← Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
492 | Jason Jaynes - Divine Leadership Secrets Every COO Turned CEO Must Know Now
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- [00:00]
Jason James
One of the things that I think is unique, that stood out to me is the signal to noise ratio outside the Catholic market is really high. There are, you know, when you think about especially and we'll just broadly define it as the Protestant space with Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, any religion, you know, besides being Muslim or Jewish, that fit under the umbrella of Catholicism. They operate in a lot of ways like small businesses do.
- [00:33]
Cameron Herold
Welcome to the Second In Command podcast produced by the COO alliance and brought to you by its founder, Cameron Herold. In the second in command podcast, we talk to top COOs who share the insights, strategies and tactics that made them the chief behind the chief. And now, here's your host, Cameron Herald.
- [00:58]
Our guest today is eCatholic's former COO and their current CEO, Jason James. E Catholic has also got their new COO on board as a CO alliance member, which I'm excited about. Jason is an experienced software engineer with 27 years of practice across multiple functions including management, product management, software engineering, marketing, support and sales. Multiple disciplines including cloud computing, IoT, mobile security, social media, online advertising and SaaS. He's currently the CEO of eCatholic and he's going to talk to us about his progression, joining as the coo, moving through that over a period of five years, and then moving into the CEO role and also then bringing on his successor and making sure that she's set up for success as the new coo. So it's an exciting episode. It's one of the rare times we've ever had a CEO on the podcast and you can understand why. We'll see you on the inside. And this is when you can watch on our Second Command podcast YouTube channel as well. So, Jason, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.
- [02:01]
Jason James
Thanks, Cameron. Really happy to be here.
- [02:03]
Cameron Herold
Yeah. So you are a rare breed and that's why I've actually invited you onto the podcast today. As we just heard in the introduction, you're actually the CEO now of a company called E Catholic. But I don't want to talk to you about much of the CEO role. You're the actual prior CEO of the company. So I'd like to talk to you a lot about that transition and what it was like being the COO and kind of go into. Into that realm. But why don't you start us off by telling us a little bit about the company itself and then we'll go back into some of your past and how you got there.
- [02:33]
Jason James
Yeah, sure. So the. The company, E Catholic, was founded in 2005 by Josh Simmons, who was the previous CEO and now just the founder. The focus of the company since inception has really been to build and bring digital tools to the Catholic Church to help the Catholic Church to reach out and touch its community. It's faithful. And when the company was started, Josh focused in on websites. I mean, we're talking circa 2005, content management systems were all the rage. Then WordPress started around a similar time frame. And he was actually a Catholic youth director and saw a real opportunity to reach out and touch the kids that he was working through through this new digital medium, but didn't really find an effective way or an effective tool set that allowed churches and folks that were operating inside of those churches to have an easy way to do that. So he started by focusing on websites and we've expanded from there. We're celebrating our 20th anniversary actually this past Sunday was the 20th anniversary of when he founded the company. And we've grown tremendously and expanded in all kinds of digital tools for Catholic diocese, parishes and schools and ministries.
- [03:49]
Cameron Herold
And what do you mean by different tools? What does that mean? Can you expand on that a little bit?
- [03:53]
Jason James
Yeah. So, you know, when we think about what we're trying to do, we're trying to help churches, parishes, schools roll out kind of a digital welcome mat to their community. We want to give them the tools that they can leverage to allow people to find them online, to learn about them online, and then to be invited in to become participants and to stay participants of that community. So it starts with the website, and then it goes from the website to things like live streaming and communication tools in the form of email and text messaging. From there we provide easy ways that churches can ask their flock to tithe and to contribute and to help church grow and to main financially relevant. And then the last piece of that puzzle is we have a product offering that we acquired in 2021, which is in all the church management software space I like to call just tell people think of it as CRM for churches. And so we bring this whole set of tools together and really under one umbrella, try to be the one stop shop for these, for these parishes and these diocese and these schools to reach out and communicate and roll out that welcome mat from a digital perspective.
