Douglas Goldstein: Cameron Herald has a TED Talk called Teaching Kids Financial Literacy
through Entrepreneurship.
He is one of the most successful entrepreneurs having started what you probably heard of
which is 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
He also wrote the book called Double Double.
You are encouraging people to encourage their kids to be entrepreneurs instead of as a lot
of people say getting a real job.
Why is that?
Cameron Herold: I just notice when I was growing up that being an entrepreneur was not actually
a job that a lot of parents would push in front of their children.
You know in the last 15 or 20 years to the internet and a lot of publicity has become
more of a cool education experience, so that’s a lot of kids in the education system who
had entrepreneurial traits that weren’t necessarily pushed towards entrepreneurship,
they were tended to push towards medication to become more like the norm and I think you
can actually spot a lot of entrepreneurial traits in kids then nurture then versus saying
there’s something wrong with them.
That was really the impetus for the TED talk.
Douglas Goldstein: I want to know that you didn’t challenge me on my referring to either
being an entrepreneur or getting a real job.
Is that because you agree with that distinction?
Cameron Herold: I think in a lot of ways, that entrepreneurship is a real job.
Entrepreneurship is you know adding jobs to the economy, entrepreneurship is really just
as good as being a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist or you know electrician or a movie star and
athlete but society doesn’t necessarily push kids along that path and I think we should
hold it up in that same scheme.
I’m not saying that everyone should be an entrepreneur but I think there’s an awful
lot of kids out there that show those entrepreneurial traits or that we can actually nurture some
entrepreneurial skills in kids to help them become more entrepreneurial either in their
careers and in fact be an entrepreneur themselves.
Douglas Goldstein: So in other words when you said in your career, someone could be
a dentist or a lawyer but be an entrepreneur in a way that he or she runs practice?
Cameron Herold: Exactly, yeah.
I actually have a client that I coach.
I coach CEOs all over the world and one of my clients own the chain of dental locations
and he has about 18 or 19 dental offices that he owns and operates and he’s a dentist
by trade, that was what he went to school for, but he was much more entrepreneurial.
I used to laugh about the fact that he really struggled with dentistry, he came out as a
pretty good dentist but never the top of his class and that was because he was much more
of an entrepreneur.
So he was able to leverage that and I think a lot of people get stuck not knowing that
they have those entrepreneurial skills and that they can do something with it beyond
just what their class that they trained in.
Douglas Goldstein: Do you think you could actually train someone to be an entrepreneur,
are there classes kids should be taking or is it just go out and give it a shot?
Cameron Herold: It could have been both.
I think it’s nurture and nature.
Sometimes you’re born with a lot of those entrepreneurial traits and I think that’s
what parents need to keep an eye open for, but then yes, you can actually train the skills,
the classic skills that you need to be entrepreneurial and there are more and more courses being
added to the curriculums both in high schools, in grade schools and in universities now that
teach entrepreneurship.
I also think that you can learn a lot of the entrepreneurial skills almost like apprentice
and like being around other businesses so you know kids go off and go and work for small,
young entrepreneurial start-ups and they would gain a lot of the entrepreneurial skills just
from being in that environment versus going and sitting in the classroom.
Kids can learn all kinds of ways online, books, courses or by.
Douglas Goldstein: One of the fears that people have if you follow the entrepreneurial route
is you will go broke.
Is it riskier to be an entrepreneur or to work for a company?
Cameron Herold: I think it’s riskier to work for a company because at the end of the
day somebody can walk up to you on Monday morning and say “Oh by the way, you know
we are reducing our company size” or “We are changing direction” or “We don’t
like you anymore” or you know what have you, whereas when you are an entrepreneur
you are in complete control, you know you are in control of you own destiny.
I think a lot of people from the other side can look at an entrepreneur and think it’s
risky, but it’s because they don’t really understand that the entrepreneur has already
done enough.
You know we figured out how to make it work, we understand our model, we understand where
to make money along the way so it’s more of a calculated risk.
Much like you know jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, you should calculate the
risk or somebody who is very, very fearful might think it’s crazy, there’s thousands
and thousands and thousands of people parachuting every day and I’m sure very many dime.
Douglas Goldstein: Why do you think that someone who focuses on entrepreneurship might just
be better at handling money?
Cameron Herold: A lot of kids are not actually good at handling the money side of things.
In fact, I’m you know probably average at the financial side of things but I recognized
early on that I could focus on my strengths and I could actually hire a good accountants,
you know we don’t need to be great and hilarious and unlike the school system which the kid
got to be good in every subject and were creative in every subject and were competitive against
everyone else in his ability to memorize every subject, you know entrepreneurship is all
about surrounding yourself of best people in hiring experts so that you could focus
on your areas of genius and I always say you delegate everything except genius.
