Cameron Herold On Finding Your Second In Command

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It is Nick here and welcome to today's show. And you are in for an absolute treat because today we are going to unpack one of the questions that I get asked pretty much more than anything else, and that is, Nick, how do I find a great COO for my business? How do I find an integrator? How do I find my second in command? Now, it is a great question for many reasons, but if I look at it through the lens of exiting a business for a high valuation, it's an absolutely crucial thing to get right. Because let's face it, if you are the founder, the CEO of a business and you are the bottleneck, everything has to come through you. You ain't gonna sell that business. So what do you have to have? You have to have a great leadership team. You have to have succession, planning, and the start of all of that is having a fantastic second in command. Now, joining me on the show today is someone that I would call the world expert on this stuff, and that is Cameron Herold. Now, Cameron has been involved in huge amounts of business success. You might have heard his name before because at the age of 42, he engineered 1-800-got junks, specifically, spectacular growth from 2 million to 106 million in revenue.

In just six years.

And in that business, he was the.

COO leadership team have actually done it before. They've probably each done it two or three times. They've worked with really smart, solid people. Managers, the first time managers, their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people.

Now, what's interesting about the conversation today is that you might be thinking that a coo, which stands for Chief Operations Officer, does all the operational stuff in a business. But what we get into today is actually something which I think is a very, very important distinction. Great CEOs are people who balance the skill sets, the things that the CEO doesn't have.

Because most people say, well, how do I know what to look for in a CEO? It's actually to understand yourself as a CEO first.

Now, I'm not going to get into any more today. This is a fantastic, fantastic conversation. If you have a business and you're thinking, do you know what I really need to learn how I can bring someone in who's going to help me take my business to the next level.

This is the conversation for you. So welcome to Scale up with Nick Bradley, Cameron Herrera. Hey, everybody, it is Nick Bradley here. Welcome to this week's episode of Scale Up. And I am delighted to say that.

I have a gentleman on the show today.

That I have been wanting to have on the show for a while. He has written a number of awesome books. We're going to be talking about his most recent book today, which is called Second in Command. And what we're going to get into more than anything else is what I would argue is up there with being one of the most important roles that you can have in a business, particularly if you're scaling a company and particularly if you're trying to create something that has what we talk about as transfer value. In other words, it's a machine that can be transferred someone else for high value. We're going to be talking today to Cameron Herald. Welcome to the show, sir.

Hey, Nick, thanks very much for having me. And I totally agree on the transfer value. I've never even touched on that.

But yeah, we can have some fun here because it's funny, like before we press record, I was saying that I would go into companies that had been acquired by private equity and I was the turnaround guy. I would go in as a CEO. Not that strong operationally, but good enough to lead the teams and put the right pieces in place. And I concur with you 100% that bringing in the right number two, second in command is just a critical thing. But let's kick off this because your career is fascinating and interesting. You've done some amazing things. What is a coo? What's your definition of that?

My definition is that it goes back to a quote that Thomas Edison made years ago. That vision without execution is hallucination. COO is really the person to make the entrepreneur's dreams come true. We're the executioner to that vision. We're often also the brakes to their gas. Or as my sister, who's been an entrepreneur for 25 years said, we can often be the leash to their dragon.

The leash to the Dragon.

I love that one.

I can concur with that.

Execution.

So let's talk about that in a broader context for a second. If I'm hearing you right, obviously it's partnering with the visionary potentially. But what, but what happens if the CEO is very operational and, and kind of, you know, you're the person who's coming in. Number two actually might have to create more. That sort of 30,000 foot view is your view. The CEO is actually just the person who balances the other main leader.

