Soft Skills, Hard Truths: Building, Leading, and Letting Go with Cameron Herold and Joe Polish

Define a COO's role. What does that mean?

So the reason I even called the book the second in command and not the COO is your second in command. Could be a coo, it could be a Vice President, operations, it could be a Director of operations, could be an operations manager, could be a gm, could be an executive assistant. It's your yin and yang partner. Where do you find them? The first thing is to know yourself. So really do an activity inventory of all of the stuff that you suck at as an entrepreneur, of all the stuff that drains you of energy, energy as an entrepreneur. Of all the business projects and things you'd love to be doing but you don't have time to do. Of all the business areas that have to report to you but you're not good at. Make a list of all those things and then flip it upside down and that becomes what this new person is going to be doing. They're going to do all the stuff you're bad at.

How can you be a domino for someone else?

The Joe Polish Show.

Any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network. You're about to meet a guy who's helped build not one, not two, but several hundred million plus companies and he does it like it's a casual Tuesday. I'm talking about Cameron Herald, the guy entrepreneurs call when they actually want results, not just inspiration. He's the founder of the CEO alliance, the only network in the world for second in command leaders and the creator of the invest in your leaders course which is basically a growth blueprint for making your team unstoppable. Cameron doesn't just teach business, he builds it. He took 1, 800, got junk from 2 million to 106 million in six years. That's not a case study, that's a growth explosion. He's coached billionaires, advised monarchies, helped Sprint telecoms scale, and he's been paid to speak on all seven continents including the Antarctica. And when the publisher of Forbes says Cameron Herold is the best speaker I've ever heard, you know this guy is bringing the goods. He's the author of six powerful books from Vivid Vision to Double Double and the host of the Second in Command podcast where he interviews the real operators behind world class companies. Whether you're a CEO, CEO entrepreneur or just want to think bigger and lead better, this conversation will shift your trajectory. Please help me welcome the CEO whisperer himself, my friend, Cameron Harrell.

Awesome. Yeah, man. Cool. Thanks very much.

You're welcome. Well, all right. So we, we've, we did an interview last year about second in command. So I definitely want to talk about this because your whole knowledge and insight about CEOs, I now really wonderful COO. Who's. Where is he? Where's he sitting? Back there. And Leon and I, you know, there's. I've got a few questions for you. So I'm going to ask Cameron a few questions. Then hold your questions. We will do some Q and A with all of you here. I think this will be really eye opening. Let's first start with what didn't I say about you. That would be a good place for people to know kind of who you are and what you do.

Wow. I guess I've always placed myself into rooms like this to continue to grow. Like, I don't want to be the smartest person in the room. So whenever I come to events, even if I'm speaking, I'm scribbling down notes and trying to learn and connect. That's why I started the CO Alliance. I was actually in this room and got the idea that there was no network in the world for the coo. So the inspiration for it came from here.

Yeah.

Thank you. I'm a dad, father of two great kids.

You know what's funny? When I was in your home in Vancouver a few years ago, it was surprising how much better behaved your kids are than you.

Okay.

Yeah. They're stable. They're not as distractible. They're, you know.

You take any photos while you're in my home?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're free.

You want me to show that one?

No. No, you don't.

There was that one remaining photo that we didn't delete.

Oh, my God.

It was comedy.

No.

I don't. Maybe we'll do a. Like a paid sort of behind a paywall.

Yeah. Show all the photos. Real fans.

Yeah. So you're probably most well known in terms of all the different ideas and stuff that you've shared with Vivid Vision.

Yeah.

And you met Jennifer Hoodie here in Genius, and then she's created her vision stuff. And that's. So a lot of people have taken that concept. So I'm going to jump around on a few different things that I think are elegant ideas that you've come up with. And I'd like for you to speak with them because I think they're. They're very helpful. So the question I have is what's the best way to use a Vivid Vision to align teams? Get commitment and get them into action. But start with defining what that even is.

Who here has heard of the Vivid Vision concept. Oh, wow, okay, that's cool. Who here has heard of 1-800-GOT Junk? So when I joined the CEO of 1,800GOT Junk, he and I had been in a mastermind community together for four years. We were members of the entrepreneur's organization. We were in a forum together. I was building the world's largest private currency company that we built and sold. He was building out what was called the Rubbish Boys and he was changing the name over to 1-800-GOTJUNK. And he handed me his vivid vision. We learned about the concept together at an EO lunch one day. He handed me a two page description of what his company looked like, act like and felt like in the future. So it was 2000 and he showed me this, what he called a painted picture of his business. And I looked at it and I read it and I said, I know how to make this come true. He's like, I have no idea how to make this come true. Could you help me? So for me, that's what got me to even start the journey with 1-800-GOT junk was because I was obsessed with Brian's vision. The concept of the Vivid vision, now that I've been paid to speak in 29 countries about, the concept is it's a four or five page description of what your company looks like, acts like and feels like three years in the future. Not five years, not 10 years, not just three years out. And you describe it as if you're walking around the office. You describe the energy, you describe what your employees are doing, you describe how your team is meeting. You describe the meeting rhythms and the use of dashboards and metrics. Maybe you've got a paragraph about operations, a paragraph about sales, a paragraph about marketing, paragraph about engineering. You describe it as if it's come true, not goals, but you describe it in its finished state. Now you can also write a vivid vision for yourself as a person. So I have a five page description of me, Cameron Herold, as a friend, a father, a lover, a confidant, a traveler, what I do for fun, sexuality, use of substances, what I do for vacations. It's all there. It's a five page description of me. And then my wife and I wrote a description of our marriage and it's a five page description of us as a marriage couple. And this kind of three page vivid vision, you share it with the world and then you figure out how to make every sentence come true. So that's what the vivid vision is in the business world. It really Catapulted the scale of 1, 800 got junk. So much so that we became a cult. You know, inside of probably most of Canada, we ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for. Twice ranked number one to work for in British Columbia. But it was the alignment of every single employee, customer, shareholder, the supplier with this vivid vision that really made it all come true. It's the one tool that's missing in every operating system on the planet. EOS doesn't have it. The Vision Traction Organizer is just a set of goals. Scaling up doesn't have it. That's a one page plan. It's a whole bunch of stuff. It's cool. Even next level growth has some but doesn't have it. If you take the Vivid Vision tool and then put it in front of every operating system, that's when those tools really make kind of magic happen.

