How To Hire An Amazing COO

Questions from the group. How many of you actually have a second in command right now? So about half of you. Okay, how many are actively thinking about hiring a second in command sometime in the next six months? Give another half. All right, so I'm going to try to cover kind of both sides of this audience for you. Some we're going to talk about the recruiting and interviewing and selection of a second in command. Some will talk about actually leveraging a second in command and how to get that true yin and yang relationship going. And then I'm also going to switch gears into a topic area that I brought into a company as a second in command. Who here is familiar with a company called 1-800-got-JUNK? So I took them from 14 employees to 3100 employees as their second in command over six years, went from 2 million to 126 million in revenue in six years with no debt, gave up no equity, and we were profitable every year. We also ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for. So I'm going to walk you through kind of how that real power relationship can go. Before I also dive in. I want to get some quick questions. So if you had a question around the CEO relationship, what would it be like, your specific business? What's bugging you about your second in command or thinking about hiring one, recruiting one? I just want to make sure I cover it in my talk. How do you not drive her crazy? Okay, I can see Ben doing that. Who else has got one? Does the CEO have a sales and business background? Okay. Do they have that experience? Okay, yeah. Laurie. Yeah. How to manage them, how to lead them. Great. Okay. Yeah, don't. But I'll talk about that. How to bring in Corp. We're not going to bring a corporate person into entrepreneurial. We'll bring in some experience, but I'll talk about that. Yeah. Last one correct. Chris or Craig. Okay, so someone with online and offline or both. And marketing. Okay. How to find. Yeah, right. All right. There's two clickers up here. I don't know which is which, but I'm going to try with one. We'll see how we do. All right. So I was at a conference. Gosh, this was about 12 years ago. And do you know Vern Harnish? Vern was running an event called the Gazelles Event. And I was speaking at his event in Atlanta. And I was just finishing off my seven years as this chief operating officer at 1-800-got junk. And I come off stage and this guy came running up to me and he goes, holy shit, you're Cameron. And I said, yeah. And he goes, I thought it was a saying. I said, what do you mean? He goes, people have been saying I need a Cameron. And he goes, I thought it was like I need a bhag, I need core values. He goes, I didn't know it was a person. I didn't know that was you. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And he goes, well, all these people throughout the EO and YPO world were saying that they needed someone like you because Brian And I, at 1, 800, got junk, had had such an amazing time together growing the company and they thought it was a thing. So I'm going to talk about why that was so powerful. I actually started an organization two years ago called the CEO alliance for one core reason. I strongly believe that we're teaching the wrong person how to actually grow the company. We shouldn't be teaching the CEO how to grow the business. We shouldn't be teaching you how to actually build teams, how to run meetings, how to do planning, how to do marketing. We should teach you about it. But we should be giving the skill sets to the CEOs to let them do it. Because we all tune out at about the five minute mark on a one hour content where the CEO will actually give a shit the entire hour. So I started this as a network for them because there's a million organizations for CEOs and there was nowhere for them to go learn. Our current members are kind of in this demographic. You actually need 8 million in revenue now to join the CEO alliance. We don't allow any second in commands in who aren't in that demographic. And members have to at least have that second in command title. Whether it's Director of Operations, gm, coo, it doesn't matter. But they're the ones who would be running the company if you were sick. So that's what the organization is about. We're starting to get a lot of press about it as well. We just appeared in a hard copy, the physical print edition of Fortune magazine with Sheryl Sandberg talking about the rise of the COO group. And it was about our COO alliance and how we're finally starting this tribe for second in commands. I've also played the role of the COO three times. So not only building 1, 800, got junk, but I was also the second in command for Gerber Auto Collision. Anyone here ever heard of Gerber? So we took Gerber is now a $900 million company. We did that acquisition we started the company with seven locations. When I left, we had about 80, took the company public and then did the acquisitions in the us so that was my first CEO role or second. My first one was with College Pro Painters. Anyone ever heard of College Pro Painters? College Pro is the largest residential house painting company on the planet. So I was also the CEO there. So I really understand this whole role that I'm talking to you about. To really nail it, it has