The Insider's Guide to Finding and Keeping Top Talent (Q&A)

Now people show up and they're like, oh, I don't want to tell you I'm bad at something because I'm going to get in trouble. No, I want to know what you're bad at because somebody else is probably really good at it. Often the CEO doesn't have to replace themselves because you can delegate everything except genius. So instead of replacing yourself, you get to get more stuff off your plate. So it's about you every six months doing an activity inventory and looking to get the stuff off your plate that you're incompetent, competent and just keeping this stuff, your excellent, unique ability foreign. It's very rare that you'll find a COO inside of your current company because if they were already that qualified, they were probably already going to be running it. So it's hard to often promote from within unless you're a very early stage company. If you have a big social media profile and you write a killer job posting, you can often find a great person from leveraging social media, which was, it didn't exist when we were building one, 800 got junk. I left I had the first Facebook account at 100 got junk in May of 2007. Now if you write a killer job posting, put some good social posts out, leverage your profile, tag people, you can often get some traction to find somebody. But I think you're better to use an executive search firm to help you poach senior talent. So the titles again are based on those four or five things. The level, the strategic insight they've got, the amount of autonomy they have, like whether you need to manage them or they can manage themselves, the amount of P and L responsibility they've got, are they able to bring people in from the outside? And then just looking at the actual roles and responsibilities and what you're willing to pay for that. So it's always a bit of a kind of a silly wild ass guess, right? It's a swag. In the last chapter of my first book, Double Double, I wrote about 60 letters to my younger self. So these were all the business lessons that I wish I'd known at a younger age. When you hire people, God gave you two ears and one mouth and your job is to listen twice as often as you talk. And we had a very senior person ahead of finance who'd been with us from the day that I got there, who, when we were at about 60 million, started saying, are you sure we're not going too quickly? I'm worried we're going too fast. Are you sure this is the best use of cash and. But he's saying it much quieter than that. He was an Indonesian. He was very soft spoken. He was very amiable, very quiet, really smart in finance. And Brian and I were just like, no, we got it. And we're just like, boom. Like on my disc profile, I'm a 98. I, I'm like, I'm going too fast for somebody who's that quiet where my mistake was if I'm not going to listen to him, I need to hire someone I'm willing to listen to. And I wish I'd listen to him. I wish I'd worked harder at listening to him. Because we missed opportunities and we almost bankrupted the company at 100 million. Brian had to go out and borrow $420 million to meet payroll the next week from his mom because the bank wouldn't finance us. We had 5 million in cash in the bank three months before. Spent 2 million on an office. Renault and a move. Spent 600,000 building a three story glass stairway. 800,000 in bonuses, $600,000 in taxes. We drained a $5 million account, went to the bank to get our first credit line in six years. Why would you need a credit line when you're making so much money and growing so quickly? And the best company, second best company in Canada. So all of a sudden the bank's like, no, we can't loan you money. We're like, why? Like, we don't have any money. Like, yeah, we're like, we were proud of how we just spent it all. They're like, you're idiots. But we had this really smart finance guy that we weren't listening to. So that was a huge lesson that almost cost us the company. We had to fire 25 people. I was phoning all of our suppliers, telling them they're not nice to us. We're not even putting their name into the draw to see if they're one of the companies that we pay 30% of their fee this month. Like we, we really had to scramble for six months. It was brutal. We were man, we were getting pro forma cash flow statements on an hourly basis for three weeks. And then we were managing cash flow on a daily basis for two months. It doesn't have to be in your town, so your mentors can be anywhere. This is a really good question. And, and by the way, there's a mentor and there's a coach. And mentors, you do not pay coaches, you pay. When I wanted to get a mentor at 1-800-GOT junk, I wrote down the list of five to 10 things that I wanted to get better at as a business leader. And I just made like this all inclusive list of areas that I sucked at or areas that I thought I needed to get better at. From that I decided what did the person who would be mentoring me look like? So I tried to describe what I would think that mentor would be like. How would I want to receive feedback from them? Did I need them to be gentle with my feelings? Or like a hard drive? Like, I wanted to describe what I thought that person might be like. And then I thought about the companies out there that I would like to learn from, that I would respect. So in the 1-800-got junk days, I was thinking of multiple units, like lots of locations, lots of cities, multiple countries, a strong leadership training program, a strong