87. The COO's Guide to The Jigsaw Puzzle Company

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Operations Room, a podcast for COOs. I am Brandon Menzinger, joined by my sick co host, Bethany Ayers. How are things going, Bethany? Yeah, I feel like I almost have your voice today, Brandon.

Not quite. What is my voice? It's not smooth and silky. No, I think you do have a smooth and silky voice, but it's obviously much deeper than mine, whereas today I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself, didn't sleep well and have whatever this is.

It started as a cold. It's a bit more than a cold, but it's not COVID. So I didn't sleep well last night because one of my aunts and I keep trying to figure out how to describe her in terms of like our relationship as she's I don't know what our relationship is, but it's just very close and it's always been very close. And she went in for surgery yesterday that I really didn't know if she was gonna survive.

She went in like an hour before bedtime. So I had my phone set that I could get messages if needed, and then just obviously slept very lightly through the night because I didn't know what was gonna happen. Was I gonna get a phone call? But also didn't want to look at my phone because I wanted to sleep and I didn't want to have to deal with any news.

So it was just this weird dichotomy. So I I ended up giving up and waking up like five something and then looked and she's out of surgery, she's still alive. Her son was in the room with her, and we had a phone call at six in the morning. There's there were tears, there was laughs, there was a lot of repetition because she's still on anesthesia.

So we had the same conversation about four times. Yeah, well, okay, so you've had quite a night then. Yeah, so quite a night. I went to bed sounding like this, but it's not a surprise that I've woken up sounding the same way 'cause it was not a good night.

I'm fifty-one. My parents are obviously getting quite old. They're both still alive. My mother, maybe not quite the same thing, but she went into hospital a couple of days ago.

And I get this like text, right? This WhatsApp out of nowhere. It's just like one line statement, Brandon, I'm in the hospital, like with a heart issue. I'm like, fuck Jesus.

I'm like, oh, thank you for that one liner. So obviously WhatsApp were back, no response. So then I m talk to my sister. My sister is the one to go to for status updates related to my parents for the most part.

So she kind of gave me the lowdown as to what was happening. I kind of feel like between young kids, aging parents, I'm not a young kid myself these days, but yeah, I feel like I'm in that sandwich period, as they call it. Yeah, I am either lucky or unlucky that my parents are already gone. So I don't have that direct responsibility.

They both died fairly young. But I'm definitely seeing it with my cousins and therefore my aunts and uncles. Most of us were in Albuquerque, so I I'm very close to my aunts and uncles in a old fashioned traditional way. That means that I'm quite grateful that I don't have all of the responsibility of that children have with their parents and I don't have to deal with all of that horrible stuff 'cause I did it young.

But I still have like the emotional toll and worry around all of these people in my life who I love who are getting old. So we have got a great topic today, which is the CO's guide to the Jigsaw Puzzle Company. We have an amazing guest for this, which is Cameron Harold. He is the founder of the CO alliance and the host of the second in command podcast and a returning guest from our previous episode.

I'm a big fanboy of Cameron because I kind of grew up with him in a way whereby I was listening to his podcast pretty consistently to understand what a CO does. And so the first thing that he had spoken about was this jigsaw metaphor that he uses. And he talked about the four corners of the puzzle being core purpose, core values, the B Hag, and by the way, I hate that term. It's so nineteen nineties.

B HAG and the one year plan as the four corners, and the four sides being people systems, strategy systems, meeting rhythms, and financial systems. So that metaphor of the puzzle and the four corners of the four sides. Do you like this metaphor? Yes.

I also had a bit of an issue with the BHAG, I have to say, because the way he described it quite often just seemed like the vision to me. But then when we would talk about vision, he would get really like confused or annoyed or because he calls it what a vivid vision, like the whole puzzle then becomes a vivid vision. And so we have vision, BHAG, and vivid vision, and they all mean slightly different things, or core what was it? Core Vision, B Hag, and vivid vision.

So I think that terminology just got a little confusing and he very clearly understood what he meant, did not understand what I meant. So I think maybe some improvement on nomenclature would would help. I think it's because he has a framework and the framework has specific terminology. And I think to your point, I think the element of confusion, as I understood it, was that we talk about normally you have your vision, your mission, and your purpose if you want to have three layers.

Usually the vision generically in most companies, standard terminology-wise, just means what is the future state going to look like at some level of like understanding and being able to translate that vision to employees and to investors and folks to get people excited by the future that is possible effectively, what that future looks like at some level of description. So I think the misunderstanding or maybe the confusion within his framework is that I think his BHAG and his vivid vision is a bit of a combination that is that vision that we would normally refer to.

It's both elements combined, I guess. And I think the distinction that he was trying to make, which sort of makes sense, I guess, was like his so-called BHAG was the North Star kind of like 20 years out, which we never really referred to, I think in our in the way that I think about these vision things. The 20-year-out thing of like the transformation of like putting a computer on everyone's desk from Bill Gates is kind of what he was referring to. And then separately he was referring to this vivid vision being three years out very specifically.

What does everything look like? So both with the product, the market, the company, very descriptively, you write a four page document. What is that three year organization look like at that stage? Yeah, I got that.

It's just that it's vivid vision versus vision. And so then I would say vision meaning like the normal definition of vision. And he would then be like, No, it's a vivid vision. Like, no, I'm not talking about your vivid vision.

I'm just talking about vision. Yeah. And I think any way you slice it, do you have a vision and can you articulate it in helpful, useful ways? And maybe these are some tactical ways that might be useful ways of actually making it come alive.

Yeah, I think so. And he's he's looking at all of the key elements of a business. I just had a a thought, because I'm not generally a fan of frameworks, but sometimes they are nice to just speed things up. We are doing our first leadership off site on Tuesday, and I needed to figure out what the agenda was.

What are we going to cover? And then also share a pre-read with the team. And so I used ChatGPT to help me with everything. And in the course of a few hours, we had it done.

