How Your COO Can Help Take Your Business to the Next Level

Our vision is to inspire, connect and enable millions of ambitious leaders of small and medium sized enterprises to scale with purpose. So what does scaling with purpose mean to you?

Well, it's interesting. My core purpose in my business is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. Even my new book, if it's helped, my new book helps entrepreneurs make their dreams happen by hiring the right second in command. Everything is just completely, completely aligned with my core purpose right now. And then I think my wife and I have just really figured out we did a vivid vision for our lives. We crafted a vivid vision for our relationship as a couple. So we both went separately, drafted all the different areas of our life together that mattered to us from our time together and our fitness and our health and our, you know, sexuality and our friendships. Then we sat and we merged it all together and talked about every sentence and merged it all. And now we have a design element to it. It's amazing, but we're really focused on how do we move our personal lives, better our personal self, better our businesses together and stay more aligned than ever now.

Oh, brilliant. Give us just a little taster of how that has manifested in the last 12 months since we last spoke. You got married and you're now touring the world.

I'll give you an example, what's manifested. We both really like smart people and spending time with smart people and kind of being inspired and, and then learning and growing. So we wanted to spend time with other communities of entrepreneurs globally. We've probably done like six or seven pretty solid amazing, you know, trips with these other entrepreneurs, which just gets us vibrating. Right? It gets us excited. And when we're traveling now globally, we can plug into these communities. You know, we can have dinner with friends over in India, we have dinner with other friends in Dubai, we have dinner with other friends in Egypt. So it's being able to be thoughtful about what we're trying to do, be mindful about why we're trying to do that, and then instead of saying, hey, let's get together for a drink or it's let's get together and go on a trip together and spending time with those smart people. And that's been really cool.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And something that you mentioned in your book, which I'm really looking forward to diving into, is the importance of managing energy. It's specifically in the context of the COO role. But just in, given what you've said, how important is it for leaders of scaling businesses to tap into those networks of other like minded people?

Well, I think it's two twofold. One is to tap into the network because you can feed off that energy and you can also give energy to that community. Secondly is to be mindful as a human of the energy that you have, you know, with yourself. My wife has been monitoring her glucose with a. A glucose monitor 24 hours a day. I get mine today or tomorrow to start monitoring mine to see our glucose levels, to see how are we monitoring that energy. And she's been doing a lot of deep dives into her health and into understanding food and what order we should be eating our food to. Again, help with our levels. I've been trying to do more with fitness and getting to the gym more often and you know, staying active. Those are important, is to take care of our body and then, yeah, the tapping into communities. I started investing in being in mastermind groups and communities 25 years ago for me whenever I plug myself into these communities. And I love that my wife likes it too. And we don't even have to sit beside each other at these events because she can carry her own weight and is as interesting as everybody else in the room and smart. We get to spend time with these other people and it's inspiring. It aligns us. We go in thinking about what we're working on and then the ideas that come from the group. I call it ideas having sex. You take these ideas from all these people that are usually outside of your industry and it kind of percolates into something that you can use for yourself. And then, yeah, I think just that amazing energy of being with people. They're not sitting, sitting around talking about who won the latest sports event or you know, they're not complaining about their neighbor or complaining about their friends. Like no one sits and complains. They're all so forward driving that that's just really inspiring and cool as well.

Yeah, I love that we're both absolutely aligned on that to the degree that we both have dedicated our lives now to establishing our own commun. I know, you know, you have the COO alliance, the wonderful community for the second in command. We're going to get into that today and we have obviously our Scalex accelerator program and then our alumni, the Scale Up Club, which for the graduates of that program. And it's so energizing to be around those people. It's just an absolute gift to be able to host and facilitate and curate material on their behalf.

And you know what's cool for both of us is we learn as much as anyone who's attending our groups. Like I'm sitting because I'm not the teacher to the COO alliance. I just facilitate. All of these second in commands come together over zoom or in person. And I'm scribbling down notes and ideas the whole time I'm there. Sometimes it's even a topic I might be teaching, but I'm still scribbling down notes. I'm like, oh shit, I forgot I should do that more. And then the second part of that is I think it's really interesting to realize that we don't have to be the smartest person in the room anymore, right? We have to place ourselves in these rooms. It's kind of that whole adage of you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Well, your income is the average because they raise your bar, right? They get better ideas, you invest at different levels, your health becomes the average of the five people. You spend time with a bunch of grumpy, negative people that sit around and eat pizza and drink beer. That's going to become your habit. But if you're around these people that wake up in the morning, they're off to yoga and then they wake up and they're doing business events and they're reading the next business book and they're engaged and they're thinking about their spirituality, all of a sudden it raises your game too. It's just better. Because at the end of the day, none of this shit matters. We all die. Like we may as we may as well have the best experience in this life that we get, right?