Why do you have to be all hurtful towards all these operating systems?

No, I just think it's the one thing they're missing.

Everything.

I don't have anything that they have. So none of my systems replace next level growth, which is what I think you should go with over an EOS or scaling up. And I'm friends with all these guys. I don't have those systems. But the Vivid Vision tool, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. If I handed you a jigsaw puzzle. If I handed Shannon a jigsaw puzzle, 5,000 pieces and they're all red. You're kind of screwed. You'd be there for weeks trying to put this puzzle together. That's why our employees drive us crazy with these stupid ideas. They don't have stupid ideas. They just can't read your mind. So if you're the only one that can see the vision, then of course you're going to come up with dumb ideas. You can have the best operating system on the planet. You can run the best L10 meetings and have the best vision traction origin. But if your employees can't see what you're building, then what's the meeting even about?

So meetings. So you wrote a book called Meetings suck?

Yeah.

So you don't really mean meetings suck. You just mean the way most people do meanings.

You know, and I probably missed. I did mistitle that book. It was actually written by a genius network member. It was by scribe. Books used to be called book in a box. I met Tucker at one of the events and I should have called it how to unsuck your meetings or something like that because people think, oh yeah, meetings suck. I don't need to read the book. No, the book is to teach you how to run meetings that don't suck. And this includes, like, L10 is just one kind of meeting. You've got annual planning meetings, quarterly planning meetings, financial review meetings, one on one coaching meetings, zoom calls. Like, there's all types of meetings. But the reasons meetings suck is almost none of you have ever had training on how to run meetings. And you have managers and leadership team people who run meetings every single day, and they have no training on how to run meetings. And then you have employees that are showing up at meetings that don't know how to participate in them because no one's trained them. So of course meetings suck because we suck at running meetings, right? None of us would ever send our kid off to play little league baseball without teaching him how to hold the bat or toss the ball or catch the ball because they'd come home from baseball and they go, daddy, baseball sucks. Like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. So we've all. I can't stand listening to entrepreneurs complain about stuff, knowing that first principles, the root causes, you've had no training to do it. The reason business is difficult is you've had no training on interviewing people. Maybe you've done it a hundred times, but you might have done it wrong all 100 times. You coach people one on one, but you've probably never had any training on coaching. You run time management and project management. You execute meetings. You deal with conflict with no training. It's like there's these layers of skills that if we give our people those skills, it would make business easier. Russ was just saying that he's got all of his employees reading the book Meeting Suck right now because he wants them to be able to run these meetings and stop complaining about it. So, yeah, that was one of my books.

So let's give us a fix that people can do to make them better.

So I'll give you. I'll give you an example. So who here has people showing up late for meetings, right? All of us. Who here is an entrepreneur ever shows up late for meetings once a month? Almost all of you. You're just chicken. Almost all of you show up late for meetings, and you tend to show up and you go, sorry, I'm late. Right? I've put a mantra in place now with all the clients that I've coached globally, that when you hear, sorry, I'm late, what it really means is, f you, I'm disrespectful. My time is more valuable than yours. The CEO of the company can never, ever, ever be late for a phone call or a meeting. Because if you are, what you're saying is your core values don't actually matter. So you have to create a system that allows people to then show up on time for meetings. Right. If I don't want you to be late, what's the system that's broken that has you showing up late? So we started to analyze that. We read the book Death by Meetings. We met with Pat Lencioni, we talked to Verne Harnisch about his meeting stuff. We really sought to understand meetings. And what we realized was all of us book our meetings and phone calls back to back. We don't put a buffer in place. Now, I can't train you to put a buffer in place. That would be a good system. If we would all globally put five minute buffers in place, that could work. The system that does work is train everyone. And this is your customers, suppliers, employees, that every meeting and every phone call ends five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time. So if we start a meeting from 9, that goes from 9 till 10, you finish at 9:55. So what we do internally and what I teach all my clients to do is we start the meeting by reviewing the purpose and outcome and agenda. I'll go over that in a second. And we say, by the way, I know the meeting's set from 10 till 10:30, we finish at 10:25 so we can show up on time for our next call. And they go, wow, nobody's ever done that before. On the agenda part, I say no agenda. No agenda. So if somebody is requesting you to show up for a meeting and it doesn't show you the purpose and outcome and then what you're covering, in what order you're covering it, and how many minutes you're spending on each agenda item, have people say, I can't come until you finish this. Why would they ever say yes to show up at something if they don't know what that purpose is? And it allows the person booking the meeting to actually book it for less time. Because you think about what you're covering, you think about how many minutes you actually need for each agendas item. So Parkinson's law doesn't expand the meeting to be too long and then you'll actually get more shit done with less people faster. So these are the simple systems that we use to scale. Not only 1, 800 got junk, but I built Gerber Auto Collision. Who here's heard of Ger Gerber? So Gerber is about a $2 billion publicly traded company. I was one of the three co founders of the franchising group for Gerber, now big public company K College Pro Painters. Anybody heard of College Pro? I opened the west coast of the United States for College Pro. It became the largest house painting company on the planet. Kimbal Musk worked for me back in 1993. So I trained Kimball and his COO Peter Reeve, who built SolarCity. I trained both of them 30 years ago. These systems are really simple to easy like systems, but they're not again taught in a lot of the operating systems out there. These are kind of soft skills of leadership you need to be good at.