And I ended up using a narrative format for my pre-read for three reasons. One, I don't have any data or diagrams to show yet because we're it's a bit early. Two, I absolutely hate our slide template and can't build anything with it. And the person I'm hoping to use to help me build the slides is on holiday at the moment and I'm waiting for him to return before I have a template.

And three, it's really easy for Chat GPT to write a narrative, and it's not really easy for ChatGPT to build slides. So it's made me wonder over the last day, is the Amazon two page narrative going to become the default now that everybody's using AI? Because it's actually easier to write the two page narrative than it is to build the slides. Actually, I think you have a really good point here.

You're right. It is so easy now to write written documents of a short nature to get across your message. And to your point, creating slides continues to be as difficult as it's always been and a pain in the ass and requires so much time and effort that I don't know, you like you're fiddling with like what's the one key statement at the top? What are my little boxes?

Are they three boxes? Are they two? Always seems to take forever to put these things together. And so I'm now thinking with the vivid vision or the jigsaw puzzle or whatever we want to call it, you could use that as the framework, answer all of those questions, and then get your four page vivid vision done very quickly.

So now I'm like, yeah, I love the vivid vision, let's use it. Big fan of the four page vivid vision. I'll tell you one story. We had a VP of product, a product leader, where he went through his product strategy and then went to at the very end of the deck, went to a black slide.

At that point, went into his vivid vision of the product of what it's going to look and feel like in three years' time. And it was the most amazing vision I've ever, product vision I've ever heard, where he didn't need any slides whatsoever. He used the black side to really center everyone's attention on him very specifically as the speaker. And then he gave his vision of what that was going to look like.

And it was such a powerful, compelling moment. I know it takes a certain amount of confidence and gravitas and storytelling capability to pull that off, but if it's possible, it it is amazing. Way more powerful. So anyhow, I've come full circle well, particularly in like the world of AI, because if you give it frameworks to use and the questions to answer, it could pretty quickly get something compelling.

Oh, and as another just because I've now changed the subject entirely, we're talking about AI rather than Cameron Harold, is when I do this work now, I use WISPAFLO and talk. And the reason why I don't just use Chat GPT's inbuilt dictation is because it's really glitchy and I'll find I talk to it and then half the time everything I've said has disappeared. Whereas WISPA flow is much better at not losing your content. Like it'll still glitch but it able to it's able to retrieve it.

And so by using that I've never lost my words since. So just as a tip for everybody, WISPA flow talking directly to Chat GPT, you can really use it as a thinking partner or thought partner and get some good content. But I I I am definitely using it like it's a person that's fallible. And so just and I used to have it come out with stuff and be like, Oh, I'll just fix it myself, whereas now I don't.

And I'm like, No, that's the wrong bullet point. I said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you wrote this, change it to that, and then it does. Or you've lost all the subtlety of my argument. You've forgotten these areas, do it again.

It's basically just delegating to somebody who doesn't have feelings. So you don't have to couch things. You'd be like, That's a really good beginning, but really this area here, you could do better. So Cameron went on to talk about his advice for new COs in the first ninety days of their role.

And he said, In the first thirty days, I'm like Sherlock Holmes, just trying to understand it all, and that pacing and not rushing to fix things and taking your time to observe, to validate, and to pull together some low friction wins as he described it. What do you make of Cameron's sage advice in this respect? I think it's great if you have the luxury, because he's going for the whole ninety days. And I think it depends on the size of the organization, the complexity and the position that it's in.

I think the format, which is the fairly standard 30, 60, 90 format of learn things, make a plan, execute the plan, is standard in what we all do. It's just whether or not you have the luxury to wait a whole 90 days, or if it becomes compacted. So actually you're observing for two weeks instead of four. Are you having to make plans on the fly?

The one thing that I thought was interesting and do think time matters is his point around not making personnel changes before ninety days. So before the team has an opportunity to understand you, get you, buy into you, and therefore back what might be unpopular personnel changes. I think you're exactly right. I think when it comes to people and the emotions around the individual, then there's consequences to these things.

So you need to make sure that whatever making the right calls for the company, given the gravity of what you're doing. It's interesting. The 3069 is so sequential. And I think the reality in scale-ups is that it's never sequential like that.

And I think rightfully so, because oftentimes you join a company and if you if you're experienced, you do a bit of pattern matching and you'll red flag almost immediately on things that don't make any sense. And then very quickly you'll validate why are they doing it? How did that come to be? Do they believe it makes sense?

Why is that the case? And very quickly you can take those red flags, validate it, and make the change happen sooner than later. You don't have to wait for 60, 90 days to make some of those changes, I think. So I think this kind of not sequential going through the process, but just not doing it sequentially, which is like flag what you flag, take your time on what you need to understand better.

And then in particular on the people front, push back any decisions around individuals until you really have a a good grasp on what is happening for the organization as a whole. I like that about it not being sequential or sequential but in different time bounds. I think that's quite insightful. The only part I'd add to the making team changes is is not just to make sure you're not making the wrong mistake, but to have the team trust the decision that you make and the team stays with you rather than revolts.

And you have to build that much more of a relationship because you got rid of Joe and everybody loved Joe. I think really doing that conversation, the one-to-ones across the company, depending on the size of the company, to get to know people, help them understand who you are, where you're coming from a little bit in that first nine days is critical to en masse get them to be in a position of like some level of trust related to yourself. Because obviously as you hit into that ninety day time frame and you start thinking about moving people around, you have to have some inbuilt level of respect, trust, credibility to make them feel like things are not being randomly done.

Or are they just bringing in your favorites? So Cameron had talked about the COO must be the leash, not the choke collar on the CEO. What do you make of that? It's such an emotive image, isn't it?

I know, I know. This is Cameron, he's all about the the vivid metaphors. The vivid vision. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it makes sense. And also it's definitely part of the episode worth listening to, rather than us summarizing it now. But basically like how to say no, but sound like you're saying yes, in effect. Put on your curiosity hat would be the hint.

