Navigating Change in Your Business | Ask Me Anything with Cameron Herold (Ep 223)

Company needs to start to evolve, to continue to scale as well. But if you're only focused on those numbers, you're missing the opportunity for leverage. You're missing the opportunity for operational efficiency. You're missing the opportunity to get more margin per employee, more revenue per employee, more customer engagement. Hey everybody. Welcome to the ask me anything. The whole format for today is for anyone to be able to ask me questions around really anything but leadership, operations, execution culture. I'm working on a new book about the CEO COO relationship. If you want to ask about the course content that I have in my invest in your leaders course and you know, which modules are most applicable or some of the nuggets from those modules. Happy to share. So any questions that any of you have. So who's got some questions to start us off? I'll start off Cameron, if that's okay. My name's David Maxwell from Belfast, Northern Ireland. And my question is outside of the norm. Cameron, you mean how have you shared previous Vivid Visions in the past just outside the normal marketing channels? So the idea with sharing the Vivid Vision is that you really want to get it socialized with your leadership and your management team first, and then sharing it with all of your employees second, and then rolling it out to all of your suppliers and business partners third, and then rolling it out to all of your customers fourth, and then sharing it to the wider audience of potential customers and potential employees fifth. And then every quarter going back up to the top again and making sure that the leadership team and managers and frontline staff read the Vivid Vision again on, on a quarterly basis. So that's really the way I like to do it. I don't really want to put it on my website right away or email it to the list right away until I know that my team and my employees and my partners, you know, my lawyer, my accountant, everybody really understands the Vivid Vision. And then I'll actually be able to roll it out on a much wider basis later. Most businesses, when they start out, the owner, the founders, the CEO is, is everybody else too, right? How do you know when you actually need to get a coo? It really comes down to are you as a leader starting to get overwhelmed in a lot of the higher impact areas of the business, the higher kind of decision making areas, the areas that might need a more seasoned strategic or senior person to be able to execute on, is one question. Second one is, do you have enough stuff on your plate that you really need a second in command or could you get an executive assistant first? Right. I've always said if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. So you really need to first get all the administrative work off your plate. That might buy you six months to 12 months before you really need a true second in command. And then the next part of that is, do you need a coo or do you need a VP Operations or a Director of Operations or a General Manager or an Operations manager? Because you might need a person as a second command to help you with stuff, but it might not necessarily require the COO title or the COO compensation pay. Right. The bigger the title we give, that often can lead people towards higher expectations, higher comp packages. Your head of finance could be a Director of Finance or a VP of Finance or a Finance Manager or a cfo. The same with each of the functional areas. Be very careful with giving out titles that are too senior too early. And be very cautious if you give out the CEO title too soon. The VP Operations doesn't have a role they can jump into. Right. So it's always nice to give them something to chase and then make sure that the compensation expectations are very clear. Like if you only want to pay $140,000 a year, that is not a CEO. That's probably more like a Director of Operations or at best a lower paid VP of Operations. Right. So be careful with the title, the title creep. Eric, you got a question? When do you bring in a fractional cfo? Great question. Fractional cfo. I believe that all companies, when you get north of, you know, $1 or $2 million, you really can't afford a $200,000 CFO. But you need to have someone other than your accountant looking at your business, looking at your financials, to ask you some questions, to maybe give you some advice. But often to ask you questions to help you figure out the business or look at the business in a different way to help you optimize for more gross margin or more net profit. So if you can pay that fractional cfo, you know, to look at your books and look at your financials on a monthly basis and spend maybe a couple of hours to give you some strategic questions, they might not even be able to give you advice. That can be very powerful. Or you might be able to get somebody to, you know, bounce ideas around with to, to get them to ask some questions as well. You say dollar value. What if it's the number of accountants you're managing? We're currently dealing with accountants in three different countries. Oh, so you've got a team of accountants that are working for you. You're at the stage where you need a fractional CFO to help oversee that for sure. Or you need to simplify the business to get away from the complexity. If getting away from the complexity isn't an option, then you need to start bringing in that fractional CFO to oversee that for sure. And you can often get your accountant or your accounting firm to help you find and hire a CFO or fractional cfo. You may not have the bandwidth internally or the deep understanding of that business area to make a decision on who to hire as a fractional cfo, but that's how I would approach it. What are the essential things to keep in mind as a coo? What would you tell yourself back when you were in your mid to 20s? One of the chapters from my very first book, it's called the Leadership Lessons to My Younger Self. And these are all the lessons that I wish I'd known when I was in my early 20s that I now know today. So it's lessons after building the companies that I helped build. And I journaled for a few months, 20 minutes a day, and I wrote down about 60 different lessons that I really wish I'd known at a younger age. Some of the advice I would try to give you is make sure that you're always on the same page with the strategy and the vision of the CEO or the entrepreneur. So whoever you're working with, always get on the same page and make sure you have ways to stay on the same page so that you're aligned with their vision and strategy. Secondly is to remember that we all have stuff to work on. You know, none of us have this figured out. Like, just because you're young doesn't give you the, the ability to say, well, I just feel like, cop out because I'm young. No, you feel like you're an imposter, because we all feel like we're imposters at times in these roles. So every single day, everybody wakes up feeling like, this is the biggest thing I've ever done. And then the third, I guess, would be to always work on continually growing your skills and continuing to grow your confidence as a leader. You know, much like our job as leaders, to grow our people's skills and confidence, our job with ourselves is to continue working on our confidence and our skills as well. And the more that. Just keep that in mind. And how do you build this confidence? Some of it is practicing the habits. Some of it's, you know, if you set three goals for yourself, write down three things you just accomplished. Right. If you set, you know, three big projects for yourself that you're going to be working on, write down three projects you just got accomplished and you'll feel good about those. If we're always driving towards the horizon, you're never going to be happy. But if you drive towards the horizon and you keep looking in the rearview mirror, then we'll often start to be happier and build some of that confidence as well. And the other one is, you know, get yourself involved in mastermind groups. Right. We've got an organization called the COO alliance, and we have CEOs and directors of operations, VP operations from 17 countries that are members of the CEO Alliance. And they have calls with each other every single month. They have a slack group where they share information every month. They have accountability groups where they meet with each other every month. And that's the way that they keep their confidence level up is with that, that peer group. Right. We've actually got some members of the CEO alliance are actually on this call right now. It's kind of good for them just to have that peer group availability.