- [05:09]
Cameron Herold
I love it. Super interesting. All right, so you know, one of the big values of the, of being in a church is the community, right? Some of it's obviously going to mass and listening to the sermon and hearing the priest and getting kind of some of the rough ideas, but some of it is that community of the other people that are like minded that. That live around you. Does the. Do the tools create an online community for the people as well? Like are you creating that kind of online groups, like Facebook groups, that thing where. Or is it more of a marketing tool, messaging tool for the church to the people?
- [05:41]
Jason James
It's more the latter. It fits into that latter category. Giving the tool the capabilities and the tools to reach out. We've kind of stayed away from the social aspect. We feel like the social world is taken care of with Facebook and Instagram and other tools that are out there. So we interface with those tools and we encourage our customers to. To build online communities through those tools. But our tools are more, you know, a good way to think about it is constant contact for the church. We're trying to give the church everything it needs to reach out and push that marketing message out and then also have a way to represent themselves when people come back to the front door.
- [06:20]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Okay, so you started in the organization about six years ago.
- [06:25]
Jason James
Yeah, that's right, 2019.
- [06:27]
Cameron Herold
And then you've moved from there into the CEO role. Can you walk us through what was your kind of responsibilities? What was kind of you, what were you, I guess, responsible for as the CEO? And then we'll talk a little bit how that's changing moving forward.
- [06:42]
Jason James
Yeah, so try to provide a little context here for the listeners. When I got to Ecathc in 2019, I was the 19th employee in the last six years, just to speak a little bit to growth, we have over doubled the size of the company from an employee perspective. We've doubled our customer base, we've doubled the number of products we bring to market and we've almost tripled our revenue. So we've been on this massive growth curve and there's a whole story I can go into about how Josh and I first met, which goes all the way back to 2012 where I was an entrepreneur with my own deal. And I'm happy to share a little bit more about that. But the idea when I came here and what Josh was looking for was he knew that he had reached a point in the business after 14 years of operating it where he knew the Cape, the company could be more, the market was bigger, the opportunity was bigger, but he was lacking that operator. And that's really what I was able to fulfill for him. And you know, when you look at the journey and I'm kind of just lay the groundwork here and we can get into more details, there's really, I think of my six years At E Catholic in three phases. There's the first two years, which I kind of think of as the foundation phase. Then the next two years were the investment phase. And now we're in the final two years up to this point, kind of been the execution phase. And I can talk to you a little bit about how my journey as a CEO has changed through all of that, even up to becoming the CEO.
- [08:13]
Cameron Herold
Walk us through that then.
- [08:15]
Jason James
Yeah. So, you know, when I think about it, I think, you know, I'm going to just throw this reference out there because I think you'll appreciate it. And I've read the book Second in Command, and hopefully the folks in your community have. And the. You. You do a good job of painting out this idea of the seven types of a coo. And in that investment phase, you know, really, I mean, the foundation phase, when I came in, we had a pretty raw company. It had a lot of potential, but we didn't have all the right people with all the right experience in place. And so I really spent the first two years looking at our systems, our processes. How are we trying to scale this company? What are we trying to do? Do we have the right foundations in place? So I spent a lot of time, you know, in the context of the seven types of COO is that change agent, that mentor the executor, and even to some degree became the mvp, which was all challenging in and of itself. But a lot of my ability to play there in those first two years and even up to this point have just been based on my career as a whole and the experience that I've gotten to get me to that point to be this operator.
- [09:27]
Cameron Herold
So interesting. I love that you actually recognize that your role as CEO also changed and iterated in terms of the style or the kind of. Kind of core overall charging role that you were playing then, too. Was that something that was cognizant at the time? Like, did you know that that was actually doing, or did you just become a different version of yourself? Like right now, you know, when you were 10 years old, you were Jason. When you're 20 years old, you're Jason. You're. You've always been Jason, but you're a different version of that human. Right? Is that kind of what happened? Did you just evolve, or did you cognizantly have to make some shifts?