Yeah, it's even the logo on my book. The second in command is the yin and yang. We're really the balance. So anything that the entrepreneur or the CEO is really good at we shouldn't even want to get involved in any areas that the CEO is weak at or drained of energy. Should be our strengths and areas that we love to work in. So it's really the balance. And I'll give you a good example. In some cases the COO is very inward facing. In other cases they could be very outward facing. In some cases they're very tech or engineering focused. Maybe they're actually more culture or operations focused. It really depends on the stage of the company. It depends on the CEO's strengths and weaknesses and depends on kind of what the core things that need to happen for the organization. So the CEO of Shopify as an example, Harley Finkelstein is a very outward facing biz dev, sales and marketing, you know, very culture, PR savvy, second in command because his CEO Tobias Luque is a very inward facing CEO. In other cases you could have a CEO who's very outward facing, talks to the media and then you need a CEO or CEO who's very inward facing. Second to that is it depends on the stage or the season of that organization. When I was the COO for 1, 800 got junk, I really had to be there to scale the company from 14 people to 3,000 people. I was a very entrepreneurial get shit done, you know, really focus on the execution and operation side. The new COO, Eric Church, who I've known for 30 years, has never spoken to the media, has never done speaking events on behalf of the business. He's a very inward facing COO where I was very outward facing, you know, sales, marketing, biz dev as well as. So the same company, but a very different season, even though we were both working with the same CEO. So it's a really delicate, interesting thing.

Yeah, interesting. For you personally though, if I said to you what type of CEO are you? Can you flex depending on the situation or have you got a certain type that you kind of lean into?

Yeah, I'm really strong in, I would say the million to 200 million stage. You know, I coach the CEO and the second in command at Sprint. But I was really out of my sandbox. I coached the royal family that owns the country of Qatar. Again, way out of my sandbox. My sandbox tends to be the 50 to 500 employee companies that want to go to 500 to 5,000. Once the company required the matrix decision making, the cross functional teams, we had 13 operating PNLs. I was kind of pulling my hair out and they brought in the former president of Starbucks USA to be my replacement. She came in and said what a cute little company. So yeah, my zone is definitely more the I say medium enterprise company. I'm also horrible at early stage companies. Right. I don't know if a product or an initiative, an idea is good. To me it doesn't even matter if it's good. It's can we get the right people and strategy and team in place and then can we stay focused?

You and I play in the same sandbox, mate. I always say that the business has to be generating at least a million, possibly a little bit more of EBITDA of profit and then we're building it to a position where it's going to be sold into the mid market private equity firms and, and then from that, because they want a three to four times return on their investment, it's going to be going into the bigger PE firms or a listing which is in the billions. So it's that kind of jump into.

That same sweet spot. For sure. I love it when we have what I call a management team in place. But the company needs to move from a management team to a leadership team.

Oh, this is good.

People that maybe leadership team have actually done it before. They've probably each done it two or three times. They've worked with really smart, solid people. Managers, the first time managers, their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people. And that's never really the solution to the problem.

Or the answer is yes when it maybe should be no.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

Because they're not good at handling conflict yet they feel bad about it. They're trying to be too inclusive. So I'm really good at building out true leadership teams of scale up companies for sure.

Perfect. Well let's do some surgery today. Because I think what's interesting about this conversation is I reflect back on the various questions that I've been asked over the last three or four years of doing this. The people who've been in my various, you know, events that I've run and whatever else. And that question of finding that number two, sometimes it's called the integrator if you talk about Gina Wickman stuff or whatever. But that number two, let's get into how you actually do this. So starting with your first point, right. How do you identify what, let's say there's a CEO or the founder of a company. How do you identify their strengths? You know, if they can't articulate that very well. Because sometimes they can't.

Yeah. And you actually start because most people say, well how do I know what to look for in a CEO. And it's actually to understand yourself as a CEO first. So it's understanding your true weaknesses and your true strengths. It's understanding your kind of behavioral traits and the style of people that you work well with. It's understanding the core areas of the business that feed you with energy that you're really, really good at and then kind of realizing the bucket of other stuff. And it's the other stuff that you'll then put the COO hat on or that second in command hat on. And by the way, sometimes that second in command does not have to be a COO title. The second in command might be a CTO that has legal and operations under them or could be a cmo. It is mostly the CEO though. But it starts with understanding yourself. So I do what I call an activity inventory, something I learned from Dan Sullivan at Strategic Coach, where I try to understand all the areas of the business that I'm either incompetent or competent at, or that I might be really good at, I might be excellent at, but they drain me of energy. And then I try to find somebody who's good at all of those things.

