Overcome the Biggest Business Obstacles Today with Cameron Herold

What you have experienced or gathered as the most complex part of the relationship between CEO and CEO. Now I understand that, you know, building relationships as complex as it is, but at that level, can you share with us a tidbit of what you have found to be the most difficult part to maneuver within that relationship?

It seems to be the communication, especially in the entrepreneurial CEO realm versus the more corporate CEO realm. So my niche is really always in the kind of 25 employees to maybe 500 or 1,000 employees. When a company has more than 1,000 employees, it's really not as often an entrepreneurial CEO. So the DNA of that CEO can be very different. But in the entrepreneurial CEO, the founder led CEO companies, most of those entrepreneurs are bipolar, or certainly on the spectrum for bipolar with the mania and the stress and depression. Many of them are very add, Many of them have tons and tons of ideas constantly. They're almost like perpetual motion machines. And their coos have a very different personality profile. So we had all of our members of our COO alliance do a Colby profile. And their Colby profile, which talks about how you initiate or start projects, say that they love to start projects by asking a lot of questions. So they're very high fact finders. Or they like to start and initiate projects by putting a playbook or an SOP or a checklist or a system in place before they start the projects most entrepreneurs like to start and plan later. We're winging it, we're shooting from the hip. We got the ideas and we'll figure it out as we go. Which tends to drive their counterpart COO very crazy. So the hardest thing that I've noticed is how do you get those two types that yin and yang, which is why I even made the logo on the COVID of the book, the yin and Yang logo. How do you get to understand the other person more? Because you can't change them. So the more you can understand them, the more the relationship will supercharge. So as an example, when I was, I had a second in command working for me. And every time I had a great new idea or in my mind a great new idea for a project, she would start to ask me a lot of questions. And it used to piss me off. I used to think she was arguing with me and debating with me until we realized all she was doing was trying to understand my project more so so that she could take it over and take it to completion without having to bother me again. So I realized the biggest gift I could give her was to say, do you have Any more questions? And she'd go, yeah, I've got three more. And the biggest gift she could give me was to say, I love your idea. Let me ask you some questions to understand it more so I can take it off your plate. And then I was like, great, go ahead and ask some questions. But it was by understanding each other that was really powerful. I also had to teach her to come to me with the executive summary. I didn't need all the data that she'd gathered. I only needed the very quick summary point. And then I would trust that if I needed more questions or more answers, I would ask her those and she would have them. And then she had to learn that from me as well. So that's what I think is probably the hardest part.

Do you have any suggestions on a CEO that just is not willing to put in that effort to read the book, to go to counseling? I've told my CEO, I'll do whatever you say is going to work for you, but let's work on our communication because we are what you just described the Yang and the Yang. And it works really well when it's good, but when it's not, it's so frustrating to try to communicate and show, hey, I'm on your team. He just won't entertain reading the book, going to counseling, doing anything.