- [10:00]
Jason James
No, I think I had to cognizantly make some shifts to. To be able to pull this off. You know, when I came into the company, I mentioned it was a small company. I was employee number 19. And very quickly, we're a software company. We build, we make software products. And so when I looked at the core foundation of what we had, both in terms of systems and people, I knew we had a lot of raw talent to work with, but there was a lot of just missing process. And so I had previously spent a lot of time in a startup that I came from right before I came to, to e. Catholic called Casita, working in this mode of change agent and mentor. And so it was a very natural gap for me to fill. I came in and I was like, how do I bring process to this company? How do I make people see what the missing parts are? But then not only do I. How do I help them see it, how do I get down and actually work side by side with them to pull them forward and. And through? You know, the. There's the whole thing I laugh about the. The meme of the manager and the leader. Which type are you? And the reality is if you want to be successful, you got to be both. You have to be both a good manager and a good leader. And. And so, you know, simple things that seem simple that I brought in that were just completely foreign to the organization. For example, I use the Scrum methodology quite a bit in my previous career, both because I'm in the. I come from the software engineering discipline. It was big, but I brought it in and my intentions were to use it to change the way that we worked as an engineering organization. What I did not plan for is that the entire company ended up adopting it as a way for the company to operate. And it kind of took hold. And it's small things like that that you. That you don't expect to see. But then the last piece, which I'll say that I'm very comfortable playing, is that executor part. And I think it just comes from. If you look at my career, I've. I've been a startup guy since the beginning. Other than. Probably the biggest company I ever worked for was right out of college. I worked for Anders and Consulting, which is now a center, was on the road all the time. But from that point forward, I was a startup guy. And so I was very comfortable with this idea of if you want something done and there's nobody to do it, you're on point to go figure out how to get it done. And so that's the executor aspect of it, is that I had to lead by example and kind of pull everybody through.
- [12:32]
Cameron Herold
Interesting. Okay, so when you were going through some of these Transition points and you were bringing some of those systems internally that you liked and were running with. I can't imagine it was all easy. There must have been a couple of hiccups or roadblocks along the way. What was one that you encountered that you learned from?
- [12:52]
Jason James
Yeah, being a change agent in an organization that's well established with, you know, you come into a company that's a small company, it's got a family like atmosphere. You know, I think when I came here, everybody that was here had been here for, you know, in some cases, 10 plus, 15 plus years, a long time. Nobody had ever really left the organization. And so I had to spend a lot of time thinking through how do I get, how do I manage up to Josh to allow him to see the deficiencies that exist, but at the same time, how do I manage down to the organization? And unfortunately, as a result of that, one of the things, one of the very hard things that I had to do that I hadn't planned for was early on let go of the guy that was the lead engineer in the company. And it was difficult because this is the guy that everybody trusted. He controlled everything. And I didn't foresee that. I didn't want that to be the case. I've worked with a lot of engineers in my career and I know how to work with engineers. But I knew that for the better of the company, it was going to be required. And so what I did, just to tell you very quickly from that change agent perspective to manage up and manage down, is I went out and I hired an external consultant, a guy that I've worked with at five previous software companies Trust, you know, with my life. He's a software engineer, amazing talent. And I brought him in and I said, I need you to go do an overall evaluation of our system and our product and I want you to put together a report card and I want you to come back and present it to me and I don't want you to hold back. And so he did in, you know, three weeks later, he delivers a 75 page report on my desk and overall grade of a D minus. And I knew there were challenges, I just didn't know how big. But that report then allowed me to go to Josh and say, here's the challenges we face. This is where the organization is today. This is where you know it can be. You want it to be. This is what your vision is. Now we got to go fix this. And that's what I've set in to do.
- [15:09]
Cameron Herold
How do you take a report that's 75 pages. And distill it down to the critical few things versus the important many.
- [15:15]
Jason James
Great question. I think in this case, there were. There were really obvious things. So, for example, there were. There were things. Things in the report that I knew were not going to be fixed overnight or they were not fixable overnight. And that was okay. If it took the organization 12, 18 months to address, we weren't going to go out of business. But there were things in that report that if one thing went wrong tomorrow, the whole company would potentially not exist. Right. So from a security perspective and a reliability and uptime perspective. So I said, that's where we're going to spend our time. That's where we're going to spend our money. That's where we're going to spend our. Our focus. And that's what we did in 2019. And it was a. It was a bit providential, serendipitous, however you want to look at it, leading in to the end of 2019, because if we hadn't done those things with the product and the systems, we wouldn't have survived Covid.
- [16:11]
Cameron Herold
Interesting. Yeah. Because the demand would have just kind of pushed through all of the capacity that you had.
