How to Get Ahead of 90% of Businesses by Hiring a COO

Hello, everybody. We are here in Tulum, Mexico right now. So I'm a little bit sweaty, but you're getting the best of me. You're going to be getting lots of action related to the second in command today. It's actually my birthday, so I'm showing up sweaty Tulum on my birthday, answering lots of questions about my new book, the Second in Command. So really want to be able to answer any questions that you have related to the relationship with the CEO and the coo. And I'm going to walk you through some of the best practices that I know to be true right now as well, just to start us off. So at the end of the day, first off is what is a second in command and what is a coo? The reality is most people are giving out titles that are far too big for the people that are actually inside of their organization right now. And this is true in any part of the company. People are giving out titles that are too big in marketing or in finance, in operations. The reality is, most companies out there today, if you're less than a $50 million company in size and you have a CMO, you probably really have a Director of Marketing with a big title, or a Vice President of Marketing with a big title, or if you've got a Chief Financial officer, a cfo, you probably have a Head of Finance or a Director of finance, or a controller or a VP of finance, but you've given them out a big title. The same is true of a COO. So 20 or 30 years ago, to get a COO title, you had to be a major player inside of a major company. We've had a lot of title inflation over the year. We've been giving away titles that are far too big, too early, and they don't match the roles and responsibilities, the level of strategic insight that someone is bringing into the company. They don't match the level of autonomy the person can actually bring in their role. And they really are not even matched to the actual compensation that you're paying as well. So the second in command and the reason I called my book the Second in Command, the reason I even named my podcast the second in command podcast, and our YouTube channel, our second YouTube channel, which is the second in command podcast, YouTube channel is because there are different second in commands to the CEO with different titles. The second in command could have a president title, could be a coo, could be a VP of Operations, could be a Director of Operations, could be an Operations manager, could even be a Chief of Staff or your Executive assistant This second in command is the person that the entrepreneur or the CEO leans on to get more stuff done and to scale up their company. So on today's Live, I want to be able to answering lots of questions. I'm going to deliver lots of content. And if you drop your questions down below, share this, like this, et cetera, we'll get a really good rich dialogue going today. But I want to be able to answer any of your questions as we go through this live as well. So the first part we're talking about is the title. To give somebody the title must match the level of strategic insight, the level of autonomy they bring, the amount of P and L responsibility that they have, the amount of people that they're able to bring into the company with them. Right. Like if you're coming in as the coo, you're probably bringing in suppliers and customers and potential or current employees coming over from other companies with you. And they also have the ability to deliver because they've done it multiple times before. So that's first and foremost. So the book, the Second in Command is for anyone that has a second in command to them. Secondly is once you're looking to recruit a second in command, where do you find them? Where do they hang out? Well, any good second in command and we can call it a COO just for sake of. Even my company that I run is called the COO Alliance. The COO is never out looking for a job. A really good COO or a really good second in command has a job. They're working for a good company. They're not going to leave a good company to come and work for an average company at this point. They need to be recruited and brought over to you. Andrew saying he loves Tulum. Yes, I'm in Tulum, Mexico. I love Tulum too. Didn't scuba dive on this trip. We dove the last time we were here and, and this is actually my birthday trip. So we're down here with some friends hanging out. We're in an incredible Pentos villa right now for the week. We've been down in Tulum for two weeks. But yeah, I love Tulum. Done the cenotes, done lots of beach stuff. Tonight we're going out for a surprise birthday dinner. Not sure where we're going and probably a little bit of partying. And then tomorrow we jet off to Utah for a crazy Halloween party in Eden. Utah with a lot of the Powder Mountain Summit series and baby Bathwater crew, which will be super fun. All right, so where do you find that second in command. You're not going to find them on Indeed or Glassdoor. You're not going to find them out looking for a job. You're not going to find them on posting things on Craigslist or industry job boards. And you probably won't even find them by posting a job on social media. I'm going to tell you to post it on social media, but let me explain why to do that in a second. Most of the good seconding commands are already engaged in working with the company somewhere. You need to go and poach them, which means you need to engage a great executive recruiting firm that can actually help you poach these people. And we're talking about true COOs at like $250,000 or north of that in compensation. Remember when I was the COO for 1, 800, got junk and I left there 16 years ago, but when I was there, I was making over 300,000 a year as the COO, and that was 16 years ago. So a true COO is really 250,000 or north of that. And if you're recruiting that kind of person, it really does behoove you to make sure that you bring an executive search firm