Entrepreneurs Try To Do TOO MUCH With Jay Abraham

Hello and welcome to a very ultra special edition of the Ultimate Entrepreneur. This is more of an encounter type series because we're going to plumb the depths of understanding and expertise of somebody who's very, very unique in the world of influencers and experts. He is arguably the only one of his category that I know of or ever heard of. His name is Cameron Herold and he is the COO whisperer, so to speak. He has a very cool organization, the COO Alliance. And the COO alliance is focused squarely and totally on guiding, improving, enhancing the performances of number two person in the organization, the chief operating officer. And it's also concentrated on helping entrepreneurs who try to do everything themselves recognize that perhaps their business could explode if they brought on a coo. But most of them don't even know they need it. Most of them don't know what to do to get one. They don't know how to recruit, they don't know how to integrate. We're going to try to cover a lot of spectrum. And just for edification and for everyone having some respect for the man we're going to talk to, his background is really extensive. He's been very heavily involved in some very, very famous franchises and the last one was 800 got junk. And he was involved in some of the very impressive auto body repair and painting organizations that he's had to navigate. Companies from very small to hundreds of millions of dollars. And he's also been a catalyst and influencer of hundreds of other companies exploding by helping them really understand how the COO can be such a vital and mission critical factor. So hopefully I did enough justice there for you. Cameron, if there's anything else I didn't say, please tell me. But welcome.

Hey Jay, thanks very much. I'm really glad to be here. Happy to share everything we can for anybody who's listening. So good. Thank you for having me.

I'm going to do something I normally don't do because I think the world you operate in is so important. And so either little understood or little optimized that I'm going to sort of throw out to you a chance to help me guide you by taking me on the right direction. Because I see this discussion being bifurcated, being split in two. Half is going to be talking squarely to somebody who is in the role of a coo and half should be talking to an entrepreneur who's trying to do too much, him or herself. Does that make sense or wrong?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's often really the case is the entrepreneurs are that radical kind of self reliant. They've done everything, so they continue to do everything. And they often have an opportunity, a real leverage point for that additional person to really help them scale.

So let's start and then you maneuver the conversation to its optimal contributional best. So first of all, if we're talking to entrepreneur, because this interview will probably be exposed in many different domains and forums, we're talking to an entrepreneur who is hard driving, achieved a reasonable amount, but is basically everything he or she is. Just, you know, the CEO, the strategist, the marketer, the this and that. How do we get them to recognize the hidden opportunity, the lost performance, the gap that they're allowing themselves in their business to really experience and what to do about it? So why don't you take me down that pipe?

Sure. So I think entrepreneurs hit these natural inflection points in their businesses when the business has to change or iterate. And I've seen some changes happen at the ones and the threes. You start off, A company does 100,000 in revenue, 300,000 in revenue, you hire a couple people, a million in revenue, you've got a team, 3 million in revenue, you've got a management team, 10 million. And maybe you have some good leaders and people that have built businesses, 30 million, you're bringing the real outside experts, 100 million. You hit lots of politics, lots of corporate people, money to spend, divisional offices, maybe global, 300 million, etc. Or on the number of employees, 1, 3, 10, 30, 100, 300. Typically when an entrepreneur goes from the 30 to the hundred employee zone, they don't have the skills to manage it and lead it all. They're starting to get stretched. And they're often working in areas that are not necessarily their unique ability or their zone of genius. Right. They're busy being busy, they're working on high impact work, but it's not stuff they love. And as Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach talks about, if you can work in your area of unique ability and get stuff off your plate that either drains you or you're not great at, somebody else can carry that ball for you.

So what?

I often find the best opportunity for an entrepreneurial CEO to hire that second in command is to hire someone who's really, really good at the stuff the CEO sucks at, or they're really, really good at stuff the entrepreneur just doesn't love to do. Then you divide and conquer where one person can carry all those great areas that they love to do and they don't want to work on the stuff that the entrepreneur works on. But it also starts to point out some issues with the COO role in that every CEO in every company is very, very different. You can have one that is managing IT and finance, or you could have a COO that doesn't touch it or finance at all. Like I didn't have finance when I was the CEO at 1-800-GETJUNK. I had some aspects of product development and IT reporting to me. Finance did not report to me at all. But I manage sales and marketing in the call center and franchising and operations. You have other coos that come in and they manage finance. Finance doesn't report to the CEO at all because the CEO either doesn't like it or doesn't have the aptitude for it. So it's really a divide and conquer, a yin and yang kind of role that the COO tends to play.

