Unleash Your Business's Potential with COO Expertise

I said our topic today is the second in command, the coo. I'm joined by my friend and total guru on lots of things to do with growing your company. But in particular this topic, your second in command, the CEO he worked with. Also another guest the show, Brian Scudamore, who helped and helped to take that company from pocket change to over 100 million. 1, 800, got junk. You know him, you've seen him on TV, Internets, everywhere you are these days, 1, 800, got junk. That whole company now well past 500 million on its way to the first billion and that foundation set in there. And he's going to talk a little bit about how he was the COO to that. But we've covered Cameron's been on the show before to talk about why meetings suck and other topics that we've talked endlessly about. Vivid Vision. We've also had Jennifer Houdie on before. And so anyway, welcome to show Cameron.

Hey Bill, good to see you again. Thank you. I'm glad you had Jennifer on the show. She's my partner on all things Vivid Vision. She's amazing. And Brian as well. Still good friends after 25 years. We actually met in the entrepreneurs organization.

In 1997amillion jillion years ago. I'm still in the Entrepreneurs Organization today. Recent past president of our local chapter and been in global and regional leadership for over 20 years.

So it's a great, great organization. Amazing. I'm actually speaking to the E.O. cairo chapter in March over there in person and I'm doing a virtual event for a lot of the, I guess the Bay area, Northern California chapters. I'm doing a virtual Zoom event for them I think later on this month. Love the organization. It's amazing.

Awesome. I have such mixed feelings about the Zoom. Obviously we have a pretty good Zoom set up now and I still do a fair amount of client sessions. We did one yesterday. Hey, Maureen Birdsall saying hi in our chat.

Hey Mo.

Nice to see friends chiming in on us. But I do love being in person again and connecting with people and sharing a drink and being in a beautiful place. So why don't we start a little bit with your personal story, talk about.

Your.

Joining Cameron and how that went and not Cameron, Brian.

And yeah, Brian and I had an unfair advantage. Brian was my best man at my wedding three months before I joined him as his coo. And Brian and I had been in an EO forum group. We were an entrepreneurs organization forum group for almost four years prior to me joining him as his coo. So it's kind of like he had a four year interview of me. He knew all my skills. He'd watched me build two other EO qualifying companies. I had a bit of an interview with him. I got to watch him building out his business. And then we had such a strong friendship and trust and relationship with each other. When he's your best man at your wedding, like we'd already cried together numerous times and you know, bad behavior on numerous times. And we knew each other. So the day that I started, it was able to really hit the ground running. I have a bit of a weird background as well. I'm a very odd COO type. And there's something that I talk about in the book the Second in Command, that you're really there as the COO for either a reason, a season, but rarely are you there for the lifetime of the company. And it's because the company trajectory just changes at some point that it's really not the right fit anymore. A good example would be Sheryl Sandberg going in as the second in command for Facebook. Was definitely there for a reason and a season. But then after 15 years, she exits and now they bring in a new COO. The current COO at 1-800-GOT junk is a guy named Eric Church. Eric and I have known each other for 35 years. We met in 1987 in Ottawa, Canada. We started a fraternity together. I was president year one, Eric was president in the second year. And I. So I've known Eric for 15 or 20 years longer than Brian's known him. But Eric has now been the COO from about the 100 million mark to the 450 million mark. He would have been horrible in the first six years because he didn't have the right skill set or DNA to be in that early startup. And I took them from 2 million to 106 million. So lots of these weird traits of entrepreneurs and timelines you have to be careful with. Brian and I just had an unfair advantage.

So you went through a lot there together and we can weave in more of that. But why don't you first talk about what is a coo? Yeah, right. I think basically, broadly as the person who gets shit done.

Yeah, I, I not even, that's even why I called the book the second in command is because the COO is one of many titles that a second in command can have in your company. Right. It could be a CEO, it could be a, an integrator, it could be a vice president of operations or a director of operations, a president, a GM Project manager. Heck, maybe in the very, very early days it might even be your assistant might be your second in command because you're just really leaning on them and you're right. In a lot of cases it's the person that gets shit done. My sister who's been an EO member for about 10 years says that, that her CEO is the brakes to her gas. I had someone the other day say.

Recent guest of the show Christine.

