Why Every CEO Needs a Trusted Second in Command

It's almost like saying what makes a great wife or what makes a great husband? It's really what's the perfect balance or yin and yang to their spouse. If I'm a husband, what makes a great wife for me is somebody who gives me the balance and where I'm weak, who leverages my strengths, who can repeat my sentences for me, who I have absolute trust in. It's the very same in the CEO. Every CEO needs a second in command to be great at the stuff that they're not.

Hello everyone. I'm excited today to bring you Cameron Herold. Cameron is a known around the world as the CEO whisperer. He's built multiple $100 million companies. He's probably best well known for helping grow 1,800 got junk from a small $2 million a year company to doing over 100 million in revenue in just six years. He's also the author of many best selling books including Double Double Vivid Vision and has a new one out called Second in Command. Unleash the power of your coo. Welcome to the show, Cameron.

Hey, Brian, thanks for having me.

I mean normally I ask for backstory, but I don't think we have all day to go over everything you've done. So let's focus in on the coo. So like when should a CEO, whether it's the business owner, in a lot of cases, small business owner and my kind of audience, when do they decide, hey, I need help, I need a right hand man. How do you advise that?

I've been around working with entrepreneurs now for about 30 years. I've played the second command role a number of times with companies and then I run this organization called the COO alliance where we've got hundreds of COOs from all over the world. So I have a of purview into kind of seeing that mindset. The entrepreneurial journey goes from. I call it the ones and threes. So you have just you and then you have three employees and then you have 10 and then you have 30 and then you have 100 and then you have 300. Right. You kind of scale out. Yeah. And each of those transitions, there's a point that the company has to iterate or change. When you get to three employees, you've got a couple people you can delegate to. Well, they're not really a coo, they're not a director yet. They're just a couple of key people that you can give some work to. Right. You get to 10 employees, you probably have your first manager who's managing some people. For you. And you need to get some results through people. Again, not a second in command. Probably a good operations person, a good project manager, a good kind of jack of all trades, master of none, someone you can count on. And you're trying to grow their skills and grow their capacity. When you get to 30 employees, you probably have your first management team. You've got four or five people that are managing everyone in the company for you. And you're really now largely managing most of those four or five people. At that point, you've probably got your first second in command. You know, it's the person that you would if you were sick for six months, that they could probably run the company for you. They're probably not a COO yet. Maybe they're a director of operations or maybe at best a VP of operations. And they probably have again, strong project management skills, strong leadership skills, stronger time management skills. But they're not a true leader yet. They're a good tactical manager. They probably don't have strategic capabilities yet. When you go from 30 employees to 100, then you've got your first leadership team, your, your kind of VP level or C level leaders that are running each of the functional areas. They probably have good leadership skills. They've been around strategy before. They think at a different level. They're better at the interpersonal relationships and interpersonal skills. That's when you've got your first coo, right? So that's kind of the core. The other thing that I always bump into is, you know, entrepreneurs when you're in the 10 to 20, 10 to 30 employee range. Well, I need to hire a second in command. No, no, you need to hire an executive assistant first. Because most of them think they need a coo. They're trying to get a bunch of stuff off their plate, but they don't realize that a bunch of that stuff is the minimum wage jobs that they can delegate to an EA or a fractional EA first, which will buy them a full year before they really need to hire their coo.

I've always viewed it as similar, kind of growing our business as like this stair step approach. It's kind of the same concept where it's like you can go up, you invest in the people, like then you can go vertically, like you can get all these sales, you reach a capacity level, then you kind of invest in more people. In our case, we can buy more stores if we have more district managers or whatever it is. And then we build out the office. Now we have a, now we have this whole office staff that, you know, we can, we can dilute their cost further by continuing to grow. Right. And then you go up and even for us, yeah, we were probably at or we have 200 employees today. And you know, we, we brought our guy on and our COO on in August, so we stretched it a little bit.