So appeal to. I would appeal to his sense of greed, appeal to his sense of need that he needs this to work. And you're only telling him this, not be. And by the way, don't ever give him this feedback in front of other employees. This needs to be done in a very private one on one where he won't get his back against the wall. But just say to him, like, I love the company, I want to be working with you, but I find this frustrating and I think we can get it better. And then give it an example of like in a traditional marriage. You know, in a traditional marriage, a husband and wife would probably go to a counselor and work together, not because it's broken, but because they want to have a better relationship. They want to love each other. They just know that they need some guidance from somebody who's maybe been able to help them before. I have a woman who's actually a very high powered marriage counselor to Wall street executives who does calls with CEOs and COOs together to help them build a strong relationship as a couple. So you're on the right idea with getting some counseling. And you do it because you want your company to be better and stronger, not because you're a broken human. But you have to appeal a little bit to that. We run a fully 100% virtual company. I'm a new COO in it, and one of the things I'm trying to do is simplify, right, and streamline as much as possible. But we're on a growth trajectory where we're starting to break things. And I wondered if you had experience or rules of thumb for more technology and what some of the platforms that you've been using in the past of when to truly invest in a platform or when can you push it, you know, another year. And whether or not, you know, when you start breaking things, it's too late, right? So you want to be ahead of it, but also don't want to invest all your profit into just technology. Great, great question. I just dropped something actually in the chat that I was sharing with a CEO alliance member yesterday. And it's some of the rules that Apple leveraged to become really as strong as they are. But they've leveraged the principles around simplicity, right? They have fewer words and fewer products and fewer like. They really get down to the critical few things in every single area. Take some of those ideas and bring them into your business for sure. Around the technology question, years ago I had a friend of mine, a CEO, and he sat down with his head of it and he said, for the next 12 months, right? So almost like a January discussion. For the next 12 months, the IT team is not allowed to build anything. You're not allowed to buy anything. I need you to find 12 free software solutions to plug into the company that will eradicate 12 expenses that we currently have. So it either needs to save us money or save us time. And we need to get it for free. And you're not allowed to build a single product. It's, you know, IT people like to build stuff, right? They want to integrate things. But the reality is often we don't need everything to be massively integrated. We just need something that works. That's simple, because momentum will create momentum. And if we can focus on growing revenue and growing gross margin, we can then take that revenue and gross margin later to build the better machine or the better mousetrap or the ideal software solution, right? So how can we plug in some of the stuff that's good? So it's teaching, it's teaching the employees that momentum creates momentum. I think we've all heard that saying that about the minimum viable product. My concept is really more minimum viable everything. How do you get it done and get it out the door? So that momentum creates momentum because there's not a single problem that exists that a check can't solve, that you can buy your way out of any problem, but you can't build your way out of every problem. And often I've heard of people talking about infusionsoft. Well, the nickname for infusionsoft is confusionsoft. I've heard of people talking about leveraging and putting salesforce into the organization, but almost every single case not they don't just get to use the software, they now have to hire a consultant to have them help them use. Like it just starts to get very complicated for no reason versus using something that's much simpler, that maybe doesn't do everything, but the reality is we don't need everything. And then lastly, give the example of most of the software that we use. We don't use 95% of the damn features anyway. You know, like think about Microsoft Excel for an example. How many of the features and functions and stuff that's there do we, we only use 10 or 20 things. We could have a piece of software that only does the 10 or 20 things and it could be free or very, very cheap and very easy to use and it would be good enough for 99% of our use cases. And I think we often get bogged down like the stuff in our home, right? Like how many buttons do we use on our microwave? What do we do? We reheat pizza and we reheat food and we, we boil water. We don't need the other 97 functions. I don't need my washing machine to connect with my phone over because we don't use a damn feature anyway. So I think it is, it's really leveraging what I put into the chat, those 10 principles around simplicity and forcing our team to think that way. Another point around this. I was speaking with the COO alliance member about this recently and it was that every mid level manager or early stage manager that really doesn't have the wisdom of having led people before their answer to every problem tends to be hire more people because they don't think about optimization or automation or saying no. So the way that they tend to scale everything is add more people. Add more people. Well, if you're in India, I've got a client in India, whenever they have a problem, they hire 10 more people because every person's only 4,000 or 5,000 a year, that's fine. But when one employee is 80 or 90,000 a year, you can't keep throwing a person band aid at the problem. So we need to grow our people and invest in their skills as leaders so that they actually have the skillset to be able to scale a business without throwing more people and thus more complexity at the problem.

Back in the day, we didn't have a lot of technology or a lot of working systems to get that CEO and COO talking and working well together. But now there are things like EOS and Scaling up and frankly some models that designate who's the integrator and who's the visionary. Do you support those types of models? And I know EOS is doing a major push to try to add thousands and thousands of clients, but do you think that's helped us in the COO world?

Yeah. And I actually in my book the Second In Command, I talk about and Gino Wickman and I are friends. We're in two different mastermind communities as peers together. Gino started EOS and wrote the book Traction. I know Mark Winters quite well who wrote Rocket Fuel. Vern Harnish, who built Scaling Up. He and I have been friends for 25 years. When I built one, 800 Got Junk. I was the original COO for one, 800 Got Junk and took them from 14 employees to 3100 employees in six years. We were the poster child for Vern's original Rockefeller habit. So I'm very familiar with both models. And also Shannon Susko, who you did not mention, has a really great model called 3Hag. Andrew Bailey with a line in Petra has some good models. There's lots of these good models out there. Attraction first is a great model, but it breaks down when you get to about 50 employees. The idea with the visionary and the integrator works really well until you get to a 50 person company. Once you have a management team in place, Traction works really well. But when you have a leadership team in place, right, with really strong seasoned leaders who have run functional areas, who have dealt with strategy, who have run bigger businesses. When you're in the kind of 100 to 500 person zone, you need to move away from Traction and probably start leveraging the scaling up systems with Burn. Vern's scaling up systems, though, require a real seasoned leadership team to run it. They're too complicated for the earlier stage businesses. I would say that most of our members in the COO alliance leverage either Traction or Scaling up or Shannon Susko's three Hag Way systems. We're kind of system agnostic, but you need to have some systems in place and then recognize that we have to change or iterate the systems as we scale. When Vern Harnish launched the original Daily Huddle idea, his model was that every employee had to speak. Well, that was okay when we launched it at 1-800-GETJUNK 23 years ago, we could have every person speak at Huddle because we only had 20 of us showing up. But eventually we had 248 people showing up at Daily Huddle. We didn't have time for everybody to speak at Daily Huddle. You'll see how we ran our Daily Huddle. A very powerful system that we iterated and twisted a little bit. And I think what works really well with Traction is just use the system, follow the system. Like don't tweak it, don't change it. But when you get to about 50 employees and you need to start changing it, that's when the model kind of breaks down. The other thing I've noticed for coos or for the integrators with Traction, and I speak to this in the book the second in Command, Gino's model talks about the integrator being the tiebreaker for every decision in the company. And I vehemently disagree with that. The second in command's role is not to be the tiebreaker, it's to teach the management team to have good debate, to teach the management team to have good discourse, to teach the management team to throw all their idea and then to teach them to talk to each other and work together, to collaborate together, to as a group come up with consensus. You don't need one person who's saying, well three disagree and three say this. So I'm going to say this, that only, only scales for so long before it starts to break down. Right. You can't have a tiebreaker, but it works well when you're in a small entrepreneurial company where your managers don't necessarily have the skill to be strategic and think. Those would be some of my thoughts around it. But otherwise fantastic models. I told my sister who had a 78 person company that she was an idiot if she did not put Traction in place. So like she went deep into it and then, you know, scale. I love the models for sure.

