, I'm going to start moving the organization towards being AI-driven. Next thing I'll do is every business area, every Monday, we'll do a 5-minute book report. So I'll take all of my people and they'll each do a 5-minute book report and show me and show the rest of their group with their laptop, with the screencast, something they used AI for last week. Maybe it's a new prompt. Maybe it was a new way they were using Claude Code. Maybe it was something they designed with Nano Banana, something that they're doing, and just demo for 5 minutes to show people what can be done so that we create this kind of infection internally. And then lastly, I would look to bring some kind of a consultant in who can help us to very, very quickly automate and optimize some of our workflow that again will drive more revenue and more, more gross margin.

Cameron Herold [00:11:55]:
But I would start with the easy wins, the low-hanging fruit, not the big hairy stuff that will end up costing you a whole bunch of people time and money and be a distraction from the core thing. That would be my starting point.

Jennifer Bagley [00:12:06]:
100% agree. There's nothing I would change about that. That's, um, it's, it's interesting. That's if they were to attempt to do what we've already done, it would cost them millions. Like, there are companies out there that have already spent the investments to be able to build the infrastructure to be able to get quick AI wins right out of the gate, knowing that the difference in between who got on Lovable or who got on Nectic or whatever platform there is and popped up some BS little AI website with an AI tool that doesn't have the infrastructure, security, or anything, but it looks really good. They've never had a visitor to their site. Telling the difference is gonna be a hard one. I think right outta the gate, that's the first issue this, the industry's gonna see is they're gonna have to make a lot of hard, they're, they are likely the less they know about AI, going to make a lot of decisions in signing on to applications, tools, and systems that are actually, quite frankly, just BS.

Jennifer Bagley [00:13:02]:
And they're going to have to learn the hard way if the owners don't understand fundamentals of AI.

Cameron Herold [00:13:08]:
Well, and if the owners don't have the right people inside the organization, all the right tools will do the wrong thing. Yeah, right. If you don't have the right people living the core values aligned with each other, making decisions to drive towards the core goals and the core rocks that the company has, And it doesn't matter how good the tools are, right? You can take the most productive employees who are working as hard as possible, but if they're going in the wrong direction, you're screwed. So it is still, it's still about making sure we have that kind of core leadership alignment as well.

Jennifer Bagley [00:13:40]:
So what happens when the owner of the company is passing this off, as in, I'm not a techie, I'm just a contractor?

Cameron Herold [00:13:46]:
They're advocating instead of delegating. The owner needs to know what exists, but not necessarily how to do it. They need to understand that these tools exist, but not necessarily how to implement them all. They need to know that they have to bring people into the organization who actually have these skills, and then they have to know how to interview them and hire them and onboard them, right? Stuff that AI can't replace still to this day. Again, most owners will sit down with somebody and say, you know, they don't know how to do a job interview, so somebody who's heard about AI can talk about it. They think the person's really smart, Meanwhile, the person couldn't demo anything they've ever done with AI. So it's, it's really going back to that first principles of, do you know what people you need in your org that are going to drive revenue and gross margin? Do you know how to find them? Do you know how to interview them? Do you know how to onboard them? And do you know how to actually make sure they're working on the right priority projects? That's a core leadership skill that people need. Leaders need to also empower and grow their management team, right, the people inside of their company.

Cameron Herold [00:14:46]:
But if they're not growing those people, it doesn't matter what great AI tool you could have, right? If you don't have well-aligned people with good leadership skills, they could all have Claude Code installed on a, you know, an Apple Mac Mini, right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:15:00]:
It doesn't—

Cameron Herold [00:15:01]:
it's not going to do anything anyway.

Jennifer Bagley [00:15:03]:
Yeah, other than delete all your ServiceTitan data because you gave it an API key and didn't understand how it worked.

Cameron Herold [00:15:10]:
Well, when I opened my house painting company in Washington and Oregon, I didn't want to give a sprayer to my employees because I knew they didn't have the skills or the confidence to actually use one. So I gave him a brush, right? I gave him a tool that would do the job. But you know what? We crushed it.

Jennifer Bagley [00:15:24]:
Please don't install Claw— yeah, open Claw and drop it on a Mac Mini and then give it access to your entire life, right?

Cameron Herold [00:15:32]:
And, and not spend time actually handling the day-to-day of the business, right? Most of our contractors right now have a shitty website. Most of our contractors don't know how to connect with their customers. Most of our contractors right now hire the first person that walks in the door that has a, you know, a pulse and puts them out on a job site doing whatever with the minimum amount of training. Most of our customers think it's the male that's making the decision, but it's the female who's saying, who's coming onto my property? But we don't sell to the woman. We don't have a female graphic designer, female marketers. Like, we're missing some of those core basics.

Jennifer Bagley [00:16:07]:
Oh yeah, amen to that. This is part of what we developed with Hydra. We were— our very first mission was how do we create the lowest token cost website there is, meaning that the bots, Google, and AI had the ability to crawl and get access to the information that the consumer was searching for faster than any other platform on the, on the planet. 98% of this entire industry is either in no website or they're in a WordPress website with 1,500 lines of code that it can't even find the content on the site. And on top of that, the content that exists is from 2000 and whatever when they built the website, and they haven't thought to re-up it. The entire logic and strategy has changed. And these are things that can actually easily be solved in a 60-day project.

