When your clients send you videos like this – Raving about your Culture – then you know it’s making a difference.
I’ve been coaching & mentoring the leadership team at EliteSEM for over a year now – and this is a video that one of their clients – Gary Vaynerchuk of Vayner Media & social media guru, made for them raving about their Search Engine Marketing services.
How strong is your culture ? Can you get clients sending you videos like this ?
When you get to a certain
point in the recruiting process, it makes sense to bring in other team members to interview prospective hires. They’ll be working with this new person, and it’s only fair they have a say on who it is.
Unfortunately, a lot of your rank and file employees likely lack interview experience. Letting them loose with no guidelines or training can make your organization seem amateurish to the applicant. Or even worse, an overzealous team member might cross some lines and end up infringing on the interviewee’s rights.
And if you’re this far along the recruiting process, you could scare off a strong candidate you were obviously coveting.
So I strongly advise you to everything in your power to make the process run as smoothly as possible. That means preparing your employees, setting guidelines and expectations and creating a comfortable environment.
Right off the bat, you need to lay out expectations for your employees. Remind them that this interview isn’t to check out the person’s qualifications or scrutinize their experience—you’ll spend plenty of time doing that. Instead, tell them to focus on cultural compatibility. Get them to touch on workflow processes, attitudes toward delegating heck, even things like lunch preferences. It might sound trivial, but this is the only chance they get to weed out people they might end up clashing with.
These days, it’s also a good idea to have your employees to do a little digging around on LinkedIn, FaceBook or Twitter to gain a more robust picture of the applicant.
Challenge your employees to find areas of concern during their ‘investigation’ and formulate questions that will address them. Things like how they’ll make up for lack of experience in certain areas, why they’ve changed jobs so often.
One little trick is to jot down questions on a copy of the resume as you go through this process, then go back and number them in the order you’ll ask. This ensures you have time to ask them all.
You also have to do everything you can to make the process as pain-free as possible. Chances are your employee will be almost as nervous as the applicant. It’s up to you to make everyone as relaxed as possible. If that means holding the interview in a coffee shop, so be it.
Of course, if you are hiring for a senior role, you might want to skip the Starbucks and use your office or the boardroom.
Involving your employees in the decision is an important step in this process. Sometimes you can become so enamored with a candidate’s education and experience that you’ll miss some serious personality shortcomings. Make no mistake, the people who would have to deal with this misfit every day will surely be the ones to take off your rose-colored glasses.
Just the other day I received a note from an 85 year old gentleman in the USA. It was about my TED Talk where I talk about looking for entrepreneurial traits in kids, and nurturing them to be entrepreneurial.
Here are a few of his points…
Those are the kinds of notes that make what I do for a living worth while… Touching the heart of an 85 year old – who now understands why his grandparents did what they did, to his father… WOW.
He wrote me again today and added to the story…
We NEED to remember – that entrepreneurial kids are NOT like the doctors and teachers who want us to ‘conform’. We are different. Nurture us. Don’t medicate us. Imagine if they’d told this gentleman’s father to sit still, pay attention, and put him on medication…
Please share my TED Talk. It’s making a difference.
Everyone in your company is bonkers. Including you. And the sooner you realize that the better.
You see, you can’t change everyone to be just like you. Nor do you want that. You want employees in your company to share the same core values. But core values are NOT the same as personality traits.
Get everyone on your management team, or in your business area, to do a personality profile each year. Something like Kolbe, Myers Briggs, DISC etc. Then share the results with each other to learn more about each other. And to learn how to work better with each other, while leveraging each others personality traits. Every year, do a different profile to continue to learn more about each other.
You’re ALL Bonkers. And you wouldn’t want it any other way.
For most companies, hiring a high-level PR team is expensive. Salaries can
range anywhere from $60,000 to $160,000 according to the PRSA Job Center. Of course that’s if you’re building a team based on a traditional model that has layers of management and comfy salaries for what is often average output.
