Strategic Second-in-Command: Fueling Business Growth

Most good COOs are already working for a good company. Most COOs are already working and growing a great business. So they're not on Craigslist, they're not on. Indeed, they're probably not on industry job boards. Great employees running great companies are not out looking for a job. You need to poach them, you need to find out where they are, and you need to entice them to come over to see your company.

I wanted to talk a little bit at some point about, you know, you, you have a storied history as an operator, as a chief operating officer, second in command, but also, of course, you're a CEO. You have your own companies and everything else like that. And I want to get into the nitty gritty of, of the evolution, like maybe even post Covid and now through AI, of what people need to be thinking about in that space. But I also want to wrap up one point I made about why I'm excited about you. So full transparency. My accountability pod and I, three years ago, we're like, all right, we need to put a vision exercise together for us. Like, what do we want to accomplish over the next three years? Foundationally used Vivid Vision for that. So over the last three years, you know, in my vision was quit my executive position, which I did with Progressive Insurance. I was an executive with them for 20 years, be able to live in another country for at least three months at a time, which I did right. Within, within a year or so, I did those things right. So it's incredible how much outlining your vision, going deep and having people around you that hold you to it works. And honestly, it's foundationally because of Vivid Vision that we did that. So I want to thank you first of all for the changes you made in my life. Appreciate you.

You're very welcome. I'll. I'll drop another link into the chat that we can share with everybody as well. This is the vivid vision that my wife and I wrote for our relationship together. And this is us thinking about. Hang on. Just click on this link and drop the link in. Now. This is us thinking about how do we want our relationship with food to be as a couple? How do we want our relationship with fitness? What are we doing in our social time? What are we doing for activities? How are we sexually? How are we growing as a couple? What are we spending our time with friends and family? And we ended up writing this five page document that described every single aspect of our life together. And then we merged all of our ideas together. Now we're sharing it with the world because we want everybody else that knows us to help us make it come true as well.

Look at this. This is very cool. Everwandertravel.com you know, it kind of goes.

Down to like, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there, right? So thinking about, you know, what's our business look like, what's our. As you did, what's your personal life look like? And then when the act of writing it down and getting a writer to help you craft it and polish it so that it really resonates. The next positive part though is really sharing it with the world. Like the more people we. Because it provides a little bit, you can't hide anymore. It's like, hey, you put this in writing, you said you wanted to move somewhere, where are you going? And the more people we share it with, they start asking you questions about it and checking in on it. And I've got a friend that literally said, hey, I saw in your vivid vision you love to do a lot of hiking. I see you're in Sedona. Can I fly up there and hang out with you for a few days? So a 20 year old friend of mine, we've been friends for 20 years, is arriving in Sedona tomorrow to spend three days up here hiking and hanging out with me because he knows I'd rather do that than go out to bars and drink.

Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. Now that is cool. I love it. The whole concept of vision. And we might, if we have time at the end, I might touch up on some thoughts I have on vision to have you check me maybe and just say, you know what? No, I don't. I don't so much agree with you. Or maybe you do so, but let's get into. I want to get the second in command concept. The book was great. You know, I've listened to you on a couple of podcasts talk about different concepts with this as well. And there's so many places that we can go. But let's start with this kind of foundationally a CEO. Well, I've heard you almost have to defend or explain how this is different than a very popular book and movement with traction. Right. And there's a fundamental difference. So in your book you're talking about second in command, two in the box, cooc, CEO. Right. Or essentially the second in command. And the CEO Traction though is talking about integrator and visionary integrator. So how are these two different things? How, like what is, what is your Book your, your teaching do that's different from Traction. If we can set that up, sure.

So Gino Wickman, when he wrote the book Traction, did an amazing job at creating what he calls the entrepreneurial operating system or eos. For usually small companies. I always kind of stay in the 5 to 50 employee range is really where Traction and the EOS model fits best. Then Gina Wickman and Mark Winters, his partner, wrote a book called Rocket Fuel, which is the kind of talking about the visionary integrator component. The integrator is that second in command in that smaller enterprise kind of model where I believe their, their model breaks down a little bit. And they did a spectacular job at finally explaining why entrepreneurs need a second in command. Right. Why we need that integrator that, that person to help us get stuff done. Thomas Edison said it best. Vision without execution is hallucination. So the entrepreneur is the visionary who's in charge of the execution. Well, that's really your integrator or your general manager, your director of operations, your VP of operations, your coo, whatever we call them, that's your second in command. One of the core areas where I think it breaks down in their definition of what that person does, they say that this, the, the integrator should be the tiebreaker. Meaning if you get seven of your people together, then integrator goes, nope, sorry, three say this, three say this, I say this, this is the way we're going. That fundamentally starts to break down as you start building a medium sized company and enterprise level company. When you're in the 50 employees to 5,000 employee range, you actually need a second in command who is a harmonizer, who can build consensus, who can get people to debate in big kind of debate and throw all the data points up and talk about the metrics, throw their ideas on and then they can get the team to work together in this forming, storming, norming, performing model so they can come out of the boardroom completely in agreement together. But you don't want somebody who says, nope, I'm calling it, I'm making the tie breaking decision. Because then everybody walks out of the room and three feel like they win and three feel like they lost. The real CEO needs to make all seven people feel like they finally understand all the points, they all agree together and they all walk out of the room with consensus after the good debate. And that's a very different skill set than usually happens in the smaller company where you need the tiebreaker. So go ahead. I'm sorry, no, that's it.