Cameron Herold [00:16:52]:
Now, this is the stuff where I think we have to be able to do both, right? Work with a group like you to come in and put the right AI tools and systems in place for our company and model some of the best that are out there. Your truck should look like a 1-800-GOT-JUNK truck or one of the A1 garage door trucks from Tommy Mello, right? If you— if your website doesn't look and feel like one of those, it should. If you don't train your people, you should. If you, if your guys showing up on the job sites are wearing ripped jeans and tattered t-shirts, again, it doesn't matter what your AI tool is because there's so much inconsistency. So we have to be able to be doing both.

Jennifer Bagley [00:17:28]:
So this is a, this is a common problem I see right now. All of the AI and LLM models have been trained on manufacturer retail suggested price from products, i.e., HVAC equipment being posted on Amazon and Home Depot. The trainers that are training this group on every stage have not modified their training strategy on how to sell equipment. For example, the technicians are walking into the house, they're dropping off a quote, the consumer is taking that quote and throwing it into ChatGPT and saying, is this a good price or am I being overcharged? Because they don't know how to prompt for line sets and ductwork and airflow and all of the things that were a consideration as a part of that. And the consumer is getting advice from ChatGPT to just call a truck in the truck, right? Call a single company that doesn't have the administrative overhead to get the price down. However, what we've been trying to train our clients is, is if you coach your technicians to prompt it with the consumer, add all of the context and all of the considerations and ask a different question. What else should I have considered to make sure that my client's needs are met? ChatGPT will actually help you upsell a maintenance agreement, a connected thermostat, a Halo air purification system, or whatever. It will actually help you upsell all of these things.

Jennifer Bagley [00:18:44]:
But getting from telling that I don't have access to a technician— I'm usually talking, or our team's usually talking to an owner. We've got to go through owner, general manager, office manager, whatever all the layers are to get to tomorrow morning I want you to take all your technicians, you set up a meeting, you take your last quote, throw it into ChatGPT, and ask the question the consumer is asking because you all need to freaking coming to Jesus meeting about the fact that ChatGPT is literally causing you to lose business because you're not forcing your technicians to utilize the system to actually help you sell more. I don't know how to solve that. I need that help. What, what is the conversation with the owner and all the middleware that prevents us from being able to make a simple change that could literally happen on Monday morning and as a part of our hiring process, job descriptions updated, keep, uh, core training for AI, these basic little things that could actually help them sell more. What, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do?

Cameron Herold [00:19:40]:
You know, it's the, it's the basic, but it's the complicated, right? It's almost like stratifying the, the potent— the, the potential customers that are out there and who is actually who we're marketing to. I used to coach a, um, a group off the East Coast called, uh, Gold Medal in the HVAC space, and they were in dozens of cities and hundreds of employees. But the way I worked with them was very different from a, you know, a 20-person HVAC company that whatever you just talked about was completely overwhelming. Like, they're not even getting both the husband and wife at the actual job site at the time of the quote, right? So they're, they're not even showing up with a client binder with before and after photos of the work and reference letters. Like, it doesn't matter how good we're optimizing a small, small company for tech. So I think it's almost looking at which companies should be optimizing and what are the things we should be optimizing for each. When we scaled 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we had 82 different tasks that a new franchisee had to be set up with for them to open their doors. And I think it would be looking at what are kind of the 10 to 20 that everyone in the home services space can do to get them to like a bronze level of, okay, they've got their shit together.

Cameron Herold [00:20:53]:
And what are the next 10 or 20 tasks that we can get the bigger mid-sized companies to do to get them to silver? And then what are the next 10 to 20 things that we can get people to do to maybe get them to gold? But it's almost pointless taking a 20-person company and trying to optimize them for the way that you're doing when they're not even doing the core basics of showing up with a branded vehicle, with a branded shirt, showing up on time, calling the customer 15 minutes before the promise.

Jennifer Bagley [00:21:20]:
That's if we answer the call.

Cameron Herold [00:21:23]:
Correct. Like, they're not even doing the basic shit, right? Like, we just signed a new member of the CEO Alliance, $6,000, um, quote, signed them up 19 minutes after their initial contact with our company. They sent us a message, 19 minutes later they'd signed up and paid. But we had another one that we closed 800 days after their initial contact. So, you know, for so many companies, they don't have proper systems in place just to connect with a customer, just to actually take that lead in the door and connect with the customer quickly. So to optimize them for proper pricing in a quote or whatever, that's kind of a gold level. And that's a company with 50 to 500 employees.

Jennifer Bagley [00:22:03]:
I feel like this is where we're landing, though. So for our clients, they go from having zero internet traffic, zero organic leads, zero AI search leads to typically in 90 to 120 days, we have a new problem. And our new problem is conversions, right? Because we are getting traffic, we are getting AI citations and mentions, they are starting to get calls and forms and texts and all of these other things. So we solved the next problem by making sure that our clients had an AI-enabled conversion platform, i.e., booking directly into their system, AI texting, AI voice, voice-to-voice communications. We're in the process of launching an AI-to-AI conversion system that will allow AI bot to talk to their website and they can communicate. See availability and close. So we're— I feel like we're like chipping away at this thing. And now we're to the point, at least for our clients who are following our guidelines on our recommendations, we are driving traffic, we are converting, and now they're in the home losing the business.

Jennifer Bagley [00:23:00]:
And we can watch the critical path of the consumer not converting.

Cameron Herold [00:23:04]:
This is the same stuff that Alex Hormozi struggled with when he was running Gym Launch. Alex and Leila had their COO in my CEO Alliance as a member 9 years ago. They came to an event that I ran together. About building a world-class company culture. He was able to get leads for all these gyms, but then he wasn't able to get the leads to join and he wasn't able to get the leads to stay. So he then had to drop into the coaching at the front line to make sure that the companies were handling the basics. That is kind of the make sure that you've got your basics and leverage AI. And that's kind of what I'm talking about is we have to do both.