in. If you send me an email cameronameronherald.com I can actually introduce you to a couple of great executive recruiting firms that will help you poach one. But the starting point is to really understand yourself as the entrepreneur, understand yourself as the CEO, and again, remember to drop questions in so I can answer them live as we go, or any comments if you're liking the content too. So in understanding yourself as the CEO, because what you're looking for in a good second in command is someone to match you, right? You're looking for the yin to your yang. So you're looking for your weaknesses as an entrepreneur and CEO. You're looking for the areas of the business that drain you of energy as an entrepreneur or CEO. And you're looking for your strengths and the areas that fill you with energy. Because what you're going to look to recruit for is somebody who is really, really good at the stuff that you suck at and they really, really love to work on the areas that drain you of energy. So that's first and foremost is make sure that you're looking for people that actually match your strengths and weaknesses. Next thing is to understand why you're bringing this person on board. Are you looking to free up your time so that you can lead people or work in your area of genius, or free up your time so you can have a Better life. Are you looking for someone who can add more kind of strong strategy to the organization or can help you execute on something? There was a great article written roughly about 15 or 16 years ago in the Harvard Business Review, and it was called the Misunderstood Role of the coo. If you email me, I can send you the link to that article as well. But the article was talking about seven distinct types of Chief Operating officers and how different they are and the roles that they bring inside of your company. So the different styles, you could have somebody coming into your company who's the executor, right? They're coming in to just get stuff done. Because the reality is often companies get stagnant. They're only growing at 2% or 10% or 15% a year when real growth is at 25 to 40% a year minimum. Right? You really want to get over that 25%. If you do three years in a row of 26%, you double the size of your company's revenue and profit. So you could be bringing in someone to execute. You could be bringing in a change agent. You could be bringing in a COO who is really helping you pivot the organization and take it in a completely different direction. Maybe you're bringing on a COO that has experience at doing ma. If you're doing some M and A transactions in the next few years, maybe you're bringing in somebody to actually be more of your mentor. This was the role that Sheryl Sandberg played in the early days at Facebook where she was the mentor to the very young Mark Zuckerberg. And her role was to actually give him the guidance in showing them what to do. That was partially the role that I played as the COO at 1-800-got junk. I came into the organization as the second in command to the entrepreneur. They were doing 2 million in revenue when I got there, operating in 12 cities when I arrived. And I was employee number 14 when I left. Six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees system wide. We'd gone from 2 million to 106 million in revenue. And we'd gone from operating in 12 cities to three hundred and thirty cities in four countries. I was really the mentor for that first three or four years because I had built franchise companies before. I knew what we needed to do for franchise sales, franchise marketing, franchise operations, franchise coaching. I really understood how to scale the franchise company. So I was really that mentor and almost a partner to Brian, who was the CEO and founder. So you need to understand yourself as the entrepreneur Your weaknesses. Your strengths, the areas that drain you and you're looking for that counterpart for you. You. When you write a job description for the role, you need to think about the roles and responsibilities of the person you're hiring as your second in command, really clearly explain that their strengths need to be and what areas of the business they're going to be running and also really point out the areas they're not going to touch. So you need to make it a very polarizing job description so they understand you're never going to touch marketing or you're never going to touch it. So if there's a second in command that really wants to oversee it, they realize this isn't the company for them. Them. In every single case, the COO matches the weaknesses and strengths of the CEO. So you could have a COO that oversees marketing, you could have a COO that doesn't oversee marketing. You could have COOs that oversee finance, you could have COOs that don't oversee finance. So it's key to make that job description so polarizing that the person reading it recognizes, well, this is exactly what I'm looking for, or there's no way I want to work with an organization like this. I also think it's important for the entrepreneur or the CEO to really clearly spell out their kind of idiosyncrasies. It's almost like you were writing a one page condensed operating manual to yourself and talk about the things that will drive this new COO crazy, the things that they'll love working with you for, the things that will piss them off so that anyone reading this description recognizes, wow, this is where I want to be. Or no, this is not where I want to be at all. Again, drop some questions down in the chats if you have questions. I apologize for the sweating. Right now I'm in Tulum, Mexico and it's a little warm in here trying to get the air conditioning cranking. But that job posting has to be written like a sales letter as well. So I also go out and get a really good copywriter to take my two or three page job description with the one page description of me embedded in that. And I have the copywriter polish that job