E11: Legendary Leader: Cameron Herold

Thanks for joining us today on Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay, where the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. And now here's your host, managing partner and co founder of HarveyMcKayAcademy.com, cliff Jones.

Cameron, good morning. Cliff Jones with Harvey McKay Academy. Welcome. Pleasure to talk with you today and looking forward to really understanding what you're all about, your vision. I want to talk about your book because I know there's a lot of useful things that leaders need to know. So welcome. Thanks for being with us.

Hey, Cliff, thank you. Appreciate it. It was fun being at the McKay Roundtable a couple months ago with you guys.

Yeah, it seemed I seem like kind of in a time warp and moving forward to the end of the year. And you certainly made a big impact on that group because you were you. It was the second time you were a part of the roundtable conversation, the first time you spoke, wasn't it?

No, only the first time. I've actually been there as well. I introduced Connor Blakely to the group and then I guess I introduced him to Joe Polish, who introduced him to Harvey. And that was kind of my lead in. I think John Rulin maybe has spoken there as well before and John and I are good friends.

Well, you did a phenomenal job speaking to the group today. Let's talk about a little bit about your background and help anybody who doesn't know of you yet understand what you're really focused on.

Sure. So I was groomed as an entrepreneur. I kind of grew up in an entrepreneurial family with an entrepreneurial father and two grandfathers that were entrepreneurs and was really groomed down that path to grow companies. I actually did a TED Talk on that around eight years ago that's still on the main Ted.com website about raising kids as entrepreneurs. And it's really how I was groomed. So that kind of gave me my kickstart. Got involved in a group called College Pro Painters, which is the largest residential house painting company on the planet. I helped build that company out and open the west coast of the US Then I helped grow a chain of collision repair shops known as Boyd Auto Body in Canada and Gerber Auto collision in the US built a private currency company which we sold 18 years ago, similar to what bitcoin is doing today. But we were doing it way before it was even kind of popular. And then built a company called 1-800-GOTJUNK. I came in as the chief operating officer for my best friend's company. We had 14 employees at the head office when I started and I was the COO. I ran everything except IT and finance. And when I left six and a half years later, we had 3,100 employees system wide and we ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for. We did it with no debt, gave up no equity. And that was 11 years ago that I left that company now. And since then I've been coaching CEOs and high growth companies all over the world and speaking. And I think I've done 20 or 485 paid speaking events now in 28 countries. And then I've written four books. So I'm just helping entrepreneurs.

Help isn't really the word, it's beyond help. Because we know how dysfunctional we can be as leaders at times, right? Lots of pressures. But you're dealing with the coo, the real operations executive. And most of the time we're hearing about CEOs, CFOs, things like that. So tell us why COOs. I mean, it sounds obvious, but tell us more about that.

Yeah, so when I started coaching CEOs and their executive teams 11 years ago, which I still do today, I started realizing that more often than not, it was really the second in command, the chief operating officer, that needed to have the skills to grow the company. The CEO needed to know what needed to happen, but the COO needed to know how to make it happen. So I was coaching a lot of the second in commands. And then two years ago, we launched a group called the COO alliance, which is the only network of its kind in the world for the second in command. And it was to give them a forum for them to be able to share information and resources with each other. It's the COO's connecting with each other, masterminding together, brainstorming together, working on growing themselves as leaders and also growing their companies. And then when they go back into the company, they're able to help scale the company. Really my core purpose, my why is helping entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. So. So the COO alliance was just a natural evolution of my core purpose.

Your timing for this conversation. Our timing for this conversation is perfect. Because there isn't a day that goes by where a visionary, the CEO, will say, hey, I see this on the horizon. But then there's Mr. Inside, as Harvey McKay talks about Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, that Mr. Inside is often missing. So how often do you show up in an organization and that COO is absent or underpowered and in need of what you do to help them transform.

And aren't you the COO for Harvey, really?

Well, I'm the chief well digger. I mean, I wear many hats. The truth is, we're a lean, mean, growing, online and real world company, so I have to get a lot done.

Yeah. If Harvey was sick for six months, you'd probably be the guy running the business though, right?

Yes. Harvey's great vision loves to come in and do the magic that he's so good at. But. But I am pretty much Mr. Inside Guy, and my team is really spectacular.