Oh, nice. Yeah. She also said another one of our CEO alliance members says he's the leash to the dragon, you know where. And then I think Thomas Edison said it best that vision without execution is hallucination. That often the visionary entrepreneur would be a disaster by themselves, but the execution person would be a disaster without vision. So it's a very yin and yang, you know, relationship between the two. So the coo, what is a COO or what is a second in command? It's the balance to the CEO. It's the person that takes care of all the stuff that the CEO doesn't love or isn't good at. And it's the person who can be that confidential, trusting sounding board behind the scenes, almost like mom and dad, you know, can sit and talk without the kids around. It is that true confidant that the CEO finally has that. You know, they might have it in a forum group, but they really need someone day to day inside of their company as well.

Yeah, I think that like principal thing of being that compliment, you know the book, the yin yang on your book cover, that symbol I think is a really great thing like finding not your best friend. I mean you can be friends but finding somebody who has is sufficiently different to focus on different things. And I can't tell you how many times in a forum group or at some kind of a business event, somebody said, you know, I'm really, if I could just find another one of me. I'm like no, that's a terrible idea.

It's funny. So you brought up a couple quick points, a couple interesting points. So years ago I spoke at a Vern Harnish event which would now be a scaling up event. Back in the day it was called the Gazelles event. And I walked off the stage and this guy Kevin Lawrence walked up to me, he goes oh my gosh, your Cameron. And I said yeah. He goes, I thought you were a saying. I'm like what do you mean? He said, everybody's been walking around here for three days saying I need a Cameron. I thought you were like a bhag or a Flywheel. I thought it was a thing. I'm like, no, it's probably just me. He goes, what I realized is they were all saying they wanted what Brian had. They wanted that second in command. But I would have been a horrible COO for almost every one of those companies at the conference because they didn't necessarily match the skills of the CEO. I didn't necessarily match the size of the company. I maybe wouldn't have matched the culture or the kind of person. And you're right, you're not looking for your peer, you're looking for someone you like. You're looking for someone you trust and you're looking for someone who's really great at the stuff that you're not great at. So those are the core things that you have to look for in bringing your COO into your company. Even in our COO alliance, we run a network of hundreds of second in commands from around the world. They would be horrible in most of the other companies, by the way. Very similar to if I met a woman out on the street, if I was single and I'm like, oh, you've been married before? Oh, you should be my wife. Because you've been married. You could be. I don't know anything about her enough to say that you'd be a good wife. Right. Nor did she know. So you have to be very careful with that selection process to not just assume that just because they've done the role means they can do it for you. You're looking for more than that.

And that's probably universal. Like the A player is totally situational. Right. It's not a particular set of things on a resume that looks blue chip. It's, it's, it's applied. I thought I just different.

Here's where it's very different. Sorry. Like if you're the head of finance for a company, you could probably be the head of finance for most companies. If you're the head of marketing, you could probably be the head of marketing for most companies because you're really more the head of a functional area. When you're coming in as the second in command, you need to be that pure counterpart, that yin and yang balance to the CEO. So it's much more than running a functional area. Some of the COOs are very inward facing. Right. Like Eric Church at 1-800-GOT junk, does not do media interviews, doesn't do speaking events, is not on the biz dev marketing, sales side of the business. But then you look at Harley Finkelstein from Shopify, the second in command at Shopify. Harley's very outward facing, very media, very public markets, very speaking. And Tobias Luque, their CEO is very inward facing, you know, engineering focused kind of CEO. So it's a real different role than most other roles in a company.

I was thinking more like the stage in nature. Like I once was about to make a VP of marketing hire. And we looked at three finalist candidates and one was super blue chip and it was coming from a much bigger company, but wanted an equity stake and a chance to grow something again. And then we hired. In the end we decided not to do them because we just didn't think that they would get their hands dirty, that they would work at a smaller business and roll up their sleeves to the same degree. We thought they just want a whole department and a bunch of vendors. And we're like, yeah, you can't work in this place right now. And we hired instead somebody who was kind of a wild card, but who turned out to be an unbelievable rock star who was hungry and right for the next step, you know. Yeah.