So let me, let's take a real scenario where you say people are here, they meet someone, they're like, yeah, let's hop on a call and talk. Right. They're going to go over stuff.

Yeah.

So you're very outcome focused and agenda focused on a productive meeting.

Yeah.

Then there's, if you become too formal, it may take away what feels like, oh, like let's just get to know each other sort of thing. How do you approach that without it being so overly rigid?

Yeah. So let's say, let's say example. I get introduced to Jason and Jason and I are going to do a quick 30 minute call to get to know each other. I just say the purpose of the call is to get to know each other. Outcome is you do a 10 minute share, I'll do a 10 minute share and then let's wrap up with five minutes of how we can help each other. We'll finish the call five minutes early so we can show up on time for our next call. Not bad. All people will often always say let's, you know, get together for an hour, let's, you know, grab an hour coffee. I try to book it for half the time. I first think about booking it for. It's like a quickie. You can get it done in less time. If you need to think about if it's an all day meeting, book it for four hours. So when you build in these little systems again, you control Parkinson's law. But that little structure, it doesn't take away from the synchronicity that can happen. It just allows people to go, okay, I have a container. I know you're serious about contributing. I'll be serious about contributing. And you can still build in time to check in with each other, make sure you're on a good, you know, what's on with your life. But it doesn't just stretch on to Whatever. And you end up having meetings. Let's say you have more than three or four people coming to a meeting. There's probably a good chance that if you're covering more than three or four topics, there's a couple people that don't need to be there for all the topics. So you start to realize when you look at the agenda, who really needs to come. And then you can allow people to stay at their desk and work on projects that are a higher ROI for their time than just showing up at every meeting.

Yeah. Okay. So, you know, you've heard obviously, paralysis by analysis a million times and people getting together and just talking about stuff. So, you know, you've probably read a lot of Peter Drucker, I'm sure, in the past. So, you know, he had that line where you're either working or you're in meetings. And then I, you know, Peter Drucker had a lot of great quotes. One of them is, there's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all.

Yep.

And so there's a lot. And he also, in the book Managing Oneself, he talks about if you got more people that are needed for the job, those people will spend more time interacting with each other than actually work doing the work. Yep. So how do you. So a couple of things. One, we're going to talk about people, and I have a question for you about a players, but also, like, let's take vivid vision and let's take meanings. And now let's take AI. With AI, you can probably do a lot of stuff to help with, you know, create a vivid vision, you know, write a vivid vision, you know, whatever talk about. Cameron Harrell has this thing, you know, called a vivid vision. Like, help me construct one. Then you have one with meetings where you can actually summarize a meeting. You can. I mean, so how. How are you. How are you utilizing AI currently and how are you thinking about it right now? Because every day it gets better.

So the new one that we're working with are. So I have members of the COO alliance from 17 countries. Right. So we have, like, people like you. You're not allowed to join, but your COO can. So we have all these COOs, and every month we have a different AI expert presenting to our members. One of the experts that presented a couple months ago was teaching us how to actually have an AI agent show up via Zoom to be present as a team member at specific meetings, especially meetings around strategy or when you're brainstorming or when you're working through, like, stuff to where the decisions need to be made. You can actually call on a team member and we're now naming these people. So the CEO of mindvalley is a client of ours. And the CEO of mindvalley literally has two named AI agents that show up at their strategy meetings and at their leadership team meetings. That's an example of how you can think about it. But again, you don't need to turn that AI agent on or invite them to a meeting if they're not meant to be there. I even talk about that, that there's different styles of communication that happen in meetings. One of the things that drives employee nuts is when they show up at a meeting thinking they're going to get to contribute. But it's meant to be more info share. Right. Whereas I'm sharing with you or you're sharing with me, or they think a discussion or decision is being made where we're just here to brainstorm and throw a bunch of ideas on the wall, and then some of the people are going to go in and think about it later and make a decision later. But if you tell them there's no decision going to be made, it's just brainstorming, then when you just brainstorm, they're okay with that. Right. So it's a style and a communication tool, you know.

So let me ask you about Brian Scudamore from 1-800-got-Junk, who I actually met before I met you. And he's super sharp dude. And, you know, last time I interviewed him at the headquarters, it was, you know, I don't know, what are the revenue now?

850. 850 million now.

Okay. Wow. And did he ever not try to become like. Because he's just an incredibly sharp dude and you got all these influencers and people dispensing business advice, and then you got guys like him who, you know, you can tap into their knowledge, but they don't become famous. Does he purposely try not to, or is it just not an area of focus for him?