I like that. So how do I know if I need it? Number one? Number two, if I decide, wow, if I free myself. I love your phrase, the. The zone of genius. It's really cool. If I want to operate in my superpower area and have someone else who's great at the things I either don't like or don't, don't want to do or can't do. How do I recruit the right person? How do I. And you don't need to tell me that the fixed compensation. But how do I reward them for whatever correlation their contribution has on our prosperity, our growth, whatever. Can you sort of take some of those?

Sure. And so first off, I'm going to go to the title of a second.

Okay, great.

Right. Because when you're a smaller company, let's say you're a 20 person company or 30 person company and you have a second in command that's your partner to help you grow this, you don't have to give them a COO title. You don't even have to give them a VP Operations title. Maybe a director of operations or a general manager or an operations manager is the title that works for what they're working on and the compensation you're willing to pay them. Be very careful about giving out big titles to people because it causes salary creep, it causes expectations creep, it can cause more complexity in the business where they think they're playing in a role that they're not really playing in. You know, 20 years ago to have a C level title, whether you're chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, you had to be a major player at a major company and now you can walk into a company with 20 employees and they've got a CFO and a CSO. God, you know, recently they came up with the Chief Revenue Officer title and that was because the head of sales didn't have a C level. So they didn't. So get a second in command who's really good at what you're not. And make sure you're interviewing for trust because you really have to trust them. Like day one, you should be giving them your passcodes, your banking information, access to your email. If you're not willing to give them that on day one, keep interviewing, keep doing reference checks, keep doing torque until you know everything about them that you're prepared to give them that. Because the reality is, to really leverage that coo, it has to be that partnership. Almost like getting married to someone. You wouldn't meet them, go for dinner and get married, you're going to date them, you're going to be engaged for a while, you're going to go on some trips, you might live together, and then you're going to get married. Well, unfortunately, when you're hiring a second in command, all of that dating, all of that living together, all of that engagement period has to happen before day one. Because if you wait to do that while they're working with you, you've missed massive opportunities and caused more problems. So you have to interview for trust, for cultural fit, for core values and for the skill set, the deep, deep skills that they've done the work before. Don't get tricked that they know how to do something. The world is littered with a bunch of really, really smart people. Maybe they've got an MBA, maybe they've read 32 textbooks, maybe they've been a part of masterminds that know how to do stuff, but they've never done it before. You know, as an example, if you ask me that, you know, do I know how to do the butterfly swimming stroke? Of course I do. I mean, you go like this with your arms and you kick your feet like a dolphin and you. Now, I would drown if I had to do the butterfly for more than a, you know, 100 yards. But I know how to do it. I even know how to win an Olympic medal, but I've never won one.

Yes, right.

So the key is to hire people that have done what you need them to do. Line up with you on the cultural fit and core value side, and you know that you can trust them so much that they won't go out of their lane and you won't go out of your lane. That's really the starting point, and I.

Would imagine it also a presupposition to me is it requires very clear communication. One of the things I just did a session in Florida with Tony Robbins for his Platinum and Lions and they ask a lot of great questions and explain some of their visions and strategies. And I kept coming back to a phrase that said if the assumption that you base something on is wrong, everything that flows from it is wrong. And I'm assuming that you really need to be very clear the get go, what each one's doing, why you're doing it, you know, methodology, conduct style, things like that. Or am I wrong?

No, you're very right. You not only have to be right for the two of you to really understand, but also for the rest of the team to now understand. Because really what used to happen was I used to go to the CEO with that problem. Well, now you go to the coo, or I used to go to the CEO if I needed help with something. Well, now you go to the coo or I used to have one on one meetings with the CEO. Now my one on ones are with the coo and I'm one degree away from the CEO who maybe I missed that relationship or I'm longing for that relationship, or maybe I'm pissed off that I didn't get that relationship. So you really have to watch for, you know, the roles and responsibilities in the org chart being defined and watch for the ripple effects, the unintended ripple effects that bringing on these big senior people can often bring into the company. Right, Good ripple effects and potentially bad ones.

That's so interesting. And then, and again, I don't know if you have models, but I'm actually thinking about asking you to speak to a couple of the groups that I work with regularly because they are befuddled trying to figure out compensation for their equivalent of a coo, whether it's a general manager, whether it's operations. And they tend to either pay too much, pay too little, or correlate it the wrong way. And I don't know if those are the right direction to take you, but have you got some insight?