Yes. Hi, my name is Devin. I'm the CEO of a lighting manufacturing company. And I started off with the president. It was just me and him. After a few years of him transitioning from having a third party represent his product to now representing it himself. And so my role has grown dramatically in the last couple years. And my ultimate goal is to help build him a foundation of operations so that he can scale his business. But he's also a founder and a president that really likes to operate in the black or in the green. And so I'm struggling between my energies being pulled away from operations and focused on sales and marketing. But I'm really trying to help him see the vision and the value in building a sound structure and foundation operationally. And so how do you navigate that with a founder who is just really only sees numbers as being valuable and helping them see the value and maybe pulling back a little bit so that you can build the operations so that when you scale, you can scale more quickly.

When they look at numbers, is it, you know, revenue and profit, or do they look at numbers like employee engagement and customer satisfaction?

Not numbers. Numbers and revenue.

Okay, so they're just focused on revenue, revenue, revenue. So start showing them some of the operation. How many employees do you have now?

Six.

Okay. And we're about.

We're around 2 million a year.

Yeah. So really, when you go from, you know, one employee to three, from three to 10, from 10 to 30. From 30 to 100. Those are the different inflection points. And much like, you know, how old is the owner of the business today?

55.

Okay. So when, when he was 5 years old, he was Bob, and when he was 15, he was Bob, and when he was 25, he was Bob when he's 35. So he's just a different version of this human. But he would have been a horrible manager as a 15 year old. He would have been a horrible leader as a 25 year old. He's had to evolve as himself. Right. The company needs to start to evolve, to continue to scale as well. But if you're only focused on those numbers, you're missing the opportunity for leverage. You're missing the opportunity for operational efficiency. You're missing the opportunity to get more margin per employee, more revenue per employee, more customer engagement. My obsession has always been that if my employees are really happy first, my customers are really happy second. That's where the profit and revenue comes from.