Personally, I don’t like traditional PR teams. They’re often staffed by writers (or people who want to be writers) who couldn’t sell a steak to a starving man. They cost time and money, and they spend most of it writing press releases that no one will ever see.
Rather than build a traditional PR team, I’ve spent the last twenty years building PR teams that work like sales teams. And instead of giving comfy salaries based on entitlement and seniority, I’ve paid my PR team members just like salespeople—with a modest base and a motivating commission structure.
The result is that I end up paying for results, which is my favorite thing to pay for.
The type of people to look for
From my experience, building the best in-house PR team means hiring junior-level salespeople who are just starting out. This group is looking to gain experience, work for a cool company, have flexible schedules, and so forth.
These types of people are hungry for experience and won’t have an entitlement mentality. They’ll understand the importance of performance and work hard to meet their goals.
What to pay
Here’s how I like to structure their pay. (Note: I’d even be fine with making the salary lower and the bonus amount higher once you know the rough numbers to expect.)
Salary: $40,000–$45,000 per year—this is as much as is needed.
Bonus: $500 per month ($6,000 annualized)—tied to the employee hitting five to eight stories a month. Don’t set the bar too low (or too high).
Special bonuses: I’ve had awesome success with putting in a special bonus program to focus the efforts on landing top media outlets. List in advance which key outlets you want free PR in:
• Top five TV stations
• Top five radio stations
• Top five magazines
• Top five newspapers
• Top five websites or blogs
For each outlet, identify how much you’re willing to pay extra for a full feature (i.e., a story about your business, with photo—not merely a brief mention in an article). This type of bonus, ranging from $250 to $1,000 per story, can generate some great large- scale coverage.
Keep ‘em focused
A word of caution: don’t let bonuses for major outlets take your employees’ eyes off the prize. You still want each member of the PR team to land five to eight stories a month. The last thing you need is for a PR person to spend all his or her time trying to “bag the elephant.”
This works
One year I set up a bonus structure like this for a five-person PR team. They landed nineteen of the twenty outlets we’d identified on the list, and they split the bonuses they earned as a team. Plus, they hit 90 percent of the month’s goals. Nice year.
The best part? I got this kind of output for a fraction of the cost that I would have spent building and paying a traditional PR team. It’s this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that will take your company to the next level.
I’ve worked with a lot of young, ambitious entrepreneurs in my time as a business coach and mentor. They are a diverse group, from tech savvy Silicon Valley insiders to master sommeliers. They’ve wanted a lot of different things, from more press to a better corporate culture. But underneath it all, they’ve all really wanted the same thing: to make more money.
It’s a universal desire, and one that I can help them achieve. But to get there, they have to prepare for fast growth. And they’ll never get there without a detailed vision of their future.
This is why I am such a proponent of creating a Vivid Vision (formerly Painted Picture). It’s a detailed, three to four page document that lays out a clear, logical vision of what your company will look like in three years.
When completed, it’s meant to be woven into your company’s culture, guiding your employees decision making and giving all involved clear goals to strive for.
Usually, creating Vivid Visions is a very involved process that can take as long as six months to get right. There’s a lot of back and forth between my clients and me. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to spend with each of you as you put together your own, but I can offer these tips that will help you get started down the right path in creating the very best Vivid Vision possible.
It’s important not to get caught up in the ‘how’ of things. Instead, dream big and worry about the ‘how’ later
You’ll need to be free of the day-to-day worries of running your business. You need freedom to visualize your future
Get out of your office and go somewhere inspiring where you can let your mind wander (I wrote the Vivid Vision for my business from the hammock in my backyard)
Turn off your computer. No matter how much willpower you have, the temptation of email or web surfing will be a distraction
Get out of your comfort zone, think out side the box—choose whatever cliché works for you. Just be creative, even outlandish. You’ll be amazed at what you can come up with. It’s a sure fire way to create a fun, dynamic vision you and your employees will love to strive for.
