How to Scale Your Consulting Business Beyond the Founder Growth Ceiling

There is a dangerous point in growing a business when you are making enough money to get comfortable, but not enough to truly scale. Cameron Hemphill has seen entrepreneurs get stuck there again and again. Instead of reinvesting to buy back their time, hire expertise, and build infrastructure, they protect their current income and unintentionally become the bottleneck.

Cameron is a consultant, operator, and investor who has worked with hundreds of businesses and built a highly specialized company serving more than 1,200 medical aesthetics practices before successfully exiting.

In this episode, you are going to discover why knowing your numbers may matter more than trusting your gut, how specialization can become a powerful competitive advantage, and why saying ‘no’ to the wrong opportunities is critical to building a scalable business. We also explore what AI means for consultants and why the people who combine technology with discipline, focus, and real-world expertise may have the biggest advantage going forward.

If you are looking to build a consulting business that can grow beyond you, this conversation will give you plenty to think about.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business.

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Cameron Hemphill is a visionary entrepreneur, consultant, and investor specializing in scaling medical aesthetics practices. As the founder of Growth99, he pioneered data-driven marketing strategies and automation, growing the firm to serve over 1,200 clinics before a successful private equity exit. With an extensive background in SaaS and CRM technology, Cameron now helps practice owners optimize profitability and achieve financial freedom. Known as “The Medical Millionaire,” he is a sought-after speaker dedicated to teaching disciplined business growth and wealth creation.

Connect with Cameron Hemphill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronhemphill/

Discover more about Cameron and his work: https://cameronhemphill.com/

Hey, Cameron, welcome.

Hey, Michael. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Yeah, it is great to have you here. So, let’s start off. I mean, you’ve worked with hundreds of businesses. I’m wondering what is one pattern, if you were to boil it down to one thing, that you feel really separates those that are able to scale from those that stay stuck?

Well, I think it depends on the lifecycle of when you’re trying to scale. Like, what you get to- what is the objective, what is the goal, right? So, anybody could start a business, they could grow it. I mean, shoot, five figures, six, seven. I think it kind of depends on what vertical you’re describing, but people can get stuck at any particular part of growing the business.

For me, we grow practices in the medical aesthetics and elective wellness space. So, when I look at it from a practice standpoint, a clinic, if I can just peg that specific vertical niche to your question, most of them get stuck at right at one and a half million. And here’s why: you have a provider that is marketable, that knows how to get patients, that is an entrepreneur that comes in and they take all the patients and they’re serving the patients. They come to find out every time they get a new patient, they just sold time. There’s only so much time in the day, and so they can only service so many patients. They’re terrified to hire, they’re terrified to fire themselves from administrative things, marketing objectives, and what happens is they want to keep everything to themselves. They have a really hard time really just firing themselves from objectives and bringing in other core talent to get them to the two million to three million. They don’t come from an entrepreneurial mind; they come from a clinical background and serving patients. So, it’s really hard to inject that business acumen into a clinic’s background.

Now, if I would say more broadly speaking, I think people just, they’re terrified. Like, they don’t believe in themselves and maybe they’re not looking at capital exposure. I mean, capital is a tool, and if used correctly, you just need to see how you can 1x, 2x, or 3x grow your company through deploying capital in the right avenues.

[03:14] – Invest Capital to Accelerate Business Growth

Tell me more about that because I think a lot of people are likely not thinking about capital, access to capital, maybe in the same ways that you are or that you have used to leverage it in the past or even today. Provide an example or two of how your clients or yourself have used capital to grow more efficiently or effectively.

Well, I think you have to understand your profitability. If you’re growing a business, let’s say you take it to a million dollars a year. That type of business, typically, a healthy business in our space is going to live right around 25% of top line, which would net you $250,000 a year. I guess decent take-home money, right? Because you have cost of goods, you have your rent, you have all the expenses that go along with that.