But definitely make sure to listen out to that part of it and the script that he shares on how to be a leash and not a choke caller. It's almost like I don't want to talk about it too much because I want everybody to listen to what he had to say. Yes, I think this is absolutely critical, and it's critical in any role. I actually experienced this myself last week.

I was listening to two people talk that I know quite well. One is a contractor, one is a full-time employee. The contractor was saying that the other person was wrong. He was saying, No, that's wrong.

That doesn't make any sense. Here's the reason why. And the other person that was a full-time employee, the reaction from her was she was very off put by the entire response from the contractor. And I could see in her face she was bristling and pulling back and perhaps not wanting to really hear why it was not a good idea in that situation.

So clearly that's a good example of not saying no like that, because what you're trying to do is ensure that whatever point that you're trying to make, you're bringing the other person on side. And the question is, how do you do that in a useful way to ensure that that's not the reaction that you get? Because if that is the reaction, nothing's gonna happen, especially as a contractor. Yeah, you're just gonna burn a relationship and not be asked back next week.

So why don't we park it here and get onto our conversation with Cameron Harold? I've always viewed a business like a jigsaw puzzle. I remember when we were little kids and our mom would hand us the 2500-piece jigsaw puzzle. We needed to look at the picture on the front of the box to know what we were building.

So for me, that picture on the front of the box is something called the vivid vision. We can talk about that. It's that four or five-page description of what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. So that's the starting point of what every company needs to align the employees, align the suppliers, align the customers.

And so everyone knows what they're building, right? If we handed you a jigsaw puzzle with 5,000 red pieces, they were all red, you'd be like, well, that's just not helpful, right? So the picture is the starting point. And then we always looked for the corners.

We'd always find the four corners of the jigsaw puzzle. We put them on the table, and then we'd look for the side pieces. For me, the four corners are your core purpose, your core values, your BHAG, which is that Jim Collins term, and I want to talk about that because almost everyone does it wrong. And then your one-year plan that you work towards that three-year vivid vision.

Those are the four corners of every company's jigsaw puzzle. The four sides of the puzzle are the employee systems, and that's the recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and leadership development of people. And then it's the strategy systems. That's time to actually be strategic, to think out on the calendar.

To have time to look at your SWATs, to put operating systems in place to actually give people the tools, to bring AI into the organization. That's all strategic. And then you have your meeting rhythms. The meeting rhythms are your annuals, your quarterlies, your financial reviews, your L10s, your weekly meetings, your daily huddles, your one-on-one coaching systems, and there's systems related to meetings.

The fourth side is your financial systems. And those are things like your cash flows and budgets and understanding the different levers to be pulling. And then the middle parts of the puzzle are all the big shiny objects like the yellow umbrella and the red beach chair. Well, those are the culture systems that kind of emerge when you have the corners and the sides of the puzzle in place.

And I think for many entrepreneurial companies, the entrepreneur gets distracted with that big shiny object. Oh, this looks cool. Let's do that. Well, yes, but let's get the corners and the sides in place first.

It's like building a home. You have to build the foundation to be strong. But if they're just excited about putting in the new new appliances and the fancy cabinetry, but we haven't got the foundation or the walls built, you you're kind of doing it all backwards. So I've just visualized building a company in the way of building a Jigsaw puzzle.

So what I really like about the corners is that you only have purpose, I think you called it. Which I like because I'm always so confused about what's a vision, what's a mission, what's a purpose. And I feel like we get into these semantic debates around it. And I like that you just have one and we don't have to worry about the others.

So a core purpose is the reason that your company exists, right? My core purpose for everything I've done for the last 18 years has been to help entrepreneurs make their vivid vision come true. Everything I do drives helping entrepreneurs make their vivid vision come true, right? Helping them build their business.

So my speaking, my coaching, my CO alliance, my invest in your leaders course, my six books, my podcast, they're all aligned. Being on your show is aligned with helping entrepreneurial companies build their vivid vision. I don't work with corporate, I don't work with government agencies, I really don't do stuff with nonprofits. It's all that entrepreneurial world of making their vivid vision come true.

So it allows me to say no to things and be very focused on what I do. And I think that's where many companies get distracted. It's like, what was McDonald's doing trying to sell pizzas 20 years ago? Like what were they thinking?

And then the second corner is your core values. And I've seen so many companies do core values wrong. They'll either have single words like integrity or passion, but then they have to have a whole bunch of explanation bullet points down below. What I prefer to do is have a maximum of four or five core values.

Have each of the core values is a very easy to understand phrase. Like deliver what you promise, respect the individual, pride in all you do, and find a better way are four very, very strong. Core values for a company. Maybe the fifth is have some eff and fun.

But they don't need any explanation, right? It's understandable. We get it. And if the company hires people who already live the core values, and fires people if they break the core values, they become an underpinning.

They become foundational in the company. But if you merely put them on the wall and you don't talk about them, you don't celebrate them, you don't hire against them, that's when you're going to have trouble. I remember they asked Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, how do you get all your employees to be so happy? He said, We hire happy people.

How do you get your all of your companies to deliver what we promise? We hire people who deliver what we promise, right? How do you get all your employees to be so respectful of it? We hire people who respect people.

What your core values are, and you hire for them, you deliver against them, you celebrate them, you thank people about them, you talk about them all the time, and you fire people if you break them, it's easy, right? That's a second corner of your jigsaw puzzle. And then the third is that Bhag, that big hairy audacious goal. Now, most companies do it wrong.

They say, Oh, they want to change a million lives or educate a billion whatever's. That's just a massive goal. By Jim Collins' definition, and Jim Collins, who wrote Good the Great is the one who coined the term B Hag, the big hairy audacious goal, it has to be a 20 or 30 year stretch that from outside the company seems impossible and from inside seems plausible. And it's not measurable.