So you hired somebody who was there for the right time and at the right size and the right cultural fit. You know, when I left 1-800-got junk. It's been almost 16 years since I left the company, which is crazy. They took about a year to find my replacement and they brought the former president of Starbucks us in to replace me. And she walked around and said, what a cute little company. Meanwhile, when I was leaving, I'm like, it's so big. They've got 3,000 employees and we're operating in 330 cities and four countries and 13 operating P&Ls. I'm like, she's like, oh, this is cute. But she was exactly as you described. She was more corporate, she was more bureaucratic, she was more consultants. And she didn't like the entrepreneurial guerrilla marketing. She didn't even like franchisees. So 12 months later she was gone. And you know, there is that kind of roll up your sleeves if you're an entrepreneurial company or if you're a more corporate. I was the wrong guy to take it from 100 million to the billion because I couldn't slow down. I couldn't become a little bit more calculated. I couldn't kind of stay at the Matrix decision making. I was very much that entrepreneurial sized cfo.

Let me mention a couple of our other past clients that I've done some work with in the past. Ben Godsey and Dustin Sellers, pro Service Hawaii work together. Really like totally different kinds of Personalities, but they grew pro Service into Hawaii, into the dominant payroll and peo company in the state that really keeps out the national players, and then went off to create new companies and things like that. And, you know, they, they, they're, they're friendly today, but. But they had many times when they are, like, really, really different than each other. And having worked with both of them, I can tell you they're profoundly different human beings. But I think that really worked in growing their business.

Well, well, and, and in any relationship, I think we can operate where we get frustrated with each other and that can blow us apart, or you can recognize each other's strengths and weaknesses and differences and, and maybe even get a coach. So back in the early days at 1-800-got junk, Brian and I got a coach. We had Joan Mara, who's gone on to become one of the biggest forum trainers for EO in history. And Joan trained us on having better communication styles. I have a COO coach where she's actually a marriage counselor to all the Wall street executives. She's coached a number of CEO COO partners that I know to actually build a strong marriage relationship. Right. Because it's really like your business spouse. You know, you're married. You and Lori, I'm sure, have the occasional argument or fight, and then you. You work through that. Right? Like, and that's. That's normal. But that's normal, right? That's absolutely normal. And then when you work through that, it builds strength. And I think that's key to remember is that you're not supposed to be identical. Even if you were, you'd still drive each other crazy at some point. So the key is to how do you recognize differences? I love doing different personality profiles for the leadership team every year. One year we might have everyone on the leadership team do disc. Next year, we might have everybody do their strength finders. Next year we might everybody do Colby. And not to try to change the other person, but just to deepen our understanding of who they are as individuals so that we can, you know, build that communication and trust and relationships with each other.

You know, it's interesting you bring up this, the romantic partners and that kind of thing. I think a lot of the same principles for sustaining and working through and having a good romantic relationship apply to the other. And I, I think about, like, you don't want to be exactly the same, and yet you want to have a similar vision of the future and some similar values and, and also some appreciation for the differences. And then you have to keep renewing the relationship, you have to go through the spaces and reinvent it on a regular basis or it expires and you've.

Got to have date night, right? So, so the CEO and COO need to get out of the office and do some fun stuff with each other regularly. You need to have some time away from the kids. So the CEO and the COO need to get out of the office regularly and just do work and hang out. Brian and I would work off site every week, usually every Thursday for two to three hours. Sometimes we'd work together all Friday, sitting at the tennis club, sitting 10ft away from each other, both with our feet up on couches and working away on our laptops and sometimes laughing away, sometimes saying nothing. But it was time away from the rest of the team. We had our own private little meeting room at the office that almost no employee even knew about. We had 250 people at the head office, had a tiny little room by the freight elevators with beaten bag chairs and whiteboards that was only ever used by Brian and I, just the two of us. And it was literally our war room. So we had a space, a place to get away, to be able to debate and discuss and strategize and support each other and then come out from around the corner and people would have no idea where we just were. And we could show back up as that, you know, that force together. Those are all important things. And we learn that from marriages too.

Vern has been talking a lot lately about having a studio, a place where the CEO can go and, and do different kinds of thinking and get out of the day to day kinds of things. And you talk about a situation room and I'm reminded of visiting the west wing of the White House and being taken down into the situation room. And it's funny, so many things are really deceptively like how they look on TV and in movies and that kind of thing. And then how they are in reality is totally different. But it's like this funny little room. Like down you go down this hallway and around and there's a window and like it, but it's, it's like buried, tiny little room. It's not a big, it's very far removed from things.