Well, so again, Harvard wrote an article about 15 years ago on the misunderstood role of the COO. And they looked at the different distinct styles of chief operating officers that existed. And in some cases someone comes in as the change agent where they're coming in to take an organization and really make some big changes to it, or they're coming in to take over responsibilities for the CEO that are very different and now they're in charge of strategy that they never used to be, which can cause kind of misalignment. So again, it goes back to the real clarity around what the roles are, what the responsibilities are, and then also not giving the COO too much rope in the first 90 days that you don't let them get off course a little bit. Right. Because they can come in with their own ideas, their own systems, their own biases. And if you give them too much rope and often what happens is the CEO is so excited to have someone in there finally running the business that they just dump it all on their plate. They kind of abdicate instead of delegate, which actually is what happened. When I left, 1,800 got junk. I was the COO from 2 million to 106 million. We went from 14 employees to 3,100 employees. And when I left, it took them 12 months to find my replacement. And they brought in the former president of Starbucks to replace me. I was like, wow, she's amazing. She's run Starbucks North American operations. Good leadership development, good brand multi unit. She's going to be amazing. But Brian literally dumped the company on her lap and wanted to take a vacation because he was super stressed it had happened. Right. He was bringing her on right as the global financial crisis was starting. He really threw it on her plate and said, well, you're really, really smart. Run with it. But culturally, she wasn't connected with the organization as well. And 12 months later, he had to fire her. So you have to be very careful with onboarding somebody who's so good and you give them so much responsibility that they don't take the company in a completely different direction from where you were going.

I think that's very profound because I can see one of the things that I am fixated on in the kind of work that I do is helping people realize that no two people ever are having the same conversation. Excuse me. Because they're basing everything, definitions, visualizations, interpretations, applications on their reference frame. And if you're not very clear to make sure you're having you either align or you define the same way, or you integrate and you get some kind of torque conversion there. It can be disastrous.

I was just talking about this whole. People see it from their perspective. The other day, I was coaching a CEO about it. And I'll give you an example for anybody who's watching. They'll be able to see this. If you're listening, I'm going to show Jay a coaster. What color is this coaster?

Okay. It appears to be light Brown.

Light brown. Okay, so. And are you absolutely sure it's light brown? I'll hold it even closer to me.

It's light brown.

You're gonna, you're gonna bet me dinner for two the next time we're together that it's light brown? It's light brown, Jay. It's gray and white. I just flipped the coaster over and it's clearly gray and white. What color is the coaster, Jay?

It's gray and white.

Are you sure? Because I think it's beige.

Right. No, it's great.

It's a great visual. So you're looking at it and you're completely right that it's beige. One side is beige, the other side is a picture of Bill Gates and it's gray and white. And it's. It's absolutely. Both of us are correct because we both see the different perspective. Yes. And leadership, real leadership comes in when you really work hard to understand the other person's personal bias, historical bias, expertise, opinions, political bias, whatever they're coming from. When you really work hard to understand it all. And then as Stephen Covey, who, you know, used to say, you know, seek first to understand, then to be understood. I think that's when leadership can really work hard or well together. As a CEO, COO is really working well to understand each other, to stay on the same page. Much like when you'll hear a husband and wife say, we grew apart.

Yes.

We only grew apart because you didn't grow together.

Interesting. I like that. Very cool. So you do. You do two kinds of work. Your COO alliance, I am assuming, and if I'm wrong, clarify it is made up of number twos in command, but you also do, as you just identified, private work with CEOs to get them to be able to optimize the contribution and the outcome of their COO or equivalent. Is that correct? Yeah.

I've been coaching CEOs and COOs for 13 years, doing one on one coaching with them and often their leadership teams. And I coach real companies. Typically 50 to 5,000 employees is my zone. The only time I've ever coached, I coached the CEO and the second in command of Sprint for 18 months. I did some work with a monarchy over in the Middle east, but most of my companies, yeah, they own the country of Qatar.

Wow.

But most of my work is working with the small to medium enterprises. 50 to 5,000 employees would be my zone.

It's a big swap. So should we switch now? And what I'd like to do, but I want you to guide me to get the best outcome from you and for everyone watching, listening. So should we move at least temporarily to talk about the guidance to a COO or number two, or should we talk more about the entrepreneur? You tell me.

I think we're speaking to both anyway, so I'll give you some points that are really, really important for the relationship to really be effective.

Okay?