No, I would say that he's the opposite. You just didn't get or weren't in his orbit to be surrounded by all the media. So he's on Dragon's Den now in Canada, which is Shark Tank in the us US we had, you know, during the time that I was there, one of the groups that reported into me was our PR group. And we landed 5,200 individual unique stories about 1, 800 got junk in six years, including being on Oprah. So Brian's had so much press coverage that he is pretty well known, but you just weren't in the circles around that well.

I mean, but again, he didn't let.

It go to his head.

Yeah, no. And he's. And I. I think he's great. I mean, I really like Brian. I mean, he's just nice dude, sharp dude.

He was my best man at my wedding. Before, before I started to work, we had an unfair advantage. So Brian and I were in a forum like this where we met every single month for four and a half years. So we really knew each other. He'd watched me build two companies. I watched him with. With 1, 800, got junk. And he was my best man at my wedding three months before I started to work with him. So we had this huge amount of trust and connection and really understood each other pretty well.

Well, let's. Let's go back to the negative times. So there came a point where he fired you?

Yeah.

So was there animosity for a period of time and then you came back to each election?

There was no animosity in getting fired. It was brutal. So we had a leadership team meeting every single Thursday for an hour and a half to discuss strategy and go through the numbers together. And the meeting would start at 8. Brian and I, every week on the Thursday would meet at seven for he and I to get in sync before the leadership team would then mink. So we got together at 7. We were meeting at the Vancouver Club and I ordered my traditional eggs Benedict. I weighed 40 pounds heavier than I do today. And Brian ordered a grapefruit. And I'm like, the. Are you doing order a grapefruit? You've never ordered grapefruit in your life. Like you, you're like eggs Benny with extra sauce. Like grapefruit. And he just looked at me and he started to cry. And I'm like, oh, I told your assistant last night you were going to fire me today. I go, what's up? He goes, I'm sorry, it's over. And he said you were the right guy to get us to 100 million, but you're not the guy to take us from 100 million to the billion. You're the entrepreneurial COO and I need more of the corporate COO. So it took 12 months for them to find my replacement. They brought in the former president of Starbucks usa. She'd run all North American operations for Starbucks. She came in to replace me. She came in and said, wow, what a cute little company. And I was fucking pulling my hair out because it Was big. I was crying so hard that Brian made me take a taxi home, and he drove my car home because I was dysfunctional. It took me at least four years to trust him after that. And it was because of the way that it was done. And we've talked publicly about this. When he wrote his book, his first book, Willing to Fail, I was like, I hope he just mentions me. And it was page three I was mentioned, then page 12, I think it was like seven or eight times in the book. And he never mentioned anyone from the leadership team, which I thought was weird. But I also really saw how much he valued me. So that's what started to rebuild our trust. There's some other things that had happened behind the scenes with him that had broken his trust of me. He'd done. So there was some stuff happening that was. That's never been talked about, that he knows and knows why there was some things happening. So it was hard. Now we're quite close.

Yeah, it's very.

It's been 18 years. Yeah.

I mean, these are very difficult things. And it's great, though, that you guys have maintained the respect and. Because that often doesn't happen. And I try to. When a relationship needs to end or transition in most cases, unless you're dealing with, you know, dishonesty or, you know, someone's embezzled or someone stole from you, you know, as long as there's a caring in the relationship, it usually always ends up better for both parties if you get someone that got you to one place. But there's that period where the firing or the separating or the breakup, because I've had some personal breakups with, you know, love relationships and things that in the moment, it's awesome. But then coming back, it's like it. It just. It just was best for. For all of us.

Well, it's definitely the best thing for my brand. And I've been. I mean, here's how weird it was. So not only was I let go by my best friend, but four days later, he asked me if I would go on stage to speak at an event because he was busy trying to figure out how to replace me and asked if I could go speak to 400 people in a slot that he'd been booked for. And then four months later, he called me to say, could you go speak at another big event that, like. So I was there speaking on behalf of the company, even though I was still going like, you. Why did you do it this way? This doesn't make any sense. And then for him, he Also had to go through these struggles. We were texting last week, like, we're really close friends now, but it was just a hard thing. And partially it was because I was in an unhealthy relationship with work, where the business was my brand, the business was my everything. I mean, Shelby, when I met you, it was back in the got junk days, right? And I had nothing else to talk about other than it was a very unhealthy relationship I had with building a business. So I think it was hard for me to rip myself away from that, to even know who I was. And I think there was a real primal hurt there. And then for Brian, he'd also taken off his left arm and said, oh, fuck, now what am I supposed to do? Like in the book when you read it, he gave so much credit for the fact that he never could have even built it had I not been there. So I think it was hard for him knowing that he'd let his best friend go for probably the right reasons, but the board really mismanaged it in the way to do it.

Okay, wow.

I went into the company a week later to actually read out a resignation and say goodbye to everybody. And so it was this really weird, you know, thing. Yeah. And I write. I actually write about it in my book, the Second in Command. The last chapter is called when the Party's over. Because at the end of the day, in fact, I was in this room about five years ago with Clayton Mask from infusionsoft, and we were talking about how long a mid to senior level person can stay in your company. And we both agreed that it was through two doubles of revenue. So if you're a $5 million company and you have the head of marketing, the head of marketing can probably be your head of marketing at 10 million, they can probably be your head of marketing at 20, but there's no way they can still be your head of marketing at 40 from a $5 million company unless they're really up leveling their skills. So I was the last person on this whole leadership team of five people to be replaced over the six year period. So it was the right thing. And I just talk about it in the book as to how to do it in the right way.