to be that yin and yang experience. It really has to be that pure balance with the CEO. And it's almost like a love relationship where you just have to get all the components right or it just won't work. First off though, before you go and hire a COO or a second in command, if you don't have an assistant, you are one and I want to save you 250 grand. Go hire an executive assistant first and then hire your COO second. I think we often go to the wrong person. We're trying to free up our time and we hire a second in command. We could actually free up a lot of our time by getting a really good EA in place first. So around 15 years ago, Harvard wrote an article and it was called the Misunderstood Role of the coo. And in their research they realized that unlike a Chief Financial Officer that really runs finance or a Chief Marketing Officer that runs marketing, the COO was kind of this anomaly. And they identified seven distinct types of chief operating officers. So I think about the COO this way. They could be very outward facing and be all around marketing or PR and sales. They could be very inward facing around operations and execution and engineering. They could be very engineering and process focused. They could be very IT centric. Right, so what is the balance? Well, the balance is they're great at whatever you suck at. And that's the core difference with the COO function versus all the other second in command functions. The second in command is the person who you can trust implicitly, who is really, really strong at the stuff that you suck at. So at 1,800 got junk. I ran everything except IT and finance. I didn't understand it, I didn't like finance. I have a form of dyslexia where I flip all my numbers around. So I get really frustrated with looking at numbers. But everything related to operations, execution, culture, pr, marketing, sales, branding. That's stuff that I'm actually world class in on the area of people recruiting, interviewing, selection, onboarding and training. I'm probably amongst the best in the world. Without exaggeration. Kimbal Musk Worked for me, Elon's brother, in 1993, as did his cousin who built SolarCity. I was a reference for Elon in 1995 for his first round of funding for Zip2 because we actually understood how to build companies. They backed Kimball and Elon Musk based on Kimbal's college propanes experience because they didn't understand Elon's vision, which seems crazy now, but at the time he was just the statistics of aunt. What operations was what I was good at. But Brian wasn't good at operations. He was my best friend. We were actually best friends for three to four years before I joined him as his coo. So you're actually looking for that piece. So when Harvard did the research and they came up with these seven core roles, the first one they came up with was they called the executor. The executor is the person that you're gonna put in place to get shit done. When I actually wrote my first book, Double Double, the working title was how to Get More Shit Done with Less People Faster. That's the Executor. The person who you just want to come in and take all your ideas and you transfer the information to them and they can get it done for you. That's a core role for many in hiring a second in command. The second one that they came up with was the change agent. That could be done in a takeover strategy or when you're having to completely pivot your company, or when you just realize that stuff just needs to be done differently and the team isn't going to listen to you. So. So almost like as teenagers, right, Chris, when you and I were growing up, I probably would have thought your parents were amazing. You probably would have thought my parents were amazing. I was never going to listen to my dad. You probably weren't going to listen to your dad. So if your dad had come in to teach me, I might have learned something. That would be a change agent kind of role. So that can be a role that you're looking for to play in your company or in your organization is that change agent role. You may have the mentor kind of role come into your organization as COO. This is probably the role that I played at 1800Got Junk. The reason is I'd already grown two franchise companies. I had very high trust, but I also had all the skills to do the stuff that they had no idea what to do. In fact, I really went in the first couple weeks to coach their head of operations, Jesse, and at the end of the first day, Jesse walked into Brian, the CEO's office and he said, I can't do anything Cameron is trying to teach me. I'll never be able to learn what he does. We just need to bring him on board. That was after day one, so that was more of a mentor relationship where I actually knew what we had to do and I could come in and do it. And they all called me uncle because I was just a little bit older than everybody else in the company at the time. Then you have the other half was a role that Harvard came up with. That other half role. What do you call the two in a box? That's when you're actually a very seasoned, solid CEO, but you recognize there's some areas that you might not be that strong in. You can get someone to play off of you. And you don't need a mentor role, but you just need someone who's really strong