So in the Smaller big company, either one. You know, I've heard you talk a little bit about CEO of. If there's 25 companies, you might be able to be the CEO of two of them or the second in command of two of them.

Right.

It's not, it's not for everybody. And you talk about technical skill and this is maybe my bias and I'm yielding to you because I want to, I want to learn this from you. In my mind, if you embody, you know, the, the traits of being a great operator, somebody who, you know, doesn't get too up in the, up in the wispy air like I will on in my business, that can actually, you know, ground things and keep things on track or whatever. To me that's, that's transferable. And now there's got to be relational, there's gonna be a relationship, a good relationship between these people. As you talk about, it's like a marriage, right? But from a skill set perspective, you make the argument, I think, unless I'm misunderstanding it, that technical knowledge matters in some industries at least. Why, why does it and where does it?

I'll give you an example of in some industries. So years ago I was asked to coach a restaurant group in Arizona and they own the Postinos chain of restaurants. And I talked to their two founders and I said I can't, I can't come in and coach you. I don't know anything about the restaurant industry. And my feeling is that my experience around operations, execution, growth, culture, multi unit operations works great in other of industries. But I think you need a restaurant person to really help you scale a restaurant business. You know, if you're coming from the car industry, car industry IP is, is very necessary, right? You can't take somebody who's from the marketing world and have them build a car company. You can't take somebody from, you know, the telco and have them build a road building company. There's usually some if, if you're around engineering or any kind of technical ip, I think that's where you need someone from within the industry who has very strong operational depth. What's really weird though about the second in command role and the reason why I say that as an example, me, I was the COO for 1-800-got junk. I grew them from 2 million to 106 million in revenue in six years. I would be a horrible second in command for 95% of the members of our COO Alliance. I'd be a horrible COO for 95% of the members of GoBundance because I don't have any tie in into their industry or I'd be the wrong culture fit for that CEO. So what has to happen in the second in command role is you need to be the counterpart to the CEO. Everything the CEO is great at. You shouldn't want to work in every area the CEO sucks at should be your strengths. You should have a good enough balance of of behavioral traits and personality profiles. So there's a real and you need to be the right person for the season that you're in the size of growth. Because I was really good at 1,800 got junk from 2 million to 106 million. I was the wrong person to take them from 100 million to the billion. Their current COO, Eric Church, who I've known for 35 years, we started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada in 1987. I was president year one, he was president year two. He's now the CEO at Got Junk. He would have been a horrible COO at 1, 800 Got Junk in the first six years because he wasn't entrepreneurial. He was not the roll up the sleeves and get dirty and build and he didn't know how to build a franchise company. Now when it's at 100 million he's been amazing to grow it to 450 million. So he was the right culture fit for the size and the season of that company. He was the right culture fit to still work with the same CEO I was but he brought in a different set of skills for the size of the organization as well. So that's where this role is so hard to pick and why, why frankly so many companies miss on the first or second try because they're missing the.

Technical need or because they're missing the cultural need or both. I'm trying to delineate that a little bit. Like what I hear is you have to. The CEO has to execute the. I mean you've said it. If you the culture in the book, it really makes a great point about it. Like they have to execute the culture. And in my mind at least that's still very transferable. So where's mistake?

It's, it's, it depends. That's. That's what's hard.

Yeah.

Earlier size company you need someone who has the technical and the kind of behavioral traits and the match as the company scales. You often still need that technical strength. You know, if you're going to come in as the second in command for a law firm. Yeah, you probably want to understand law and understand how law firms Operate makes sense. It's hard. But if you're the head of a consumer packaged goods industry and you're selling natural food or you're going to go out and sell dog food or you're going to go out and sell, you know, crackers, that's fairly transferable. If you're in consumer packaged goods, you're consumer. Do you follow?

Yeah.

You know, if you're in the vehicle sector, you can probably move from cars to trucks, but you probably can't move from cars to planes.

Makes sense. Right, I get that. Yeah. The reason I ask is this because you said it a moment ago, like in the gobundance world, a lot of the people I work with, guys that have built companies that might be, you know, 50 plus employees at this point. The, the whole traction thing, like I need my integrator. It's, it's almost like a phraseology. Like I think you've been, there's a guy, do you know Matt King? Are you familiar with David Osborne's right hand guy?

