Cameron Herold scaled 1-800-GOT-JUNK? from $2M to $106M and watched his team struggle to keep up. A marketing head who thrived at $4M-$8M couldn't handle $16M. The fix: a COO must grow people in three ways: confidence through praise, connections through networks, and competence through skill-building. Without it, you replace staff constantly and lose your culture.
Chapters
You are going to outgrow the skills of your people unless you focus on doing this one core thing. And let me explain what I mean by outgrowing the skills of your people. I was at an event about 5 years ago with the founder of Infusionsoft, Clay Mask. He and I were sitting at a breakout and we were talking about the growth of a company. Now, when we scaled 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, we doubled the revenue of our company 6 years in a row. We went from $2 million to $106 million in revenue in 6 years. Well, if you take a $2 million company and you have a head of marketing, they can probably be the head of marketing at $4 million. They might be able to be the head of marketing at $8 million. By the time you get to $16 million, it's just so substantially different. They probably don't have the skill set to be able to do that. So you're constantly replacing those people if you're in a high-growth environment. So as your company grows, you need to be growing the skills of your people or you will outgrow your people. So one of the core skills of the COO is the ability to grow people. And you can grow them in 3 ways, and you have to grow them in these 3 ways. You have to grow all of this confidence of your people. So your job is to grow their confidence so they show up every day feeling good about what they're working on, showing up with good positive energy, having the confidence to take on more responsibility. And your job is to praise them and show gratitude and thank them to keep that confidence level very high for your people. The second area you have to grow them in is their connections. You have to grow them so that they know the other people to reach out to. As two of my friends, Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan, in their book Who Not How, they wrote about that we have to know who can help us make these ideas come true. We have to know who can help us put these projects and initiatives in place. We have to know who can help us scale. We don't always have to be the smartest person in the room. So your job as a leader is to grow the connections of all the people that work for you so they have other whos that they can reach out to. It's one of the big values of our COO Alliance is our members have 190 other COOs from 17 countries where they can connect with and get kind of fast-tracked information. And then the third area you have to grow people in is their competence, right? Or their skills. Your job is to give them the skill set and to always grow their skills so they can take on more responsibility They can take more off your plate. They can work on bigger projects with more autonomy without you having to manage them on that day-to-day basis. So those are the 3 core areas: the competence, the confidence, and the connections. And your job is to grow people almost like a gardener is watering plants. Your job is to always be growing your people in those 3 areas. And if you don't grow them, then your company will outgrow them and you'll be replacing them and hiring people from the outside constantly instead of them being able to keep up. If you're growing them from inside, your culture is going to stay much stronger. Than constantly bringing them in from the outside.