And you know what, one of the first stretches that you were feeling at a hundred is you were probably at the point where you're like, I have these strong people that report to me, but I don't have enough time to grow them. I don't have enough time to mentor them. I don't have enough time to remove ob obstacles for them. I don't have enough time to do any skip level meetings and deep dive into their functional areas. You're still so busy running the business that you don't have time to flip the org chart upside down to be there as a supportive leader. When you have that level of COO who you know you can count on, you know the core values are sacrosanct, you know that you've got a good trust relationship with them and they got the skills, it gives you the breathing room to start being strategic. It gives you the breathing room to start thinking about the business in a different way, which gives you incremental leverage. You know, one, one thing that happens when you're so busy running the business is the solution to every problem tends to be hire more people.

Yeah.

But when you can slow down and be strategic, all of a sudden you go, wait, we could actually say no to those four opportunities and have less people. We could automate, we could optimize, we could leverage AI like, holy. We could grow in so many better ways because it gives you time to think. And, and if you can get that right, second in command in place, it gives you a leadership team time to think as well. Yeah.

And it's like balancing the growth in. For me, I was in that role, you know, I was focused on growth, like, how do we get more stores? And a lot of that is relationship based with me and other people in the market. But then it's how much time am I spending on trying to grow versus, like working on the stores and what we got? That's where you feel it. And I. In terms of your comedy, I've heard you on other podcasts talk about, you know, having less staff and then paying them more.

Right.

You have better quality people that you're paying double, but you've got like four less amount of people, so they're making double and you have Half as many heads to manage, but they're all like top notch in their class and like it's a much easier organization to manage than a bunch of, you know, being cheap. But then you need like a ton of people, right. And then you have turnover and it's like all this stuff.

So I call it talent stacking. That if you can stack the talent in your organization, you get those incremental results. And we've all heard that saying of that one, A replaces three Cs. I grew up in Canada and we played a lot of hockey and we've watched a lot of hockey. And when a player on the hockey teams, you got six players against six and when one of them gets into a penalty, he goes into the penalty box. Your team is now playing shorthanded. But these teams that are playing shorthanded often score goals because they have the four best players and their goalie out there with nobody else interfering, getting in the way. And like you're getting more done with less people.

Yep. They get the breakaways, they get all kinds of stuff because.

Yeah, right.

Because the other teams may be being too aggressive too. And so then they, they take that to advantage. So you really go by head count, not necessarily kind of revenue count. I guess they're somewhat correlated.

I mean you should. Yeah, they are correlated. You can almost do the 100,000, 300,000 million, 3 million, 10 million, 30 million. They almost definitely correlate there as well. When you get to 10 million, you can start to afford to buy the talent. When you're at 3 million in revenue with your cost of goods sold and your overhead, there's not enough margin there to be able to buy people. So you're kind of getting away with what you can at 10 million, you know, if you imply like a 40 cost of goods sold and some overhead, you might have some room to start buying people. When you get to 30 million you can absolutely talent stack, you can afford to go buy good.

That's where we're at now.

So. And that's what's happening in the Bay Area. If you look at every single major VC funded or publicly traded technology company, they're taking their money and they're buying people, people. That's why all these engineering people cost so much is because the Facebooks and ebays can afford to pay, ah, give another hundred grand. I don't. They're basically predatory hiring. Yeah.

And they got Twitter and Elon Musk is like firing everybody and jokingly running Twitter on like 75 people. Now what makes a great COO. What should somebody the qualities that someone should look for when making this hire.

It's almost like saying what makes a great wife or what makes a great husband? It's really what's the perfect balance or yin and yang to their spouse. If I'm a husband, what makes a great wife for me is somebody who gives me the balance in where I'm weak, who leverages my strengths, who can repeat my sentences for me, who I have absolute trust in. It's the very same in the coo. Every CEO needs a second in command to be great at the stuff that they're not. So in some cases, CEOs are very inward facing, very technology focused, very systems operations focused. They might have a second in command who's very outward facing, who could be the face of the brand, who could be sales and marketing and biz dev, or it could be flipped. I was terrible at it and I was terrible at finance. So I didn't run those two business areas. I've got 30% of my CEO alliance members that finance and IT report to them. It's a yin and yang. And then it's also how can you really get the strong trust and communication between the two so that it is kind of like that marriage? But then lastly, it's also the timing. Because I was the right COO at 1,800, got junk to go from 2 million to 106 million. I would have been a horrible COO to go from 100 million to a billion.

