Your Company Growth Will Shock People IF You Apply THIS!

When we really are us and when we let our employees know us. And if we as a leader, connect more with them. Not about the work stuff, but what are they struggling with? How was their weekend really? When we care for them as people, they will go through brick walls for us to get all their projects done and work harder and manage their time better because they know that someone actually cares about them.

What would you say the kind of main differences between a CEO and a COO are?

It's almost like a man and a woman. You know, men are not hairy versions of women. We see the world differently, we think differently, we react differently, we're just different. Right? We're similar, but we're different. The CEO or the entrepreneur tends to be very vision. They tend to be very future thinking. They tend to start projects very, very quickly and plan later. The coos tend to be the who, what, when, where, why and how of everything. They tend to think through everything before they start and initiate. They don't tend to have as many visionary ideas, but they tend to be able to understand how to make those ideas come true. Oftentimes the COO is the brakes to the entrepreneur's gas, or we're the leash to the entrepreneur's dragon. We almost like the yin and yang where we really are that perfect partnership with the CEO.

How important is this to understand at the start phases of a company and when you're maybe you're in a small business that gets to five at max, five to 10 people, what ends up.

Being really critical is that second in command has to be probably the best in the organization at actually dealing with all the people issues. So the recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and leadership development of people, which is critical when you're a remote team. And then it also has to be good at managing conflict, managing communication, managing different styles, which again is critical when you're managing teams. And then now, because we've all got these companies that are distributed with employees that are in multiple countries, multiple cities, but the second commands have to be very good at those sides of the business where entrepreneurs are often not as good. Often the entrepreneurs are great at the cheerleading, great at raising energy, but they're often bad when the negative stuff has to happen, when the tough discussions, the hard decisions have to be made. You know, the firing of people, that's really when they need the cleanup person. Because the CEO is often so worried about making sure that people like them, they need that counterpart that that's just part of the relationship of the CEO and the coo.

Where did this first come up for you, like, when did you know this was what you were meant to be doing?

I was groomed as an entrepreneur. My father had run his own company for years. Both sets of grandparents raised their. Ran their own companies. My dad had a very strong company culture. He hired misfits. He hired people that wouldn't have been able to get jobs in other places. Hired a lot of people off government work programs. You know, he would have hired the aborigines. He would have hired the person with the physical disability. He got to know them and care for them and like them, where they were almost the misfits in the rest of the city. And I think because he cared about them as humans, they went through brick walls for him. And I think that was something that I saw at a very early age, was that culture. And it was this culture that people loved him and cared for him and. But he was all about the customer, you know, all about caring for the customer as well. So I just kind of grew up in that environment.

How did you influence people in a way that motivated them to work?

I started with the saying that money talks, bullshit walks. And so what I recognized was, at the end of the day, almost everybody has some economic motivation. So I'll give you the example of Kimbal Musk. I hire Kimbal. He's now going to be running a franchise. I'm training him how to run a franchise. But for me, I want him to do as much revenue as possible. So how do I make Kimball do more? I sat down with him and I said, how much money do you want to make this summer? He said, I don't know, 15,000. And I said, what would your life be like if you made 20? He's like, I got him to set his goal at 20,000, but he's like, I don't know how to do that. I said, well, if I showed you how many clients you needed to do and how much revenue and where to find the client. So we. We took the profit number and. And then we backed that into a plan. And then I just helped coach him on executing the plan. But I started with a goal that was his. The goal was money. How much money does he want to make? So I do kind of the same thing with people today. Where do you want to be in your career? How much money do you want to make in sales? What would you do with that money? What would you do if you had more money? So instead of me saying, you have to learn situational leadership, I show them how learning situational leadership will help them become a better leader or manager in the company. It'll help them progress in their career, it'll help them, you know, get more done, it'll help them reduce the amount of hours they have to work. Now, instead of motivating people, I hire self motivated people and I find what carrots matter to them and then I just help reverse engineer that. So we had to become very good at recruiting and interviewing and hiring the right people. And then we had to become very good at the training and onboarding and leadership development of those people. And then we had to become very, very good at the coaching and delegation of those people. So no, I don't make those mistakes because I put systems in place to save myself from those mistakes. I put the interviewing systems all in my invest in your leaders course to actually show people how to do that. So you can know, if you look at somebody's resume, I can tell you very quickly whether that person is motivated, whether they're a growth oriented person, whether they're a team player. If I look at their social media profiles or LinkedIn profiles, I just get to know them. And then in the interviewing process, before I even read their resume, if they send me a resume, I kick it back and say, thanks for your resume. I'm not going to read it yet. Please read this five page description called our vivid vision of what our company looks like, acts like and feels like in the future. And then send me a two to three minute video of how you'll help us make our vivid vision come true. And if I like your video, I'll read your resume and then we'll bring you in for a group interview. So I don't waste time going through their resume until I see their video. When I see someone's video, I can tell from the tone of their voice, their energy, the way they're showing up, what they're saying, what they're kind of tying into, the vivid vision of whether they get it and if they're already excited and inspired.

It seems like you've had a lot of experience going in at a certain point, growing really rapidly. Like how did you learn to manage that scale?