That's super cool. Smaller.

Yeah, yeah.

I took a lot, I tried to take a lot of ideas from, I call it ideas having sex. Right. I take ideas from great companies. I probably incorporated 50 or 60 ideas from members of our COO alliance into the book and also probably about another 25 or 30 from our second in command podcast guests. Because they've all got these really rich insights into what makes that strong CEO COO relationship as well. Or what made a good onboarding process for them once they got hired too.

Yeah. Good to shout out the COO Alliance. We've recommended to clients in the past and they've said great things, but there's a lot of organizations around founders, entrepreneurs, and CEOs and not as many things available for. So the CEO alliance is a great resource for CEOs to connect, to learn and support each other and to grow together with their unique concerns and perspective.

And without their work spouse around. Right. Like, it's kind of like guys need to have a guy's weekend once in a while or a guy's night. And women need to have their time without the guys around. Like, it's just good to have that space to be able to. And what's really weird is we'll get all the COOs together and they'll kind of bitch about their CEO, but in a good way. It's like, God, they're crazy, but I love them so much. Or they're crazy, but I want to embrace their crazy. And. And it's like, yeah, me too. And then it's like, how do we do it? It's really cool to watch it. It's a really empowering. You know, part of our. Of the organization is how much they care about the CEO that they work with and. And whose companies they get to help build. Yeah.

Talk to us about how do we design the job, hire the person, that whole world of it, if we think we need one. I just started working with a new CO at one of our clients, and many of our clients, as they go through rounds of financing and growth, start to get a more formal or upgrade their coo. Talk to us about that process a bit.

Yeah. So the initial process really is to really understand yourself as the entrepreneur or the CEO. What are you really good at? What areas of the business drain you of energy and what feed you with energy? What areas of the business do you love to work on or maybe your unique ability? And then also, what are the goals of your company? Are you trying to build to sell? Are you trying to build to give you more free time? Are you trying to build for cash flow? Are you trying to build a company that you love going to day to day? And when you understand all of those components, then you'll know who that second in command is for you. I think we have a mutual friend, John Daly or Jack Daly. And Jack's always said if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. And there's some real truth to that, that before you hire a COO or a second in command, at least make sure you've got an executive assistant to get all that admin work off your plate to free up your time so that then you're only working in closer to your unique ability. The COO really should come second to that. So the starting point is to understand yourself. The next part is to really look for somebody who matches, as you mentioned earlier, the size of your company. Right. The core kind of behavioral traits of your company and the growth phase you're going through. And then it's to look, do you have someone internal who you can actually promote and bring up through the company? That was one of the things that Vern loved about Brian and I were we were able to continue to scale the company through six doubles in size. But at some point we didn't have the internal person to promote from within. We really needed to go for that outside hire. So it's understanding when to go outside or when you can have somebody internally to promote as well.

Yeah, I think there's a lot to think about there. Very often companies either immediately go to one or the other. Oh, just everything. We don't have the right person because they're not seeing the potential in people and they're not really in people's world, on their team and understanding who's ready to step up.

Or.

They are afraid to go outside and they're just looking inside and struggling to find people who aren't really ready or interested in stepping up. And they're pushing people to step into a role that they just do not want.

Yeah. And I think that's because the CEO or the board or the leadership team doesn't roll the camera ahead two or three years to really think about what's the org chart look like in three years and two years. What are we really running? And does the person that we're bringing in have the capacity to run it at that level or to scale it to that level? Often it's very tough to bring an internal in unless you have a true mvp, like a true person rising up in the ranks that really has that deep domain expertise that you don't want to lose, and they've somehow shown themselves as a really strong leader. The coo, more than any other leader in the organization, needs to have strong interpersonal skills, the ability to build consensus in teams and really good foster debate and the ability to see across the Organization and the ability to have not domain expertise to necessarily run an area, but at least enough domain understanding to lead a group of people that run five or six or seven different business areas with deep domain expertise versus other functional heads are often really strong at their functional area and can lead people, but they may not understand the organization as a whole.

One of the things that has served me well as a coach but less well as a CEO is I tend to see people as bigger, better than they currently think of themselves or showing up. Right. I see like, oh, I could see this person like developing in this way and that's generally great. As a coach, that's a really, I think a good thing to see people as a future, bigger self as CEO. Sometimes I would be like, oh, you're going to be awesome as our head of operations. And then I, I'd sort of push people into something that they didn't want to do and weren't ready for.