posting so it really pops off the page page and makes a massive impact on the reader because you want to push half the people away and really attract the other people in like a magnet. So you're going to be sharing that job posting on social media with your email list. You're going to be putting bonus programs in place for your current employees to help share this and push that out. And you're going to engage an executive recruiter to help you bring that person into your company. That's critical. Next thing is the interviewing process itself. When you're bringing in a COO to come into the organization and you're typically bringing somebody in from the outside world as well, you're often going to be bringing someone in as your second in command over top of a lot of your current team. So they're going to be essentially managing your VP of finance, managing your VP of culture, managing your VP of ops, et cetera. So you need to make sure that the people interviewing the COO are not just the CEO. You need to have some directors and VPs interviewing who their potential boss will be as well. That's critical. So you've got a question from Andrew. Andrew said, what KPIs should I be tracking for my second in command and how do I ensure that she or he are on track? Well, here's what's interesting about this. The KPIs are very different based on the actual person that you're hiring for your company. So as an example, when I was the COO at 1-800-got junk, I did not have it and finance reporting to me. So I was responsible for operations, for marketing, for sales, for pr, for the call center at one point, but also for franchise sales. So I was really on the revenue side of the business, definitely not on the backstage part of the business. So what I was responsible for were things like employee net promoter score, customer net promoter score, our franchise partner net promoter score, franchisee revenue, company revenue, company gross margin, company profitability. I was responsible for, for how fast our franchise partners were rolling out and how quickly we could get them to success metrics. So those were metrics that I would be responsible for. Very, very different from somebody, let's say like a Harley Finkelstein, who is the COO for Shopify. He would be focusing on very different metrics. Probably things like, you know, well, it's certainly on the growth side because Shopify is on the growth, but certainly probably around technology. So he'd be looking and focusing on different things. And that's what's critical is you put the metrics in place based on the roles and responsibilities of that person who is actually running it for you. So you can't say that one COO has the same metrics as every coo, whereas most heads of marketing have the same metrics that other heads of marketing might have, or most heads of HR would have the same metrics that other heads of HR might have as well. So, so make sure that your metrics that you're measuring the COO success by match their roles and responsibilities. The other thing is they also have to match the stage that your company is in. When I was the COO at 1-800-got junk, I had very different metrics that I was responsible for to what the current COO has. When I took the company from 2 million to 106 million, well, his metrics to take them to 450 million are very, very different from what my metrics were in the early days. So it isn't even tied necessarily to the company or to the title. It has to match the actual roles and responsibilities and the stage of that COO inside of your organization. All right, so let's go back to the and keep again, dropping questions in the chat. We'll answer those as we go. If you're doing that interview process, you also want to make sure that you're only interviewing candidates that match the culture of your organization, the stage of growth of your organization, and they also match the core or the kind of behavioral traits of your leadership team. They really have to come in in sync because again, you're bringing somebody in who is seasoned, who has done it before. They've probably built a few companies before. You have to make sure that they match your company's core values as well. So it's critical to have some people inside of the company interviewing these candidates, not just for skills, but also on how are they going to mesh with the company, how are they going to fit with your company's core values? And that's critical that you interview second in commands to match your company's core values and culture fit. And that's where a lot of people can make a big mistake. In fact, when I left 1-800-got junk, they took 12 months to find my replacement. I actually thought they'd found a fantastic replacement. She was the former president of Starbucks North America. You know, multi unit operations, great retail, great leadership company, great brand foundation, fantastic growth, very good profitability. The problem was culturally, this new COO did not match the culture of the company. She was very corporate, very bureaucratic, all about hiring consultants, didn't like the guerrilla marketing, didn't want to listen to franchise partners. Really, it was kind of all about this corporate methodology and mindset. While the company was very entrepreneurial, it was a quick start. We had so much fun. We wore blue wigs in all of our marketing. We did a lot of guerrilla marketing. We embraced all of the ideas from franchise partners and tried to figure out the best way to take their ideas. So culturally she wasn't a good fit. And culturally is probably the reason why she ended up getting fired 12 months later. So you have to make sure that you have systems to interview the candidate on culture and that you interview them on the proven skill set that they've done it before. You're not looking to hire a coo, and this is why sometimes it's dangerous to even promote a COO from within. You need a COO to come into your company that