Leadership, Culture, and Success: Insights From Cameron Herold

So you don't have to oversee the stuff that you don't like, and you need to hire people that like that stuff. And that is, again, understanding yourself.

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Hey everybody, Roland Frazier here and welcome.

To another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast. We are so happy and excited today to have a friend of mine I've known for a long time now, Cameron Herold, who is the founder and CEO of the COO Alliance. So COO as in Chief Operating officer. And I think it's so wonderful to have him here because so many people ask me how can I get my operators, the people that are running the business, to do the things that I need them to do and how can. How can I separate myself from operations of the company and Cam? Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Roland, appreciate it. You and your team and Deanna on your team have been really great at sending over referrals over the years and even people, not even referrals, but people that need some advice and resources around that second conversation command. And happy to always help any of your kind of tribe. So thank you for doing that.

You are very welcome and a shameless plug for Cameron, which I get nothing for other than the joy of sharing great people with him. We have actually sent multiple coos to Cameron from our business as well as others and nothing but good things to say about that. So if you guys need to train up your COO or you are a COO and you want to level up your skills, I highly recommend that you reach out to Cam and and we'll share how to get a hold of him at the end of the podcast. But right now, will you tell us a little bit about kind of what your background is and how you got into this COO alliance thing?

Yeah. Well, it's funny that you're calling me Cam because the only people that ever called me Cam were my family and I was groomed as an entrepreneur. So my entire first half of my life I went by the name Cam. Switched over later in life as to Cameron. So either one works. But it's funny, my family groomed us as entrepreneurs and to this day, my brother, my sister and myself have all really been running our own companies for between 15 and 25 years. I had my first operational company when I was 21 years old. Actually 20 is when I started it, but I had 12 full time employees when I was 21 years old. Really kind of cut my teeth at running businesses at very young ages. And then got involved with a couple of different friends along the way. Three different friends, and helped them build three different companies effectively as their second in command in those stages. So built out a group called Gerber Auto Collision in the US that's now the largest collision repair chain in the world. We built out a private currency company that we sold back in January of 2000. But we all know what would happen with that market crash right afterwards. So we lost a $64 million company, got 3 million at the exit, and then helped my best friend build out a company called 1-800-GOTJUN and I was his CEO of that company. Took them from 2 million to 106 million in six years. Left there 16 years ago. I've written six books. I've been paid to speak now to entrepreneurial audiences in 27 countries on every single continent, including getting paid to speak in Antarctica. And then six years ago started off the COO alliance and I also host a podcast called the Second in Command Podcast where we don't interview any entrepreneurs, we only interview their COOs. That's a little bit of a tour.

Now I'm jealous because I've been wanting to go to Antarctica for a while now and you've actually done a paid speaking gig in Antarctica. That is pretty daggone cool.

Well, it was from a mutual friend of ours as well. It was Yannick Silver that was hosting an event there and Yannick had me speak and handed me a check right in front of all the entrepreneurs to technically prove that I'd been paid to speak on every single continent. Now that is awesome.

I love that. I love that well. So now you have a new book that's out too, Right? You want to share a little bit about that and we can talk about kind of what that covers.

Yeah, it's interesting. The first four or five books that I wrote were really about building out my brand and sharing a lot of my content around general business areas of scaling up companies. I co authored a book with Hal Elrod called the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs and that went very well. But this last book that I wrote called the Second Command is really some IP and some content that really wasn't being shared. There were a couple of books that talked about very early stage companies, maybe hiring an integrator. But that kind of system and model usually breaks down at about the 50 employee mark. And I really wanted to talk about how to actually bring on a proper second in command, whether it's a COO or a VP of operations, typically of a 50 to 500 person company. So I walk through all the content of actually recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and then building that really strong yin and yang relationship with the COO so that the CEO can really leverage themselves and scale up the company.

Okay, so let's talk about that. We are in the process of, in a couple of the companies I'm in right now, involved with, we're bringing on people in different C suite capacities. Sometimes it's through referrals, sometimes it is through recruiting firms. Tell us a little bit about, like if, if somebody's listening or watching this right now and they're like, I, I don't have somebody yet, I need to find somebody, what's the best way for them to go about doing that?