Yeah. And that's really what we focused on for the coos as well. So the question was, if I go into companies, how often do I see a COO missing? Yeah, it depends on the scale of the organization. When you get to around 50, 60 employees is when you're starting to put a true second in command in place. When you get over 100, you really need to have that true second in command in place. So my test is, yeah, if the CEO or if the entrepreneur was sick for six months, who would really be running the business? I think a lot of entrepreneurs make a mistake though, and they hire a second in command too early. What I would rather see them do is to hire an executive assistant first. And I've always said that if you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. And entrepreneurs will tend to hire a second in command and they delegate a lot of stuff to when they could probably get 30% off their plate to an EA who's maybe a $60,000 a year role and then drive in towards the more senior second in command later.

So that gets them to highest and best use of time, which is generally what's missing when you, I mean, you walk in and what are the biggies that you see missing typically that are holding these organizations back?

Typically it's time where the entrepreneur is not spending enough time in their unique ability. And they're working on a lot of the busy areas of the business. They're not working on the core areas they're really good at and they get energized from. So if they can delegate everything except genius, they scale. Secondly, it would be a lot of the operational skill sets that often when we're growing a company, you wake up in the morning and it's the biggest thing you've ever done in your life. It's bigger than it was yesterday, and yesterday it was the biggest. So where do we learn except hiring great people and allowing them to scale our companies for us? Third is it's usually the entrepreneur has a very different behavioral profile to a True operational person entrepreneurs tend to be very quick start. They shoot from the hip, they make it up as they go. They're attracted to the big shiny objects, which they should be. They're very quick at starting things. They see opportunities quickly and jump on them. They're good at the networking and sharing the ideas and sharing their vision and selling the story. But they're often they lack in the cleanup and in the process and the system, the follow through. So I try to find that second in command group tend to be very strong at putting systems and processes in place and almost are help. They want to make the CEO iconic. Like they recognize the role of the CEO is to be that iconic North Star. And their job is to play the operational kind of almost like the guy behind the curtain for the wizard of Oz.

And that's really Harvey's role. Harvey is truly the CEO chairman. Right. And because of his stature and his other commitments, we have a hybrid model. But the threshold is it revenue driven or bodies driven? When you see the necessity for a true COO to come in from perhaps contract part time to full time and really be part of that C suite.

It'S a little bit of both. I mean because especially nowadays that you can be contracting out using freelance outsourced people, partners, I think there's a revenue component in there as well. So I also look at it as a leverage of my time. If I was the entrepreneur, let's say I was earning a million dollars a year in profit. My effective hourly rate is $500 an hour. So any task that I'm doing that is less than a $500 an hour task is not worth me doing. I would be better off delegating that and working only in my unique ability. So for me, my unique ability areas are coaching, vision and planning speaking events and talking with the media. Outside of that, there's really nothing that I should be doing. So I have a team that's starting to do the rest of as we did at 1, 800, got junk. And that's really, I think the core for the entrepreneur is what do you love to do, what are you really, really good at? And how do you do more of that and delegate everything but genius. So it can come with a revenue level where you can buy your way out of every problem. You can use money as a lever and a way to accelerate your growth and then also as a way to get free time. I think a lot of entrepreneurs get trapped in the I need to do this. Well, no, it needs to get done, but not necessarily by you have you.

Found it's hard for your CEOs to let go of control issues, to delegate. And how do you help them bridge that G?

It's a real skill set that once they develop that skill set and that muscle of letting go, they almost start loving it. They start to realize that the faster they can let go, the faster they can hire. As long as they align people with that vivid vision of where they're going and they grow the people and hire the right people, they can really accelerate their growth. So it's usually hard to let go. And then when they do, they're like, oh my gosh, how did I ever do without this? Like, I don't check my own email. My assistant handles my email now and does all my bookings and client meetings, deals with speaking events. She checks me in for my flights as well as booking them all. Like a lot of the little things that I used to have to think about, that's now handled for me and I'm looking at getting more and more of that done.

That's a great distinction because I'm inclined to think, oh, I can do this on my app on my own, I can book my own, I can change the flight. But you're saying CEO, COO, you know, 3, 4, $500 an hour effective rate, anything less than that, delegate it. Otherwise there's an opportunity cost to that. You're holding yourself up.