Thank you Cameron, very nice to meet you. Appreciate you doing this. I'm the COO for private equity backed security systems integration company. We're a national player and we have a roll up model. We put together the platform and now we're starting to buy businesses and I've done that in the past. Some of the issues or some of the challenges I have is that we're buying companies and we're about a 200 plus million dollar organization, about 20 million in EBITDA is that when we're buying other companies and rolling them in, how dynamic the organizational chart gets right and how personalities start to conflict and also how you utilize the best out of the best people. Right, so you're just smiling. So I'm sure you've been through that before. I'm just wondering how you target some of those challenges.

So Chris, to your point, when we did acquisitions and I started doing acquisitions back in 19. Shoot, when was this? 94 to 98. I did about 20 acquisitions for Boyd Auto Body and Gerber Auto Collision. I was a partner in the franchising group. It's now a $2 billion largest collision repair chain in the world. I was doing some of the acquisitions in the early stages and what we learned was the first thing that you want to when you do the acquisition to integrate people on is make sure that they understand your core values and live them deeply. That they understand your core purpose and they mesh with it deeply. They understand your bhag and they really buy into your vivid vision of where you're taking the company. It's also to really get them to understand your core of how you got to where you are. Like understand your genesis story and all the trials and tribulations that got you, like really integrate at the core level first. And I think most companies go sideways where they try to get the new company that they're integrating to use all their software or use all their processes or do everything our way. That's not what it's about. What it's first about is do we like each other, do we know each other, do we trust each other, do we respect each other? And then it's starting to get rid of the toxic cultural cancers, the underperformers, the ones that don't already live all those core values. You start with that. In terms of brand integration, what I believe you do is you keep your current company brand. So the company that you're acquiring, let's say it's, you know, Dustin Lockman sales, and it'll be a division of, you know, the COO alliance. In the second year, it's equal. It's, you know, Dustin Lockman sales, a division of CEO alliance and they're 50, 50. And then at the third year, it's, you know, the COO alliance. Dustin, like you kind of move into the bigger brand because it's like Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. So it doesn't matter what we call everybody. Don't piss off all the old legacy employees there by changing their name right away. Let's get them to like us and trust us and know us first. Another thing I try to do is get some mergers of the talent together where we go off site and we go and do have fun together, we spend time together, we, you know, do a leadership, a couple of leadership retreats, but we stay in a couple of of Airbnbs. So we wake up in the morning in our shorts and T shirts and have coffee together. And that's the team building you need is to get to know each other, right? Is it's really integrating that. One of my former clients, John Ratliff, who sold this company for about 107 million using STS, did 21 acquisitions over the course of about five years. That's how we did all of his acquisitions, by merging the people and the core values and the talent first and then the systems later.

As I really struggle with keeping up with all of my tasks and keeping up or keeping in touch with all 11 direct reports, how do I find.

A balance between my responsibilities?

