Why Your COO Asks So Many Questions | Cameron Herold (Podcast 337)

Lacy's going to ask seven or eight or nine questions before she starts the project. The who, the what, the when, the why, the how, the budget, the priorities. And for Nick, it pisses him off because he thinks that she's arguing with him. She's not arguing with him. She's trying to understand him. And Nick has been rolling this project around in his mind for an hour or a day or a week or three months, or he just intuitively knows because he sees the whole thing. So he delegates it onto her lap, and he's a little bit kind of overwhelmed with all the other stuff that's going on, and he just expects her to catch up. So I'm going to suggest that all of you do your Colby A profile. It costs you about 50 bucks, 60 bucks. And then ask your CEO or your COO to do their Colby A profile as well. The only thing you're going to learn from a Colby, but it's huge, is how people initiate or start projects. So as an example, we'll use Lacy and me as an example right now. So Lacy's the COO or Nick's company. And Lacy's profile is very typical of a coo. I'll show you what my profile is. And my profile is very typical of an entrepreneur, or right away, the numbers are very different. So just even looking at the numbers, you know there's going to be something different. Cameron is 4393. Lacy is 8814. So I'm going to explain how the Colby A Profile shows up in the workforce and talk about why it's important that you understand each other. So I think there's lots of different personality profiles that we can do as leaders. And what I like doing every year is a different personality profile with my entire leadership team. So one year we might all do Love Languages. Next year we might all do Myers Briggs. Next year we might all do Strengths Finders. Next year we might all do Colby profiles. What we're trying to do is learn and try to understand the other person as much as we can. And the more that we can do this learning and understanding each other, the more that we're going to get in sync with each other, because the reality is we're not going to change each other. I can't change Lacy, she can't change me. But we can understand each other and work better and work closer together. Right? Lacy can't change Nick, Nick can change Lacy, but they can definitely get in sync. And just like the book from 20 years ago, Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, or not hairy versions of women. CEOs are not more analytical versions of CEOs. We just behave differently. And so the first number in a Colby profile is called Fact Finder. And that means the higher your number means that tends to be where you start things. So Laci starts in either the first or second number. I start in the third number. Laci's first number of Fact Finder means that she'll start a project by asking a lot of questions. Or if Nick, her CEO, delegates something to her, Lacie is going to ask seven or eight or nine questions before she starts the project. The who, the what, the when, the why, the how, the budget, the priorities. And for Nick, it pisses him off because he thinks that she's arguing with him. She's not arguing with him. She's trying to understand him. And Nick has been rolling this project around in his mind for an hour or a day or a week or three months, or he just intuitively knows because he sees the whole thing. So he delegates it onto her lap. And he's a little bit kind of overwhelmed with all the other stuff that's going on, and he just expects her to catch up. Or Lacy, she needs to ask questions. Or Nick, the biggest gift he can give her is to say, what other questions do you have? What else would you like to know about this? Do you need any more time to pick my brain? For Lacy, that's like the best Christmas gift ever. It's like, wow. The gift of time and the ability to ask you questions so I understand, is huge for her now. Likewise, when Lacy goes to Nick with something, she likes to give him all the facts. She likes to give him all the data. She likes to give him all the research because she's done all the research. Or he's going to say, I don't need that, or hurts Lacey's feelings because she thinks he doesn't care. What he's really saying is, my hard drive in my brain is full. I have no room for it. I need you because you're really smart and my CEO to keep track of all that for me. But if I ever come to you with a question, you better have all the facts and figures ready for me. But don't tell me unless I ask. What Lacy needs to give Nick is the executive summary, or she needs to speak to him in sound bites and a maximum of two or three, maximum, or needs to give him, like, the executive summary of the summary. She needs emails to him, have to be two or three Bullet points maximum separate email about a separate topic with two or three points. But Lacy wants to write an entire memo with all of the thoughts and all of the background and all the data and all the spreadsheets and for seven different projects. And she puts it all in one email. Nick needs one email, and it needs to be two or three bullets short. That's the way a fact finder works. With what Nick's profile. Nick's a very high third number, probably like mine. He's a high quickstart, meaning he starts now and plans later. He's winging it. He's shooting from the hip. He makes it up on the fly. Momentum creates momentum. When Nick gives a fact like is revenue or the number of clients, it's an approximation, but he says it with certainty. He'll be like, we have 55% of our customers in California. Lacy's gonna be like, no, we have 48. Nick's like, yeah, it's the same. No, 48 isn't the same as 55. But Nick's plus or minus 10% is pretty much the way CEOs think. So Lacy likes something exact because she's done all the work. Nick likes averages and approximations because it doesn't really matter in his mind as long as momentum is trading momentum. The second number that most CEOs and presidents and EVPs are high in is what's called follow through. But it doesn't mean following through or means is that they like to put a system or a playbook or a process in place before they'll start working on the project. They need to think through all the step by steps before they'll start working on the project. They like to have it all organized before they get started. For the entrepreneur, it drives us crazy because we just want to get going, but they want to kind of organize it as if we're going to do this project 10 more times, which is probably true. We probably will do it 10 more times. But what entrepreneurs feel is we're going to figure it out each new time until we have a good system. The COO likes to put a system in place and keep tweaking it as we scale. Or just some examples of why personality profiles are really important or what I would suggest you do is, is to have your entire leadership team do their Colby profile and then spend the hundred bucks to get Colby to do a call with you to teach each of you how to work together. So teach Nick how to work with his CFO. Teach Nick how to work with his CEO, Leslie. How to work the CFO, etc. Or just something I've been thinking a lot about, and I think it's really important. I'm not paid by Colby to talk about it, but I just think for the money, it's worth it. It's almost like going to a marriage counselor where they just understand husbands and wives. They understand because they've seen us a thousand times. We have all these blind spots. They don't. Another thing I've been thinking about is marketing and sales and the way that operations and marketing tend to be almost like scissors or. I often notice with companies is they have a season that they spend a lot of time on marketing and selling, trying to generate revenue, generate revenue, generate revenue. All of a sudden they have so much revenue, they kind of subconsciously put on the brakes. They really work hard on operations, they really work hard on fulfillment, and all of a sudden they're running out of work. So they drive hard on marketing again. And I was speaking to a CEO this morning, and he said that every July and August is always slow, and it's because it's a slow period. And I said, well, if you go from January through April and you're going 100 miles an hour on marketing and sales, do you ever slow down in May and June on marketing? He said, yeah, always, because we're so busy. Or he's why July and August are slow is because you've cut off your marketing. Totally dawned on him that we need to keep marketing even when we're busy. I've always liked to build a company going faster, faster, faster, and knowing that the faster I go, it's going to show some things shaking. And when it's shaking, it'll start to show us what to work on. Often COOs like to work at putting the systems and the processes in place to make sure everything's perfect. And they push back a little bit on wanting more revenue. I always err on the fact that revenue and gross margin solves every problem right. There's not a single problem that exists that writing a check can't solve.

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