I know David very well. No, I didn't know Matt.

So Matt is like you, you used to be said I need a Cameron. It used to be said about you, I need a Cameron. Everybody in abundance knows Matt is the. I need a Matt. Right? I need a Matt King. I need a Matt King. So everybody wants that, they want the integrator and that's what I'm wondering. Like so what's the guidance on find and let's start with layer one. Is it necessarily a COO or is it potentially something less than that if I may. But like so what is the integrator? What's the, what should people be thinking about when they think about an integrator? Should they just be thinking, oh no, you need a COO every time.

Great question. Two really good questions there, wrapped in one. So the first one is what's the title that we give this second in command? And that's why I've been called my book the Second in Command because it can have very different titles. Right. No one is walking around with the term integrator on their business card. No one's really walking around with the title second in command on their business card. Right. They have a title. So the title tends to be Director of Operations, General Manager, Vice President, Operations Executive, vp, Chief Operating Officer or COO or President. But that tends to be the second in command title to the entrepreneur or the CEO. The title that you give someone should be based on their roles and responsibilities, the level of strategic insight that they bring into the operation and the amount of compensation that you're willing to pay them. So as an example, I had an email this morning from an entrepreneur whose title is CEO. And I knew for sure that she runs a smaller company because I know her and I know her business. And she sent me an email and she said, I need a killer COO to help me grow the company. They need to be amazing. And I emailed her back knowing exactly what her answer was going to be. And I said, what's the compensation for the role of this killer COO? She said, 90 to 120,000. So I responded and I kind of laughed and I said, my executive assistant is going to make 90,000 this year. You're talking about hiring a director of operations, not a killer coo. So be careful with giving out these huge titles because A no good COO is going to want to work for 90 to 120. No good COO is going to want to come in and really roll up their sleeves and run a company that's that small. And if you hire someone with a big title, they have nothing to chase, they have nothing to really work towards. And they're going to go on indeed and Glassdoor and Google and see what a chief operating officer should get paid. And they're going to say, why am I not being paid 300,000? And you're going to start feeling guilty and try to pay them more when really you should be paying them based on what they're doing. So there's a whole. That's something to really consider and be careful with. So that's question one. Question two is, you know, what are you really looking for when you're hiring the second in command? It's really about doing an inventory of yourself as the entrepreneur of the CEO. What areas of the business do you really love working in? What areas of the business drain you of energy? And do you suck at. And separate those two buckets? Okay. What areas of the business are you really, really good at? Right. And then, and then what are all the things that are bogging you down and taking up your time and make some buckets there? The first thing you want to ask yourself is, do you have an executive assistant? Right. If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. So you need to at least get all of the admin off your plate, all the $10 an hour, $20 an hour tasks. And don't delegate those to a $200,000 vice president of operations. Delegate those to an executive assistant first. Well, if you're left with a whole bunch of stuff that drain you and you're not good at and are beneath your effective hourly rate, you're going to delegate those to a second in command based on what you're giving them. What would those buckets look like? And that starts to describe what you're looking for. So as an example, you know, you're married.

I am.

You know, let's say that you and I were getting separated from our spouses, which we're not. If I meet your wife and I said, hey, you've been a wife, you could be my wife. That's ridiculous. I have no idea. I don't know what she's like. I don't know, like, I love cooking. Maybe she loves cooking. Is that going to be an argument? Or maybe like, you know, like I don't know anything about her temperament or her behavioral traits or what she likes to do for fun. Just because she's a wife doesn't mean she'd be qualified as my wife. So in deciding what we're looking for, it's really describing ourselves first. If I can describe me, I can describe someone who would want to hang out with me, someone who would want to work with me. If I can describe all the areas of the business that I want to hold on to, then I'm going to find a COO that really doesn't want those areas. So as an example, I did not have IT and finance reporting to me because frankly, IT and finance are not my strengths. They overwhelm me. The details confuse the shit out of me and it's kind of like fingers on a chalkboard to me. But 75% of our COO alliance members have IT and finance reporting to them. In other companies, the CEO is a very outward facing business development spokesperson. Like a David Osborne. Right? Very outward facing biz dev, sales, marketing. Amazing human, kind of a gregarious leader. That kind of a leader. Well, his COO is probably more inward facing, right? Operations, execution. Doesn't need to be on the stage or have the spotlight. Well, if you look at the CEO of Shopify, Tobias Luque is a very inward facing CEO product IT finance, the public markets. Their second in command, Harley Finkelstein is sales biz dev, marketing pr, very outward facing coo. So it's a. There's not really an exact description of what it is other than it's your yin and yang. It's the balance to everything that you are. That's how you know what you're looking for is to know who you are first.

As an aside What's. What is Elon. He feels like he's all of that. Is he an anomaly?