And I think about a typical relationship with a couple, right? Whether it's husband and wife or a gay relationship, doesn't matter. Matter. You need to have date nights or you need to have time to disconnect, put your phone away, hang out with each other, talk about what's going on, talk about the issues, really kind of reconnect. And the CEO COO needs something in their calendar every week where they're having that relationship. Connecting time. When Brian and I built 1-800-got junk, we would go for a run every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 6:30, we'd go run 6, 8, 10K together, come home, shower and change, and meet at the office. On Thursday middays, we would actually go off site for the day and we'd sit and work together at one of the clubs that we belong to with both of our laptops, and we just work. Sometimes we'd be laughing, telling jokes. Sometimes we wouldn't even talk for three hours. But it was just our time to get away, work on our projects, and be around each other. You know, those are important times for the C CEO coo. They also need time for the COO to really talk about the frustrations and the struggles that the CEO is causing. And that has to be done behind the scenes. So it's almost like a mom and dad can't argue with each other in front of the kids, but they need time to argue with each other separately and show up in front of the kids as a force that's really strong together. The CEO needs to recognize that there's probably only one person in the company that will ever tell them that the emperor has no clothes, right? That the suit is. You're naked. There's only one person that will ever tell you the real problems, and that's the COO. The COO's job is to tell you the problems in a confidential, safe space and for you to say thank you and ask clarifying questions and never to be upset when that truth comes to you. Because if you ever shoot the messenger, you're going to be all by yourself as that circle. The COO's job is to make sure that they never, ever hurt the brand iconic that they're trying to build, right. The COO's job is to make the CEO iconic, to turn them into a Howard Schultz, to turn them into a Ray Kroc, to turn them into a Brian Scudamore or what have you, you know, Mark Zuckerberg. The COO's job is to play behind the scenes and do all the dirty work. And the CEO's job is to make sure that behind the scenes they're making sure that everybody loved the coo. And even though they're the hard ass. Yes, I know they're tough, yes, I know they're hard. But it's their job. They have to. So behind the scenes, both the CEO and COO make each other look good. And then privately they get to debate, discuss and be hard on each other and then come back out as that team or team kind of together.

This is really stimulating. So if you were to identify, talking about the coo, a hierarchy of skill sets or critical functions, knowing that every business is going to be unique, but there must be some degree of, you know, the 8020 rule, what would they be and why?

What do you mean by that?

Well, I mean, okay, the role of the coo, depending on the business is this, this, this, this, this, this and this. Yeah, a bunch of this is, are going to be variable depending on the skew of the business, its maturity, its size. But there's certain ones that are going to be universal. They have to be very good at this. They have to be very good at this. And very good means whatever, whatever your definition is. I'm just trying to get some.

Yeah, this is what Harvard identified was the hardest part to identify on the COO role is they identified seven distinct types.

Okay.

There is, there almost isn't a basket that makes them all the same because they're supposed to be good at the stuff the CEO sucks at. So if the CEO. So as an example, if you're an engineering process driven CEO like Tobias Luke, who's the CEO of Shopify, you're very inward facing, engineering, product focused. As a CEO. His coo, Harley Finkelstein is very outward facing business development, sales, pr, marketing, you know, rah, rah, cheerleading.

Yes.

That's interesting, right? Harley has a bigger social profile, but in other companies, Howard Schultz was very much the outward facing business development, you know, talking to the media, etc. But he had very inward facing CEOs who were operationally engineering, almost socially awkward. So it's hard to say other than you need to be really good at the stuff the entrepreneur or CEO Sucks at. You probably need to be good at systems and leadership development and recruiting. Right. Because you're always bringing in more people into the team. But that's a leadership trait. I think you need to be good at consensus and conflict management and project planning or have really good people that are really good at project planning that report to you.

I like that. So let me ask, you know, here's.

A silly example, but it really illustrates the point. Back in the 1950s, the woman made dinner and cleaned the kitchen and cleaned the house and the man went to work and made money and came home and they met in the middle and had dinner together and they had the relationship. The thought of a guy cooking dinner or cleaning a house or going grocery shopping was foreign back in the 50s. It just was very, very rare, extraordinarily rare. But now, now the pink jobs and blue jobs are kind of all shaken up and divided out by who likes them and who wants to do them. I love cooking. I would way rather cook than clean. I would rather dry dishes, than wash the dishes. I would rather unload the dishwasher than load the dishwasher. But I would be happy unloading the dishwasher every day for the rest of my life as long as I didn't have to load it.

I love it.

So in the CEO COO world, it's the same idea.

That's great. That's great. So a question that maybe, and I'm asking questions that are intriguing to me and maybe they're good advocate advocates for everybody. Maybe not. So do I want somebody, preferably who understands my industry, who comes from a parallel universe, does it matter and why?