Cameron Herold [00:23:38]:
We can only AI ourselves so much. And then we also need to have the basics, and then we need to AI some more, and then we need to have the basics. And I think companies need to be very cognizant of that. What's that?

Jennifer Bagley [00:23:50]:
Yeah, this is the— this— I feel like we're just chipping away and solving, solving, solving, and then we land in the issues that naturally come with human beings.

Cameron Herold [00:23:59]:
Yeah, exactly. I was used to coach Marcelo Clauret. He was the CEO of Sprint. Marcelo had sold his first company for over $1 billion to SoftBank. He was then appointed the CEO of Sprint. I was in his office in Kansas City, one-on-one coaching him. We were top grading his team, deciding who to fire, who to handcuff, who to actually change seats, who to train. And he started laughing and he goes, when are people not going to be the problem anymore? And I'm like, dude, you're the 82nd largest company in the United States.

Cameron Herold [00:24:24]:
They're always the fucking problem. Like, you can put any AI tools in place as we want to. If you have the wrong people in the wrong seats that aren't aligned with your company culture, and they're not showing up love bombing your customers, all those AI tools go out. So it is about doing both, right? We have to keep all of these entrepreneurial companies focusing on both sides of that equation. It was why College Pro Painters in every single market could destroy, from a sales and marketing perspective, the 30-year trade Italian artisan painter who painted way better houses than we ever painted. We won every job that we competed on because we showed up with a binder. We showed up as a fraternity boy with a nice golf shirt. We flirted with the housewife because we knew she made the decision.

Cameron Herold [00:25:10]:
We pretended the husband was really involved, but we knew he wasn't making the call. We had a female marketer, female brander, female copywriters work on all of our content. Like, we taught them what to say. We asked for referrals. We put signs out on the job site. We weren't talking about how to put better paint on a fucking house. Like, that didn't even matter, right? So I think there is— there's both. I talked to Tommy Mello about that recently.

Cameron Herold [00:25:35]:
I was at his office back in Scottsdale about 4 months ago. I'm like, you have 400 of the best branded vehicles I've ever seen. Why are they all sitting at your office in the parking lot overnight? How many of your customers are driving past your office, go to the back of your office, and drive back He's like, where should I park them? I'm like, out on the street like we do.

Jennifer Bagley [00:25:54]:
Yes.

Cameron Herold [00:25:55]:
He goes, well, how do people get to my trucks? I don't know, the same way they get to your office. Take a car, take a bus, whatever. But have those high visibility lawn signs out in the field. So I think we need to be doing both.

Jennifer Bagley [00:26:07]:
Yeah, this is a thinking game. I, I tend to end every call with not everybody's a good client. The ones that are, buckle up, buttercup, because we're going to address some things that are really uncomfortable.

Cameron Herold [00:26:18]:
Well, I think for you guys it is stratifying all of the people in the home services space into the ones that you can get to bronze, then the ones that can get to silver, and then the ones that can get to gold. And not trying to get everybody to gold until they've already done the things at silver. I remember our, our franchisee with 1-800-GOT-JUNK in Washington, DC calling me one day and he said, I need the next marketing tactic. I'm like, well, where are you parking all of your trucks right now? He goes, yeah, yeah, I know we have to do that. I'm like, yeah, but you're not. And are you putting up signs? No, no, I know, but we have to do that. Are you putting out door hangers on each side of your current jobs and across the street? No, no, but I know we have to do that. I next— I need the next— like, I'm not giving you tactic 4 until you're doing the first 3 on every single job.

Cameron Herold [00:27:01]:
100%.

Jennifer Bagley [00:27:02]:
100%. It's making me turn down, turn down relationships because I'm doing those qualifying questions in advance and saying this isn't a good fit. Like, These have to be in your roadmap. You have 120 days to have these things in place before your phone starts ringing off the hook and we have a different problem. I don't want to be in that position. You don't want to be in that position. Will you buckle down and make these things happen?

Cameron Herold [00:27:23]:
And that might be a different type of coach that you put in place in your model or a different group coaching component or a different cohort model. But everyone needs to be thinking about AI and working on that. Like we have— I have 2 speakers coming on to my monthly mastermind with all of our CEO Alliance members in an hour and a half. Both of this month's speakers are about different parts of AI. One's talking about cloud co-work and how to implement it. The other one is actually talking about sales automation and marketing automation leveraging AI. Next month I'm going to have somebody talking about AI tools with finance and AI tools with budgeting and AI tools with dashboards. So we're always going to talk about that, and we talk about hiring better people, aligning better people, growing the skills of our people, like the basic blocking and tackling that businesses can't get distracted with.

Jennifer Bagley [00:28:13]:
I'm going to go down a coaching session for, you know, as a, as an agency, a marketing— my background is in supply chain management, so, okay, it's, it's very difficult to focus on only a single niche. And when we hire, even our own, in our own environment, we're hiring an account manager that is experienced in marketing who's dealing with a business owner operator who needs actually a full consultation. But if they had my experience, they would own their own business. I don't think we can, I don't think we can make these guys wildly successful with having a single piece of the pie. I think that the operational, financial, and HR elements have to be part of the equation. How do we get there?

Cameron Herold [00:28:58]:
And those could be partners that you plug in that help them. You know, again, at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we had what we called our Platinum Group or our President's Club. Of our franchisees. They were the franchisees that got to $1 million in revenue that we wanted to help get to $10 million in revenue. So we would coach them, we put higher, like better coaches in, we help them with vision, we help them with execution. We worked with them on different issues than we were working with the ones that were just trying to get to the million. They were both in the same space, but we worked with them on different things.

