How To Run Multiple Companies At Once

It's irresponsible not to hire everybody to do everything. He can literally go grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup. His daughter, who's going away to university, has never known dirty clothes because the clothes go in the laundry hamper at night and they're washed and hung in her closet in the morning when she wakes up. You can't look at revenue per employee and compare against us when you're operating in a market like that. I started a business about eight or nine months ago called the Op Spot. And I've just been realizing how little time I'm able to dedicate to that, even though it's a great business and a really great idea. And of course it's kind of chugging along, going sideways and burning a little bit of cash and being frustrating for me. And I just realized that the only way that you can ever operate multiple companies is to have the team, the budget, the vision and the goals in place and then put in place kind of the time and coaching to get those people going. But it's really hard when we have to be in the middle of that. And then we also need to be cognizant of the time that our team is spending on multiple businesses. When we say, oh, you know, we're just drawing a little bit from here, we're drawing a little bit from there. At times we're also stealing from one to pay the other, right? We're stealing time from one, or we're stealing resources from one, or we're stealing money from one. And we've got to be very cognizant and careful with that. Second one is just to go after what you're looking for. I've been really looking to get some more top tier guests on my podcast recently, so. And I started reaching out to them directly and I just literally just decided to cold call and say, here's my short pitch, here's what I can do for you. And they're saying, yes. One of those I interviewed last night and it was the campaign manager for RFK Junior. Anybody running a campaign that was running a good front end campaign, if I could learn from their campaign manager what it's like to actually manage a political campaign, regardless of the political party. But my lesson there was, you're really looking for something, you got to go after it. It's a lot easier for us as CEOs to often get in some doors and to get people to say yes. And sometimes we think that, oh, we can't really make the call or we shouldn't really make the call or whatever. But at times when we just make that call or we make that email or we make that DM to somebody, it's pretty crazy how they can respond very, very quickly. Another lesson that I've got is to inspect what you expect. It's like trust but verify. So just think about the areas in your business where you're trusting and where you're letting stuff run. It doesn't hurt to trust but verify. It's not a breach of core values, it's not a breach of culture. You know, it doesn't matter if you're going to make somebody feel sad. The reality is it's better to have all that information and inspect what you expect than it is to have to go back and figure it out all later. Often good financing companies in place that can actually assist with putting financing mechanisms in place. They're often looking for successful businesses with good paying customers and they just want to become an additional bank. And you can often plug these in. Typically what can happen, let's say that the financing company takes 10% or 15%. They'll also upcharge to your client 9%. And your kind of net really when you do the math is actually only about one or two. So it really can be a kind of an effective mechanism if you consider, can you put a financing mechanism in place so that your customers can buy your stuff as long as you're selling to people who need your stuff? Right. I think it's super unethical when you're the, the sleazy online salesperson who's like, and wait, there's more and you got to buy before this call ends and we've got a financing and you know, selling stuff to people that they don't need and can't afford. At the end of the day, when we accept credit card payment for many of our clients, that in a way is financing for them because they're using the credit card and we're paying a 2 or 3% financing charge for them to use the credit card. And if they were to do a wire or a check or pay us in cash, we're not losing that 3%. So what a lot of global companies are doing when they're not like an online business or they're not pushing their clients to pay me a credit card, is they actually tack on the 3% for using a credit card. So there is something there that is a potential lift, definitely seeing more of it. Globally we're actually doing some financing and one of the things that we do for COO Alliance Members, if they want to pay, they can split their invoice and we allow them to split over a 90 day period. Pay first now and the rest in 90 days. And we actually tack on a financing charge, I think of about 12 or 13%. So it doesn't hurt me to finance that for them and to give them that, that credit option. So there is an opportunity for you to split bill for clients and charge them 12%, charge them 15%. If you don't need the cash, there's nothing wrong with you creating that financing mechanism for them to allow them to cash flow their purchase. And just remember that you know what prime is now, what your cost of borrowing is. But if it doesn't cost you anything, it really doesn't hurt. We've never, we might have had like one or two people over the last six years not pay their second half and say go, I'm not interested now after three months, which is insane, but you know, everybody else we've done it for, and it's been dozens and dozens have always paid. Most humans look at this speedometer and, and it's really, really big and it's right in the middle of the dashboard. It's the most important metric. It's right in front of you and then there's another metric in the bottom right hand corner and every once in a while it lights up orange and it's like, hey, running out of gas, go fill up the gas. That's a metric that you look at once every few days. You glance at it, but the speedometer you're looking at constantly. The reason it's down in the right hand corner and the reason it lights up is it knows that hey, if we go too low, you're going to have a problem. The key with metrics and ratios is to have lots of them, but decide which ones are the critical few that are going to roll up to the leadership team level. Because you should have three for marketing and three for IT and three for finance and three for operations, three for customer, two to three for every business area. That should be your leadership team dashboard. But you might have 30 metrics that finance watches. But God forbid they ever roll up to the leadership team level. Now if there's two or three metrics at the leadership team level that are red, you might all of a sudden ask finance to show you the 30 metrics they're looking at. Or if any of finance's metrics turn yellow or red, they might pop up on the dashboard and you all of a sudden get notified. So it's okay to measure lots of things as long as they're not in front of you constantly. Because if you've got 330 metrics for every business area, you get 150 metrics. It's like having your dashboard littered with all these metrics and the speed being the same size. You'd never know what speed is. You'd never know you're running out of gas. It's not a question of is it a good metric. All the metrics are good metrics. The key is which ones are you going to look at, what are you going to do about them when you get there? It's about understanding the metrics as well. The interesting part about a fractional cfo, if you've got a head of finance right now and they're a cfo, the CFO should be coming to you with strategy, with budgeting, with a lot more P and L and cash flow projections, they