Yeah, partially it's be like, leave me alone. Well, yeah, and you're right because partially some of it is they don't want to necessarily do that. I had somebody in our call center years ago running a team of about 80 or 90 people and I thought he would be great at moving up into the next layer in our organization. As I'm like a senior manager in the call center. And he's like, I don't even like the call center. I'm like, why are you here? He goes, I just doing this to pay bills. I'm like, well, what area would you like to work in? He goes, oh, if I could work in finance, Accounting, I would like die and go to heaven. I'm like, oh my gosh, kill me. If I had to work in accounting, I would lose my mind. He's like, no, I actually went to school for it. I'm like, well, we've got a payroll clerk role. He goes, oh, I would love that. Get me in to go work in finance. Yeah. So I had something different in mind because as you pointed out, I didn't really know who he was as much. Right. I never interviewed him in the early days, so I didn't know anything about his background. And then I started to assume based on things versus really seeking to understand the person and their goals and where do they want to go and where can we see that fit? And being a COO who's strategic enough to lean out two to three years to see what the company's going to need and do, we have that and it becomes a real skill set when you go from 30 to 100 employees and then from 100 to 300. The ability to bring in outside people into the roles that you need them to be in without upsetting all the people that are currently in the company. It's a real skill to be able to do that.

Yeah, I think having the skill for the next phase, right. And knowing it, being ready for it, whether you've done it or not. But it's of interest to you, you've got the basic chops for it, you want to tackle that thing is really useful. And I think that other thing you said about knowing and recognizing yourself, we spend a lot of time trying to suck less at certain things instead of just going, no, I'm really awesome over here, I should just leave that stuff alone and focus on what I'm great at. And hopefully with maturity and self awareness, you start to lean into what you're brilliant at and let go of the other things, the love loath. Develop your Gallup strengths and let go of the things that are you're not strengths.

Well, and what you're speaking to is something that is really hard for people to learn. I think because for 18 years we were bred in a different way by the school system. Right from the time we were in kindergarten until fourth year, fourth year university. So for kind of like that 16, 17 year period, we were told that you suck at something, get a tutor, you're not good at it, work harder, you're not getting good grades, study harder, work harder, get a tutor, practice more. Great. So now I'm going to come average at all these things I suck at. What the school system should have said was, you suck at that, get someone else to do it, you suck at that, get them to submit your coursework for you, you suck at that. Collaborate together and all of you submit the same essay. But that's not the way the system works. So of course now all of a sudden when we're in our mid-20s, until our probably our mid-40s, we're having to unlearn. That's a lot of years of habits. But as soon as we can unlearn that and realize, wow, we get to collaborate, we get to almost cheat, we get to have all these other people do our work for us and submit it. That's freaking amazing. And kids these days are learning that because that's the way that the online gaming works, right? They work together, they collaborate, they problem solve, they work remotely. So I think they're actually going around the school system now, which is probably going to be a Big strength for them in their careers because that's really what their careers will require. But yeah, it's hard to learn or to unlearn that habit, I think.

You know, it's funny, we have two grown amazing kids out living their, their best lives and, and I remember as they grew up, like we would get worried about certain things. Oh, they're spending a lot of time on their phones and in their media and things like that and G in on the computer and oh, he hacked his way into his computer and that kind of thing and worrying about that stuff and, and yet when you look at today what they do and what their brilliance is, it's exactly in line with those things. Right. Our son figured out, we gave him a computer and put all the parental controls and he rooted the thing right away and did what he wanted and, and we were like, well, should we take it away and be the tough parents? You know? No, we should just. If he knows how to do all that we've given the values, he should know what to do. He's going to get exposed to like whatever weird stuff there is and hopefully he's not susceptible to that. And, and look, he's an AI developer today who's developed one of these AI art tools that's, you know, now got a bajillion users and amazing. And our daughter does the most amazing design and photography and art things and connects to people all over the world and works with the biggest names and the coolest new stuff that you could imagine in that field. Right, all exactly the kinds of things that, that we stressed about, you know.