The opportunity cost is really three, because I could use that time to either recharge my battery so that I could then work in my unique ability, right? Like they asked Richard Branson years ago, like, when was the last time you went to a grocery store? He thought about it and he said, I don't think I've ever been to a grocery store. He goes, no, I've never been to a grocery store. And they were like, well, what about as a child? He goes, no, no, I never went to a grocery store. Like, that was always dealt by someone else for him. So when most of us have cleaning ladies who clean our home, they clean our bathrooms, they clean our. But what about somebody to come in every six months to change your light bulbs and change the air filters and fill up your car with gas on Monday and Thursdays and deal with the car wash Monday and Thursday, all of these little things that yes, it only takes 10 minutes, but if I could use that 10 minutes to call Harvey McKay and say, hey, Harvey, just wanted to say hi and thanks for that roundtable versus me doing a 10 minute task, or if I could contact Joe Polish and Say hey Joe, just call him to say hi for a few minutes. Instead of me spending the few minutes filling up my car with gas. There's all these three minute things that can either be an opportunity to network, an opportunity to work in my unique ability, or to really recharge my brain. The next part of that is that when you're scaling a company, the more that your customers and suppliers see you working on menial tasks, the lower they perceive the value of your organization to be. So if you're that accessible, it means that you're really not that strong. So it's by making yourself a little bit less accessible that the true value of your company starts to come out. And then they really appreciate your unique ability.

So the transition of letting go then leads to defining the role and responsibility of the hire. So if it's an executive assistant, as a good, good starting point, there's a certain burden that comes along with that leader. Adding those people. How do you guide your clients to add the right people at the right time while they learn to let go?

You kind of touched on it. It's really starting with that scorecard and the job description for the role. So before you say I need to hire a, let's say director of marketing, maybe, what are all the things you need to get done? Make a list of all those things. Is that a marketing manager, a director of marketing, a digital marketer, Is it perhaps three outsourced people, a copywriter and an SM person and somebody run your Facebook campaigns. Like when you look at what needs to get done, that shows you who can actually do it and then you can define the rate that you need to pay to get it done. I think a lot of people end up filling the gap with, especially from the old days, you know, of we were always hiring full time people. My role is to hire less full time people and to have a few core full time people managing hosts of freelance experts and then using tools like Asana and Zoom and Basecamp to actually manage and lever ourselves very effective.

Stay, lean, limit the number of fixed expenses we add to that income statement as we grow.

Well and also these fractional people don't get sucked into the day to day. They don't show up at meetings they don't want to be at. They're only working on their critical few things. They're doing the core stuff they're experts at and they're not involved in getting cc'd and reply all and all the rest of the crap.

You said the key word. I wanted to talk about that Relates to big time sucks inefficiencies. I know you're big on the whole meeting thing. Tell us. And I know you got a big book on that. Tell us about the book and why you're so hot on that. How you. I mean, great title. So tell everybody how that happened.

And yeah, it's interesting. I even. I saw a post on social media about four weeks ago. Elon Musk said to his employees, if you're in a bad meeting, I want you to stand up and walk out of the meeting. And I send him a text. I'm like, dude, don't tell people to leave the meeting. What you want to do is actually fix the core problem, fix the root cause, fix the meetings. So the reality is meetings don't suck. We suck at running meetings. The only reason a person's in a bad meeting is someone doesn't know how to run them or they don't know who to invite. So I tried to codify how to actually run successful meetings. So the book is called Meeting Suck, and it was written so that every employee at every company would be reading it. 33% of the book is written on how to show up and participate in meetings. 30% is how to run meetings. And then the last third of the book is what meetings you need to have to run a highly successful, great company. So it's by getting employees to actually understand this that you can unsuck meetings. The reality is, most of us have never had any training on how to run them or how to participate at them. So of course they suck. I got the original idea from one of my clients who had 600 employees. And he was saying that everybody's complaining about meetings. We have to stop them. And I said, no, we have to fix them. Because a meeting is anytime you have two or more people over the phone or on video or in person working through something together, that's a meeting. So codify it now.

Not to give away the book, because we want people to buy the book if they haven't read it yet. But what are the biggies that you do to fix? Keep meetings from sucking. Yeah.