Jennifer Bagley [00:29:32]:
So here's my struggle. You are the first coach in the trades industry that knows anything about AI. So the coaching that I'm seeing that is available is so old and so archaic that from the stage, they're getting bad advice. From the coaches in the best practices group, they're getting bad advice. I mean, think about a best practice group that holds an event. What they're looking for is what speakers will pay them to get on stage to pitch whatever message, not are they the right speaker? To deliver the correct message to help these guys grow. When they're bringing on their vendors and they're filling their floor with vendors, what they're looking for is sponsorships. They're looking for cash money.

Jennifer Bagley [00:30:15]:
They're not looking for the best players, the validated players, to go get a booth. So these guys are filled with twice a year back-to-back-to-back events of experts and gurus and trainers and coaches and vendors that are technically just a a golden egg.

Cameron Herold [00:30:34]:
Well, this is why, this is why I tell every entrepreneur that they should be in at least 2 mastermind groups. One that is in their industry so that they can get the best practices from their industry. But if that's the only mastermind they're in, it becomes an echo chamber. It's like a Dealer 20 group in the car industry. You hang out with these other 20 car dealers, but all you're hearing is about from the car dealers. But then if you join the Genius Network, or if you join Baby Bathwater, if you join Mastermind Talks, you join YPO or Vistage all of a sudden you're around other entrepreneurs from other industries talking about problems. And then it's ideas having sex. I take an idea from a multi-chain dental office and I take an idea from a car dealer and I take an idea from a digital marketing agency.

Cameron Herold [00:31:17]:
And now those three ideas have a little idea baby. And that's exactly what I need for my HVAC company. But if I'm only going to HVAC conferences, I'm only going to hear HVAC things. And then I also think the leader needs to also get their COO to join things like the CEO Alliance. Get your marketing person to go to things like Unbound. Like, put your people into events so that they start building connections and they start getting ideas from different industries as well. And then all— but, but that's becoming a real learning organization versus just sticking day to day and trying harder. So many entrepreneurs are like a fly banging their head on the window, and they're going to try hard until they get out the window, but they end up dead on the windowsill.

Jennifer Bagley [00:32:01]:
You're defining literally the marketing space in the trades. This is why I've never participated in any marketing group activity, club, networking, anything in the trades, because they're all literally living in an echo chamber. They're all practicing the exact same thing. Doing— they're all building WordPress website, high code, tons of plugins, shitty content, one blog post a week, and wondering why they're not getting results. But they only hang out together in the environments I live in. When I go to a marketing event in the real estate industry or in the medical industry, which I'm speaking at in a couple of weeks, or in the technology space, they would shudder at what's being done in the trades industry. Shudder.

Cameron Herold [00:32:45]:
And they would learn too. They would also see something in the trade space and they would pull that into their business, right? I think it's why Tommy Mello had someone like me coaching him. He used to get coached by Dan Martell. He was a member of the Genius Network. He was a member of Vistage. Like, he's spending time in these other groups. He has his COO, Luke, as a part of my COO Alliance. He has 30 of his managers going through my Invest in Your Leaders training, the online course.

Cameron Herold [00:33:12]:
It's, it's all— it's a bit of everything and a bit of both. And then on the— again, on the AI stuff, it's— look, I think it's looking for the AI systems that you can put in place quickly that don't take a lot of people, time, or money that will help you drive revenue and increase your gross margins. And if you just focus on that flywheel for a while, all of a sudden you'll have more revenue and more gross margins. And then you can put systems in place for optimizing and automating all the other stuff later. Right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:33:41]:
100%. You could— they could nail right now. Right now they could check off marketing automation, fully AI-enabled web marketing, digital organic content, We produce a million pages of content a day now with 47 people. And the content is significantly better than anything you could get out of Bob. I'm just saying.

Cameron Herold [00:34:02]:
Yeah, for sure. And they're not doing that. And then at the same time, I'll bet you everyone listening right now does not have an automated system in place to ask every single customer for a Google review. And that literally just getting more and more Google reviews is going to be like a satellite that you launch that stays in orbit forever. I had a company in Scottsdale called Redirect Health. They were doing hundreds of clients a day through their locations. They had zero Google reviews. I pushed them to do it, and now they're at something like 3,000 or 4,000 Google reviews.

Cameron Herold [00:34:36]:
But now anyone who looks up Redirect Health, they're like, oh, of course I'll go there. Look how many Google reviews they've got.

Jennifer Bagley [00:34:41]:
That was one of the first— that was one of the first things we built. It was a platform called AI Local, and not only did it automate getting the Google reviews, it writes the review for the consumer. Consumer. So they click, copy, paste, and post. So like, amazing, the level of little tiny intricacies you can get with AI automations like that.

Cameron Herold [00:35:00]:
Like, yes, and that's something— that system everyone should use because it drives revenue. And if you've got rep— like, and, and Redirect Health is 4,084 Google reviews, so they win. Like, if you look up anyone in their industry, they win, right? So, but again, that's where I would have everyone start. And I would be looking at, again, the gold, silver, and bronze. What are the systems that can put in place for everyone in the home services space to automate some of the stuff using AI that gets them to bronze. And then let's go back and fix all the other shit on site with customer and employees and having no— don't have any jerks and don't have employees coming in who smoke. Okay, we're good there. Now let's go to silver.

