Cameron Herold on Founding the COO Alliance and Antarctica

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 I'm excited to welcome our guest, Cameron Herold, a business growth guru that's helped hundreds of companies hit exponential growth. Cameron is the founder of the COO Alliance, which is the world's leading network for chief operating officers, of which I'm a member. And he's also the host of the podcast Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief, of which I'm a rabid listener. Prior to his consulting, Cameron was the chief operating officer at 1-800-GOT-JUNK and helped them grow from $2 million in annual revenue to over $100 million in 6 years. Cameron and his team took on 17,000 competitors. 17,000. And they came to dominate the market. So the next time someone tells you that you're in a crowded industry, just remind them that someone has to win. Welcome, Cameron. Thanks for being here. I'm very excited to have you on.

Cameron Herold: Hey, Michael, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Michael Koenig: So let's review some Got Junk metrics from your time there. 6 years in a row of 100% growth from $2 million to $100 million in revenue. Franchisees in 330 cities across 4 countries with 30 operating P&Ls. $5,200 unique press stories, the number 2 employer in Canada, and a stint on Oprah.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, I think, I think it was 13 operating P&Ls, not 30, but everything else was dead on accurate.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. Got it. I mean, those numbers are stunning and the machinery behind your PR and marketing is the stuff of legend. But what I'd really love to chat about with you is the story behind the story. Let's dive into the operations you and your team designed and and also your mastery of people management, development, hiring. So to start, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, famously said, "Customer first, employee second, investors third." What's your response to that?

Cameron Herold: I completely disagree. I've always said that it's employees first, customer second, profit and revenue come third. My reason for that is that if you obsess about your employees' happiness, if you really care about employee engagement, they'll care about your customers and they'll go through brick walls for you. But if employees ever feel like they come second to customer, they're going to feel like they're overworked, they're underappreciated, and they're going to find ways to cut. So it just is a little bit counterintuitive. But the more that I obsess about making sure they're happy, caring for them, growing them, growing their skills, growing their confidence, really caring about them as humans, they just take care of the company for me.

Michael Koenig: I agree largely with that. No, I agree entirely with that. It's people, processes, and if you're a tech company, servers. So if you mess up the people part, the processes don't quite matter, do they?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, they don't matter at all. You know, when you really do care about the human side, they actually will figure out a better way. They'll look for optimization, they'll look for automation, they'll stay late, they'll pick up the pieces and do stuff on their own.

Michael Koenig: You put a lot of emphasis on hiring A-players, right? Those folks that are so good, they aren't looking for a new role and you have to actively recruit them. How do you determine if someone is an A-player before you start your recruiting efforts?

Cameron Herold: So it's, it starts with really thinking about what you're looking for and describing what the person actually has to achieve in their role. And then you're looking to find people that have already achieved that. For the rate or the price that you're willing to pay. You know, I could say that I need a head of marketing and I can go out and get, you know, Johnny Ives from Apple and pay him a few million dollars a year, but that's overkill. So, but if I only want to pay $60,000 a year, then what can I really get for that money? So it's a combination of what am I willing to pay and what do I need to get done? You know, an example of what do I need to get done versus someone knowing how to do something. Do you know how to win a world record? Not a clue. Yeah, no, you do. Just be fast. Just be faster or better than everybody else. You know how to do it, right? Do you know how to do all 4 strokes in swimming? Probably. But you might drown doing the butterfly, but you know technically how to do them. So if I was hiring a swimmer and I wanted someone who knew how to do that, that's okay. But imagine if I said I wanted to hire someone who has won a world record. Who has competed in the Olympics in all 4 strokes, who has broken records in the individual medleys, you'd be like, oh, that's a very different person because they've actually proven it before. So what I'm looking for in hiring A players are the people that have done what I need them to do and that culturally align with the organization so that I don't have to try to mold them into something because they already fit.

Michael Koenig: So in terms of those A-players though, there is a price you're willing to pay. That price is never gonna be enough for the truly, truly great ones, or maybe it is, but what else do you do to, to lure them there? And, and kind of where I'm going with this is Got Junk is famous for its culture, right? Employee and, and franchisee happiness. You've spoken about how the culture needs to be more than business, but less than a religion.