The problem is, they like that $250,000 and they want to keep that. They start to create this vanity lifestyle around their new lifestyle. They want to buy the fancy things, and look, $250,000 or $300,000 can buy you some nice things. So, you can get stuck in that world instead of saying, “Look, I’m going to reduce my income. Let’s say I’m comfortable living on $100,000 a year. I’ll take that $150,000 a year and I’ll go buy my time back and hire people, hire expertise, maybe buy new equipment, do a build-out, hire consultants, hire marketing agencies, whatever it is to get you over that hump.” So, I think people can really get stuck wanting to live in that quick-win vanity lifestyle and really just keep themselves stuck.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think very often people view money that they might spend as a cost, not as an investment. So, they view it as an expense to put money somewhere, but instead, if you view it as an investment, investment is something that you really believe and you’re confident you’re going to get a lot more back than you put in. And if that’s the case, then by default you’d want to keep putting more and more into it to get more and more back out. But not everybody sees that right away or feels comfortable around it.

The other question I had for you was you’ve worked a lot, as you said, in the med spa space, hundreds of businesses. Is there something that you’ve found that businesses tend to misdiagnose, meaning that they’re trying to maybe fix something that isn’t the real problem inside of their business? And if so, I wonder what that might be.

[05:39] – Make Better Business Decisions With Data

Yeah, perhaps. Look, I think most of the times they don’t know their numbers. They don’t have a proper P&L, they don’t have a proper balance sheet, maybe they don’t have a bookkeeper, CPA, consultant, or financial acumen, whatever it is, and they’re trying to solve something through emotion and through a feeling versus data points and numbers.

I see that all the time. It’s like, “Hey, actually, in fact, I have a use case right now.” So, I sit as the chief operating officer for a very large consultancy inside medical aesthetics, like the most well-respected brand. And when we’re talking inside of a board meeting, even our company, we’re saying, “Look, we have X amount of leads that are coming in every single month. Here’s the conversion rates, here’s the funnel, where are things falling off?”

Somebody could look at that and say, “Hey look, we either have a sales problem or we have a messaging problem.” Well, if you just peel back the layer and look at the actual data, you can peg it instead of saying from an emotional standpoint, “Oh, I don’t think that our salesperson’s that great,” or “Our marketing team sucks.” It’s like, well actually, let’s look at the conversion metrics, let’s look at everything that breaks it down, and then you can make a decision based on data.

So, I think there are so many businesses that go off of a hunch or a feeling or an emotional response versus looking at the data. And sometimes they don’t even know how to look at the data, and so they go off of a gut feeling that could be detrimental to the business.

Yeah, I think that’s a really great point. We’ve actually had a conversation internally about this very recently. You’ll hear from some team member that the feeling of this or that, like, leads coming in are softer than they were, whatever it might be. But then when you actually look at the data, it tells a very different story. So, if I was just to break that down for everyone who’s joining us: step number one, figure out what is the data that actually drives your business or your growth or that matters most for you. And then number two, make sure that you’re actually tracking it. And then number three, make sure that you’re reviewing it consistently with yourself or your team so that you are able to make better decisions going forward.

All right, take me back then to your early days. I mean, how do you even get involved in the world of med spas? I mean, I don’t know if I’d look at you and go like, “Oh yeah, Cameron, this is a med spa guy, man.” So, what got you into that space?

[07:46] – Build a Scalable Business With Automation and Niche Expertise

Yeah, it was- I fell into it. Like most dudes, I would say, fall into it. We don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I’m going to get into the beauty industry.” So, look, I come from a very extensive software background, SaaS background, CRM background. I got into real estate right out of college. Realized that there’s a pain point with leads, with follow-ups, with systems, and I don’t know, I’m just an organized guy. And so, I quickly said, “Look, we gotta solve a way for people to follow up with leads and transaction management.” We built the CRM, we raised capital, we sold the CRM. Actually, Coldwell Banker bought it. And so, I have been tinkering with CRM back when Salesforce.com went public in like 2002, and I actually was one of the early investors in Salesforce.