in some areas to then really leverage it up to the next level. That's the other half role. The next one is the partner. The partner could be somebody who just brings some other skill sets to the table that you don't have or who can really free up more of your time as well. Often the entrepreneur, the CEO is just running at 100 hour weeks or 80 hour weeks and they need someone to give them some of their life back. And that COO partner role can actually help out there as well. This slide here I was thinking about, this is funny. This is Prince Charles with Queen Elizabeth. I'm just thinking like, can you imagine spending your entire life waiting for your mom to die just so you can be king? Wouldn't that be horrible? But you know that's what he's thinking, right? But the heir apparent. The heir apparent is a role that often as a mature company is growing, where you realize that to keep that strong person, you have to move them into a COO role or you recognize that you're going to be leaving as CEO at some point and you're trying to groom that person. So you appoint them or you name them as the second in command so that you can exit or move into a chairman role. So I'm coaching the current number two company to work for on Glassdoor and The current number 12 company to work for on Glassdoor. I've been coaching them for years, since before anyone had heard of them. The current number two is called Elite SEM. They're a big digital marketing agency. I started with them when they had 30 employees. They're now at about 400. And the current president and CEO is Zach Morrison. Zach used to be COO, but when they were getting ready to position the company to exit, Ben wanted to move into a chairman role. The heir apparent was Zach. And then Zach took over as that COO role. So that can be a role that is played as the coo. And then last is that mvp. The MVP is someone who you just see as so critical in the business that is doing something that no one else can do. And if you push them up into that role, it just elevates the brand to another level. A great example of this would be Harley from Shopify. Harley's one of the first people I interviewed for the Second In Command podcast. Harley is someone that Tobias, who's CEO would never want to lose because Harley's the biz dev, the outward face, the total mvp. And from the early days, they positioned him as CEO even though he didn't have the experience for it. But he was totally that MVP perception that they needed in the company. You can see the totally different roles being played. The hard part when you're actually bringing a second in command in your company is to identify what role they're playing and why you're putting them there so that you can explain to everyone else in the organization why it's not going to be them. This is one of the most critical roles in your company. And the data says that the cost of the wrong person is 15 times their annual salary. If you put this person, the wrong person in place, and you're paying them 200, 300,000 a year, if it's the wrong one, it's going to cost you three to four million dollars per year to have them there. So you have to be very careful at putting these people in place. Now, I've mentioned a couple times this 250,000 I want you to think about for a second. In fact, why don't you all write down on a piece of paper, what do you currently pay your coo? Or if you're going to be recruiting one, what are you planning to pay them? If you multiply that number by 15, if you've got the wrong person, that's what it's costing you. Because other employees not joining you, opportunity cost, time lag that's going on, misinformation that's happening, decisions that are being made by the wrong person, a board that won't invest with you because they don't trust that person, relationship issues between you and them that everyone else in the employee or company is seeing. It's kind of like mom and dad fighting and the kids all don't want to be around them. The cost of the wrong person is really powerfully expensive. So how do you find one? This is around how much you're actually willing to pay them. So in the COO alliance, we asked all of our members in the CO alliance how much they got paid. Somebody here mentioned Organifi earlier this morning. May from Organifi is a member at the CEO Alliance. And May's compensation was at the right level. She was around 250 to 300,000 a year. And I had another member of the CO alliance who was making 90. I'm like, really? $90,000 and you're the COO? And we realized she wasn't really the COO. She was really more of a general manager. So I want you to think about for a second, what are you paying and what should the appropriate title be to match that compensation? Because you could be a general manager, a Director of Operations, a VP of Operations, or a coo, but you're still the second in command. But the bigger your title that you give someone, the more inflated sense of ego they have, the more inflated sense of expectations they have, and the more kind of ideas of what they should get paid. And that's all inflation that happens because you don't really care about titles. And we've gotten really, really sloppy with titles in the last 20 years. Twenty years ago, to have a COO title, you had to be a major player