Cameron Herold of COO Alliance on Second in Command

Michael Koenig: Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal Chief Operating Officers come to share their knowledge, advice, and at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and our guest today is someone who needs no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyways. The founder of COO Alliance and former COO of 1 800 GOT JUNK, and the author of the newly released book, The Second in Command, Cameron Herold. Cameron, welcome back. Hey, Michael. How are you? Nice to see you. I'm doing very well. First off, congrats on the book. This is this book seemed

Cameron Herold: inevitable. It's weird is for the last six years, I've run the COO Alliance for the last five years. I've run the second command podcast, and it didn't seem inevitable to me at all because I'd written five books and I don't think I've ever wanted to be a writer. And then [00:01:00] somehow in the middle of COVID I just kept realizing I had all this IP around, recruiting and interviewing and onboarding and like everything in the COO space. And there really wasn't anything great out there. There was a couple little things. Gino had done a good job with Rocket Fuel with Mark Winters and there was a book out of the UK on the, but there wasn't anything that was really tangible that I wanted to get into. So anyway, I just started working through it, had a great team that I was able to work with. So now it seems inevitable now. I'm like, why didn't I do this years ago? What's funny is two weeks after launching the book, we landed our first COO alliance member because of the book. I'm like, ah, I should have done this six

Michael Koenig: years ago. That's fantastic. Now it's so interesting because it's instructional for CEOs. On, Hey, what does a COO do? How do I pick one? How do I even think about this? And then, but as a COO, as I was reading it through, I'm like, oh yeah, this is pretty cool. And that's I get it and holy crap. And it was almost instructional [00:02:00] for me.

Cameron Herold: Yeah. I almost wrote the book two-Sided where if you started, if you had, I gotta grab the cover of a book, but if you had the book like this. It was written for CEOs, and if you flip the book over, it was written for COOs and I was literally, but the production of it was gonna be too tough, but it was literally going to be the same content written from both sides. How a CEO should hire a COO and then how a COO should find the right company to work for. But it ended up by design being written that way, where I wanted it to be for the C-E-O-C-O-O relationship. Which meant that both people had to get huge value from every page. It somehow worked out.

Michael Koenig: That's great. Congratulations. , . COO Alliance is excelling. And it's growing like crazy. You commented at one point in the book that you moved into the CEO spot. You are now on the other side of the

Cameron Herold: table. [00:03:00] Yeah. So I've been running my own company for the last 16, 16, 17 years. So I've functionally been, a COO since 2007 when I left when it under got junk, but, and I, but I've always had that COO mindset and mentality because I'd played the second in command role three different times. Two times prior to 1 800 GOT JUNK, I'd been in the second in command role. So I really did understand all that. But then strangely, if I go back to when I was 20 years old, I had 12 full time employees that worked for me. So I was an entrepreneur at 20, did the entrepreneur thing for a bunch of times, and then became few times, and now I've come back into the space. So I've always been around that second in command space for sure. So

Michael Koenig: that's very interesting. I was thinking about what I really wanted to chat with you. About, because we've chatted before and this is your return, and I feel like I get a second chance at bat here. And I Wanted to go through almost a greatest hits or a best advice. So I've got I've got a ton of questions that I've written down [00:04:00] and I figured we'll just do a lightning round for a little, you game?

Cameron Herold: I'll be cold. Yeah,

Michael Koenig: yeah, for sure. All right. You were 20 years old. You had 12 employees. What'd you wish you knew?

Cameron Herold: I wish I understood better about how to probably balance my time a little bit more. That first summer when I had the 12 employees and I was running my own company, I had, I was painting houses and we had six simultaneous houses being painted. So six different houses at the same time. I had no life, at the end of every workday, my friends were out in my driveway. They'd all moved, a bunch of them had moved to Sudbury to work for me and they're all playing basketball out in my driveway. Meanwhile, I'm inside running my business. And I had a horrible ability to bifurcate my time a little bit, to block my time, to have balance, and I only learned that in my second and third summers. But I wish I understood more about how to run a business and have a good life, because I [00:05:00] developed some bad habits as an entrepreneur. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of CEOs tell themselves that business is their hobby and they have fun doing it, but at the end of the day, they're not fun people anymore. And I look back at, I look back at that summer and I wasn't a fun person. But

Michael Koenig: also the gift of youth. You have the energy and the vigor to be able to work like crazy at the same time.

