What Does An Operations Person Even DO? Understand The COO Role & Operations

You know, obviously my expertise is around operations, execution, culture, growth, PR meetings, strategic thinking, anything about the operations of growing a world class company. If you want to ask any questions around that. Also anything about the CEO COO relationship as well. So the first question I've got is what does a good operations person even do? I'm glad you actually even mentioned an operations person because I'm hearing a lot of people just use titles all the time, you know, like what does a CFO do? Or what does a COO do? And the reality is that it really depends on the actual business that you're in and it depends on the roles and responsibilities that have been delegated to everybody on the actual leadership team. So if you think about your leadership team right now, and you've got the CEO of a leadership team, what is the CEO's role and then what are the strengths of the CEO? What are the weaknesses of the CEO? What are the areas the CEO doesn't love and delegate everything except genius. So a really good operations person, if they're the second in command to the entrepreneur, should be taking anything off the CEO's plate that they suck at, that they're not good at, that they don't love doing, and then delegate everything except genius. I also really think we have to be careful with giving out titles that are too big. Tie the title to the actual roles and responsibilities of the person. Don't just throw the actual titles out there. So as an example, let's say you have somebody who's the head of finance. Your head of finance could be a controller or a director of finance, or a VP of Finance or a cfo. You've got a head of marketing. It could be a marketing manager, director of marketing, VP of marketing, cmo, et cetera. So just be careful that you don't call your second in command a coo, unless that's truly matching up to their roles and responsibilities. Because they could be a general manager, operations manager, BPOps, etc. Next one somebody said is start focusing on saving costs and drive more added value. Yeah, right now I think there's, there's been such a huge kind of shift in the global landscape in business for the last number of months. The businesses are a little bit skittish, a little bit nervous. I would be actually investing my time and energy into growing gross margin and growing revenue. Because the reality is when you focus on revenue, you'll actually be able to solve every problem. There's not a single problem that exists that a check can solve. Joe Polish has said that for Forever, I think that was. Dan Kennedy is the one who actually coined that phrase. But if your business is sitting, focusing on cost cutting, you're going to get more of that. But if you sit and focus on growth and focus on revenue, then I think you're actually going to really see more of that. So where your focus goes, energy flows. Next question. Was probably sick of it now, but can't get enough of the vision stuff. Can you go about articulating the vision for a lawyer? So the idea with a vivid vision in a company, what was happening in companies in the past is we used to have a vision statement or a mission statement and that was how we were trying to align people. But the reality was it didn't explain how our customer engagement was going to be. The vision statement didn't necessarily explain what marketing looked like. It didn't explain our meeting rhythms, it didn't explain our office environment, our company culture. And I think what happened was the entrepreneur has in their mind a vision of what they want their company to look like in the future. But if they don't articulate that to their customers, their suppliers and their employees, then everybody else starts making it up as they go. So the idea of the vivid vision is clearly articulating in a four or five page written document what the future of your business looks like, acts like and feels like. And then sharing that four or five page document with everybody so they can start to read your mind and every sentence becomes a future state. And if you're driving towards that future state, you'll start figuring out how to make that come true. I think that's the power of using that vision. If I was a trial lawyer, I might be thinking about how am I going to show up in court, how am I going to be working with the courts, how am I going to be, you know, working with my teams? And you're going to describe your mannerisms, you'll describe your demeanor, you'll describe your preparation, you'll describe the way that you're feeling and you're trying to actually anchor yourself in that moment so that when you're actually performing either in your role or running your company, you can start performing a little bit more on instinct. So Robert Kinsler's got a question about any insight on division level COO style positions. How might one approach that differently than a global coo? So I'm going to take a stab at what you're meaning. Division level COO style, again, I think it goes back to the title. Are you talking about like a director of Marketing versus a COO for a company. So if you're the head of a business area, I think again, you have to actually really take a look at what are the roles and responsibilities of that business area. Or let's say that you're an entrepreneur who maybe has a number of companies that you're operating. How do you actually split your time over all those different companies? You want to have an operations person, whether it's a COO or a BP officer general manager who's responsible for that company. And then you kind of have different operating models, different operating plans, different operating visions for each of those businesses. There's an old saying that a person can only sit on one toilet at a time. And if you try to sit on more than one toilet, it gets kind of messy. That's why you need a head of operations running each of those business units so that you can actually really keep them focused and helps you focus your time as well. Let's see. Parshel has a question. What books and resources do you recommend? The COO of a startup? Great question. I really like the EOS Traction as a great book for startups. I think it's a really well written, documented, easy systems to put in place. I also really clearly like one of my books, Double Double. You know, you don't have to read it cover to cover, but for entrepreneurs, chapters 1, 2, 4, 6 and 12 are especially important in the startup phases. I also really like Michael Gerber's the E Myth and it just gives some lessons that are really tried and true that still work in the entrepreneurial world today. And then I also really like Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. And the last one is insanely simple, just around the principles, around simplicity that you can bring into a business. And it covers Apple and Steve Jobs, obsession at Apple. But it's really more of a business book than a lot of the biographies have been written about Steve Jobs. See, Brian Wilson has a question. Do you agree with pay ranges for employment positions and showing guidelines for advancing up the ladder? Yeah, Brian, absolutely. What I look at for every role in a company is having three levels, three or four levels within that role. So if you have a marketing manager, maybe you have a marketing manager. 