Wonderful book. The second in command. Release the power of your coo. This is playing right in your unique ability. Why has it taken five previous books to get to this book, which I would have thought this would have been your first.

Yeah, it's interesting. Well, and it's funny. I was just thinking as you were talking, if my English teachers knew that I had written one book, let alone six, they would probably just, I think it's over. It's over. They're like they, because they told me constantly that I was horrible at English. I, I, I can barely speak English, let alone write books. So I, I never set out to write a book. I didn't want to write books. I never wanted to be an author. It had never dawned on me to do this. So 12 years ago, I had a lot of my coaching clients were wanting more of my information and one client specifically, and David asked me if I would write his manual for his PR people inside his company. If I could train his PR people and write A manual on how they could do pr. And I'm like, dude, I don't want to write a manual. And he goes, I'll pay you five grand to write like, 20 pages of. And I'm like, I will have it to you by Monday. So I wrote it all up and I sent it over, and his wife was like an editor, and so she kind of did some copywriting on it and sent it back to me. And I go, that's amazing. And I gave it to David, and he sent me five grand. I'm like, I have content on a lot of areas, and that's how I wrote my first book, Double Double. His wife ended up being my editor, Sonja. We got a publishing company to put it out the door, and people really loved it. And my speaking fees went from five grand to 15 grand. Now my fees are 40,000. But because it elevated my fees, and then I landed a couple of coaching clients from it, and I landed a couple speaking events. I'm like, whoa, this is a big brand building tool, too. I transitioned from wanting to share the content with people to help them to, whoa, this will grow my brand. And then the other books kind of happened because of that. They were fairly easy to put out. So those books just kind of came out pretty fast and easy over 10 years. This one came out because of two reasons. One, I've been running the COO alliance now for six years. I've had 350 members from 17 countries. I really started to know the COO role, and I used to play the COO role at a couple of companies as well. One being 1-800-got junk. But in getting to know all of these other COOs, I realized that I had some IP that I could share. I had some resources that I could share, some insights that I could share. Second to that, I ran a podcast, or still run a podcast called the Second in Command. And I've had 245 guests who are all COOs. So in interviewing 245 COOs of really good brands like Bumble and Shopify and, you know, brands that we know the name of, I had insights from those people to share. So I thought, I can just pull this content together and share it. So the book is really filled with examples from these people as well. And then strategically, I realized, wow, it is a marketing tool for the Second In Command podcast and the CEO alliance. So if I can write it in a way that it's really, really good, as if I had nothing to like to market, right? If I had no CEO Alliance. If I had no podcast, could I write a really great book that on its own would be amazing? And if I could do that and weave in some marketing of the SEO alliance, it would be huge. So that's what I did. I worked really hard on this one. Really pleased with it. This is also the only book that I ever did the audio recording of. I went into studio in Dubai, read it for two days. Now I'm doing another reading of it again, sitting by the fire and reading each chapter for our YouTube channel. And every time I'm reading, I'm like, this is good. Like, it's really good.

Well, well done, you. It's. Yeah, I agree with you. And I encourage all of our listeners to, to go out and get a copy. You alluded to it earlier just to, to give the, the audience a sense of your own credentials in that role. You have a beautiful endorsement from Brian Scudamore, the founder of 1-800-got-JUNK. And you guys went on an incredible scaling journey, doubling revenues for six years. So if you just share with the listeners kind of the abridged version of your experience with Brian.