Well, Elon is. Elon's not actually operations. Elon's very, very good at. And I've known Elon since 1995. I was a reference for Elon and his brother Kimball in their first round of funding for Zip2 because Kimbal must used to work for me. They had one employee at Zip2 and I was a reference for them with their funding round. So Elon's very, very good at kind of doing seagull management in the right way. Like swooping in, flying over an area not completely all over everybody, but. But very Steve Jobs in a way. Like he just notices all the stuff. It drives him crazy. He tells people to get it all fixed and then he swoops in somewhere else.

Yeah.

So he. But he doesn't want to sit in the details unless it's the really deep details around like a massive engineering kind of a problem where he can let his computer brain run. But in terms of managing and running the day to day with zip two, that was Kimball Musk. They, in fact, Kleiner Perkins did not want to back Elon because he'd never done anything. He was way out of the box visionary. Trying to build a mapping company on the Internet in 1995, before people had email addresses. So they backed them based on Kimbal Musk's College Pro Painters experience at having run a College Pro franchise. Because Kimball had done sales and marketing and operations and finance and running people and had had built a business with 12 employees, they decided to back them on that instead of they asked for $600,000 and they were given 3 million in funding that night.

Wow. That's the connection. You were a franchiser for them, right? For College Pro.

That's right. I was a franchisee for three years in Sudbury, Canada and then I worked on the franchisor side for four years where I had to recruit, hire and train franchisees.

Crazy. The connections there you talked about. We talked about. We were bantering about AI at the beginning of this and I. I've heard you talk about maybe in the book, maybe on a podcast, the inverted org chart. Right. The two in the box are at the bottom and sort of, you know, servant leadership is the best summary I could give it. Like, you know, you're the. The top of the org chart is really the people that you're pouring into, you know, and all of that. Is that, is that a. That, I mean, AI aside, is that a new reality that companies have failed to come along with, especially post Covid, because it just feels to me like post Covid, vivid visions are important for organizations to have so that those that are going to work for them are understanding of what they're getting into, like what they're enrolling themselves into. Right. But I feel, and again, you're in this way more than I am. I feel that your inverted org chart speaks to this point. That I believe, which is, I think it's more important today that organizations understand the vivid vision of their people. Not within the organization even, but just generally, what do they want to accomplish and really be enrolled in that first such that they become enrolled in the organization's vivid vision. Is that true?

Yes, very true. And I'll expand on that. Not just do I need to understand the vivid visions of what my employees want to do, I need to understand them as human beings.

Right, right, right. Not within the company. Right. Like just generally.

Exactly. As. As humans. What. How do they want to reconnect with their parents? How do they want to be as a spouse? How do they want to be as a person? How can I help them with all of the things in their life? How do I help them cross off items on their bucket list without ever attaching those to the company? If I can become like a mentor and a friend and a supporter and. And growing their confidence in the skills as a person, they're going to care about me running a company because no one's ever cared. No one's ever cared for them like that before. So it is a bit of that servant leadership. And I don't know where I ever came up with this idea of the upside down org chart, but I just decided to flip it one day and say that the CEO should be at the bottom, supporting the VPs who are supporting the frontline employees who are supporting the customers. Like that inverted pyramid. And then the vivid vision would be above the bottom of the upside down pyramid so everyone can see where we're going. The customers, suppliers, employees. And then the inside, you build the pyramid, the two walls. The left wall is your core values and the right wall is your cor. You build the company inside your core purpose and your core values.

I love it. Yeah. Are you. Do you feel like you with your company or your organization or do you know of other companies through the COO alliance or other connections you have that have really nailed that concept of understanding the vision of the human?

Yeah. Matthew Kelly wrote a book years ago called the Dream Manager, and he's done a really, really good job with getting people to understand the idea of caring about your employees dreams and goals and personal lives. I, I do it with a number of my employees in a bunch of different ways. Right now I've got one employee who's struggling in a relationship and I'm covering some of his counseling. I've got another guy who is really struggling wanting to get into fitness and I'm paying for some of his personal training. I had a, an employee of mine years ago whose car broke down and I cut him a check that day and sent him a deposit and told him to go to a car dealer and I sent him a couple of links for minivans because he had like three kids under five years old and his wife is driving a car with the car breaking down. I'm like, it's not okay.

Yeah.

So. But when you do those things, the employees go through brick walls for you. Because like no one cared for me like that. My parents didn't, my friends didn't. You know, everyone's so busy. And then when I asked them to jump, they're already jumping. You know, when I asked them right, like, right. I asked them to work harder. They're like, yeah, let's do this. Like they're. Because, because I care.