brand, strong growth, good profitability. This was 2005. Starbucks was just starting their real big, rapid global expansion. Starbucks kept popping up in my mind as a brand that I really thought was respectable. And then this was 2005. I think LinkedIn started two years before. So I put a LinkedIn post up and I sent a letter to all of our franchisees at one eight Thunder got junk. And I said, does anybody know any of these three titles? I found the org chart online for Starbucks. And I said, these are the three titles. I'd like an introduction. Does anybody know these three people in these three jobs? And one of our franchisees, Drew Boyles, who is the mayor in El Segundo, California right now, he's the franchisee for 1 800-yard chunk came back to me and he said, the two titles you listed aren't the right people at Starbucks. The one you want to talk to is Greg Johnson. I used to report to Greg. His title is misleading. He runs operations for North America for Starbucks. And he's like a quality guy, a great husband. You'll love working with him. So I called Greg and I said, or Drew introduced me to Greg. And I said, why? I asked you about mentoring. And he said, well, what are you thinking? And I said, before I do the call, I need to send you my list. I sent him the list of what I wanted and what kind of person I wanted to be mentored by. And Greg's like, I'm in. He's like, I've never heard anybody say I want a mentor. And they've actually thought clearly what they wanted and describing the kind of person that they wanted. So that's how you'll find a mentor, is to have the employee and you do the work of what they're looking to get better at and what the mentor looks and feels like, and that'll help identify who that person is. And then I said to Greg, I want to do a one hour call with you every month, and I want to do an in person meeting for a full day every quarter. One quarter I'll come to you. One quarter you come to me and I can't pay you. I need you to give back to me like somebody helped you in your career. And because I approached it that way, with that level of forethought, that was why he said yes. We used the same approach to then find each of our executives their mentor. There was exactly the same approach, and that's how we identified the companies. You know, the head of the call center, we wanted an unbelievable call Center. And WestJet was winning all the awards in Canada for running call centers. So we were just like, who's the head of your call center? And somebody said, it was Kelly. So we contacted Kelly and we said, hey, we want to fly out and talk to you. And we were a good brand. So she talked to us and then we said, hey, can you mentor Shirley? And she goes, I'd love to. Shirley's great. They said, if you want people inside of your company that are really focused on growing their skills, hire people who are really focusing on growing their skills. I'm like, oh, interesting. Hire people that want to grow. Don't try to take somebody who doesn't want to grow and try to grow them. And it reminded me of the quote from Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines. And somebody asked him one day, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? He said, we hire happy people. Simple, right? So make it a part of your jobs going forward that you need to prove to us what you're doing to grow. Like, what business books are you reading now? What self growth are you going through? Like, how are you. Are you setting goals? Are you doing training? Are you tracking your macros? Like, what are the stuff that you're doing as a human to become a better human and then stop hiring humans that don't care about growth. So that's one. The second one is to kind of inspire them. And it can be by showing them the vivid vision of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. So they're excited about where you're going and then show them the gap that they don't have the skill to do their job a year from now. And if they don't get that skill, they get to get replaced. People come to me and go, well, I'd like to get a bonus because I did a great job last year. No, that was called your salary. I paid you a salary to do a great job. I expect you to do a great job. You get to keep your job. If you knock the COVID off the ball and you take off more responsibility and you take on more business areas, you're going to get a promotion. Then you get paid more. And if you don't do a great job for the salary that I'm paying you, you get fired. So we set that expectation very, very quickly. With every company I've ever built is bonuses don't come from doing a great job. Getting to keep your job comes from doing a great job. And A players, by the way, love that. C players are the ones who are trying to, like, get the regular. It's like, why I don't pay kids an allowance. It's because it teaches them how to do the minimal amount of work and how to get nagged constantly to get the same amount of pay every single week. Yeah. Same way is to show them the opportunity to get all the stuff off their plate that they're not good at. Because people know that they have stuff on their plate that they're not good at. And showing them, like, I'm doing it, too. So if you do the activity inventory for you and you show them what you're getting rid of, that empowers them to go, oh, I can suck at stuff, too. And I can get that off my plate. See, the school system messed us up. The school system said, oh, you're really bad at French. You