So Michael Ebrath, in his book, which I'm going to interview Michael tomorrow, he talks about you coach someone up or you coach them out. So you weren't really coached out. You just got to a point where it's just like, this can't work out.

And I knew it was Happening. Like, I knew that it was done. I literally told Brian's assistant Christina the night before. I'm like, I think Brian's going to fire me tomorrow. She's like, shut up, go home, you're an idiot. Like, we'll see you in the morning. And then I always took a different path out. It's 60,000 square feet. So I was walking out of the business in this weird direction and Helen, our head of hr, was sitting, filling out some paperwork in a boardroom. And as I went to say goodbye, she turned the paperwork over. And I'm like, I'm totally getting fired tomorrow. Like no one had ever turned over paper. I was a fucking coo. You don't turn over paper. So I knew it was coming, I knew it was wrong, and I knew I was the wrong guy to scale it. It was just, there's a good way and a bad way to do things and it just wasn't done well.

So in second in command, I mean, you talk about how, you know, there's the role of a CEO and there's some that fit in some circumstances and some in others. I mean, I think you describe it quite well. Define a CEO's role. What does that, you know, I mean chief Operating officer, but what does that mean?

Okay, and let me explain the title. So the reason I even called the book the second in command and not the CEO is your second in command. Could be a CEO, it could be a Vice President, operations, it could be a Director of operations, could be an operations Manager, could be a gm, could be an executive assistant. It's your yin and yang partner. Okay, so the title, to have a true C level title to be a chief of anything, Chief technology, chief Marketing, Chief financial chief operating. 30 years ago you had to be a major player at a major company. And then what happened is the banks in the late 90s started to give away titles of VP to people as a marketing tool. Remember when you had like your 25 year old friend was the vice president of some random bank, you're like, what the fuck? He's like, no, I'm. I'm 12 layers below the CEO. And then when the Internet started to hit 95 to 2000, we started to actually be able to market ourselves. So a title became a marketing tool. So we started to give out not only equity in lieu of compensation, we started to give out titles to people as a door opener with their email signatures. That's where title inflation started. So to be a true title Inflation. Inflation, yeah, I think I coined that term. So to have to be a true chief operating officer or a chief financial officer, et cetera, you have to come in with a level of strategic insight where you're actually helping to direct the direction of the organization. You come in with a level of autonomy where you actually can say, here's all the stuff that needs to get done. And the CEO goes, thank God. I didn't know what to do. Brian didn't give me anything to do for five years. I was showing him what needed to happen. You have a level of P and L and budget responsibility and the ability to actually manage a P and L and budgets. You bring people and partners into the company with you, right? Oh, and then your. Your compensation is actually valid compared to what the title is. If you have $120,000 person, they're not a COO, they're a director. A true COO is in the 250 to 550 range. I was getting paid $312,000 18 years ago. I was a COO. So be careful with the title you give people, okay? The question, though was, oh, yeah, what is one?

Like, what? Because you have the COO alliance, so you have a focus.

I would, I would retitle it now as to, like, you've got the genius network. Not like, I would call it the second in command society or something, because we have COOs, directors, ops, GMs, whatever. As long as you're the second in command of the CEO. So to find a really good one, you have to know yourself. The weird thing about a COO is I was the right COO for Brian from, from 2 million to 100 million. I was the right stage. I knew how to franchise. I'd done it twice before. I could come in with all the autonomy and strategy and, like, I literally nailed that role. And on the trust and friendship side, he was my best friend. So it was just a perfect yin and yang approach. The stuff that I sucked at, it and finance, he loved. And he was good at all the other stuff I was really good at. And he didn't want to go near the current coo. Eric Church. I've known Eric for 38 years, which is really weird. We started a fraternity together in Ottawa, Canada, in 1987. I was president the first year, he was president the second year, and he's now the COO at 1-800-GOT junk. Eric's been there for 12 years. Crazy, right? Eric's been there for 12 Years. He would have been a horrible COO completely. And he said it, and so has Brian. He would have been incapable to be a COO for the first six years because he didn't have the entrepreneurial skills. He wasn't from the franchising space, he didn't know how to scale a startup. But he's been incredible from the hundred million to the billion. It's absolutely his zone of genius. Remember Jeff Taylor from Monster? Do you know Jeff Taylor? Remember monster.com?

No.

Maybe it was Vern.

I know another Jeff Taylor, but I'm thinking Monster.

So Eric used to work as like a senior executive VP with the head of Monster. Like, he was very seasoned in the corporate world. So even though it's the same CEO, there's a different season that you have to hire for. If I look at all of my members of the CEO Alliance, I would be a horrible CEO for 95 to 98% of their companies because I don't match the skill set of the industry. I don't match the size of the company they are. I'm not a good fit with their, their CEO. So it's this weird role. But if you're the head of marketing for a finance firm, you could probably be the head of marketing for all finance firms. If you're the head of IT for a fitness company, you could be the head of IT for all fitness companies. If you're the COO for a fitness company, you may not be the right fit for that CEO. So it's a really tough role to hire for today.