It depends on what you're trying to do. So you may want someone with industry experience or you may want somebody who thinks of the industry completely different because you're pivoting or changing. Maybe you want somebody to come in who's doing acquisitions and you want somebody who's got more M and A experience than industry experience. You may already have a lot of. If you have a very technical type of sell, you probably want somebody with industry or engineering experience so they understand that side. But if you're a typical business to consumer, you don't really need that as much as. Good.

Good answer.

Especially as the company scales, you tend to have business leaders who are really good at those functional areas already. The COO might be leading seven business areas that have really deep domain expertise. Right. So you may have. The key is can you build teams, can you build consensus? Can you grow people? Right.

I love that. Let's get into. Let's talk about what you do privately when you coach a CEO, entrepreneur, founder. Let's talk about what you do in the COO alliance and how the two work.

Okay, sure. So in my coaching, there's a spectrum in coaching where I think you have a coach on one side of the spectrum which usually uses the Socratic method to ask the person a lot of questions, to have them figure out for themselves what they should be doing. That's not what I do. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have the consultant who is the expert that you hire to come and do the work for you. That's not what I do because I don't do work. I kind of lie in between in the middle of a coach and a consultant more as a mentor, whereas I've done most of what you're going to be doing. So I'm going to give you the shortcuts or, or the cheat sheets or the easy to implement systems to do it faster and leaner. And I'm not going to ask you seven questions when I already have the answer for you. So I'm probably going to find out what the problem is and give you a couple of shortcuts and some analogies that help you understand it. So I tend to be kind of the. Because I've been coaching client. Well, I started coaching entrepreneurs actually, in 1989.

Really?

Yeah. I had coached 120 entrepreneurs by the time I was 28. 128 real companies.

Wow.

Elon Musk's brother. I hired Elon's brother Kimball in 1993 and he was a franchisee for me, as was his cousin, Peter reeve, who built SolarCity. I was coaching them 27 years ago.

Oh my gosh.

I've been coaching people for a long time, so coaching for me is more giving you the expertise, giving you the cheat sheets, giving you the skills for the COO alliance. I move myself out of that role a little bit more and I want the mentoring to come from the peer group. So I'm trying to bring more and more seconding commands together in a combination of online events, online masterminds, closed private Facebook and Slack channels where they can communicate with each other. Presents peer presentations from each other to the groups, occasionally bringing in outside experts to speak so they can hear some outside expertise, and then having offline events where they can come and attend offline events as well. So but it's really more for them to learn from each other versus me always being there as that sage or the expert. So let's say that if we had a two day event, I may present for 30 minutes of the two days. The rest of the time I'm facilitating, making sure that they're communicating, collaborating and so your catalyst.

I love that. Yeah, it's good. That's wonderful. So interesting. I just give me one second because I'm having an ADD moment and I had a really good thought question that I wanted to pose to you about this. Well, first thing is you found. I knew what I was going to say. I've dedicated most of my career to finding what I'll call the highest upside leverage points that were overlooked by the entrepreneur in any business and then identifying all the different facets that that leverage could be taken to. And it seems to me that you in a very, very unique and distinct way are doing that in terms of helping either a show hard driving entrepreneurs who want to do it all alone and be singular how much more powerful and how much more profitable and how much more rapid and ele their business could grow and achieve if they had the right second in command to relieve them and let them operate in what you call the zone of genius. I really like that. And secondly, it seems that you're also taking the second in commands and helping them progressively be better and better by having them interact with one another and getting all this real world peer perspective and sharing and enhancing and iterations. Very unique. Is there anything else like this?

Not really. Not really? Yeah, I mean there's books and there's courses people can take and stuff, but not really. I've often seen entrepreneurs again because I was running my first company when I was 21 years old. I had 12 employees. I ran my own business for three years while I was in university. So I had to figure out the shortcuts. Plus I wasn't the smartest kid. I was. I got 62% in university. I got 64% was my average in high school. So I was like a solid, you know, 2.5 GPA. Right.

Do you think that just was that you weren't because you're obviously super bright, was that that you weren't engaged?