Cameron Herold: I was just out yesterday with a couple who have a podcast called A Little Bit Culty, and they were interviewing me on their podcast as to when culture goes too far. And because I've said that so often, they wanted to talk to me about it. One of the things that we did really well at 1-800-GOT-JUNK and all the companies that I've helped create globally is I try to find a way to attract people into the company like a magnet and push other people away from the organization so they don't come. So you create like an energy vortex that keeps pulling in more culture people into the organization. When you do that, people will come and work for a little bit less money. They come because of a cause. They come because of the other people they get to work with. They come because of the high bar you're setting for them. They come because you already obsess about core values they're aligned with. They believe in your core purpose. They understand your BHAG, and they're obsessed with that vivid vision that you've created. So when you create this energy and these magnets to pull them in, you're going to push people away that don't fit that culture. And it starts to spin off more and more of that rate-positive energy that you are looking for.

Michael Koenig: So, if you're pushing people away that don't quite fit, how do you avoid the risk of creating a homogeneous culture?

Cameron Herold: Yeah. We're not looking for the same kind of person or the same DNA. So, you might have in a DiSC profile some high Ds, some high Is, some high Ss, and high Cs, but they all believe in the core purpose. They all believe in the BHAG. They all live core values already. They just have different personality profiles. Maybe they have different Kolbe profiles. Maybe you've got high Fact Finders or high Follow-Throughs or high Quickstarts or high Implementers. But again, if they obsess about the core, right, as Simon Sinek would talk about, the core purpose or your why and your core values, then they're not going to be homogeneous at all. But they definitely believe in the core essence and the DNA. You know, at Apple, as an example,. You're going to have very, very strong technical functional skills, very strong finance skills, very strong interaction with manufacturers. So very different breeds of humans, but they all believe in the cult of Apple, right? They all believe in, in change, challenging the status quo and creating these insanely great products that change the human race.

Michael Koenig: So in terms of ongoing performance evaluation, you've hired these A-players, and how are you going to evaluate once you've brought them on, was it the right move? Was it the right fit? Are they the right person for the job?

Cameron Herold: Same way that I evaluate my kids on a minute-by-minute, daily-by-daily basis. I think we've overcomplicated business in trying to create these performance reviews. If I waited— I've got two boys that are 18 and 20. If I waited until every three months to give a performance review, it wouldn't work. So I got to praise them ongoing. I got to give them shit ongoing. I got to tell them where they're screwing up ongoing. I got to tell them what they're doing well ongoing. I got to coach them and raise their bar and cheer them on ongoing, you do the exact same thing with employees. So it's just very proximal feedback, very specific feedback, and always looking to raise the bar, but always thanking them and praising them and showing them how far they've come and what they've done really well.

Michael Koenig: So as a COO of a large organization, how do you go about doing that with that praise? How do you— Cameron Harold, the COO and leader of the company, go about putting that in motion?

Cameron Herold: It starts with a cultural DNA when you're looking for those people that just praise and say thank you and have gratitude. It's the people who when you're in a restaurant, you see them thanking the hostess and thanking the busboy and thanking the waiter and actually looking them in the eyes. Those are the same people that will do it in the workforce. You look for people that have core values already. I remember the Taj Hotel Group, who is a large hotel group based in India. They never hire anyone based from the big cities. They only hire people from the villages and the small towns because they've lost the essence and the core value side. I think it was Howard Behar, one of the 3 CEOs, I think there's now 4, been 4 CEOs at Starbucks. When Howard Behar was CEO, he spent 2 hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes to employees in stores. Now, he didn't know who to write the notes to. A spreadsheet was put on his desk and he would handwrite cards and then they would go out in the mail to all these stores and employees. But he was spending 2 hours a week, which is 5 to to 3% of his week as the CEO of a massive organization saying thank you and praise. So it's putting the DNA in place for that. It's starting your meetings by showing gratitude. It's starting all your meetings by thanking someone for living or exhibiting a core value. It's every time you set 3 new goals, praising people for hitting 3 goals that we just accomplished. It's just a focus on that that actually kind of builds a fire and a spark throughout the organization.

Michael Koenig: So it's really catching them doing something right.

Cameron Herold: Versus something like— Classic One Minute Manager. There you go. Yep. It's a classic One Minute Manager with Ken Blanchard and Dr. Paul Hersey, who wrote Situational Leadership. They're the classic core of management coaching and DNA. I even talk about that in my Invest in Your Leaders course. I have a coaching module. I have a one-on-one coaching module, and I have a situational leadership module, and it's all based on the Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey models. Fantastic.