Okay, and in terms of the level that's required. Right, because you mentioned before about leadership and management and not to, not to simplify this too much, sometimes if you bring in too high a level leader, they kind of want to do strategy.

Right.

As opposed to kind of getting their hands dirty.

Yeah.

How do you balance that piece? And also like, because you just mentioned consultants, you know, the bringing in of a consultant who can bring that capability or a fractional resource versus someone who's full time and embedded with you in the vision. How do you kind of work all that out?

And this is true of any title for any role in a company. We've had title inflation over the last 20 years. Back in the mid-1990s to late 1990s, to have a C level title, whether it was CMO, CTO, CO, you had to be a major executive at a major company. But once the dot com crash happened in 2000, instead of giving out equity in lieu of compensation, we now started giving away titles as well. We were trying to attract people into our company. So we're giving them stock options and money and titles and we got this title inflation, where now you'll have a 20 person company and you've got six C level people. They're not C level executives, they're really directors with big titles. So the title that you give out to someone, whether it's COO or VP of Operations or Director of Operations or Ops manager, whatever, is based on the roles and responsibilities that person has, the level of P and L responsibility that they have, the level of strategic insight they bring into the organization. Right. The lack of management that they actually need and what you're willing to pay. And then you put the title based on that commensurate with those four things. You know, let's say that you're talking about your head of Finance. It doesn't have to be a cfo. It could be a Director of Finance, a controller, a VP of Finance, a finance whatever. Be very careful with giving away titles that are too big, because what happens is the employees then think that their role is much more senior. They go online and do searches to find out what COOs or CMOs should get paid and all of a sudden they think they should be getting paid 350 grand a year. But. And then your answer is, oh, well, but you're not really a coo. Well, then why did you give them the title? Or you're not really doing those roles, then why did you give them that title? Or you're not strong enough, then why did you give them that title? So entrepreneurs can be very lazy and cause themselves a lot of problems. And I think that's where titles come from.

And I think it comes back to what you said beforehand about defining what the role is accountable for and what it's there to do. Because I've had this challenge recently we've been looking to bring in and I'll use the title because it's, you know, you've just mentioned it as a cmo. Right. And the problem we've found is, you know, what do we really want? We want someone who can look at my brand, which is high value exit, and look to kind of really look at that strategically and build it out and then we have the team underneath to kind of execute. The problem we've got, though, is we've had lots of people wanting to do that role. Who? Exactly what you just said, right, that they're calling themselves cmo. They don't want to do anything other than the strategy, but they've got no proof points. I think it does come off the back of exactly as you said. There's been this transition, particularly with early stage companies thinking that they have to go and raise money with this massive C suite kind of pitch deck thing going on on the leadership page. Right.

Which it's also a bit of an art or a skill that executives need to hone, which is the ability to say no to people with not risking or worrying that we're going to upset them. You know, our parents were much better at saying no than we are as parents. You know, we're trying to be all nice to our kids and not hurt their feelings or be nice to the stat. Like the reality is, I think true leaders have to say no more often than we say yes. And our role is to grow people, to grow their skills and grow their confidence, but not necessarily to kind of give it all away.

No, precisely. Well, let's get into the second point. So firstly, we evaluated there that, you know, what are the potential kind of strengths, weaknesses, gaps of the CEO, which then can help define the type of CEO coming in. What about where do you find these people? I get asked this question all the time.