Yeah.

So the number one metric that I measure over all other metrics is how happy are my employees? The number two metric that I measure is how happy are all my customers. And. But if he needs to flip that a little bit, if he's only focusing on the profit and the bottom line, he's missing the point.

I would say above everything, we value our service. And so everything that do is always just how can we respond to people as quickly as possible? How can we provide them with the experience and service that goes above and beyond? But what my role and what my goal is is try to optimize our operations so that we're being more efficient and maybe not coming to a head with an issue and then having to deal with it in the moment, but taking the time to think about it. So that way we've considered the issue before it even occurs. So that way, when it comes up, we're prepared.

Put the systems in place that are easy to in place, that are going to help you with that, you win. But I would also lean towards making sure your employees are super happy before your better customer service. If your employees start getting overworked, they start feeling like, why is the customer so important? What about me? But if they feel like all you care about is them, they're going to care about the customer, so they're going to give you the better customer service. Right. You end up with that result. I was just curious to understand a little bit more about the COO alliance. Kind of the composition there is this, you know, does it span the early Stage to, you know, Series B type of company. Some of the questions I had are obviously very different from a Series B or Series B funded company. So if you could speak to that, that would be great. The purpose of the CEO alliance is to give second in commands a place for them to meet with each other. Because there's a bazillion groups for entrepreneurs, right? You've got techstars and you've got ypo and you've got Vistage and EO and Genius Network and Maverick and Baby Bathwater. All these amazing groups for entrepreneurs. And then there's groups for lawyers and accountants and engineers and doctors. But there was never a mastermind group or community exclusively for the second in command. So that was first. I recognized it when I was the COO for 1, 800, got junk that I needed a place to be with other COOs as I was scaling 1, 800 got junk instead of just being in more of these entrepreneurial communities. The makeup of it is you need to do at least 5 million in revenue or have raised 5 million in funding to qualify. So if you've done a series A or Series B and you've raised at least 5 million or you're on the revenue number, you're on track to be large enough to join. Our biggest member is about a billion. A little over a billion in revenue, but the average size member is around 40 million in revenue. Our youngest member is actually now 21. It used to be 26. We have a 21 year old who is CEO of three different companies, which blew us away. Our oldest member is 62. We've got about 40% women, 60% men and we have members from 17 countries. We have a three hour event online every month that's live online where we have different themes and formats, where we have guest speakers, we have breakout groups. You also are placed into an accountability group with five or six other members and you get to meet with them on a monthly basis as well. Just that small group of five or six. And that gives you the ability to exchange problems and work in that smaller group format with them. And then we also have the Slack group where you get to share information and problems with each other to be able to help each other grow and share those resources. And in addition, we also have two in person events a year. We have one in September and one in April and those are held in Arizona. That's where you can actually fly in and spend two and a half days in person with all the other COOs, but those are optional to the program. Got It. Thank you so much for that. And quick follow up to that if you can maybe speak to kind of the composition of hardware versus software companies in that ecosystem were a hardware company initially. So I think that helps me. I would say about 25% are pure play digital. I'd say about, you know, 30, 40% are, you know, pure offline businesses, right, where we've got like a chain of restaurants or a chain of nursing homes and then, you know, the rest are kind of a hybrid, which is most companies are today where they use some stuff digital, they're using apps, tech stocks, whatever. But I'd say only about 20 or 30 are pure play digital companies. We've got some digital agencies, you know, we've got brands that you know, the name of, you know, 155 is a member of the CO Alliance. We've got brands that people have seen and know and then we have brands that you've never heard of or didn't even really, you know, the Sunbrella fabric, if we sit down on any outdoor furniture and that Sunbrella brand is the fabric, their CEO is a member. We've got the largest Pizza Hut franchisor in the world is a member, you know, their second in command. So and then we've got members from all over the world from the Philippines and from China, from Fiji, from Barbados. Kind of crazy.