How do you go about hiring for like. Well, let me ask, how many of you have a COO or someone that is your second in command? Okay. How many of you don't have one, but would like one?

Okay. How many of you might be replacing the one that you have in the next 12 months? Okay. By the way, if you're looking at the person that you have as your coo, remember that at some point they're going to drive you crazy. But even if you replace them with somebody else, that new person's going to drive you crazy too. When I was coaching Marcelo Claret, Marcelo was the CEO of Sprint. He'd sold his first company for over a billion dollars to Softbank. And then Masa appointed Marcelo, the CEO of Sprint, to prepare to do a merger with T Mobile, which we did. I was sitting in Marcelo's office in Kansas City and he was asking me about people and he said, when are people not going to be the problem anymore? I'm like, you're the 82nd largest company in the United States. They're always the fucking problem. So our Job as a leader is to grow people. It's to grow their skills, to grow their confidence and to grow their connections so that we can delegate everything except genius. So your job is to keep working with the people you've got. So the COO that's driving you crazy, that's just an opportunity for you to coach them. Right? Or to put them into the CEO alliance and let us work with them, let them work with each other. But our job is always to grow people. So don't get frustrated with them, don't give up on those people. Where do you find them? The first thing is to know yourself. So really do an activity inventory of all of the stuff that you suck at as an entrepreneur, of all the stuff that drains you of energy as an entrepreneur, of all the business projects and things you'd love to be doing but you don't have time to do, of all the business areas that have to report to you but you're not good at. Make a list of all those things and then flip it upside down and that becomes what this new person is going to be doing. They're going to do all the stuff you're bad at. Okay, number one, then describe the kind of person you are as a leader. Look at your Colby profile, look at your disc profile and look for the counterpart to that. Someone who matches really well with that personality profile. That's the starting point of what you're looking for, is to understand yourself first. Once you know what you're looking for. I would describe the title that matches the roles and responsibility, the metrics that they're responsible for and then think about the proper compensation and put the proper title in place to match the compensation. Don't put a big title on a small role and don't put small compensation on the wrong role. And then I like engaging executive search firms. I have three executive search firms that we refer to. One is Max Hansen. Has everybody met Max Hansen from wisecodes? So Max, now a genius network member. They're specialists in recruiting COOs and senior executives. I like working with them because they're culture based recruiting.

That's how I ended up finding Leon.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Oh, then were you involved in a search for John Barry's law firm a couple years ago too? No. So anyway, so, so another random story. Yeah. I like getting executive search firms to poach really good people and then, and then giving them the vivid vision. And if the really good people don't like the vivid vision of where we're going, I still want to go out and keep Searching for the people that.

Do you know, one thing that's very. I don't know. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I don't like poaching people from other companies.

Business is a full contact sport.

Say more then.

So I'm not going to poach them in a direct way. I'm going to attract them a little bit. Right. What I'm going to do is make sure that my vivid vision is out there and my brand is so out there that an A player only wants to work with us. Right. I'm not necessarily going to be directly cold calling the competitions people, but I'll certainly make sure that the competitions people know what we're doing so that they come over.

Yeah. No. There's a part of me I wish I was more hardcore in some areas. I mean, obviously, I think how many of you hate letting people go? Even when you know they're a wrong fit, even when they know they're a wrong fit, but they still don't leave? And you don't know how to.

CEOs don't like firing people. That's why you have a COO to do that for you. My job, our job as a COO is to make the entrepreneur look good. So one of the, and I talk about this in the book the Second in Command, one of the core roles of the COO is to make the CEO iconic. One of the CEO's jobs is internally to make sure we look good. So your job with Leon, who, by the way, is now a CEO alliance member, I just gave him a year membership. Even though I paid to be in this program for eight years, I'm giving him one year free.

What he's doing right there is manipulating out of me.

He's going to get it back. It's a thank you for letting me come. I gave him a membership for free for the year, but I made him promise, you got to show up because sometimes people don't value stuff for free. He's going to show up. He's going to be at all of our calls. But your job internally, when he has to roll the tough decisions, when he has to fire people, when he has to say no, when he has to say we can't because of your job is to make sure everybody internally still loves him.

Oh, like, yeah.

It's like mom and dad, right? Mom and dad have to argue and fight, but not in front of the kids.

We're still going through the thing where it's like, I'm so used to things I can't let go of. And he's like, no, I got this. Let me do this. That's why you have me here. And there's that part of me that's like, I get discombobulated because I'm like, am I supposed to have him do that?

He's a much better fit than your old one. Oh, with the D. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm not going to mention his name. He's a good guy, but not the right.

Yeah. And he learned how to run a company. He's now running a successful company as a result of working for me. Yeah. Well, okay. So in 2009 I went on a. Richard Rossi organized a trip that we went on a. It was an interesting month. It was the. It was the. The month I went like an entire month without cell phones, electronics, anything. Much harder to do today. So I spent nine days in Vietnam, first with John Butcher, Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullenwig who was the founder of WordPress. Garrett Gunderson. And then come back for two days and then go to fly to Galapagos and we go on a National geographic boat for 10 days and I'm there with Member Tellman. Crazy Tillman.

Yeah.

And Dan Sullivan, Evan Pagan and Brad Smart, a couple of other people. And so Brad Smart wrote top?

No, he wrote who? His dad wrote Jeff. No sir. Yeah, Brad wrote TOP like the father.

Jeff is the one that wrote who.

Yeah.