Is it easier to hire? Like there's all this talk about not being able to hire like my old company. I hear from past co workers, you know, in, in executive positions like man, finding talent. Finding talent. And my, my indictment, if you will, has been yeah, because you're trying. It's a bunch of Old World 50 year old managers saying this is our vision, get on board, work hard or whatever without understanding the human. So my theory has been if somebody's figured out how to, how to prioritize the human, it actually becomes there's labor out there. You can find it if you're doing it the right way. Is that true though? Are you seeing that?

Yeah, it's, it's. I would say that as a smaller company, like less than 10 employees, that kind of a caring leader does not make it easier to hire. Because no one knows except for the few people that are working for you.

Yep.

So as you scale, you know, when you go from. And it's the tens, the ones and the threes. When you go from 1 to 3, from 3 to 10, from 10 to 30. So when you're at about 30 employees, it starts to really help you attract more people because you can get 10 or 20 of your current 30 employees to leave an indeed review and a glass door review about how Great you are. You can get some local media coverage about what a great employer you can are employer you are. You can get some of your current employees to get some videos that you can put on your website about what a great place to work it is. And you can be start becoming a bit of a culture magnet. When you go from 30 to 100 employees. You can stack the reviews. You know, you can get 75, 80, 90 great reviews on indeed and Glassdoor and tons of videos and YouTube videos about how great of an employer you are. And you can get the media to work in your favor and win contests. And then it becomes you're like a magnet for talent. Then it's when, when we were building one, 800 got junk. I think it was 2004 we ranked as the number two company. No, sorry, number one company to work for in British Columbia.

Yeah.

2005 again, number one to work for in British Columbia in 2006, the number two company in all of Canada to work for that same year. The other two great companies to work for in British Columbia with Lululemon and Vancouver Olympics, those were. We were the only three companies that anyone wanted to work for in the city. Well, Lululemon was a cult. Vancouver Olympics was throwing money at people because they had four year job until the 2010 Olympics. And then we were a garbage company. But it's because our culture, we were a little more than a business, a little bit less than a religion. That cult kind of permeated and that's because we obsessed about people. So yeah, it becomes a almost an unfair advantage as you get bigger and the results are.

I mean I think you were number one in the North America number one call center in North America when you were at 1, 800 jump.

Correct? We were. In 2004, we won the number one call center of the year in North America. Beat out every other call center. And then we also in 2006 were the number one franchisor in the world from the International Franchise association based on our franchisees net promoter score, we had a positive 98% franchisee net promoter score.

Wow. You. You talked about cheat codes, I think you called it or cheat sheets or whatever. Oh, actually before we get there, I wrote this down. Can you explain tens and threes? What did you mean by that? I don't think I've heard that before.

So I don't know where this concept came to me either. But as a company grows it everything, there's an inflection point every time you get to a one and a three, whether it's when you're one employee, right, just you and you hire a couple people. Hey, now there's three of us and I can delegate some stuff and we can get some stuff done. When you get to 10 people, you usually have one person who's now managing a bunch of people for you. So now you have to get results through someone. You can't actually leverage everybody. You're not really sure what people are working on. When you get to 30 employees, you have a management team, probably five or six people that are managing everyone, and you're managing the five or six people only. When you go from 30 to 100 employees, you have your first leadership team. Like truly seasoned people that have built companies before and they're more strategic. When you go from 100 to 300, your leadership team elevates. So they can actually run a corporation. They can manage the P and L, they understand balance sheets and ratios and metrics and numbers. And you at the CEO can now elevate yourself into strategy and vision and culture, maybe even doing acquisitions and growth in different ways. On the revenue side, it's the same way from 100,000 to 300,000 to a million to 3 million to 10 million to 30. The inflection points are the same. When you're at 300,000, you can afford to hire a couple people. When you're at a million, you can afford to hire some people, but not two hundred thousand dollar people, but maybe a couple hundred thousand dollar managers. At 3 million, you can probably hire your first real solid person, right? At 10 million, you can afford to hire, you can buy some talent. You know what's happening in the Bay Area right now. It's funny that 50 years ago the government was all concerned about predatory pricing. You know, the big bad company that would come in and buy up the industry by pricing at such a low level that no one could compete. And there's laws against predatory pricing, but they've never put laws in place around predatory hiring. And what's happening with all the public companies right now, the Googles, the Facebooks, the ebay's, the stocks, whatever, they're all using all this public money and VC money to overpay to buy up all the talent. So the reason that engineers are making 350,000 is not that they're worth it, it's all these tech companies are saying, fuck it, give them 350, let's give them four, I don't care, it doesn't matter. Because they can buy up all this talent for more than they're really worth so they don't have to spend forever trying to recruit. Unfortunately, the small business person that can't afford it has to be really scrappy and innovative to try to get to the 10 million mark where they can start to compete on the war on talent.

Interesting. Have you seen a company that has a compelling and solid vivid vision and the right two in the box, not scale to ones and threes. Have you seen companies fail that do that? Go through the motions of. I mean really two key lessons of your six books, right? Like vivid vision, two in the box. The right two in the box. Have you seen, have you seen companies that have done it right but still couldn't scale or failed?

