Cameron Herold says COOs need to reject more ideas to stay focused. He uses ROI to evaluate proposals: people, time, money against employee impact, revenue, and strategy. At 1-800-GOT-JUNK, only 15% of staff were trained, so French translation got postponed.
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I want your COO to say no to you. If you're an entrepreneur and your COO is saying yes more often than they're saying no, you have a big problem. So the COO's job is to say no more often than they say yes. In fact, every senior leader has to get good at saying no more often than we say yes. And let me explain why. The first part is the CEO wants to be surrounded by people that say no and not now. You don't want to be surrounded by yes men. You don't want to be surrounded by people that say, oh yes, boss, you've got all the right ideas. You need to know. Know that your leadership team can say, actually, I disagree. Here's why I think that's a bad idea. Here's why. Here's what the data says about that idea. Here's why I think we should delay that. Here's why. I think there's other priorities we should have. Here's why. So sometimes the no is a not now, or sometimes the no is a no because. But you need to have true leaders around you that can say no. So one of the skills that people need to develop to be able to say no is, is to be able to explain the roi, the return on investment of certain ideas. The CEO has to be very good at analyzing the amount of people, time and money that have to go into a project and then what that return on investment is going to be. Right? Is it going to make our employees happier? Is it going to make our customers happier? Will it drive more profitability or more gross margin or more revenue? Will it drive towards some part of the strategy that the company is really working hard on this year? If those inputs are going to give us those right outputs, then it's a yes. Otherwise it's either a not now or it's a no. But if a COO is trying to be liked, if the COO is not good at handling conflict, if they're trying to build this big permissive organization where everybody gets involved and we all have a vote and we take everybody's ideas to stake, some of that is good, but you end up working on so many different parts of the business that are not necessarily a yes. Give you an example of this. Years ago at 1-800-got junk, we had about 3,000 employees system wide. Now that was 2,800 of them out in the field working in trucks, hauling junk. And we had an lms, we had a learning management system which was an online system with videos and online training for our 2,800 people to be out in the field to know how to haul junk, how to do it safely, how to sell with customers, how to upsell sell, how to price, all the things about. About loading. It's more complicated than you think it is. So There was about 10 different modules that people had to go through. 2,800 people going through those modules. And someone in our training department was building out the French system. All that content was going to be in French because we were just opening up in Quebec. Now, on the surface, it seemed like a good idea, put it in French. We're opening up in Quebec. Let's go and do it. But my spider senses were saying, wait a second. That's going to take a lot of people time and energy. It's going to cost a lot of money to translate. But we're going to have to reshoot stuff. We're going to have to dub all the information. We're going to have to double check and transcribe it back to make sure that it actually translates properly. So I asked the person in the learning department, I said, of the 2,800 people in the United States, how many of them have already gone through the online model and been trained in the model and that are certified in the models? Only 15%. So only 300 people had been trained in the content in English. And, like, instead of developing all this content in French, why don't we train the other 2,500 people first? So it was a no and definitely a not now for that project. But it was because I had the confidence to explain that to the leadership team and to the learning development team that they're like, oh, my gosh. And they completely killed the content. It also allowed us to go back in and examine all of the activities and all of the projects that everyone was working on. But if your CEO is not good at saying no, if they're not good at saying not now, you end up building a lot more complexity and you end up with a lot of people working on a lot of miscellaneous projects. In fact, when I was writing my first book, Double Double, the original working title was how to Get More Done with Less People Faster. It was because if a leader is good at saying no, you can work on the critical few things versus the important many. So make sure that your COO and every leader inside of your company is good at saying no, and they're good at saying not now.