So at 1800 got junk, our BHAG was to build a globally admired brand. That meant building a great call center, having a great franchise program, great marketing, great PR, great branding. Everything we did had to become measured against other globally admired brand. Internally, we called ourselves the Starbucks of Junk Removal or the FedEx of Junk Removal.

That's who we benchmarked against. Boeing's was to democratize air travel. Nike was to crush Adidas, right? In 1972, that was a crazy B HAG.

Microsoft was to put a computer on every desktop, and then they later said, and in every household. But Microsoft didn't even make computers. But their BHAG of putting a computer on every desktop was because the software that we would all want to use would be so powerful that we would need those. And they sold the operating system, DOS and Windows that was on all of these computers.

So that's the purpose of the B Hag, is that big aligning force. My BHAG is for companies to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. Because the one sentence vision statement or mission statement doesn't work. Right?

You just mash a bunch of words up into a fancy sentence. It doesn't do anything. And that's where most people have the problem with the vision statement or mission statement, which is why I've completely replaced it with a four or five page document that describes the entire company. But then the vision is very similar to the beehag.

So I don't use a one-sentence vision statement. Most companies, when they have a vision statement or a mission statement, they got a bunch of their executives together. They all pick their most important words, their most inspiring words, and they put all the words together into one sentence, right? To align the world's organization with these kinds of people doing this kinds of things, doing that kind of like it's just so watered down that it's weird.

Again, Google's Bhag is to democratize the world's information. That could be a mission statement, but most companies stretch it out into something that's just this gobbledygook of crap. You have your vision as you described it, and you're trying to describe how five years out or some time period out, what is the the company that you're trying to achieve? What does that look like?

What does that feel like? That type of thing. And usually that vision, for the most part of scale ups, we tend to intertwine, I think, the B HAG with the vision itself as part of the same package because we're trying to disrupt the world in some phenomenal way. So again, the vivid vision is a three-year-out vision.

It's not five, it's not 10. When you go out five or 10 years, it becomes so far out there that no one really takes it seriously enough yet. The B hag of the 20 or 30 year is an inspirational, like democratizing or colonizing Mars is a B hag. But the vivid vision for what SpaceX looks like in three years is when you describe the leadership team, the use of metrics, what the company operates like, what the culture is like.

You describe operations and IT and marketing and finance. It's kind of a paragraph about each functional area and all the operating parts of the business. In the EOS world, what they've done is they put to play something in place called the Vision Traction Organizer, which is basically 10 goals. And it's these 10 big goals that align people, which is great.

But those 10 goals don't necessarily describe how we work together as a team. They don't necessarily describe the energy that you feel when you walk into an office. And it's important because the entrepreneur often feels that in their mind, right? The entrepreneur, the CEO often has a full vision of what they want all this to look like, but no one can read their mind.

When they write that down and describing the company, let's say December 31st, 2028. So three years out, everyone can see it and feel it. And it's close enough that they can start working towards it. But the foundational things that they're gonna put in place are the year one projects, and then they'll do the year two projects, then they'll do the year three projects.

Right. Some sentences of the vivid vision they'll start on now, but if you lean out five, ten years, there's not enough tension to really worry about that. It's just so far out there, we can kind of keep pushing that down the road for a few years. The reason I only do the one year plan is if you start putting plans in place that are really firm for three years out and two years out, the world has completely changed twelve months from now.

The more so now because of what's happening with technology and AI. Don't know how happy you're gonna be with this question, but I guess it's like, are you looking at using the vivid vision as a alternative system to EOS? So like if people just aren't getting on with EOS, they go to vivid vision or are they complimentary or how are you viewing them? Yeah, very complimentary.

In fact, I've talked to the team at EOS about this. I talked to Mark Winters about it. I've spoken to Geno Wickman, who wrote the book Traction. I'm actually interviewing their their new COO on our second command podcast.

I've interviewed the team at 90.io, which is the operating system that a lot of the EOS people use. So the vivid vision is what's missing for EOS. Right.

E EOS is is a great operating system for the systems that you need to scale. My invest in your leaders course is something else that's missing at EOS. It's the leadership skills that everyone on the management team needs to operate a business and the people, right? There's nothing in EOS about situational leadership or coaching or delegation or managing projects or running interviews, or they talk about the L10 meeting, which is great, but what about the annual meetings, the quarterly meetings, the daily huddles, the one-on-one coaching meetings, the financial reviews, the business area reviews are all meetings that are needed when your company is a mid-sized company.

Right. When you get 50 to 100 employees, you need more than an L10, right? If you're coaching people on a weekly basis, you need more than an L10. So the vivid vision is like an aligning point.

And I would say about 40% of our COO alliance members use EOS. And we even have a dedicated channel inside of Circle, inside of our CO alliance community, which is like Slack, where we have a dedicated channel for all of the EOS users of the CO alliance. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of EOS. One of the things I like about EOS is the simplicity around people.

It's kind of a ready made scorecard. You might get a better scorecard, but this is a really basic one and I like that to begin with. I do too. Remember, the people systems start with the recruiting.

So EOS doesn't talk about recruiting. It doesn't talk about running the interviews. It doesn't talk about reference checks. It doesn't talk about the onboarding of people.

But once you have the people, then that people systems, right, around what they're doing and what the responsibilities are is absolutely critical because it helps with communication. It helps with understanding what things people are supposed to be working on and what they're responsible for. I'm noticing a trend right now with companies that are looking to bring AI in. They get all their employees to write down everything they work on and they realize that half their employees aren't doing more than 10 hours or 15 hours of work during a week.

They're just trying to automate some work and they're not even doing 40 hours work. Like so now we're able to replace people when we realize they don't have much so so EOS is really powerful in that sense. And then it's the leading of people where how do you coach people? How do you align people?

How do you handle conflict with people? How do you remove them when they're in the wrong seat or put them in the right seat, right? Those are all pieces that you have to layer into the operating system of EOS. So maybe just to switch gears.

