In this conversational episode, Eric Siu and Neil Patel debate the prevalent advice that owners can simply hire a CEO and step back. Drawing on personal experiences and industry examples (e.g., Starbucks, Uber, Microsoft), they argue that most founders must stay actively involved—especially at early and growth stages—because CEOs need oversight and alignment with equity holders. They label high‑profile cases as edge‑cases and caution against teaching the "hire‑and‑walk‑away" model to aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly those pursuing entrepreneurship through acquisitions (ETA). The discussion then shifts to CMO recruitment, where they contend that the most effective marketers are those who have turned around “boring, ugly” companies (banks, HVAC, insurance) rather than those who simply rode the wave at high‑growth tech firms. They warn against misaligned recruiting processes that let unsuitable candidates slip through. Mid‑episode, they promote the Agency Owners Association, a peer‑group for agency founders, sharing member testimonials. The hosts also highlight the current state of podcast advertising, using Alex Cooper’s $125 million SiriusXM deal as a case study to illustrate that despite a recent dip in ad spend, attention remains valuable and ad inventory may be cheaper. Finally, they plug an offshore marketing hiring service (marketingschool.io/hire) as a solution to wage‑inflation‑driven talent costs. The tone is conversational, skeptical of popular myths, supportive of nuanced involvement, and promotional when discussing their own services.
Chapters
All right, we're going to talk about today, can you hire a CEO and just leave them alone? So I'm looking at someone's LinkedIn post over here. We're not going to put the LinkedIn post up, but it just sparked the ideas because the LinkedIn post, the premise of it is I've hired dozens of CEOs, dozens of CEOs, right? And this is how you hire these CEOs, right? And I remember from 4 years ago, everyone on X was talking about, yeah, you got to build a holding company and you got to hire the CEOs and then you got to get out of their way, right? And remember, we were— so Neil and I were hanging out yesterday. I was telling him about how I spoke to a YPO guy, very successful guy, and he's probably around mid-70s or so. And he was just telling me— I brought up the book, the J. Paul Getty book again, right? I was like, you know, he has this concept in here called the working businessman. And he's like, dude, anytime I've tried to step away from the thing and anytime I was not involved, everything fell apart, right? And I'm just like, I think this whole concept is so broken where people— I think it's misinformation where people are teaching people, hey, you can just hire a CEO and get out of their way and let them do their thing. I think that's a pipe dream.
I don't— that's not a pipe dream. There's actually—
You have to be involved. Look how involved you are right now.
Like, no, no, there's real cases of people who are hired guns who run a company. Just look at the guy who now is the CEO of Starbucks. Well, he's the CEO before Chipotle. Yeah. And before that, Taco Bell. He's—
My point is, my point is you have to— I believe you have to be involved in some way, shape, or form. So whether you're a chairman or even if you're even disconnected from it, you have to be involved.
Uber, the Expedia CEO is taking it on. He's a good CEO and he's done really well.
He is a good CEO.
And the founders, Travis is not involved in all this.
But before we started recording, I think these people are exceptions to the rules. And I think teaching it broadly for the majority of people, especially the ones that they call it ETA, entrepreneurship through acquisitions. I think starting out like that is a big mistake.
If you have enough money, it can work out. Most people don't have the capital required. to hire some of these amazing CEOs. And then other factor is, is there's a good CEO depending on the stage of the company you're in.
Yes.
When you're starting up, I believe you need more of that entrepreneur-minded person. Scaling from $10 to $100 usually requires— $10 million to $100 million usually requires a different person from a lot of times from what I've seen. And usually $100 and above requires a different person as well.
You leave your CEO alone?
We do leave him alone, yeah.
How often do you call him?
More than once a day, but I don't tell him what to do.
Brad, is that leaving him alone?
Exactly. But I don't tell him what to do and I don't micromanage.
No, the fact that you're constantly checking in, you're staying involved. That's my point.
Sure, but he really does run the company and I don't.
I believe that he runs the company, but you and Mike, who have the lion's share of the equity, you're incentivized to care and that's why you're staying involved. You're not micromanaging him. But you're communicating constantly.