I’ve helped with dozens of Vivid Visions in my career, and the ones that really stand out in my mind share a few common traits. They forgo all the mind-numbing corporate double speak and restrictive, creativity-killing metrics and get right to the heart of the exercise:
“What is really possible for my company?”
Check out these advice where I talk in more detail about certain aspects of the Vivid Vision/Painted Picture process. You can also find a copy of my own Vivid Vision online at BackPocketCOO.com, To some, it is just a four page document. But to you, it very well may be the most important four pages you ever write. email me at Cameron@BackPocketCOO.com for coaching around doing your own.
There are really only 11 weeks left in the year, not 13…
We all know that meetings suck, right?
You hear it all the time. It’s the one thing that almost everyone in business can agree on.
Except it’s not actually true…
Meetings don’t suck.
We just suck at running meetings.
When done right, meetings not only work, they make people and companies better.
In Meetings Suck, world renowned business expert and growth guru Cameron Herold teaches you how to use focused, time effective meetings to help you and your company soar.
This book shows you immediately actionable, step-by-step systems that ensure that you and everyone in your organization improves your meetings, right away.
In the process, you’ll turn meetings that suck into meetings that work.
In life, we always hear about people who’ve made huge decisions from their gut – without data.Today, I want you to make a decision, not only from your gut, but also from some data. A decision that is only $12 per employee but will be priceless for your business.
Right now, your gut is telling you something is wrong with your company’s meetings. You KNOW everyone complains about meetings.
People HATE going to them, they HATE running them, and they really have NO idea which meetings are truly necessary but they hold meetings simply because they think that is what they SHOULD do.
Even some of the smartest CEOs in the world complain about meetings – Elon Musk publicly told employees at Tesla & SpaceX to walk out of meetings if they weren’t being run properly.
I sent Elon a message saying that wasn’t going to fix anything – the key is to fix the root of the problem – NOT continue to ignore why meetings suck.
A Meeting is – Any phone call, video call or occasion where 2 or more people meet to discuss or work-through office topics.
Most employees on average spend 1-2 hours per day in meetings.
And likely, none of those employees – front-line staff or leaders – have had any training on how to attend meetings or participate in them, LET ALONE How to RUN THEM.
Consider this…
If the Average employee spends just 1 Hour per day in meetings – that’s 1/8th of their time.
If the Average employee earns $50,000 per year.
And they’re spending 1/8th of their time in meetings, that means you’re paying $6,250 dollars per year for just ONE employee to attend meetings.
The reality is, employees spend 1/8th of their time – and 1/8th of your company’s payroll – doing something they have literally NO idea how to do.
The Reality is…
95% of employees are booking & leading meetings – and they have NEVER been trained on how to run them.
95% of employees have had NO training on how to show up and participate in the meetings they attend daily.
And 95% of employees and companies have no idea what meetings are even necessary to hold.
Meetings CAN be hugely effective – IF you know how to run them
Meetings don’t SUCK, we just SUCK at running meetings.
Investing $15 per employee – to help ensure the $50,000 a year you spend on them is an obvious and easy choice.
This could be the most impactful $15 you’ll ever spend and will save the company’s money, time and resources instantly.
Buying a copy of Meetings Suck for 100% of your employees and having them read it this month will have a huge impact on your company’s success.
Public relations has always been an essential part of doing business which is probably why you’re shelling out big money to an outside PR firm. But the truth is that you don’t need them. You already have all the necessary tools in-house to do as good a job as the so-called experts.
Cameron Herold and Adrian Salamunovic have taught thousands of company execs how to exploit free media coverage and ditch these expensive, often ineffective outsiders.
Cameron & Adrian have also built in-house PR teams, spent decades learning how to generate Free PR and how to leverage public relations to complement their sales and marketing strategy.
