Another way of putting it – Cameron Herold has made the world his home and he’s been wandering the globe backward with his wife – while working remotely and running a thriving enterprise.
Although Dubai has a special appeal for him.
“There are only a few entrepreneurial hubs right now – Portugal, Austin, Dubai. They feel like the Bay Area back in 1999. There are other benefits of Dubai. “I’m officially a resident there. No garbage, no stealing, no homeless everywhere. The tax situation beats the Canadian one and I only need to be here one day every six months.”
Best known as “The CEO Whisperer,” the COO of 1-800-Got-Junk during its dramatic rise and now a business growth guru, Herold has some harsh words for the West. It’s like what Ayn Rand predicted. They are driving out the entrepreneurs. We are seeing the fall of an empire right now. It’s adapt or die.”
Watch Cameron Herold at METAL
But Herold is not all doom and gloom. He is dedicated to the building of business communities bonded by a singular vision. “Our great grandparents built cities, societies and states. Now everyone’s just trying to extract from communities. For Gen Z, their big goal is to be an influencer. We have to bring back a sense of big vision.”
Herold is the author of several books, most notably the veritable bible of COO efficacy, The Second in Command and Vivid Vision: A Remarkable Tool For Aligning Your Business Around a Shared Vision of the Future.
“If you are building a business, you are in this together, which means you have to build a culture that inspires loyalty. To do that you need to focus your company around four things. First – your company’s vivid vision, and that means what we look, feel and act like in the future – if all your employees can see it, they get indoctrinated into the culture. Second – your core values. Nothing complex, just four or five phrases and you hire and fire based on that. Third – your core purpose, that’s your ‘why.’ And fourth – your BHAG, which is not just a number but that twenty to thirty-year march that seems impossible from the outside, but from the inside, very possible and it lights you up. At 1-800-Got-Junk, ours was to be a globally admired brand even though we were only 14 people when I started.”
Being an entrepreneur is hard, he says. “There’s no loyalty to companies any more – 6 months to 18 years is the average for young workers. So you have to be rigorous with these four principles if you want to keep your people. You’ve got to grow the skills of your employees. We understand the struggle because we’ve been through it. They don’t. I always share how hard my days have been to get here. I know my life looks cool, but it takes a long time to get to the night before you are an overnight success story!”
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