Yeah. So there's a couple parts to what you're on, what we're talking about here. The first one is that most great employees, especially as you move into those leadership ranks, are never out looking for a job. Most great employees have a job, they're working for a pretty good company and you need to entice them away from wherever they're working. So the starting point with that is building out a scorecard and a job description for that role that is really strong and really polarizes. You want a job description that pushes 50% of the people away, who they go, no way. I don't ever want to work for that company, which really magnetizes and attracts the other 50% in. The other thing I like doing is getting a copywriter, somebody like you, but not quite as expensive, who can take that job posting and rewrite it like a sales letter so that it pops right every Job posting is a sales letter and it really needs to attract and market people, people into your, you know, into your recruiting funnel. Next thing that I like to do is put a couple of hoops in place to make them jump through a couple of hoops so I can actually see if they really skilled. See if they really want the job. Have they read our company Vivid Vision? Do they really kind of vibrate at the same resonance as we do and are they excited about what we're building? And then the last part is I use a recruiting firm because recruiting agencies can really go out and help us poach the best people and entice them away. I've got one firm that I've introduced a bunch of your clients to as well over the last 11 years and they exclusively focus on COO or second in command searches now as well.

Can you care to share that resource for us?

Sure. It's called the Wise Scouts. They're on the board of Conscious Capitalism. They are. The CEO of Wyscos was the president of his YPO chapter.

Is that Max?

Max Hansen? There you go, see?

Yeah, yeah. Where are you? Actually, they are helping us right now with somebody. So that's, that's really funny. I didn't, I didn't know that I, I didn't know that was you.

You were connected to that.

So that's awesome.

And I was at his wedding years ago and he was at my prior wedding years ago as well. So yeah, great guy, great company. But again they've done. But that's my point is that really, really great firms, of course they're working with you, right? Because you've been able to find the best people. And I think they are amongst the best in North America for sure in that search, in that niche.

What I like about the process that. Cause I've been involved actively in the process in one of the current searches we're doing right now with those guys is that they started out and this is something that I, I think is really, really helpful because a lot of times they'll say, you know, we'll give us a job description, you know, write the job description. But what these guys did, did a great job of was there were, there were two questionnaires and one of them was really, really in depth into what are you looking for? Who will they report to? But, but then into some really cool things that I hadn't seen. Somebody asked before. They said if you could have your dream person that you know, your dream CEO, who would that be? A name name. So like then it. Then I had to think about, well, who are some of the great operators that are out there and, you know, and who would that be and what makes them great? And that was really, really cool. And then in the. I think the other questionnaire was like a DNA thing where it was really, really in depth into the company and the things we want them to do. I just. I just really thought that was a good process. Do you share that kind of stuff in your book, or how in depth do we get in that?

I do. And it's interesting that what they're digging for in some of their research is they're looking for the cultural DNA of your company so they can find the cultural DNA of a second in command that matches that.

Yeah.

The starting point in looking for a really great second in command is understanding yourself as the CEO and understanding your company and really understanding all of those idiosyncrasies. Almost like as if you were writing an operating manual to yourself, right. As the CEO, you would then hand that operating manual out and says, who wants to help run me? And they go, oh, yeah, you're a great fit. Because frankly, I was a great second in command for 1, 800, got junk. But I would probably be a horrible second in command for your company because I don't have the right skill set or DNA match or I'm there for the wrong stage. Right. So it's all about understanding yourself and also the stage of the company you're at the current COO at 1,800-got junk. I took them from 2 million to 106 million, their current state. They then dipped down to about 70 during the global financial crisis. The current COO has taken them from 70 million to 450 million in the last nine years. He would have been a horrible COO for the six years I was there, because he was the wrong match for the size of the company, the season that he was in. So there's all these little idiosyncrasies you have to look for in finding that right second command.

So that's interesting that you bring that up. How do you deal with, like. Like, if you're a person who is looking for the right second in command and you've got people who have been there. Like, you know, they were there. They were. They were the initial people. And maybe they're not founders, but they came on early. They kind of feel like their founders. Um, but they've. They've gotten. The company has kind of outgrown their core skill set. How do you know when that's happened? And then how do you deal with that and, and treat them well, but also not constrain your company from the growth it needs?

Yeah, it's a really insightful question. So what you're talking about there, and this is where Clayton Mask, the founder of infusionsoft, he and I had a discussion one day over lunch and we both agreed that most features senior level people can only grow the company twice. Right. Two doubles before the third double is just too complicated for them. So if you're a $3 million company, maybe your head, your second in command can get you to six and then they can get you to 12. But it's really hard for them to run the company at 24.

Yeah.

So what you need to do is keep growing their skills at the same pace as the company is growing, or you have to start preparing for that delicate conversation of you either need to exit, right. That person needs to leave and go somewhere else to continue to grow their skills, or they get to report to the new CEO that's coming in. Right. Maybe they're going to get to run an area and report to that new person. Usually because the CEO doesn't have the skills or the time to really keep growing the people they need to bring in those, those external people. That typically happens in the 100 employees to 300 employee stage. When you're actually forming your first solid leadership team and where you, when you're in the 30 to 100 stage. You used to have a management team.