So obviously Bethany's joining a new organization as a CEO and I've been at my company now, my new company that I'm working for for about six months. What is the best way to tackle that first six month thinking in terms of what you should focus on, what matters? Yeah, so I call it the first 90 days or the first hundred days of entering into an organization. In the first month, the role of the CEO or COO coming into a company that already exists is to really get to understand the culture, the people, the current strategy, the past, the SWOT analysis, the competitive landscape.

It's going for lunch with every leader, either in person or over video. It's sitting in on every business meeting and just sitting in the corner and listening. And in the first 30 days, it's asking questions. And I like taking a notebook and scribbling down all my ideas.

And for 30 days, I'm like Sherlock Holmes, or I'm like a detective, just trying to understand it all. I want to understand everybody. I want to know who do people think we should fire? Who do people think we should promote?

Who are the A players? I want to get to know all the idiosyncrasies. I want to know what got us to here and where were we stumbling? And I really want to know the customers and the strategy and the marketplace.

And I don't want to put any ideas in place in that first month. In the second month, I'm going to go back through my list of ideas because I might have a list of, oh, we should fire Bob and we should promote Betty. In month two, I'm going to go back and stress test all my ideas. I'm going to go back and really question all of the things that I'm thinking about to see which ones we should start running with.

And then by month three, I'm going to start putting in place the projects and initiatives that are very easy to put in place. And then have a low what I call PETA factor, a low pain in the ass factor. They don't require a lot of people, time or money, right? I want to put projects in place that don't require a lot of people time or money that will give us a good ROI so that the team will go, oh, that was easy, right?

Look at this idea that Bethany had. That was easy and look at the result that we got. I'll also look for projects that will be like launching a satellite. They might take a little bit of effort, but once they're done, they pay dividends for a long period of time, right?

Maybe it's going out to our 500 customers from the last three years and getting a hundred of them to leave a Google review to take us from five Google reviews to a hundred Google reviews in a month. All of a sudden we go, whoa, we've we're now substantially changing. And that pays dividends for the next 12 months. I try to avoid any of the projects that are complicated, like putting a new CRM in place or changing systems in a very big way, or coming in with an entire EOS system.

I might come in with one component of it. Maybe it's just the L10 meeting, or maybe it's the vision traction organizer. So I would look to put very simple systems in place first. After your first quarter is when you can start making some of the people decisions, like firing people or bringing in people from the outside.

The reason for that is by that point your team has started to know you, like you, and trust you, and then they're ready for some of those bigger decisions that require a little bit of the I don't want to say politics, but a little bit more finesse. The kind of trust that you've made a good decision and getting rid of Bob wasn't every no where everybody's wondering who's next and Bob was such a nice guy. And they don't even know you yet, right? So then they're like if they don't even know you or like you or trust you, and all of a sudden Bob's gone and you're putting a CRM in place, then they could all be the right decisions.

It's so much change early that you and I I did it wrong. I I came into Winding Country Got Junk. I'd already built two franchise companies before. I knew exactly what needed to get done.

Brian had no idea how to build a franchise company. He'd sold his 12th franchise and had no operating manual, no franchise training system, no franchise marketing system. There was nothing other than the vision. So I came in guns ablazing with all of the right things to do, but people were like, who the fuck is this guy?

I'd been running a 900-person marketing company or an internet agency coming into a 12-person company. It was too much too soon. We had to bring a marriage counselor in to teach me about my own leadership blind spots in the second month that I was there. The one that I introduced to companies now specializes in the CEO COO relationship.

And she also does marriage counseling for kind of the Wall Street power executives and their spouses. So she, her name is Dr. Patty Ann Tublin, and she's fantastic at working with the CEO, COO, because they're very much like men are from Mars, women are from Venus, right? CEOs speak CEO and COOs speak COO.

CEOs want the bottom line, they just want the facts, they need information quickly. They need you to take their idea and run with it. The COO wants all the data, they want the systems, they want to understand the whole process, they want to know how everything fits. They usually want to give too much information to the other.

So teaching them how to work together is a very powerful kind of instinct. That would be fascinating. Pretty much every time I talk to a COO, the conversation will end up with my CEO is driving me crazy, pushing too hard, doesn't understand and I'm sure it's the other way too. At the end of the day, the COO has to be the brakes to the entrepreneur's gas, but not the parking brake.

Or we have to be the leash to the entrepreneurial dragon, but not choke them. Right with the leash. So when you join our organization and the CO walks up to you in week one and says, Hey, here are your eight things I want you to focus on. What do you do with that?

What would be your reaction to that? I think it's first sitting down and really understanding what are the roles and responsibilities of the CEO for the next year. What are the roles and responsibilities of the COO for the next year? What's the reporting structure of the current people on the team?

And then really understanding are you a COO or are you a VP of operations? Are you a general manager? Are you director of operations? At what level are you really coming into the company?

A true COO is you're usually coming in with a lot of strategic insight, PL responsibility and autonomy. When you're coming in at more of a VP level, you're tending to get some stuff handed to you and you have some strategic insight. So it's really getting a meeting of the minds there. So I would be asking questions.

I love this list. I would start by saying, by the way, I love this list, right? Love your list, love the eight or 10. This is fantastic.

Can we go for a lunch today or this week so I can ask you about each of them just to understand them even more? Because you've been thinking about them for three to six months. I need to play a little bit of catch up. I've got some basic questions that we can just either or go for a walk and I can just take some notes so I understand them even more.

But by telling them you love their ideas and you want to understand them even more, it creates a safe space for you to then go through the who, what, when, where, why, and how of each of their projects, the understanding the inputs of how much money and time they're willing to spend and what ROI they're looking for on those. After you've gone through that, then you can say, Totally love this list again. I've got three or four ideas as well that might dovetail in well with these.

Can I walk you through what those are and how I see them all fitting? So then you're opening the door up because they already know it's safe and you love their stuff and you understand it, that then talk start talking about your ideas and how they can fit together. So it's just a it's a communication kind of a trust game that you need to play with them so that they start to learn who you are and know what you are. The yes and.

