The Real Second-in-Command Your Company Needs

So the reason I even called the book the second in command and not the COO is your second in command. Could be a coo, it could be a Vice President, operations, it could be a Director of operations, could be an Operations Manager, could be a gm, could be an Executive assistant. It's your yin and yang partner. So the title, to have a true C level title, to be a chief of anything. Chief Technology, Chief Marketing, Chief Financial, Chief Operating. Thirty years ago you had to be a major player at a major company. And then what happened is the banks in the late 90s started to give away titles of VP to people as a marketing tool. Remember when you had like your 25 year old friend was the vice president of some random bank. You're like, what the fuck? He's like, no, I'm 12 layers below the CEO. And then when the Internet started to hit 95 to 2000, we started to actually be able to market ourselves. So a title became a marketing tool. So we started to give out not only equity in lieu of compensation, we started to give out titles to people as a door opener with their email signatures. That's where title inflation started. So to be a true chief operating officer or a chief financial officer, et cetera, you have to come in with a level of strategic insight where you're actually helping to direct the direction of the organization. You come in with a level of autonomy where you actually can say, here's all the stuff that needs to get done. And the CEO goes, thank God. I didn't know what to do. Brian didn't give me anything to do for five years. I was showing him what needed to happen. You have a level of P and L and budget responsibility and the ability to actually manage a P and L and budgets. You bring people and partners into the company with you and then your compensation is actually valid compared to what the title is. If you have $120,000 person, they're not a COO, they're a director. A true COO is in the 250 to 550 range. I was getting paid $312,000 18 years ago. I was a COO. So be careful with the title you give people. The weird thing about a COO is I was the right COO for Brian from 2 million to 100 million. I was the right stage. I knew how to franchise. I'd done it twice before. I could come in with all the autonomy and strategy and literally nailed that role. And on the trust and friendship side, he was my best friend. So it was just a Perfect yin and yang approach. The stuff that I sucked at, it and finance, he loved. And he was good at all the other stuff I was really good at. And he didn't want to go near the current COO, Eric Church. I've known Eric for 38 years, which is really weird. We started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada, in 1987. I was president the first year, he was president the second year, and he's now the COO at 1-800-GOT junk. Eric's been there for 12 years. Crazy, right? Eric's been there for 12 Years. He would have been a horrible COO completely. And he said it, and so has Brian. He would have been incapable to be a COO for the first six years because he didn't have the entrepreneurial skills. He wasn't from the franchising space. He didn't know how to scale a startup. But he's been incredible from the 100 million to the billion. It's absolutely his zone of genius. So Eric used to work as like a senior executive VP with the head of Monster. Like, he was very seasoned in the corporate world. So even though it's the same CEO, there's a different season that you have to hire for. If I look at all of my members of the CEO Alliance, I would be a horrible COO for 95 to 98% of their companies because I don't match the skill set of the industry. I don't match the size of the company they are. I'm not a good fit with their CEO. So it's this weird role. But if you're the head of marketing for a finance firm, you could probably be the head of marketing for all finance firms. If you're the head of IT for a fitness company, you could be the head of IT for all fitness companies. If you're the COO for a fitness company, you may not be the right fit for that CEO. So it's a really tough role to hire for. If you're looking at the person that you have as your coo, remember that at some point they're going to drive you crazy. But even if you replace them with somebody else, that new person's going to drive you crazy, too. When I was coaching Marcelo Claret, Marcelo was the CEO of Sprint. He'd sold his first company for over a billion dollars to Softbank. And then Masa appointed Marcelo, the CEO of Sprint, to prepare to do a merger with T Mobile, which we did. I was sitting in Marcelo's office in Kansas City and he was asking me about people and he said, when are people not going to be the problem anymore? I'm like, you're the 82nd largest company in the United States. They're always the problem. So our job as a leader is to grow people. It's to grow their skills, to grow their confidence, and to grow their connections so that we can delegate everything except genius. So your job is to keep working with the people you've got. So the CEO that's driving you crazy, that's just an opportunity for you to coach them, right? Or to put them into the CEO alliance and let us work with them, let them work with each other. But our job is always to grow people. So don't get frustrated with them. Don't give up on those people. Where do you find them? The first thing is to know yourself. So really do an activity inventory of all of the stuff that you suck at as an entrepreneur, of all the stuff that drains you of energy as an entrepreneur, of all the business projects and things you'd love to be doing but you don't have time to do, of all the business areas that have to report to you but you're not good at. Make a list of all those things and then flip it upside down and that becomes what this new person is going to be doing. They're going to do all the stuff you're bad at. Okay, number one, then describe the kind of person you are as a leader. Look at your Colby profile, look at your disc profile, and look for the counterpart to that. Someone who matches really well with that personality profile. That's the starting point of what you're looking for, is to understand yourself first. Once you know what you're looking for, I would describe the title that matches the roles and responsibility, the metrics that they're responsible for, and then think about the proper compensation and put the proper title in place to match the compensation. Don't put a big title on a small role, and don't put small compensation on the wrong role. And then I like engaging executive search firms. I have three executive search firms that we refer to. One is Max Hansen. Is everybody Max Hanson from Weisscoats. So, Max, now a genius network member. They're Specialists in recruiting COOs and senior executives and then giving them the vivid vision. And if the really good people don't like the vivid vision of where we're going, I still want to go out and keep searching for the people that do.