Yeah, but let's look at Microsoft. Satya has done a better job growing it.
You're using all the biggest companies in the world. You can't do that.
Why can't I?
You can't. There's so many of them.
Brad.
They're all edge cases. Exactly. Like we got Brad over here supporting. Thank you, Brad.
Thank you. Okay.
Entrepreneurs who do well are edge cases as well.
'Cause most entrepreneurs don't succeed.
But we're talking about the top 1% of the 1% of the 1%, right?
Yeah. But when I hire a CEO, I hire the best person in my industry.
He's great. But, and I think, and I met him before, right? So, Mike Gullickson, we—
I don't know if you met him.
No, we met in San Francisco. You, me, Sujin were there.
He wasn't there. That was JJ.
That was our president. Oh, okay, okay. Anyway, point is, I believe for the majority of people that are hiring a CEO, you can't just leave it alone. That's my opinion. You can disagree with it.
Well, it really depends on the stage of the company.
I'm just saying for the majority, I'm going to speak in generalities.
What stage company though?
At any stage, you can't just leave them alone.
A lot of times—
For the majority of people, especially— okay, let's just focus on— okay, for this person, this person posts over here. Let's focus on earlier stage. Let's say, you know, $10 to $20 million.
I think you need the entrepreneur involved. The founder.
Yes.
But what's funny is, is I'm an LP in a lot of ventures.
Better be funny.
Okay.
It's not funny for any of the podcasts.
Or here. What you think is actually different than what a lot of VCs think. I'm an LP in a lot of venture funds that are also growth funds. A lot of times the founders get in the way and they actually want to put in hired guns who are better at scaling and taking companies public.
I mean, that's seen all the time. Yes.
Yes. But that's not edge cases. That is a lot of the growth companies. You get what I mean, right? You're saying that—
But specifically for this person that's talking about it, it's this person's teaching people that, hey, you should go buy a business and hire a CEO. So let's just call it 1 to 20.
Yeah, no, that's not going to work.
I think that's a mistake. Yeah.
And anyone who's teaching that probably doesn't know how to make money themselves as an entrepreneur. So they're teaching it. We probably disagree on that one.
Well, no, no, no. I just don't want to say anything. But I— fine, I agree with you on that one. But like—
Yeah, because I know you and I disagree on coaches in general.
No, no, I'm not even talking about that. We agree on this point.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's a good way to start the podcast. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to To do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.
All right. So funny enough, well, it's not funny, but similar to CEOs, I was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday when we were talking about CMOs. And they were like, oh my God, this person's amazing CMO. You know, look what they did for companies like Uber and Facebook. And keep in mind, they weren't CMOs at those organizations. Like, oh, they'd make a great CMO at my company. A lot of these businesses like Uber, Facebook, being amazing marketer does help them grow faster, but being a mediocre and average marketer. You still look really good working for some of these companies just because their product would've just naturally grown even if— You were amazing.
And then they claim a lot of the credit.
Big up. And I see this a lot. But what I think are some of the best CMOs are the ones that have worked at boring, ugly companies that aren't growing and they turned them around, they figured out how to grow.
What would be like a boring, ugly company?
Um, I don't know, like a bank or like a traditional bank.
HVAC?
Traditional bank, HVAC, plumbing, roofing, life insurance.
I'm ordering my Air One.
There you go. So if you work at some of these corporations, grocery stores, financial services like wealth management, and you can figure out how to take declining or stagnant company and you figure out how to turn it around, of course you're probably going to get help from other departments as well.
Mm-hmm.
And you can do exceptionally well from a marketing standpoint, be more efficient with the dollars, figure out how to make them more top of mind, figure out how to get them to grow again, figure out how to increase the LTV. If you can start doing a lot of these things, to me, that's amazing CMO. But what you're seeing a lot of corporations do is recruit from, oh, you did this at Facebook early on? You must be amazing. Oh, you did this at Uber early on? Yeah, go take some of those people and put them into boring, ugly companies that are declining and see what they do to turn them around.