The great senior people are never out looking for a job. Great senior people are working for a really good company, Great, doing really good work, probably very engaged at what they're doing. You probably need to use an executive search firm to poach them like a sports team uses a recruiter to go and find people. You have to first know where they are, then you know how to have to know how to attract them. You attract them by having a great brand, good press coverage, lots of online reviews. Whether it's on Indeed or Glassdoor or Google or trustpilot reviews. You have to really package yourself. Almost like a jewelry company is packaged with the blue box and the white ribbon. You kind of make yourself look perfect. You have to attract them. You have to have a job posting that you get a copywriter to rewrite the job posting so that it pops off the page. And then you really have to engage your social networks, your email list and recruiters to go out and try to bring these people in.

Got it, Got it. So it's much more of a deeper process and a well considered process than just kind of rushing around the place looking, you know, posting it out on LinkedIn or something like that.

Yeah, it's funny, like I was asked recently, I'm moving my residence from Barbados to Dubai right now and I was asked to provide a CV or my resume. And I started laughing, going like, I haven't had a resume since 1989, like for real, what did you do?

Did you actually go and create one?

I pulled all my stuff off LinkedIn and I had my son draft into a resume for me.

I haven't got one either. I mean, I haven't had one for a long time.

My 20 year old son wrote my resume with all my LinkedIn bio. It was just kind, I just said like, here's my website and here's all the press about me. Like that should cover, right? And they go, yeah, that's good. Yeah. It really is about first understanding what you're looking for and then recognizing that you have to do a lot to bring them into your organization. Average companies will never recruit great people. Right. You have to build a strong cult or a culture and that has to permeate through your website, your brand, your marketing, your social media, your online reviews. So that everybody, it kind of feels something that a great person's going to want to be intrigued with.

And if you are, let's say just to kind of go back a step that if you're an earlier stage business, so let's say you're looking to break through eight figures of revenue, okay. So you're in the seven figures. So you've got, you've got a bit of foundation, you've got a bit of cash flow to invest. And is your advice to. Because you know at that point you may not have the brand, you may not have all the things in place. Right. Because it can be a bit messy.

Right.

In that stage. Is your advice to bring in more like try and find that, that full time embedded person. It's going to be more expensive and a more, maybe a longer or harder hire or bringing in fractional or, or consultants to help you get to a certain stage before you start to build the more embedded team. What's your views on that?

It depends. It's kind of like saying, should I hire a full time nanny to take care of my kids or a babysitter? It depends. Are you going out for the date night with your spouse or do you need someone six days a week? So what are all the roles and responsibilities that you need this person to do? What are all the key initiatives they need to be responsible for? What are the key metrics that you're going to measure their success by? And then how much time do you anticipate that's going to take? If that is a 20 hour a week task, a freelance fractional person might work. If you're tipping in the favor of 30, 35 hours a week, then you're, you know, you're in the favor of full time. But there are amazing fractional people out there that are frankly offshore, overseas, Latin America, Eastern Europe, that can do some unbelievably amazing stuff until you have the need for them to be full time.

Yeah, okay, so there's no excuse.

You would never hire A full time nanny so that you could go out with your wife three nights a week for a date night.

Unless you're in Dubai. Sorry for everyone listening, we were just joking about potentially. I'm potentially moving to Dubai. Cameron's moving to Dubai.

Yeah, true story. There's $1,600 a month for a full.

Time nap and I just stayed with a good friend of mine out there who has two plus two drivers. It's great. He's always out on date nights, so to speak.

We'll see you when. See you when you get here.

Exactly. So I just want to draw on another point you made. Cause I think it's really interesting. It comes up a lot, this offshoring or the idea that building capability and leveraging exchange rates and things like that. There's some big hits and misses here in my, in my view. Like a lot of people go, I'm going to go to the Philippines, I'm going to, you know, go and find the next all star marketing person. There's a cultural thing that happens there, right. You can get some good people task, but not necessarily great at the other stuff. In your experience, right. When you're looking at kind of the world, I know you do this with your consultancy and everything else. How do you navigate that in terms of different regions, have different capabilities? How do you, how do you kind of contextualize?