What you're speaking to right now is really interesting. I think as leaders we need to recognize that somebody who's 50 years old might not have 30 years experience at all. They might have five years of experience six times in a row. And another leader who comes in at 30 years old might have 5 years experience and the technology skills to kick our ass. And I think we need to have the wisdom to drop down to that layer to really start learning the tech stack, to really start learning the technology leverage and to be able to share the wisdom that we might have on leadership, on interpersonal skills, on business dynamics, on politics, so that they can understand stuff that they're not quite adept to as well. But we really have to kind of, in both sides, cross that chasm to reconnect because Gen Y is starting to come into the workforce pretty furiously. And if the baby boomers are holding onto the past, I think in many ways, you know, you're out of a job.

Well, it's interesting as a thing as well for the COO topic. Right. Because I think about that old VP of marketing and the person had all the ingredients, but had not yet been a VP of marketing for a company like ours. And we were like, should we take a leap here? And we were like, yeah, it feels like the right thing to do.

Do.

And then she left that and is now CEO and founder of a really cool toy company that does these cool stem toys for. For girls. But, you know, she. She learned and leveled up and went right through that kind of thing. But there was a little bit of a leap there compared to the more traditional hire that we might have done.

Yeah. Something else we have to be careful with is Gen Y often come into the workforce with a lot more confidence than their Gen X and baby boomer kind of counterparts. But sometimes that confidence is confidence not really based on expertise. It's just confidence. And what happens is they go through the roller coaster much higher kind of ups and downs than anything else. Right. Like, they really can roller coaster much heavier. We have to be cognizant of that.

I think our. We skew pretty high in confidence in the United States. But, you know, you could have all the belief in yourself in the world, and if you run off a building, you know you're probably going to fall and die. Right. You can't just go, I believe I can fly without the right equipment and training.

This is not a Disney movie.

Dumbo Anka his w. His ears. And yeah, the.

The other thing I recognized when I was writing the whole book, the second in command, which is when you bring in this outside person, what are they supposed to do? Right. What's their role coming into the company? And I started to think about the first 90 days. There's a great book about the first 90 days in an organization. And I kind of tried to adapt it a little bit for what the CEO's first 90 days should be. And I've been playing with this concept, you know, while I was writing the book, but even post writing the book and a lot of the media work that I've been doing in the first 30 days, the role that CEO, and really the role of any executive coming into a senior role above other people that have already been there in the first 30 days, it's to examine every aspect of the company, to kind of walk around with a notebook and write down all of the things that you want to change or do, but don't do any of them. You know, go for lunches and Dinners and coffees with everybody. Sit in on zoom meetings, sit in on training sessions, listen in on phone calls, ride shotgun out in the field. You know, whatever you can do to just observe and write down all the stuff that you want to change. Great. Month 2. Go back through the list of all the stuff you want to change, like fire Bob. Now go talk to eight people and oh, maybe I don't need to fire Bob. Maybe I need to fire Kelly. Maybe I need to promote Bob. You know, put this system in place. Oh, maybe we shouldn't. Or maybe. Yeah, but not yet. So you'll examine all of your ideas in the second month and you'll kind of stress test them all. You'll test all of your own hypotheses in the third month. Start putting in place all the easy ones, the ones that are the low hanging fruit ideas first though. Right? The ideas that don't take up a lot of people time or money so that all the people in the company see these easy wins coming and that momentum, creating momentum, which gives you the base of their trust and their relationship and their understanding of you as a leader, that in the second and third quarters you can start doing the bigger, heavier projects that require people time and money. That's kind of my belief on how a COO should enter, or even now a senior executive should enter into a company.

Yeah. If you were to roll that back 20, 30 years, you would be expected to accomplish even less in 90 days. 90 days might be more of your listening and lear learning period, but that's got to be compressed. You've got to start to produce some results and make some moves in that time frame. But you do need that initial bit to listen and think and learn and then start to check your assumptions.

Yeah. Because every, every new idea you've got, every new project you want to initiate is like a boulder. And that boulder that you throw into the pond is going to get to the bottom as it's supposed to. But there will also be good ripple effects and bad ripple effects of that boulder. And if we don't think about all of those, the ripple effects can actually outweigh the value of that particular project in and of itself, in your role and in the leverage you're going to have with the organization. So it's just being more cognizant of that as a leader versus trying to dive in too early. I think.