I've seen a couple where the leader was culturally not really aligned. So there was some, you know, ego is the enemy. Ryan Holiday's kind of stuff where ego got in the way. I've seen some stuff where, you know, the industry goes through a massive transformation or massive. I'll give give a great example. And thankfully they turned this company around. But two years ago, two and a half years ago, when Covid hit, my sister had 75 employees. She was doing a million dollars a month in revenue. She was 20 years running her business, but she ran co ed intramural sports leagues for people in their 20s and 30s. She had 180,000 people playing in her sports leagues. And then when Covid hit, she wasn't allowed to operate at all. Well, you can't tell. 180,000 people playing volleyball and soccer and ultimate Frisbee and baseball and you know, ultimate whatever to play on. Zoom. How does that work? So she literally went to three employees overnight. So there's a company that she almost failed, but she was able to turn it around, built an online business doing games now called Workplace Jam, running fun social events online for people. And when Covid came back around, she was able to really leverage it back and she's back up and running again. But that's somewhere where amazing vivid vision, amazing two in a box. Rob Davies, her CEO, has been her CEO for 18 years. He's a member of the CEO Alliance. They could have failed, but their culture was so strong, their systems were so strong, they managed the company in such a strong way that they didn't operate with a lot of debt. They operate like they operated in a smart way. So when literally the black swan event hit, they were able to figure it out because they weren't massively leveraged, they weren't all in. Right. They weren't operating in an irresponsible way. But yes, I've seen it. But it's usually because of those two things. Either the entrepreneur gets in the way of themselves or it's a black swan event. That's, you know.

Yeah, that just happens, Right. Environmental factors happen. Back to the cheat sheets real quick. It's funny you mentioned systems as well. And the question is, is really this. So you know, you talked about, you know, high school and I mean, this resonates with me. Like study an hour or two before, cram it in and get it done. Get by. Right. 2.4 GPA, whatever. Like, man, that's my language. Like I didn't have the confidence to understand back then that there's a diminishing ROI on shit I don't care about. Like, I don't give a shit about Machiavellian history or whatever. So I'm not going to spend hours and hours getting the grade you think I should get. I'm going to cram it in, get over it, and then I'm going to move on because I'm never going to touch this shit again. Right. So you talked about that, that concept of understanding the cheat sheets and even how systems are written. I think you said like on post it notes, right. Like you just, you kind of go, you're a DI disc, you kind of go. Right. So is that serving you because you're a CEO and you've been a coo, Is that, is that style? Is that way of being. I think that resonates a lot of people that probably listen to this pod. Is that serving you as a CEO like you know, fast going back of the napkin processes, you know, just get by whatever, or is that serving you as a coo?

Both.

I'm just kind of curious how that shows up.

Both until you get to around the hundred million mark when you need to be able to slow it down, be more cross, functional.

As both. As both. As COO and C O.

As both. Yeah. As both. See, when, when you're in a smaller entrepreneurial organization, small to medium sized companies, momentum creates momentum.

Yeah.

Perfection doesn't scale. By the time you've perfected it, all three other competitors have swooped in and eaten your lunch. You need to. You can't afford perfection. So, you know, unless you have like a VC writing your checks every day, you can't afford to build the perfect everything. It's minimum viable everything, not just minimal viable product. It's like get it done and get it out the door and then we'll grow as we go. So in the Entrepreneurial, small to medium enterprise. Yeah. That momentum, you know, the cheat sheets, the. The quick and dirty. By the way, you said that I'm a high DI. I'm in 98D and a 74I and disk in my. My Colby profile is 4393. Like, I'm literally. I'm a perpetual motion machine. Sure.

So.

But that's really good in that entrepreneurial startup stage until you have this strategic team of leaders that needs us to be more thoughtful, where you make a decision and the impact is too big. You know, you. You can't. We almost bankrupted 1-800-got junk around the 100 million mark because Brian and I were both too entrepreneurial, and we were making it up as we go, and we didn't understand how to leverage the balance sheet. And one day we went to the bank because we just spent $5 million of our own cash on an office. Renault A move, bonuses, taxes. We literally drained out 5 million bucks. Thinking we were smart, we went to the bank to get a credit line. They said, well, we can't loan to you. We're like, why not? We've been profitable for six years. Number two in Canada. Look at our growth. Never had any. And they're like, yeah, but you don't have any cash. We're like, I know. That's why we're talking to you. He had to go out and borrow $420,000 from his mom to meet payroll that week.

Wow.

Then we fired 25 people. Then we called vendors and said, we're not paying them for three months. I had vendors screaming at me over the phone. I'm like, you keep yelling. I'm not even putting your name into the lottery to see if I pay you 25%. We're going to pay them 25% of their bill. Like, because we didn't understand. So that entrepreneurial breaks down at a certain stage, but it's critical in the early stage.