Cameron Herold: I still have that today. I can still work like crazy now, but now I understand the fact that I'll never get it all done. I'll never catch up. I can delegate more. I can say no more that no is a yes and yes is a no, that I can actually work on the critical few things versus the important many that perfect doesn't scale. There were lots of lessons that I've learned over the years that I wish I had known at a younger age for sure. Because I would have still been just as successful, but I would have had more fun with my friends. I would have let, I would have let Cameron out to play a lot more. What's your

Michael Koenig: best advice on how to delegate?

Cameron Herold: It's to delegate everything. That your [00:06:00] to do list does not have your name written at the top of it. It's a list of stuff that needs to get done. Your job is to figure out who can I delegate it to, and if I don't have anybody that has the skills or the confidence to do it, I'm going to delegate it to someone anyway, and I'm going to help them grow their skills or confidence. It's just to keep delegating and growing people, delegate and growing people. And I think the more that I can focus on doing that, the more that I'm focusing with my clients on doing that, the more their businesses

Michael Koenig: scale. But there are unique abilities, which I think you identify. Yeah.

Cameron Herold: The idea of unique ability is something that Dan Sullivan, who built strategic coach talked about. And if you, let's say someone followed me around with a video camera for an entire month and they videoed me very kind of Gary Vaynerchuk style, right? So they watched me doing everything in my life for an entire month. And at the end of the month, I write down everything I saw myself doing on the video. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a whole, maybe I'll have 80 different things that I've worked on in the course of the month. I categorize them in one of four ways. I for [00:07:00] incompetent, meaning I suck at it. C for competent, meaning I'm okay at it. E for excellent, meaning I'm really good at it, but I don't necessarily get energy from it. And then you for unique abilities, the stuff I'm really good at and I get fired up and I would do it for free except my kids have to eat. So the key is how do I delegate everything except genius? How do I get everything off my plate except my unique ability areas? So today is an example. I have two media interviews, I'm coaching a CEO and I'm going for lunch with a CEO and a COO here in Mexico that are clients of mine. That's my entire day. And the rest of my work that I have that's done, that's busy work, can get delegated and done by other people. But all I'm doing is the stuff that fires me up. How do you prioritize? And this can happen, by the way, with anyone in the company. You could be the head of finance, and you can start delegating and growing people, so you just work on the things that fire you up as well. You could be the head of marketing, same. You could be a front line manager who finds it A ways to say, no, I don't wanna do those things, or I suck at those things, but let me [00:08:00] work on these projects 'cause they fire me up and I'm great at it. The way I prioritize is based on what I call the low pita factor. So what are the things that I can do that have a low pain in the ass factor, and what are the things that I can do that if I get them done, they'll pay dividends for a long period of time. Like how much energy does it take for a satellite to go around the earth? None, right? Once it's in orbit, it goes around the earth forever for free. So how can I get some things done that will pay dividends for a long period of time? And I prioritize on those. The next thing I do is I prioritize on anything that will make more revenue or more gross margin because there's not a single problem that exists. That writing a check can't solve, right? I can buy my way out of any problems, but a better system, better playbooks, better IT, blah, blah, blah. That doesn't necessarily pay the bills, but more revenue I can pay for all those other things to get done. So I try to focus on all revenue generating [00:09:00] projects first.

Michael Koenig: Interesting.