Yeah. Now it's. What we've experienced is it's hard ego wise and I guess, I guess it's all ego, but it's hard ego wise for somebody that's been the COO to effectively be demoted or you know, to move into a role that's under somebody, even if that person that's coming in is more experienced and you get some kind of friction about that. How do you, how do you know if it's maybe going to work or maybe not?

Yeah, it most often doesn't work. It really can work. If the person usually, if they're a shareholder in the company and they know that they have these other intrinsic kind of benefits of actually sucking it up. Right. It's kind of like suck it up, buttercup. If you can, if they can suck it up and get through that ego stage, it can often work. But I find it's often better for that person to exit and go and do it again at their next person.

How do you know if, if the person that you're talking about like, like you say I'm at 10 million now and we want to get to 100 million. And if you bring in somebody that's done too big a thing, maybe even somebody that's done the 100 million thing, how do you know that they, that, that they like, they're not going to come in and expect to have all these resources that you just don't have? Maybe as a bootstrapped company at 10 million that they did have, say at a funded company with 100.

Oh, I've lived it. I hired the former head of marketing for McDonald's and Dairy Queen and brought them into 1-800-got junk. And the first thing he said was, who fills out our FedEx slips? I'm like, what? We're this entrepreneurial company. You're filling them out, dude. Well, and it's interesting that when I left 1,800got junk at the 106 million mark, it took them a year to find my replacement. They brought the former president of Starbucks USA in to replace me. I'm leaving, going, oh my God, it's so big. And she comes in and says, what a cute little company she was. Too Corporate. She lasted 12 months and was, was let go after 12 months because she was very corporate, very bureaucratic, all about hiring consultants. Didn't embrace the entrepreneurial culture, didn't embrace the kind of guerrilla marketing tactics, didn't like the franchisees ideas. So she was a mismatch on culture. Which is really what's interesting about Wisecouts is they won't bring in someone into your organization an interview until they know if the cultural fit is strong. They don't even tell the candidates what company they're applying to work for. That's how important the culture fit is. First with the CEO, the culture of the organization, they make sure the match is there on the skills and the DNA and then they'll bring them in to start meeting the team.

That's that I think, I think that's so important. And I, I've seen that happen a few times too. Like the filling out the slips thing, it's like who's, who's the person that writes the copy? Who's the person that does email? It's like you do?

Yeah.

And it's like, no, I don't.

I.

Because they've, they've really. Would you say that what that is is that they never had that or that they've kind of lost touch with it or. I mean it definitely seems like it's not the highest and best use of them because they've maybe evolved just to more management. How? Give me some insight on that.

It's usually more the leadership team that's hiring them. It's usually more their fault than the candidate's fault.

Right.

Usually that the job posting wasn't clear and polarizing enough to make sure that they understood they were going to be rolling up their sleeves and getting dirty and doing work. It's often because we put a title in place that's too big for the role. Maybe it's really more of a director of operations or a VP of operations. Yeah. But we go, oh, titles don't matter. Let's call it a CEO. And we start attracting CEO candidates who think they're going to be leading teams and running teams versus getting in there and doing the work. Right. If you're the head of marketing, you could be a marketing manager or a director of marketing or a VP of marketing or a cmo. So it's often I look at the cause of the leadership team to say, what are we putting out there and how are we attracting some of these wrong people? And then how do we not have the right. And I talk about this in the book the Second Command. How do we not then screen for these people to know they're the cultural fit first and the skill set second? Years ago, back in kind of the 70s, 80s, 90s, we used to say hire for attitude, train for skills. That's a, that's kind of a phrase for frontline first job employees. That is not for leadership team. You don't hire culture and trained skills of a leadership team person. You need to hire and recruit for both.

Okay, so now let's, we've been talking about recruiting. Let's talk about that. You have somebody there now and in. We understand that maybe that doubling is a good way or that that doubling is a good way. Double twice is a good way to kind of say whether they, they can stay or not longer or how sophisticated they might be.

Yeah.

How do you support the CEO or the head of ops that you've got right now and maybe train them up, get them education, prepare them for what's coming.