- [16:16]
Jason James
Absolutely.
- [16:17]
Cameron Herold
So as a. As an entrepreneur who then kind of became a COO, often the COOs are laughably frustrated with their entrepreneurial CEO. Right. They think the entrepreneur is crazy. They think that the entrepreneur is having the idea of the week or the idea of the hour, and they're all ADD and bipolar and all over the place. And then you went from being both the entrepreneur to now being the coo. Did you notice some of that in yourself? And did you notice the strengths of that as well?
- [16:47]
Jason James
I did. I think early on, because I had been an entrepreneur, there was a big visionary aspect to me. Like I. When I see something and I look at e catholic, I had a vision that I saw, and I knew that that vision was aligned to some degree with Josh. Josh's vision and where he wanted to go in a large way. But what I very quickly realized was it wasn't my job in this company to be the visionary. I needed to let that go, and I needed to work with Josh in an open and real way to force him to allow me to be the operator and the change agent to go make his vision a reality. And so we both kind of had to give something up in that. In that relationship. And it took us a while to get there.
- [17:36]
Cameron Herold
Hey, it's Cameron. I hope you're loving today's episode. Quick Question for you. Does your company have a strong leadership training program in place to grow the skills of everyone who manages people? If you want to help yourself and your company grow, get everyone who manages people learning from my Invest in youn Leaders online training program. There are 12 core leadership skills that I cover online and they're all going to really grow. CEOs pay me $78,000 a year to coach them one on one, and now you can all benefit for 1% of what they pay me. These are the same leadership skills that I created and certified everyone in at 1-800-got junk when I was there as CEO. Go to investinyourleaders.com today and use promo code podcast10 before the end of the month to get 10% off each manager you sign up. Now back to the show.
- [18:32]
Okay, so now you're moving from the. The COO role into the CEO role and you're bringing a replacement in who is now the COO. You put that your new CEO. What's your new CO's name, by the way?
- [18:45]
Jason James
Karen. Karen Lackey.
- [18:47]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, Karen. So Karen is now a member of the COO alliance, which is great. And. But I want to know for you, what was the transition like or what is the transition like currently? Because you're really in the middle of it of moving from that COO role into the CEO. What's the style that's changing? What are you letting go of? What are you focusing on that's different? That kind of stuff?
- [19:08]
Jason James
I'll say one word, and that is. It's been difficult. It's hard. It's been really hard to move from the notion of being the COO and being three miles wide and three miles deep to now being the CEO and having to be three miles wide and one inch deep and trust and turn over that control to my team. It's been difficult because Josh, he painted this beautiful vision and we started working on this back in 22 time frame, I think, actually, because that was when I first. I think I listened to your first podcast ever. It was July of 22 and there was a guy by the name of Sean. I can't remember his last name. He interviewed you on being a coo. And I'm trying to think of his name. You would remember if I could pull it up, it was, oh yeah, Sean Lane is the guy's name. And you or may not remember that, but it. But you talked about the eight types of a COO there and it reached out and touched me. But we were. Josh and I were at this interesting Intersection where we were struggling to understand who. Who did what. Was he the visionary and I was the integrator? Because he went from this notion of being the visionary and the. And the integrator. And so we had to start to work through, through that so that change happened. But I have it on my desk because I knew that we probably have a question that come up. Is that out of that you. You talked about building your vision. And, and so we use that as a rallying cry. Josh and I did for him to go away and paint what his vision was for the company and put it down on paper and present that. And it was amazing once he did that, how it freed our relationship up in that visionary integrator way for him to say, I have now communicated what I want to be done. You as the integrator can go do it. And I'm giving you my trust in that. And so we operated fairly well in that regard through all of 23. And then it was in 24, Josh really realized, hey, I think the time is rapidly approaching where I'm going to probably step out of the business full time into more of a founder role. And I think you're the right person to step into the CEO role. So 24, I got promoted the president. So as CEO and president, so I still operating, but for the first times, I truly had the reins of the business. I wasn't looking to change the vision, by the way. I was aligned with the vision, but now I could start to make some of the actual change that I wasn't able to make when I was just the CEO. And we can come back and talk about the why behind that. And that continued through 24. We made a lot of change in the organization. We're continuing to make change in positive ways in 25 this year, in January, I got announced as a CEO. And the one thing that I'll just say about it is there's something different about having that title on your shoulders. You know, when you looked at my day to day and my responsibility and what I'm trying to achieve, that didn't change. But man, when you wake up and you have that title on your shoulders, you just carry a different weight around with you.