has done it before. They've been there before, they've actually managed and overseen the areas that you need them to oversee and they've gotten the results that you need in other companies before. So you need to have the interview process in place to interview people and make sure that they've done it before, which means you need to train your team on how to actually do proper interviews. One of the core modules that I have in my Invest in youn Leaders course is on interviewing. And I really suggest that you train all of your people on how to do proper job interviews so that they actually can know how to screen candidates out for proper skill set as well. You can also bring in some outside experts to help you with the interview process too, if you don't have the depth of interviewing senior talent. Get a couple of advisors, get a couple of people on your board, bring in a couple of coaches. You know, years ago I was actually paid to do interviews for Naomi Simpson, who's on Dragon's Den and Shark Tank in Australia. She's built a massive organization over there. Well, I interviewed and helped her select her head of PR and communications because she didn't have the depth internally. So she brought me in as an expert to do that. I've also been hired a number of times to interview and help companies select a great set coo. So you can pay an expert or ask board members, etc to come in to help provide that strategic guidance on the interview as well. So you've got another question right now. Any new tools or tech AI etc that you think could help benefit operations? Loads of hype around this topic these days and some real gems. Yeah, I'm not going to talk so much about the actual technology tools, but the mindset that your company needs to use right now to embrace AI. And this is what all of our members of the COO alliance are doing right now too. They are really focused on giving people in their company at least one to Two hours every week to go and play with different AI tools. So we've given them all. There's a dashboard, it's called, there's an AI for that, and the dashboard, there's an AI for that shows roughly, I think it's 7 or 8,000 different AI tools that exist. Now everybody's talking about ChatGPT. That's only one AI tool. There's another 7 or 8,000 AI tools that exist. So if you give all of your employees time to play with the tools for one to two hours a week, and then they come back and report into the organization and they come back and report in on what tool they were playing with, how they used that tool, what they learned from that tool, what kind of results they got from that tool, and maybe they do a five minute book report to the rest of their team on showing them how they use that AI tool. That's what's really going to leverage your organization, but not by just forcing people to use one or two tools when so many out there currently exist. So it's also a mindset that we need to create inside of our companies. And this is what COOs need to do, is create the mindset that the only employee who is at risk of losing their job to AI are the employees that don't, don't embrace and start using AI. It's kind of like 30 years ago if you said, oh well, that Internet's just a fad thing, I'm not going to use the Internet. You wouldn't be able to succeed in your role today if you didn't use the Internet. It's going to be the same with any of the AI tools that are out there. You will be replaced. If you push back and say, I'm not going to use AI, someone with AI will replace you in your job. So that's the mindset I like coos to actually commit with. It's interesting. I've actually talked to a number of different CIOs about this over the years too, that people who come in and say, oh, I've got 25 years of experience, they often have five years experience five times in a row. They don't necessarily have 25 years of incredible experience behind them. So you need to be cautious that people are resting on their laurels and resting on their past experience. You're always looking for people that are hungry with growth. Again, any other questions? You want to drop those into the chat? We can answer those for sure. I'd love to be able to answer more questions around the CEO COO relationship, Where do you recruit the coo? How do you pay them? Let me talk a little bit about compensation of the second in command as well, because it does actually match into. I'm just going to move out of the way right now. I've got a guy with a leaf blower who is probably not going to be making me very happy in a little bit. So I'm going to move to a different part of this room. I'm in Tulum, Mexico right now. Hopefully this gets a little quieter in behind this wall here. We shall see. No, it's not that much quieter, is it? All right. So in terms of talking about the how to pay, the way that you're going to pay a second in command is all based on their roles and responsibilities, the level of strategic insight that they can bring into your company. And remember, strategy and planning are very, very different things. Lots of people that are 25 years old can come in with the planning expertise, but they don't necessarily have the strategy because they haven't been there and done that number of times before. So you're looking for a second in command that has P and O responsibility, the strategic opportunity. They've done what you need them to do before and they come in with a level of autonomy where they actually don't have to be told what to do. Right. If you bring on somebody who is younger into the organization, you're often needing to tell them what to work on. You're needing to almost delegate the roles and responsibilities and projects to them. So the higher the person goes up in the compensation level, they're coming in with that level of autonomy, P and L responsibility, strategic insight into the organization. And they're bringing good people from the outside world into your organization as