And it's interesting that's, that's even why I called the book the second in command is it could be a head of ops, BP Ops, coo. Right. So for that second in the first part is to remember that our job is to support them. Right. So flip the org chart upside down like an inverted pyramid with the CEO at the bottom. Supporting the leadership team, supporting the frontline employees, supporting the customers. Right. Everyone can see the vivid vision of where we're going. And you build your company inside your core values and your core purpose. So that's kind of the vision that the CEO should have, is their job is to support them. One of the ways you're going to support them is to make sure you give them and continue giving them the skills to scale. Ben Horowitz in the book the Hard thing about hard things, that a senior leader can only go through one triple and it's too hard to do the next triple.

Yeah.

So if we know that coming in, keep growing their skills, plug them into the COO alliance, get them coaching, push them through the invest in your leaders course. Say yes to any book or any podcast they want to be learning from or any mentor they want to get. Encourage them to keep growing like we do. Right? CEOs join mastermind communities and get coaching because we know we can learn from those tribes. That's number one. Secondly is to make sure that you have time in your calendar one hour a week for the CEO and CEO to sit and connect and talk about strategy, talk about plans, talk about culture, talk about people and, and really stay in sync. I remember years ago when we were building out what's now called Gerber Auto collision in the United States, $2 billion top line company. Now I joined, we had seven locations left when we had 65. And the CEO and I were talking and I said, I need a one hour meeting with you every week. He goes, cameron, you know what you're doing. Run with this. I don't even need to be involved. You know how to scale this. I'm like, no, no, this is for me, not for you. I'm not asking for you to manage me. Time for me to get stay in. And he goes, oh shit, I never even thought of that. I'm like, no, this is my hour. So that, so you need that. Second thing is, is have that date night. I often think of the CEO and the COO like a married couple. You need time away from the kids. You need time away from the rest of the management team where you can stay in sync, get to like each other, have some hobbies or commonalities, even if it's breakfast or lunch or a glass of wine or a bottle of wine. Maybe it's play game of golf or going for a hike or going for a run, but have some time away from the rest of the team. So at 1-800-got-JUNK. I keep talking about this company like it was yesterday. It was still 16 years ago, Brian and I Would leave the office every Thursday for three hours just to work off site at one of our clubs, either his tennis club or mine. And we just sit with our laptops and work away. And sometimes we'd talk, sometimes we were just right beside each other, but it was being away with each other. And then we'd go for a run every Tuesday morning and every Thursday morning as well. And often have a drink together at some point during the week. But that was away from the others. To stay in love with each other. Right? To really stay in like with each other. Brian was the best man at my wedding three months before I started working with him. So we had a bit of an unfair advantage.

Yeah, that's great. What do you do in terms of. In thinking about comp? Because you get lots of schools of thought. There should be performance based and variable and fixed and equity and everything else. Talk to us a little bit about that.

This is great, great, great. There's like three or four questions in here. So the first part is compensation for a role has to match the title, the job description and scorecard, what they're responsible for doing, the metrics and KPIs, they're responsible for delivering the amount of P and L responsibility that they have and the level of strategic insight they can bring into your organization. So based on that, that's when you're going to decide are we calling this person a director of ops or a VP of OPS or a general manager or a coo? Based on what they're doing, their strategy. Right. P and L responsibility, the title might get bigger based on that title that determines how much to be paying them. So I'll actually share a link with you later that we can share with Everybody. It's about 200 different COOs that have entered their comp into a spreadsheet and they can see all the rows and it's whether you're male or female, what state you're from, the size of your company and revenue, the size of your company with number of employees, what your title is, their base pay, any long term incentive, any bonuses, any equity. Really, really cool data points around what people are really getting paid.

The reason that's really great. I appreciate that and we'll put that in the show notes too. Thank you.

Yeah, well, and the reason it's important is if you go on indeed. Or Glassdoor or Google, what a COO gets paid, those numbers are skewed about 15% higher to entice people away from their jobs. So that these job boards and you know, have, have More clients. Right.

Interesting.

But it's really not clean data, huh? So that's number one. Number two is around equity. You remember this as well as I do 30 years ago. Right. Let's go back to 1993, which is crazy. That was 30 years ago. In 1993, to get equity in a company, you had to go and buy stock from that publicly traded company because nobody was giving it to you. 1995 to 2000 is when we started giving away equity in lieu of compensation. That's really when it started. Okay. We were giving away equity instead of compensation or instead of a lot of compensation because these startup companies in the Bay Area didn't have it. So they would pay an executive 70 grand a year. And here's some stock options. When the dot com bubble blew up, right March of 2000, Steve Ballmer said there was an Internet bubble. The NASDAQ crashed over the next six months by 78%. We then started to have to pay people salaries and we kept giving them stock, but nobody then wanted just stock because it was all imploding. So then we started having to pay them well and give them equity. And the slippery slope continued. Then what happened is Gen Y started getting very lazy at saying no. You and I are baby boomers. We're able to say no or we're Gen X. Baby boomers are good at saying no. Gen X is pretty good at saying no. Gen Y. Oh, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. So we'll keep giving away equity. So most companies don't give out equity in their company. And most good executives don't need equity or bonuses. They're always going to work as hard as they're always going to work. So I'm more in favor of actually paying them very, very well to do their job with no bonuses, no long term incentive, no equity. Because the reality is they're going to do a really good job for that pay.