I've been, I've been talking to companies about this for 16 years now. I hired my first fractional freelance overseas person from the Philippines in 2007. And what really frustrates me is entrepreneurs will hire the first person they come across or the first outsource agency they come across and hire the first person that crosses their desk and hope that it works. You would never hire a full time employee based in Boston, Massachusetts or London, England that way you'd put them through a recruiting funnel, you'd put them through three rounds of interviews, you'd do reference checks, you'd look at the samples of their work. You need to do the same level of rigor of interviewing and recruiting and onboarding a brand new freelance person as you do a full time person. So I think when you actually structure it and think about it in that way, you'll probably have a much higher prediction of success because you're doing the groundwork in advance. And, and I told the CEO recently who said, oh well, if I'm hiring a second in command, it's going to take me 90 days to know if I made the right decision. And I said that's because you stink at interviewing. I said, if you actually knew how to do proper interviews and reference checks and torque and onboarding, you would know everything about that person. Day one, you'd never get married and say, well, I'll tell you in 90 days if I made a good decision. Why are we hiring full time or freelancers or offshore people without putting them through that same.

Why do you think, why do you.

Think we, we, as I said, like entrepreneur community does that? Because it seems to happen more than it should.

I think. I think it's new to many of us, so we don't know we haven't been burned yet. You know, entrepreneurs tend to like to stub their toe and then learn to be careful where they're walking. We tend to learn from some of those mistakes or if we're in mastermind communities like, you know, YPO or EO or Baby Bathwater, all these amazing communities for entrepreneurs. We all want to help each other. So the other day I was saying, I really want to find somebody to work with me on zapier integrations and AI integrations for the business. And this woman really quick like, oh, I know exactly who you should talk to. And I'm like, awesome, how long have you been working with them? And she said, oh, I haven't. I just learned about them the other day. And I said then politely, I will pass. Thank you for considering, but I don't want that quick hear you somebody if you don't know who the hell they are. So we're just so trying to help the other person that we're often doing a disservice. And then I think entrepreneurs aren't careful and cautious enough. For me, every business that I've built is so darn important that I agonize over every full time, part time, fractional hire over every supplier to make sure they're a cultural fit, like everything. I spend the time on that so that then I don't have to worry about it and I can accelerate.

Great. I love that. And for people listening to this who want a bit more depth into how they can think about recruitment process or something that they can follow, do you have any resources yourself, personally that you would point them to or any kind of books that you've used that you found have been very, very helpful for them?

Yeah, I mean, the best book that I've read was Top Grading by Brad smart, but it's 800 pages. So his son Jeff Smart wrote a book called who? And he distilled Top Grading down to about 200 pages. One of the chapters from my book, the section on people and hiring in my first book, Double Double, is quite strong as well. But I love the systems in the book. Who.

Okay, perfect. Because again, I know a lot of people will reach out and ask me this. Ask you. We can put into the show notes and it's all good.

I launched a course two years ago with 12 core modules that every manager and leader need to get really strong in. It's called Invest in your leaders. And one of the core 12 modules is the interviewing module. And I teach all of the interviewing skills. One of the very first companies that I built, we had to hire 8,800 people every single year. It became the largest residential house painting company on the planet. So we became operationally world class when you're recruiting, interviewing and hiring. And that was in four months. When you're hiring almost 9,000 people every four months, you become operationally world class at recruiting, interviewing, selection, hiring, onboarding, training and leadership development of people. So I cover that part too.

And where. And again, I think I can predict what you're going to say here, but I'll ask the question. When we think about strategy and vision, right? And then we think about culture and people, how do you, how do you think about the balance between those things?

Like, and I'm, I'm glad you said strategy and not strategic planning. There's no such thing as strategic planning. There's strategy and then there's planning. They're two very different things that are very close to each other. So I visualize every business like a jigsaw puzzle. Remember when you were a kid, you were like 10 years old and our mom gave us a jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the front of the box is your vivid vision, right? Or the, it's the four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future. Then we look for the corners of the jigsaw puzzle. For me, the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle are your core purpose, your core values, your bhag, right? The big hairy, audacious plan. And then your one year plan to make your vision come true. Those are the four corners. The four sides of your jigsaw puzzle are your people systems. So that's the recruiting, interviewing, all the hiring stuff. Then it's all of the strategy systems. So it's your mastermind communities, your coaching, your annual, annual meetings. It's, it's thinking those times in your calendar. Be strategic. Then it's your meeting rhythms. Is the third side the fourth side is all your financial systems and the culture is the middle. It's kind of what emerges from those.