So I was Brian's second in command. I was his COO for 1-800-got junk. And when I joined the company, I was employee number 14. I walked in the door, there were six vice presidents, six people in the call center, and Brian, there were 13 people. I was number 14 when I left six and a half years later. We had 3,100 employees system wide. We went from 2 million to $106 million in revenue in six years. So we doubled six years in a row. We doubled the size every year for six years. We gave up no equity, we had no debt, and we ranked as the number two company in all of Canada to work for. We'd also landed 5200 individual unique stories in the media about our company. Before social media even started. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing. We'd really built this amazing company. And I was the coo, kind of reverse engineering Brian's vision to do that. Now, I mentioned this in the book, but I don't even think I gave it enough credit. Brian had an unfair advantage. Brian was my best man at my wedding three months before I started to work for him. So we knew everything about each other. The day that I started to work. The second part is we had been in a mastermind group together called the Entrepreneurs Organization, and we were in a forum group, 12 of us, that met every single month for four and a half years. And Brian saw me build two other companies and I saw Brian building his company. So again, it's almost like we had a four and a half year interview to get to know each other and like each other and respect each other. Day one, I knew everything he sucked at and everything he was great at. Day one, he knew everything about me and he literally could have given me the passwords to everything. You know, we, we would have given each other our bank account information if we asked for it. So I think it's unfair for people to think that they can just go and do that and get it. But he also hired really well. I had built two other franchise companies. I kind of unlocked the secrets of everything that you need to get to that unfair advantage point as well. But that's what we did.

Let's begin because the COO for a lot of our listeners will be that title. Chief Operating Officer.

Too big?

Yeah, C suite title associated with big corporates. Our listeners are those leaders of small, medium sized enterprise seeking to scale. So just put, I like the second in command. Let's debunk or break down this title for those who are listening. So in language that they can understand.

If you're running a finance department in a company, right, all the money side of the business and you're the head person in the finance group, you could be a controller, maybe a Director of finance, maybe a vice President of finance, or maybe a cfo. If you're the head of the marketing division, you could be a director of marketing or a marketing manager, or a VP of Marketing, or a Chief Marketing Officer. So the COO title has become very popular. But do not give out big titles in any business area too early in your company's growth. The title that you give the person has to match the roles and responsibilities, has to match the metrics that you'll measure their success by or that they're accountable to. And it has to match the compensation that you're willing to pay them. I have a salary survey that we send out where coos from all over the world enter their salary, their bonuses, the size of the company, number of employees, their age, whether they're male or female, and their exact title. And you really get a good glimpse in this spreadsheet of the actual data points of what titles and salaries and comparables are actually really worth.

It can be given a myriad of titles. The second in command really is a generic title that, that captures all. Do you distinguish between the CEO role that's second in command and let's say the founder or CEO?

What happens is as a Company starts to grow. And I think of it as like the ones and the threes. When you're starting a company, it's just you, you're the founder. It's just you do everything. And some things you do really well, and some things you're just not that great at, and some things you kind of don't even like doing. So you end up hiring a couple of people, and all of a sudden there's three of you in the company. You got a couple people doing lots of things, and they're not experts, but they might be a little better in the areas or they might like the areas more. But you can kind of divide and conquer the three of you. And then you get to 10 people. Your company has 10 people. You probably have one manager who's managing a bunch of people and you still have some direct reports. And that manager, again, may not have more skills than you, but they might really like the area more and they spend more time on it. And because they spend time on it, you can get more done. And it's almost like it's all good enough, right? It's minimum viable everything, right? Momentum, creating momentum. When you go from 10 people to 30 people, you now probably have your first management team where you have a person leading each of the business areas and those four or five or six people report to you, and the other 20ish people report to those five or six, right? That's really when you probably have your first second in command. You have a person who, if you were sick for three months, could take over and run the business for you. You have a person who is behind the scenes, your real trusted counterpart. You probably have that one person on your management team who you can sit down with and confidentially say, I don't know what I'm doing, or I hate this work, or I'm super stressed. And they go, I got it, boss, I'll take this for you. It's kind of that one. It's almost the yin and yang, right? When you go from the 30 to 100 people, you now have your first leadership team of very seasoned, solid leaders of each business area. Most of them will have run those business areas for at least one other company before. And again, that's probably when you have your first COO versus a VP of OPS or a Director of ops. But that's kind of the migration point for anybody who's very early on in the entrepreneurial journey, kind of in the 1 to 30 employee stage. If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one the key thing you need to do before you hire a second in command is hire an executive assistant to get all of that admin work off your plate, all of the minimum wage jobs off your plate, all of the tasks that drain you of energy off your plate so that your EA can handle all of that to free you up to work on the bigger business ideas. And then when you've got too many of the bigger stuff, then you can really get the first second in command.