should be analyzing numbers and running dashboards and metrics. If they're not, they're probably more like a controller or a director of finance with a big title. And sometimes it makes sense to get a freelancer to come in and look at the data and set up your dashboards and show your team how to identify what's on them. And because the other part is when you build out all these great dashboards and like, it's like looking again at our car, there's all these other symbols on our dashboard and none of us clue what to do with them. Like, I really don't know what I'm supposed to do. So all I do is I drive into the dealer, I'm like, hey, there's a light on my dashboard. What do I do? And then they charge me a whole bunch of money and all I needed to do is change the oil. The key with our metrics is to teach our employees with these specific metrics. Here's what we do if they're red with these metrics, here's what we do if they're yellow with these metrics, here's what we do if they're green. So it's important to not only display it in a good way, but also to educate and teach people. And then is part of the fractional CFO's role as well is to set up the dashboards, teach people how to interpret the dashboards, teach people how to use the data that's on those dashboards, and then also to to set us up so that we know which ones to look at monthly, which ones to look at weekly, which ones to look at daily and which ones to be looking at on the minute. We don't need to look at the gas ten times in a five minute drive, but we probably do look at the speed ten times in a five minute drive. Right. Or we have an alarm set up that says we're going over the speed. So there's different frequencies and things that you do when you're over certain points. One of the things that leadership teams have to do when they fire somebody or when somebody quits, they tend to be like, oh, great, I'm glad they're gone. But what we really also need to do is like, what did I miss in the interview process? What did I miss in the early days when that person was working with me? That could have become a signal first for later. What did I miss in the oversight for them? What did I miss in the onboarding for them? You know, this mistake that I found or that we found in the business in the last month that's been compounding is something that I had a line of sight to 33 months ago. I saw some mistakes happening, but we fixed those ones and then I never continued to check for those mistakes later and the mistakes kept compounding. Now that was me being trusting and me being sloppy. Doesn't mean the person was a bad person. It meant that in that particular area they needed more data oversight or I needed to decide did I need a better person who could oversee the data. And then secondly, it is looking at a balanced scorecard. It is looking at, you know, what are the roles and responsibilities and metrics that each person is accountable for on a quarterly basis and resetting on that, making sure that, you know, each person commits to their manager what they're going to be working on. And the manager says yes or no. The leader's job is really to align people to make sure that they're working on the most important stuff, they're working on the critical few things, and to make sure that they have the skills and the tools to do their job and the confidence to do their job. It's also to make sure that you have the metrics in place to know if they're doing a good job right. And some of those metrics that when you decide you're starting to see some things, you can put the metrics in place to measure those. The other part of it is that you start thinking about the people you want to be hiring and deciding, how do I hire more of those people who are going to show up the way that we need them to be showing Up. How do we look for those behavioral traits in advance so that you're hiring the right people going forward and you don't hire any more of the ones who aren't working on the right stuff. That's been probably one of the biggest insights I've ever had in business. Is building a company like growing people, growing employees is the same as growing our kids. They need praise, they need confidence, they need love, they need gratitude, they need focus, they need our attention, they need our time. They need to be shown how to do stuff, and then they need to be given more responsibility. Like, it's exactly the same. It's all those things, you know, if we're so busy being leaders and we don't show our employees that we love them or care about them, then when we go to them with the problems, they don't feel loved. Vision isn't just the vivid vision, right? Vision is showing them the different goals. Vision is executing them or training them around core values and our bhag and our core purpose. Vision is asking them for their ideas before we give them our ideas. You know, one of my core points for leaders is the leader should always speak last. Right? The leader should be asking their employees for their ideas, asking for the employees for the problems that they see. And then the leaders should contribute at the very end. Because what will often happen is if you start asking your employees for their ideas, you'll recognize they have some better ones than you might have had. Or they're not used to being asked for their ideas. They're not used to being asked to lean into the future. But when they start exercising that muscle, it becomes quite good. So again, if our job is to grow people to grow their skills and to grow their confidence, then it doesn't take that much effort to actually help them with that. Right? Again, leadership is an art and a skill, right? It's something that we're constantly having to kind of weave around and play with and try and practice and get better at. And it's hard. These are systems and parts of us as leaders that we just have to keep getting better at. And that comes into the interviewing and the onboarding and training and the development of people. Right? It's why I believe so strongly in growing the skills. Skills of our people. Because if we keep growing their skills and we grow their confidence, they don't drive us crazy as much anymore because they can actually take on more. Why do you think you're going to be good at managing grief and managing grief at work and managing the impact of grief when it's not your business, you need to reach out to some people and they'll tell you when it's time to step back in, but they'll also help you through the grieving process so that you can step back in so that you won't be a ticking time bomb. Second part is, yeah, it is your employees business to know that you're struggling. Because it's your business to know if they're struggling. Because the more that you actually all know that you're all struggling with shit, the more they actually are really going to go through brick walls for you. Because every single employee that works for you today is struggling with a sickness, finances, Christmas, relatives, death, parents, childhood traumas. They're all struggling with shit. So how dare you pretend that you've got your shit put together? That's cool. Like they need to know that their CEO is human who's struggling with some shit. It's why when people go to like a 12 step program and all of a sudden they're surrounded by people that are struggling, they feel a sense of calm. Or when the MeToo movement came out and all of a sudden it was like every woman was putting MeToo because they something in their life that wasn't cool. They don't feel as alone anymore. And I think as a leader, this isn't 1980 anymore. In 1980, you're right, it was nobody's business to know what was going on. But nowadays I think it's very powerful when we connect with them as a human because they are too. If you like that video, you're going to love more here@watchcameron.com.