Cameron Herold: I had somebody, this was Fortune Magazine 20 years ago, asked me, how do I hold employees accountable? And I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. I had a CEO that I was talking to a few months ago and they said they had They were looking to hire a project manager to manage their four main people. And I'm like, why don't you just teach your four main people how to manage projects? One of the things that I've always worked on is growing the people's skills, right? I launched a course two years ago called invest in your leaders and I put every manager and every leader through this course to go Through the 12 core modules so that I can grow their skill set and grow their capacity

Michael Koenig: It's almost like bringing in an entrepreneur and cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset or that founder mindset. Yeah, exactly.

Cameron Herold: So you're not going to just hire somebody to oversee them. You're just going to start getting people to think that way. We had years ago, we had 900 employees at this internet company we were building. And so I was running one of the business units [00:10:00] of the, this nine. Unit company effectively. And we had a business area review meeting every quarter where the head of each business area came in and presented on their company to the board and to the leadership team. And we got ripped apart, but all of the other business heads were sitting there watching it happen. And it just raised everybody's game where we would present on what our plan was for the quarter, how we did last quarter, what we were doing with our metrics, any pain points we had. And then we got grilled for 30 minutes to 60 minutes. And over the course of eight hours, you watched every single business area get grilled. And that process is what raised our game, not having somebody come in to manage us, to do better or hold us to the metrics. It was this kind of culture and process that did it.

Michael Koenig: It's that sounds pretty intense. How do you balance that intensity? With essentially having people still be happy. We

Cameron Herold: were excited to do it because we knew that it was for the good of the company. It was raising our games. We got to then sit in and grill the other business heads too. So it was what's good for the goose [00:11:00] is good for the gander. It wasn't just like we were getting grilled and then had to leave the room. We all got to watch it happen. And we realized that it wasn't. Being done other than to grow the organization, grow the economic value, it was good. It was cool. It's like a group of high performing athletes. That they want their coach to pat him on the ass and cheer him on and say, Hey, good, but they also want the coach to say, Hey, you're screwing this up, get better in this area. It's got to be the balance. And I think that was something that we just, we saw that it was for the good of us and for the good of the company. And we were always growing. I loved them. I thought they were amazing. I brought that same meeting rhythm, we called it the bar, the business area review, I brought that into 1 800 GOT JUNK and I had, once we got to about a couple hundred employees at the head office, we started running the business area review meetings as well and they were very successful.

Michael Koenig: And how would you go about giving that feedback?

Cameron Herold: It always has to be tied to first off getting the business area to give their own feedback first, right? So the idea around coaching is [00:12:00] that the person being coached has to do the introspection and understand where they can improve and where they can do, continue doing well. So I always turn to the person in the business area and I tell me, what are three things that you can continue doing next quarter? And what are three areas that you should improve on next quarter? So they start that process. And then the leadership team comes in with showing them three things that they can continue doing and three areas for them to improve on. So there was always a balance. It was never one sided with ripping them apart and showing them all the areas they sucked. It was a balance of. And we always started with the stuff that they could, were doing well. So it was a bit of the shit sandwich. But I think that process of having them get introspective and do it first opened them up for more feedback. And then them also realizing that we all had areas to grow. Me included. I think it's an athlete mindset or like a Cirque du Soleil mindset where the best in the world are always trying to improve. When you create that culture that we're all growing, we're all just trying to improve, then they feel good about it.[00:13:00]

Michael Koenig: Yeah, there's this anecdote, Patrick Waugh. The famous hockey goalie, whom I hate because I'm a Detroit Red Wing fan. Montreal Canadiens? Yeah, on the Montreal Canadiens when he was there. He during the game, his stick broke. And he then let in a goal. The next day at practice, he took his hockey stick, he broke it in half, and he played the entire practice like that. He walked off, threw it in the trash, and then said, That'll never happen again. But

Cameron Herold: that, that's the mindset that we have to build inside of our companies where feedback is the breakfast of champions, right? Where, but people also know that they're doing really well and you create that safe and we also, we'd always create these environments following Michael Gerber's idea from the email that people don't fail systems fail. So we created a no blame environment that if something was going wrong, it wasn't a person's fault. It was a system that was broken or a system that was missing. So when we were giving them feedback and giving them areas to work on, it was [00:14:00] always related to the underlying systems. So they felt safe. They knew that if we didn't like them, they were being fired. We weren't going to sit and waste an hour giving them feedback and then firing them. So you're only here getting feedback because we love you.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And, And I just have to cover this. Um, Patrick, if somehow you ever end up listening to this. I still hate you.