What three podcasts or books would you recommend that every CEO should read in addition to the CEO alliance podcast that we should all be listening to.

So I mean I clearly, I love the Second in Command podcast for, you know, because it's, it's our podcast and we have, you know, interviewed amazing coos from all over the world from some really great brands. So definitely subscribe and listen to the Second In Command podcast. I really like the My First Million podcast with Sam Parr and Sean Puri. I love their thoughts around business and optimization and growth and I love seeing that they are kind of forward thinking and strategic. So I get a lot of value out of their stuff. I definitely pick and choose through some of Tim Ferriss episodes. I think he's done a really good job with a lot of his stuff. I love some of Lewis How's Content as well. I think he does a great job with stuff around leadership and stuff that we can bring back into our teams. I love some of Jordan Harbinger's business guests as well, but I think there's not a lot that's around the COO and operational depth. But I really do like the Second Command podcast. I mean we have 215 episodes of brands that, you know, like Bumble and Shopify and the Cleveland Indians and, you know, some really cool brands, Blockchain. So definitely absorb that one for sure. My question would be, in my role today as a coo, I have two founders that are hands off on the business. I actually run a lot of the operations. And so my question is what analytics or visualization techniques have you used successfully to show the founders of what is happening and what is going on in the business? So the business is successful and we're doing well, but I wanted to make sure that they have full visibility into my day to day in a very strategic way. So any, any advice? There's. I think the question really is less of what software do we need to represent the data that we have and more do we really understand how to actually know what data to be reporting inside of our businesses? Right. So think about, you know, what car do we drive to, you know, around the city every day? So let's say that you drive a, you know, a BMW 5 Series and you know, you're driving around, you've got a dashboard in front of you. If the BMW's computer put all of the data that it measured up on the dashboard, you would be overwhelmed because there'd be too much data. So right in the middle of the dashboard is this huge dial for the speed, right? And you look at that constantly as you're driving. And in kind of the bottom right hand corner, just slightly in your view, is this tiny little gas gauge that lights up orange or red when you're below a quarter tank to go, hey, you're almost out of gas. And there's some other dashboard stuff there too, and it might light up. If you need to know. What you need to know with your business is kind of the same. So at your leadership team level, you don't need all 300 data points being represented for everybody. You need to have two or three from sales and two or three from operations and two or three from finance and two or three from marketing and two or three from customer. You need to be a leadership team dashboard that kind of rolls up and then you need to have that dashboard displayed in such a way that you can see how you're doing against your goal, how you're doing against historicals. Are you green, yellow or red against your goal or historicals? Right. Who's responsible for that metric? And then let's say that marketing's three metrics on the dashboard all show up as yellow. One week you're going to sit down with marketing, you're going to open up the hood and you're going to look at all 30 metrics that marketing looks at, but you don't want to have all 30 of marketings and all 20 of ops and all 17. A sale. Like that's where most businesses go wrong. It doesn't matter if you're using Power BI or DOMA or whatever, if you're representing too much data or the wrong data, or all of the data is the same size and color, you're completely missing the point. The other thing to think about with data is are you looking at predictive indicators or lagging or leading indicators? Right. So there's different kinds of data points that you want to be looking at in your business as well. So I have a question around meetings and structuring meetings. So what is the best way to structure meetings and ensuring that everyone stick to that structure? Actually just did a call with a bunch of our COOs about an hour ago from our CO alliance and we were talking about one of my books called Meetings suck. I highly recommend that you have all of your leaders and all of your managers actually read that book. And then I'm also going to reference my course called Invest in your leaders. One of the 12 modules in Invest in your Leaders is on how to run highly effective meetings and how to get people engaged in those meetings. So first off, when it comes to meetings, every meeting has a different purpose and outcome, right? You have your daily huddles, your weekly leadership team meeting, your one on one coaching meetings, your financial review meeting, you've got your strategy meeting, you've got your quarterly meetings, your annual, you know, planning meetings. So you have different kinds of meetings. So it's hard to say, like how do you organize a meeting? They're very different. Kind of like saying, how do I plan food? Well, is it dinner for four or is it Thanksgiving dinner or is it, you know, lunch for two kids before we're scrambling off to soccer practice? So we need to understand what meeting are we talking about, what's the size of our organization, who's coming to the meeting, what's the purpose of the meeting, and then it kind of goes out from there. But in the invest in your leaders course and in my book meeting suck, I give you the tools to actually run all of those types of meetings. And I give you the tools on how to get your employees engaged in meetings. And then I talk about the overall themes for meetings. So the overall themes for meetings are meetings have to start exactly on time, meetings have to Stop five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time, which gives people time to walk down the hall, talk to their assistant, get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom and start the next phone call or meeting on time. I book all my meetings for half the time that I first think about booking them for. So if I book it for an hour, I book it for 30 minutes or let's get together for a day, I book it for half a day. I control the idle chatter, right? We have a moderator, a timekeeper in a parking lot. So I kind of go through some of those normal the meeting norms. But then I do cover how to run each of those proper meetings. And I also talk about how do you engage the quieter, analytical, more amiable people that often don't say much when you've got your sales guy talking over them all the time. It teaches you how to actually get people engaged. And my rule of thumb is if you're inviting them to a meeting, they better be engaged or you better be engaging them. Otherwise don't invite them to the meeting and don't waste their time. Right? So we talk a little bit about that in the book and also in the course too. What are your thoughts on the great resignation? I think it is about time that so many employees quit working for shitty companies, doing shitty jobs and having to drive 40 minutes there and 40 minutes back for the privilege. I think it's about time that they quit and I think it's going to be really, really hard for average companies to survive because these companies employees are going to get to go work for great companies based in other parts of the world. So I was talking to a company the other day who's based in Ohio. He just lost one of his key employees to a company based in Luxembourg and he didn't even know where Luxembourg was. So he had to look up where the hell is this country that I just lost an employee to because the world is now very flat and Covid accelerated that. So I think it's about time that we had the great resignation because I think a lot of people felt very trapped working at very average companies and saw no other way out. I also think that there is a little bit of a swing back right now where employees are also realizing they don't have all the cards because some of the big companies are doing some layoffs. I think that's really healthy that we have the great resignation happening in times of maybe a bit of a recession coming, which at least balances out some of the equilibrium. I heard a saying years ago, if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business. You're out of business. It's up to us right now to make the changes inside of our business so that we can actually attract and retain these great people versus having to react to it and think something's wrong.