What would have made you terrible to go from 100 to 400? Like I guess, what changes in the business?

Yeah, we had 3,000 employees system wide. We had 248 employees at the head office, 330 locations, four countries, 13 operational businesses. I'm a very entrepreneurial minded, quick start, execute now, plan later. Company just started to get too big and we couldn't grow at that kind of almost frenetic, energetic pace.

Okay.

I also came in as a bit of a mentor because I had built franchise companies before. I'd been a franchise before. I could take a lot of what I knew how to do and just tell people how to do it. Tell people what to do. When the company scales, you're no longer telling everybody what to do. You're. You're kind of more supporting and growing them. And that was where I was then, out of my element.

And I feel like as our company's gotten bigger, it's kind of like it becomes this giant elephant. You can't push it. Right. It like kind of does its own thing, you have to direct it. There's that great book about changing. It's like there's the rider and the elephant, right? And like the rider's got to really kind of direct where it's going. But the elephant, if the elephant wants to go right, doesn't matter what the rider says, the elephant's going, right. I feel this frustration sometimes too. It's like, hey, you want to do all these things, you want to try these new ideas? And it becomes harder.

Here was a classic example of where I broke down as a CEO. We were at about 100 million mark and we had these 13 operational businesses. We were starting to open some corporate locations. We just opened Australia, we just opened up in the uk. We were in Canada, in the us And I was making decisions based on my gut that have intuitively played out to be correct. They've all played out to be correct later. But we didn't have enough cash to be able to or cash flow or bank facilities to grow. So where I was making decisions based on what we had in the bank and cash that I could see and how we could scale, we couldn't actually get to those numbers fast enough using the bank. And we didn't have any bank loans, we didn't have any credit facilities because I was like, we got 5 million in the bank, we'll just spend that. I didn't understand how to leverage a balance sheet. I didn't understand. I didn't understand how to grow a hundred million dollar company. It's kind of like I understood how to be a teenager, but I didn't understand how to be a parent of teenagers. Yeah, it's really similar.

Do you find yourself in that? Like, I guess there's two ways you go. One is you, you try to figure out how to do that. The other way is you just say, hey, I'm going to stay focused on where I already feel like I'm good at.

Yeah, well, and it's funny, like, now that I started this COO alliance six years ago, I very quickly understood that my role is not to be there to teach COOs how to be COOs. My role was to bring together a group of amazing COOs and give them the space to be able to mentor and coach and facilitate and collaborate and kind of build that community for them to do it. I've got COOs who are members running $1.2 billion companies. I can't teach them, like, what am I doing? So. So I kind of have become a bit of the sage on the side, right? Or instead of their teaching. So I just recommend that's, that's a power.

I mean I'm in a mastermind group. That's the power Mastermind.

Right.

It's one person and following like the Sherpa. It's about bringing all these minds together and like letting each other help each other and then that's where the real value comes in.

I was approached to, to coach a franchisor recently and I was like, you know what? I'd be the wrong person to coach your franchise business because it's in the restaurant space. I don't have any restaurant ip. I don't have understand the restaurant industry. I think it's very different. But if it was anything in the home services space, I could probably coach almost any franchisor in the home services arena. I could never coach anyone in the automotive space because there's too many techn aspects to what you do and how you do and also the location based. It's just different. So my skill set breaks down.

Okay, well you can send the auto ones to me. I'll, I'll take them.

There you go.

How does a cc, it's like the Ying, the year Yang. How does one then do a self assessment or what kind of advice do you have them or just most people just kind of know, hey, I'm, I'm like not really organized. I need somebody who's organized. Like how does someone do that assessment?