In Free PR, you’ll learn how the media world operates while you gain invaluable insider knowledge and actionable advice on how to:
Landing public relations coverage for yourself and your company is a powerful tool to help elevate your personal brand. PR is easier to generate than marketing, PR is easier to leverage than marketing and PR is more cost effective than marketing. In other words, Public Relations is more critical than ever in growing your brand and your business.
You’ve got more passion, commitment, a larger stake, and a deeper understanding of your business than any outside PR firm could ever have. So stop wasting money and take the reins yourself. Learn the secrets to landing TONS of Free PR for your company.
What they’re saying:
“I think PR is the core for promoting any business. Public relations acquires customers! That’s what’s cool about this book.”
– Kevin O’Leary, Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank
“The ultimate guidebook for those looking to get press, grow their brand, and get in front of the masses. Free PR is the roadmap you’ve been looking for.”
– Peter Shankman, Founder, Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
“Adrian and Cameron will show you the secrets of getting massive exposure for your business. This book is packed with actionable insights from two guys that actually know how to to do it.”
– Dan Martell, Serial Entrepreneur & Investor (Intercom.io, Unbounce)
“I told Cameron to write the book on generating free PR. I’m excited to see that he’s finally sharing his secrets with the world. This is a must read for any entrepreneurial company and marketing team.”
– Verne Harnish, Founder of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and author of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)
Many corporations have slick, flashy mission statements that ultimately do little to motivate employees and less to impress customers, investors, and partners.
But there is a way to share your excitement for the future of your company in a clear, compelling, and powerful way and entrepreneur and business growth expert Cameron Herold can show you how.
Vivid Vision is a revolutionary tool that will help owners, CEOs, and senior managers create inspirational, detailed, and actionable three-year mission statements for their companies. In this easy-to-follow guide, Herold walks organization leaders through the simple steps to creating their own Vivid Vision, from brainstorming to sharing the ideas to using the document to drive progress in the years to come.
By focusing on mapping out how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of business, without getting bogged down by data and numbers or how it will happen, Vivid Vision creates a holistic road map to success that will get all of your teammates passionate about the big picture.
Your company is your dream, one that you want to share with your staff, clients, and stakeholders. Vivid Vision is the tool you need to make that dream a reality.
A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth — while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers — from creating a vision for the company’s future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company — is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur’s company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold’s experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: How to design meetings for maximum efficiency; How to hire top-quality talent; How to grow in particularly tough markets; How to put together a board of advisors — even for a smaller company; How even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance.
Hal Elrod’sThe Miracle Morning has helped redefine the mornings and the lives of millions of readers since 2012. Since then, careers have been launched, goals have been met, and dreams have been realized, all through the power of the Miracle Morning’s six Life S.A.V.E.R.S.
Now The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs brings you these principles in a whole new light—alongside the Entrepreneurial Elevation Principles and the Entrepreneur’s Elevation Skills. These are essential skills that you need to create a successful business and personal life. Cameron Herold— Bestselling Author and a widely-respected expert on entrepreneurial mindset—brings his wisdom and insight to you using Hal Elrod’s powerful Miracle Morning framework.
The principles and skills you’ll find in this book will help you to channel your passion and achieve balance in a remarkable new way. – Learn why mornings matter more than you think – Learn how to master your own self-leadership and accelerate your personal development – Learn how to manage your energy—physical, mental, and emotional – Learn how to implement Hal Elrod’s invaluable Life S.A.V.E.R.S. in your daily routine – And much more… You’re already an entrepreneur. Now discover how to take your success to the next level by first taking yourself to the next level. The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs is your roadmap to masterfully building an empire with a powerful vision, utilizing your areas of personal genius, with the right team at your side.
A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth — while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers — from creating a vision for the company’s future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company — is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur’s company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold’s experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: How to design meetings for maximum efficiency; How to hire top-quality talent; How to grow in particularly tough markets; How to put together a board of advisors — even for a smaller company; How even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance.