Cameron Herold: I got my my, my idol when I was growing up was Ken Dryden, who was the goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. And I was 35 years old flying from Toronto to Cuba because Canadians could go to Cuba. And I was sitting on a flight and Ken Dryden was sitting in front of me and he turned around and I started talking to him and I was like a 16 year old kid talking to him to his idol and all of a sudden I started laughing going, I can't believe I'm 35 years old and I'm giddy talking to you.

Michael Koenig: That's amazing. You know what that happened to me with Isaiah Thomas. Again, Detroit Piston, the ultimate bad [00:15:00] boy, right? But one of the things that I do, is whenever I meet someone famous, I go up to them, and I give them my autograph, and I say, my mother always told me, if you meet someone famous, give them your autograph. And then I just walk away. And usually it turns into a pretty cool, fun conversation. Yeah, it's quite funny. This is what I picked up from mom. Thanks, mom. So we've been talking about developing talent. As a team grows, the company needs growth. How do you decide whether to promote from within? Or bring in someone from

Cameron Herold: outside. Great question. So it depends on the functional area. So let's stick with operations and talk about how do we know if we can promote someone inside operations to a COO role or someone from inside the company into that COO role. The things that the COO need to be really good at. Is all the stuff the CEO sucks at. So you can look internally and say, do I have a candidate who's really good at all the stuff the CEO is [00:16:00] not? And can they do what's on their plate? That's, you'll know that because of what they've been doing before. Secondly is do they have the leadership chops? Do they have the leadership skills around things like situational leadership, coaching, delegation, Interviewing and hiring growing people, managing conflict communication. Are they good at all the soft skills of leadership if they are, they could probably be promoted internally. Next thing is, are they that MVP player that God forbid they ever quit and maybe moving them up into the CEO role as a way to handcuff them to your company for the next 5 years. That can be a very strategic move because you could bring in a better person from the outside as COO and now you've just pissed off seven people internally and you're going to lose two or three of them. Maybe the upside isn't as good as the downside, right? So there's a little bit of those kind of strategic discussions or thoughts that need to happen for sure. I believe that if you have an organization that has a large degree of [00:17:00] not so much IP, but technical side of the business, like you're a, an engineering company or an architectural company or software, like anything that requires a lot of IP and deep understanding of a business, you're often better to promote from within. Because it's very hard to bring someone from the outside world into your organization. It takes them 12 to 18 months to truly understand the kind of Wikipedia of your entire business. In

Michael Koenig: your recent book, you talked about not being too rigid. You set an operating system for the company, you have an org structure, you set a plan, maybe you're using OKRs, you set it for the year. How do you stick to that while still having flexibility and maintaining the ability to change course when

Cameron Herold: needed? I learned this at a very young age. I guess I did talk about it in the book, The Second Command. It's a kind of a bob and weave culture, that you can't be so rigid that you break. If you look at water flowing down a mountain, it's incredible how it just follows the path of least resistance and it gets to [00:18:00] the bottom of the mountain, which is exactly what it's supposed to do. Business isn't supposed to be rigid. It's supposed to follow the same kind of Thank you. Cause of least resistance. So I think we as organizations have to be pointed in the direction of our vivid vision. Leaders have to be focused on that vivid vision, and then we have to take the meandering path, towards that. And as long as we're taking the path and living inside of our core purpose and inside of our core values, if those are the boundaries, let's say the core purpose was a, like a bobsled track. One side was your core values and one side was your core purpose. You're going to get to the bottom, but you take a bit of a meandering path down. And I think if you try to go so darn rigid all the time, this is the way we've always done it. It just starts frustrating people internally. So I've always had a bit of that bob and weave culture, best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. You just have to make it up as you go, but at least you're always pointing in that right direction.