So you're suggesting that the culture, like you, you can't just create the culture until you've worked on those other things.

Yeah.

The culture is going to happen anyway, but in terms of being able to define it or create it, it comes. Right.

Culture happens because you have all the right people on the box, but they have to be aligned with your vision, the core values, your core purpose, your bhag. Right. Culture emerges because you're obsessing about getting rid of the wrong people and growing people and caring for people and growing their skills. Culture emerges because you give people the meeting rhythms to get stuff done and to work through issues.

The private equity guys are going to love you. Cameron, I don't know how much work you've done in that world.

I haven't done a lot in private equity, but I built the number two company in Canada to work for. And I've coached two companies that went on to become number one in Australia. One that went on to become number two in the world on Glassdoor. Another one that went on to become number 12 in the US on Glassdoor. Culture has been my world. Culture is not the free massages and the free lunches. Those are perks. Culture is an obsession and an alignment with vision, core values, bhag and core purpose. And then obsessing about getting rid of the wrong people and giving our grain to our best horses. A players are racehorses. B players are workhorses. C players should go to the glue factory.

Got it.

My thoughts.

Okay. No, I know. I like that. And the A players, B players thing comes up quite a bit in terms of how you get that balance right. Because A business and I've been in these environments, as you can appreciate the PE environments, pretty aggressive at the best of times. Sometimes they will flood a business with A players and you get huge amounts of competition.

Okay, well, A players are not just the people who get the results. In my world, the A players are obsessed with core values. They're obsessed with working together and collaborating. Like, like. Not even just a team, they're, they're like obsessed. Like a Cirque du Soleil, right, where they're trying to collaborate and work together. They're in. A players are not just the total, like Wall street executive who, in spite of everyone they work with, get the best results. Those in my world have to get fired.

So they would be a C player in your world? Yeah, because they're not Aligning. So you might have someone just to. Sorry to jump in, but just to be clear, you might have someone who gets results, but they're culturally toxic.

I just told the CEO the other day, $100 million company to fire someone who's been with them for 10 years. Nobody likes them. Star performer. Everybody hates working with him. He's trying to give him a private office and not make him come to retreats. I'm like, dude, you're taking care of the wrong person. Take care of all your people that are showing up, giving it their best, trying their all collaborating, working through conflict in healthy ways. Take care of those people, not the jerk.

Yeah. And what about the. The definition of the B player, the workhorse then?

I mean I, I love workhorses. I like that. Like, I think if you've got 25 of true A players and 75% of true, grind it out 40 hours a week, get it all done, you know, not necessarily God forbid they ever quit, but they're good, man. Like, I had this woman, Holly McLennan, who worked for me in marketing. She just got it done every single day. She was in at 8:59, she left at 501. She came to the company events. She was never on social media. She was never stuffing around, wasting time at the water cooler. But man, she was dependable. She did great work. Everybody liked her. I would hire Hollies all day long.

Yeah. Again, this is an interesting thing because I think sometimes people don't understand the different types and so they kind of think about it in terms of I've got to have all these kind of a players. I mean, I'll give you an example of this may come alive. I did some consultancy for Google a while back. Right. This is a while back when I was in education technology and, and there was some really big issues. Really big issues. Because the people in there a. How they're measured is very much about beating the next person. Right. But you've also got kind of. You're kind of spied on quite a lot. We certainly were. We're talking a decade ago. What did that breed? Well, that breed, you know, people who had to kind of beat everyone else to get a result. Right. And if you weren't competing like that, you weren't really valued.