When you're the second in command of a company and you're the COO of about, as I recall, about 100 employees, you can't lead 11 people anymore. You might be able to quickly oversee them and quickly manage them, but our job as leaders is to grow people. It's to grow their skill set and grow their confidence. It's to help them remove obstacles. It's to be there and do deep dives into their business areas so that we can help them. If you have 11 people, you're spread too thin because you have no time to do your job and you have no time to really grow their skills and grow their confidence or do the deep dives or the skip level meetings to really get into their businesses. So I think you really need to thin that back out a little bit. Ideally, a CEO should only ever have five direct reports at most because you also have culture, strategy and your board. And I treat each of those as a direct report. So I only allow a CEO to have a maximum of 5. I would love COOs to be maximum of 7 or 8. Now if you're a manager of an area and everyone in that area does exactly the same thing, you can have many more direct reports because, you know, as an example, when I was with College Pro Painters, I was on the very senior leadership team at College Pro Painters. One summer I had 32 franchisees that I recruited and trained and Coached, but every franchisee did the same job. And I'd been a franchisee for three years before, so I really knew the job. So the fact that I was coaching all of these different franchisees, I was effectively teaching them all the same thing and moving them all faster. So if you're the head of a sales group, you can have way more than the eight people. But if you're running seven or eight different business areas, there's no way you can understand each of the business areas and all of their moving parts and all of their people effectively if you have that many. So you have to thin that one out.

I got involved with a very young blockchain development company, and I realized that there's a huge generational gap. I'm being called the old one, and I'm 37 years old.

Great.

And they're. They're exquisite at their work. Everyone is a great employee. But being called the old one at this age, for me, like, I. I now need to wear a hat to work.

Yeah.

On zoom calls. Because. Or else I'm not. I'm. I'm lame.

Yeah. And you need to swap out the Irish knit sweater for a sweatshirt. I love the Irish knit sweaters, by the way, but.

Well, that's the.

That.

That's. My big question is, like, how do you deal with the generational gap when, you know, it's like, I. I still think I still got it.

You do still got it. You know, my dad, when he was 80 years old, was still smart as ever, but. And he had a lot more wisdom to bring to the table, and he was still young at heart. Right. And I think we need to. So all the generations need to learn a couple of things. We need to learn that each generation has something that they're bringing to the table. Gen Y and Gen Z bring technology skills to the table that baby boomers don't have. Baby boomers can bring some wisdom to the table and wisdom of time that the younger groups don't have. I was just mentoring one of our COO alliance members recently. Savannah. She's 25 years old. She's taken a company from two employees to 108. Technologically, she could probably kick my ass. But the questions that she was asking me and the scenarios she was giving me to me were kind of laughable in a way that I was like, I couldn't believe that she didn't know the answers, but of course she doesn't. She hasn't been through these scenarios so many times to have seen it so many times. So it's starting to get those gaps reduced by respecting each other's strengths, by looking for each other's strengths. Thirty years ago, a book came out called Men are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. And it was to show that men and women are different. Men are not hairy versions of women. We see the world differently, we think differently, we act differently, as do women. And how do you respect that and understand that? That's really the course as to how do you bring the employees together to see each other's strengths and weaknesses? And it's by doing some team building skills. Not the skills where you all take marshmallows and straws and build something, but the team building skills where you all do a lifeline exercise and you talk about your highs and lows, you talk about where you suck and where you're really good. It's about truly understanding vulnerabilities and then being able to come to the table and feeling safe with some of their vulnerabilities. It's sitting down with them and asking them, you know, showing them what we're weak at and asking for some of their help. So it's us showing up and being vulnerable to allow them to be vulnerable. I remember years ago, I was at my tennis club in Vancouver. I forget who it was. It was here from Vancouver. Maybe it was Chris who said, I was at my Vancouver tennis club. And Jimmy Pattison walked in, who's one of the most successful entrepreneurs in western Canada. Tens of thousands of employees. Jimmy was probably 80 years old at the time, maybe older. And Jimmy walked in with his MacBook and his iPad and his iPhone, and they were almost like stacked up like a little pyramid. And I saw him walking in and he sat down near me at a table, and he was waiting. And this younger girl came in. She was about 25 years old, and she came in to sit down and Jimmy stood up and shook her hand. And he reached into his pocket and he pulled out a $50 bill. And you know how, like, seniors will take the bill and they, like, they kind of hold it and show you. They're handing the bill. Jimmy, like, showed her the $50 bill. And he hands it to her and she goes, thanks, Jimmy. What do you need to learn today? He goes, I hear I can talk to these things and they'll do stuff. Can you teach me how to talk to my phone? And she goes, okay, what else? And he goes, well, I hear that I can get all three of these things to. If I delete something here, it'll delete them there. Can you Teach me how to do that. Jimmy is one of the smartest entrepreneurs in Western Canada. He's the biggest employer in Western Canada after the government. Government's number one. All the Jim Patterson companies are number two. And he's showing up as the dumb person in the room with a 25 year old woman who could not touch anything that he does in the business world. And she's asking, he's asking her for help on things. At the end of 20 minutes, he says, okay, what questions do you have for me about business? And she goes, I want to know what it's like to do this, I want to know what it's like to do that. He was paying her for her time, but he also recognized that he could flip the switch a little bit after he was being truly vulnerable and allow her to ask him some questions too. And I think that's the environment that you want to try to create, Justin, inside of your company is this. We have stuff to learn together. And it's the one plus one can equal three. It's also starting to show them some of your relationships. I recently heard of a CEO alliance member. I was out with his CEO for dinner last night and we were laughing. He goes, I can't believe that my COO has just learned about Simon Sinek with his Start with why and his golden circle. And I was laughing with Dave. I'm like, Simon was on my board of Advisors in 2004, four years before he wrote the book Start with why. Five years before he did his first TEDx talk that went viral. Simon flew out to Vancouver to meet Brian and I to be on our board. And if I tell this COO alliance member this, it's going to blow his freaking mind that Simon used to sleep on my couch. So sometimes, sometimes you leverage a relationship or, you know, a connection that you have with, with somebody that young and it kind of, they go, whoa. Like I, I was an advisor. Sorry, not an advisor. I was a reference. In the very first round of funding for Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk in their first business, Zip2, they only wanted to raise 600,000. They raised 3 million. They had one employee, Kimbal Musk, worked for me in 1993. You tell that kind of a story to a 21 year old and all of a sudden their jaw drops and they go, whoa, teach me shit, right? But it's to also realize they have a lot of stuff they can teach us too. Like I want to learn technology and these automations and hacks that Gen Y can teach Me, I'm going to be.