I was on an advisory board years ago with a CEO who came in and was talking about a, a problem head of sales that had kind of become kind of out of control and was making a lot of money and was destructive in the company. And, and, and so after much discussion, they, they were all pretty unanimous in recommending that they cut this head of sales. And like you can survive this or whatever. But the person didn't do the careful preparatory work. They just went and pulled the trigger two days later without thinking about how that would go. And within 18 months, the company one, the person literally walked their book of business and their client relationships across the street to a competitor and was like, yeah, those are my clients. I'm the one with the relationship. And you know, you're going to play hard with me. Fine, bye, bye. And destroyed like a, I don't know, 50 year old company overnight.

Yeah. That is sometimes even when the COO needs to both be tactical and strategic, they need to slow some of the business down to actually sit back up to the strategic level and kind of think about it. Right. Again. What are the ripple effects of these decisions? What are the ripple effects internally as well with our current employees as well? I don't entirely always agree with the whole slow to fire, quick to fire or slow to hire quick to fire. I think we need to actually not drag our ass on firing, not delay it, not be slow. But I don't think that, Yeah, I think you need to be strategic and thoughtful about firing. Yeah, don't drag it out six more months just because you're chicken. Get. But I don't think you should be rushing because there are these unintended consequences that happen with those decisions.

You know, that, that I think there's. That it's one of the other benefits in this CEO COO relationship. If you really are bringing different strengths and you're really looking from different places, then on these critical things you have an opportunity in your counterpart, whether you're one role or the other, to sound out some of these things with each other if you're working well together. I think about, I had with a company really great steady production over many years and a really great focus on sales. And I put my focus on sales, but I changed some other things and I didn't have the same attention and tracking and ask myself what is most likely to go wrong here? And I ended up buying millions of dollars of goods I wouldn't need.

You know, there's a couple parts to this that are important, is that the COO is often going to ask a lot of questions before they initiate a project. And most entrepreneurial CEOs will start to initiate the project and they'll figure it out as they go. Don't get frustrated. As the CEO, don't get frustrated. When your COO is asking you lots of questions. They're not debating you, they're merely trying to catch up and to understand your ideas and to think about it from all the different perspectives so that they can run just as fast. So the biggest gift the CEO can give a COO is this question. What else would you like to ask me? What else would you like to understand? Give them the gift of time. The biggest gift the COO can give the CEO is to talk in sound bites, give them the executive summary, and realize they don't need all the information from all the research you've done because their brain is full. Right. So it's really understanding each other.

Yeah. You know, another aspect of that CEO COO that I was working with a few years ago, the CEO was very much activator, like me getting started kind of a person, jump right in, ready, aim, fire, ready, fire, aim right Kind of a person. And the COO was very deliberative and that kind of thing. And the CEO would get very frustrated with the CEO, like, oh God, he's so slow.

He can't.

Like he's going to come back and say, fine, but he's going to take a whole week. And after we did strengths work with the team, they. They realized the difference. One was deliberative and one was activator. And what they negotiated between them is now when the one had something that he wanted the other to jump on, he would just ask, how long do you need on this? Or he would say, hey, I need till Friday. Right.

It's just, that's what I mean about the simple, simple understanding of the other people. The more that you can do these personality profiles to the other so that you can work well and collaborate. You do build that strong, strong yin and yang again. It's where Brian and I had such an unfair advantage because we'd known each other for four and a half years. He'd watched me build two companies, I was watching him build his. We'd done all the cool, fun stuff that we could almost complete each other's sentences for a long period of time. Right. We knew each other so well that we knew where each other's crazy spots were even before we started to work together.

I. We've been talking as if the COO needs to be hired at every point. But at what point should you not be hiring a coo? At what point should you not promote and develop that?

When is tour it's really it's really when again, your first hire needs to be the executive assistant, where you can get all the admin off your plate. The next early stage managers or leaders you need in your company. If you're in the 10 to 30 or 30 to 100 stages, functional area heads that maybe have some good domain expertise, but maybe they're not strong strategic leaders. So you're going to build out your first management team. Yeah, when you can build a good department, heads like a head of marketing, ahead of sales, ahead of operations, ahead of finance, ahead of it, head of customer engagement, head of people, kind of the rough functional areas, you've probably got a good management team in place at that point. As a CEO, you probably don't have enough time to manage, to grow people. You have enough time to manage them, but you don't have enough time to grow them, to grow their skills, to mentor them, to do deep dives into their areas. That's the point when you know you need the second in command to free up your time as the CEO to think, to be strategic, to do the deep dives, to grow people, to build a virtual bench. But if you're constantly just trying to manage them, going from meeting to meeting and manage them, that's usually the trigger point that a second in command can help you leverage and really scale things up.