What would your strategy be when you're constantly trying to grow new systems and then you're being met with a founder who is constantly diverting you away from that in your effort to like, for example, like make weekly meetings or every other week meetings with the team and then them come to you and say great idea, but throw that to the side. We're focusing on this now and having a culture where constantly reprioritizing causes like strategies to go to the wayside.

I think you're just getting to the stage where the company needs to start evolving right? Where the company can't just be the way it was. You're moving from being a teenager to the adolescent. And the company needs to evolve a little bit. And our job is to show the leader that it's time to evolve. I would caution you to be careful about system system systems for the sake of system system systems Y we need to put systems and processes in place that are easy to put in place that allow us to make our employees happier, that allows us to make our customers happier, that allow us to make more money and profit. Otherwise those systems can really bog us down when we need to still be small and entrepreneurial. Because you are still a six person company that can be nimble and entrepreneurial and kind of wing it. But he needs to decide or you and he need to decide. How entrepreneurial do we need to be? How much bobbing and weaving are we going to do versus how much can we get more organized in systems? So this is a bit of a balancing approach, right? It's about process over outcome. Sorry. It's about outcome over process that at the end of the day, if, if I see a great employee who I just know I have to hire, I'm just going to hire the great employee. You know, Ray Dalio said that if you see a snake in the grass, you don't write an sop. You don't write a system or a playbook to kill the snake. You pick up a stick and you bash it over the head. Be careful to not be putting in place too. And I'm very big fan of systems, by the way. I've built lots of franchise companies, so building 1-800-got- junk, Gerber Auto Collision and Boyd Auto Body College Pro painters were all about systems and all about easy to execute systems and all about systems allowed us to scale, but we would also short circuit a system very quickly if it allowed us to get to the outcome really quickly as well.