Once we sold that company, I then went and consulted with Salesforce. We built the skin on top of Salesforce.com that was the real estate version of Salesforce. We sold licenses all over the world, and this was a wonderful time where we could go buy those licenses from Salesforce and Force.com for a dollar a month and we were selling them for like $80 a month per user all over, and it was wonderful. We went and on a rally raise we brought private equity in. We actually bought a website company, a lead-gen company, and a transaction management company. We had the CRM. So, we kind of built like an end-to-end system within the real estate space. And so, I flipped out of that company and then I got into the e-commerce space. That was kind of exciting for a while and I did a lot of e-commerce stuff, which kind of put me into the digital environment.

My wife has been in the beauty space for, shoot, 25 years now. She’d probably kill me if I said that. Let’s just say 15 years just to not age her. So, I would look at her and how she runs her business, and it was all just antiquated through day planners for your appointments. There was no calendar. There was like no online booking. And I was like, “Look, you could totally automate this business and scale it.” She had no interest in that.

But I had a buddy at the time that was buying a med spa. This is in like 2014. And he’s like, “Hey, I’m thinking about buying this med spa.” I’m like, “What’s a med spa?” “It’s where you go get the Botox, dude. Like, you know, for the wrinkles and stuff.” I’m like, “Oh, I think my wife does that.” He’s like, “Hey, we look at the numbers. You’re an entrepreneur guy. Will you help me out? I think we need like a system and some marketing. I think I can get this thing for a good deal.” He’s just a buddy reaching out. I’m like, “Yeah, let me look at it.” So, I looked at it and I’m like, “Look, I think this is pretty cool. You have an asset here, you can buy it at a discount. I think if you turn on some amazing marketing and some automation, you could turn this thing into a nice little cash-flow system.” So, I helped him. We implemented review automation and a feedback loop through Google. If you got Google reviews, it’s amazing. We implemented a website and lots of SEO. We turned on digital ads. We did all these things.

Then I started hearing about medical aesthetics conferences, so I started going to them. And there was so much demand. I went to the first AmSpa conference. It’s the biggest conference that they put on every year in the industry. At the first one, there were like nine, maybe 12 exhibitors in the room. We were one of them. And we came back with like 30 accounts. And I’m like, “Okay, this is interesting.” I kind of hit the right timing with the right value proposition with the right background all at once.

Then what I did was I started figuring out who was the most impactful in the space. I started signing those customers because I knew those customers had a following. Then I figured out all of their following are actually their peers, and their peers own medical aesthetics practices. So, if I can build out a really nice, robust, influential roster, that roster by default is going to talk about me. Okay, cool.

That opened up a world of opportunity. Then we turned on ads. Then I started speaking, and then we’d go to conferences, and we just got really intelligent really quick while the industry was taking off. Naturally, we just absorbed over 1,200 clinics. It was challenging to scale an agency that quickly, that fast, with that type of velocity. It was a lot of fun.

I have a SaaS background, so I “SaaS-ed” the entire thing. If you sign up with us, you pay a one-time fee plus a monthly fee and you get whatever we were selling. Then with my CRM background, I launched CRM because I realized we had a conversion issue. We could create the traffic, but we had a hard time showing the result. So, we built our own CRM while at the same time GoHighLevel came out. That was like a punch to the gut because then every agency then had GoHighLevel. I’m like, “Dude, I just spent a fortune building a CRM and GoHighLevel is pretty good.”

Anyway, that’s how I got into it. That was kind of the story. But we built a business that was attractive enough to sell it to a private equity group, a strategic investor. They came in and ultimately made an acquisition that was very material. I lived through that, went through that, and stayed on for a year. And now I’m investing all throughout the space. I know everybody in the space. I’m having fun. I invest in tech companies, I invest in medical aesthetics practices, I talk to private equity guys all the time, and I’m just enjoying it.

[13:08] – Create a Pricing Strategy That Drives Recurring Revenue

Fantastic. My camera just bugged out there for a minute, so I plugged a different one in. But that’s great. I mean, you’ve definitely had a journey there.