I was wickedly add, not engaged, bored in class, didn't see the point, didn't understand why I was learning calculus that I knew I'd never use. And then I just was. I had other things I was doing that seemed more important. Like I was day trading stocks in 1981. I was 16 years old and I was day tried. I was calling my broker from a payphone in our school. He's like, dude, you can't keep flipping out at like every quarter point. So what I've seen is entrepreneurs are like flies trying to get out a window. And they're going to keep trying as hard as they can. They're going to keep banging their head on the window. And I'm kind of like you. I see the door that's open right here. If they just turn and go out the door, it's just easier. So maybe you see the highest point of leverage. I always see the path of least resistance as well. I just see like it's just easier go that way. Like, you know, so I try to give them the shortcuts. And because I'm not the smart guy, I couldn't create the complex models or spreadsheets or because I don't know how to do them. So I give you these real simple systems. They're like, well, shit, this works. I'm like, yeah. It's like. And momentum creates momentum for me. So for me it's not about perfection. It's about how many of these little things can I get up into orbit so that they'll always be in orbit and that momentum will create more momentum. I try to do that with companies.

That's really.

I obsess about culture more than anything.

No, I love that. So I'm gonna now take this to a crescendo and then hopefully a beautiful conclusion. The crescendo is what do you want? When. I mean, I've got a philosophy. Anytime any two people come together for any reason, for any amount of time, you. Your goal is to make the other side better off because you were in their life. And if you adhere to that, no matter what on the spectrum, it's pretty powerful. And we have two categories of people that are experiencing this. Entrepreneurs and number twos. What do you want both of them to take away from this? More than anything else that's going to help them immediately see sees more advantage. And why?

Well, one for sure is that whole one plus one doesn't equals three. The sum of the parts is way, way stronger. So if the CEO can help the COO grow and the COO can help remove obstacles for the CEO that divide and conquer, that two in a box. When Brian and I built one 800, got junk, we were unstoppable. Like to do what we did. He could never have done it without me. I could never have done it without him. There's no way. We would just never would have gotten. We didn't. It was just we were the right DNA the right fit of skill sets, the right drive, the right trust. He was my best man at my wedding two months before I started working for him, really. So we were. We already had deep, deep, you know, trust. So I guess what I would want them to realize is that it's worth working for. It's worth finding the right one. It's worth building that relationship. It's different from any other role in the company. It is your. It's like your business marriage, but one that you don't want to get divorced from.

No, that's a great. That's a great point. So let's talk about access, how people access you. I mean, you've got a wonderfully collaborative, vibrant, vital and dynamic, unique group for COO second in command. And if they want to learn more about it, they want to access you. What do they do?

Yeah. So we have the COO alliance is the place that they can find out all the information on growing their second in command. We have the Second in Command podcast where we've interviewed about 140 so far. Coos. We will never interview the CEO. We only interview their second in command. Because everybody knows the rest of the story, right? Everyone knows the CEO story. I want to hear the other side of the story.

That's great.

So we have the COO of the Cleveland Indians. We have the COO of Bumble, the COO of Shopify. So we're interviewing the CEO of these great brands. That's a good spot for them to start. All of my five books. I've written five books now. Double Double Meetings Suck. Vivid Vision, the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs, I co authored with Hal El Ruddy Free pr. All of those are on Amazon, Audible and itunes. And then my main website, Cameron herald.com they can check out as well.

And it's spelled. I spelled it wrong first time.

Everyone spelled it wrong.

H E R O L D. Correct.

That's correct, Yep. My dad's license plate is E, not A because everyone spelled our last name.

A R O, L, D. Well, you possess a very distinctive, very unique, and very incalculably valuable knowledge, skill, and grasp of a piece of the puzzle that I think certainly entrepreneurs, maybe, maybe at the corporate level they get, but in the entrepreneurial level, I think it's shamefully limited. And if you can bring illumination, if you can bring higher performance, if you can multiply the. The duality that what an entrepreneur can create for his marketplace and thus what they can reciprocally give back to them in terms of prosperity, wealth, it seems wonderful. And you're a very unique man, and I'm thrilled we did this. We did one earlier, and I didn't really get into very much depth. This is a great showcase, not just for you, but of what you understand that entrepreneurs and CEOs need to. So I thank you very much. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't or anything you want to say in conclusion that I didn't allow?

No. I really appreciate the time and kind of giving some exposure to this relationship. I think it is just a really important role, I guess. One quick side note that I was just thinking about was a lot of entrepreneurs tend to say, I need a second in command. And the first thing I'll say to them is, do you have an assistant? And often they're like, no, I don't have an ea. Well, if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. And they need to hire an executive assistant before they hire a second in command.

That's a great intervention. That's wonderful. I've enjoyed this and I appreciate it and I'm glad we got to revisit it. Makes me very happy for the people that will get a chance to be benefited. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Jay. Great seeing you. I really appreciate the time.

My pleasure.