Michael Koenig: And what about coming into an organization where those structures may be very rigid, and you have to [00:19:00] introduce that to people who, for years have operated in a way, in a certain way that things go? We

Cameron Herold: had so I was a part of the leadership team. I was second command of building a group that's now called Gerber auto collision in the U. S. And it's about a 2 billion market cap. Largest collision repair chain in North America. And when we were building it out, my partner and CEO, Terry used to say, let's sell them. Not tell them and what we were doing was we were doing corporate acquisitions We were acquiring all these other auto body chains and then keeping the owner of that location in place or the owner of that chain In place, but they now had to run inside of the Gerber and Boyd auto body systems So we would sell them and not tell them we would show them the benefits show them the opportunities We kept nudging them in that direction But if you're so like no it has to be done this way We're all 16 year olds trapped in that old bodies, right? So the 16 year old person pushes back against mom and dad It's like when mom and dad said because I'm your mom. That's why well that doesn't work after we're seven or eight years [00:20:00] old that's that lesson only works until right? It's the same in the business world. You can't say because I'm the CEO Oh, that's the way we're doing it or because we've always done it that way Our human nature kicks in, regardless of how seasoned we are as individuals, we kick back into our 16 year old self and we're, so I think sell them, don't tell them.

Michael Koenig: I like it. It's funny that we bring up children. Last we spoke, we talked about encouraging children and celebrating. Every little step they take or, and giving that positive feedback all the time.

Cameron Herold: No, it's interesting. Like I learned from, there's a book called the The One Minute Manager. It came out 30 years ago, maybe 35 years ago by Ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Herzey that are really the founders of a concept called situational leadership, and it's really understanding the human psychology of people that praising them to success, right? And people again, are these. Children trapped in adult bodies that we're all starving for some praise and some validation [00:21:00] to a point, right? I don't turn to my 20 year old son who's running his own business in Montreal. I don't turn to my son Connor and say, Hey, good job walking. I stopped praising him on walking when he was two, right now I'm praising him on how hard he's working with his marketing and how well he's working with his promoters and but I'm always looking for areas to praise them in. So that then I can give them areas of improvement and areas of feedback and areas of things to work on or consider. And I think we need to as, I don't think I've ever seen a leader yet. Praise their people too much. I don't think I've seen a single leader yet say thank you, or show gratitude, or celebrate the core values. The only one who comes to mind, frankly, is Howard Behar, who is one of the four CEOs at Starbucks, and when Howard Behar was CEO of Starbucks, every Friday, For two hours every single Friday, he would handwrite thank you notes to people and stores inside of the 14, [00:22:00] 000 locations at Starbucks. Now Howard didn't know who to write thank you notes to, but every Friday morning there was a spreadsheet on his, and I was being groomed as a, I was being mentored by the COO at Starbucks. So I had a lot of insights as to what was really happening. Every Friday morning there'd be a list on Howard Behar's desk of about a hundred different stores and people to write thank you notes to. The stack of thank you notes was there with the addresses already on them and all he had to do was write. Hey, Michael, congratulations with the Frappuccino record in Flint, Michigan. Looking forward to seeing you when I'm there, Howard. And he would stick it in the envelope and then he'd write the next one. Hey, store number 1207, congratulations on selling more egg bites than anybody else in the system last week. Thinking of you, Howard. This, he was the CEO of one of the biggest companies on the planet. And he was spending 5 percent of his week, two hours every single week saying, thank you. That's the only example of a CEO that I've seen who actually has really systemized

Michael Koenig: gratitude. That's fantastic. Now and I want to [00:23:00] in here in Ann Arbor, I want to go to the Starbucks and just hand them just like a big poster board of Hey, I came in a year ago, y'all crushed it on my coffee.