I’m wondering when you got started, how did you think about pricing and the strategy? And as you progressed throughout that, did you just raise fees or did you have a slightly different approach to optimizing pricing of the business?

We wanted to be. Look, I “SaaS-ed” the whole thing, so I packaged it, right? You could sign up for this package and we had our mid-package. So, if you go to any SaaS company, you’ll see ‘Here’s your offerings and you’ve got your low tier, your freemium, your mid-tier, your high-end tier, or you can go totally custom.’

We totally “SaaS-ed” it. We made it so easy to stand up that it was hard for customers to say ‘no’. We charged a pretty reasonable onboarding fee to fund the implementation and the resources, and then we’d kick that monthly fee in immediately. We were closing like 50 rooftops a month at our peak. We had so many people going through onboarding. We just had a really good process and system.

Our offering was, I wouldn’t say we were like the Ferrari of- top design. We were just good at everything. We could generate a lead, we could generate a report. We would show up, we would get the job done, and do it at an enough aesthetically pleasing level that people were happy and deliver a result. For the price point, it was hard to turn away.

I think you could go like Gucci, full-on high-end, and charge $30,000 for a site. like this, again, I don’t think you can do that these days. Maybe you can, but how many practices and rooftops could you spin up? My whole thing is I want rooftops and recurring revenue. That was the whole thing. Rooftops, recurring revenue, and a happy customer.

That’s really what we focused on. We made it attractive enough to where it was easy for somebody opening a practice to sign up, to somebody that had been a practice owner doing five million to migrate to us, because they do look at marketing as an expense and an investment. It’s interesting when you have the conversation. So, I think that we did a really good job there with pricing. If they had multi-location, we had an avenue for that, too. But I think if I looked back, I wouldn’t have changed the pricing or the scope. The model worked.

[15:43] – Stay Focused and Become the Go-To Expert in Your Niche

If you were looking or just identifying one thing that you did, one area that you believe drove the most qualified buyers and clients to the business, what was that? And do you believe that would be different today?

You’re saying, are you talking customers that would sign up?

Yeah, clients for you.

Clients for us, yeah. We were extremely competent within our niche. We could speak the language of a practice owner. We could speak the language of a practice manager, a marketing manager. We knew the products they use. I could talk to you about neurotoxins, fillers, lasers, and laser equipment. We were very competent. They trusted that we understood the business through their lens and who their ICP, their patient, was that they’re trying to attract. That was really important to us. Then, throughout that journey, I had so many people that knew I had this big agency, and they’re like, “Hey, man, I own a trucking company,” or whatever, “a clothing shop. Can you help us?” And it was just, “No, man. Sorry, you gotta go see someone else. This is where we focus. This is who we serve.” We stayed disciplined to that.

I’ll tell you another thing, too, is when you’re an entrepreneur like me, you can get sidetracked with the shiny object or the next idea. I tuned into so much books and content, and I studied the wealthy and I studied the entrepreneurs, diligently studied them. All of them said just be laser-focused. You’re not going to conquer your objective tomorrow, but you’re going to make progress every single day. If you continue to focus on your business that is doing well and double down on that, good things are going to come instead of getting sidetracked by entrepreneurship syndrome. And I did that. I said ‘no’ to everything.

Was it hard for you? I think every entrepreneur goes through this, likely at multiple stages of their progression, where there’ll be offers, there’ll be opportunity to say ‘yes’, and it can feel really hard to say ‘no’ when you look at an opportunity and go, “I know I could add value there.” But usually deep down inside, or maybe it’s just very, very clear, that saying ‘yes’ to all those will dilute the core. It sounds like ‘no’ was just an easy ‘no’. “If it’s not a fit for what we’re doing, we’re not going to take it on.” Was it that cut and clear or was there a bit of a progression where you had to learn and you said ‘yes’ a few times and then you said ‘no’ later on? Kind of walk me through how you thought about that. What was the mindset?