at a major company to have a CMO title. Who here has a cmo? Who's got a Chief Marketing Officer? How many employees do you have? No employees. Subcontractors. And you have a CMO, right? Subconscious. Right? Who here has a CFO? How many employees have you got? 25 employees with a CFO. So think about something. Is it really a Director of finance, a VP of finance, a controller, or a CFO? Because again, 20 years ago to have a CFO title, you'd be a major player to major business. Right now, we've all of a sudden, in the last three years, what's the new C level title that's magically appeared? Where the fuck did that come from? You know where Chief Revenue Officer came from? It came from guys like you, the head of Sales, who didn't have a C level to match their cmo, cfo, COO people. So we gave you a title and called it Chief Revenue Officer. That's all it is. There's never been a Chief Revenue Officer title in the history of ever. Until you guys finally were the Odd one out, so we gave you one and it caused inflation in our salaries across our company. Be very careful with the titles that you give out and the compensation level you give out. But you do need a second in command. So how do you find one? The first thing I want you to do is what I call an activity inventory. I took this from Strategic Coach. I want you to take a look at all the stuff that's on your plate. Pretend that someone follows you around with a video camera for a month. And then I want you to replay the video and write down every single thing that you see yourself doing over the course of a month. Opening emails, replying to emails, booking meetings, follow up meetings, booking flights, checking into flights, getting your boarding card, showing up at events, whatever it is, running one on one meetings, attending masterminds. Write down everything that you do and then I want you to categorize the stuff you do as one of four ways either I for incompetent, C for competent, E for excellent, and U for unique ability. Incompetent means you suck at it. Competent means you're okay at it. Excellent means you're really, really good at it, but you don't love doing it. Unique ability is you love doing it. You're really good at it. You get more energy while you do it. People get energized watching you do it. It's the stuff that you would do for free except your kids have to eat. That's unique ability. Then I also want you to put down a dollar wage. If you were to pay someone to do that one job all day long, what would you pay them? 15 bucks an hour, 30500 an hour, what would it be? When you're looking for a coo, you want to get all the incompetent, incompetent off your plate to other people. Either stop doing it, outsource it, optimize it, automate it, delegate it to an employee, get an EA to do it. The stuff that is on your plate that's excellent tends to be their stuff that you're really powerful at but you don't love doing. Hire a COO who loves doing those things and has done them before, right? That's the key point. They love doing the stuff you don't love doing and they're just as good at it as you are, but they get energized off of it. Like poke fucking holes in my eyes if I have to sit and look at diagrams of IT infrastructure shit and building software, right? But Brian from 1800-grad-JUNK loved that stuff he loved pouring over the balance sheet and the numbers. He loved meeting with investors. Kill me. And then for him hiring people, it was like he hated that stuff. I was like, I love that. It's amazing. Next thing you want to do is create a scorecard for the role. So think about what are the top five things the COO has to get done in their first year with you? If you want an example of this scorecard, just email me. I'll send you this exact one. This is from a client from Toronto that I coached from 3.2 million to 52 million in four years. His company on Amazon is called Viva Naturals. He sells, like, coconut oil and krill oil. I coached Hussain for four years. This is his COO's scorecard that we created when he was getting ready to interview them or use another version of the scorecard that we use for the COO alliance and rate your prospects on this so you can actually see where they are in alignment with the core eight areas that you would want as a second in command. So what you're looking for is how am I going to measure their success? How am I going to measure how they fit with the organization? And. And then I want you to go out and recruit and interview and hire people that have done it before. You're not looking for people that know how to do it. You're looking for people that have done it. Let's say you were hiring a swimmer. This is a weird analogy, but run with me on this one. If we were hiring a swimmer, do you want somebody who knows how to swim all four strokes, Someone who knows how to win an Olympic gold? Do you want someone who knows how to break a world record? Or do you want someone who has won world records, who has won gold medals and who has won events in all four disciplines? Right. You want the experience. Because I know how to win a gold medal, I know how to break a world record, I know how to do butterfly. I mean, I would drown, but I know how to do it. What's that dolphin kick thing like? Right? I know how to do it. I suck at it. The problem is we often don't dig deep enough to find out if they've done it. I had a CEO recently and he said it takes about 90 days after the person has started to know if you have the right person. And I said, that's because your interview process sucks. If you interview properly, you know, the day they start. The reason I can actually say we were so strong at recruiting and interviewing at college Pro Painters every Year we had to go out and get 800 franchisees. 