well. They're able to bring customers with them, they're able to bring prospects with them. They're able to bring other employees that they've worked with in the past to come over and work with the past as well. It's actually a really great sign of a good leader that really good people tend to follow good leaders to other companies. It's really interesting. I actually have people that used to work for me at 1-800-God junk who are still friends of mine today, 16 years later. And some people that I actually even had to fire over the years are still actually good friends of mine as well because we built such a strong relationship and they understood that it was just the end of their time. I'm going to speak to that for a second as well. Let's say you bring a second in command into your organization. When is the party over? When do you know that these are the wrong people? Well, what happens is it's almost like a child who's living at home. The child lives at home for a certain point in time and then it's time for them to leave and go away to college or to move out on their own or to start their own family. And families, moms and dads need to be very cautious, cognizant of the fact that your job is not to keep your kid in your home forever. Your job is to grow that person into a happy, healthy, independent adult who can go off and live on their own somewhere as well, well inside of a company. At some point your company is going to get to a size that you outgrow that management and leadership team and that will include your second in command as well. So when we were building 1-800-got junk again as an example, I had four or five other VPs in the organization. And over the first five years that we were there, we doubled the size of the revenue of the company every single year for six consecutive years. So we went from 2 million to 106 million in six years. In that growth phase, we started to kind of outgrow some of the people. After one year, we outgrew the head of franchise sales. So we, we brought in a new head of franchise sales. After three years, we outgrew the head of the call center. So we brought in the new call center head. After five years we outgrew our head of finance. We brought in a new director or vp cfo. Actually we also started to outgrow the head of it. We brought in a new head of it and then in the end of the middle of the sixth year, the company finally outgrew me, right? I wasn't able to continue to grow my skill set. The company just got big. We had 13 operating pieces, 3,100 employees operating in four countries, 330 cities. It was just big. 248 people at the head office. They bring my replacement in, who is a former president of Starbucks usa and she goes, what a cute little company this is. So at some point your company is going to outgrow people. The general math that is accepted is that a good mid to senior level person can only stay in their role for two doubles in revenue before it's too hard for them to do the third double. So let's say that you have a $5 million company right now and you have a head of Marketing. Your head of marketing can probably get your company to 10 million, they can probably get your company to 20 million, but it's going to be too hard for them to take you to 40 million. Clayton, the founder of Infusionsoft and I talked through these numbers and we both agreed that two doubles is pretty, pretty relevant or they can do that, but it's very hard to do that third double. The key is to make sure that you hire leaders that are self driven learners, that are wanting to continue to learn and that you put training programs in place to coach them, to mentor them and to give them skill development. I launched my invest in your leaders course as a way to grow the skills and leadership skills of people. We launched a community for anyone that works in operations like people, like managers, directors, VPs. It's called the op spot. No CEOs are allowed, no COOs are allowed. It's an online operations community for them to grow their skills. And then we also have obviously the COO alliance as a community of global second in command where they're growing their skills and their confidence and their connection, their capacity as really good leaders. So make sure that you're always growing your people or the company will outgrow them. Next question is, what's the presence of an elite COO feel like inside and outside of the office? This is really cool. If you bring in a really strong COO into your company, they're going to cause ripple effects, right? Good ripple effects and bad ripple effects. It's almost like a big boulder that you drop into a pond and it causes ripples. Well, the COO's job, a really great elite COO, going to cause ripple effects. They're also going to get to the bottom of the pond perfectly, which is what you're hoping for. So from inside of the organization, the COO will be there developing people, they'll be there growing people. They'll bring in a level of rigor into the organization. They'll be able to scale the company and also scale the employee culture. They'll be able to impact results and impact the growth of people and impact the growth of revenue and impact the growth of profitability. They'll come in with systems that will help the company optimize their work, automate their work, but also, again, make people happier. They'll often be able to bring in systems into the organization where they'll drive more revenue per employee, more gross margin per employee, and again, they'll be making the employees happier. A good second in command, a good coo, a good elite COO comes into your organization will absolutely be obsessed about the employee net promoter score, which will drive your customer net Promoter score, which will drive profitability. So they tend to make the business run easier, run simpler, run cleaner. They tend to remove a lot of the frustrations that tend to happen in many of those entrepreneurial organizations