Cameron Herold Shares the Hiring Mistakes Costing Founders Millions

**Cameron Herold** (0:00)
Most people say, I've got A players. No, you've got B players, because the A players are working for Elon and for Google. For real, right? The A players are working for the best companies. We get all the Bs and Cs. I realized that if you get two A players and pay them $200,000 each, or you have six C players or B players and pay them $100,000 a year each, your two A's will destroy your six Cs or Bs. But you have to hire really, really good people and not just pay more for your Bs and Cs. I think a lot of people just pay too much.

**Brad Weimert** (0:26)
How you find those people and how you actually discern whether or not somebody that's just been overpaid forever. Because the world is full of executives that are hiding inside of a Fortune 500 company or been getting paid $300, $400, a million dollars a year.

**Cameron Herold** (0:41)
And they're shit.

**Brad Weimert** (0:41)
And they're shit. So how do you prevent that happening? How do you find the executive from a massive company that could actually work in a small company? How do you think about that?
Congrats on getting Beyond A Million. What got you here won't always get you there.
This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven-figure business and scale to eight, nine, and even 10 figures. I'm Brad Weimert, and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology, and wealth building, and you'll learn some of the specific tools, tactics, and strategies that are working today in those multi-million 8, 9, and 10-figure businesses. Life can get exciting Beyond A Million.

**Cameron Herold** (1:36)
I heard, I think it was the founder of Airbnb who said, you won't know it's an A player until you're sitting talking to them, and then you'll know what an A player really is. And I was like, oh, that's interesting, right?

**Brad Weimert** (1:49)
That's like a, you won't know you're in love until you're in love.

**Cameron Herold** (1:52)
Right, yeah, I guess. And I think Elon even said something about the only true A players are the ones that I'm learning something from in the interview.
Like when he's interviewing them and he's learning, he's like, that's an A.

**Brad Weimert** (2:03)
Mm-hmm, yeah, I've heard him say that. I've heard about his interviews, actually, from somebody that worked for him for a while. And he was like, it was weird. I didn't think we were in an interview initially.
And we were just talking. And then it went on for like three hours. It was going down like crazy rabbit holes about, and you know, Elon is so dynamic and knows so much about so much.

**Cameron Herold** (2:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Brad Weimert** (2:26)
And so he was like, what I found out was that he would go down to the end of the chain of his depth of understanding.
And if I knew more, that was the trigger. This was an interesting proposition.

**Cameron Herold** (2:39)
That's interesting.

**Brad Weimert** (2:40)
Yeah. I was actually talking to our internal recruiter today, and he was talking about a specific role, and we were talking about just sort of the dynamics of hiring, and somebody was missing a specific skill set. And I was like, no, no, no. If they had all of the skill sets, they'd be out doing their own shit. Or they would be working for Elon.
And what I said was, or they'd be making several million a year in a high-paid role or a high-profile role for one of the big companies.

**Cameron Herold** (3:07)
Yeah. You know, one other thing on hiring, I was speaking at an event in Dubai last year, came off the stage, I'm six foot four, and I'm talking to this guy who's taller, he's like six, seven.
I'm like, what do you do for fun? He's like, I play volleyball. I'm like, do you still play? He goes, yeah, I play pro beach volleyball. I'm like, holy shit. I said, I played in college for a bit, and I played on my team in high school. I said, if I had five of my guys from high school and he starts laughing, he goes, we would beat the six of you every game, two on six.

**Brad Weimert** (3:35)
Oh, wow.

**Cameron Herold** (3:36)
And I realized that if you get two A players and pay them $200,000 each, or you have six C players or B players and pay them $100,000 a year each, your two A's will destroy your six C's or B's.