Michael Koenig: So let's dive into operations. When you joined Got Junk, there weren't any processes. How'd you go about tackling that? How'd you prioritize and continue to do so throughout your time there?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, they had processes in the call center and they had some very loose ones for the guys out in the truck because Brian had been running the company for 10 years. But, you know, there were only 14 employees at the head office. We had 12 franchises that were just sold and a couple were up and running. So there was no operating manual, there was no training manual, there was no marketing budgets or plans, there was no coaching program, there was no franchise sales program. So I had built a couple other companies before that were fast growth and had been in the franchising space. I had been both a franchisee and a franchisor before, and I saw systems in a very simple way, right? My systems were always like, if I can write it on a Post-it note, and the worst employee in the worst market in the worst weather can actually execute that system, then we can run with it, we can grow. So we started putting in place those systems. I wrote the first operations manual, which was about 300 pages. It was about 20 different, 24 different chapters, you know, hobbled together a franchise training program. The very first day that I got there, we were running franchise training for 2 franchisees that had been signed 6 weeks before I got there. And two of the franchisees came to us on day one and said, if this is what training is, we're going to give back our franchise, we're leaving. So Brian and I rewrote training every night for the following day and executed a brilliant session. So it was just sticking to the basics, creating systems that were easy for people to follow and execute and making sure that they could be scaled in the worst markets.

Michael Koenig: Okay, so I've got to know then, what was the training like that this person said, if this is how it's going to be, we're done?

Cameron Herold: Part of it was our director of marketing at the time stood up and said, hi, my name is— I won't use his name. I'm so-and-so. I used to work in the trucks. I'm a lawyer and I have no marketing experience and I'm director of marketing. And they went, well, that's fucked. And then it was just very kind of talking. They were just standing talking about some stuff, but there was no— there were no pretests. There was no written content. There was no role-playing or practicing. So I follow this adult learning model of abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, concrete experience, and reflective observation. You make sure you go through those cycles of learning. And then I also make sure that we include some visual, some auditory, and some kinesthetic learning. So they're doing some stuff, they're listening to some stuff, they're watching some stuff. There was really none of that built out. There were no speaker notes, there were no handouts, there were no, you know, slides, or I don't even know if we had PowerPoint back in the day, probably flip charts or PowerPoint. But all of that had to be created. And when you understand the methodology for adults learning and you understand how to teach them so that it sticks and they can scale, it was easy for me to put it in place even though I had to do it the night before. They just didn't have the competency, which is okay. That's why I came in, right, was to help them put all that in place.

Michael Koenig: A 300-page manual. Were people reading that?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, all of them. We actually gave them— and we gave every employee and every franchisee had an open book test. Where— and the open book test was a 90-minute test where they had to go through all of these questions and then find the answers in the manual. So my reason for doing it that way was in school I remembered the concepts, but I couldn't know it enough to regurgitate it on a test, but I knew where to find it. And in the franchising world, there's no way I can get people to memorize 300 pages, but I need them to RTFM. Read the effin' manual. So instead of calling us with a question, go check the marketing chapter, find the question. If you can't find it, then call us, right? If there's a better way, we'll tell you and we'll put it in the manual. But I needed them going to it, kind of like go to Google and find your own answer, go to YouTube and find your own answer. So yeah, the open book exam was critical and they had to get 85% or greater just to actually open their doors as a franchise. And every employee, whether it was a call center or tech employee or finance employee, they all had to do an open book exam as well.

Michael Koenig: That's quite interesting in that you're teaching them to help themselves. You're training them to help themselves versus, you know, knowing everything from, from memory, which is more—

Cameron Herold: or making, or making it up on their own. Right. So I call it interdependence. I wanted someone that was independent enough that they would follow the system, right? That they were dependent enough that they would follow the system if it was in place.. And if there wasn't one, they were kind of entrepreneurial or independent enough, they'd make it up and wing it and then let us know what they did. But we wanted them to follow the best system. And if we didn't have one, we'd create it or they could help create it. We just didn't want them all out there doing it their own way because there usually is a better way, which is why we have a format.

Michael Koenig: If we fast forward to today, change the, change the industry. It's not junk collection. It's a tech company. With that type of training. What do you think that looks like and how has it evolved into something that's done for this type of work environment?