Cameron Herold: I love it. I walked into a Starbucks years ago. I'm going to see if I can find the pictures. I'm telling the story, but this was going back 17 years ago. I walked into a Starbucks location in Vancouver at Gramble Island, and they had a photo of me sitting beside the cashier, and I was the Starbucks drink of the day, and I was a long, tall frappuccino. That's

Michael Koenig: fantastic.

Cameron Herold: I love that. I don't know if I can ever find the photo again, but it was great. Oh, I do have it. I was the Starbucks drink of the day. Oh, let's see this. Let's see this. Oh, look at that. It's amazing. It says, so I'm six foot four. I was a grande two pump vanilla Americano Misto, nonfat [00:24:00] because I run.

Michael Koenig: That is too funny. Way to create a drink that encapsulates the person. Tell me about there's so much experimentation that I'm encouraging personally with AI for my teams. And my approach, even with this podcast has changed quite a bit with the tools that I use. How are you seeing this play out for operational roles? How has it changed how you operate?

Cameron Herold: We've had a lot of discussions inside of the COO Alliance at our monthly meetings and also at our in person COO connects on our Slack channels. We talk about AI a lot and my mindset around AI is this. There's not a single employee whose job is at risk Because of AI, unless they don't embrace AI. If they embrace AI, it'll become a tool, it'll become a weapon. Now, 30 years ago, for somebody to say, Oh, I don't need to learn how to [00:25:00] type, it's not a big deal. We had to actually learn how to type 30 years ago. A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K. We had to learn where the keys were on the typewriter. Children today don't have to learn where the keys are because they're using it right now. From the beginning, right? So it becomes a tool. So what we're doing now on a weekly basis is telling all of our employees and I'm getting all of our seal alliance members to tell all their employees that spend 1 to 2 hours a week playing with a I. And by the way, there's a dashboard that I used. It's called. There's an a I for that. There's something like 8000 different a I tools that exist to do 2500 different tasks. What's incredible is people are talking about Chad GPT. That's one. Of 8000 A. I. Tools. So what I get the employees to do is spend 1 to 2 hours a week playing with different tools, trying it out in their role and then coming back in on Monday morning at our team meetings or in their business area meetings and doing a five minute book report. Here's a tool I used. Here's what I used it for. It flopped. It didn't work. Or here's a tool I tried. Here's what it did. Here's [00:26:00] how I'm using it. And reporting back into the group on a weekly basis. So everybody is seeing how everybody is using these cool tools. That's building some really cool momentum. I love

Michael Koenig: that. That's one of the things that we've been doing as well within Two Cows. We have a Slack channel on AI, and it's really starting to take off in terms of people showing just how they're using it.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, we're doing the Loom videos. We will do a little Loom video or a screen capture. We'll literally, here's what I'm doing, and we share that video. That's the power of how do we educate people with this new tool is let's all teach each other.

Michael Koenig: Sure, absolutely, because it's such a blanket tool as well, right? Just using ChatGPT, for instance. You need to learn the prompts, because it's so generalized, and you need to learn how to get the most the most out of it.

Cameron Herold: Here's an interesting one. You and I are both, do podcasts, so are you using Descript at all? You're actually using a platform that's now owned by Descript. Yes, exactly. So we can actually go [00:27:00] into our video. People that are listening don't know this can happen, but we can now take our finished video. And at the end of the video, you can take out all of my coughing. Cause I'm recovering from a problem last night. We can take out all of my ums and ahs. And if I said Flint, Michigan, you could replace that and say Ann Arbor instead of Flint, Michigan. Just by changing what was in the transcript. And now my voice will say Ann Arbor instead of Flint, Michigan. And no one watching will even see the difference. That's a really powerful AI tool. And that's not ChatGPT, that's a different, right?