Yeah, it's kind of a toxic political culture. When, when we built the number two company in Canada, 1-800-got junk. I was coaching the Vancouver Canucks hockey team on culture and their assistant coach was coaching me on sports culture. And what Mike Johnson, the assistant coach Talked to me about one day. He said, one of our teammates comes off the ice on every shift and has his head down, sitting on the bench with his head down. And he said, do you know what he's doing? I said, no. He said, he's crying at the end of every shift, he comes off and he breaks into tears because he's given it everything he's got on the ice. That's level five leadership, right? That is the humility and that insane drive that Jim Collins talks about. And they had this one player on the team, Bertuzzi, who was an egomaniac. He was a bit of a jerk. Great hockey player, but he was always a bit of a jerk with the media. The other players didn't love him. He got into a major, major fight and got kicked off the team. And the Vancouver Canucks went even better as a team because all of a sudden they were gelled where they had this team of level five amazing humans that had the personal humility and the drive to be the absolute best.

Yeah. Someone said to me a long time ago, in my kind of sporting career, what was it that a champion team will be? The team of champions. I don't know if that's always proven to be true, but I like the concept.

I would bet on it more often than not, though. Right. And I'll tell you what, they're certainly going to be solid B pluses or A minuses. I'd rather bet on B pluses or A minuses and work with those people than have the absolute home run but be around toxic energy.

Exactly right. And I think your point's perfect there in terms of if you're going to bet on it, it would happen more often than not. And you do see it. You see these teams that if you just looked at talent, right, on paper, you know, they shouldn't necessarily win the championship, but they do. Right?

And.

And it's got to come down to culture. You know, how they work as a team, the unit, you know, all those sort of things. Belief, confidence.

It's the. There's a. There's an old movie from years ago in the United States. I'm Canadian, but it was called the Bad News Bears.

I remember it.

You got to rewatch it again.

I'm older than I look. I'm like almost 50, so trust me, I know.

Yeah. It's all these misfit kids who just. They somehow get it together and they go through. Through brick walls together. And for me, at the end of the day, none of this stuff matters. We're all just walking each other home. None of us are getting out of this alive. Like, I would rather build those kinds of companies that I can be proud of, that they can be proud working together, that it's fun to come to work every day and we're getting really darn great results. That to me is worth it.

Yeah, well then, but then the journey's fun, right? Like, you know, as opposed to just thinking about the outcome and the outcome becomes a byproduct of that. So I get that too. And a lot of times again, if I just keep referencing back to my world, people forget that in my world because it's about reverse engineering an outcome, a result, and it's a big outcome for a lot of people. But people forget that, you know, the way of getting to that is just as important and actually probably secures the certainty of that result more readily.

Again, I would bet on that certainty more than I would bet on the other way.

So let's begin to wrap things up, Cameron, because I know you're probably going to go enjoy yourself in Dubai, but I do want to bring back some of the points here and just kind of bring it into a bit of a framework, if we can, for people listening. Because I know a, an interview conversation like this, people are going to be going away thinking, how can I start to pull this together? So CEO, slash founder is listening to this and they want to start, they, they realize that they've done some things well, some things are not, but they just want to kind of look at everything and they want to review it and they want to kind of just let's, let's say put in place the areas that they can, you know, potentially improve or optimize. How would you, how would you advise.

They start that I would start with understanding why we're doing it and where we're going over the next three years. Because as the, as the Cheshire Cat and Alice in Wonderland said, you know, if we don't know where we're going, any road will take us there. So be careful with trying to optimize things that are going to take you in the wrong direction or take you off course. So first understand, where are we going over the next three years, what are we driving towards? And then reverse engineer that. That's step one. Step two is I try to look for kind of the low hanging fruit, the easy to work on initiatives that once I put them in place, they'll be like a satellite and they'll play dividends for years without a lot of effort. And then third, I really kind of obsess around the people side of the business around, bringing the right people in, getting the wrong people out, really making sure that I'm applying the right skills and confidence to everybody, really growing people. Because if you really align and grow people, that's where the real trajectory will come from, especially if you've got them aligned, you know, in the right direction.