Yeah, there was a couple of times that we took on customers in the early, early days. I would say before 10 rooftops, we took on some customers that definitely weren’t our ICP. We’re like, “Look, we can do it. We’ll take the monthly recurring revenue.” But we quickly realized that’s not who we want to serve. We cannot build a sustainable business this way. Every single agency out there can service every single customer. If we want to get really specific and be the experts in this space, we have to focus. We did a really good job of that. I think it’s really hard for an entrepreneur to not get- like, we get bored pretty quickly. But if you stay up and you just look at your business and you monitor it and I could see the growth, every single month we were growing. Dude, I would do manifestation, and I would literally bring in “This is how many accounts we’re going to get this month and here’s our recurring revenue numbers for this whole year.” I would zone in on that and I believed it into our soul. I’m not even kidding. It was like spiritual.

I just stayed super-focused, and I said no to everything. I’m like, “Look, there’s going to be another chapter in my life. We’ll build this thing up, whether it’s five years from now, 10 years from now, and we’ll sell the asset or we’ll just cash flow the hell out of it.” We were patient. We were fast, but we were patient, and stayed true to our customer and what we’re trying to deliver to the market.

[19:43] – Build a Resilient Business With the Right Growth Metrics

So, Cameron, so far, your journey, it sounds like it was all kind of up and to the right. Things were pretty smooth in terms of growth. Was that the reality, or I’m wondering, did you have months or periods of the business that weren’t easy, that weren’t seeing growth, and maybe were seeing decline? And if so, maybe just kind of share an example of that and how you kind of navigated through it.

No, we did not have any months of decline. Man, once I flip on the engine and I hunker down, I go. So, no, we did not. We started the thing in, I think, our first 2017, 2016. We started framing the business in 2015, and then 2017 is really when we turned on. So, we powered through COVID. COVID was interesting and weird and hard, and we had to defer payments for a couple months for customers. But then we’d go to our vendors and we’d say, “Look, defer payments to us.” And we were disciplined enough to have the cash, the capital, to just weather through. I guess that was the storm, but that only lasted three months, and so we didn’t really have any expenses. We still had some income; some people were still paying us.

But then after that, it just took off. Everybody just was like, “Hey, if I can’t see patients, I’m going to work on my marketing or I’m going to work on my systems.” And so, we just saw it just go through the roof. The business just continued to grow and grow and grow, and we had extremely healthy margins. This is a SaaS business, so very healthy margins. We offshored a tremendous amount of our resources. So, we had incredible talent, cost-effective, incredible talent. We’re very disciplined about boots on the ground in the United States, and we ran the thing like a machine. So, no, we didn’t. We were really good marketers, really, really good marketers. And so, everybody wanted a piece of it.

I don’t know. It was just luck with the timing of aesthetics. It was our current mindset of area of expertise and then how we built it up with process engine. It was a wonderful run. It was hard. I worked my ass off. I worked extremely hard. At one point, I’m an early riser. I would get up at like 5:00, and then I rolled the clock back. I’m like, “All right, 4:30. Okay, let’s do 4:00.” There was one point I started getting up at 3:30 in the morning because I’d like to go to the gym at 5:00. I’m like, “Well, from 3:30 to like 4:50, I can crank out all this work and then I’ll come back and then I’ll crank another hour, and then I can take the kids to school.” So, I was working some crazy freaking hours, man.

Looking back, is there one or two things that you focused on that you feel had the biggest impact? I’m sure there were lots of numbers that you were looking at, lots of activities, marketing, hiring. But if you were trying to narrow it down to like, these are just the one or two things that I feel probably had the biggest impact on the real growth that we saw, anything stand out?

[22:48] – Use AI to Increase Productivity and Strengthen Your Expertise

Yeah, it was two things. It was revenue growth, expansion MRR growth. That was our number one KPI month over month, actually. And then also churn. If we’re going to sell 50 units a month and just churn out 50, we’re just treading water, so there’s not really a- we obviously have a customer issue there.