Starting a new president job in two weeks and I've done it a few times. But you know what, what is the top three things to keep in mind when you're building a new relationship with a CEO or frankly taking over for her and handling the rest of the team?

I think you have to go in, in your first 30 days with a notebook and a pen and walk around writing down notes, writing down ideas, writing down all the things you want to change and don't change anything. Like, I want to fire Bob. Great. Why write down the notes, but don't do it. I think we should integrate this.

Cool.

Why do you think that? Write it down. We should buy this. Cool. Why do you think that? Write it down. For 30 days, observe and write down all of your hypotheses or all of your things that you think you need to do in the second and in that first 30 days as well. Go for lunch, for breakfast, for dinner, over zoom meetings, whatever you can do to really get to know the other people. Not just their dog's name and their, their kid, you know, their birthday, but who are they? What rocks their world? What's their bucket list? What are they? What are their passions, their insecurities, their fears? What are they really struggling with at home? Is it a parent relationship or a relationship with their spouse or money or. And let them know where you struggle. Like really build the human connection. In the first 30 days with everybody. In the second 30 days, it's all about going back to your notebook and all of the ideas that you had and really probing around those ideas to see if you would change any of them. Like, would I still fire Bob based on what I know now? Would I really do that integration based on what I know now and kind of test all of your own hypotheses to really stress test those to see if you would make any of those changes. And then in the last 30 days of the first 90 day program, that's when you can start to execute. But I would do the very easy to do things that are going to get you the small wins quickly so that the people can see, oh, we did something, we made that change and we got a win. Resist anything that is the big hairy integrations, like ERPs. Just like firing a negative person is a big win. Hiring a cool person is a good win. Making some change that makes life easier is a big win. Training some people on some stuff that helps them become faster is a big win. So anything that is low hanging fruit, easy to do and will pay dividends over time. I would do those in that third month. And that usually sets you up for good success. The second part of this is how do you build a strong relationship and trust with the CEO? And that's behind the scenes. You guys becoming friends behind the scenes, you guys building some commonalities behind the scenes going off site and working, having date night, like really doing stuff together, Getting to know each other is really important as well.

Speaking of Justin's point and what you were mentioning about professional, professional development and growing skill sets, I keep getting in this situation where I have, you know, small 20 million revenue max. Pretty much these small mid sized businesses where they love cheap labor. So I am getting a lot of young green employees, right?

Yeah.

So I'm wearing a lot of hats as it is in a company that size. But I, you know, it is important to me to make sure that everybody's. I'm retaining employees but also really focusing on their professional development. Because I didn't have that at their age. You know, I had a boss that was like, do the job or I'll find someone who will. We don't talk like that anymore. And we want to grow them, you know, within the company. So I'm not sure in some of these scenarios where, you know, I'm good at my job.

Right.

But I'm not necessarily. I don't know their job. So I have to professionally develop them. I don't have anyone above them helping me like kind of create that plan. What's the best way to kind of go about helping them grow within their careers?