Yeah. More often than not, the entrepreneur is giving you all the projects, not necessarily to start them all right away, but they don't know where else to keep those projects. They need you to keep them safe. So if you can say, I've got all the projects, I understand all the projects, here's the order I think we can build those projects, here's where my four other ideas are gonna merge in.

We're gonna do these ones in first quarter, these ones in second quarter, how does that fit? They go, Oh great, at least you've got my projects. Because really what's happening is their brain or their their hard drive is full and they need to get some stuff out of their brain and into your hands so that their brain can keep working. You're the guardian of their babies.

What tends to happen with entrepreneurs is when they tell us their idea and we start asking them questions right away, they think we're arguing with them. They think we're debating with them. But when you say, I love your idea, let me ask you some questions so I understand it even more, they're like, Great, ask me questions. Then they don't feel debated, they don't feel argued, they feel like you like it and you just want to know more.

After you ask them all the questions, half the time they're gonna be, as we were talking, that's a stupid idea, we can kill that. Or after we've talked about it and now I understand the ROI and the time, let's shelve that till next year. But you didn't come right out and say, That's a dumb idea, here's why. What do you think the ideal communication is between the CEO and the CEO week to week?

There's always this question of different personality types and what what they prefer in terms of a walk around the block having a coffee, end-of-day chat, that's very brief, 20 minutes, the two-hour block on Friday, also like I th I feel like I've encountered every possible variation. So let me let me put it in terms of like a marriage, right? When you've got two people and they're married, you need to have date night, right? You need to have time away from the kids.

And you need to have time on a daily basis just to stay in sync with the stuff that's happening. Like who's picking up the kids, who's taking care of the dog? Have you got this? There's a bit of a divide and conquer that happens on a daily basis as well.

And then there's a little bit of a check-in and appreciation that happens on that daily basis. So the weekly, there has to be a weekly one-on-one between the CEO and the COO. I remember when we were growing Gerber Auto Collision, and I said to the CEO, I need to have a weekly meeting. He goes, I don't need that.

I'm like, no, no, it's not for you. It's for me. I need your time for one hour every week to walk through what I'm working on, to ask you questions, to get some insights, to get inspired by you, maybe just to get some praise or to bounce ideas, but I need that in sync every single week. And then every quarter, we need to get together in person and go play some pool or play some golf or hang out and maybe get deeper into the strategy and the planning.

But we need some time just to get in sync. So you need some time with your CEO and COO to get away from the rest of the leadership team, to go for a run, to go golfing, to work off site from the tennis club together. And then you need to have time in the office on a weekly basis and even daily check-ins around what's going well and what's not going well. Brian and I got so good in scaling one-800 got junk that our desks were right beside each other.

So that we were literally could hear each other so that we could stay completely in sync throughout the day. So that we could catch each other and go, that was fucking amazing. I love what you said there, or here's an idea I just heard, or kind of a lot of that in sync stuff. But every Tuesday and Thursday we'd go for a run in the morning.

Tuesday mornings he would meet me at my house. Thursday mornings we'd meet at his house to go for a run. And then Friday we'd work from his tennis club or my tennis club. And we would literally be off site for the morning, sometimes not even chatting, just working away on our laptops, but able to stay in sync away from the rest of the team.

It sounds like a more intense relationship than your marriage. Or a deep best friend or like brothers, like that level of time you spent together. We had an unfair advantage. Brian was also the best man at my wedding three months before I joined him.

So we we were also in a forum group in EO for four years. So he knew me and had seen me run companies and I'd seen him running his. So we already knew a lot about each other and we liked each other. But I think when you're hiring a second in command or when you're looking to work with a CEO, make sure you like each other.

Make sure that you do want to spend time together because they will be your business spouse. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, right? Women solve problems and see the world differently than men do. Men are not hairy versions of women, but if we can learn to communicate and collaborate and talk to each other, I remember when when I would come home, my wife would want to be telling me about her day.

I just hold the basket and let her tell me all about her day. And I'm like, that's kind of cool and amazing. And and if she's not telling me about her day, then something is shutting down. Well, you need to understand the CEO the same way.

The CEO needs to create space for the COO to give them all the updates. So I'll have like just a little point of contention of like men are from Mars, women are from Venus, or every human is different and needs to understand how to relate to any other human. What's really powerful right now is you can take any personality profile, whether it's Myers Briggs or Disk or Colby, and let's say that it's you and the CEO or you and the COO, you put in, I'm the CEO, here's my Colby profile, here's my COO's Colby profile.

What can you tell us about how to work better to col together on a day-to-day basis? And then ChatGPT or Grok will literally give you a one page report on how to work better in sync with that person. You can do that with all of the people in your company that have done personality profiles. It's really powerful.

So tangentially related and going a bit back into frameworks, the company that I've just joined has no formal values documented. Although there does seem to be quite a cohesive culture and people are working well together, but there's no nothing documented now looking to hire people and I'm kind of trying to figure out what is it in the culture, what's not it in the culture. Any either ways that you for you suggest going about formalizing it? I love using Jim Collins' model called the mission to Mars.

So Jim Collins says you go into an organization and you find from the current people, if we only had five of us and we were going to go to Mars and establish our company in Mars or wherever, new city, who would we take? Who are the five most critical, amazing humans inside of our organization if we had to go and start again? And you get consensus around who those five are. And then you say to the team, describe them.

What is it about Kelly that we love? What is it about Kelly that that makes her that role model? And when you get all of the five people described, what about Bob? What about Brandon?

When you get them all described, you start seeing the commonalities. Those commonalities become the core values. So that's what you're noticing. You're noticing that there is a core, there is a culture.

We just haven't defined what it is. That tends to be how you can quite quickly find it and articulate it. It's a really easy exercise. It's a fun leadership team exercise to do.