But you're saying it's like you said 100 million, so you could be a psycho to 100 million, essentially. Right. Like is what I mean. I'm not saying it's like it turns off at 97 million, it's okay, and then at 100 it's not. But, like, it's that much Runway. It's not 3, 4, 5 million.

It's in the.

In the eight figures.

Yeah, it's. It's in. It's in the 50 to 85,000 range that you can actually be that. That entrepreneurial psycho for sure.

Wow. What's IDEAL Is it 50 or is it like, you know, right out of the gate? Or do you need that entrepreneurial spirit, do you think, for a startup to really even get into the 10, 20, 30, 50 million?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I don't think anyone who's listening could give us five names of entrepreneurs who started companies that weren't manic, weren't add, and weren't perpetual motion machines. With that, you know, momentum versus, like, every single company started with minimum viable product. There's not a single company out there where they perfected it. All right? Whether it's Uber. I sat with Garrett Camp at Burning man in the summer of 2008, and he was explaining Uber to us two years before he launched the app, six months before he hired Travis to come and work for him. It was very minimum viable product. Right. When Elon started Zip2, they were sleeping at the YMCA or sleeping in their office and showering at the YMCA next door. They. They didn't have it all figured out, but they didn't need to have it all figured out. You know, 1-800-got junk. Brian would literally knock on doors in Vancouver asking them if they had junk, and they'd say no. And he goes, but I saw this in your backyard. Like, he would literally look over fences to see what junk people had. Then he'd pitch them at the front door.

That's crazy.

Now, that system doesn't scale, right? You can't get 330 franchisees peeking over people's backyards, but it allows you to get started, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's. What's going through my mind is that, that's the. I talk to a lot of people about man. You know, I, I love to. To explore entrepreneurship, but I make 250 a year. Two kids, wife, husband, whatever it might be, and, you know, to step out and they. What's that? I'm sorry.

It's a hard leap.

It is, it is. And. And a lot of it is. I think there's a perception that there's got to be perfection or that it's figured out or that you've got, you know, like, I would think, like, I'm not organized enough to be an entrepreneur.

Right.

I'm just, I'm too all over the place.

I think when people really do study entrepreneurs and they study their first year of every entrepreneur, it will give you the confidence that most people could. Or a lot of people could do it. Yeah, the. A lot of people don't have the entrepreneurial DNA. The skills can be learned. It's The DNA that most people have. I think back to College Pro Painters. You know where I mentioned kind of as my almost complete the golden thread. The founder of College Pro Painters, when He started in 1971, his first three estimates, one was a small house, the whole exterior. One was a bedroom inside of a house, and one was a small factory. And he didn't know what to charge, so he charged a thousand dollars for all three of them. He didn't land the factory, thankfully, because he would have gone bankrupt. He did not land the bedroom. He wishes he did because he would have been rolling in cash. But he landed the small outside of the house for a thousand dollars, which today would have been about $3,000. That was a good size amount of money for a company house back in 1971, probably more than that. And he was able to figure it out by painting the house and time and motion studies and learning. But he didn't know what to charge. He was in the library the night before reading books in the library about how people would quote paint jobs. And that's how he decided to go out and start. But if he had to have the perfect system, the summer would have been over by the time he was able to start.

Makes sense. The one thing I wanted to ask you about as we kind of, we're starting to wind down, so I want to make sure I get this question in. So what I, what I've heard from you and have read about, about everything that you talked about, which I think is really insightful, is second in command. COO is not mutually exclusive, right? Define what you need. Might be an EA right now, right? Define what you need and go hire that VP of operations, director of operations. Maybe it is a full on coo. Whatever it might be, it still I think leaves one question for those that are saying, okay, I get it, but I need my integrator. I don't know where to find these people. Like where are they? So how do what? I don't know if there's a, a tip, a tactic, a trick, an idea, suggestions on where do people look for that next second in command, whatever level it might be.

You know, it's, it's that old, that old kind of joke that women used to make. And I don't know if it's is that, you know, every good man is either taken or gay, right? Well, most good COOs are already working for a good company. Yeah, most COOs are already working and growing a great business. So they're not on Craigslist. They're not on. Indeed they're probably not on industry job boards. Great employees running great companies are not out looking for a job. You need to poach them, you need to find out where they are and you need to entice them to come over to see your company. Which means a good vivid vision that describes your business in the future, a great website that shows a great company culture. Really good indeed, and glassdoor reviews. So when you start enticing them, they see good reviews, good media coverage about you, good awards that you're winning, and then you can probably entice them. But another way to entice them is to use a great executive search firm to go out and make the calls for you to bring those qualified candidates in to meet with you and then just make sure that your office space or your physical environment via Zoom, etc. Is enticing to bring them in. The best people are not looking for jobs.