Cameron Herold [00:35:41]:
Okay, we've grown you here. Now let's go back and fix that other shit internally. Like, do you have the good leaders and do they like— you know what I mean? It's like two steps forward, one step back, two step forward, one step back. But any entrepreneur that sits down right now and goes, yeah, it's not going to change my business, you're out of business. Done. Because someone like— you might as well start teaching your children— leverage AI and they'll eat your lunch.

Jennifer Bagley [00:36:04]:
You literally might as well start teaching your children and your grandchildren how to whittle wood and make jam because you are freaking toast. Not just toast in the trades, toast in life.

Cameron Herold [00:36:14]:
And I'm like you, I learned about ChatGPT from my son. He was in second year university and he showed me how he was writing his exams. I'm like, What the fuck? This is so cool.

Jennifer Bagley [00:36:22]:
Oh shit, it's gonna change everything. Yeah, I came back like the Wicked Witch of the West, man. My poor team didn't know what the hell I was like. We're no longer building in WordPress, we're testing every single application. We're going to identify the platform that has the lowest code, fastest load time, least tokens. We're going to freaking figure out how to deliver content. A website's not going to be a website anymore, it's going to be a little avatar. It's going to be a content distribution center and every human is going to be utilizing an AI assistant to be able to do all of their heavy lifting.

Jennifer Bagley [00:36:52]:
And we need to prep for that right freaking now. And my poor team was like, you crazy bitch.

Cameron Herold [00:36:56]:
You know what? You actually said something right when we were starting that I wanted to double-click on, and it was that you used to have 320 employees and you're down to 47. So often I hear entrepreneurs saying, oh, I have a goal to get to 80 employees or I have a goal to get to 100.

Jennifer Bagley [00:37:09]:
I'm like, tiny team, baby, tiny team.

Cameron Herold [00:37:12]:
I'm like, you never— you should never have a goal to have more people. People are a pain in the ass. People are problems. People are harder. Your goal should be more revenue per employee, most gross margin per employee, and then decreasing your payroll as a percentage of revenue. But you should be looking to get more labor efficiency as you scale, not to add more people. And then the other one is, if we know, and we're certainly hearing this, that AI is going to replace everyone, right, or every job, one of our core jobs as a leader is to go back down to Maslow's hierarchy of needs and solve the second layer of safety and security and make sure that our employees know that they're safe as long as they are always trying to get better with AI as well. They're safe as long as they live core values.

Cameron Herold [00:37:59]:
They're safe as long as they get along with everybody. But they're not safe if they don't deliver results. They're not safe if they don't work within a meritocracy. They're not safe if they don't start leveraging AI and trying to and learn then yes, they will get replaced. But that's the— and those are the people I care about, are the ones that are showing up that way. I'll love bomb them and make sure they feel safe and secure.

Jennifer Bagley [00:38:23]:
Every single human in our company was given an opportunity. Everyone was given a silver platter, and it was saying, I want all in or not in. There is no room for one foot in and one foot out. That will not exist in this business. And you see the 40 5, 47, however many, uh, after Friday that chose to go all in, but it definitely wasn't everybody by any means. I mean, even to this day, the last huddle we had, um, this was yesterday or the day before, our CTO's response was, this may be your job description for the next 48 hours until it's not, and you need to be ready to identify what is needed within the business and raise your fricking hand and be prepped and ready to be able to accomplish that because we're automating every single role, every single piece. There are plenty of areas for people to play heavy, heavy value, but it can't be standard account management. Like we've automated the majority of it.

Jennifer Bagley [00:39:22]:
Now we need to see elevated. So now we're going to have to learn operations and learn finance and learn business and be able to provide input and advice that's more than just marketing. Like we have to be able to level up.

Cameron Herold [00:39:33]:
Yeah. And that has to be in your job postings and job descriptions so that you scare the shit out of about 30 or 40% of the people. Like, I don't want everybody to apply.

Jennifer Bagley [00:39:41]:
I don't want average.

Cameron Herold [00:39:43]:
I only want the people who are like, fuck yeah, I want into a culture like that. I want bob and weave. I want fast paced. Like then. So but make sure that you show them that on the upside and then make sure again that you get them to open their laptop and show you how they're currently using tech. How they're currently using AI in any way to at least get the people that are raising the bar.

Jennifer Bagley [00:40:03]:
Oh, you'll like this one. So this is a recent change that we made. So we have a set of autonomous agents that entire job, they have all technical skills. So one is really good at SEO, one's really good at data analysis, another one's really good at presentation, another one's really good at sales skills, presentation skills, management skills. So we have all these different really highly trained experts. AI agents. So we have removed our traditional management structure and traditional review structure, and now we have a feedback mechanism where the more that an employee leverages the AI agents to ask for input, either pre-planning for what they're going to do or what they already did, get feedback. RAI now at the end of the month sends us a, sends us a summary and says, here's your entire team, here's how much they've utilized the system, these were the core areas they needed to work on.

Jennifer Bagley [00:40:55]:
This is their improvement since the last time they gave them impact. And that's funny because each of the agents, if you need like a soft, like, I'll tell you what you did first, did good first, it'll be that real, like, make you feel good first and then it'll kind of lean in. And then I have the one that's a complete asshole that's like, you spent 23 minutes talking about AI. The client tried to redirect you 3 times. That should have been a 2-minute conversation. Get your shit together on the next one. Listen to client cues.

Cameron Herold [00:41:22]:
It's freaking awesome.

Jennifer Bagley [00:41:24]:
So now our entire review process has zero bias and it's every day.