Cameron Herold: Sure. So, um, a lot of people are familiar with Simon Sinek's work, his book Start With Why, and his famous infamous TEDx that went viral and is now the number 3, I think, TED Talk of all time. Simon was on our board of advisors 4 years, 5 years before he wrote that book. He was on our board, he spoke at our conferences, he stayed at my house. We were great friends. He slept at my house, I think, for a week. So, when Simon came up with these golden circles, they were originally a cone shape and it was why, how, what. And so, we make sure that everybody, whether it's a tech company or an offline business, whatever, is really deeply integrated with the why of the company. So, your core purpose, your BHAG, your core values. Values, your vivid vision, the history of the company, the crazy shit that got you there. They need to know all of the DNA that made us who we are. That's kind of your why. The what is what most companies train on, right? It's how to do the job, how to use the software, how to work with the customers. It's what we do day to day, how we go out and haul junk and put it in a truck. That's what we do. What I train on is the how we do it. What I focus on more is the how we do it. And so, sorry, it's the why, how, what. Most people focus on the what. The middle ring is what most people miss. It's all of the stuff around coaching, delegation, time management, email management, project management, one-on-one meetings, interviewing, hiring, conflict management. It's all the core executive functioning skills that most leaders in all companies are deficient in. You know, you think about any tech company out there, if you've got managers All those managers are doing job interviews. Have they really been trained on how to do interviews? Nope. Do they know how to do reference checks? Nope. Do they know how to actually grill a candidate or sell a candidate using a reverse sell or use open questions, closed questions, pregnant pause? Nope. And yet they're doing interviews every day and then they go, it's hard to find good people. No, you're just shitty at interviewing. Right. It's kind of like saying meetings suck. No, you suck at running meetings. So what I try to do is in all industries is train managers and leaders on all of those skills. So if they're good at situational leadership, they're good at coaching, they're good at delegation, they're good at running one-on-one meetings. If we've invested in their skills, they can grow the people. That's how you grow the company, and that crosses every single industry.

Michael Koenig: So one of our previous guests, Nathaniel Manning, he's the COO of Kettle. He described his approach to operational efficiency as creating processes without bureaucracy. How did you balance implementing the operational rigor that you're talking about and still having streamlined execution?

Cameron Herold: Yes. Well, one is to make sure that the systems are simple, easy to execute, right? So dumb it down to a Post-it note. I think often people try to like, oh, let's put it all in Process Street or let's create all these great SOPs. If it's too complicated, no one's going to use it, right? You're creating process for process sake. I had one CEO one day, he's like, I'm really excited, we created 82 processes. I'm like, who gives a shit? Like, what do you need? What do you need 82 processes for? Like, what are the critical few things that we have to make sure we're doing perfectly? And let's get those systemized. So I like literally documenting a process on a Post-it note, then moving it into a Google Doc or a Google Sheet. And then after we've tried it and broken it and worked on it and revised it, then you can move it into something like Process Street or SweetProcess, etc. So that's kind of my original thought on it. And then secondly is, again, really, really simplifying it. If it takes an MBA to figure out the process or the system, no one's going to use it. And then lastly, I have a mantra internally that I try to teach organizations, which is outcome over process. I think it was Ray Dalio that said, if you see a snake in the grass, you don't create an SOP to kill the snake, you bash it over the head with a stick. Right? That at some point, If you have a diamond in the rough, forget the process, pick up the diamond, right? So I've had not very many, but certainly a handful, 5 or 6 times when I'm interviewing people that I'm like, cut the shit. You know you're perfect. I know you're perfect. Let's get this done, right? Like, why are we pushing the process here for no reason? Or the sales process, right? Like, I have a process that people have to go through, but if I've got the right person that should be in the CEO Alliance, we just put them in the CEO Alliance. I just had one of my coaching clients the other day who I know the CEO, I'm coaching this company, I know the organization, they totally qualify for like $35 million in revenue. She wanted her COO to join. I just said, yep, sign her up, pay the bill, boom. My team's like, whoa, where'd she come from? Like, how come she didn't go through? Because we don't need the normal funnel. We're good. Yeah. But you wouldn't want to run the whole company by winging it.

Michael Koenig: No, you certainly wouldn't. You're bullish on reverse engineering from a company's desired goals and ambitions to the current state. In an interview, and forgive me, I'm blinking on which specific one, but you mentioned that the reverse engineering process doesn't necessarily start with a financial plan, which is very common. How and where do you start reverse engineering, and at what point does the financial plan start to come into focus?