I can relate to this. You know, the exact assistant proceeds and maybe can graduate into the role, but certainly precedes that coo.

They might be able to graduate into a director of ops role. But you're. It's going to be very, very hard for, for an executive assistant to ever move into the C suite unless they've had a number of companies under their belt. It's just too big of a stretch. Or unless your company scales by 7 to 10% a year for 10 years and they can kind of grow with you. But if you're on a real rapid growth trajectory of 25% or more annually, you really need to start hiring the people that have done it before. You can't just hire for cultural fit, you need to hire skills as well.

Those listening, you know, many of them will relate, will either be sitting in that 10 to 30 band or the 30 to 100 band. Where do they start in terms of the process of actually, if they don't have this second in command already in place? Let's get super practical. Yeah. Where do they start?

Dan Sullivan, who started Strategic Coach, created a really interesting system called the activity inventory. And the activity inventory is when you sit down and you think about all the stuff that's on your plate. So the great exercise that I try to explain to people is pretend that someone followed you around with a video camera for an entire month. Almost like Gary Vaynerchuk, right? You've got somebody videoing everything you do for 30 days and then play back the video and write down everything you see yourself doing. You might end up with 80 or 90 things that you do over the course of a month, right? Every task. So I open up a spreadsheet and I write down every single task, one task per row, in column A of the spreadsheet. So now I've got all these things right, 80 or 90 things that I do in column B. I categorize each task in one of four ways, either I for incompetent, meaning I suck at it. C for competent, meaning I'm okay at it. E for Excellent. Meaning I'm really, really good at it, but I don't necessarily love doing it. And then U for unique ability, which is the stuff I really love to do, I'm really, really good at it. I get energized by doing it. That's column B, column C. And this is what I've kind of added to the model. If you were to pay someone just to do that one task every day, all year, right, what would you pay as the hourly rate? What would you pay to clean toilets? What would you pay to open emails? What would you pay someone to book flights? What would you pay someone to do speaking? And then you end up with this long list of things with a price associated to them. So the first thing the CEO needs to do is say, who can I push or delegate all this stuff off to? Can I get it out to an ea, Can I get it to other people? At some point you end up with a basket of things that you really need a true second in command to do. You're going to take all the stuff that drains, you have energy, all the things that you might actually just be excellent at, and you're going to hire somebody who loves to do those things. I hate finance. I hate it. But there's coos out there that absolutely love it and finance. So the key is, how do you find that yin and yang of someone who loves to do the stuff that you're bad at and who doesn't want to work on the areas that you love? That's the starting point.

I love that. And I noticed that within the book you give a breakdown of that. I also like it because of the acronym ICE in terms of the incompetence, the competence, you know, we've now got an understanding. And certainly for those founders, as they begin to scale their companies, they're taking on more and more and more. Taking the time to do this is absolutely fundamental to actually creating a level of awareness in the first instance.

Well, and if the CEO is ever saying to themselves, I don't have time to do this deep work or this thinking work or this strategy work, it's time to hire a second in command. Because the CEO needs to have time to think, to be strategic, to do networking, to go to the mastermind groups, to stay at the 30,000 foot level or at the top of the mountain, looking at where we're going and then coming back to tell the team where we're going and then getting out of their way again. But if the CEO is spending all their time managing people or just Trying to keep it all together. You have no time to really grow people. The reality is the leader's job is to grow people, to grow their skills and to grow their confidence. And if any leader is so stretched that they don't have time to really grow their direct reports, to really remove obstacles for them, to help them, to mentor them, to coach them, to cheer them on, if the leader doesn't have time to do that, then the leader is too stretched.

Yeah. And something that again, that really resonated the term I use myself. You know the acronym CEO? Don't think of it as Chief Executive Officer, but rather Chief Energy Officer. And if your energy is getting, is leaking and dissipating as a result of doing things that you absolutely hate, then again, what we're saying here, this is the trigger for you to actually get. If you're in the early stages of scaling, the executive assistant, if you're in the more mature stages of scaling, then looking for this second in command, the Yang to your yin.