800 brand new franchisees. They all started May 1, and by August 31, we produced 64 million in revenue. But in that four month period, those 800 franchisees hired 8,000 painters that were all college students. So we went from zero to 9,000 employees in six months. Produced $64 million in four months. August 31, all 8,800 kids quit and went back to school. September 1, we woke up and said, oh, shit, we got to do it again. You become operationally world class at recruiting, interviewing, selection, training and onboarding. But if you don't do it properly, then you have 90 days on the job to see if they're the right fit. I want to save you all that pain. Your job as the CEO is to find somebody that works really well with you. So you have to know yourself first to find somebody who matches you perfectly. And I've said it a couple times, one of the number one core things to look for is trust. I want you to know everything about this person so that the day they start, you give them your master password to 1Password. You give them your bank account information, you give them your keys to your house, you let them take care of your kids, you let them travel with your wife for a week, you let them literally take everything. There has to be complete implicit trust. Brian was. I was sorry. He was my best man at my first wedding four years before I joined him. The trust of me coming in to join him at 1-800-GOT junk was already implicit. We'd been in a yeo forum group together for four years. He knew everything about me, right? I'd been through him in bipolar episodes, when he was crying, when he was almost separated from his wife, like, then I got to come and join him. The trust was already implicit. When you have all of the details of what you're looking for, I want you to get your first job posting written, and then I want you to get a professional copywriter to polish it and make it pop off the page. Has anyone here ever had a real copywriter write a job posting for them? Quick show of hands. Jennifer, can you stand up for a second? Sorry. Just because it's embarrassing. So this is Jennifer Houde. Jennifer is somebody who I get all of my clients to send stuff to. She takes their rough work, stuff we would normally polish, and she and her company, her team polish it and make it pop off the page. If you have a job posting for a coo, the most important role you're hiring for why? If you're not a professional copywriter, why would you ever put that out to the market? To recruit the person, write up what you would normally post, send it to her, and give her, I don't know what you charge to polish them. 500 bucks or something, or 1,000. Let her polish it, and make it pop off the page. You read the difference between what you'll be pushing out there to the market and what you have currently. So now you're going to get a professional job posting in one of your interviews. Usually the second interview for us, we use what we call torque, which is the thread of reference check. We learned this from Brad and Jeff Smart, who wrote Top Grading, and then their second book is called who has anybody Heard of Torque? So torque, the thread of reference check is. During the first couple of interviews, I'm going to ask you some random questions. What do you do for fun? Ben's like, I play tennis, you know? Dan's like, oh, I go to Mastermind events. Well, who do you play tennis with, Ben? He gives me a couple names. Who do you go to masterminds with? Who do you not like at War Room? Who do you like hanging out with at War Room? Who's your best friend at War Room? Who did you have lunch with at War Room? And I'll pull all these names of people out. I might ask them a little bits and questions, but after two interviews, I'm going to sit down and say, by the way, we have an interview next Monday. It's going to last for two hours. And in that interview, I'm going to be asking you some questions about some of your references. The guy's like, oh, great, I gave you three. Oh, yeah, I'm not going to ask you about those three. Here's 12 names of people that you gave me in the first two interviews. By Monday, I need you to come back to me with email addresses and phone numbers for at least 80% of those 12 people. You can decide who they are. A candidates will get you all 12 out of 12. B candidates will get you most of them. C, players will run away, and you'll never hear of them again. Then you bring the people back into the interview and you sit down with Ben and you say, so, Ben, I know you said you liked hanging out with Brad. What would Brad say about your ability to do this first thing on the scorecard? Where would he say you'd failed at in the past? What would Brad say about this core value of ours? What would Brad say about this core value? What would he say about this