Cameron Herold: Great. So, what I try to do is get the CEO or the entrepreneur to lean out into the future, kind of 3 years out. So, let's say that you leaned out to December 31st, 3 years from now, and you almost hop into a DeLorean time machine with Michael J. Fox and the Doc, and boom, you pop out and it's 3 years from now. And you get out and you look around your company. You walk around your physical space, you take a look at how the Zoom meetings are working, you think about your distributed team.. You talk about your culture, you describe your marketing, you describe your PR, you describe your meeting rhythms, you describe your use of dashboards. You don't worry about how it happened, but you're describing everything that you can describe and how your company looks, acts, and feels 3 years from now without worrying about how it comes true. That finished state 3 years from now is your vivid vision. It becomes a 4 or 5-page description. Well, then you can think about what are the core projects to make each sentence come true. And what's kind of the basic order of operations to make that happen? Kind of like building a home, right? If I'm building a home from scratch, I don't go and put the Wolf stove and the cabinets in on day one. I probably have to build the foundation, you know, and then I have to put up the walls and put in the electrical and the plumbing. I know I want to see the cabinets and the beautiful flooring and the lighting, but that comes in after the painting. And, you know, there's an order of operations to building a home. There's an order of operations to building your business. So you think about all the projects to build it out. And then from that, you can come up with a 1-year plan, and then a very rough 2-year and 3-year project plan. But you have a 1-year plan that you can then create a budget around. So you might know what your revenue goals are going to be 3 years out, 2 years out, 1 year out, profit objectives 3 years out, 2 years out, 1 year out. And then you build an operating plan for the first year to then execute. And then you can reverse engineer that into quarterly and monthly milestones and rocks, etc.

Michael Koenig: One of the things, and I think the next part, you talked about quarterly and monthly. I think you also do weekly, and you call it plan, brief, execute, and debrief. Tell me about that.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, learned that from the military. I think it's the US Air Force that has that mantra of plan, brief, execute, debrief. So we had that above every single whiteboard in our offices, and the basic idea is to get the team together Always be visualizing where you're going for the year, but you know what your plan is for the month and for the week. And then what are the top 5 things we need to get done this week? Do the people know how to do it? So do I need to give them any coaching or mentoring or just stay out of their way or cheer them on? That situational leadership aligned to their projects. So they commit to those projects, you brief on the projects, you get out of their way, they start working on those projects. At the end of the week, you find out what went well, what didn't go well, what we can tweak,? Do they need any mentoring, support, coaching, et cetera? What's our next plan for next week? Go execute. So, it's just a series of that kind of stepping towards your monthly and quarterlies.

Michael Koenig: And so, how do you shake it up? Say this week went really poorly and now we're not one week off, we're two weeks off and we're not necessarily going to hit that quarterly. Do you go and you modify the vet? How do you accommodate that type of thing? Because nothing ever goes according to plan.

Cameron Herold: Well, sometimes it does, but sometimes it's more like a bob and weave towards a plan, right? Like we hit 59 out of our 60 forecasted months at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and the year forecast was done 12 months, or sorry, 3 months before the start of the calendar year. So I was planning 12 months and we were hitting 12 out of 12. We missed one of those months over a 6-year period, even though they were all hit. Well in advance. But we were, we were kind of anal retentive around what specifically we were going to do to hit each number. We measured on a daily basis. You know, we reported our numbers on a daily basis. We reported our monthly trend on a daily basis. So we didn't wait till the end of the month to see how we were doing. We knew one day and two days and three days. And the reason we did that was when I was building another company called College Pro Painters, you know, we had four months to go out and hire 800 franchisees. And then we had 2 months to go out and hire 8,000 painters and train them all. And then we had 4 months to paint $64 million in houses. So between May 1st and August 31st, and then September 1st, 8,800 university kids would quit and go back to school. 30 of us would get drunk. We'd wake up September 2nd and we would do it again. So when you have to build an 8,800-person company from scratch every single year, you become operationally world-class at operations, execution, planning. And then we also knew that one week was now 6% of our year, right? We only had 17 operating weeks from May 1st to September— to August 31st. One week is now 6% of your year. If you miss a week, you're screwed. So we were measuring and monitoring on a daily basis, and that gave us the ability to course correct very quickly.