- [22:24]
Cameron Herold
What's the weight? What's different?
- [22:26]
Jason James
It's a great question and I've thought a lot about it. I think it's a feeling of being vulnerable and waiting for the other shoe to drop. And if the other shoe drops, there's nobody else to turn to. There's nobody else that you can point the finger at because guess what? You are the captain, my friend. You're the leader. And there's livelihoods. There's livelihoods. There's this beautiful mission that has been going on for 20 years that Josh started. I've got a lot that I'm pulling forward and I don't want to make a mistake and let that down.
- [23:01]
Cameron Herold
Interesting. All right, with you now moving into the CEO role from the COO role, are there defined areas that you used to focus on day to day that you're trying to let go of?
- [23:13]
Jason James
Absolutely not.
- [23:14]
Cameron Herold
What are those?
- [23:15]
Jason James
Absolutely. So a couple of things come directly to mind. Number one is engineering. I'm a software engineer by trade. That's what I started my career in. So I would get down, go to standups with the engineering team. I would actually be in code reviews, looking at code, working on PRs. I've stopped doing that completely. I've had to pull myself out of those day to day standups and away from the engineering organization. The second area, and I'm excited to say we just finally hired a controller into the business. We've been in existence for 20 years and we've never had anybody that's actually truly own the financial and accounting function. And so I, Josh did that and then I took it over. And so now I'm able to begin to transfer that over to our new controller. The last piece is just starting to build the confidence. And this is, I think, where we talked about Karen coming into this VP of Operations role to be truly be my second in command and start to allow her to take forward the vision and the mission that I'm painting in the direction I want the company. But then let her be the executor, let her be the change agent where I don't need to. Because if I'm spending my time down in the business being the change agent and the executor, I'm not doing what the business needs me to do, which is looking, looking out on the horizon and talking. Where are we going to be 12 months from now? Where are we going to be 24 months from now? What could this company be and look like?
- [24:41]
Cameron Herold
If you want more leadership tips and systems from me, they're free at YouTube.
- [24:47]
Amronherald and that's H E R O L D.
- [24:52]
There's got to be some areas of the business that she is going to be really strong in that you were not strong in. But I'm sure there's also some areas of the business that you are much stronger than she is that are naturally Going to drive you a little bit crazy. Have you identified what some of those are and have you talked to her about that?
- [25:09]
Jason James
Yes, yes and no. We haven't really got into much depth because this, this relationship in this role is kind of new for her. But, but I see, I see those things on the horizon. So for example, one thing is she doesn't have a strong background in technology and programming and software development. She's done some of it, but she doesn't have the level of depth that I have. And so I see things very quickly that are happening in the organization as it relates to engineering and when things may be going off path or not going quite the right way. And I can help quickly to, to direct those. If I'm not in the day to day anymore, I can't do that. And I think that's a gap and a blind spot that she's going to have and it's a critical one because we are a software organization. The other part of that is product and product strategy and product management and starting to be able to help to lay the vision for the business, but then allow my product management team of which she leads to fill that vision and to define the 1, 2, 3, 4 steps for how we get there. And that's not a muscle that she has a great deal of experience in.
- [26:19]
Cameron Herold
Why, why are you letting her or giving her that as part of the area for her to run when you feel like it's stronger for you? Why, why not keep that yourself and let her oversee other areas of the business?
- [26:30]
Jason James
And it's a great question. I don't have a good answer for it. You know, maybe you're right. Maybe I need to be spending more time in that area. I, I'll say two things. I, I think first of all, if I stay too connected to the engineering side of the organization, I get too myopic, too deep and it doesn't allow, it doesn't free me up to go focus in the other part of the, of the world that we talked about a second ago that I need to be focused in. Second of all, I'm a firm believer when it comes to product strategy that she absolutely has the skill set to do that. I just need to help keep pulling her up and forward. And I've been working with the product managers alongside her to get us there. So I think it's just a time thing and not a, she can't do a thing.