To give a broad guideline, if you can, what should entrepreneurs and the COO or the seconds in commands that are that are listening and watching, what would be a reasonable expectation around a couple of brackets, like maybe, yeah, I'll do.

So if you're a true COO. Well, here's a bracket. I left one, 800 got junk 16 years ago and I was getting paid 306,000 back in 2007. So I think a real true COO today is 300 to 450 plus is a true COO. Okay. If you're a VP of Operations, you're probably more 150 to 300. Okay. If you're a director of operations, you're in the 120 to 180. You know, my executive assistants, and I'm sure yours is. We pay them well. My EA is in the mid-90s.

Yeah.

So if you're paying somebody 95,000 a year and you're calling them a VP operations, they're not a VP operations. They're at best a Director of operations. Operations. What.

What's the difference between those three positions, do you think?

It's the amount of P and L responsibility they have is number one. So how much they actually can run the business like a business without you needing to decide everything for them, it's the amount of strategic insight they can bring in. Right. They've built companies, they've built teams. They have the wisdom of time. Like, we've got a great CEO alliance member who's very strong on the tech stack, but really, really horrible on all of the leadership stuff because he's too young. He's never done this before. Right. He's 23 years old, running a $15 million company. He's never really fired. He's never really run teams. Like all of the stuff that we've had with time, that becomes kind of leadership soft skills. It's the leadership soft skills, the strategy and the P and L responsibility. And then lastly, the level of autonomy that they can have in their role. Right. When Brian brought me into 1-800-got-JUNK, I was like, thanks for your vision. Get out of the way. Let's do this. He didn't have to manage me. He kind of had to reel me in at times. So it's those. I think it's those four things.

Okay. I really like those. And I like those last two as far as kind of making the difference between where they are on the. On the scomps, the comp scale and the title. The title scale. So now let's. We talked about KPIs. How do you effectively. If you are a second in command or if you are in charge of one, if you are first in command, how do you monitor performance? What are the KPIs that we should be looking at?

It's interesting and it's kind of like saying how high is up? We have to measure what that person is responsible for. So as an example, when I was the COO again at 1-800-got junk, I did not run finance. I did not run it. I also did not oversee finance or IT at Gerber Auto Collision and Void Auto Body.

I also now, when you say oversee, is that. Does that mean they don't report to you? They do they?

Correct. Yeah, those. Those functions reported to the CEO. So I had sales and marketing and operations and PR and our call center and franchising and corporate locations. Those all reported up into me. Okay. And then Finance and IT reported to the CEO. But we have about 30% of our COO alliance members where Finance and IT report directly to them.

Right.

So what's interesting about. How do I say, what metrics should the COO be responsible for? It depends on what they're overseeing. It depends on what areas are kind of on their scorecard. It really depends.

So if we're designing, like, if we have a chance to kind of remodel our company, should we have finance and some of those other things, like IT reporting to the coo or.

It depends on how much the CEO loves those areas and is really good at those areas. So what I like doing. What's beautiful about this CEO is you get to delegate everything except. Right. And as Dan, our friend Dan Sullivan talks about, you end up working only on your areas of unique ability.

Yeah.

So when we were building Gerber Auto Collision, the CEO Terry said we'd just taken the company public. It was a direct public offering on the. On Toronto Stock Exchange. Like, I hate dealing with the investors, and I hate dealing with legal, and I hate dealing with the stock market. I'm like, don't delegate all that to your cfo. He goes, no, but I have to do the earnings calls. I'm like, no, you don't. You're a CEO. You can do anything you fucking want. And he goes, oh, shit, you're right. So from that day forward, Brock was the cfo, did all of it. And then Terry moved back into the biz. Dev, the growth, the sales, the marketing. So you don't have to oversee the stuff that you don't like. And you need to hire people that like that stuff. And that is, again, understanding yourself.