And so you know, I had a lot of discussions with him about top grading. So my challenge has like I even had written back then, you know, I was using free recorded messages to describe the position. And we would say to people is you need to shoot a video or record a message and send it to us telling us why we should hire you.

Right.

And he was like this is one of the best frickin ways to recruit people I've ever seen. And I ended up going to some of his events helping him with some of the marketing for. But I've always had like I could come up with the marketing concepts but sitting down with a person to evaluate them, to interview.

So here's the question. How much training have you had? Have you gone through the top grading training?

Yeah, a long time ago.

Did you ever have anyone video you doing interviews and give you feedback on that?

No.

Did you ever role play or practice doing interviews?

A little bit, but not a lot.

Yeah. So. So you've had kind of base level training on interviewing. Yes. To really train your team. Right. So at 1-800-got junk we had to hire. Let me back it up at College Pro painters, we had four months to recruit, hire and train 800 franchisees. Imagine recruiting, hiring, training 800 franchisees in four months. I hired Kimbal Musk back in 1993 as a franchisee for me. His cousin Peter rive, who built SolarCity, I hired him the same year. So imagine being in the 30 people to hire, recruit, interview and hire. And then in one month we had to train those 800 people how to interview and hire 8,000 students to paint houses. So in four months, five months, we had to hire 8,800 people. And we did it every year for seven years. We became operationally world class at interviewing. Very similar, like Brad and Jeff Smart. I know their systems inside and out, great systems. But I've been trained in it, I've practiced it, I've role played it, I've had videos of me, I've had feedback, I've watched it, I've given myself feedback. I've been trained in this stuff. I also make sure that anybody in my companies has been trained in this base level skill more than they train them on what the Genius network is or what financial literacy is. We train everybody on what we do and not on how we need to do what we do. It's kind of like Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. Simon used to be on our board of Advisors back in 2004, five years before he wrote the book. Start with why. But you have your why, your how and your what. Simon's obsession is the why. Right? Core purpose, your core beliefs, your core values, your bhag, your vivid vision. Most companies train on the outer circle on what we do, how our systems work, what the Genius network is, all that stuff. I train on the how, all the soft skills of leadership. So the reason that interviewing is hard for you is you've never really had enough training to be really good at it. Imagine if you'd had the training on interviewing that you've had on copywriting. Yeah, right. Then it gets easy. So for me, interviewing is really, really simple because I've had an obscene amount of training around it. For me, copywriting is so difficult because I've never done any work around it. You'd be like, well, have you not taken a letter and written it out? And no, I've never done that. Like, have you ever written Dan Kennedy stuff? No, I've never. You'd be like, how could you have not done this? Well, because I spent my 10,000 hours on the soft skills of leadership and you spent years on marketing. So you're operationally world class around marketing and biz dev and relationships.

I can even write better than parislandropolis back there. That guy sucks. Compared to. I'm kidding.

Yeah, but those are skills that we have to make sure. I like flipping the org chart upside down. I like putting the CEO at the bottom of the org chart, supporting the C level and VPs who support the directors and managers who support the employees. Like an inverted pyramid with all the customers here so everyone can see the vivid vision. And then you build your company inside your core purpose and your core values. Well, one of the things I have to make sure people are good at is interviewing. Again, these are skills that aren't taught in EOS or in scaling up. We give the people the systems, but we don't give them the skills to actually manage the systems.

Yeah, and by the way, I was, I'm asking you this in a very purposeful manner, doing my best to communicate what as I can. Because the, the actual question I had was how do you spot and hire true A players and avoid cultural misfits? And of course you could give a really good answer to that. But the depth of it is. Well, even if you say whatever it is, there's this part of me that's always had this. I've, I've read the book. I've read the entire giant book of top grading. It's a big book. And, and there's this part of me that like still has difficulty with it.

I got it. You know, so, so the, the real question is how do you spot them? The first is beat them. Be so well trained in interviewing that you actually know how to run the torque system. The threat of reference check. Right. Be really well trained that you know how to probe and ask all the proper questions. Be so well trained that you can actually run a series of one on one interviews and then cross reference based on. So you're actually rating the same person, but three of you who have interviewed them rate them on those things behind the scenes. It's just being trained in it. That's number one. I'll give an example of how well trained I was to spot something. This was back 30 years ago. One of the things that someone had to be really good at to be a franchisee was time management and project management. So I really wanted someone who understood priority management. I'm interviewing this candidate and he was explaining his time management like it literally sounded like getting things done. David Allen's book is like pick your A's and B's, number your A's, put how Many times, you know, minutes for each a. Put them into your calendar. Fucking color code. I'm like, God, this guy really knows time management. But my spider senses were saying he knew how to do it, but he'd never done it. I know how to win an Olympic gold medal. Who here knows how to win an Olympic gold medal? We all know. Just be fucking faster. Who knows how to set a world record? Who knows how to do front crawl? We all do. We would drown racing in it. Right? So I could explain how to win an Olympic record. If you hire me because I know how to do something, you will fail every time. So in this interview, I'm like, this guy, something is like, he knows how to do this. I'm like, this was back prior to PDAs. This was 93, 94. I said, where's your daytimer? He goes, out in my car. I'm like. And everything you've just described is in your daytimer. Like, quarterly planning, monthly, your weekly. You do all this? He goes, yeah. I'm like, can you go grab your daytimer?

Are you talking, David?