And again, like, I'll give away as much as I can. Again. The key is to have. It's a $12 investment, right? If you're not willing to spend $12 on an employee to read the book, like, why do you have a $50,000 employee? Insane. So the average employee spends 18 of their time in meetings. So really you're spending $7,000 a year for that person to go, I think you buy everybody a $12 book. But all of the meetings have to have a clear purpose. Just the one sentence, why are we here? Every meeting can have a maximum of three outcomes. What are the three things that you're going to get done in that meeting? And if you have more than three, you should be booking a separate meeting. The reason for that is the purpose and outcomes, and then the agenda, what you're covering, in what order, and how many minutes on each item you're going to spend that determines who you invite to the meetings. And you also want employees to opt out of meetings when they see the purpose, outcomes, and agenda. To say, I don't really need to be there for that. You're covering stuff I'm either not interested in or I don't need to be involved in, or, I think you've got it. I'm not going to show up at the meeting. I'll just opt out. That should be a great thing, because now we know they're sitting at their desk working on stuff that they're engaged in.

All right, so I need to ask about that, because there must be some bully leaders out there who insist everybody's at the meeting, and they're right. Their own people. It's a culture of kind of like, hey, I better not miss this meeting or I'll get fired.

That's more of a cultural issue. You can't really change a culture. If the leaders are that bad, where they're an autocratic, dictatorial leader, they're going to get ousted at some point. If everybody's reading the book, which is teaching them that I'm not opting out of the meeting because I don't think it's valuable. It's just that my time, my roi, my return on my time, and the money you're paying for my salary is better spent working on these projects instead of that meeting. So it's really leading up and explaining that as an ROI perspective.

Now, do you find most employees can quickly get their mind around the mindset of being an ROI component in the grander scheme of things?

Well, that's why I even covered it that way in the book. Meeting Suck was to show people that we only have three outputs. Our people, our time and our money. And you want to get the highest ROI off those three, which is mean you expend that resource in the right way. So it's teaching employees to lead up by saying, I don't want to come or I want to come. And then it's also teaching leaders and employees that if we're being invited to a meeting, everyone gets to talk. Otherwise, what am I coming for? Right? So it's teaching them how to get the quieter, more analytical, more amiable people to speak. I give them some tools for that as well.

I know you. Sorry to interrupt. I know you're a good storyteller. Can you share a quick story or anecdote that would. That kind of would help us see the impact of fixing the meeting sucks problem?

Oh, sure. I mean, again, if you think of it just on a pure dollar perspective, if an employee or a company has a million dol a year payroll and your employees spend, on average, the data says one hour a day, then really you're spending 18 of your payroll on meetings. You're spending $120,000 a year. If people are going to do something and they don't know how to do it, you're wasting all that money. So the real output off that is there. The second part is most problems start because of meetings. Either because the employees are being invited and they're frustrated, or because they want to share their opinion. It's not being heard. They're getting talked over by a very dominant person, someone who's very expressive. So by putting a system in place, like getting people to write down their ideas on Post it notes and read out the Post it notes and the leader speaking last, the leader often realizes the group already has the ideas. They don't have to be the one constantly sharing them. That, you know, that tool is really powerful. Another one that I use is you finish every meeting five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time. And what that does is it allows you to walk down the hall, talk to your assistant, get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, start the next phone call or the next meeting exactly on time. So instead of building in a buffer, you finish every meeting and finish every phone call five minutes early. And then I just put a mantra in place that if you're not five minutes early, you're late. You'd never see an Olympic athlete come running out onto the pool deck for a 9 o' clock start saying, I'm here. They're there before they're warming up and being ready. And then also check your cell phones. No one should be using a cell phone in a meeting. They should be checked at the door, put in a bowl, or on the table left at the door. If you're not able to sit in a half hour or an hour meeting without your cell phone, it clearly means you're too busy, go back to your desk and do the other work and let the people in the meeting stay focused.

Now, what do you tell the anybody in the room who's. Who's using the excuse? Well, hey, this is how I take notes.

We're going to take them differently here. Unless the only other twist I will do on that is I'll allow you to do it to take notes. But if we call you on the fact that you're checking email, if we're right, you have to buy everyone at the table lunch. If I'm wrong and I call you out on it and you are just taking notes, then I will buy everyone at the table lunch. So it creates a bit of a fair play environment and there's a bit of a risk there as well. You start taking checking email and all of a sudden you got $100 penalty for buying your peers some Luke, It's a great idea.

So let's transition from that particular book to the work you're doing at the highest level is really to bring COOs together. Describe your vision and where your COO alliance, because I know you're.