You know, that's another thing. It's kind of a tangent here, but a lot of people don't take a hard look at how they're going about their recruiting because what happens is they start to recruit a bunch of recruiters and those recruiters are used to their own processes and they don't align. And then what happens is a lot of people that shouldn't have made it through, they start making it into the company.
Yes.
And I'm sure you've seen that quite a bit.
One too many times.
I'm still ordering it. Go ahead.
All right. So, but yeah, so my whole belief is when people are looking for marketers, CMOs, directors, VPs, don't just recruit from big, fast-growing, high-flying companies because a lot of what makes that company successful isn't translatable from a marketing standpoint to a company that's in an older industry, that's not sexy, that's declining or stagnant.
I think if we're to take it even to a higher level, it's So adversity doesn't just create your character. At the end of the day, it reveals your character, right? And so when you work for a company that's boring, when you run through rough patches, you either power through it or you don't. If you don't power through it, you get fired, right? But you can coast in these multi-trillion-dollar companies and nobody will— you might not get caught because the product keeps growing to your point, right?
Right.
And they have so much distribution. If you're Microsoft, you have so much distribution coming from all these sources.
It's like saying, hey, I'm the CMO of Nvidia. Look how good of a job I've done. No.
I helped Nvidia grow to $3.5 trillion or whatever it is.
Something like that.
In the last 4 years. No, you just sat there.
The product delivered. Exactly. You don't have to do anything really.
Yeah.
Like, I'm just being honest, right? But a lot of people take credit where they didn't really do anything. And that's the sad reality of hiring some of these people. Yep.
I think a lot of people like to take credit for things they didn't do because it, it helps reinforce their, um, their ego.
So let's, let's look at Nvidia's stock price.
I'm curious.
I don't think they're $3.5. That'd be too high. Yeah, $3.18.
But that means it was $3.5 a couple weeks ago when I saw it.
Did it? Was it?
If you multiply the numbers?
No, Nvidia has never been $3.5.
I don't know why I think $3.5 then.
Um, 52-week high is $105. 40 times, curve is 3.18, so 3.18 divided by times, close, 3.451.
Yeah, that's what I saw. That's what I saw. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now, and it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire. To learn more, you can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. Alex Cooper jumps from Spotify to SiriusXM for a $125 million podcast deal. Did you read about this one?
No.
Okay. So Alex Cooper, she's got a powerhouse podcast called Call Her Daddy. I've actually never listened to it before.
What is the podcast about?
I don't know. Call Her Daddy. Use your imagination. I have no idea.
I don't want to Google it.
But it's the number 2 original behind Joe Rogan's Experience. And again, She's got— she got moved over from Spotify to SiriusXM. So, I think like these podcast wars are starting up again. But it just goes to show you that, you know, even though in the last year or so, the last maybe 2 years or so, podcast advertising has kind of gone down and waned because people are like, how do you prove the ROI for it? But this just goes to show you that, you know, the attention is still worth its weight in gold. Because I don't know about you, I don't think you listen to a lot of podcasts, but I listen to quite a few each week.
Yeah.
I think the attention is very valuable. So anyway, let that be known that podcast advertising— by the way, if a lot of people aren't buying ads right now, that means it's probably cheaper for you. So, you decide if you want to play the game or not. I know Eight Sleep does a lot of podcast ads and it's done really well for them. And they do a pretty good job of measuring it.
So, she went from Spotify back to Sirius because she went to Spotify originally for $60 million, right?
Was she at Sirius before? I don't think she was at Sirius before.
I don't know if she was at Sirius before.
No, I think this is a first of its kind for Sirius.
But, uh, Cooper previously struck a record-breaking 3-year, $60 million deal with Spotify in 2021. At the time, this was the second biggest podcast.
3 years later, double the value.
Yeah, 3 years later, double the value. Good for her.
Yeah. SiriusXM, if you'd like to pay us $125 million, we'll do it too.
She must have a massive audience.
Oh yeah, huge. Good for her. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to join the Agency Accelerator— Agency Owners Association.