So it's called the mission to Mars. You can go on Grok and just ask for the Jim Collins mission to Mars core values exercise and they'll pull it up. Thank you. So I've always wondered.

So you run the CO alliance, you have a ton of CEOs across all sorts of industries. Bethany and I traditionally have always been traditionally our entire careers have been in technology and in scale ups, in particular younger companies, Series A, Series B, venture back companies and so on. And I'm always wondering how like are we missing a trick? Is there learnings out there in the world from a CEO perspective in other industries that we're not aware of that we should be somehow?

Or maybe conversely, how portable are CO skills to other industries? So if I was to join, I don't know, manufacturing or something, would I actually be successful? Or is there just like a ton of stuff that I would have no idea what I'm doing? A really great question.

What I've noticed over the years is that other functional areas, the heads of the departments are more transportable to other businesses in the same industry. So if you're the head of marketing for a manufacturing company, you can probably be the head of marketing for any manufacturing company that's around the same size as you. If you're the head of IT, the head of sales, the head of customer engagement, whatever, you can probably move into another industry or another company in the same industry.

What's different for the COO role is you also have to match the skills and the style of that CEO because you're becoming kind of the yin and yang partner to them. So you can hire a babysitter to take care of your kids easier than you can find a new spouse, right? You can hire the head of marketing easier than you can hire the head of operations. The second part is you're looking for someone who matches the size of the organization.

So the current COO at 1-800 Got Junk has been there for 14 years. His name is Eric Church. Eric and I have known each other for 37 years. We met each other in 1987 in Ottawa, Canada, started a fraternity together.

I was president the first year, and Eric was president the second year. Eric and I are such close friends that we know everything about each other. Eric would have been a horrible COO at 1800 Got Junk in the first seven years. Because he'd never built a franchise company.

He wasn't entrepreneurial. He didn't have the right culture to get us to the hundred million. I would have been horrible to go from the 100 million to the 900 million they're at now, but he is the perfect for that zone because he is more corporate. He is more structure, he is more professionally serviced and managed.

And we're both really good fits with Brian. So we both match the CEO, but our timeline of when to arrive was different. So there's that component to figure out too. What I do believe is that the skills and ideas you can take from other industries are as powerful as the ones that you can take from your own industry.

And I think every CEO and COO should be a part of an industry trade group, right? Like you should be if if you're in the real estate space, you should be a part of the core collective and go or go into the Go Bundance group. But then that becomes an echo chamber where you hear a lot of stuff from your industry. You should also then be in a non-industry group like a YPO or a vistage or a COO alliance for the COOs, where you're getting ideas from lots of industries, but from your peer group of other COOs or in YPO's case, other CEOs.

So do you think that means in some ways it's easier to change industry because it's harder to find the connection with the CEO, so the CEO should be looking more widely, or do you think it's just all When the CEO is looking to hire a second in command, they really have to understand themselves first and the company second and then the size of the organization third, right? Because you're looking to have someone who matches you, who likes to do all the stuff that you don't, who is really good at all the stuff that you suck at.

Ideally, someone who has some industry experience, like I had franchising. We weren't looking for junk removal. We were looking for franchising in the home services space, right? Not franchising in the restaurant space, very different.

And then we were looking for someone who was entrepreneurial. Why I built all these entrepreneurial companies. I'd coached 120 entrepreneurs before 1993, right? I'd I'd been coaching before business coaching wasn't even a thing yet.

For real. Like business coaching started in 1993, and I'd already coached 120 entrepreneurs. So yeah, you have to find someone who matches you and the industry and the size of the organization. It's a tough role.

And where most companies fall down is most of the entrepreneurs have had no training on how to do a job interview. They don't know how to do an interview. They don't know how to do reference checks. They talk too much during the interview.

They don't know how to probe. They don't know how to ask open and closed-ended questions and use a pregnant pause. They don't know how to to to get the candidate selling themselves. So what happens is they hire because they like someone.

Liking someone is only one part of the job interview. But knowing that they've done it before and have the skill sets to do it before, and that they don't just have the knowledge to do something, but they've done it. Right. Like I know how to win an Olympic gold, just be faster than everybody else.

I know how to break a world record, just be faster than ever, but I've never done it. So I know how to manage people. I know how to to run a P L, but I've never been an accountant. So learning the skill of of being able to interview past the knowledge and into the actual experience layer is where most companies are not very good at yet.

Do you have so I agree. I feel like the area where I struggle most is sales because they're just really good at selling and what you want to hear, but I want to know what they actually have done. Yeah. So th this so on the interviewing side, it's just asking questions.

So it is just saying, so when have you done it? Who could I call to verify that you've done it? Who have you worked with while you were doing it that I could talk to? If I called Bob and asked him about your skills at having done that, what would he say?

Right? It's it's those kinds of questions and probing that you're asking that most people don't have that skill set yet. They haven't been certified in interviewing. It's one of the 12 modules in my invest in your leaders training is the skill of of doing interviews.

But we have to get our management team to like a bronze or a silver layer of skill set at doing interviews because they do them all day long. Business is really, really easy if you give people the skills that are in my invest in your leaders training and an operating system like EOS that work together. Right. But you can have the best system like EOS, but none of the soft skills of leadership, your business is never going to be successful.

Or you can have all the leadership skills and no operating system and you're not going to be successful. Yeah. So in that interviewing space, I feel like working in scales back to back, we're always going into high growth mode. So you join a company, we're doing a fundraise, we're gonna land ten million pounds, and we're gonna go off on this crazy growth journey.

And step by step, company by company, I've gotten better at this leveling up of the interview process, if you want to call it that, from first contact all the way through conversion of a candidate to an employee and the onboarding itself that happens post that entire process. Is there anything that you can kind of impart on me as somebody that's who's done this before several times, of things that I should maybe think about more or maybe think about less, perhaps? So at College Pro Painters, which is where I really learned kind of the real world MBA of running a company, every year we had to go out and hire and train 800 franchisees.