Cameron Herold [00:41:30]:
And as good as that system could be for all clients, I think that's a system that only gets put in place for silver. Like, because, because the ones that aren't yet at bronze, it's going to overcomplicate, it's going to overwhelm. Like, there's certain things that would be nice for people to know, like I'm doing a lot of, um, my wife and I are doing a lot of, of training in the area of sex right now. Like, we're going, we're working with, with, like, we're going to events and to groups and working with coaches, and we're really pushing the boundaries on sexual growth, doing stuff around tantra. And so, but unless you know how to be like a basic love, like, you don't want to teach somebody who's never had sex how to have tantric sex, do you know? Like, It's like you can't take a 16-year-old and start talking to them. You know what I mean? Like, you can't take a 16-year-old and teach them about stuff that they don't even know the basics yet of the birds. And like, they need to understand how to at least— anyway, like, that's the same within business. There's so many things we could be teaching people, but if we give them the wrong stuff, they're never going to focus on the right stuff.

Jennifer Bagley [00:42:39]:
I could have never implemented this a year ago.

Cameron Herold [00:42:42]:
Correct. And so trying to finish these things, trying to teach these things to your clients, I would be saying, by the way, we have some other shit that when you get through Bronze, we'll show you what those are. Right now we're not even going to tell you, or here's what they are, but I'm not going to teach you. You don't get to learn that until you learn these. And I think the, the, the, um, what ends up happening when we know all these things is we want to show them to everybody But it's too overwhelming, so they don't focus on the basics.

Jennifer Bagley [00:43:11]:
Oh yeah. I mean, there's 101 reasons why I would not give this to— I don't, I don't know if I have a client that I would give these little autonomous brats to, right? Because they don't understand like what a SOL MD file is and what a Markdown file is.

Cameron Herold [00:43:27]:
They need to understand how to inject and train and so forth, an AI agent, how to prep their But they should all, but every one of them should have an AI tool to help them get more Google reviews. All of them.

Jennifer Bagley [00:43:39]:
Yes.

Cameron Herold [00:43:40]:
Yeah.

Jennifer Bagley [00:43:41]:
Yeah.

Cameron Herold [00:43:42]:
But if they're not, if they're not using that, you're not going to give them the next layer of tools. And I think if you structured your content that way, that there's like all of these levels they can move through, it's kind of like Landmark or, um, even, even the, like any, and there's, there's any of the cults that like they have like You have to learn module 1 and prove, and then you're allowed to go learn module 2, and then you can prove, like, kind of stepping them through that way.

Jennifer Bagley [00:44:05]:
Yeah.

Cameron Herold [00:44:06]:
Or like the education system. Like, I would love to be able to teach people how to multiply matrices, but I should probably talk to them about how to do the basic multiplication and addition and subtraction, right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:44:17]:
Yeah. We created this group called Just Start AI, which is kind of our petri dish for that, because I wanted to see how many of our clients would independently come to training and learn how to prompt, what a skill was. The difference between the different LLMs. But man, it's the wild, wild west out there. Then all it takes is a Facebook post that's from some Yahoo on stage that says install OpenCall, buy a Mac Mini, give it your API keys.

Cameron Herold [00:44:48]:
It's overwhelming even for people in the technology sector. There's so much coming and that's the problem is we get distracted with the big shiny object of all the stuff that could be, and we're not doing the basic things that we should be doing.

Jennifer Bagley [00:45:02]:
100%.

Cameron Herold [00:45:04]:
Like you mentioned, people's websites not set up, optimized for—

Jennifer Bagley [00:45:08]:
are you running paid ads? Your website looks like shit, and your content literally makes you look like—

Cameron Herold [00:45:14]:
like, I, I found out that I had a couple of, um, bot crawlers that we were blocking. We were trying to block all the bots because we didn't want them to— well, a couple of them were the bots that were crawling our website for Gemini, and a couple Like, so we had the wrong bots being blocked.

Jennifer Bagley [00:45:29]:
I'll give you a list if you want them. I have a perfect, perfect LLM file, llm.txt, or llm-full.txt and a robots file. They're perfect.

Cameron Herold [00:45:39]:
That'd be great.

Jennifer Bagley [00:45:39]:
I'll get you afterwards.

Cameron Herold [00:45:41]:
And that's probably a bronze level thing that you help all companies do, right? And then once you've crossed off, here are the 20 things that you do at bronze. Oh, now you've graduated, you go to silver. Silver costs more and you're qualified to get to silver because you're doing those basics.

Jennifer Bagley [00:45:58]:
Yeah. And you have a different level of account manager and coach and everything else.

Cameron Herold [00:46:02]:
And be okay with some of the— you know what, like I had—

Jennifer Bagley [00:46:05]:
I never— I have zero clients that come in ready for any level than the basic floor. 100% of the prospects, regardless of size, they could be doing $20 million, they could be doing $50 million, they could be doing $5 million. 100% are coming across our desk as the floor.

Cameron Herold [00:46:23]:
They might go to bronze really quickly, and then like a Tommy Mello's company will probably go to bronze in a month, silver in a month, and then start working to gold. It might take somebody else a full year to get to the end of bronze. That's okay.

Jennifer Bagley [00:46:35]:
Even Tommy Mello is still sitting in a WordPress website with content that needs a lot of work, and no, he's still got—

Cameron Herold [00:46:41]:
he's still got his trucks parked in his parking lot. It's crazy town.

Jennifer Bagley [00:46:45]:
I'm just saying, unfortunately, friendships and connections, I'm sure, cause the challenges on making decisions sometimes.