Ultimately, I'm trying to put in place touch bases in connecting with the employees that we have. And I think it's really important to make them feel valued and by connecting with them on a weekly basis to just say like, what's working, what's not, what can we celebrate? What are you struggling with? And I'll have these on the calendar. And then he's like, clear your calendar for two weeks. Like you're not meeting with anybody. I need you to do this now.

Well, you know where you're going with then is in the invest in your leaders course. And this is not like it's supposed to be a pitch for the invest in your leaders course, but in the invest in your leaders course there's two modules would be really powerful for both you and your CEO to both watch. It's me teaching the content. The one is on doing coaching. It's how to coach your employees and how to do delegation. Actually. Here's the core modules that'll be helpful for him. Coaching, delegation, time management, project management and one on one meetings. Those, those are five of the 12 modules in the course and even running effective meetings. I think it would be very helpful for him to devour that content, for you to devour that content because that's going to really give you the foundational blocks to scale and keeping it entrepreneurial as you do. Right.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

I would like to ask the question that. Yeah. I'm the CEO of Snapsoft Ltd. Which is a Hungarian software development agency of 70 people. And I'm looking forward to hire my first CEO. As I don't have a CEO, I'm doing the CEO's job now. So what I would like to achieve is that hire him or her until the end of the year. My question would be is that I would like to manage this from my network. That's my first point. And everybody's asking for equity, which is not a problem for me. Actually. I'm just quite curious about is this a standard that you could just hire a CEO for equity or investing model or something like that, or would I be able to manage this for pure salary? And what would you recommend regarding that? I know that it is Hungary and it's a different ball game.

I've coached companies in 26 countries. I've also Done paid speaking events on every single continent, including Antarctica. So I'm very, you know, comfortable with working with clients around the world. You do not have to give out equity to get good employees. Gen Y has gotten very good at asking and Gen X and baby boomers have got really bad at saying no. And we need to get better at saying no. I'm going to pay you fairly, I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to create a good company, a good culture. But you don't have to give out equity 20 years ago to get equity in a company. It's more like 24 years ago prior to the rise of the first.com area from 97 to 2000. Prior to that, to get equity in a company you had to buy it on a stock market for most employees. Now there's never going to be an equity payout. There's never going to be a transaction. There's not going to have enough that's going to be meaningful. So what I try to do is pay people very fairly for the work that I'm getting them to do. And I try to build a company that can't just give out equity. So I try to build a company that actually has good gross margins, has a good company culture and can pay people fairly. I'm more of the mindset of don't give out equity unless you absolutely desperately need to. When I left 1-800-got-JUNK 15 years ago, Brian replaced me with the former president of Starbucks US and she came in for no equity, for a solid remuneration package and no real long term bonuses. But she got to build the second best company in Canada and she thought it was a cute little company. She was the former president of Starbucks US and she came in for no equity. So you don't have to give out equity. So we're working on automotive anti theft and now here's the dilemma. Because we offer a security product, I find it really difficult when pitching it to angels, to other tech companies, to folks in general because of the very strict confidentiality standards within our company. I only give answers based on my experience of having done something or having worked with companies that have done those things. I never give an opinion and I have no experience at working with early stage pitching VCs. So I'm going to respectfully say I don't know, I can't help you. Anything I tell you would be an opinion and opinions are like assholes, we've all got one. But I don't think opinions are valid. I would go and Talk to companies that have raised money in the tech space and ask them that question and you'll get lots of experience share. But I think it's very dangerous to share opinions or to give opinions.

My question is, and it's been interesting listening to everyone because I really serve as more of a fractional capacity and I would really say more as a doo just based on the company's revenue sizes and it's primarily been online businesses. But it's interesting hearing some of the things Devin has shared and others share the same problems. They're just at smaller businesses. So I'm interested to know if you have a piece of advice for someone like myself who is really trying like most of my business owners are between 1 million and 5 and so keeping them on track because it's like squirrel, oh this. So many of the same problems. But being that we're not full time employees and not fully in the business except maybe 40, 60 hours a month, what would be something that you would share to keep them focused but also keep us moving the needle forward?