from the outside world. What a great COO will bring is visibility around the brand, better, possible public relations, better social media presence, better reviews on trustpilot and Glassdoor. And indeed they'll understand Google reviews. They'll understand about kind of packaging the organization, almost like packaging jewelry. Tiffany's isn't great jewelry. It's nice jewelry. But when you put it in the blue box and the white ribbon, everybody thinks it's just so much better. So a great elite COO will actually be able to package the organization in their way. That was what I did with 1-800-go-JUNK in helping to scale us from 2 million to 106 million was we packaged the organization. We built the number two company in Canada to work for. We generated 5,600 individual unique PR stories over six years. So you bring that outside COO in, they can actually impact the organization that way as well. Another question around the Ops Manager. My Ops manager is in the OPS spot. Thanks for doing that. Always looking for ways to grow my people. I love my team. You're welcome. I'm glad they're in again. The organization, the OP Spot, was created as a community for people that work in operations. Just like the COO alliance was created as a community only for second in commands. We recognized that there were so many communities globally for entrepreneurs. You've got YPO, which I've worked with in about 14 countries. You have the Entrepreneurs Organization, which I've worked with in 28 countries. We have Vistage, we've got the Genius Network and Baby Bath Water and War Room and Mastermind Talks and Driven gobundance. There's so many groups for entrepreneurs and then there's also organizations out there for lawyers and marketers and IT professionals. But there was really nothing for people in those operations roles. So we created the COO alliance as the only network of its kind in the world for the second in command. And we have members now from 17 countries. And we created the op spot as an organization for anyone that works in operations roles or manages people. So that's like managers, directors and VPs, both great communities where those members get to collaborate with each other, share resources, share networks with each other. And they're all there to build their confidence and to build their skill set. What's really interesting around both of these organizations is when most members join, they come in with a level of imposter syndrome. It's very normal, right? They're coming into an organization and they feel like, wow, this is the biggest company I've ever run. I have the most most responsibility of my life right now. And they feel like everyone else in that community is so much smarter than them. I think the average size member we have in the COO alliance is around 45 million in revenue. Our biggest members around 1.2 billion. We have a few members, over a billion dollars in revenue now. So a lot of members come in at the 10 million mark, 20 million mark, even at the 100 million mark. And they see all these other great coos around them and think, wow, everyone else is so much smarter. What they're missing is that we often diminish our areas of unique experience. Right? Our areas of unique ability. We often diminish those and think, oh, it must be so easy because it's so easy for you. It's not easy for other people. An example, one area of my unique ability is speaking events. I've been paid to speak in 28 countries. I've been paid to speak on seven continents, including Australia or Antarctica. It's very easy for me to get on a stage and. And blow away an audience with great business content. So I just kind of diminish it as, oh, well, anyone can do it. The reality is it's very hard to actually be that kind of a speaker. It's very hard to actually get on those stages and deliver in that way. Whereas I look at other IT professionals, maybe they're really strong at IT or engineering, and they take that for granted. I don't understand it at all. So one thing that happens when you join these communities is you start to shed your imposter syndrome syndrome, because you recognize that your strengths are really something that other people need, and you recognize that you don't actually have to be the one to figure everything out anymore. We often come into an organization thinking that we have to figure it all out. The school system in many ways broke us down and showed us that we had to be the smartest person in the room. Well, as two of my friends, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, in their newest book, who not how, wrote about, it's a who problem, not a how problem. A good COO is going to recognize that you don't have to be an organization to figure everything out. You have to be an organization that is massively connected and can collaborate with others globally to be able to take the best ideas from other organizations and plug them into your community as well. So a lot of our members of the COO Alliance, a lot of our members in the OP spot, their CEO and entrepreneur are often members of a YPO or an OR Strategic Coach, Genius network, et cetera. Because the CEO sees value in those connections. They see value in understanding they don't have to be the smartest person in the room. And it's about connecting people that actually is going to leverage your organization as well. So again, drop some questions down in the chat. I can answer those live for you if you want to talk about anything around operations, execution, culture, meeting rhythms, pr. If you want to ask me about anything about the COO alliance or the Invest in youn Leaders course, the OP spot, happy to answer all those. So we have a question. Where, if you were back at year one of being a coo, where would you put the most focus at the company and separately, yourself? Great question. So if I roll the camera back to, well, this was the fourth company that I was the second in command for. But if I go