I heard a saying years ago that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. And I didn't want to constantly be the one teaching people how to grow their businesses, teaching people how to scale. What I wanted to do is connect really smart individuals with each other and allow them to share information with each other. So effectively, we started a mastermind, which, you know, is a concept that Napoleon Hill in the book Think and grow rich popularized 100 years ago, roughly 100 years ago. The basic idea is that we have five events a year in Scottsdale, and the COO's select three of the five to come to and they meet in that group with each other, with their peers. That's the highest level group for the COO Alliance. We're now also launching in 30 cities over the next three years what we're calling the COO Alliance City Forums. And that will be eight to 14 COOs in a select city. And they'll meet every two months with their peer group with other COOs. The idea being that they'll share in information with each other, share problems with each other, they'll help unstick each other on situations they'll present to the group. But it's really a masterminding situation where they're learning from each other and with each other.

Who is the ideal member or candidate for the COO Alliance?

Sure. So COO alliance for the national program, you have to have a minimum of 50 employees and 5 million in revenue. And those are hard data points. And then for the city forums, a minimum of 20 employees or full time equivalents and a minimum of 2 million in revenue. The reason for that is that we get into a lot of the operational stuff related to people.

And when you have entrepreneurs who don't quite have that scale yet, do you ever make exceptions or how do you.

No, we don't make exceptions. Again, it's because we're working on the operational execution people issues that a lot of the discussion and communication is around. Leveraging people that they just be kind of out of the communication. So there's probably other groups for them or just other ways for them to grow. So really we're targeting. A lot of our clients are really YPO members, Young Presidents Organization members, eo, which is Entrepreneurs Organization and vistage, which are all great groups for entrepreneurs, as is the Genius Network, but groups where entrepreneurs are learning from each other. We're looking for those people second in commands and putting them into these programs.

All the groups. You just mentioned, the networks, top tier networks help us understand the added value you bring at the COO alliance and makes it worthwhile, say an EO member, adding that to their commitment.

Yeah, it's really kind of a critical point. Think about for EO or for ypo, where the members are going and working in a forum. They're going to meetings, they're learning how to grow their company, but they're not really the one doing it. And the COO is not allowed to go to the meetings, they're not allowed to join. Maybe once a year they have an event for the executive team can come. So often what happens, the entrepreneur is trying to very quickly download this new idea. Hey, I heard about this cool thing called top grading. And they give the COO a two minute brief on it and say, read this book. And the COO is bewildered. Well, of course they're bewildered. You know, the entrepreneur had an hour session or 90 minutes with some speaker or a forum experience and they don't know how to transfer that information or they don't have the time or the desire to get into the systems and the operations where the COO really needs that brainstorming and understanding of their peer groups. So we've just created that group for them. So it's a way for the entrepreneur to grow their company is by growing their people. In this case, it's growing their second in command.

Now, is there a geographic focus to your expansion with the 30 cities you have planned?

There is it's interesting. I actually just talked about it. We launched a podcast called the Second in Command podcast where we only interview the COO for great companies. Everyone's interviewing the entrepreneur. I want the rest of the story. I want to interview the chief behind the chief. We talked about this morning on the second in command podcast that we're launching in the top 30 metros in North America over the next three years. And those are all the top 30 metros by population. And we have a map on the COO alliance website with colored dots and it shows which cities are open, which cities were looking for chairs and for members, and which cities we're only looking for chairs in currently.

Talk about the transformation of the mindset a COO would experience as they network with you. Because you've been at this a long time, obviously you walk the walk your stories with. I mean the companies, the growth you describe. I mean you're the workhorse behind that. So fill us in on the mindset that these guys are really developing, working with you at your level. Yeah.

The one I did not anticipate was wow. I finally found my tribe where people are really feeling like they found their peer group because they would often go to these other events with entrepreneurs. They would go to local meetups or go to local technology meetups or go to conferences were really meant for the entrepreneur and they didn't really fit in. And I didn't anticipate it being as strong a feeling of wow, I found my peer group. That's number one. The second one is that the COOs are really starting to realize their entrepreneur is not crazy after all that their quick start, their high D and high I from disc, their very entrepreneurial wing it and shoot from the hip and big shiny object and add. That's exactly who the entrepreneur is supposed to be. And they realize that when every other entrepreneur is just like theirs and they see that they're like every other coo, they realize the synchronicity of that yin and yang. So I didn't quite see that being as powerful as well as them realized most of them really kind of thought their entrepreneur was kind of crazy and they didn't realize that now it's really their unique ability.