I used to have this stuffed squirrel, got this like taxidermied squirrel and I used to sit it behind me over my shoulder when I was doing coaching calls. And when the entrepreneur got disfocused, I'd move and he'd see a squirrel. It was just hysterical. Kiba what I would do is a couple things. One, I would have the entrepreneurs read the book Vivid Vision. The book Vivid Vision is something that will completely align and inspire the entire organization. It's being used by companies all over the world. It's got hundreds, I think it's like 7 or 800 reviews on Amazon right now. It's, it's really, really well received and it's all about getting them to describe their company three years from now as if it's completed three years from now and it becomes a four or five page written description of what their company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future. So when they describe their company that way, it then helps the team to figure out how can we make that come true. Second one is to remind them that the more that they grow their employees, the more their company will grow. Right? They're to flip the org chart upside down so the CEO is at the bottom supporting the VPs, supporting the employees, supporting the customers. Not at the top telling them what to do and holding them accountable. But if they can actually grow the skills of their employees so that they grow the leadership skills, the situational leadership skills, the, the coaching skills, the classroom Teaching the effective meetings. If they can really focus on growing their people, their people will go through brick walls for them. And then third, if they can really care about their employees as humans and remember that every single one of those employees is struggling with something at home. They're struggling with a parent, they're struggling with a kid, they're struggling with a spouse, they're struggling with a pet, they're struggling with debt, they're struggling with the human condition of just being. If they can actually care about their people more than they care about the business, their people will care about the business way more than they do today. Those are all kind of a little bit counterintuitive, but I would be really focusing them on that. The last one will be get them to focus on the critical few things versus the important many. Right? There's a few core things that if they focus on those, will move the needle versus all the busy work that we tend to get bogged down with. How do COOs see cybersecurity within the organization, the CISO, and what do they expect from the cybersecurity of the company? I'll give you an answer that's similar in a way. It's just in terms of overall risk assessment for the company. What do we care about? What we really care about is stacking up all the potential risks. So maybe all the potential cybersecurity risks that we have thinking about them as to like, what's the percent chance that any of those are really going to happen? And then what's the easy solutions to put in place that give us the highest return on our people, time and money so that we're mostly protected. I think the good coos will avoid the complicated solutions, the very expensive solutions, the solutions for threats that, like we were told one time by a risk assessment company that we needed to have an earthquake proof, vibration proof floor in our server room. And we're like, hold on a second. We're in junk removal, for God's sakes. Like if our servers go down, if the building crashes, like we're in freaking junk removal. It's not like we have planes in the air, there's no brain surgery happening. So we just decided not to spend the $70,000 on the earthquake proof, vibration proof floor because the threat was kind of minimal. There were other things that we thought were bigger threats. So I'd say that that's probably how they look at it. I think I'm on the right track then, because that's exactly what I do, is determine the risk levels and Advise. Maybe not the easiest to knock off, but the most doable, most important. Here's what's going to get you return on your limited resources to spend on cybersecurity. All of our companies have the same three inputs. We all have people, our employees. We all have time, like days or weeks and months in front of us. And we all have money. Our job is to get the highest return on investment of each of those investments. How do I get the highest return on my people? How do I get the highest return on the number of days or months in front of us? And how do I get the highest return on the money? And the key is to make the easiest decisions that stack up. Because I believe momentum creates momentum. Right. Versus perfection.

You know, CEOs are by nature very creative. They're often wonderful relationship builder people, but they can have a hard time letting go.

Right.

They especially founder CEOs. I work for a company with co founders and my CEO is a wonderful visionary. But it becomes a challenge sometimes with making sure that she or the team is more solution focused. So when the team runs into a problem, they will say like, okay, I have this problem, here you go CEO, fix it for me. And then she does. Right. My role is to help break that. But do you have any advice to help me accelerate that so that we can get into a better spot?