back to 1-800-got-JUNK when I came in as employee number 14, I would have delegated fact faster. I would have worked at hiring freelancers faster because I was aware around 2000 that there were freelancers I could start to get. Not as maybe as many as There were around 2007, 2008, where it became almost ubiquitous. You could get freelancers, but I would start to delegate faster, train my people and grow my people's skills faster. And I would have tried to look for freelancers faster for myself. I really would have worked at balance a lot more. So In July of 2000 I actually clinically was redlining, burned out with stress, had a nervous breakdown. I was written up in the Wall Street Journal as one of four supernovas whose careers went very high and flamed out with stress during the dot com era. So I learned that I started getting healthy again, started running half marathons, started losing weights. But then through my trajectory of building up 1, 800, got junk. I kind of did it to myself again when I left 1-800-got junk in 2007, I weighed 40 pounds heavier than I do today. I wasn't smoking anymore, but I was definitely drinking more, not eating healthy, not getting exercise. Now I eat much healthier. I exercise regularly, I work out with trainers. Even though we live globally, we've been traveling full time for over two years, living on the road, I still get to the gym constantly, still get to yoga, still work out with personal, virtual or in person trainers. Try to make healthier eating choices. I probably would have done a lot more of that earlier on in my career, but I think I was young and didn't really have the wisdom. When I started at 1-800-got junk, I was only 35 when I left. I was 42. So I was still quite young, even though I'd had some massive success in building out Gerber Auto Collision and College Pro Painters, the private currency company. And then 1, 800, got junk. But that's a great question. Again, drop your questions down in the chat. I can answer those for you. We've got a little bit left in the Live today as well and then we'll wrap things up. I'm calling in from Tulum, Mexico. It's actually my birthday. Decided to do this anyway as a birthday gift for all of you and answer any questions you have about the CEO COO relationship. I can answer any questions around operations, execution, culture, leveraging that second in command role. I can even talk about my course, the Invest in your leaders course. If you want to know about any of the 12 core modules in that course and why they're so important, happy to talk to you about those as well. That's called investinyourleaders.com let's see if we go back to the you know, we've now interviewed and recruited that second in command. How do you bring the second in command into your organization? Well, any good COO that comes into a company recognizes that in the first 30 days they're not going to do anything. They're not going to fire people, they're not going to hire people, they're not going to roll out these new systems they're excited to roll out. They're going to come into an organization and observe. So they're going to come into the organization and for the first 30 days they're going to sit in on every business meeting they can. They'll sit in on finance meetings, they'll sit in on marketing meetings, they'll sit in IT meetings, they'll sit in on board meetings. They'll sit in the cloud corner of the room and just observe. They'll listen, they'll look for different intonations that are happening, body language that are happening, and they'll make notes of all the changes that they want to make in the company in that first month. They'll go for lunch or dinner in person or virtually with every director and every VP and every manager that they can, they'll do skip level meetings and meet with people in teams just to ask questions and listen and learn. And they'll be making lots of notes of all the things that they want to change in the organization. But they will not change a single thing in that first 30 days. In the second 30 days, they're going to go back and meet with people again and ask them questions about all the areas that they're thinking about changing. They'll go back and ask the questions about all the assumptions that they're making in the organization. Let's say they come in and they think, oh, I should fire Bob. They'll go and talk to seven people people and realize, no, I actually need to promote Bob, I need to fire Kelly. But they're going to be stress testing those ideas in that second month, in month three, they're going to roll out the easy projects, the projects that are the quick wins kind of, I call them the low hanging fruit projects. And they'll go out into the business and put the projects in place that don't require a lot of people, time or money so that everyone in the organization sees, wow, they came in with a good idea, it was easy to put in place, it got us a quick win. And that builds their trust, it builds the collaboration in the organization so that in the second quarter that COO can start rolling out the bigger projects, the hairier projects, the crazier projects. That's what I would do in terms of their onboarding. The other thing I do in their onboarding is make sure that I look for the ripple effects. I look for the ripple effects inside the organization and I look for the ripple effects they're calling causing outside of the organization. Delusionally aware. Thanks very much for the happy birthday wish. Appreciate that. So yeah, you're going to be looking for the ripple effects that they cause. Remember, you're bringing in a second in command into your company. Like when I came into 1 800, got junk, there were already five VPs working there. They were worried about who I was. They didn't necessarily love some of my ideas. I raised prices in the company by 40% in that second month, which kind of freaked some people out. But what they recognized afterwards was, okay, I