It is so cool to that you say that I talk about joy and genius because genius is good, but you also should be in the areas that give you joy. And if you love digging into SEO, you know, just understand that there are people that can do that. So if it's compromising your ability to be able to be the CEO, then, you know, maybe don't spend quite so much time there. But I really. I really like that. And. And it allows people. It gives people permission to not have a formula they've got to cram themselves into. I think that's really, really cool.

It also gives the CEO permission to not have to work in areas of their business they don't love. And I'll give a really specific example of this. Most CEOs that we know are very outward facing PR biz dev. The rainmakers that like we would do the speaking events, their books would be written by us. But the CEO of Shopify, Tobias Luque, does not do as many of the speaking events in biz dev as his coo Harley Finkelstein does. Harley's very outward facing biz dev sales marketing. I've known since they were a 50 person company. Tobias, I didn't even know who the heck he was until like year 10 because he was like product in engineering and finance. Right. Very inward facing almost as Jim Collins would say, that level five leader.

Yeah, yeah. I think especially in tech you find that.

Right? Yeah. So that's what's really intriguing now is the CEO can hire their yin and yang counterpart to work on the areas of the business they don't love that they're not good at to then really replicate and scale. Right. It's almost one of the ways that a company can truly scale is delegating everything. Except there's another part of this as well, is that one of the key indicators that a CEO or entrepreneur needs to recognize is when you're so busy running the business, you're so busy just managing people and you don't have time to grow people and lead people and support people. That's when you need to hire a second in command because you always need to be growing people. Our role as leaders is to grow people, to grow their confidence and grow their skills and then work on culture and recruiting always.

One of the things that I have also found I'm going to mention, and it'll be interesting to see if you've experienced it too, is I've had people that I had that talk with about doing the things that they love and, and they don't want to delegate things. Like they're like, I don't want, I'm going to do finance because I don't want somebody else to have to do that because it's terrible and I hate it and I don't want to put that off on them. And I'm like, you don't understand. There are people that love finance, there are people that love sales. Right. And, and, and you just have to understand that like people actually really enjoy those areas. You're not punishing them to some horrible fate of only dealing with this thing that nobody Wants to deal.

Well, and here's, here's something really interesting. You love copywriting. You're really good at copywriting, dude. If you asked me to write a letter and like, make it polished, I would, I would agonize over it for two weeks and you'd be like, fuck yeah, give me a bottle of wine, let's do this. But I remember delegating these memos to Katherine Pittman, who worked for me in communications. And she was so excited that she got to rewrite the memos for the coo. And, and it would take her a half an hour to rewrite something that it would have taken me all week.

So now we've talked a little bit about kind of culture and role and finding people and supporting the people that are in second command and then monitoring and KPIs. What are some of the other areas of the book that would help people to know more about?

Well, one really intriguing one is when's the party over? Right? When do you know that it's time to part ways and to either let that COO go or to encourage them out the door to go to your next stage of growth? So when we took the company from 2 million to 106 million at around the 50, 60 million mark, the head of the call center was replaced for the second time. The head of franchise sales was replaced, the head of finance was replaced, the head of IT got replaced. And then it was my turn. And it was a Thursday morning. Brian and I were meeting with our leadership team at 7:30 in the morning as we always did for two and a half hours. And Brian said he wanted to meet me for breakfast. I said to his assistant the night before, he's totally firing me tomorrow. She's like, no, he's not. Go home. And then I did my wandering kind of through the 60,000 square feet of office space and said goodbye to the head of hr. And as I went to say goodbye to Helen, she flipped some papers over on her desk. I'm like, fuck, I'm totally getting fired tomorrow. Anyway, so Brian and I meet at 7 o' clock in the morning and I order my traditional eggs Benedict and Brian orders grapefruit. I'm like, grapefruit? That'd be like Roland ordering a glass of water at a bar. I'm like, what are you doing? You don't. You never drink water? And he looked at me and he goes, I think it's over. And I started to cry. And he started.

That's how he started.

Yeah. Oh, that's. That's Tough and it was. And yeah, grapefruit, like I got fired with grapefruit. So yeah, it was, it was hard because he was right and I knew he was right because it had been really hard for me for the last 12 months. It was easy to go from 2 million to 50. It was hard to get to the 106 because it just became big. We had 3100 employees system wide. We were operating in 330 cities, 4 countries, 12 operating P. Ls. It was just fucking complicated, excuse my language. And what he knew was I was the right guy to get them to 100 million, but the wrong guy to get them to the billion. No. Six years later when his book WTF came out, my name was littered throughout that book as all this praise about all the things Cameron had done and he never even mentioned anybody else on the leadership team. I knew that he liked me, but it took a long time to recover from that, let go, even though I knew it was wrong.