Yeah. And you know what else is super interesting is there's a time period that a COO might be a good fit for your organization and might not be. So I was a great COO for 1,800, got junk from the 2 million to 100 million. But I was the wrong guy to take it from the 100 million to the billion. And then now they then replaced me with the former president of Starbucks United States. She came in and thought, what a cute little company. Meanwhile, I'm pulling my hair out because it was so big. She only lasted a year. She was too corporate, was too bureaucratic, didn't fit. So Brian replaced her and then finally found a guy named Eric Church. And Eric has been the COO for 1-800-GOT junk and ODE brands for almost 10 years now. What's weird is, and he's been amazing, he's taken it. It actually went, after I left, it went from 100 million down to 70 million. Eric came in and took them from 70 million up to 450 million. Now Eric is COO. Would have been horrible in the first six years. And the reason I know this is Eric and I have been friends for 35 years. This is so weird. Eric and I started a fraternity together in 1987 in Ottawa, Canada. Get this though. I was president the first year and Eric was president the second year. Now I also recruited Eric and got him into a company called College Pro Painters. So I know his skill set. Eric didn't know the franchising world well enough to have taken them from 2 million to 100 million. He wouldn't have been horrible because he didn't know how to do the things, but I didn't know how to operate a big business. And that was where he was really good. So there was a time period that you have to be the right person at the right time. And Brian talks about that as well in the book.

For me, you've hit on something there which certainly, as we scaled and scaled across six continents to almost $150 million in revenue, from about $5 million in revenue. 700 people operating across those six continents. And at a time when we were growing, I joined very similar to yourself. There was 15 people in the business. As we were scaling, we were keen to and revered the executives looking from beyond in these much larger companies, imagining what it would be like to attract that caliber of person in when we did, you know, and there's different ways of doing that, but when we did, we found that they were. It was oil and water, the environment that they were used to, you know, operating within and applying their unique ability just wasn't. It was the spanner for the wrong nut. So you totally.

You've.

You've hit like, the fact that Eric was able to actually go down into the weeds of a. And it's, you know, a $70 million company isn't, you know, a small company by any stretch, but you're still doing small company stuff at that stage in terms of the structure and the format. For him to take it to that level required him to not only roll the sleeves up, but actually think in a much more corporate way and make that transition.

And it's interesting because I didn't understand the difference between the DNA or the. The behavioral traits or the cultural fit of a corporate person until I hired one. And. And I'll tell you the story. It turned out to be amazing at the end of the day, but not because of why I thought it would. I hired this guy named Richard Bender. Richard and I are still friends 22 years later. Richard I hired as my director of marketing a very small one, 800 got junk. And, you know, we had one person in marketing, and he was going to build out the marketing team, and he came in, and on the first day, he asked me, who fills out our FedEx slips? And I was like, what you do? Like, if you need something shipped, do it. Like, if the toilet overflows, fucking mop it up.

Yeah.

And he couldn't comprehend how he would have to do such a menial task. And I'm like, oh, Shit, wrong guy. So three months later we killed it and he ended up buying eventually the Vancouver franchise for 1-800-got junk and has owned it now for the last 18 or 20 years and has been a fantastic franchisee. So you really have to look for both the behavioral traits, the core values of the person and the proven skill set. And just because they ran a big company doesn't mean they know how to grow a big company. And that's the distinction.

So let's get into that because you call out specifically the behavioral traits that the CEO or the leaders of the company who are contemplating second of command should really consider to heaven the second in command. So can you speak to the behavioral traits that we should be looking out for when we're appointing the second in command?

You know, let's say that you have a. A very entrepreneurial, you know, bob and weave, kind of make it up on the fly culture. You need someone who fits that. Let's say that you have a company that has a kind of guerrilla marketing, you know, fun culture. You need someone who fits that. Let's say you have somebody who, you know, you have a business that is focusing on, you know, government relations or, you know, it or finance, and then you need someone who fits that. There's not a single salesperson in the world who would ever make it through an HR person's interview. HR people hate salespeople because they're like oil and water. HR people. Everything has to be dotted and crossed. Everything has to be policies and procedures. Everything has to be exact. HR people are more amiable and analytical. They're usually a little bit more cautious and careful. The sales people are cowboys. They're making it up, they're winging it. They shoot from the hip. They have to be. If you're ever on a sales call, every prospect gives you stuff in a completely different order. There's no format. You have to think on your feet and be gregarious and raise energy and make it up on the fly and then say yes and figure it out later. That horrifies HR people. So you have to look for those different behavioral traits. Right? I would never want an HR person who's making it up on the fly and winging it and shooting from the head. That'd be terrible. And like that. We need that yin and yang to the CEO. So what's the behavioral traits of your partner going to be like?