Which is not. It's to flip the org chart upside down where the CEO is at the bottom supporting the VPs and C level who are supporting the managers, who are supporting the employees, who are supporting the customers. Almost like an inverted pyramid. And recognize that our job is to grow people every day. Our job is to grow their skills and grow their confidence. Almost like they're climbing up two ladders and they've got their left hand and their left foot climbing up their skills ladder and then right beside it, one foot away, they've got their right hand and right foot climbing up the confidence ladder. Imagine if you're climbing up two ladders and you've got to grow their skills, which grows their confidence, which grows their skills, which grows their confidence, which grows their skills. You can teach them more. That grows their confidence. You're cheering them on. It allows them to try a new skill. If you keep doing those things, you're going to actually grow the people the Second part of that though is to talent stack the organization and to recognize that hiring one A replaces three Cs. Right? We really have to at some point teach the organization and teach the company that. You know, I've had an adage for years, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. You can't keep taking these people that are just the adage of hire for attitude, train for skill. Worked in the 1980s, but now we need to hire for that right culture fit and the proven skill set both. And it's sometimes worth it to pay a bit more to get the right people and then put them in the right seats.

Well, I think my problem, like the problem falling into is like I have no problem working with green employees and like teaching them how to be humans in the workforce, like how that part works. But it's the part where it's specific. Like I worked with a bunch of architects and it's specific to their industry. So I'm finding myself doing independent research on what to do, you know, to get to the next level and develop skill sets for them. It's more of like an advice thing. I don't know what to tell them. You know, this is what you do to move up in your career and within this business. So because it's also set for us.

Too, I would take a look at that, the link in that course that I shared because at least for now, those skills are the strong executive functioning skills that transfer across almost every leader in every company. Right. Time management, everybody needs to be better at. And most people have never been trained in handling conflict delegation, project management, running effective meetings, doing job interviews, one on one coaching meetings like those are the soft skills that every manager needs to become effective in. And the, the inverse of that is if you're an employee, you need to understand all these skills so you can lead up as well. Past, past that is, is to hire people that are more self driven learners. Right. Is to just change your recruiting. I even talk a little bit about that in, in the course as well.

I want to ask about leveling up especially like I know a lot of people here are CEOs. I am Operations manager. How do I get to like the next step level up to like a director level and then from a director level, say upwards, what I see is.

As a person moves up in terms of their title, it's their roles and responsibilities are becoming larger, their span of control in terms of people that they're leading and growing becomes larger and that the level of strategy or strategic ideas they're bringing to the company becomes bigger. So years ago to have a, to have a COO title or a CFO title or a CMO title or a CTO title, 20 years ago you had to be a major person in a major company to get a C level title. We've kind of had title inflation or deflation. I don't know what you would call it. Where now if you're in a 20 person company, you've got a COO, you're probably not really a COO, you're probably a director of operations or maybe a VP of operations with a title that's a lot bigger than you. But what's interesting, we did a survey with different titles and you'll see that as the titles increase, the compensation tends to increase. But it's usually because their roles and responsibilities are becoming more, their span of control is becoming more, and they're bringing more strategic thinking into the table. When I was the COO at 1-800-got junk. So I left there 16 years ago now, which is incredible. My salary back in 2007 when I left was $307,000, $310,000, that was in 2007. So that's probably more like 750 today or 600 today. That's a true COO. If you're making $120,000, you're probably more in the Director of Ops role. So the way you move up in the organization is ask for more responsibility. Go through things like the invest in your leaders course to grow your leadership skills and your functioning areas. Devour the books that your CEO is building so that you're on the same page. So if the CEO is reading Traction, read it. If they're reading scaling up, read it. If they're reading who Read it. If they're reading double, double, devour it, right? Try to get the same level of skills or so that you can build that commonality and understanding of what they're talking about and then really go to them constantly and just say, where can I get better? Give me feedback of where to continue and where to get better. Like any high powered athlete, you take the best in the world at golf. They still have a coach, right? They're still working on their mindset and their skill set. So don't look at coaching as a negative. I coach CEOs all the time. I coach the CEO and the second in command at Sprint, you know, they're the 82nd largest company in the US and I coached them for 18 months. Jamie Jones was, you know, a two and a half million dollar salary plus bonuses. And I coached him for 18 months because he was still trying to get better. So I think it's just that it's constantly trying to improve. We'll get you there.