We were very focused on those two KPI metrics, knew what private equity was looking for in a business like that, and then we just kind of modeled it around that. So, we put customer experience first, because I’d rather sell less units with a lower churn and just keep slowly growing the business. So, I would say those are the two factors that we monitor the most.

When we were talking earlier about just marketing agencies working with clients and AI, I’m wondering, what’s your take? How do you feel that AI is changing professional services, changing the world of consulting, changing how agencies engage? If you were to kind of put your future hat on, where do you think the biggest impact would be and how would you play that? Or how are you advising your clients to think about that?

I mean, I have dove into AI more in the past 18 months than I think any- Well, there’s three subject matters that I’ve dove into in the past 18 months more than I ever have: AI for sure, GLPs, peptides, weight loss, that’s a massive at-scale solution there, and then obviously the other one would be just traditional legacy medical aesthetics and consulting and private equity.

As I look at AI, I was listening to a podcast just recently actually, the All-In Podcast. If you tune in, those guys are freaking cool guys. They’re talking about SpaceX and what’s taking place with Elon and just all of the stuff that he’s building and really what’s going to happen with our mobile phones and will we need mobile phones in the future? I totally resonated with it.

I’m going off track a little bit on your question, but the iPhone is cool right now, but I’m starting to think the iPhone is actually becoming boring because I have to go in and if you want to order DoorDash or you want to book airline tickets, I’ve got to go pull up this little thing, click buttons, put my credit card information in, hit this thing, type in my email, find the dates. It’s becoming annoying. It’s like, “Can’t the thing just do it for me? Hey, dude, book the flight to Cabo next week, Tuesday. Find the best ticket. Here’s my budget. Go get it done. You got my Amex on file.” I like that speed of productivity. So, I think to talk that back to what’s happening with consulting and agency: you can spin up sites and graphics. There are so many tools available that it’s just increasing the speed and the velocity of production.

From a consulting lens, I think people always want to buy expertise. They want to feel that comfort of expertise and having a team member and a soundboard. But, shoot, I use Claude and ChatGPT. I don’t even write emails. I just tell it to write the email, actually. And it’s learned. I have a brain inside of both of my LLMs. It knows who I am, everything about me, how I would respond and how I respond in every situation. So, I tell it, and so really, it’s now I’ve programmed my LLM to be me in a way. But I couldn’t make my LLM that intelligent if it didn’t come from me.

Sure, it would be very different. No, and so is there anything that you’ve changed in how you are advising or consulting with private equity clients because of AI? Have the conversations changed for you? Do you feel like you have to put more emphasis on something given that, let’s say, the PE firms or other clients you might work with, they obviously can access Claude or ChatGPT and they can get a lot of information? Now that information is obviously going to be the average. It’s not going to have the lived experience, it’s not going to have that human element or the expertise that you have. But I’m just wondering how have you navigated that, if at all? And has your approach changed?

Yeah, it has. I think there’s a race to AI. Everybody now has an AI feature toolset inside of their tool belt. If I was to look at the tech stack inside of medical aesthetics, there are electronic medical record systems. Some are legacy and antiquated; others are new, built on AI infrastructure. Some are SaaS with layers of AI. Then you have all these gadgets and widgets around them, like a lead conversion engine or a retention engine. All those EMRs are just going to build the feature and consolidate. There’s going to be a massive consolidation that takes place inside of every tech vertical. It’s just going to happen.

From a consulting standpoint, you could peg something against benchmarking or dashboards or show me this and build me that. I think that I see a lot of that taking place now. But I do think the training aspect, like sales training consultant, how do you train your front desk to be great at sales? How do you train your providers to be an incredible individual at running a consultation? That takes an expert, and that expert can use AI to build the agenda or maybe build an LMS system of them and license that to them if you want to.

So, yeah, I think everybody’s using it as a toolset, but I think tech consolidation will take place. From a consulting lens, everybody’s all of a sudden smart. Emails are becoming so smart and intelligent, it’s like, “Will you please have a misspelled word in your email so I know it’s authentic?” So, I think speed is one. I think I can work ten times faster now.