So that's a really good point. It's. I like the metaphor of he ordered a bitter fruit to fire. But you guys are friends. He's best man at your wedding. Before you work with him, you jog every, you know, you meet for twice a week for three hours, you jog together. How does that affect your friendship? And how do you keep your friendship and have that conversation? Especially when you start off with, I think it's over.

It was, it was brutal. I was sobbing, he was crying as well. He actually made me take his car home instead of taking or made me take a taxi instead of driving my car home because I was unable to drive the thing. The nine minute drive from the Vancouver club to my home. Yeah, even do the drive.

Well, this had been a part of your life for, for how long?

Seven years? And then even for four years prior, we were in a mastermind together where we'd meet every month and I was kind of coaching him behind the scenes and helping him scale. And yeah, I bled blue. I was, you know, the brand. It was, I was employee number 14 and when I left, we had 3,100. It was, it was my baby too. It was really, really hard. It took me a long time to get over it. I had a chip on my shoulder to then try to prove that I was as good as everybody out there that I was coaching for six, seven, eight years probably. I found it very hard to trust him for years until really, until I think the book came out. I think when I read his book wtf, And I was like, I hope he mentions me. And then on page two and then on page 10 and then on page 18, I'm like, okay, now we're good. And then it got embarrassing as it kept going. I think it was the book that made me go, wow, he did love me and he did love my work and it allowed me to settle back into doing that. And I think for him, he also saw me for years, as I've done today, keep talking about and raving about this great brand that we built. I think it allowed us to reconnect again, but it was hard. I think what we should have done was get some coaching and counseling as friends to work through that. And I think we could have gotten through it in six weeks instead of six years. Interesting.

What would you do if you were in his role now and you had to let you go?

I think he would do exactly the same thing as I would. I think we now have some hindsight of wisdom of just going through it because we'd never gone through that before. I think we would do it in a get some counseling and some therapy and write a vivid vision together of how we're going to become friends and really work on that stuff to really honor how strong our friendship and trust was at the beginning and make sure that we get to there. And I think we both discarded that and thought that each would get on, would get through it. He then had to ask for 12 months just to find my replacement. Right. So yeah, he was going through his stuff as well.

Right, right. And so. So now would that just be. I guess since the lady from Billions isn't generally available, who seems to be like the amazing counselor. Right. Who do you go to? Is that like a family therapist or what?

It's interesting. I would actually go to. There's two people. One is Joan Mara, who is a renowned forum trainer for YPO and EO members and has been doing forum training for them for 30 years. She's fantastic at working through those. The leadership hard discussion. The second is a woman named Dr. Patty Ann Tublin, who I've done 50 plus calls with. She's a marriage counselor to Wall street power executives. And my wife and I even hired her to start working with us kind of the day we got married so that we would continue to build a strong relationship. But you bring in someone like that to work with you because they've dealt with strong couples on these kinds of issues. And I think I would work with both of those are one of those.

I love that if I could get. We'll get together and get that information and I'll get those names spelled right in the show notes. So what do you think is the one or two or even three coolest things in the book that you share that and you don't have to spoiler alert them, but, but, but that people haven't seen or thought about. Maybe that's counterintuitive or that you just get really excited about being able to share.

Well, first, it's just really the only book of its kind out there. I mean, there's dozens and dozens and dozens, dozens and dozens of books on marketing or PR and anything else. Like, there really isn't much out there on this. This topic.

Right.

I think it's also on really how to leverage that role. Right on really how to get. Because you're bringing in a, let's say a $300,000 person. How do you get $3 million worth of upside in year one? Right. What are the things.

Is that a fair expectation? A 10x return on your.

On your investment for every employee, it needs to be at least a forex return because you've also got your cost of goods sold and your overhead that you're then. So I think you need a forex return on every employee, regardless of their title. If you're hiring a $50,000 person, you need to get $200,000 worth of upside, which means you need to structure. It's almost like rigging the game for them to be able to get that right. And going into it and focusing on that. I learned that years ago, frankly, from a woman I was coaching. Her name's Suzanne Evans. She runs a coaching program of hundreds of people. I was coaching her. She would hire a person to do video for her and turn that $70,000 video person into a $200,000 mini business this year. She would say, look, you're doing my video, but you got to go out and find other clients to do video for and bring in 200 grand. She turned everybody into a mini profit center.

Yeah.

And I think more companies need to think of that is how am I going to create some upside? Because often we can build all this back end. And now we are trying to drive more revenue just to pay for our overhead instead of making our overhead drive more revenue.