But I also wanted to add to Adidas question what worked for me in the past when I was an operations manager for Sprint. The advice that was given to me from my direct report at the time, when I asked him, how do I get to your level and above that? His advice, and I've used it for years after that, was to learn the position that you report to and identify ways that are going to make your superior jobs easier, even if that means taking on additional responsibility. Because if at any given time where he needs to take a leave of absence or needs to rely on somebody to cover, you're going to be that guy. Right? And I continue to use that advice, from going to director to going to BP and now being a coo. So, Adidas, if anything, I can leave you with. I would identify your superior's job and what you can take on and what you can do to help his job or her job easier.

Yeah, I like that a lot. You're right. Because what you're trying to do is to actually free up their time so that they can move up in their role. So if you can keep taking stuff off their plates, it's often very hard, by the way, for the more entrepreneurial CEOs to delegate. You know, as an example, if we start a company, we've been doing all the jobs right. We did some of the bookkeeping early. We did sales, we did marketing, we did customer service. We did all the shit. Not very well, but we did it all. So it's hard for us to often give that stuff up. I remember when I was the COO at 1, 800, got junk, and I used to put out a weekly newsletter to all of our franchisees. And we only had, you know, between 12 and 20 franchisees when I was doing this. And it was all their numbers. I was kind of rating them against each other and showing them where they could improve and get better. And. And every week I would put out this newsletter and the. The dashboard. There were mistakes and it didn't look great. And it was. It was fine. It was way better than we ever had. But one of my employees one day said, do you mind if I do next week so that we don't keep rolling it out with mistakes? And I'm like, sure, go for it. His first one was so much better than what I used to do. It was Almost laughable. Like it was formatted better, it looked better, it was cleaner, there were no m. And I don't care if it took them two hours to do what maybe it took me a half hour to do, it was way better. So yeah, if you keep turning to your boss and asking them to take stuff off their plates, that really does help elevate them and, and thus us. It helps elevate you. You start making yourself indispensable in the organization too because they see you as the go to person to take more off their plates for you. It's also good for you to try to delegate more to people as well. Right. For any of us as leaders we have to delegate more things to more people. The question I always bump into is, or the comment is, well they're not good enough to do it but yeah, but your job is to coach them so that they are good enough to do it. That's why you go through the invest in your leaders and you get them to go through invest in your leaders is so you become better at coaching, you become better at delegation, you become better at project management, you become better at your one on one coaching meetings. If you can learn those skills, you can delegate more to people. Your job should be to look at everything on your to do list this week. Think about all the projects on your list and how many hours are each of the projects going to take. Add up the total hours and then delegate 80% of those hours. Before you start working on a single project every week you should delegate 80% of your stuff and then spend a huge chunk of your week growing the people's skills and confidence so they can do it better. So that over time you don't even have to delegate, it just becomes their stuff.

Yeah, thanks Cameron. I've got a thought. So I've bounced back and forth. I actually am usually the number one. I've been the number one and number two but I think I'm a better number one. And so I typically have hired chiefs of staffs and COOs and I've always bounced it back and it's always become a great debate with the board and you know, go all in on COO or. But really what I sometimes look for is a hybrid to do a little bit of admin but also a lot of operational day to day make sure stuff's getting done. I just curious your thoughts and philosophy on that.

Here's my thoughts around it. The first key hire that an entrepreneur needs to hire to get stuff off their plate is not a coo. It's an executive assistant, right? If you don't have an executive assistant, if you're on this call and you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. You need to get all of the stuff off your plate. That is a minimum wage job to a fractional person or a freelance person or overseas person or whatever. But you need to get enough stuff. My executive assistant, Meredith, who's been with me for seven years actually just hired her first ea. I've gotten her to now hire one because she's been getting paid enough. She's dealing with so much stuff that we've now got a woman in the Philippines doing stuff at six bucks an hour for her so that she can work on the higher level stuff for me and my companies. Right? Second thing is the second key person you need to hire is that project manager, right? The jack of all trades, master of none. Then you might be into a Director of OPS or the VP of ops. When you're truly hiring your first VP of OPS or coo, it's when you recognize that if you can have someone take the higher impact things off your plate that either drain you of energy or you're not great at, but there's still higher level things and there's in enough buckets that they can manage people, which allows you as the CEO to be strategic, allows you to be vision, allows you to focus on culture, allows you to build your virtual bench, allows you to have time to think so that you're not overwhelmed in the day to day. That's when you're hiring. Your first true second in command is someone who can free you up to be in that zone, right? So that you're only working in your areas of unique ability. So I talk about the unique ability and your zone of genius and delegating everything except genius and really having that true yin and yang partner. Harvard did an article years ago called the misunderstood role of the coo. And they did. I talk about that in the book the Second in Command. And it's different types of COOs in different companies and also different types of COOs at different stages of companies. I was the right COO for the first six and a half years of 1,800 got junk. I took them from 2 million to 106 million in six years. No debt, no outside shareholders, gave up no equity. But I would have been horrible to go from the 100 million to the billion. Their current COO who's been there for about nine years, he and I have known each other for 35 years. We started A fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada, in 1987. I was president year one. He was president year two, which is weird that he's now the COO, but he's been amazing to go from the 100 million to 450 million. But Eric would have been horrible in the first six years because he didn't know franchising. He wasn't entrepreneurial. He didn't actually, whereas I'd done it so many times before. So if I came in kind of as the MVP and as the. The mentor, Eric needs to be there more now as more of the executor and the partner. Right. So there can be a. It's like a relationship. It's either for a reason. A season or a lifetime. Sometimes you're the right COO for the season, and then the season changes. And in other cases, I've had people go, oh, I'd love you to be my coo. I'd be horrible as your coo. I don't match you or your company or your skill set. And you're great in all the areas that I happen to be great in. So there'd be conflict. Most of the COOs in the CO alliance and our average members like 40 to 50 million in size. Our biggest is about 1.2 billion. But most of our COO alliance members would be horrible. COOs at 1, 800 got junk. Right? As I would have been horrible in their company. So you have to find the right fit at the right place at the right time with the right CEO. And that's where that yin and yang magic really happens. Tough role to hire for you.