Yeah, I mean, one thing I’m sharing with clients a lot that we work with is to start thinking about what in the work that you’re doing that AI can’t do. Because at some point everyone’s going to be able to do the majority of things, and if they have access to the same LLM models and all that, the output may end up being very similar. But what can you contribute? What can you add to that that makes your output significantly better or even completely separate from that, what can you offer? What can you do that AI can’t? So, your example there of sales training: somebody can read from AI how to do sales training better, but actually having somebody work with them through that and talk about the facial expressions or the human connection components, you can’t do that with AI right now. I’m sure in the future there’ll be ways that- there’ll be holograms or something will stand beside us and it’ll be like virtual sales training where there is someone in that room with us. But for now at least, I don’t know how long that’ll take, but for what I can see, that’s not there yet. So, just starting to think about what can you do as a consultant or advisor that AI can’t do, I think, is definitely an important question to consider.

[30:18] – Build Discipline for Sustainable, Long-Term Growth

Yeah, look, I think it also comes down to showing up. Look, I think that the majority of the world, straight up, is lazy. I think that half of us show up, maybe probably less, and we do a mediocre job and we don’t try. And I do think that the world is getting more and more lazy. I see a separation taking place. I think there’s always the elite of the elite, the people that wake up early, the people that crank, they eat healthy, they want to go get it, they want to provide, they want to get better. I love those people. I think there’s other people that just take it for granted and think it’s easy and take shortcuts.

What I’ve learned in my career is it comes down to discipline. I don’t want to work out every day, but I do. And I know every time I do it, I feel better, I show up better. If I’m going to commit to somebody, I’m going to commit and I show up to the meeting. I don’t slack off. Then you learn how to use AI, you learn how to use tech, and you implement that and you find cool new ways to work with the technology.

I don’t know. The future will be interesting, but I think that people that want to produce will produce and will continue to take market share in anything that they’re doing if they show up. And that’s why I think success is, most people think it’s hard. I actually think it’s easy because most of the people don’t show up. And so, all you have to do is show up and have discipline around that, doing the shit you don’t want to do. Because most people don’t want to do things they don’t want to do; they just quit doing them.

Do you think that part of that or what contributes to that is that people’s timelines are too short? Meaning, they are willing to put in the work, but they’re not willing to put in the work consistently for long enough to actually see the rewards of that work? Or do you believe that if you’re doing the right things, you should see progress and results very quickly? Like, what’s your take on that?

Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think, let’s just look at it from an investor lens or from somebody that’s just wanting to start saving money and seeing a return. The average investor, even the average hedge fund investor, is terrible at generating a return compared to just putting your money in an index fund and S&P 500 and letting it grow.

Everybody wants instant gratification because I can pull up my phone right now and I can order a sandwich to my house. I can get an Uber to my home. I can get Amazon packages here. So, we’re addicted to instant gratification. But to build something extraordinary and to create wealth, it takes time and discipline and doing the things, and I think people stop doing them.

It’s just like, if you want to save money and invest money into the stock market, everybody can be a millionaire. Every single person. You just have to take a chunk of your earned income and you just go put it into the index fund at the S&P 500, or maybe now a consolidated AI fund if you want, and keep deploying cash to it every two weeks and live on 50% of your income and invest the other half over the course of 20 years. I don’t need to get into the math, but every single person has the ability to make millions of bucks. But nobody wants to do that because they want to be rich today. And that’s where people need to read up on what it takes to generate something extraordinary.

I agree, man.

All right, well, Cameron, thanks so much for coming on. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you and the work you have going on. Where is the best place for them to go to learn more?

Just go to my site. It’s http://cameronhemphill.com or my Instagram is @TheMedicalMillionaire

There we go. All right, thanks again.

Appreciate you. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Important Links:

Cameron Hemphill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronhemphill/

CameronHemphill.com: https://cameronhemphill.com/

The Medical Millionaire on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themedicalmillionaire/

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