So imagine in four months to go recruit, hire and train 800 students to be franchisees. And then in one month, we had to train them to go out and hire 8,000 students to paint houses. So over the course of four and a half months, we were recruiting, hiring, and training 8,800 people. So our interviewing systems became operationally world class.

Like there's not a lot of companies out there that hire 8,800 people every single year. And I was in the top 30 people of the company doing it. So the systems that I would make sure that you have in place are first to really know the behavioral traits that you're looking for on a roll-by-role basis. What are the three to five core ways that we need that person to show up?

As an example, a salesperson will never make it through an HR screening process because HR people hate salespeople. Salespeople are winging it, they shoot from the hip, they make it up on the go, they don't follow systems because there's no real systems that exist. They need to be able to bob and weave and sell with culture and match energy and be as persistent as possible. And no does not mean no to a salesperson.

No only means no in a bedroom. For HR, they can't stand any of that. No means no, I's are dotted, T's are crossed, policies and procedures. So very different behavioral traits for two different humans.

So understand what behavioral traits you're looking for. Make sure that everyone who's interviewing the people knows what you're looking for, knows how to define it, and has some starting questions to start the interview around those areas. At the end of the interview, make sure that you can rate people on a bell curve against the core behavioral traits you're looking for and the skills they need to have, and rate them where 40% of the candidates get a three out of five, 20% of the candidates get a two out of five, twenty percent can get a four out of five, ten percent get a one out of five, and ten percent can be given a five out of five.

So that bell curve of candidates with at least three proofs for why you gave every rating. So simple systems like that are powerful. I don't let anybody look at a resume when it's being submitted. I eat we email the person back right away.

We were like, thanks for your resume. Please read the vivid vision of what our company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future, and send us a two to three minute video of how you can help us make it come true and what you love about our vivid vision. The only resumes I'm gonna look at are the videos that I get back that I like. Then I'll look at the video and the resume and bring them in for a group interview.

And then we tend to follow the systems from the book Who by Jeff Smart or his dad's book, Top Grading. We kind of take that and make a more entrepreneurial version system to run the actual interview with the first, the second, and torque. Here's what drives me bonkers is like employees will or companies will say, Oh, I don't want to spend three or six hours interviewing a candidate over three interviews. Okay, but then you're gonna just wait 90 days to see how they work out.

Like the reason you have to wait 90 days to see how they're doing is because you suck at the interviews. If you were good at the interviews, it's that slow to hire, quick to fire. You have to be slow to hire, but it's by being intentional with your process. The reason that most people don't do the long interviews is they don't really know how to do the interview.

So they just end up talking to people and asking a bunch of random questions and not even knowing where they're going with it. So then, yeah, it just becomes a bit of a waste of time for everybody. We didn't have time with that at College Pro Painters because if we hired the wrong franchisee, we couldn't replace him until next year. So that means we were down a franchise.

So we were very, very predictable with what we were looking for. How like I'll tell you right now, I go back to 1986 when I was hired as a franchisee. They were looking for leadership, attainment, tenacity, introspection, and interdependence. Those were the five core traits that they looked for.

That was 35 years ago, and I can still rattle those off. Actually, almost 40. So when you're so clear on what you're looking for and you know how to find it, the definition of tenacity was the dog-like work ethic to hit over, under around any obstacle put in one's path. That's a definition I remember from when I was doing interviews for college pro painters in 1989 when I was hiring franchisees.

But most companies couldn't give you the definition of what they're interviewing for tomorrow. Does it work for leadership like senior leadership positions? I'll give you, I'll give an example on senior leadership. We were hiring somebody to be the head of finance at 1-800 Got Junk, and I wanted to know culturally what they were like.

I drove past their home to see what their home looked like. And I remember driving past, it was a drive-by, and I remember driving past Trisha's home, and they know this, Trish Saltis, who became the CFO. She lived in the same neighborhood that Brian and I lived in, Czech, right? Culturally similar.

We drove past her house. It was this cute. Kind of craftsman style bungalow. She had their living room windows open.

I could kind of see inside. You could see that it was decorated and it was clean and and and the garden was done. I'm like, yes, I get it. Then I drove by the other guys, and the other guy, we could never get a read on him.

He was just very beige. And I drove past this guy's home, and it was this very kind of nondescript. Beige. Yeah, it was it was gray, but beige home, right?

It was like there wasn't even any land, it was just like grass, it was nothing. So culturally, we would dig. You go into their Facebooks, you go to their LinkedIn, you like you have to care about this stuff. And that's where it goes wrong with senior leaders, you think, is just not digging deep enough on the culture side.

'Cause it ends up being leadership style or culture that means that they're not a good fit rather than whether or not they can do their job. Correct. I had the CEO of a law firm, John Barry, and he was hiring a COO. And the COO was flying into Oklahoma, and John said, You can stay in our guest house and we'll have dinner the night before, then we'll go in and do the interview the next day.

And the CO said, Great. I mean, any COO that says yes to staying at his potential customers or employer's guest home check, right? As a culture. They get to see each other really quickly right away.

John is a former military guy, total type I call him type triple A, just total type A. He says to the guy, hey, I don't know what you're up to in the morning. I don't normally get up at five o'clock and go to the gym. And the COO says, Awesome.

I brought my workout gear with me. I was going to get up and do a workout on my own. I'll go with you. You don't even have to do an interview at that point.

Like you already know this person is culturally fitting, right? But now you can get into the skills. Have they done it before? Right.

But most companies won't do the work. So we've had a fascinating conversation today, Cameron, thank you. Like big theory practical suggestions. If our listeners only take one thing away from listening to this episode today, what is it?

Their families and their lives. So I think it's to remember that human experience and and really care about people on the journey that we're on together. That's a fabulous way to end the episode. So thank you, Cameron Harold, for joining us on the operations room.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe or leave us a comment, and we will see you next week.