Michael Koenig: And so if it's not seasonal, right, How does that change, right? You have a very firm timeline here. If you don't hit it, then things start to get in trouble. But say that isn't there.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, well, I bring that same— I try to bring that same urgency and focus into businesses that have the luxury of the excuse of, ah, we don't have seasonality. Okay, it doesn't mean we're gonna get lazy, right? Ah, we got an extra week. No, we don't. Look, we're— we only have 3 inputs into our business. We have people, we have time, and we have money. And our job is to get the highest return on those 3 inputs, right? The highest return on those 3 investments. So I don't like it when companies get sloppy and lazy because we've got time. So I'm always having more of this implied urgency, right? As an example, I never say that something's going to be done by Monday. It has to be done by Friday. I never say that it'll be done by January 1st. It'll be done by December 31st. There's all like, I try to, it's psychological, but it's always just a little bit more urgency. I don't ask someone when they're going to get something done by. I ask them to think about how long it's going to take, how little time they could do to actually get a pretty good result, not perfect result because we don't need perfect. And then I try them to see in their calendar when they're going to do the work. So don't tell me when it's going to get completed. Tell me how little time it'll take and when you're doing it. That moves everything forward. When I delegate things to people, I don't say it'll only take you 2 hours. I say I only want you to spend an hour and I only want you to spend $300. So we give them a financial constraint and a time constraint. Otherwise, Parkinson's law takes over and work expands to fill the space that we give it. Hmm.

Michael Koenig: It's interesting. In a Fortune magazine article, you were given the nickname The CEO Whisperer. How do you decide when to whisper, when to yell, and when to be silent?

Cameron Herold: That was actually— that was Forbes magazine. I've been written up in Fortune twice, so you're excused. But that was the public, and that was the physical print edition of Forbes magazine. It was the publisher of Forbes magazine, Rich Karlgaard, wrote an article about me and the Vivid Vision concept. So the question was, how do you know when to whisper, when to scream, and when to what?

Michael Koenig: Be silent.

Cameron Herold: The leader should always speak last. So when you're in a meeting, when you're in a room, the leader's job is to grow their employees' skills and grow their confidence. And if the leader's always talking, they're hurting their confidence or they're not giving them a chance to share their ideas. So the leader needs to speak last and pull the ideas out of the group and say, amazing, that's great. And notice, wow, they're smart. Right. Next one is the leader's job is to kind of use the whole two ears and one mouth. God gave us to use them in the same ratio we were given. So it's to ask questions, to listen, to truly look at the nonverbal cues, to truly care and understand, and also to ask kind of leadership questions. What's the underlying system that's broken or missing that we can improve on? So you create kind of a no-blame environment, which opens the doors for you. The leader's job is to praise. I've always said the CEO is to be the chief energizing officer. It's to really infuse the organization with positive energy that drives it forward. When is their job to scream? Maybe in private, never in a public because you can destroy the energy and destroys trust. And I think you always also have to remember that people are human and there's always something else going on in their lives that might be affecting them too. And to try to humanize that. I think it's okay to be firm. Be firm but fair, but the whole public praise, private criticism.

Michael Koenig: What about in the context, and maybe you can expand on this, of the COO and the CEO relationship? So let's remove everyone else from this picture.

Cameron Herold: I was just thinking about that before you even asked it. I'm working on my 6th book right now and it is about the CEO-COO relationship. So I've just put together the overall view and table of contents for it. And I've got my first meeting with my team on it next week. So the CEO's job is to make the COO look good internally. The COO's job is to make the CEO look good internally. It's a true yin and yang. So behind the scenes, you can argue, you can debate, you can fight, but in front of the team, you have to be a force that is kind of together. The CEO's job is to remove obstacles for the COO to make sure the COO is only working on their areas of unique ability and vice versa. The CEO's job is to take all the stuff off the COO that they suck at or don't like doing. I think the CEOs often are so focusing on their own skills, they miss the opportunity to grow the skills of their second in command and to grow their team. It's why I started the COO Alliance. It's why I started the Invest in Your Leaders course. Is if we grow our people, they'll grow our business. So the CEO is always there to make sure they're growing the COO's skills, to growing the COO's confidence, to finding mentors for them, to help remove obstacles, to be there as a resource, and also to make sure that the CEO is clear on the vision and culture that we're driving towards, and then get out of their way so the COO can do it. The CEO has to know what has to happen the CEO needs to know how to do it.

Michael Koenig: You've created Invest in Your Leaders. Tell us about it.

Cameron Herold: Yeah. So I've always believed that the more I grow my people, the more they'll grow the company. And I've also always believed that there's a set of core skills that we need to be really, really good at our jobs. So, and these are skills that have been really existing for 50, 100 years that will never change. You know, how to coach a person isn't software. It's— there's a— there's an art and a skill to raise their bar and, and give them feedback and grow their energy and grow their confidence in coaching, right? In sports, you can have really great coaches or really horrible coaches. They get very different results. Having a one-on-one meeting— like, all managers tend to have these one-on-one meetings with their teams, but do they have a good system and a format to do that? Running meetings. You know, we all run Zoom calls, phone calls, in-person meetings, but have we ever been trained on how to facilitate a meeting, how to run it quickly, how to engage everyone, how to get the quieter people talking, how to get the salespeople to shut up a little bit, you know, how to brainstorm, how to make decisions? So there's, there's systems around that. So I just try to codify in a very simple way the— what I think are the 12 core skills that every executive, every leader needs to then grow their company.. And if we focus on growing their skills, their confidence will grow. So they'll do better in their job. We can praise them more. They'll learn more skills. Their confidence grows, right? It's grow their confidence, grow their skills, grow their confidence, grow their skills. It's that kind of two-ladder approach.