did care about the people, I did care about the customer. I did have a level of insight that I could bring in. And they started to see all these little wins that I was stacking on top of each other which then allowed me to start firing people. But the ripple effects were real, right? They were worried about Their jobs. They used to get to report to Brian, the CEO, and now they didn't get to report to him anymore. There were franchise partners who used to call Brian that. I was like, nope, you got to call me now. That caused ripples. So your job as a leadership team and as the CEO of the company is to think about and look for the ripple effects that these second in commands are bringing when they come into your organization like that. That's critical to think about as well. The last part is, what does the COO need to be good at coming into the organization? Well, every second in command, regardless of the roles and responsibilities of pav, regardless of the stage of company they're running, and regardless of the CEO that they're matching, the COO needs to be the master of situational leadership, managing conflict, bringing up great collaboration tools so that you can get the teams to actually debate and discuss and look at metrics and talk about facts and feelings and come out of meetings with consensus. They need to be great at actually building and growing people. They also need to be great at building up the virtual bench and recruiting people into the organization. So regardless of the company that a COO is with, they need to be good at all of those things. If they're not good at all of those things, they'll operate in more of a command and control role than they will actually in a collaborative growth role. It's one of the bigger problems that I have with the book Traction by Gino Wickman. I'm friends with Gino, he wrote a great book. But in their book Rocket Fuel, his second book, he talked about the integrator or that second command is the tiebreaker in every decision. That is not true. When you get past 20 or 30 employees, they're no longer the tiebreaker. They're actually getting the leadership team to discuss and debate and look at facts and figures and talk about restrainers and drivers and then come out of meetings with consensus. But they're not making the tie breaking vote. It's almost like in the early stage of growing children when your kids are 4 or 5 years old, parents always say, do it because I said so, because I'm your dad, you know, because you're in my house. Well, that works until the kid gets to about 13 or 14 and then the kid starts pushing back a little bit, saying, no, I'm not going to do it your way, and they start asserting themselves. Well, as your company grows and you have a management team that's becoming a leadership team, you can't have a CEO Or a COO with veto power or with tie breaking power because it just starts to piss off the organization. So a real skill of that COO is around collaboration. All right, let's wrap things up in a little bit. Want to drop in any more questions that you have below? If you want to ask any more questions in the chat, we will do that. Andrew said, I love this subject. I'm absolutely a workaholic, love working on my business. But I didn't recognize burnout as a real risk. By the way, I said happy birthday in the chat. Chat but didn't get through. Thank you Ender for that. Appreciate it as well. So on the burnout thing, this was back in June of 2000. I was building up an Internet company. We just sold the company to Network Commerce in Seattle and we sold the company for 64 million. 64 million Canadian, 42 million at the time U.S. and in that transaction we were now part of this 900 person company. Well, we had to go out one day and fire 150 people and then two weeks later we had to fire another 150 people. And I had to drive up to Canada and shut down and fire everyone in the Canadian operation at the same time. My wife was pregnant, I'd just gotten married, we were buying our first house. The stock market, NASDAQ had crashed from about its all time high in around February of 2000. This was now, I think September of 2000. We'd gone down to around, down about 75% by that point. So like my whole world was clapped. My mom had cancer, everything. I was moving from the US back to Canada and I thought I was handling it well. But I was drinking, I was smoking, I was eating steaks every night and eating a lot of rich food. And I went into the doctor's office to get a physical done. I needed to have a physical I think to get insurance or something. And when I went into the doctor's office, he asked me what was going on. I said, I don't know. I've got this strange kind of metallic taste at the back of my neck, almost like I can, I was chewing on tin foil or aluminum foil was the best way I could describe it. And he said, he gave me this test and if you get 150 points on the test you have a 50% chance of a heart attack. If you get 250 points you have a 95% chance of a heart attack. I had 435 points. So I was clinically redlining and I didn't recognize it. Because I didn't have the self awareness to say wow, I need to slow down, I need to eat healthier, I need to get exercise again. I was only 34, 35 years old at the time but I wasn't self aware of the signals that my body was telling me to slow down. So yes Andrew, if you know that that's there, if you feel some of that's there, we need to actually decompress a little bit more. We also need to treat ourselves more like resources. Right? Healthy mind and a healthy body. All right, I think we're going to wrap things up. I've got the least reef blower coming in again. It's getting super noisy. Hope you all enjoyed this. Definitely want to subscribe below. Definitely check out some of the links that we dropped in the notes. Definitely share this episode with friends as well. If you like this content you can drop me an email and we'll do another live shortly as well.