1 marketing manager 2 marketing manager 3 the same title, but the roles and responsibilities that they have and the lesson learned, less support that they need, plus the skills that they've been able to acquire over time gives them that bump up in the pay grade and it also gives them that next level. But you don't have to change the actual title. And it's really important because you just don't want people who are doing well taking on more responsibilities always to want a bigger title in the organization. Sometimes the title doesn't change, but maybe that's how the bump in pay goes up. So at College Pro Painters, where I really cut my teeth in business, we had a role of general manager, and that was one of my early roles there. And the general manager was responsible for recruiting, training, and coaching franchisees. So every year we would have to go out and recruit and train them. My first year I had 16 franchisees and I was a district manager. That was the level one of a general manager. The next year I was a senior district manager, which was a level 2 of a general manager. We all had the same title, general manager, but I had more franchisees. In my second year, I had 21. In my third year, I was a business manager and I had more responsibility. I had P and L responsibility. I had a field advisor that worked underneath me. I managed about 30 franchisees and I didn't get as much or need as much support from my vp. And then later on, I went on to a fourth level of a general manager, but it was still the general manager role, but now I was opening up multiple states. So, yeah, if you put in place the roles and responsibilities abilities, the skill director skill levels that people need to achieve or skill development they need to be getting, that's how you can give them a bump in pay, but you don't have to give them a bump in title. Joel Hansen has a question. What have you learned most about how you operate during this new remote world? So I've always worked remote, or I have for 13 years. I've been coaching CEOs globally for 13 and a half years now. Started with Skype and then I was on Zoom about six years ago. So no real change for me. I'm missing the travel for sure. I really miss the global travel. I miss going to the conferences. I've been going to the Genius Network and War Room and Baby Bathwater and the TED Conference for years, Mastermind Talks, and really was looking forward to being back at a bunch of conferences and events this year. So certainly missing on that. But I'm getting ready to start living globally and running my business from being more global as well. My plan is to spend one or two months every quarter living in different cities around the world and then probably spending one or two months, you know, back in North America and do that for about a year or so, and then After a year or two, really ease into living globally fully. I've got a list of about 32 cities that I want to live in. I've got one to three months per city and I just want to start living more global. So my kids are a little older, they're 17 and 19. So that's what I'm kind of thinking about in terms of the remote world. I'm also definitely not seeing a huge rush for businesses moving back to their offices. I was did an interview, it's going to come out on the Second In Command podcast in about two weeks with the second in command for Wikipedia. And actually it's the Wikimedia group that oversees Wikipedia and she was saying that They've got around 450 employees and they've already told their employees to not plan to go back to their offices in San Francisco until June 2021. So they're already pushing out 10 months saying don't even plan to go back to work. So huge shifts going to happen in the real estate world for sure. Another question from Rob Kinsler. What would you say is the difference between a director level position versus a C suite position in a small business? Particularly relatively diverse small business? Yeah. So again, Rob, I think it really goes back to title inflation. I think we're giving out titles that are too big. 20 years ago to have a C level title to be a CEO or a CFO or a CTO or a cmo, you had to be a major major employee at a major major company. You know, you just didn't get C level employees at small companies if you were a 20 person or a 50 person company. Most of them didn't even have vice president titles. They had director or manager titles. But what happened over the years is I think Gen X started to get a little lazy. So my demo, from the kind of current 40 year old to the current 55 year olds, we got a little lazy and we gave out titles and we gave out titles because it doesn't really matter. We'll just give the person a title. And it was kind of like giving away equity, giving away a good compensation. We gave away titles a little more freely and we ended up getting title inflation inside of our companies. So I think there's no real difference in terms of the skills that are required. I think we often give out the titles too early based on the roles and responsibilities and the pay level. So even for me, I run an organization called the COO Alliance. We've got second in command, we've got people with the president title. The GM title with the DP Ops title doesn't matter as long as you're the second in command to the entrepreneur. They pay $7,500 a year to be a member and we have 12 monthly online events, but every one of the members of the COO alliance has a different title. So I really wouldn't worry about trying to give out C level titles when you're a smaller company. I would try to play those back as much as possible because you don't want the salary creep to happen because of titles and you also want people to be able to drive towards getting that title as you grow your company. So I try to reserve those if possible. I remember when I walked into 1-800-got-JUNK for the first time. Strangely, it was 20 years ago this month that I walked into 1-800-gotJUNK and we had six vice presidents and six people in the call center and Brian the CEO and it seemed odd to me that he had six BPs when five of them didn't even have a direct report. And that was an example of title inflation. Just wanting to give people a title to make them feel important instead of keeping their roles and responsibilities tied to a title and tied to a pay grade. Hopefully that's helpful. Let's see, last question we've got right now is how do you show your clients and staff that you appreciate them? Eugene, I love that. That's a great question. I actually follow a lot of the rules, rules and methodologies outlined in a book called Giftology by John Rulin. So as an example, all of our COO alliance members get a custom engraved knife with their like a big, huge chef's knife with their name on it. All of my guests at the Second in Command podcast, I send them a custom engraved chef's knife as well. And John's company takes care of all that for me. We also make sure that all of our members who are coming to events, we know in advance what their favorite drinks are and what their favorite snacks are. And in their gift bag when they arrive is their favorite snack. And then we make sure that the bartender makes their favorite drink for them without them even needing to ask. So just kind of listening to those needs are some of the things we do. But we really follow a lot of the systems from the book called Top Rating.