No, it makes perfect sense. On the concept of vision this is what I wanted to ask you to check me on. And it's funny, I. I read the book a while ago so maybe, maybe I'm poaching it right from the book. I don't even know it, but I've always, I've been, I've formed the opinion that there's three elements to a really effective vision and I want to see what you think as I share these. Agree, disagree. So the first is that it has to be written kind of for you. If it's a personal vision, you know it's got to be written for you and you only not including like your spouse and your kids are crushing it and all this stuff. It's like no, no, you don't know if they're going to crush it. That's up to them. That's their vision. What's your vision? That's one of the three. The second I always say is that it's way written as it's already happened. So you know we're in February of 23 and it's a three year vision. You got to write it like you're sitting in February 2026 future stated if you will. And the third, the third thing that I always, I always say is it's got to eliminate. You have to eliminate some of the how like the path there you want to have goals for but the outcome is what you're. You're aiming at. This is what we're going to. It's going to look like like the how you got to leave it open to change. Where am I wrong or am I.

Wrong no, you're bang on. The best example of eliminating the how is this. If we were a homeowner and we were going to build it, we wanted a home to be built for us or we wanted our kitchen to be renovated. We're going to describe what the kitchen looks like in its finished state. We're going to describe what the home looks like when it's built. We might have pictures and drawings that we give to a contractor. The contractor will understand our vision enough that they can create the blueprints or the plans to make our vision come true. Then they can hand the vision and the blueprints to the employees, and the employees can recreate our dream. When we're describing what we want our kitchen to look like, our home to look like, we're not explaining how to put in the plumbing and how to put in the electrical. I don't care how they hang the cabinets, as long as they look like this. Right. I don't care how they put the floor in, as long as it looks like that. Well, in our company, it's the same thing. The CEO shouldn't be worried about how it comes true so much as making sure that everyone, our customers, suppliers, employees, potential employees, potential customers. If everyone can see the future of our company three years in the future, they can start to figure out how to make parts of that come true. Our job as the CEO is to make sure that they build it in the right order. Put in the foundational building blocks first. Right. I don't want to, I don't want to hang my cabinets and put in the wolf stove on day one and then six weeks later start putting in the walls. Right. You kind of build the foundation, you put up the walls, you put in the electrical and the plumbing, you put in the draw. You kind of build it in that right order of operations. The company should be built the same way.

Amazing. That's a great, great way to describe it. And thanks for that. I was, I was curious. I'm like, I got the vision guy on. I got to run these by him and see what he says. So let's talk. It's out now. Second in command. Yeah, whatever you want to plug here to make sure people get their hands on it. Because it's excellent.

Thank you. Yeah. This, this book is really written for entrepreneurial and mid sized companies. So it's really the companies that are in kind of the million to 250 million stage that are really looking to bring on either their first or their second, third, second in command. Right. You might be going into your next round of a COO. Like when I left 1-800-got junk and they brought in Eric. What are you looking for in your your next coo? So it talks about how to recruit them or first talk about what are you looking for. Right. How do you identify what you're looking for? How do you then recruit those people in? How do you interview those people once you've got them joining you? How do you onboard them? Because there's a whole process in order of operations to onboard six people successfully. And then how do you build that amazing relationship with them so that you build that true yin and yang or that two in a box model with them as well? And then I also even talk at the end is when the party's over. How do you know when it's time to get that next COO for that next stage of growth? You know when you've really gone from the 100 million to 300 million, how do you get somebody to take you to the billion or, or what have you?

Yeah, that really resonated with me. So, yeah, I'm available on Amazon. Any websites you want to direct folks to. Where can people follow you or learn more about what you're doing?

Yeah, definitely. Take a look at the COO alliance for sure. Something we never talked about was the course that I led. It's called invest in your leaders. But if they go to invest in your leaders dot com, those are the core 12 leadership skills that everyone needs to be good at to build up any size company. And then all of my books are available on Amazon, Audible and itunes. And then also check out our podcast, the second command podcast. People are really devouring that content.

I love that. Invest in your leaders. Same target audience, kind of that 2 million to $250 million entrepreneur.

Exactly. Yeah. Once your company gets to around 250 million, you probably have a learning development department. You've got an HR department that's running personal development development plans and you probably have internal training programs. When you're in the 2 million to 200 million dollar phase, you don't have that. And this is an easy way to grow your people. And again, my belief is the more we grow our people's skills and their confidence, the more they can then grow our company.

Incredible. Thank you so much for doing this, Cameron. It's been a true, true pleasure. You're somebody I followed for a long time and your work is honestly very impactful for me. So I appreciate you being here, brother.

Thanks, Jamie. Appreciate it. So keep going. There's another video for you right here. Filled with insights, so click and keep growing.