Can you elaborate on the second one again? Because again, I would have thought the people might come before that.

So what were the points again? I said, I said vision.

The vision.

Three year, three years out, reverse engineered, which is, which is great. Then you said kind of the things that you can affect, I think quickly, that have. Yeah, that basically have some sustainability to them. So once they're done, they kind of keep, they keep repeating.

I talk to every new COO about this as well, by the way, in the first quarter, they're supposed to identify all the key things to try to do to scale the company and to put in place. But put in place the easy to put in place initiatives. Because we only have three inputs. We have people, time and money. And our job is to get the highest return on investment of those three inputs. Often we work on the big Harry projects, the big ERP integrations, the CRM integrations, the big crazy stuff that takes a lot of time and a lot of people, a lot of energy and money. And they don't necessarily ever get easy. Well, that like I believe momentum creates momentum. Like it's the minimum viable everything, not just minimum viable product. So I like taking things that will pay dividends for a long period of time. One example is go get a lot of Amazon reviews for your product or go get a lot of Google reviews for your product, or go get a lot of Indeed reviews because it makes it easier for the next 10 years if you can. Like one of my co, one of my former coaching clients, he has a coconut oil on Amazon with 96,000 five star Amazon reviews just for his Viva Naturals coconut oil. No one's buying any other coconut oil on Amazon except Viva Naturals now. But it took a lot of work to get to the five thousand and ten thousand. And then those reviews will pay dividends for years. So I try to work on those systems that will then act like a satellite and orbit the earth for free for decades.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And I know it's. It's similar, I suppose to some extent when Jim Collins talks about the flywheel effect. Different context, but. But the small things that compound on each Other. And then you start to get momentum. And then when you've got momentum, it's much easier than trying to, you know, create something from scratch.

Yeah. And the momentum creates momentum. And then you can work on the next cool thing. And then you can work on the next cool thing. So the more plates that you have in the air that are spinning or the more satellites that you have that are spinning, the more that the organization scales.

Love it. Very good. So everybody listening in today? We have been rifting backwards and forwards. Pretty much a lot of your book. Actually your book that's come out recently, Second in Command. But how many books have you written in total? I know there's Vivid Vision and then there's the other one you mentioned as well.

Double Double. That was my sixth book. It's by far my best book. And my most important book is the Second in Command. But yeah, I wrote Double Double Meeting, Suck Free, Prime, Vivid Vision. I co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs with Hal Elroy.

Okay.

Yep. And the newest is the Second In Command.

Okay. So Second in Command, available at all your good bookstores, Amazon, wherever you are listening in the world. And I'm going to recommend you go out there and firstly get that book, but more importantly, do a little bit more research and digging on Cameron Herold. You can go to his website as well, which is www.cameronherald.com, where he has coaching programs. You've got a mastermind as well for COOs, isn't that correct?

Yeah, I have something called the COO Alliance. No entrepreneurs are allowed to join. We've got members from 17 countries. And then I also just launched a mastermind community called the OPS Spot and it's for anyone who works in operations. And we've already got members from seven countries from all over the world that are in manager of Ops, Director, Ops, VP Ops roles. Really helping give them the skills and confidence to excel too.

Perfect. And I think I made a comment on there recently asking about is there a recruitment jobs board or something like that? And you said this like that? That was me. Have you got something like that coming as well or not?

2024, I actually had one on the CEO alliance and it was too much of a pain in the ass to deal with so I just pulled it. But there will be one in 2024.

Awesome. Well, listen, Cameron Herold, it's been an absolute pleasure and a delight having you on the show today. Some really important things that we've touched on and for anyone who keeps getting in touch with me, asking me these questions, about? Where do I get a coi? What is it? What do they do? I'm just going to flag them straight back to this episode. So thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thanks Nick. Appreciate you having me.

Hey, thank you for listening to this episode of Scale up with Nick Bradley.

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