Your New COO Shouldn’t Change Anything for 30 Days

A-players want something challenging. This will be the hardest place you're ever going to work in your life. We're going to grind. Awesome. This sounds like my kind of place. And then you're going to need to poach them. The best people are not looking for a job. They're working somewhere. You need to go and get them. You need to know where they are, and you need to bring them into your company. So how do you onboard them? Well, my rule of thumb is that you take at least the same amount of time as it took you to recruit and interview and hire them to actually onboard them. And ask yourself, are you onboarding people or are you waterboarding people? Most of you are waterboarding people. Thank God you're here. Start. Well, let me give you 5 minutes of training. Let me just talk to you about the history and who we are. Okay, now go. We've all done it, but it took you 6 weeks to interview and recruit them. Why don't you take 6 weeks to actually train them? Who here knows this? The Golden Circle is Simon Sinek's concepts. Simon has the number 3 TED Talk of all time about Start with Why. He was on our board of advisors 5 years before he did that TED Talk. He flew out to Vancouver to meet Brian and I because he read about us in Fortune magazine. He had a 5-person marketing agency when he met us. And he drew this concept for us 5 years before he wrote the book. So you've got the why, you have the how, and then you have what. Most of you bring people into your company, you train them on what to do, right? You train them on the core job that they're actually going to be doing. That's fine. Simon trains people on the why. I think you have to actually indoctrinate people in your cult. The history of your company, your core values, your core purpose, your BHAG, your vivid vision, all the crazy shit that happened along the way, your first customer, the first person you had to fire, like literally indoctrinate them in why you exist. Make sure that they really know every leader and every director and every manager and they can kind of breathe the ethos of your company. That takes time. That's not a 5-minute discussion. And then what I like to do is train people on how. That's the invest in your leaders training. I train them on how to manage people, how to lead themselves and run projects and ask for coaching. We had a woman working for us, Amy Chan. She was running marketing. She's our marketing coordinator at Wendy Hunter Got John. Everybody knows Amy Chan. Amy's now like an online personality around dating and stuff. If you've ever seen the Amy Chan, that's the Amy Chan I'm talking about. She worked for us 20 years ago. I talked to her in the lunchroom. I'm like, how's your job going? She goes, I can't wait to start. I get to start on Monday. I'm like, what do you mean you get to start? You've been here so long. Everybody knows you. What do you mean you get to start? She goes, I'm still in training. I'm like, that's right. She went through a week of franchise training, a week of call center training, rode in the trucks for 2 to 3 days, did every single guerrilla marketing tactic for at least 2 hours, sat in on PR meetings, sat in on sales meetings, went for breakfast, lunch, or dinner with every director and every manager in all business areas. And I have more, right? Talked to Brian and I about the history of the company, watched videos around the culture and core values. Oh, read the actual franchise manual and did an open book test on the franchise manual. And she was a marketing coordinator. But imagine how solid and up to speed she is the day that she starts working on actual work. She knows the company way better than almost anybody working in your company knows your company. But we took 6 weeks to get her up to speed to make sure that then she can run. So make sure that you actually onboard people properly.

All right, if you're the COO of a company that does at least $2 million or greater in revenue, or you're the CEO of a company and you're in the United States or Canada, if you would like a copy of my book, The Second in Command, for free, Go to cooalliance.com/freebook. That's cooalliance.com/freebook, and I will mail you a copy for free. I will even cover the shipping. Jump on that one today.

So, the way that I leverage a good second in command is in this first 90-day period. The first 90-day period for any senior person coming into the company, the first 30 days they make no decisions. They don't fire anybody. They don't hire anybody. They don't start a project. They go through all this onboarding training and they get to have a physical notebook and they scribble down notes about all their ideas. In the second month, go back and stress test every hypothesis. Go talk to a bunch of people about Bob and you might find out, no, we need to handcuff Bob. We need to fire Kelly. No, we don't need a CRM. We've tried that. We need this. Take all your ideas and just go ask people enough about them to understand them even more. And then in the third month, Try to put in place a bunch of projects that are easy wins, low-hanging fruit. I call it the low PITA factor, the low pain in the ass factor. They don't need a lot of people, time, and money, but they'll give you some kind of a result. Usually if you can do a project that actually drives kind of like a satellite, it takes some effort to get it in orbit, it'll pay dividends for years. So I was coaching the CEO of a company the other day called Male XL. They do like male testosterone replacement, $20 million company. And I went on Google and I looked up their company and they had like A 2.4 rating with like 12 reviews. I'm like, embarrassingly, you suck. I don't want to talk to you about anything else in your company right now. This is horrible. So literally for one week, all they did was focus on reviews. They have about a 4.4 rating with about 150 reviews, and it's now on autopilot. They're starting to collect more. They weren't even looking at it. You know, 400-person or 300-person company, someone had missed that. That's a low-hanging fruit opportunity. If your second in command or your COO can put in place some stuff that are the easy wins that don't take a lot of people time and money, they all of a sudden build the trust of the people. Oh, this person's easy to work with. They have projects that don't— aren't gonna drag me down. And they already know, like, and trust you. So then in the second quarter, you can start working on the bigger, hairier projects.