Yep. It's very similar to raising kids. You know, we all went through the. When you're raising young children, you do everything for them. You pour the glass of juice, you make every sandwich, you make every egg and at some point you're like, wait a second kid, pick up your own toys, put your own toys in the toy box, make your own bed, brush your. Like I used to have to brush my kids teeth, teach them how to brush their teeth, how to do their own shower. Right? Our job is to grow our children to become happy, healthy, independent adults so they can get out of the house. Our job as leaders is to do the same with the CEO. We have to grow the CEO skills to be a better executive, to be a better Chief Energizing officer, to be better at delegating, to be better at growing people. Our job is to grow our so they can make decisions aligned with core values. They can make decisions aligned with core purpose within their budgets and to have confidence in their decisions and to support them. So it's a skill. I would get three to five of your managers going through the invest in your leaders course. Anybody who's a coo, this is the stuff we talk about all the Time at the CEO alliance, you should really look at getting yourself involved in that. But tell the CEO to really, really work at growing people, growing their confidence, growing their skills and not doing it for them. Right. Years ago, my son came to me and said, hey, dad, can you make me an egg? I said, yeah, I can make you an egg. I went out to the kitchen, I said, grab two eggs out of the fridge. He goes, I only want one egg. I said, I'm going to make you an egg. You're going to make me an egg? And he started laughing. I said, grab the frying pan. Put some butter in the frying pan. About this much. Swirl it around. Here's how you crack an egg. Okay? You crack an egg. And I literally did it. And then we sat down and ate an egg together. The next day I came in and he was making an omelette from scratch. I'm like, where'd you learn how to do an omelet? He goes, well, I knew you weren't going to do it, so I looked it up on YouTube. I'm like, good for you. But we need to do that with our employees, right? To always do it is like making lunch for them until they're 35 years old. And that gets old real fast. Get the team and the CEO both going through the course and they'll both learn how to coach and how to be coached. They'll both learn about one on one coaching. They'll both learn about delegation. Some strong skills in there for both. Whenever you were at 1-800-got junk and where you and Brian Scudamore were two parts of an arrowhead as CEO and CEO, whenever you had an ideological difference in certain things. Do you have any anecdotal insights or thoughts briefly on how you work things out from those on a scenario in an isolated scenario, for instance? Well, first off, Brian and I were best friends. Three months before I joined him. He was best man at my wedding. He had an unfair advantage where we had been in a CEO mastermind group together for four years as part of the Entrepreneurs Organization. He was best man at my wedding three months before I joined him to start working with him as a CEO. So we had an extraordinary amount of trust, extraordinary amount of respect for each other. We were friends and we did shit together. So we leaned back on that relationship a lot. We went for runs in the morning, we went for beers together. We hung out with each other's families. Like we really spent time together as people because we liked each other as people and we leaned heavily on that relationship. First we had some coaches. We worked with a couple of relationship coaches who worked with us on communication and rebuilding trust. We would do a lot of like walk and talks where we would disconnect from the office and go for a walk. We'd go for runs together and just disconnect. But yeah, we just, I think leaning on the trust and leaning on the relationship is what we did most to get us through the tough times. By the way, one. Yeah. One of the other modules in the invest in your leaders course is conflict management. It talks about how, how to actually manage conflict in a really healthy way. All right, everybody, hopefully that was helpful for all of you. I just wanted to do an ask me anything for all the amazing second in commands out there COOs, subscribe to this second in command podcast. Definitely look at joining the CO alliance if you're 5 million or greater. For sure, check out the invest in your leaders course. But most of all, remember, none of this matters. We're all going to die. This is just what we do to make money. Let's have some fun along the journey because this is just what we do to make a buck. Have fun everybody. The feeling of being comfortable. Failure and the fear of failure is what really stops you from starting. Yeah, it's the concept of like, but what if I this happens and it's these, it's this paralysis by analysis. Right? I think it's like, what if this happens? What if this happens? What does this happen? Sometimes you got to just do it.