Cameron Herold [00:46:57]:
Yeah, sometimes people get stuck on— and they also, because it's overwhelming, they don't really know where to go, right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:47:03]:
Yeah, this is— and this is, this is new.

Cameron Herold [00:47:07]:
There's, you know, it's like, it's like, it's like never seen before. Oh, it's like, it's like asking people for investment advice. Like, I, I've been always been obsessed with investing. I've done very well with investing over the last 44 years. And I had a friend the other day tell me he's investing in corn futures. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, I'm not even like going to talk to you. You're so off the radar of what I invest in, right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:47:33]:
I can look up corn futures.

Cameron Herold [00:47:36]:
Yeah, but his opinion, his opinion could, could be right, but it's also over overwhelmingly distracting from, I think I'll just keep buying Amazon and Microsoft and Google and Apple.

Jennifer Bagley [00:47:45]:
Microsoft and Tesla and Google and Apple.

Cameron Herold [00:47:49]:
But I've been buying Amazon stock every 1 to 2 months for 22 years.

Jennifer Bagley [00:47:53]:
Oh, yes. That's my baby. Microsoft is my steady Eddie.

Cameron Herold [00:47:57]:
Microsoft forever. Apple forever. Google forever. Ever and ever and ever.

Jennifer Bagley [00:48:01]:
Google forever. Are you on Nvidia or no?

Cameron Herold [00:48:04]:
Yeah, I've been Nvidia for 6 years now. My son actually got me into Nvidia just over 6 years ago. Because he was— he knew it was a gaming chip. So, and I can show you the dates we started buying. Pardon me?

Jennifer Bagley [00:48:15]:
Exactly the same. They made me also invest in the Take-Two because of a new game that was coming out, um, Grand Theft Auto. So they had me invest a year in advance of that one as well. What about Plant Tire?

Cameron Herold [00:48:28]:
No, I have my 10 core stocks that I always buy, and then I've been buying Bitcoin every month for 9 years. I've been buying Bitcoin since 2017, every single month. Yep, same, on autopilot. Really freaked out. I was talking about Bitcoin in 2014.

Jennifer Bagley [00:48:42]:
But again, a little, uh, Doge and Shiba though. I don't know what it is, and I know better than that. I know better than that, but I do have those on autopilot for whatever random reason. 50 years from now, some crazy AMD thing goes on.

Cameron Herold [00:48:57]:
I just don't— I just— but again, that's like, again, with AI It's like, oh, I just still want to play with these tools. Cool. But do you have these things automated? Yeah. Right. Unless you're— so like, you can play with those if you want to, but are you doing the core basics of investing? You can play with some cool— like, I have an AI avatar of me that, that people can ask me anything, and it has all my books, videos, podcasts, whatever. It's cool, but it's not the core thing I should have been working on a year ago with AI.

Jennifer Bagley [00:49:26]:
Yeah, 100%.

Cameron Herold [00:49:27]:
It was a distraction.

Jennifer Bagley [00:49:29]:
Right now it's everything's so backwards. I, I, I probably 100 companies have came to us in the last 30 days that are buying AI conversion systems on websites that have no traffic. You got to do the right things in the right order at the right time. Why are you buying? Because they said this will help you get more business? No, it'll help you convert more business. You need visibility and traffic first. Just, just, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye. The list is long.

Cameron Herold [00:49:59]:
Well, and if we can, if you can simplify that stuff for the businesses, I think that, I think there is a model for people to know, here's the basics, the bronze, silver, gold, do these things, go to the next level, do these things. And then getting companies like yours to help them, that's where most will scale.

Jennifer Bagley [00:50:16]:
I'm going to feed the transcripts of this entire podcast to my little AI agent named Groot and Sarge. And I'm going to let them build it for me when I get off this call. It will be done by 1:30.

Cameron Herold [00:50:29]:
I would love to see you. I'd love to see what you come up with with that because I'd be really curious how, how it implements. It's very similar again to the stuff that Alex Hormozi tripped over with Gym Launch 10 years ago was you can help everybody fill with leads, but if you can't get those leads to join, if you can't make sure those people are happy, if they don't meet other friends at your gym and don't get progress at the gym and they don't know what exercise to use at your gym, You're going to have churn and then you're going to go back saying you need more leads. You never needed any more leads. You needed the other systems as well.

Jennifer Bagley [00:51:01]:
And the predecessor is human beings in the middle, which that is my struggle in my own business. If I get real pissed at a human for not delivering, trust me, I will figure out how to automate that single thing.

Cameron Herold [00:51:14]:
Well, and then that's why I go back to my online course, Invest in Your Leaders, is it's the soft skills that anyone managing people needs to be good at. Can we be better at coaching people? Can we be better at delegating? Can we be better at running one-on-one meetings? Can we be better at classroom teaching? Can we be better at managing conflict? Can we be better at interviewing and hiring and onboarding and running meetings? If we're not good at those soft skills of leadership, we're always going to be bumping back into those people issues.

Jennifer Bagley [00:51:42]:
Okay, so we're getting close to the top of the hour. Yeah, this has been the best interview I've ever done. I've appreciated my time with you more than any other human I've ever had on the show. Noah, No offense, do not take it personal. These are just facts. Both can be true.

Cameron Herold [00:51:57]:
Okay.

Jennifer Bagley [00:51:58]:
Um, however, how do people get involved with you? I mean, right now you've, you've got better answers than anyone I've ever, ever interviewed in this space. So what, what are the options for them to be able to work with you, get on your list?