core value. And then I'll switch after going through about 15 minutes of what Brad would say on the five things on the scorecard and our five core values. And I'll say, what would Kelly say about item one? What would Kelly say about item two? And I will do the threat of reference check. If I called so and so, what would they say? The two hour interview is just the threat of me calling all those people. The C players again haven't even shown up. The B players are getting all kind of nervous. The A players are like, this is awesome. If you want to do references afterwards, you do them. And I strongly recommend that you do reference checks. When I do reference checks, they go something like this. Look, Ben, I'm calling about Bob. I'm thinking of bringing him on as my coo. I know there's some bad stuff in there that I'm going to find out later, but I need you to tell me now what it is. Please don't make me chase you down the street and beat you up with a baseball bat. If I find this out later, like tell me the bad shit, I will keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing until you tell me the bad stuff. And I will call up to 10 people to do reference checks on the key hires. Because the day that they start, I need to know everything about them. I've worked way too hard to get to this stage to allow somebody to come in and not know enough about them. You are not looking for your A players on Craigslist. You have to poach them. And if you don't know where they are, you have to go and get a couple of executive search firms that know where they are and know how to find them. So I've got four different executive search firms that I use. If you want introductions, give me your business card and write search. I'll introduce you to them. One only does $400,000 plus roles. They only do C level. They're unbelievable at it, but they will poach people for you. Second one only does mid level between about 100,000 and $300,000 roles. And the third only does sales executives, sales managers, sales VPs, sales directors. But they're amazing at recruiting salespeople. But you're not going to get the best players. The best players are never looking for a job. The best employees aren't out looking for a job. They're working somewhere. They're really happy. You've got to poach them and bring them into your organization. I want you to hire somebody and recruit Somebody who's already done what you need them to do. I want to recruit somebody with the proven success, not just the knowledge on how to do it. And if I'm building a hundred million dollar company, let's say I'm 50 million and I'm building $100 million company. I'm not going to hire somebody unless they've already helped grow a couple of hundred million dollar companies. And I don't want to hire someone who's run a billion dollar company and bring them in to run my 50 to 100 million. When I left, 1,800 got junk. As the COO. It took them 12 months to find my replacement. They found the former president of Starbucks, Skinner, to come in and replace me. Lonnie had run U.S. operations for Starbucks, which is amazing. Multi unit operation, fantastic culture, great leadership development program, amazing brand marketing, pr. Like really, really strong company. The problem was she was too corporate. They brought in somebody from president of Starbucks and I was leaving 1, 800 got junk going, fuck, this is so big. And she's like, what a cute little company. There was a disconnect on culture. So be really careful that you bring somebody in, not only who has the skills on how to do it, but they've already done what you need them to do. So that's how you find them. So how do you leverage them? Let's say you've got somebody coming into your organization. How do you leverage them? The first thing you have to realize is that everything they do is going to cause ripple effects. If you bring the right person into your company, they're going to be successful. Your job is not to help them be successful. They will be. That's what they do. Your job is to watch for all the unintended ripple effects, the good and the bad. What are suppliers saying? What are customers saying? What are your employees saying? What are they not saying? With Lonnie at 1-800-got-JUNK, the stuff that they missed was she was corporate, she was hiring consultants for everything. She wasn't into the guerrilla marketing. She was never listening to franchisees. Our whole brand was built off that. She thought stunts and PR was kind of cute but didn't want to follow suit with it. We had 5,200 stories about us in six years. And she didn't like PR. She those were the ripple effects that were happening. You need a space in your office for you and the COO to actually brainstorm and work. A space that you continually go back to or a space off site that you continually go back to. We had two different clubs in Vancouver. And Brian and I would spend every other Thursday off site together, just sitting, working independently, sometimes brainstorming, sometimes just sitting side by side and just working together as a place to just have to work and hang out and brainstorm, place to disconnect. We had what we called date night. We went for runs twice a week. In the mornings, we'd go for a run at 6:30 in the morning, go for