should get a French tutor. I had a French tutor for two years, and I still suck at French. Now I don't even like French people. I found this French butter, though, that has sea salt in it. That's amazing. But French people really pissed me off because I can't speak their language. And for two years, I had to go to this woman's house and get tutored in French. What they should have said was, hey, you've been winning speaking competitions all through grade school. We should get you a speaking coach. Nobody ever did that. They told me to get a French tutor. So now people show up and they're like, oh, I don't want to tell you I'm bad at something because I'm going to get in trouble. No, I want to know what you're bad at because somebody else is probably really good at it. I'm really bad at written communication, I'm good at speaking. I'm really bad at writing. I can piss people off with a happy birthday email. But what I found was this woman who worked for me, Kathryn Pittman, was actually a journalist and she was a writer. She went to school. I don't even know what it's called, but she went to school for like writing. And, and I would let, I'd say to her, hey, can you take this memo that I want to send out to the team? Can you like, oh my God, I get to like, rewrite your memo. She thought she'd died and gone to heaven. For me, it was gonna take me a whole week to rewrite six paragraphs. So, yeah, it's just setting them up for that, that they're gonna get to work on the stuff that gives them energy, the stuff they're really good at, and they get stuff off their plate that they're not good at because we're trying to build these kind of high performance teams. I'm not sitting here pitching from the stage. There's no back of room offer. There's not like, I'm not sitting. But it is irresp not to sign up 3 to 5 of your people for the invest in your leaders course for how little it'll cost you. If you use that promo code, it'll be like 700 per person to give them those 12 skills. So here's what I would do. I would take three to five of your managers, sign each of them up for the course. So spend 3500 bucks and then tell them all to do two modules next week, all of them, do the first two modules and then at the end of the week on Monday, have them do a five minute book report over lunch. What did you like about the content? What are you going to use from the content? Week two, do the next two modules and then on Monday, do a five minute book report. What'd you like? What are you gonna use? Week three, do the next two modules. Do that for six weeks until you go through the six modules and then next quarter have them go through those 12 modules again. You do that for, for a year with your team. Watch what happens to your growth. It'll be huge. And I have like a CEO alliance member has 27 of their managers going through the course right now. Grow them that way. That's the easiest way to do it, is plug them into something. And again, I'm not pitching my stuff. It's irresponsible not to put them through that. If you want interviewing, I would have them read the book Top Grading by Jeff Smart. I would have them read chapter two of my book Double Double, which is really good, by the way. When you read business books, you don't have to read them from front to back. It's not 50 shades of gray. You don't have to read the whole novel, right? Just read the good stuff. Just read the chapter on people can be valuable. And then find a couple of videos, you know, on interviewing and then, you know, go ask, you know, your tribe. Ask here. Does anybody know any people that can do a interviewing training? Over zoom and pull out together. You can hobble, hobble it together module BY module. Those 12 skills are the 12 modules in the course and they're in the order that you should go through them in so situation. Leadership coaching. That's exactly how it's done. And it's me teaching the module. So it's me on video, it's my written content, it's the pretest, the post test. And after they go through all 12, they get a LinkedIn certification badge, which they all feel good about. I didn't brand myself that way. It was the publisher of Forbes magazine. Rich Karlgard had seen me speak a number of times and he was introducing me at a big event. There's a 900 person event of CEOs that I was speaking at. And Rich had seen me speak I think three times at that point. And he came out on stage and like embarrassed I could show you the clip. He said, I'm the best business speaker he's ever seen. And then he, he kind of laughed and he said, I shouldn't jinx people when I say that. But yeah, he's the best business speaker I've ever seen. And he's seen like all of the leaders that we know in business speak. And then, then he said, cameron's kind of like the CEO whisperer. So he gave me that moniker and it just kind of stuck. And then I used it on the books. So now I'm kind of trying to retitle it as the CEO Whisperer, but my core purpose and Simon Sinek helped me write this standing in my kitchen that night. That was why I was gonna tell the story. My core purpose is to help entrepreneurs make their reverse engineer their visions. Right? Help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen is what we wrote that night. The way I do that is with my course, with my speaking, with my CEO alliance, with my books, with my podcast, with my coaching. Everything I do is to help you make your visions come true. It's why it's why, like when I'm telling you, like, sign them