Cameron Herold argues that hiring a COO at $900 per day frees founders to focus on revenue. He breaks down how operational leaders at One Eights Under God Junk, Gerber, and College Pro Painters built systems that paid for themselves in a week and generated three to four times their cost annually.
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Let's say you're going to hire a $200,000 vice president of operations, someone to really help you scale up the business right now. We all get nervous with that $200,000 fee, right? But you're not handing them a $200,000 check tomorrow. It's about $18,000 a month. That's a little easier to palate, right? It's actually not even $18,000 you have to worry about. It's only $9,000 for the first 2-week period. $9,000 you can all actually write the check for. You could all write the $9,000 check tomorrow and not worry. It's really only $4,500 a week. It's actually only $900 a day. If you had a second in command in place and you gave them proper focus and you helped get some stuff off your plate and onto their plate, between the two of you, you'd make enough money to pay for the $900. Maybe you'd get $3,000 in revenue at 30% gross margin to pay for the $900. You don't have to fret the whole $200,000. What you have to do is get leverage by freeing up some of your time to work on the stuff that you're good at and gives you energy so that you can create enough revenue to then have them do your job. Yes, I have a group coaching program for CEOs. And the beauty of my group coaching calls is you actually get to ask me questions on every call. You're not just listening to other CEOs. Drop me an email, cameron@cameronherold.com for more information. All the stuff at One Eights Under God Junk that I did was the stuff that Brian sucked at or the stuff that he hated doing. I happened to be really good at it and happened to like doing it. But because he freed me up or freed himself up by delegating stuff to me, we then scaled. It was also stuff that he didn't know how to do. And I came in on day one and said, we need to do this, this, this, this. He's like, shit, I don't even know how to do that. I'm like, I know how to do it. Let's go. It was like build a sales, a franchise sales program, build a franchise training program, built a franchise manual. He'd sold 12 franchises. They had no manual, no training program. It was all built off of the idea and the charismatic leader. And he had you know, this thing called the Rubbish Boys that was operating in Vancouver. So imagine how much value that created for the company by him paying me. But he didn't worry about how much he was going to pay me for the year. It's like, can you create enough value this week? We sold one franchise 2 weeks later. That paid for me for 2 months. The fact that I was showing up and talking about what we'd done with Gerber and what we'd done with College Pro Painters, all these franchisees were like, oh, shit, I'm in. So don't worry about the whole year that it costs you to hire somebody. No matter if it could be a marketing person or a Copywriter, just break it down to what can they do that week to pay for themselves? What can they do next week to pay for themselves times 10%, times 20%? And after 2 or 3 months, they're, they're 3 to 4 times their, their cost. That's really where you want to get to, is that they're creating 3 to 4 times the gross margin of what they cost over the course of the year. That's your goal to scale. And then it's just keep hiring people to do the stuff that will create more value for the business.