Some of it was learning from doing and some of it was learning from some extreme failure. I was clinically redlining. I had actually collapsed on the floor of the elevator, crying and shaking and I was just going through an extreme amount of stress. While my mom was dying of cancer. I just bought my first house. I had just gotten married and realized I wasn't in love. There was a whole Bunch of things happening simultaneously. And I wasn't taking care of myself. I was drinking every day, I was smoking. So I clinically burned out when that happened. When that burnout happened, I decided to get my shit together. So through the got junk era, I became healthier, I became more focused on fitness, I started running half marathons, I started to kind of get it together again. So I had to learn to adapt and to get better at delegation and better at saying no and better at prioritization because, you know, that was where I was in life.

So do you think back, like if you'd been spending more time on focusing on your health that you would have been more productive? Or do you feel like you were able to get so much done because you were just completely obsessively focused and maybe not doing, you know.

Yeah, no stuff. Now looking back, I know that I probably could have been more successful had I actually focused on health and balance and well being and delegation and getting results through others and not been so radically self reliant and, you know, able to just push through. So I think that I was able to now learn that now I have the wisdom of a few of these cycles and seeing that no, you don't actually work 60, 80 hours a week to be successful. You hire people, you delegate more, you train people. So I was coaching someone recently and he said, well, I can't delegate that to my team because nobody can do it except me. And I said, no, delegate it to someone and then give them the skills and the confidence. Coach them, take everything off your plate and give it to people and then coach them. And so I would have become much better at doing that had I not been in that habit of, you know, just work harder, work harder, work faster, work faster. Yeah.

And how did you manage? I guess, bad employees throughout that period, like throughout this large scaling process, bad.

Employees have always been easy for me. You know, again, when you're 20 years old and you have 12 employees working for you and you have a bad employee, you fire them. Firing the wrong person. The upside was great. Making those tough decisions, firing the wrong employees quickly is the right thing to do. That we should be spending our time with our best employees, not spending all of our time and energy with our negative employees. I was only hanging out with the good people, like all the guys who are fun and good energy. I carried more of that good energy throughout the day. The one bad apple spoils the whole bunch of. It's very true. It's like a cultural cancer in your organization. If we know we Have a cancerous tumor in our company, the cost of that wrong person is 15 times their annual salary. Because of negativity, because of problems, because your good employees think you care more about the shitty employees. Because other good employees that won't come work for you because of them. Because, like there's all these problems and spinoffs that happen. You're better off to just fire the person, maybe even have to pay a fine to fire the person than. But you're better off to get them out.

As the leader, how do you suggest managing relationships? Cause I find I love my team and I love spending time with them, but I'm also their leader. And I found in the past, like, becoming their friend, you know, not that we don't get along, but like, becoming quite close friends with them sometimes changes the dynamic. When I have to be the leader and direct, am I coming out from the wrong perspective or.

Well, see, I disagree with that. I believe, and I think I believe this more and more than I ever used to believe. Because of the age that we're in now, now there is no professional and personal anymore because of social media. We are just out there. So it's better to just show up as Josh or as Cameron consistently and air our dirty laundry and air our personal side and because we're human. So just show up and be ourselves, all of us. But also get to know them, like, really care about their fears, care about their dirty laundry, care about their insecurities, care about their worries, care about their struggles as humans and they'll go through brick walls for us to build the company. But if we always try to be above them or be a leader to them, they know that we have our shit. So behind the scenes they're all talking about our shit or they see our shit on social media so they know we have our shit. I just grew up that way that I was doing that in 1986. My friends were working for me, so they already knew me. My friends were sleeping at my home and painting houses for me. We were going out drinking and doing stupid shit together because I was 20 years old that I didn't know how to be a boss to a bunch of friends. So I just held them to core values, held them to the goals. I was firm but fair. But I absolutely. They knew who I was because they were my friends before they started working for me.

Would you suggest having scheduled just like get to know the team more meetings? Like, how would you suggest doing that when we are so remote we're not going to have a chit Chat of.

The office by the Watercool Yeah, it's really hard because I think we need to find ways to have those chitchats. So we need to have time. We need to do that with our employees more. So we need to actually slow down and connect with all of our employees as humans and recognize that that 10 minutes that we connect with them is probably going to fire them up for the next 40 hours this week. Our role is to be the chief Energizing Officer, right? It's to stir that Kool Aid and energy up, and it is to connect with them as humans. It's also important to get our employees into communities of places where their peers hang out so they can hang out in spaces with others. I started a community recently called the op spot. So it's theopssspot.com and it's a place for operators, by operators. So it's anybody who works in operations roles, anybody managing people like managers, directors, and VPs. It's a community for them to hang out with each other without a bunch of entrepreneurs and CEOs around so they can connect and collaborate and chat with each other. Because the reality is, none of this shit matters, man. We're all gonna die. We're all just walking each other home. And if we try to be something instead of just being us, when we really are us, and when we let our employees know us, they're now connected with us, then they're gonna work harder for the company. And if we, as a leader, connect more with them. Not about the work stuff, but what are they struggling with? How was their weekend really? How is their relationship with their spouse really? How are they doing with their weight gain really? How are their hobbies? When we care for them as people, they will go through brick walls for us to get all their projects done and work harder and manage their time better because they know that someone actually cares about them. So stay ahead of the curve as a coo. This next video is packed with great leadership lessons for you. It'll really help you as you continue in your growth.