Michael Koenig: Yeah, one of the tools that I use is called Podium. It's podium. stage and essentially I'll upload the video and Descript has some of this. And it'll do the transcription, which is great, but it'll also give me all of the show notes. It'll write the summaries. It'll write the Oh, huge. Yes, it'll write the episode titles and they have a chat GPT integration. It'll draft and write [00:28:00] all of the social posts. It has cut out hours. And it has saved me so much cash. It's unbelievable. So it's just a

Cameron Herold: Huge timing. Thank you for that. Because that's something that my team has been working on is trying to leverage things to actually get all that content. We've had 315 episodes and we're producing one or two a week. That's huge. So podium dot stage. Yeah.

Michael Koenig: Podium. stage. I'm pretty sure that's it. For

Cameron Herold: sure. If it's not, I'll figure it out. Yeah. This is the power of these tools is sharing what we're using it for so that we get inspired and then can find other ways. But as soon as we push back and say, Oh no, I'm not using it or, Oh no, it's less than. Those are the people that are at risk.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, and it reminds me of, there was that movie Hidden Figures, right? You had all of the computers, right? Which were actually people doing all of the computations by hand for NASA. And then NASA brings in that huge [00:29:00] IBM. What do the computers do? They learn how to now use the actual IBM device, fight that, if you don't fight and you don't change and adapt, then like you said,

Cameron Herold: you die. Yeah. Yeah. The original engineers that put the man on the moon were spectacular and probably the best engineers on the planet, but I guarantee you, they're not still using slide rulers like they did back in the sixties. Exactly.

Michael Koenig: Exactly. That's fantastic. Yeah. Look. Thank you. Here's a question that I've been wondering about, which is, who's a COO that you really admire? And I'm sure there isn't just one but who's one that you think about and you're like, oh they were just phenomenal.

Cameron Herold: There's a couple. Sheryl Sandberg, is clearly the queen bee of COOs, right? She was. Really came in as the adult in the room for Mark Zuckerberg when he was only 23 years old and she was his COO for 15 years, which is an incredible run and I don't think we give enough credit for how Facebook became what it became under her leadership for the [00:30:00] kid in the room, which was, the Brainiac, but not necessarily the business mind. Matt Rawlings from a company called Rippling is incredible. He did and releases a document that he gives out to every single employee, and it's called the operating manual to himself. And he gives out a two or three page description of how to work with him, what pisses him off, how to interrupt him in meetings, how to Give him feedback, how to ask for help, and it's really cool to see that his insights into himself have allowed everyone in the company day one to understand him. And sometimes it takes you a year to really understand the person or longer. I think that's been a really interesting tool. I'm going to talk about a guy, Eric Church, who is in the second command role for 1 800 GOT JUNK. I was the COO for 1 800 GOT JUNK, and I was a very different COO to Eric. Because the stage of the company was a very different stage trajectory of the organization. He came in, I took them from 2 million to 106 million. Over the next two [00:31:00] years it went from 106 million down to 70 with the global financial crisis and the wrong second in command. He came in at 70 million and it's taken him to 450 million. He never talks to the media. He never does speaking events. He's not an outward facing culture person like I was. I was speaking to the media, doing speaking. Like I was. I was an outward facing biz dev sales and marketing culture, much like Harley Finkelstein with Shopify. Eric is a very inward facing, very level five leader who's about process and people and and I think it's very interesting to see someone who doesn't care about any of the accolades or the press or building a brand around himself. He's just very focused on what his job is. And I think that's really interesting to watch. I had to beg him to actually contribute some content for my book, The Second in Command, because he's never contributed content like that. And he did it because he and I have been friends for 35 years. We started a fraternity together in Ottawa, [00:32:00] Canada, 35 years ago. I was president year one, he was president year two. So I had to beg him for some content. Oh,

Michael Koenig: wow. So he was the successor for you twice.

Cameron Herold: Twice. Strange, right? Yeah. How about that? Yeah, really?

Michael Koenig: Yeah, it's cool. That's very cool. Best piece of advice you've ever received?