Well, that craziness, I understand the shiny object, the vision. There are very few people on the planet earth who can be a good visionary and then have that high follow through, compliance, fact finding, skill set. So mindset. Now let's talk about skill set because my chief marketing officer is really the coo because our business model is an online content, you know, the Harvey McKay Academy, successor to the Harvey Mackay University. Our business model is an online melded with real world events. So that's my CMO is really a coo.

Yeah, that's what we're seeing is that every second in command has a slightly different skill set. And Harvard actually wrote an article years ago called the misunderstood role of the coo. And they identified seven distinct types of chief operating officers. And what we're realizing is that a coo, in my case I ran everything except IT and finance. So I ran marketing, operations, sales, the call center at one point, franchise development, all of our field operations, like all of that ran through me. Our product development to building our software. In other cases, I've got COOs that are in the CEO alliance who run finance. They run finance and sales and they don't run marketing. There's a CMO that runs marketing. But what it is is it's that true de facto. If the CEO was sick, who would kind of take over for six months. That's usually my test on the operational who's the true second in command. And that's what we're looking for. So yeah, you're right that there's very different skills, but it's who is the real go to point person that would be there running the business.

Yeah, because you have to think secession, plan, continuity, alignment with vision. I mean that eliminates a massive amount of risk. Most of us just presume in our superhuman leader kind of way, we'll be immune. But a lot of problems happen when people don't plan for that. Succession.

Yes, some of it's succession and some of it as well as just leveraging up the CEO to really work in their unique ability. Right. The more that we can free them up to work on the three or four things that. So I categorized all the stuff on a person's plate in one of four ways. If we were going to video someone, a CEO in their role for a month and we wrote down everything they did, I would categorize all those tasks as one of four things. Either I for incompetent, C for competent, E for excellent, and U for unique ability. So the incompetence, easy, we suck at it, or the competence, you know, it's easy to understand. I'm pretty good at it. The excellent is I'm really, really good at it, but I don't love doing it. The unique ability is the stuff that I'm really, really good at, I love doing. I get energized from it and people get Energized, watching me. That's when you know you're in your unique ability. And the key is how can you get everything off the CEO's plate except for the unique ability. And often they're working in the areas of excellence, but it drains them. And the more that they can either take free time or work purely in their unique ability, the faster the company scales. And then can you build that unique ability, leadership team, right, etc.

Yeah, it comes through for me. It comes through awareness. My awareness evolves through the mistakes I made trying to be too much to everybody and, you know, so then I learned to let go and empower others. I find most of the people, the best people, best of the best. They want to be given the vision, a little bit of direction, encouragement, and they want to run with it. They have that ownership mindset. Now I'm curious, I want to honor your time too. And I know we're getting short on time, but as we come to the end of this conversation at least. How often do you see COOs with that marketing mindset that you clearly had? I mean, it's marketing content, digital social media. Can COOs exist without that skill set today? Or awareness of it?

Well, okay. It's an awareness of it, I think, is the key. That was the key part. I think CEOs and entrepreneurs have to be aware of what exists, but they don't have to become experts or good at it. So we have to be aware of what technology will leverage our business, but we don't have to be good at it. We have to be aware of sales and sales training, but we don't have to be great at sales. We have to be aware of financial controls and financial systems, but we don't have to be an accountant. So yeah, we have to be aware of all things marketing, but we don't have to become the best in the world at it. What we have to know is that funnels exist and digital marketing exists and retargeting exists and tracking certain data points exists and that you can measure virtually everything and that TV is dead. They have to understand the basics of marketing to then ensure that an expert in marketing, either a fractional outsourced CFO and I've got a really great firm that has fractional CMOs that get plugged into companies all the time, because maybe you've got a million dollar marketing budget and You've got an $80,000 person as your head of marketing, you might be better off getting $50,000 worth of consulting or coaching a year to have that $80,000 person knowing how to spend a now $950,000 budget.

I submit that the number one gap is the marketing technologist who's got a grip on the ROI for sales and marketing, anything that's business development related in terms of a line item. And that until the C suite has awareness of how those things can be terribly ineffective. But when the right people on their team are empowered to do what they do best as marketing technologists, content people, then the roi, right. The whole boat rises.