What I would say there? But fundamentally, they're aligned by their core values. The core values are the same in terms of resonating on A certain frequency.

Yeah, yeah. The core values are going to be the same, but the way that we show up as individuals might be slightly different.

Yeah.

But what matters to us is going to be the same. That's, that's the key salient point. So I always say we have to interview for core values for behavioral traits and for the proven skill set on a roll by role basis. If you're looking for the second command, you know, what are those? What only really changes. Core values don't change across any role in the company. But the behavioral traits and the skill sets change for every role in the company.

There's something in this at its core. It requires a level of humility by the leader to actually complete this inventory checklist, this activity inventory checklist and really be ruthlessly honest with themselves about the things that they suck at. Because there's likely there's a level of ego there to actually found a company in the first place. I mean, but it's making sure that it's your servant and not the master. So being humble to accept there are things that you aren't good at. I was speaking with the CEO just this week and we were, we were chatting on a similar topic and, and he mentioned some of the activities that really formed his day and he said I hate doing those things. And if, you know, well, why are you doing them? You know, if you hate them, your energy changes, the energy of the people around you change. But if when you hit something, there is somebody out there who really loves that. Yeah, so, so speak to this Cameron.

Well, I, and it's interesting, I've never thought about the whole that the CEO needs to have the humility to say what they suck at because that is really what needs to happen. Because there's something there about that's, that really is the mindset of, and that's why it needs to be such a safe relationship with who they hire is you need to be able to turn to that person and say I suck at this.

Yeah. And even the visual of that yin and yang and it's the COVID graphic of your book, it doesn't that you know, this role is subservient to me as the leader or founder. It says we, we literally are one. I have recognized what I'm really good at, where my strengths lie, what my unique ability is. And I have identified all of those things that I'm not. And these play to your unique ability. And together when, you know, we become a potent force as a result of that, you know, they're coming together this Alliance.

Yeah. The CEO needs to be able to collaborate with all the different functional areas. They need to be probably even better at a lot of the people skills, the interpersonal skills, the conflict skills, the collaboration skills. They need to be able to understand enough of the business areas at a base level of competency, but not at a domain expertise level. The head of an area needs to have the domain expertise, right? The head of finance needs to be really great at finance, the head of IT needs to be really great at it. The head of marketing needs to be really good at marketing, etc. The CEO needs to at least understand each of the areas in terms of roughly what they do and what they work on, to understand the, the kind of interdependencies and to be able to work with the people. It's a really weird role.

It's a role that requires a huge amount of competency in being able to. What I often find is filter. When CEOs are up, everybody's just on a high. But with that up, I often find came a crashing down. Now, if you've got that turbulence that's just weaving or ripping through a company, that can be very destructive and very disturbing to building a culture. I find that certainly acting as a filter, a stabilizer to the ups and the downs, and be able to almost, you know, if you have this visual of, you know, being the megaphone, but there's a filter within that megaphone. So you have these private conversations with the leader and you then communicate something that, that keeps people at their most productive rather than. If I use the, the analogy of the airplane, you don't want to see these conversations happening between the pilot and the co pilot.

Again, if I go back to the family analogy, mom and dad need to be able to debate and fight and talk about the kids confidentially and talk about their future, but not in front of the kids. Right? But they need to have that space to then collaborate and have the consensus and then, you know, and mesh. So that's one for sure. You talk about the, the CEOs having these highs and then the crash afterwards. In my first book, Double Double, I talk about the fact that most entrepreneurial CEOs are on the spectrum for bipolar disorder. The mania, the big highs, is why people follow us. It's why they'll invest. It's why they quit their job to join a small company. It's why they'll say hell yes to a project without knowing how we're going to do it. They like to follow that leader. Right? It's called Follow the leader. But what's hard for the leader is if they don't have a safe place, if they don't have a place to talk about their fears and insecurities, they can't often tell their spouse where they're really worried because it freaks them out. They can't really tell the other members of the leadership team because they'll all quit and go somewhere else. The leader needs to have that one person, that confidant that behind the scenes, they can go, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm nervous about this. I know we're making this big bet, but I'm scared. And the CEO can go, I gotcha. You keep going out there as the good energy, right? As Jack Daly calls the chief energizing Officer and all stay behind the scenes and play cleanup. The other role for the CEO and the coo. My sister says that the COO has to be the brakes for the CEOs gas, because the entrepreneurs are always like, go faster, go faster. And the CEO is like, yeah, but we're kind of driving towards this brick wall. Let's like slow down to go into that corner. Right? And the CEO needs to be the thought process behind the energy. And then the last thought I have on this is Thomas Edison once said that vision without execution is hallucination. The CEO is vision. The CEO is execution. And that's why it's so critical to have that good second in command is you need to have the execution to make the vision happen. And most entrepreneurial CEOs don't have the ability, the capabilities, the desire, or even the focus ability to actually make a lot of their ideas come true. Right. They get too distracted.