an hour run, and we just run along the ocean in Vancouver. And it was just time to decompress and just talk, but also time to just hang out. But we had to carve that into our schedule to make sure that we had it. This one is really key. You have to learn how to share the spotlight. My role as the second in command was to make Brian iconic. My role was to roll out all the tough decisions, to roll out all the bad decisions, to be the one who was driving hard on all the results and KPIs. And his role was to be the cheerleader and the culture guy. And my role was to always make him look good. But his role with me behind the scenes was to tell everybody, it's okay. Cameron's still a good guy. He just has to roll out the tough decisions. So he always had my back and I always had his back. And that's where that true power comes in. So the key is to remember is what are you looking for? How close can they match you? How close can you actually work on that relationship and that trust and they'll be successful? So I'm going to switch Gears. I've got eight minutes and 50 seconds for questions. I want to make sure I cover these ones first. So how do you actually bring a COO into your company and not drive them crazy? The core reason. What's the core reason entrepreneurs drive operations people or employees crazy. Too many ideas. In fact, every time we come from an event like this back into our office, what are they worried about? Oh, fuck. Another 72 great ideas, right? And you know what we say to them? Here's this really good idea. I learned it at War Room. It'll only take you two minutes. No, it'll take us six weeks. It's going to cost us 80 grand, and we have no time in that project chart for everything else. So one way you'll actually not drive them crazy is to flesh out your idea. I call it a decision filter. I took the idea of the impact filter from Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach, and I added to it to flesh out the idea and then talk about the roi, how much time, how much money, how many days are we putting into this? And what's the ROI going to be? Will it impact revenue? Will it impact profit? Will it impact customer engagement? Will it impact employee engagement? So we understand why we're doing the idea. If you can't take time to fill out a one pager, the team is allowed to say no to the idea. Until you give them time, you can actually get them to fill out the one pager with you. That's one way you won't drive them crazy. Second way is to give them the ideas and let them keep track of them. And once a quarter, vote on which ideas to green light, vote on which ideas to yellow light, meaning we're going to do it, but not yet. And which ideas we're going to red light, meaning we're killing them. But don't just start the ideas. Most of us as entrepreneurs, in the absence of having a place to keep our ideas, want to start them. What we really mean is we just don't want to lose them. So that's one way. Second way that you won't drive them crazy is to teach the employees that you're bipolar. So most of us as entrepreneurs could be clinically diagnosed as bipolar. I talk about it in chapter 12 of Double Double. Talk to them about how the fact that we're add. Teach them that we're narcissistic and teach them these are our natural traits that make us us. But then slow down a little bit to let them ask us the questions. Let us put, you know, put the systems in place so let them be them, but then teach us why we're a little bit crazy as well. It doesn't give us a hall pass to be crazy, but it lets them understand us a little bit. So next one was hiring somebody with sales and biz dev experience. Yeah. If you suck at sales and biz dev, hire somebody who has that. If you're strong in it or you really love it, hire somebody who doesn't have any interest in dabbling in that. And then you won't get people who really want to work on that stuff. Right. Brian didn't really want to get involved in operations and PR and sales and the call center and franchise sales. He didn't care about all that stuff. He was good with designing the software and being the face of the company and talking about culture stuff. That was all good. How to lead. Here's how I lead. I flip the org chart upside down. Most of us have an org chart like this, right? CEO with A couple of other boxes. What I do is I do this. The CEO is at the bottom supporting the VPs who support the managers, who support the staff, who support the customers. Everyone can see the vivid vision of where we're going. And we build the company inside our core purpose and our core values. So the way I lead people is to support them. I show them where we're going. I keep them aligned inside our core purpose and our core values. And I support them by mentoring them, removing obstacles for them, helping them with communication. I've always believed that my role as a CEO is to grow people. Again, the reason I started the CEO alliance is to give a place for us to put our second in command in so they can grow. If we grow them, they'll grow our company. But our role is not to tell them what to do, is to point them in the direction and let them figure out what to do. You think about if you're a homeowner and you're building a house, if you're building a house as the