So if a kid is really strong in sales and marketing and leadership, that’s what they
should focus on and they should hire people or outsource people to run all the other aspects
of their job, the IT, the finance, you know operational sides.
You might have somebody who’s very strong on the financial side of the business and
maybe they hire somebody to run the sales and marketing because they’re more inward
focused.
So it’s not actually true.
You don’t need to be good in the finance side.
Those people are readily available.
Douglas Goldstein: So let’s say you wanted to teach your kids some basics about money
and a lot of people say “Okay I’ll give you an allowance once a week” and you know,
you can handle it in a certain way.
What’s your take on allowance?
Cameron Herold: I don’t like allowances as much as giving kids the opportunity to
spot opportunities around the home or a city to make money and then helping them with that
and negotiating with them.
I think a regular weekly allowance is teaching the kids to expect a regular weekly pay check
and then we end up managing them like managing employees, you know trying to hold them accountable
to do those tasks and they end up trying to do the minimal amount of work to get that
regular pay check.
What I’d rather do is [host] a whole bunch of chores that need to get done around the
house, get the kids to recognize there’s always 20 or 30 things that needed to get
done and they can actually go and do those things and negotiate a fee for that.
So maybe it’s doing the laundry or raking the leaves or shovelling the snow or picking
up around the kitchen or doing whatever, those chores can all be worth something, taking
out the garbage, and then if they compete against each other you might have two or three
siblings that one of them is hungrier in spotting opportunities, they get the opportunity to
make money.
So you are teaching them to just follow opportunities, teaching them to negotiate, teaching them
to hustle, teaching them to work hard, teaching them to spill some of their time with opportunities
to make that money versus the regular pay check.
I also like to get to the financial side of things that when they make money, they really
have to save about half of their amount of money for housing and for their future rather
than just going off and spending it all in the next video game so I teach kids to spend
half of the money they get within their [own] account and half the money can be spent on
the things that they like.
Douglas Goldstein: I know that you have this concept, you referred to it as vivid vision,
can you tell us what’s that about and whether that’s also something that could be applied
in personal finance or is it only for CEOs?
Cameron Herold: Vivid vision can be applied to really any part of your life.
It can be applied to your personal finances, to your personal life itself, to your business.
The idea is essentially this: you lean out into the future as an individual or a business
owner and pretend that you are standing three years out from today, so let’s say it’s
December 31st, three years from now and you described every aspect of your business as
if you are standing in a finished state three years from now.
You describe what the company looks like, what the culture is like, describe how people
are living their core values, describe every business area as if you are kind of standing
in that business department talking to the employees, describe marketing and IT, talk
about what the customers are saying about you, what the employees are saying about you,
what the media is writing about you.
I cover it in pretty broad detail and I booked double, double in chapter one but the idea
is to describe in three or four pages in vivid detail what your company or personal life
looks like three years in the future so that when you share that document to everyone else,
they can see what you are building as well and they can help you reverse engineer it
and then really each sentence of that vivid vision is a finished state that you could
figure out one or two projects to make that sentence come true.
So if you are thinking about your financial literacy or your financial tradition, you’d
be describing kind of that finish state and reverse engineering that.
Douglas Goldstein: It sounds a lot like a financial plan we do for people, we normally
look further.
In other words, we’ll talk to someone about doing a retirement plan that could only come
into effect 10, 15, 20 years or more down the line but they still have to really have
a vision of what they want rather than someone coming in and just saying “Yeah, I want
to have a billion dollars” because that seems a little bit too amorphous.
Cameron Herold: I think that’s where a lot of people lose track is they often put the
big 20-year plan in place even for their company they have that came up with other, the big
20-year push of holding a big operation and being able to sell it, whatever it’s going
to be, but they forget that it’s really hard for everyone else to attach themselves
to a goal that is so far out there and that it’s much easier to get people to attach
themselves to a goal that is a little bit more proximal and three years tends to be
enough of a stretch that it gets people excited but it’s not so far out that it’s too
far out there, you know five years tends to be a little bit too far of a push.
I like to use the big 20-year retirement plan push in addition to the three-year push so
it gives them a big stretch they’re working towards and then the more finite goals that
they are breaking down.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people learn more about these ideas and the other ideas that
you’ve come up with?
Cameron Herold: They can go to the main TED website and they can see the TED talk and
just look up under my name Cameron Herold or my main website which is www.cameronherold.com,
it has all the tools that I talked about and my book Double Double is also available online.