Most people don't know. Most of the entrepreneurs really fall in this area and I've heard it so often they're like, oh well here's an example. I get offered all the time to be someone's coo. I'm like, first they can't afford me. Secondly, they have no idea what my skills are and my weaknesses are. And they just think that because I was the CEO of one company, I could be the CEO of their. That's kind of like saying if I was, was single. I'm like, oh, you've been, you've been a wife before, why don't you be my wife? That's ridiculous. Right? So it starts with the entrepreneur saying what am I good at? What am I really bad at? What fills me with energy? What drains me of energy? What are the functional areas of the business that I have good expertise in that love? And what are the ones that I could really get some domain expertise around? That's really the starting point. So it's kind of like an activity inventory. And then it's also if you could come up with two or three core Areas that if you spent time on those, you'd really leverage your unique ability or really leverage your zone of genius. If you can delegate everything except genius, you'd supercharge the business. So it's kind of splitting those roles up and then it's finding a COO who doesn't want to work on the areas you're good at. Right. If you're Tobias Luque, who's the CEO of Shopify, has Harley Finkelstein as his coo. Harley's not great at the engineering. He's not great at it. Harley is an outward facing business development, sales and marketing machine for Shopify. In another company, it might be exactly mixed. You might have a CEO who runs all of the engineering and finance sides.

So where can people look to find one? I mean, is it, is it indeed, is it referrals? Is it any other sources that you've seen success at least maybe for out of your alliance of where people kind of come from?

Yeah. The first one is that great people are never actually out looking for a job. Right. You've got to, you've got to know where those great people hang out and you've got to try to poach them or you've got to know where those people hang out and you got to go and get them there. I mean, before we went live, you mentioned the Special Operators Transition foundation, which is like a, sounds like it's a network of these former military special ops people that want to work in operations and companies. I'm like, whoa, that's like all the ducks are hanging out in the one pond. They're all waiting, going, shoot me.

Right?

Okay. So I think a good executive search firms knowing groups like that where you can put your offer in front of them and see if you can attract them in and definitely leveraging your network and your email list. But what I like doing is getting a very strong job description written and then getting a copywriter to polish that job description so that it's almost like a marketing letter or a sales letter. Like it really polarizes, it really pops. And treating it like a marketing thing and sharing that with the whole world, that's. That's the core starting points for sure.

Yeah, that's great, the copywriting. Because a lot of times we go and just write a job ad and like I write or my brother writes it or whoever and it's like it sucks probably. And it probably looks like every other one out there versus I would bet like only 2% of like ads are professionally copyright written. Right. That they look good and they're attractive and they.

I'll give you a great example of how a great copywriter can polish one. And it's also how truly understanding your company culture is core to recruiting a good person. So I was coaching a client based in Florida. They have the heart car, the cardiac heart monitoring system that's on the space station and Everest base camp. So very advanced cardiac science business. Right. They wanted a head of engineering and they said if you ever wear a pocket protector or a pair of dress pants to the office, we'll fire you. You must come to work wearing board shorts and flip flops.

Okay.

Yeah. Now their team was like, whoa. And like, no, but that's us. Like, that's, that's who we are. So, so they put this out there and all of a sudden this engineer was like, oh my God, like, I surf every other day and I like live four miles from your office. And like, are you kidding? Are you, Were you joking? And they're like, no, this is us. Match made. Because he had the technical skills, the culturally fit and he just attracted like a magnet. But they had other people that were very qualified with like, I can't believe you told me that. I'm all professional. And they're like, yeah, well you just wouldn't be a good fit for us anyway.

I mean, I guess you go on like upwork or some sort of outsourced website to find some like a copywriter like that.

Yeah, I, I love having one who's kind of sitting in the wings that you can turn to like every month to get like little, little projects.

Yeah. And you mentioned it's sodif it's called Special Operation Transition foundation to where we've hired, you know, RCO and I know three other people who've similar to mine who kicking ass. So that's gold. It's a non profit. You know, obviously you make a donation if, if they help you find somebody. And yeah, it's, it's, it's awesome. So gold.

I mean it goes back to the whole the A players hang out with A players. Right.

So you bring on a new coo. What are some of the common mistakes you think these guys make or that a new COO should be like aware of?