This is another thing we started seeing with members of the COO alliance is the second in commands that were members of the alliance started to get data points from all of their peers to find out that some of the areas of digital marketing they thought they were doing well in, they were failing in or there were other areas that they didn't even know about and they were blown away. And these were like the heads of ops. So. So it's a really great opportunity that if you unplug from your business for a little bit, you really kind of lift your whole organization up because you're learning from the shared wisdom of others versus sitting in your kind of little boat by yourself.

I'm a past member of Vistage, lots of organizations of that level, but I've never run into an organization like yours just for operational people.

The COO literally the first one really of its kind in the world. So we're building out the network for the second in commands globally. And I guess part of it is because I was one so many times right. That I saw the need. I'm very entrepreneurial in my DNA, but I think I counter that with this natural OCD nature of the systems and processes and scale.

I get that. And it's essential, especially for any business that has to do with heavy online inbound content technologies, automations, especially workplace automation. CEOs have to understand lots of technology things. And I found that most CEOs and many CEOs don't know the questions to ask about those things. And you're probably. The value is people come together, they're working on their business with their peers and that's how you're taking awareness to new levels. Are you bringing outside speakers and things? Is that how you do it?

Well, we only bring in one outside speaker per event because again, the value is the members learning from the members, not from just going to see some other speaker again. So it's a lot of the masterminding and sharing. But I'll give you an example. The last event we talked about the people area and specifically the recruiting and interviewing part of the whole people spectrum. So we just asked the group and for an hour they shared the tools and hacks that they use to automate and leverage technology in the recruiting and interviewing process. And when you get all these COOs sharing information and showing screenshots and walking us through the software that they're using, all of a sudden you've got 25 or 30 COOs that have just gone to the next level just because of that one hour meeting. You can't even really quantify. We tell everybody that if you don't get a 10 times return on your investment, it's 20,000 a year to put the COO in the CEO alliance. 10,000 a year for them to be in a city forum. We're saying if you don't get 10 times that value on ideas to save money or make money, we give you your money back. And they all get it, usually within the first day of their three events, you know, annual program.

That's phenomenal. So not only can you save the world by ending the misery of sucky meetings. Right. Tell everybody how we learn about your book and how we learn about COO alliance or any other cool stuff you want us to know about.

Sure. So all of the books, Double Double Meetings, Suck the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs and Vivid Vision, they're all available on Amazon, Audible and itunes. And then the COO alliance is just cooalliance.com and there's information there on both the national program and the regional city forums. And then lastly is the CameronHerald.com which is where they can get videos of me speaking and any of the other tools they're looking for as well. And the podcast. And the podcast as well. Right. Clearly. The podcast. Second in Command podcast on itunes.

Yeah, Tell everybody more about Second in Command. That's a great title you have. You have a way with words. Is that, by the way, is that your stuff? Is that your marketing creativity there?

That was mine, yeah. We went to a group of peers and somebody said that we should be. We're number one. And number two, I'm like, there's absolutely no way we're going without. As our tagline, you don't want the pressure. I'm not explaining the joke. If you missed it, that's too bad. So the Second In Command podcast again was I was listening to Guy Raz, who I spent an hour and a half talking to him at the TED Conference. This year I go to the main TED event and he and I were talking And I said, I love your podcast, how I built this, where you're interviewing all of these entrepreneurs, but I want the rest of the story. Like, I want to know the other side of that story. And I listened to Brian when he was doing his interview for 1-800-got-JUNK on the second in command podcast, and everything he said is dead on accurate. And there's more to the story. And it's not like he omitted it. It's just I saw it from a different perspective than he saw it. And I think about all these entrepreneurs when I just want to know the operational side of that entrepreneurial journey. And I think that's what we're trying to share now. Is the chief behind the chief?

Well, I hope we get to visit with you a lot more. You're busy traveling, speaking, building the alliance. Anything else you want us to know before we wrap up? Cameron?

No, I'm good, man. I'm getting ready to go for my afternoon run. I'm excited about that.

Go for it. Thanks for being with us. We'll talk to you soon. Cameron.

Thanks, Cliff. I appreciate all the time.

Thank you for listening to Street Smarts with Harvey MacKay. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you consume your favorite audio. Don't forget to leave a positive rating and review before you sign up for your free membership@harveymckayacademy.com to learn more about Harvey McKay, make sure to visit www.harveymckayacademY.com. thanks for listening and we'll be back soon with a new episode.

Sam.