Well, we've covered a lot of really good things here. So what it is, why it is, how to work together better. The getting started phase, when you don't need it and when the time is right for it going internally, externally. Is there something that we haven't covered?

When's the party over? When's the party over? You know, I remember, I remember this was a third. This is stuff that no one would ever talk about in their right mind. But, but this was 16 years ago on a Thursday morning. And actually Wednesday night I said to Brian's assistant, I think Brian's going to fire me tomorrow. She's like, shut up, go home. And I went in. Brian and I were meeting at 7am the next morning and I ordered my eggs Benedict and he ordered a grapefruit. I'm like, grapefruit? You ordering grapefruit? You've never ordered grapefruit. You've always had the eggs Benedict too. And he looked at me and he started to tear up and I'm like, oh shit, this is really happening. And he said, I think we're done. I think you were the right guy to take us from 2 million to 106 million. But you're the wrong guy to take us to the billion. And I teared up and started to cry as well. And I said, I know you're right. I know that this is the right time. And he recognized that no matter how much he liked me and cared about me as a person, no matter how much I'd done to get us to there, my season was over. And the reason I was there to help him franchise and build out everything, because I did. Taught him how to franchise, taught him how to franchise, sell, built the marketing, built the pr, built like I built the whole business with him. But once it was built, we were both too entrepreneurial. He needed someone who is more detail oriented, who could slow it down, who could be more strategic. And I was just like, keep growing. And it was too big for me. So you have to know when that season is over and not think it's a failure. It's just the next stage. My first wife and I get along great. We raise two amazing kids together. We have a very healthy relationship. When I was getting remarried in May, she sent me a note and said, wish you well. Hope you and Ashley have an amazing honeymoon, and I'm happy for you both. That's not a failing first marriage. It's just a chapter that had ended. And I think you need to recognize as the CEO, when that chapter comes to a close. And how do you close it in a right honorable way so that you can then move to the next chapter and, you know, not destroy. You don't need to destroy stuff when you go to the next. The next stage.

It's a really fascinating. I love that you looped it back on that. Of thinking about what the season is and how to know that kind of thing. And that Lori and I, you know, my wife well and have this habit that we do is very much like our business habit, except a little more personal. Where from time to time. Well, every year we do a mini version, but sometimes we do kind of a deep dive. Let's kind of complete the relationship to date. Let's take stock of all that went well and all that we're proud of and that we cherish. And let's also take stock of all of the frustrations and disappointments and hurt and that kind of thing. And we just, like, get it all out. Not to, like, rehash it or fix it, but just to acknowledge it and what's there, like a deep retrospective on the thing. And then we say, okay, that relationship is over. Whatever that, that, you know, the marriage of the last 10 years or 20 years or whatever. Is over now what? And so we really work on getting it all out. So we get to this kind of blank slate and then we say, what is there to create for the future? And so far, 28 years in, we always see something new after getting that place. And it's a little terrifying every time because it feels like when we say that's over, that are we in fact saying it's over by doing that thing? Are we going to go forward? It's scary, right? But then we're kind of was like, where do you want to go from here? And. And so far we've come up with, you know, what the next phase is about.

Well, and you know what I like about the true marriage versus the business marriage is the makeup. Sex is better. Have some effing fun, right? None of this matters at the end of the day.

Yeah, well, it's nice to have a breakthrough. And I think when I think about like that thing that you were speaking to, like you saw, oh, I'd serve this purpose, what my value is here, what's needed is that. And you know, we could get to that in our relationship at some point as well. But it's true of the business relationship. Some point you say like, oh no, we're headed in different places. And in fact, when my wife and I stopped working together, it was because what in part, in large part because what I want to do with the business and what she want to do, the business were not the same anymore. And we're like, yeah, we should stop. And I've been thinking that I was going to be a full time coach for a long time and this is the time and that's when I made that break and started full time coaching.