Yeah. So one is that. And there's two parts to this. The COO is kind of like dropping a big boulder into a pond. Right. Their job is to get to the bottom. Well, they're going to just fine, but there's going to be a lot of ripple effects. The CEO's job is to watch for all the ripple effects, the good ripple effects and the bad ripple effects. More often than not, we're so worried about onboarding them and making sure they're up to speed and making sure they're doing well in their role and helping them. We forget all these other things that are happening, like the four other people in the company that are pissed off they didn't get the job. Or the two people that are now having to report to the COO but they miss reporting to the owner. Or the two people that are reporting to the COO and their styles don't mix and they're worried. Or the person who reports to the COO and they're worried they're going to be out of a job because the COO has a friend who's also a VP of that area. Or the COO has all these great ideas, but they're putting them in place too soon before they really know the business. So you have to watch for all those ripple effects. The second thing that I like to do is say in the first 30 days, the COO's job is to sit and look and listen and watch and observe and have a notebook and write down as many things that they see and observe and notes in the notebook and do none of them. Literally just, I want to fire somebody. Write it down, but don't you dare do it. I want to change this meeting. Cool. Write that down as an idea too, but don't do it. 30 days, sit in on every meeting, Sit in on phone calls, ride shotgun, sit beside the mechanics. Just watch and learn and listen and read and listen in on phone calls and read emails and. And like, observe every meeting you can. Right? The next 30 days is to go back and stress test all your hypotheses. It's like, hey, I think I would want to fire this person. Go dig in around that. Go ask some more questions about Bob. Oh, oh, wrong. Or, yeah, probably do want to. So month two is kind of testing your hypotheses on each of your ideas. And then at the end of month two, it's stacking them up in the order of priority. Which one should I do first? And then month three, you start executing on all those ideas. So you're really giving yourself two full months to think and to watch and to observe and to get up to speed and to think about what you're going to do. And then it's making those decisions then, because after two months, you've gained enough relationship trust with the other people on the team and you understand the Business a little bit more to make those decision. So it's slowing down before you go fast.

That makes sense. And then one on that month, three. So you have this big list of things. What do you recommend? Is it the easy wins you go for for first that are just the quick ones, or is it the ones that maybe will have the most impact?

Intuitive question. It's the. It's the easy wins first. It's the low hanging fruit so that the people around you can see that an idea that was put in place is paying results. I like it to like launching a satellite. If I can quickly launch that satellite and then it's in orbit forever for free. That's a good easy win, right? What are some things that I can do quickly that'll pay dividends for a long period of time? So my team's like, huh, that was cool. That's easy. That was a good win. Get a couple of those under your belt before you launch some big project on like, you know, integrating a new ERP system that's going to drive everybody crazy for six months.

Yeah, we have the same approach when we're acquiring, you know, we acquire a lot of existing franchises, right? And you have this whole new team and they're like scared on day one because it's new ownership and all this stuff. And like our goal is like day one or week one. Like, what are just these easy little wins? And a lot of times it's like deferred maintenance or like something needs to be painted or like the equipment's broken or like we upgrade the computers. I don't. All these little things that they've been waiting and waiting and waiting and we come in, we're like Superman. And it like, these guys are serious. They don't just want to like cut and run or like whatever strip the company or people. You know, they have all these crazy.

Theories when you go in and just paint the location and give them new kind of cool computers and take them for lunches and tell them not ever wear a tie anymore. They're like, wait, what? This is awesome.

We had a store once, we bought last year and it was so dark in the shop, the guys wore like lights on their heads because none of the lights in the shop work. So we like, you know, we get electrician and we like replace the LED lights. And it's just like stupid things like that that.

I was in the auto body space for years. We built Gerber Auto Collision in the US And Boyd Auto Body in Canada. It's not like a $2 billion company. We would do the acquisitions and when we bought the auto body shops, we'd go in and epoxy, paint the floors in this light gray and paint all the walls white because we wanted it to be female friendly. We wanted the woman to be able to walk through the shop and feel clean and not, not clean enough that her kid would eat off the floor.

Dingy dungeon.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Amazing.

And same for CEO that's like, he's been working some of those easy wins and a lot of them are like you said, they have to be pretty good at the interpersonal relationships, right? What are their wives? How many kids do they have? Like, he knows more about some like the mechanics and some of the store managers do because he like intentionally asks them the questions and gets.

He cares. Yeah. And he cares and yeah, that's, that's you. You actually just touched on probably one of the core skills that a COO or second command needs to have is the interpersonal relationships, the ability to build connections with humans because they're not there as a tiebreaker in making decision. There to get people to work together and collaborate. They're there to draw the conflict and help people get through it with each other. They're there to actually leverage people's personal goals and personal dreams and attach them to the company's core purpose and missions. Like they have to really understand and care about people.