- [27:19]
Cameron Herold
Okay, so when you were actually doing the recruiting or the interviewing was she was an internal hire.
- [27:25]
Jason James
Yeah. So she was she's been here longer than I have. And an amazing story. She started with us in a part time role I think back in 2016 and moved her way through multiple different roles in the organization all the way up to the current role as VP of operations.
- [27:44]
Cameron Herold
Were there any components of that that you were thinking maybe I should go outside versus inside or was it definitely like a better A W? No than W? Don't. Did you just know that she could do it because you obviously had some high regard for yourself, you'd been doing the role. It's often hard to hire your own replacement. What went through your mind?
- [28:01]
Jason James
Yeah, so I did think about is this a role that's better to hire outside versus bring from the inside? And I think a couple of things I'll say that really made me it obviously clear that she was the right person and the right fit for the role. Number one is she had already proven herself to be capable of stepping in up and into any challenge that I had given her. So when I started here in 2019, very quickly identified Karen as somebody that had the capabilities to keep rising and doing more. And so when you think about somebody that's been a jack of all trades in the organization, there's probably not a role that she hasn't performed besides software development. So I already knew she had already proven to me that she had the raw skill set. That was the first thing. The second thing is we actually started having conversations when it became apparent even all the way back in 23 that Josh was ultimately looking to transition out of the business. I was already thinking about my succession plan from a CEO perspective and thinking about is there anybody in the company that can fill that. So Karen and I had already been operating somewhat in that responsibility in that, in that way. And so it was very natural for, for us to keep, to push, keep pushing on that. So when, whenever I got promoted to president at the beginning of last year, I brought her into a new role, owning and being responsible for our entire customer success side of the organization. And then in 25 when I got promoted the CEO we kept talking about ultimately it's going to make sense for me to transition this operational responsibility to somebody which we just did about a month ago.
- [29:40]
Cameron Herold
Love that. At one of our last CEO alliance events meetings, one of our members said that the best way to get leaders to grow is to hire leaders that like to grow. Right. To hire self driven learners. Where have you been growing in your career? What have you been focusing on getting better at?
- [29:58]
Jason James
Yeah, I think right now is a great Example, this type of stuff, it's not natural to me. I've spent a lot of my career on the inward side of the business. And so being this external face of the company, starting to get comfortable with this idea of sitting on a podcast and talking to somebody for 45 or 60 minutes about the company and myself, is not something that is overly natural to me. And so this is one area that I've been trying to improve in. The second area that I would say that I've spent a lot of time in over the course of the last year is really digging in and thinking about what are the, what are the levers and the strategic ways that I can help this company to grow. So, for example, we overhauled our entire sales and marketing side of the organization last year. I'm a firm believer in when I don't have a skill set, I'm not scared to go outside and find somebody that does have a skill set that can help. And so I went out and actually tapped a guy on the shoulder, Dean Zarila, who I had worked with, serial entrepreneur, great guy on the sales and marketing front and brought him in on a contract and he worked hand in hand with me to help me to overhaul sales and marketing. I've done some, some sales in my career. Cameron. I was a sales engineer for about six years, so I had some confidence around that. But it was all enterprise sales. It wasn't SaaS sales. So I've really had to grow my knowledge and my understanding and my leadership around how do we think about sales and marketing in a new way beyond what I. What I was, you know, capable of prior to this.
- [31:33]
Cameron Herold
Interesting. I have a strategic slash kind of branding marketing question. I'm just kind of curious. E. Catholic. I mean, pretty clear you're focusing on the Catholic church space niche. There's a lot of other religions out there. There's a lot of other forms of Christianity out there. Do you go after. Do you have like, other brands? You have like E. Synagogue and E. Like Muslim. Like, do you market your product, like, to other churches? Like, do you have Baptist churches using the E. Catholic app? Like.
- [32:03]
Jason James
Yep. Yeah. No, it's a great question. The quick answer is yes. We have a non Catholic brand. It's called Gabriel soft. Gabrielsoft.com, we don't offer 100% of the same products under the Gabriel Soft umbrella that we offer under the Catholic umbrella. And that is because there's a lot of things that we do. And one of our unique selling points and differentiators in the Catholic market is that we're uniquely Catholic. We bring that through our products.