Made me giggle when you talked about if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. That was great because my question plays into cultural and leadership evolution. So in 2003, this firm was zero in revenue. Now we're 90 million. Most of that growth coming in the last five years. Many of the key leaders here only have worked here. And so convincing them that we need to evolve, because I think in five years, we'll be over 200 million in revenue. So what are some strategies to convince founders the need to evolve a company?

I like showing them privately over lunch, a few data points, and it's kind of like evolve or die, right? Or if the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. When leaders are saying, I've got 30 years experience, I come back to them and say, no, you have five years experience six times in a row, right? Because most of Them haven't kept growing their skills. They're just doing what they've always done. I spoke with a CEO recently and I said, how do you know how to do one on one coaching meetings? He said, I've been doing them for 10 years. I said, where did you learn them? He said, nowhere. I just started doing them. So I said, you could be doing them completely wrong for 10 years. And he goes, oh, I never even thought about it. Right. So the key is to give some skill base so that they know how to do it in a more effective way and then point out some data points. You know, Blockbuster used to be the biggest in the world as well. Where the hell are they now? Right. Barnes and Nobles or Borders don't even really exist now. And you could also take a 30 year old or a 25 year old, call it a 30 year old who has the technology skills to understand so many different ways to optimize or automate the business. And we could teach them the wisdom of leadership. And they'll kick the ass of any 50 year old who's a strong leader who's been doing it for 30 years. Right. The key is to actually be able to get the right people in the right seats. And that's a tough, a tough one to go after. But that's what I would try to show them is those things recommendations on how CEOs can best build their personal brand externally. Right. If you're new to an industry and come in as the coo, how to get your personal brand out there. Yeah. So one of the things that we're doing with our COO alliance members is we're getting them exposure. On our Second in Command podcast. We've had all of our or as many of our CO alliance members as we can over the last bunch of years become guests on the second Command podcast. That's one way. Another way is to do speaking events inside of industry events or customer centric events where you can actually become kind of a thought leader for the organization. That was something I recognized at 1-800-GOT junk was if I could actually be the thought leader COO and be on the stages speaking to the media, doing the speaking events, doing work with the press that would elevate my brand and that was more valuable for me than equity. It's why to this day no one can name any of the other. Sadly, none of the can name any of their five executives that built the company. But everyone knows my name related to the 1-800-got junk. So that would be what I would try to do with some of those.

And you talk a lot about freeing up time the COO to strategize and focus on the company culture, et cetera. But what do you do if you find that you as the coo are actually the one primarily handling these responsibilities and that it's not really necessarily an issue of client the coo, but perhaps rather a lack of experience?

So my belief is that the CEO should not be great at everything. And there should only be, you know, three or four things they're great at, and they should give up all the things that they're only average out or they suck at, and the CEO should embrace that. I remember when we were building Gerber Auto Collision, my CEO partner said he hated working with the investment bankers, hated working with legal, hated working with the public markets. I'm like, well, you don't have to do that. He goes, yeah, I'm CEO. I'm like, get our CFO to do it. He loves it. Like the CEO in some cases love engineering, in some cases they don't. Tobias luque. Most CEOs are outward facing, speaking to the media and marketing and pr. Tobias from Shopify almost never talks to the press. Harley Finkelstein, the coo, talks to the press. And Tobias focuses on the engineering and tech side of the business. So really focus on where you're great.