Michael Koenig: In order to gain the confidence, you gain confidence from knowing what the skill is, and then you gain confidence from executing on it. Or both?

Cameron Herold: Or both. Think about when we were back to riding a bicycle as a kid. We sometimes got the confidence with our mom or dad going, yeah, good job. Even though we pedaled twice and fell on our ass, it was the energy they infused us with that gave us the confidence to try to pedal more. And then pedaling more, we felt some skills, so we got some confidence, and then they cheered us on, so we pedaled more. And then we were pedaling a lot and we got some skills and they didn't have to cheer us on. When I was teaching my oldest son how to drive a car 5 years ago, there was a lot of confidence building. There's also a lot of holy fuck, be careful. Right? Well, he drove me home from a movie last night at midnight. I didn't have to cheer him on once because it would sound stupid if I said, hey, good job braking. Right? Good job stopping at the trap. So as you grow the person's skill set, you pull back a little bit from the praise because they don't need it anymore. But yeah, they feed off of each other. Again, the leader's job is to grow people and it's to grow their skills and confidence. And both of those feed the other.

Michael Koenig: Cameron, I want you to run an experiment. And the next time you're in the car with your son, just start complimenting him on, oh, great brake. Way to use your right turn signal.

Cameron Herold: Right. Good job pouring the orange juice. That was amazing. I love the way that you put the glass on the counter safely. Be like, what the fuck is happening?

Michael Koenig: It's too good. Do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it with my entire family. They're going to be like, I love the way you're walking.

Cameron Herold: Great job walking. Right? Because when our kid was like 12 months, they were like, you walked. Yeah. But that's all leadership is though, right? I was just paid to speak when I was down in Antarctica. I've now been paid to speak on all 7 continents. I was in Antarctica last month. There were 65 CEOs. I was paid to speak to them. And I said, "We're at the bottom of the world. The CEO's job is to be at the bottom of the org chart, supporting the teams, growing their skills, growing their confidence, aligning them with core values and core purpose and vivid vision, but not sitting on top of them telling them what to do and holding them accountable." Right.

Michael Koenig: The bottom-up org chart, which I love, by the way, the way that you've done that. But I have to ask, Who in their right mind goes to 65 CEOs and says, let's— I know what we're going to do. I want you to travel for a long time. I want you to take a plane, train, boat, and automobile and get to Antarctica during COVID Oh my goodness.

Cameron Herold: Which was insane. I just, I just posted a video from our trip this morning on my Facebook and I just said that Sophia and Janik are probably two of the only leaders capable and crazy enough to do this during COVID So, it was Janik Silver who was one of my very first coaching clients from 14 years ago and Sophia Amanski who is his second in command. And, they pulled together these 65, I think it was 63 CEOs from around the world. Jacques Cousteau's grandson was with us with his wife. My fiancée was with us. We had a DJ that was spectacular. We had a silent disco on the shores of Antarctica. They said it was the first silent disco and disco they've ever seen in Antarctica, um, and we've got videos and photos to prove it. We— I was hoping to see some penguins. The second day we were there, we saw somewhere, they said, within eyesight, within 300,000 and 400,000 penguins, um, which creates a river of shit that you have to walk through, and it's disgusting smell. And the seals, 3 different types of seals, 5 types of penguins, and icebergs the size of buildings that were everywhere. Unbelievable.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. So cool. And I wonder how many other firsts you could have checked off there. We talk a lot about those silly questions that we had at the beginning, but I'm—

Cameron Herold: we were probably— we were probably the only crew to have penguin onesies. There were 65 of us walking in penguin onesies.

Michael Koenig: Oh, that's fantastic. I love that. Yeah, well, we were talking about the CEO-COO relationship and it's so key, right? When the powers combine. What is it? When the powers— when our powers combine. Captain Planet, right? How can COOs vet a fit during the hiring process?