How do they go about getting the people below them to do some of those things? Right? Like for my CEO, it's, it's like, how do we get the district managers to take a more personal interest in the employees? How do we get the store managers to kind of have those one on one conversations, right? It's kind of like that emotional intelligence, like bleeding its way down.

So two parts. Let's flip the org chart upside down. So let's have the CEO at the bottom supporting the VPs who support the managers, who support the frontline staff, who support the customers. So you build that kind of real supportive, caring, removing obstacles, coaching, cheering people on structure. Everybody starts to feel it versus the holding them accountable, managing them. So that's one definitely the leading from example, right? So he's, he's doing it and showing it and then making sure that others see it. So it's kind of subtly showing that and calling that out. So it's in a meeting, it's like, hey Bob, how was your weekend with so and so and how's your guitar lessons going? Other people like, what?

How do you remember that? Like, how do you know that yeah, yeah. Maybe I should like know something about someone I work with.

Yeah. It starts to bleed into the. So you start to infuse that in the organization is another. And then the other is growing people. Right. I, I believe that a leader's core job is to grow people, to grow their skills and to grow their confidence. Those two things always. So if you, if, if you observe that one of your direct reports, sports isn't strong on some of the interpersonal or isn't strong on their coaching or isn't strong on their conflict management or isn't strong on spending time with people, coach them on that, find that and show them the stuff they're doing great. Right. And, and to help them develop on the areas that they can get better.

At as the CEO. So for, for me, what are the things I can do to allow my guy to thrive?

Stay out of his way. Cheer him on, shine the spotlight on him internally in the organization so people know that you're proud of him and see the good work he's doing. Have time behind the scenes where and actually one on one, talk to each other about what you're doing well and could do better. Ask him for advice on where you suck and where you can do better. Truly being vulnerable. Have time to disconnect and just go and work together and hang out together and be friends together so that you have that. You know, Brian and I had a real unfair advantage at 1-800-got junk. I started with him in October of 2000, but three months before that he was my best man at my wedding. We already knew everything about each other. We loved each other. We'd been in a mastermind group together for four and a half years. So he had like a four and a half year interview before I even started working with him. So it's working on those things I think can really help your COO succeed for sure. Yeah.

And getting the feedback. I know a couple times he's been giving me feedback when I would like I got mad at somebody in a meeting, right. And like gave them a bunch of shit in front of other people. And he was like, man, you shouldn't, you shouldn't really do that. Like, so I've been, I've been conscious of that now of just holding my mouth when I felt that I should say something and, and addressing it one on one offline. Right.

Like it's so hard. I talked about that recently that I destroyed the culture in my. For about a month because I rightly so ripped everybody apart for something that wasn't going well, but the net result of me showing them where they'd fucked up in the way that I did, it was so bass awkward that I was like.

Because then they don't want to take chances. They don't want to speak up, but they don't want to, like, they just want to be these, like, then like very narrow people versus like we want people to like.

Yeah, well. And your role as the CEO is to be the chief energizing officer. What energy are you bringing into the organization that you can infuse with them on that daily basis? Because that momentum creates momentum, that energy transfers, right?

Yeah. Whether it's positive or negative, I'm bringing all the negative energy.

You're bringing it.

I'm going to infect everybody versus staying positive, even if I don't always feel that way. So is that so one of my questions, and maybe I already answered it, but what are the common things that CEOs do that then hold them back? I would imagine it's micromanaging. I would imagine it's like ping ponging. Direction and vision's terrible.

What else? Yeah, the seagull management is a good one. Right. When you swoop in, you shit all over everybody and you leave. I heard that recently I had a CEO that I was coaching and his COO is a CEO alliance member. And the CEO said, you know, everything's going so well in the company. Like, all 120 employees are operating. I feel like I need to go break some stuff. I'm like, no, dude, just let it operate. Great. Like, just chill, relax. So CEOs have to sometimes step back and just allow it to operate and, and look at it from a different lens. I think CEOs have to praise more. I think we're so good at showing areas for people to improve and what to fix what's broken and all. Like, you know, this could be tweaked or this could be fixed, or this could be broken, or imagine if that could be better. Or here's six new projects. We forget that all we're doing is loading people up with more instead of constantly, you know, praising and gratitude and praising and gratitude.