No. Okay. He goes, for what? And I said, I just want you to flip through your daytimer and show me. You can show me from across the desk. I don't need to see the details. I want to see if everything you told me you know how to do is actually what you do. So he goes, sure. He grabbed his jacket, went out to the car. I've never seen him since. Because I knew that what I was looking for was not how to do it. I was looking for someone that had done it and could prove that they've done it. Then I can also use the torque process, the thread of reference check. So again, this is the stuff that I talk about in my invest in your leaders training. One of the modules is interviewing. You need your people to be base level certified on every skill. If I gave you the 12 core skills that people need to be good at, all of your management team, all of your leadership team, and even you should have at least a bronze level of competency on every skill. Silver's pretty damn good. Gold means you can certify other people on those skills. When you can actually bring training into your organization like that, then it gets easy to hire people and interview people. So your problem isn't that it's hard to find people. It's that you're still at, like a bronze, basically level of competency.

Well, at this stage, do you think I should even be doing that?

No, you should be interviewing for culture fit. And not for actual skill set. And often when you're, when your company gets to a scale that like as an example, we were hiring a head of engineering in IT at 1,800 got junk. We didn't know anything about engineering in IT. We didn't even know how to interview to see if they had the skills. So we brought in the head of IT from Business Objects and the head of IT from Abe Books, Boris Wortz, who had literally just sold for about 400 million to Amazon. And they interviewed our final three candidates for us. When we were looking for our CFO, we brought in the former CFO of business objects, Crystal Decisions, former CFO from Arthur, from Deloitte and Touche in Vancouver, our head of accounting, they interviewed for Skillset and we interviewed for Cultural Fitness.

Yeah, okay, so, well, you have your the 12 core leadership skills that everyone should master. So can you talk about them and I'd love to hear your spin on it now with AI, you know, I mean, do you consider this something to master?

Yeah, I don't think. Let me go through the 12 and I'm pretty sure that at least 9 or 10 of the 12 can't be replaced with AI. You might be able to leverage and make you better, but you still have to be good at it because you're implementing a soft skill with humans. So here's the 12 skills off the top of my head. I'll see if I can do them. Situational leadership. And if you ask, if you want to write them down, you can ask me questions, I'll explain them. But situational leadership coaching, one on one coaching, delegation, time management, project management, handling conflict interviewing, running effective meetings, reverse engineering, vision, delegation. Ah, there's one more. Can't remember because I can't see them, but those would be kind of the 11 of the 12 core skills. You can't really AI your way out of that, like delegating a project to someone. But almost none of us have had any training on delegation. Well, the onus is on the receiver. If you want to get back a result on time and on budget in the work that you're looking for, it's your job to delegate it in a way tying it with situational leadership. The ability to adapt your leadership style to make sure your person you're giving it to has the skills and confidence to do it and then to coach them and make sure they have the time blocks. But if you've never had any skills in this, then of course shit doesn't come back to you on time or on budget or drives you crazy. So it's hard. So I think there's skills that you can maybe leverage, but I don't think any of those can really be. I'll give an example how AI can help you with interviewing. Let's say that who's got a behavioral trait that they need someone they're hiring for to be good on? Who's hiring somebody right now? Okay, detail oriented, great. So how do you find that? Fuck, I don't know. So you go on to ChatGPT and you say, what are five questions I can ask to start the interview process to see if someone's detail oriented. Cool. One example would be describe your closet to me. Right? When you just. And don't say is it organized? That's way too leading. Describe your closet to me. A detail oriented person. A person like me will tell you that when I used to have a closet, because now I travel was all my shirts were hung color coded. Like dress shirts, light to dark, jeans light to dark. Like everything was color coded. Of course it is, right? If you're detail oriented, if you're like a normal human, it's just like shit in a closet. But someone who doesn't think like a detail oriented person would probably just say, I don't know, it's like a walk in closet. Like they don't even know where you're really going with that. Now, interviewing isn't just the five questions. Interviewing is then being able to probe around the five questions and being able to rate somebody on those five questions or being able to know how do I actually define what I'm looking for? So I know it when I find it. So I think ChatGPT can help you figure things out if you know what it is you're trying to find. So I teach that as to. As an example, if you're hiring a salesperson, there's not a single salesperson that will ever make it through an HR screening process. HR people hate sales people. HR people are about details, policies and procedures, following the rules. They're a little bit more kind of play it by the book. Sales people are making shit up. They're winging it. They're not following the. Like, they're way out. There's no box anyway. They're so outside of the box it doesn't even exist. And they're too high gregarious. Right? High energy. They scare HR people. So don't get HR people interviewing salespeople. But if I'm looking for an HR person, I don't want somebody who thinks outside of the box and doesn't follow rules. Jesus. Behavioral traits have to match the role that you're looking for. As an example, we were hiring and one of our traits had to be tenacity. We defined it as the dog like work ethic to get over, under around any obstacle put in one's path. Then we actually knew what questions to ask to see how tenacious someone was. So One of our VPs one day said that somebody was a five out of five in tenacity. I'd rated the person as a one, so clearly there was a mismatch. And I'm like, how could they possibly be a five? He goes, they're a hard worker. They were a bricklayer. I'm like, no, they were lazy. They dropped out of everything. They never got help in anything. They ended up with a shitty job to be a bricklayer. They're not a hard worker. He's like, oh my God, you're totally right. There's a difference between someone who works hard and somebody who has to work hard.

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