Cameron Herold [00:52:16]:
Yeah, easiest way to find me is cameronherold.com. So it's cameronherold and then h-e-r-o-l-d.com. It has links to all of my books, my Second Command podcast, my COO Alliance where you plug your COO in, has links to my Invest in Your Leaders training. It's all there.

Jennifer Bagley [00:52:33]:
All right, you guys have the link. What about how do they get access to the AI avatar that can, I'm sure, just make it so you don't have to trade time for money?

Cameron Herold [00:52:41]:
If they go to askcameron.ai, askcameron.ai, it's free. They can ask me anything. It has all of my content, all of my books, everything is there that they can use.

Jennifer Bagley [00:52:53]:
Dude, you're amazing.

Cameron Herold [00:52:54]:
Thank you.

Jennifer Bagley [00:52:55]:
You make my heart feel good.

Cameron Herold [00:52:57]:
I've all— this is— I've always— my core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their vision come true. That's why I've always done what I've done.

Jennifer Bagley [00:53:04]:
And are there, are there ways, um, groups they can join where there's either one-on-one or one-to-many? Do you have—

Cameron Herold [00:53:11]:
yeah, I have, I have a group coaching model that I do, but I, I try I don't really talk about it much because I'm— my core focus is growing the COO Alliance, which is a mastermind community for the second in command of companies. So anyone in your network that does $2 million to $200 million, put their COO or VP Ops into the COO Alliance. That's one for sure. I selectively coach entrepreneurs one-on-one, but I only do 6 or 7 concurrently. I used to do 20 every year, and I just have moved away from that because it's I've been coaching people for too long for it to be fun. But if they're usually in the kind of $30 to $50 million range, that's a good size for me to start coaching.

Jennifer Bagley [00:53:53]:
I love that. So anybody that is on here— oh, go ahead.

Cameron Herold [00:53:57]:
Well, we're going to— yeah, and then the last one is that Invest in Your Leaders. If they go to investinyourleaders.com, that website has the core 12 skills that I trained Kimbal Musk in, that I trained Tommy Mellow in. Those are the core leadership skills that anybody managing people needs to be really good at. And most people have never been trained in. You know, like, as a classic example, I talked to an entrepreneur recently and I said, how many people have you ever hired? He's like, oh, 70 or 80. I said, how much training have you had on interviewing? He goes, none, but I've interviewed hundreds of people using my spidey senses. I'm like, maybe you've done it wrong every time. And he was like, oh shit, like It never even occurred to him that he was just doing what he's always done.

Cameron Herold [00:54:39]:
But maybe there was a better way, right? Yeah.

Jennifer Bagley [00:54:42]:
These are these blind spots. If uncovered, can change your life.

Cameron Herold [00:54:45]:
Huge.

Jennifer Bagley [00:54:48]:
My hope for everyone that has joined today is that you've had many lightbulb moments, that whatever your current wiring and programming is, you've just been presented with new information that hopefully can change your mind. If anything, at least open it up to seek more information. I think the number one skill you can have right now is curiosity, and this is a really good call for that. Like, we just listed off 3 websites. I would not do anything else for the next 30 minutes except go open up each one of those 3 websites. You star those babies. You can do this in 5 minutes right now. Go open up each one of those websites Star it, put it in your little unorganized, which you need to organize bookmark list, the little folder that says VIP, and bookmark it right next to Catalyst for the Trades podcast.

Jennifer Bagley [00:55:43]:
Bookmark it and then go to your calendar and time block time to spend on one of those websites. Please do that in the next 30 minutes.

Cameron Herold [00:55:53]:
You just said, like you just said, the biggest priority is to be curious. And I was waiting to say yes, and time management, priority management. Because all that curiosity can be so distracting. But if you're just really good at time management but you're not working on the right things— I mean, it's a blend of those two things.

Jennifer Bagley [00:56:10]:
Yes, right? Yes. This is the system: without clarity, you cannot focus. Without focus, you cannot execute. If you do not execute, you will not effing win, right?

Cameron Herold [00:56:20]:
And then delegating everything except genius so that you're working on the shit that you're really good at and you love to do. And then coaching and growing people so they're doing the same stuff.

Jennifer Bagley [00:56:27]:
100%. Clarity means a lot. Clarity means a lot, a lot. Be curious, make decisions faster, then you can focus, then execute, then start back and do it again.

Cameron Herold [00:56:38]:
Like, let me give you one last thing before we wrap, and then also to remember that none of this shit actually matters because we're all going to die. And make sure that we love bomb our people along the way because that's actually what matters. Let's really love bomb our employees and our customers and take care of each other. Because we're all just walking each other home.

Jennifer Bagley [00:56:57]:
Yeah, 100%. You guys, this next 5 years is going to be a doozy. Buckle up, buttercup.

Cameron Herold [00:57:06]:
Thanks, Jennifer.

Jennifer Bagley [00:57:08]:
Cameron, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Thanks, everybody, for joining today. You guys, as always, please share, like, post, comment. If you want to have Cameron back on, I vote yes. Send him messages. Let us know. I would love to have you back on any time.

Jennifer Bagley [00:57:22]:
If you're bored and you have an hour and you want to spit out some incredible genius, you are welcome to this show. Any day, anytime. You could be a regular.

Cameron Herold [00:57:29]:
Be great. And if we want to do a live Q&A, we can do that too. If we want to do a Q&A with your list and have them show up and ask me questions, we can do a fireside chat with Q&A even.

Jennifer Bagley [00:57:37]:
Uh, Krista, book it! Let's go. It'll be on the calendar in the next hour. All right, you guys, thanks. Peace out. Have a good one.

Cameron Herold [00:57:46]:
Ciao. Thank you.