Yeah, 100%. Anything that I have not asked you that you would like for me to have asked you?

Well, I'll kind of wrap with one thing, is none of this shit actually matters.

Well, then why are we here, Cam?

This is just what we do to make money. Because the reality is we're all just walking each other home. None of us are getting out of this alive. And I think we as leaders need to be able to have laughs. You've been a role model of this forever that you can be so serious and so driven and you're constantly laughing and giggling and I think we need to have fun along the way and not take ourselves so effing seriously. And I think if every entrepreneur and CEO can remember that, that if you're so head down working in the business, freeing up some time to allow yourself to have some joy and start crossing stuff off your bucket list and start enjoying the journey, that's one of the reasons you're going to hire that second in command. Because the reality is we only get this one life. We got to live it too.

I couldn't agree more. And I love that that's our closing thought. Everybody, look, if you don't get this book and get familiar with what Cameron teaches and what he shares out there, you're absolutely missing out. And whether you're an operator or a CEO, founder, this is stuff that really matters. This is the stuff that is real business. And so will you share again the name of the book where they can get it and then for people that would like to reach out and connect with you, the best places to do that for sure.

Yeah. So the book is called the Second in Command. It's on Amazon, Audible and itunes. And I did the audio recording. I spent two and a half days inst studio in Dubai recording the whole thing. The COO Alliance. So just go COO alliance.com check that out. Absolutely. Check out the Second Command podcast. And then my, my email is Cameron, Cameron Herold and it's H R O L D dot com. So Cameron, Cameron herald dot com awesome.

The very, very last thing that I want to ask you is how do you see AI chat, GPT, Claude Bard, all of that as a critical skill sets, two seconds in command and B, how they might be using them or should think about using them as they move forward.

All right, so about two weeks ago, I listened to you and Ryan doing a podcast episode about the fact that you had AI doing a podcast like creeped out going. I don't know if they're tricked us. Is it really them or not? Look, I've been telling all of our CO alliance members and every kind of employee I can tell touch that the only employees that are at risk of losing their jobs to AI are the employees and leaders that don't start leveraging AI. Right. It has to Be a tool. And it's no different than 30 years ago to some CEO saying, oh, I don't need to type. Yeah, you do. Anybody who's type, I used to see CEOs on planes typing like this. You don't see that anymore. Every CEO can type 70, 80 words a minute, right?

Yes, they can.

So entrepreneurs should be spending one to two hours every single week. Your employees should be spending one to two hours every single week. You know, there's a dashboard called, there's an AI for that that shows about 5000 different AI tools that exist to do currently 1800 different tasks that AI can do. Everyone's talking about ChatGPT. That's one of 5000 tools that exist. Right. We need to play with all these tools to find out which ones can help us scale our business. And I think need to give all our employees time to play with them and then report back in like a book report every Monday saying, hey, here's a tool I played with. Here's what I did with it. You do that on a weekly basis. You've really supercharged your company.

I love it. Hey man, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. Really appreciate it. You guys should grab the book the second in command. It is something that is required reading for our folks in all of our portfolio companies. And as I mentioned, the COO alliance, which, which Cameral Cameron started and is a in depth, would you call it a mastermind more than anything else?

Yeah, it's really so it's, it's because.

You'Ve got training too that I know our folks have been through.

Yeah, the training. The course is called invest in your leaders. That's completely different. That's really there to grow the skills of all managers and leaders on stuff like situational leadership, coaching, time management, project management, all the 12 core skills that every manager and leader needs to be good at. That's in the investor leaders course. The COO alliance is a mastermind community of second in commands. We've got members from 17 countries, but about 80% are US, 15% Canada, and about 5% global. 40% of our members are women, or I think it's like 36% are women. And it's a community for them to share resources with each other. You need at least 5 million in revenue just to qualify. We don't let you in if you're a smaller company. The average size is about 40 million and it's no entrepreneurs allowed. It's only second in commands that are there to learn from each other help each other scale help understand how to scale their CEOs company and free the CEO up for more time. So it's a little bit of me teaching, but it's really more of them sharing with each other. And we've got three hour events online every month and then we do two in person events every year. Our next one's being held at MIT's Endicott House where the EO programs are held every year.

Oh that's fun. That's fun. Well, you guys should definitely check that out again. Cameron, thank you, thank you for being here today and we'll look forward to seeing you guys next time on the next Business Lunch episode. If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing it with a friend. That is the best thing you can do for us is to help spread the word and and share valuable things like Cameron shared today with the rest of your network. See you guys next time.

Thanks, Roland.

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