And for us, it's keeping it simple. Like, I'm all over the place sometimes with reporting and numbers and data and all these KPIs and all this stuff. And I think we're trying to get down to like, what are just like the four things that we could do and just like really focusing on.

On that one of the core, core things or one of the core metrics that I think every CEO should focus on is the employee Net Promoter score. It's how happy are my employees? Because if your employees are really happy, chances are they're going to do everything to take care of the customers. The employees are going to go through brick walls for you. The employees are going to work harder and longer. So then all of a sudden your customers are really happy. Well, if you got really happy employees and really happy customers, your turnover is low, your retention's high, your training costs are low, your customers are really happy, you can probably charge more.

I mean, I'm familiar with Net Promoter, a customer standpoint, but I've never thought about it from an employee standpoint. So that's.

It's the number one. The number one metric for me in every company that I've ever worked with is how happy can I make my employees?

Okay, and how do you survey them? Just like a Google form or something.

Google form. If it's a. If it's a small company, I walk around and hand everybody a post it note with the same color pen and I'm like, just write a number of 1 to 10 on the post it note of how you'd rate us, you know, as the best company to work for. If it's a Google form, you can do it out or survey monkey and just say, what's also one thing we can do to make this a great place to work? What I do is I do that survey twice a year. Year I do it once. Once in January, once in July, and in July I just say, what's one thing we can do that wouldn't cost money that would make this the best company to work for? Just keep taking those ideas.

Yep. That's awesome. So you mentioned COO Alliance a couple times. Can you just talk to me a little bit like, what is it? What does it cost? Who should join? What do they get? That kind of thing.

I was a member of a lot of different Mastermind communities for entrepreneurs. I was a member of the Entrepreneurs Organization. I did strategic coach for seven years. I was in Genius Network for seven years. Baby Bathwater multiple times. Mastermind talks five times. I've got onto a bunch. And then I've worked with YPO in 10 countries. And so lots and lots there's all these groups for entrepreneurs. But the problem is the entrepreneur is not really the one who's growing the company. It's their second in command or it's their leaders. And there were groups for marketers and engineers and lawyers and accountants or all these groups. But there's no community for the second command. So I started it for them. Membership is 8, 900 a year. They have a three hour event every month for 12 months. They have a closed, private slack group where they all share messages and ideas and questions with each other and they all answer and help each other throughout the year. We also have accountability groups, so we put them in groups of six and they meet for one hour every month in small groups of six to share their problems and support each other. And then we have two optional in person events a year. One is held in Scottsdale, one's held at MIT in Boston and we have them come to those and that's about five grand per event.

That's like a two or three day event. Bringing in speakers or talking.

Yeah, the one that we have coming up in April, we have Chip Connolly who is the founder of the Joy de Vivre hotel chain. We've got Don depony, who is a monk punk. And then a guy named Warren Rustand who is a spectacular speaker on leadership. You know, he was, he's worked inside the White House, sold 2 billion dollar companies. Every time I see Warren speak, I feel like a complete loser in life.

It's like, what's some of the content? Like what are some of the discussions these guys are talking about in the three hour a month or you know, at these conferences?

Yeah, how to build a better relationship with my CEO, how to be more open and vulnerable with my team. We've got a speaker coming in to talk about AI and all the different, like eight or nine different AI tools to leverage inside of our business. Building better workplace culture, meeting rhythms, metrics, KPIs and dashboards, you know, interviewing, recruiting, hiring. It's everything, it's. And it's the stuff that as entrepreneurs we're like, yeah, we need better people on the bus. And we think that's a discussion about recruiting. They want to talk about interviewing for six hours and probably chat about it in their accountability groups two more times. You know, they want to, they want to review all the interview questions that are being asked. They want to talk about the software that we're using to onboard people. They want like, they get into that, they get into the real nuts and bolts of the business.

And you have a wide range of industry. I mean, you mentioned people in finance and stuff.