Cameron Herold: I'm not even sure it's a piece of advice. The one that comes to mind the most is we almost bankrupted the company when we were at about 60 million. Our head of finance was very quiet, very amiable. He was a Filipino and he would come to us and say are you sure we're not growing too quickly? I'm worried we're going too quickly. I'm worried we're spending. We're like no, we got this. No, we got this. And when we almost bankrupted the company, we realized that we weren't listening to him. And my biggest lesson came from was if you're not willing to listen to somebody on your team, hire someone you're willing to listen to, right? Because God gave us two ears and one mouth, we need to use them in that ratio, but if you can't get past the [00:33:00] cultural issue, or if they can't, get your attention, then hire somebody, because you don't have all the answers, right? And that was a really very scary lesson Brian had to go out and borrow, Brian the CEO, had to go out and borrow 420, 000 from his mom just to meet payroll.

Michael Koenig: How do you learn to listen?

Cameron Herold: I sit on my hands. This is a weird one. So I'm very I'm a 98 I in disk. I'm a 78 D. I'm a very high quick start. And as most entrepreneurs are, someone taught me to sit on my hands and that strange feeling of sitting on your hands prevents you from being expressive. So I literally will find myself in boardrooms and meetings when I'm wanting to contribute or I'm in mastermind calls when I'm wanting to contribute and I just force myself to sit on my

Michael Koenig: hands. And does, and that reminds you to listen to ingest and not listen to reply? I think it

Cameron Herold: does two [00:34:00] things. I think there's a psychosomatic component to it where there's some physical thing that happens because I'm an expressive, because I'm like an Italian, I talk with my hands, right? I get it, all this nervous energy comes out. If the nervous energy can't come out because there's a physical thing, I think that's part. And then yes, it does remind me just to shut up, right? Yeah, that's fantastic. I think there's a physical, I think there's actually a physical thing there.

Michael Koenig: What? I'll show you something right here, stepping off camera. We talked about AI. We talked about reminders to do this. I went to Dolly. Now I am aesthetically challenged. I am artistically challenged. I cannot, I can barely sign my name and. I popped in to Dolly let's see, can I get it? Give me a stop sign floating in space that's been splattered by paintballs. And I liked it so much that I then took it, went to Framebridge, [00:35:00] I added, it says, and think. So stop and think and I have this right in my sight line and I use that now to not not jump in immediately and make sure I'm listening to, to learn.

Cameron Herold: That's super cool. I'm going to give you a lesson or give it share with everybody who's listening a lesson My mentor who is being groomed as the second command at Starbucks gave me one time He told me a story and it was that he was driving through Seattle And he got a phone call from Howard Schultz who was the CEO at the time and Howard Schultz said to my mentor Greg Johnson Why is the letter B? On the sign at 50th and Wallingford in Seattle, not working. And Greg said, I don't care why the letter B on that sign is not working. Howard said, you better care. And Greg goes no, that's not a leadership question. Howard goes, what do you mean? He goes, asking someone why a certain letter on a certain sign isn't working isn't a leadership [00:36:00] question. Howard said what's the leadership question? Greg said, the question we need to ask is what system do we have in place? Or what system is missing to ensure that every letter on every sign at all of our 14, 000 locations are always working? He said, that's a question I'll answer. And I think as leaders, we need to look for the systemic questions more than for the kind of symptomatic question. Don't answer the symptom, answer the root problem. And I think we need to ask better leadership questions as leaders. We need to look for the root cause of things. And that, when you build that system in place of that mindset that it's not a person's fault that something goes wrong, there's an underlying system. It allows everybody to say, hey, there's letters not working or hey, something's going wrong because nobody's going to get in trouble for it. Now we fix the system.

Michael Koenig: Mic drop right there. Really? Yeah. [00:37:00] Absolutely. 100%. Cameron, thanks so much for for joining me. This has been awesome. It's so great to catch up with you and congrats on a great book. The book is Second in Command. We'll drop a link to it. And everyone should go out and grab it. Especially if you're a CEO looking to hire a COO. But also a COO if you want to know how to work with a CEO. Cameron, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks Michael,

Cameron Herold: appreciate it. Have a great one. Thanks, you too.