up for the course or put them into the op spot or like, because all I see is, is banging your heads against the window. And I know that you're going to go home and keep trying hard. And it's not that hard. It's really not that hard. It's like, you know, the secrets on real estate, the stuff that you like, what I need to learn about real estate. You guys would laugh at how little I know and how many stupid mistakes I would make. You need to learn the same about operating a company. And then it's just, then watch what happens. It gets crazy, crazy profitable and it gets easy. You're not frustrated. A CEO who I coached for a couple of years, Jason Hennessey, and he's a big expert in SEO and his company was doing so well and he said in a call, he goes, I have nothing to do right now because the company's really growing at 120 employees, everything's kind of humming along. He goes, I feel like I need to go break some just so I have something to work on. I'm like, stop. Don't break some. Like, stop. Step back and identify. Who are your emerging leaders? How can you grow them? Who is the team? How can you collaborate? How can you get strategic so that you can kind of go out and look where you're going and come back and show them? How can you spend more time in mastermind communities outside of your industry? Like, you should go to Baby Bathwater, you should go to Strategic Coach, you should go to Genius Network. You should be plugged into three or four other mastermind communities in addition to this so that you see what's. And then its idea is having sex. You take an idea from here, an idea from there, an idea from there, and it's like a little idea baby happens. And the CEO's job is to think about culture and vision and strategy and people and not get into the day to day. The other one is to learn how to run skip level meetings so you can skip over your direct reports and meet with their teams to ask questions and listen or to give ideas and listen and not to engage. And there's a huge skill around running a proper skip level meeting because CEOs can really up their company. When they go meet with people and they say, oh, that's a good idea, we should do that. No, just say, that's an interesting idea. Thank you for that idea. But don't tell them it's good or bad. And don't say you have to because you need the rest of the story from whoever you skipped over. So the two things you can do so that the COO doesn't have to get replaced or a senior person doesn't have to get replaced is you have to grow their skills and confidence and network at the same pace that the organization is growing. Let's say that you have a COO running a five person or $5 million company. They can run it at 10, they can run it at 20, but when they're trying to run it at 40, it's just really hard, right? So look at like how many employees are they managing? What kind of meetings are they running? What skills do they need to run that company? You probably don't have those skills because it's the biggest thing you've ever run, right? It keeps getting to be every day, it's the biggest thing we've ever done. I was coaching Marcelo Claret, who is the CEO of Sprint, and I was sitting in Marcelo's office, just he and I in Kansas City. And I'd met Marcelo when he was running bright star, $1 billion private company that he sold and then was appointed CEO of Sprint. And I'm literally sitting in his boardroom, we're top grading his team, we're talking about who to fire, who to handcuff, how to coach people. And he looks at me and he's like, when are people no longer going to be the problem? And I'm like, you're running the 82nd largest company on the Fortune 500, like Fortune 100, and people will always be the problem. And here's somebody who's still getting skill development as the CEO of the 82nd largest company. So that's why we need to get coached. It's why our people need to get coached. But you constantly are growing. I was coaching his COO, Jamie Jones coached Jamie for 18 months. We did one on one calls every single month for 18 months. The CEO of Sprint. Jamie's base salary was 2.4 million. I'm like, what the, what am I going to teach you? I don't know what I'm going to teach you. But like he was still trying to learn. So I was trying to identify what do they need to learn and who can coach on that. Sometimes it can come from you, sometimes it can come from experts, sometimes it comes from putting them into communities. But it's, it's getting people that want to learn is number one number. And then it's always hiring the right people a little bit before you need them. So I like hiring ahead of the curve. So the next time you're hiring a senior person, hire somebody who has already built what you're building so that the next one or two years, maybe the next double is easy. That's kind of like a giveaway that gets them the two doubles after that. You know, I'd built, I'd built a few companies already. Like the private currency company, we were hiring three people a day for about a month or two. Like we hired 900 people over the course of six months. Yeah, like if you've never led a team of people that are hiring 900 people, I can do 30 people in a weekend, easy and have predictability that 90% or more will be successful in their job a year later. So when you have those skills, I can drop into a 14 person company and go, we got this. And then two years later it's starting to get hard. Three years later it's getting difficult. And at five years it's just too big.