Cameron Herold says most CEOs hire a COO too fast. Start by listing everything on your plate, then ask your team for three strengths, three weaknesses, three opportunities, and three threats about you. Delegate the admin work to an EA or AI first. Only hire a COO if real operational work is left.
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The CEO wants to get a bunch of stuff off their plate, but a bunch of that stuff is really admin work because at the end of the day, the CEO is just frustrated with all of the stuff that's on their plate and they don't do an activity inventory and analyze the cost of all of those things on an effective hourly rate basis. In many cases, women call on their intuition and personal relationships and they somehow discount intuition. In the business world, men really don't call on their intuition anywhere near enough. We have a human computer inside us that tells us to things. So I think if we were slowing down and listening to our intuition, those are really good data points. So if you feel as an entrepreneur like you're not doing enough around strategy, you're probably not. If you feel like you're missing opportunities, you probably are. If you feel like you're working on all these areas of the business that you suck at, it's probably, probably true. If you listen to your team and some of the frustrations they have, they're probably right. If you gave every member of your management team five minutes instead, I want you to write down three strengths, three weaknesses, three opportunities, and three threats facing the business related to me as the CEO. What are my three strengths? What are my three weaknesses? What are my three opportunities? What are my three threats as the CEO? And you take the common comments that they give you. Those are really good data points that often show you that, yeah, hiring a second in command now is probably the right time. But before you do that, at least make sure that you have an executive assistant. I've seen this one happen often that the CEO wants to get a bunch of stuff off their plate. But a bunch of that stuff is really admin work. It's the $15 an hour work that an EA could do for you. You don't want to hire a coo to do $15 an hour tasks. So if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. Let that one burn in for a second. But I'll get a bunch of this stuff off your plate and get an EA to do that stuff first. The second hire is your second command and it might be a Director of Operations or a VP of Operations or a coo. But really start by getting the admin off your plate first. And I guarantee that almost everybody listening has that as an opportunity today. Because at the end of the day, the CEO is just frustrated with all of the stuff that's on their plate and they don't do an activity inventory and analyze the cost of all of those things on an effective hourly rate basis, I'll give an example. In our home, right? At our home, we have to do laundry, we have to do cleaning, we have to make food, we have to go shopping, we have to fill the car up with gas, we have to do landscaping and cut the grass and paint the house and fix the electrical and fix appliances when they break down. Well, all of those things have an effective hourly rate. The amount of money that I'm going to pay a gardener is probably different from the amount of money I'm going to pay for someone to clean toilets and scrub floors, right? There's minimum wage work, there's work that is lower paid. Then there's more work that is like paying, paying someone to paint my home. I'm clearly going to pay them a lot more than I would pay a person to cut the grass. Right. There's a skill in painting my home. So you kind of climb up that ladder. Well, very similar in the workforce, the stuff that you're delegating to an executive assistant, at some point when the pay grade becomes high enough, you could probably give that to a more operationally minded person or somebody who has the skill. But if stuff doesn't take a lot of skill, then it can actually be delegated to an ea or we can actually even start to leverage AI and automate some of those workflows to make sure that we can get it out of the person's hands and that a computer can do that for us. If the CEO sits down and there's 30 things that they want to get done this year and they recognized there's just no way we're going to get 25 of those done. But if we got a bunch of those done, our revenue would grow, our margins would grow, our employees would be happier, our customers would be happier. That those kind of roadblocks and you realize that you're the block, that's a big red flag. That's a huge red flag.