- [32:27]
Cameron Herold
Yeah.
- [32:28]
Jason James
You know, there are things the Catholic Church fundamentally does different than every other religion in the world. And that's true really with any religion. So we have that brand. I will say we haven't really tapped into that brand yet. We've dabbled over there. But one of the things that I think is unique, that stood out to me is the signal to noise ratio outside the Catholic market is really high. There are, you know, when you think about especially, and we'll just broadly define it as the Protestant space with Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, any religion, you know, besides being Muslim or Jewish, that fit under the umbrella of Catholicism. They operate in a lot of ways like small businesses do. And so in that world I'm not just competing against some direct competitor who's uniquely serving the religious space. I'm competing against the mailchimps and the constant contacts and. And these other 900 pound gorillas that have been around for a long time. And they're spinning a message that a lot of these Protestant churches, they view themselves in that light. We have to bring people in the door. We think differently. We were running this like a small business. The Catholic Church, you know, a lot of what we deal with is still hierarchical. You know, you've got the diocese and within the diocese, you got the parishes and the school. Everything rolls up to the bishop, which ultimately rolls up to the Vatican and to Rome and to, and to Saint, I mean Pope Leo now. And so there's this hierarchical dimension that drives kind of the way people think and what they do. And being uniquely Catholic in this space is a differentiator for us in a very significant way that it can't be in that Protestant space.
- [34:12]
Cameron Herold
That makes a lot of sense. Funny, I have a close friend of mine from years ago, Simon Sinek, used to work with us back in the 1-800 Got Junk days. And he's a funny story one time where he went in and was cold calling the Catholic Church of. Or they had called him, it was the Catholic Diocese of New Hampshire. And Simon went in and was meeting with him. He's got all this funny story about going in through the double doors, through another set of double doors, through big double doors. And he comes in and all these guys wearing all the crazy outfits and he sits down at the table and I guess I don't know whether it's like the cardinal or whoever it is goes, are you Catholic? Simon's Jewish. Simon goes, I have faith. Okay. So he called me up, I'M like, wait, you just landed the Archdiocese of New Hampshire as a client. He goes, I'm going to be the second Jew to save Christianity. I'm like, I'm like, you're crazy. That's ridiculous. Just a funny story that I don't think gets told that often anymore. All right, I want you to go back and give yourself some advice. If you went back to the younger you, the 20, 21 year old Jason James, what advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today?
- [35:23]
Jason James
I think, you know, probably this is cliche because you probably hear this a lot. And I'm going to avoid the failure thing, but I don't be so afraid to make mistakes. I'm not talking about failure, but just mistakes. I spent a lot of my early life trying to walk the line and avoid just making a mistake in a public, visible way. And it really was ultimately when I started my own company in 2011 and that went through the evolution of that company and it failed that I really started to understand mistakes matter because I am who I am today because of that mistake and a lot of other mistakes I made along the way.
- [36:04]
Cameron Herold
So interesting. Okay, where do you think that you have done really well that you want to make sure that you continue doing?
- [36:12]
Jason James
I would say that I typically view myself as a people leader and a people person. I'm empathetic. I like to be in touch with my people with our company. I want people to believe and see the world the same way that I do. But I want to do that coming from a position of love and not from a position of being this hard, driven manager. I want to lay out a vision, let people see it, ask them to be part of it with me and to work together to accomplish it. And so that's. That would be my answer to that question.
- [36:47]
Cameron Herold
You remind me of one of my favorite authors, a guy named Matthew Kelly who wrote a book called the Dream Manager and he's another God Squad guy. So, Jason James, you're doing a great job as the CEO, the former CEO of E Catholic. Thanks very much for sharing with us on the Second in Command podcast.
- [37:02]
Jason James
Yeah, thanks Cameron, for your time. I appreciate it.
- [37:04]
Cameron Herold
Awesome.
- [37:08]
You've been listening to Second in Command, brought to you by COO alliance founder Cameron Herald. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and our other podcast streaming platforms. For more best practices from industry leading COOs, visit cooalliance.
- [37:28]
Com.