Yeah, I want to touch on that, but we're on a roll with metaphors here and analogies. And I notice you've got your aura ring on. And I'm thinking as we speak that we both measure our hrv, which. Which measures the tonality between our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic. And you want that really healthy tone from the kind of the going into your sympathetic, your fight or flights, and moving into your parasympathetic, which is your rest and digest. So it's that kind of accelerator brick analogy. You know, if we use HRV as a measure of the tone and quality of the higher nervous system is operating using that metaphor, what should we look for in terms of measuring the quality of the relationship between the COO and the coo?

The COO needs to be able to watch the CEO and Be able to kind of pull them back down from the stratosphere once in a while to say, hey, we're being a little erratic, let's kind of come back down to reality. Or wow, you look like you're a little stressed, you look like you're a little depressed, you look like you're a little burned out. Why don't you get out of here for the day or for the weekend or for the week or for a few weeks and get off the grid. Decompress. You need to be more like a racehorse, right? We need you to show up and be performing and you can't do that at 60, 70 hour weeks. The way that you have to work on that relationship and take care of each other is you need to have date night. Right. You need to have time away from the office together as friends, doing stuff that you like to do that's fun. You need to be able to decompress together.

Yeah. Completely relate to this so vividly in we used to go west gain for, for a week every year, speaking about it earlier and that was the time when you just, you got away and over a beer you'd say, look, what worked well last year? What didn't work so well? Where's your relationship at the moment? And it just, it was a reset for the next 12 months and so critically important and maybe others within the business maybe didn't fully appreciate that time that we spent away, but it was so critically important. As you scale, some of the things that you need to be aware of is these, you know, are certainly be very conscious of, is that support for one another. What do you need to be mindful of also as the pressure comes on in terms of ensuring that support for one another, what are the warning signs that actually, you know, something's happening here in, in the context of this relationship that I need to be aware of?

One is to just be mindful that you're always watching the other person to help them remove obstacles and to help them, you know, get better in their role. So it's confidentially behind the scenes showing the other person their blind spots. I speak about the emperor's new suit, right? And it's the old Aesop's fable about the. The king is getting these clothes made and he's got this magic tailor who's building this beautiful suit of clothes and everyone in the room is going, there's no clothes. You're, you're trying on nothing. He's putting air on top of you, pretending it's this magical light suit. And the King goes out marching in the parade and he's, he's just wearing his underwear. And this little three year old goes, but the king is naked. And, and it embarrasses the king. So behind the scenes, someone needed to tell the king he was naked. And no one had the courage to do that. But if you did it in front of everybody else, the king would get upset. So behind the scenes, I needed to be able to say to Brian, dude, you're screwing up. Like you're missing this, or we're not doing this well enough and I do it in a safe place. And then he needed to be able to say to me, hey, you're not delegating enough or you need to delegate more. Let's get that off your plate. Like, why are you doing all this stuff and not growing people? That was something that I could have been much better at. In the first two or three years that we were building the company together, I was so kind of, I'll work hard, I'll work hard, I'll work hard, I'll take all this on. I'll work hard that I didn't get stuff off my plate soon enough to other people who were capable or even get it off my plate to people who weren't necessarily capable and just grow their capabilities so that they could do it more right. And then also I think being there to help each other solve problems, it.

Would be remiss of me not to ask about the importance of the vivid vision concept, which you've become synonymous with, you know, in, in the context of this relationship, in terms of bringing the right person on board, that person being accountable, and ultimately measuring success.