We've got pure play, offline businesses, got pure, pure, pure online businesses. We've got members from 17 countries. Our youngest COO is 22 years old and he's a CEO of four different companies, all doing more than 5 million in revenue. It blows my mind. Our oldest member is 62. We've got about 40% of the members are women.

How many. How many do you have?

We're in around the 200 range right now, but we've got the largest Domino's Pizza franchise. Franchisee. They've got a couple hundred pizza. Dominant Domino's. Look.

What was one of the biggest mistakes you made as a coo?

Not listening to my VP of finance. When we had a very quiet, very humble, very amiable, and he was very smart, but he would come to us and say, do you think that this is a good decision? And Brian and I were like, yeah, yeah, that's great. Let's. Let's roll. You know, I'm worried that this. No, no. We got this. And we just wouldn't listen to him with his concerns around cash flow and around how we were. We were using our cash to scale the business. And we at one point had no money. Went to the bank to get a credit line. The bank said, well, you don't have any money. And we're like, yeah, we just spent our 5 million in cash. We paid 2 million for the office renovation. And the moves, like, paid 800,000 in for taxes, paid 800,000 in bonuses. And they're like, well, that was dumb. We're like, why? They're like, because we can't loan to you with your position. So Brian had to go out and borrow 420 grand from his mom to meet payroll. So I realized that if you're not willing to listen to the people that you have reporting to, you get people you're willing to listen to. But God gave us two ears and one mouth. We need to use them in that ratio just to even listen, to hear what they're saying, to go, oh, that's interesting. That was a huge.

Maybe we can consider that even if you don't do it, you're at least pausing for a second.

Yeah. And to truly understand it, like, what do you mean? Should we slow down? What do you mean? Are we sure? Can you show me what you're thinking? Like, let me understand that. Like, if I'd spent 15 minutes more just understanding it, Brian has spent 15 minutes more understanding it. We wouldn't have then had to fire 20 people and, you know, shut down the UK and call our vendors and tell them we weren't paying them for one of them. We said, we're not paying you for 90 days. And she started yelling at me. I said, if you keep yelling at me, I'm not even putting you into the lottery to see if you get paid in 90 days. Like, we don't have, like, yell.

All you want is that you build. Not corporate, too. I mean, because it's a franchise, right? And a franchise. Yeah, he takes on a lot of that. There's capital investments.

No, we. We had 13 corporate locations that we started to open up. And because we were trying to prove to franchisees and we were doing it, we're like, we can run a location anywhere. Like, give us the worst market, we can open up there and kick ass. Okay, well, then do Chicago in the winter. We're like, okay, so we. You. We did it. And then do, like, an African American market in South Philly. We're like, we got that one, too. And then we opened up Australia and then we opened up in the uk. So our corporate expansion. And then we had, you know, we had 60,000 square feet at our head office. We had, you know, 248 employees at our head office. So we had a big corporate behemoth that we were starting to manage, too.

So where can people find the book? When. When is it released?

Yeah, the book. The book comes out in two weeks. It comes out January 24th. So probably by the time we're live, we'll be. We'll be out. It's on Amazon, Audible, and itunes. I actually read the audio version for this book. Of all my six books, this is the only one I decided to read. And they can find. If they go to just Amazon, they'll find it. Or if they go check out the COO alliance, they'll find that as well. And then check out investinyourleaders.com, which is all of the core leadership skills that managers need to excel in their jobs. And it's really how you're going to grow a small business into something large.

It's a set of courses, correct? I've looked through them. I thought they looked pretty good.

Yeah. It's what I consider are the core skills that managers need to be highly effective in their role. And if we grow their skill set, they can grow the company. You know that you think about any manager out there, they all run meetings, but they've never been trained. Or they all do job interviews, but they've never been trained to have. They all like coaching and delegation, time management. So I just created the modules around that. That's how I've grown all the companies over the years, was teaching those skills.

Well, that's awesome. I appreciate you coming on and chatting with me and sharing all your knowledge. And wisdom. And, you know, I got a ton of good notes, and I'm excited to start, you know, putting some of the stuff into place with my guy.

So thank you. I appreciate the time, Brian, and congrats on your hire, too. It sounds like you've got a fantastic coo.