Cameron Herold: So it's really first start by being very, very clear on what you're looking for, right? Really understanding the behavioral traits for the person you're hiring. As an example, every role has a set of different behaviors that you're looking for, right? My best example I ever use is there's not a single great salesperson who would ever make it through an HR screening process. HR people hate salespeople, right? Salespeople are too gregarious, they're winging it, they shoot from the hip, they're out of the box, they don't even know if they're there is a box, nor do they care. They certainly don't dot their i's and cross their t's. HR people are all policies and procedures, and right then they're more analytical and amiable. So HR people often turn away the best salespeople because they don't fit. Well, we're not trying to hire more of you, we're trying to hire a different— so it's being clear on what you're looking for, it's being clear on what the skills are, it's asking very, very tough questions, and it's understanding the interview process. It's understanding how to go through a resume, how to scribble notes and questions, how to ask open and closed-ended questions, how to probe, how to use the pregnant pause, how to use TORC, what questions to ask to uncover things like leadership and tenacity and introspection, interdependence. And when you understand those things, you can scale it. I cover that in my Investing Leaders course too, a whole section on interviewing that is how we did it at College Pro Painters where we had to hire 8,800 people every year. By the way, there's not a lot of companies company in history that hired 8,000 people every single year. You know, even the Googles.

Michael Koenig: It's crazy. I was actually thinking of a political campaign, but that's several years, right? It's a political campaign. You put billions of dollars into it, and then after the election, you just shut it all down.

Cameron Herold: Well, we used to have, um, these yellow signs that we would put out on people's lawns for College Pro Painters. And back in the '90s, we created an ad campaign and we put up all these yellow signs all over the city and it said, Canada's fourth political party? Question mark. College Pro Painters. Because people were seeing our signs everywhere. So we just thought we'd have some fun.

Michael Koenig: Oh, that's too good. Okay, time for my last and favorite question. We've all had those moments where you have a new problem and you've thought, well, never thought I'd see that. Antarctica aside, do you have one that comes to mind that you can share with us?

Cameron Herold: We almost bankrupted 1-800-GOT-JUNK. We were a $100 million business and we were out of cash even though we'd been very profitable. We spent $5 million on a renovation, an office move, a glass stairwell, bonuses, taxes, paid cash for everything, went to the bank to borrow some money. They're like, you don't have any cash. Like, I know, we just spent all our money on this. We were really proud of it because we'd never needed like a credit line. And we had to borrow $420,000 from Brian's mom just to meet payroll. Yeah, this business, the stuff of like what they don't teach you in Harvard Business School, man, they just— this stuff is not, is not taught. There's a lot that isn't taught.

Michael Koenig: Definitely not. Especially the stress, how you deal with the stress, how you handle that. Because it's all— if you're running a marathon and you get stressed out on mile 1, forget it, you're not going to make it to the finish line.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, there's just too many, too many variables. And I think that's one of the reasons why CEOs and COOs have to be a strong force together is they have to believe in the vision. They have to be driving towards a plan. They have to bob and weave when it comes to it. There has to be so much trust in each other that when shit goes sideways, good or bad, you can just bob and weave with it.

Michael Koenig: Right. So it's also not just relying on yourself, but on the others around you and the team you've built so much.

Cameron Herold: Oh yeah.

Michael Koenig: All the time.

Cameron Herold: Yeah, for sure.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. Well, Cameron, this was amazing. Love this conversation. Thanks so much for joining me. Where can people go to keep up with you, learn about your leadership course, and just all of the myriad things that you are doing constantly?

Cameron Herold: Yeah, take a look at the, uh, well, the Second in Command podcast is something they should all take a look at where we interview COOs from all over the world. We've got about 205 episodes right now. Uh, definitely take a look at investinyourleaders.com. All that course content is there and, and great for all managers and leaders. The COO Alliance. They should check that if they're a CEO of a company doing at least $5 million or greater. And then all 5 of my books are available on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

Michael Koenig: We'll drop some links to them. And the— for the Second in Command podcast, I don't remember what episode was, but the one that is the absolute best was obviously the one I was on.

Cameron Herold: I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Michael Koenig: Well, there you have it.

Cameron Herold: Thank you.

Michael Koenig: Thanks for listening to Between Two COOs. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and a very special thank you to Cameron Herold for joining us. Tune in next time for our next COO chat on Between Two COOs, and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. Just visit between2coos.com for more. And if you have a minute, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell others about the show so they can get great advice from phenomenal COOs. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Between Two COOs. Tune in next time, and until then, so long.