Well, the day that I decided to join Brian as, you know, his second in command at 1-800-got junk, he handed me his vivid vision, what he called his painted picture. It was a two page document that described 1-800-got junk in 2003, described the company three years later at December 31, 2003. And I remember reading it and going, I get it, I can see this. And I liked the vision of what he was doing. And I also thought of so many different things that I knew how to do to make that vision come true. Like, I can make that sentence come true. I can make that sentence. I can make this whole paragraph come true. What's cool is it was two years before that Brian and I both learned the vivid vision concept the same day from an Olympic coach. And we were both using it in our prior companies. So I liked his vision, I understood his vision, and I Saw myself in his vision. So that's critical that a CEO can hand that vivid vision to attract people who are excited about making that come true. Fast forward to December 31, 2003. We'd made it all come true. It was incredible how much. But Brian walked up to my desk that day and dropped the 2006 vivid vision on my desk. And I remember this so vividly. He started laughing and he ran away. And he goes, I have no idea how you'll make this one come true. And I started reading it. I'm like, holy shit. This is because it was describing the hundred million dollar company. We were only 16 million. We were 16 million that day. And he showed me the $100 million company. Three years later, we were at 106. It was a fun journey, but yeah, it's a critical tool to align people, to inspire people. And it helps to give the leadership team and the employees the same level of intuition that the CEO has. Because you all are starting to make decisions with that same gut because you know, it's aligning with that same shared vision that you have of the future.

Is there anything in the context of the second of command that we haven't touched on today that you feel that, you know, you should share with the listeners?

I heard recently that a spouse at times can be there for a reason or a season or a lifetime. And I think often the COO can be there for a reason or a season or a lifetime as well. That it's not necessarily a failure to at some point need to stop working with that COO to bring in the next COO. My skill set started to break down at the $100 million mark. I didn't have the DNA or the skills, nor could I have necessarily learned that. I probably could have learned some of the skills, but I didn't have the DNA to be the hundred million to the billion dollar coo. So when Brian sat me down at that hundred million, it was a Thursday morning and we were having breakfast in Vancouver and he said, I think it's time, I think we're done. And I started to cry and he started to cry and I was. I literally fell apart. And he made me take a taxi home that day because I was incapable of doing the 12 minute drive. He was right that it was the next era and I was okay with that. It took a while to understand that. And a few years later I got divorced from my first wife and it was super hard to get to divorce. But now I look back at that and go, that was the Right relationship for that time. And it would have been the wrong relationship forever. But we could have respect and like each other as humans and still co raise our kids together. But it was a good relationship for a season. And I think you have to recognize that at times just because that COO has been with you or any leader in your company. The key is to, to exit that relationship in a good way and in a respectful way and in an integrity based way so that that person can go on to their next chapter, their next season. Right.

That is so profound of the hers the back of my neck are standing up that. And it's something that you and I will hear a lot from CEOs who are scaling a business that they really wrestle with the relationship they've had with people who have been there from the start and, and they struggle with how to have the conversation. But you know what I often say, you know, it's the most compassionate thing to do when you see somebody who you really value and somebody who's been with you along this part of the journey, really struggling. Unless they've. They're up for the journey, unless they're. You feel that they want to, to go on with you and are willing to embark on the training and the leadership journey that's required there, then the best thing to do is to have that conversation and to create a space for somebody who will absolutely love and relish the next part of the journey and you release that person to get on with what they really like doing. And life's too short as.

Yeah, it's too short for all of them. And I think just trust your gut on how to have that conversation because at the end of the day we're all just human.

We never really grew up. We just learned how to behave better in public.

Yeah.

Can you share with our listeners three timeless takeaways?

Well, I mean one, and I've said this, none of this actually matters. You know, this is just what we do to make money. At the end of the day, as Ram Dass said, we're all just walking each other home. So, you know, enjoy the journey, have some fun along the way. Is one second is to remember that I think everyone is actually struggling with something, right. Every single person that we encounter at work, in our businesses, customers, suppliers, employees, they're all hurting with something. They're struggling with a relationship with a spouse, with financials with health issue. And to be cognizant of that, we're all just trying our best and at the end of the day to connect with them. As well. And I guess to work hard to find that partner that you love and you admire and you want to share your journey with, because at the end of the day, it's kind of fun to be able to share that journey and that path with somebody, too.