homeowner, you can't tell the workers how to build your house. You haven't got a clue how to build your house. What you can do is you can show the workers what the vision of your house looks like. The contractor will build the plans and then you can support the contractor who supports the workers. And they'll build your dream for you. Because everyone see it and they build it inside the timeline and the budget you've got. So I kind of flip it into that servant leadership model. How to bring in corporate. You never ever want to bring in somebody who's corporate into an entrepreneurial world. They'll fail because of cultural fit alone. But you want to bring in someone who has the depth and experience but culturally fits with your company. They have to fit with your core values. They have to fit with the way you do things. They have to fit with your kind of cultural day to day. And that's the most important thing to look at. Don't get enamored with experience or their pedigree or the jobs that they've been in. In fact, I helped another client of mine, Dave Asprey. I used to coach Dave Asprey from Bulletproof Coffee. Dave was hiring a second in command two years ago. I helped him do the interviewing and recruiting of Anna. Anna came in as his COO and president. We did a really good podcast of her on the Second in Command podcast. She came in as president, CEO. She used to be the head of Amazon Prime, President of Amazon Prime. And I Was worried that that was going to be too corporate. So when I was interviewing her, I was all about culture fit. She's like, no, no. I used to run a startup and I led a startup and I started a startup. I'm like, oh, you're entrepreneurial. She goes, yeah, I just ended up getting like sucked into this amaz and I was good at it, but I really want to go back into the startup world again. Okay, great fit. And then culturally she geeks out just like Dave does around all this stuff. And then super strong on all the things we needed her to be strong in. So be really careful with bringing on corporate and work to bring in the experience. But the culture fit online and offline marketing, it's really when you look at the stuff you're good at and the stuff you love is hiring somebody who's really countering the stuff that you're either not that good at or don't love. Or if you think that you're looking for more of a partner because they have a lot more operational depth as you're scaling. So you guys, your company. I won't give away your numbers, but you've gone from like 1x to 10x or from 10 to whatever. Now you're going to go from 10 to 100. You might be looking to go. We may not have that next skill set. So maybe you're looking for somebody who really has it, but culturally they align with you and Danette as that entrepreneurial couple. I'm more worried about bringing someone in when you're hitting this trajectory that really fits culturally with you. These have to be people like, you want to go on vacation with them, you want them over at your house for dinner, they're going to be your best friend. That's what you're really looking for. And they have all that skill set. And then we talked a little bit about how to find them. I like using the recruiting and being very, very clear on what I'm looking for. So a question Michael has is a co founder of the company. He went into the operations role in the company. He's wondering, how do you really know if you have the skills as your company scales to stay in it? One of the good things about being a founder are the, the C level is you can start hiring people that are better than you. So the key is, can you learn and are you good at people leading? Can you lead people? If you can lead people and you're good at learning, then just keep hiring really, really smart people and lead them. But when you flip IT upside down. You don't have to be good at it anymore. Right. Because you're just supporting them, removing obstacles, pointing. But if you feel like you always have to tell them what to do, that's when we're weak because we don't know what to do. When you flip the org chart upside down, then it's easy. How do you evaluate someone who's better than you? Great question. More than you know. How do you know? Easy question. So we were bringing on a head of finance to come into 1-800-got junk to run our finance team. At the same time we were bringing a head of engineering and IT to come in. We didn't have the operational depth to know if they really had the skills we needed for two very skilled jobs. So we went out to the industry. So we brought in the head of finance at Business Objects and Crystal Decisions and ABE Books and Intrawest, and they worked to help us interview our head of it. And then we went out to find on the finance side some people with Vancouver Olympics and Lululemon and they helped us interview the head of finance. So we found. Really? And we got our head auditor from. Not Arthur Anderson, I don't remember. But yeah, maybe Deloitte. They came in and helped us do the actual interviewing. That's a great question. Yeah. So it's not. We don't. This is the key for us as well. We don't have to know how to do this. We just have to know the who's right, who knows how to do this and plug those people in. Thanks for having me out. Appreciate it.