← Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Ep. 487 - Beyond the Buzzword: Real-World Impact of Emerging Tech
00:43:08
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- [00:00]
Cameron Herold
Hey, it's Cameron Herald, the host of the Second in Command podcast. Before we dive in, there's something you need to know. If you're a coo, VP Operations, or you're in any role where you're the second in command to the CEO, the COO alliance is the place for you. If you're the integrator to the visionary, you're going to want to join us. The COO alliance is the world's leading community for the second in command. We've had over 500 members like you join from 17 countries to grow their skills, connections and confidence. You'll get the tools, friendships, and a 10x guarantee to ensure that you get your money's worth. Go to cooalliance.com to learn more and see if you qualify. You can even book a free call with our team to ask questions. Now, let's jump into this week's episode. So I tend to hire people on the sales and marketing side first because they can actually grow revenue. So the easiest way to get profitability is to grow revenue. The second way that you can grow revenue is by decreasing your cost of goods sold and then by reducing some of your overhead. I was playing with some numbers the other day and this was actually after doing a coaching call with another CEO who's not on the call. And I was just playing with these for fun last night. I want to show you something and it's really kind of scary and crazy at the same time.
- [01:20]
Gloria
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 Herold.
- [01:45]
Cameron Herold
In this episode, I'm talking about the rapid evolution of cutting edge tools that are transforming the way we run our businesses. I'll be sharing examples of how quick thinking and innovation can turn complex challenges into streamlined, simple processes. You'll hear insights from industry leaders and learn how tapping into the latest technology can lead to powerful, sometimes unexpected results. We'll also talk about strategies to get your team excited about adopting new tools. From sparking curiosity with friendly competitions to launching structured learning initiatives that build a culture of experimentation and collaboration. Whether you're trying to stay ahead of the curve or just looking for smart ways to work more efficiently, this episode is packed with practical takeaways.
- [02:34]
Chris
One of our rocks for the quarter was to vet various AI vendors and come up with and go ahead and get One hired, get them on board for going essentially auditing our entire operation and figuring out what we need to do when. And we've already done that, we've already gotten through that part and through the vetting process, we've got our one person that's going to do two really cool things for us. First of all, they're going to do a workshop and the in depth workshop is going to be for seven people. They're going to have them, seven of our folks that we're going to strategically get throughout our organization. We've got about 50 employees. So going to give you an idea of where we are, those seven are going to, we're going to make sure that to get them comfortable with the AI with actually using it. And some of he's got some very specific things for them to do. Then give them homework on a more advanced thing to do. And while that's happening, this engineer is going to go through all of our systems and do a tech stack audit to look at all of our existing technology and figure out what AI is available within that technology, what is available outside of it, and then help us so we can prioritize which ones to take on first, second and third. And in the meantime, while that's going on, Gloria is actually going to be hiring one of the people we vetted there and had a very good way of creating those Personas, which is essentially little bots. But we're going to create up to three bots this quarter just to verify them, to test them, to see how they work, see how they learn. And then we're going to systematically run them throughout the entire organization. We're going to start expanding them, but we're starting with three this quarter.
- [04:27]
Cameron Herold
Well, and I love that you're also starting with, you got the three agents being set, but you've also got the fact that they're looking at the software you currently use and just seeing what automations are even available in there. Right. So like that, that's kind of what I mean, that a shovel doesn't dig a hole. Right. This iPhone is a great tool, but most of us have no idea all the features and functionality that are on it. I'll give you one that blew my mind. We learned this about a year and a half ago. You know how when you're trying to type something and you can never, you have to like put the. Gotta move your fucking finger to get the cursor to go somewhere because you can't get the cursor in the right place. You know, if you Actually press Lacey will be like, of course you can. But when you press the space bar and then move your hand while your finger is on the phone, while you're just pressing, you press this. The spacebar is your cursor. When you press the spacebar and go like this, the mouse goes exactly to the letter that you wanted out in seconds. I didn't know that, Lacy, you've known that for a while, right? That's an example of. That's just a simple tool that saves us so much time. Right. Or the chat, like the autocorrect features. You know, when you type something in and it can autocorrect, I type in three letters, but it autocorrects to entire paragraphs. For me, that's been something that's been available on every computer for 24 years for free. So there's all of these tools that are time saving things that most people never even touch on. So, John, I think that's a really good starting point, is starting where we already use stuff and then have them give us the kind of insights around there. Just want to show you something because this is kind of mind blowing. And then we'll go with Lacy. So you guys can see my screen right now. So I often have to type in my address. So I just type in addu and then I press space. It puts my address in. Or I have to do my email. So I do CCH is my one email. BPO is my second email. BPOO is my third email. Or if somebody wants information on my speaking, I put SPK and autocorrects to that entire paragraph. So Chris is actually drawing on my screen. That's really crazy. That's actually quite dangerous that I have that turned on to allow people to do that. All right, I gotta figure it out. Thank you for being politically correct today, Chris. I appreciate you. You know, somebody asked about my coaching. I type in CCing. So those are little, very, very simple examples of AI. Right. I use Grammarly. Grammarly is one that just, you know, saves me forever, but also makes me not look like an idiot. So, yeah, I think that's a smart starting point, is going with the tools that we have. Gloria, do you want to go next?
- [06:52]
Gloria
I don't want to interrupt, but just to add to quick, I was going.
- [06:57]
Cameron Herold
To ask you, Gloria, because you guys are together.
- [06:59]
Gloria
Yeah. Just real quick. We also are on Microsoft 365, so we do copilot. Copilot's in our, you know, in our safe space. And that's probably one of the biggest hesitations on our end was like, can this information go out? We do with client information, a lot of medical records, type of compliance and so. But we do have Copilot because Copilot, you know, integrates as a feature, integrates with Outlook, with, with Docs, with Teams, with PowerPoint presentation. So it has this AI feature to be able to enhance your email. And then we also, in our case management system and our CRM, you know, all of these platforms are having these AI features coming out. And so we're just, we're in the weeds of IT right now. But educating our team is what we ended up identifying. Some people were getting it, some people weren't. So let's start with the basics, have a workshop. Basically AI101. Half of it is going to be stuff we already know, but where other ones that are just jumping on board, we'll get it. And there's huge value to those workshops because they also help in developing protocol, your SOPs and having those internal compliances what you can and can't do well.
- [08:14]
Cameron Herold
And I think you also identified something, Gloria, that you're in the weeds with it right now. And it can be very dangerous and overwhelming. When we have consultants coming in, showing us all the things that can get very kind of big and very kind of scary and very expensive. We have to actually use and trust a little bit of our entrepreneurialness and kind of bring them back in to say let's just do the critical stuff right now, work on that and let's not get into the weeds on everything else. Because there is a lot of. That's why they call it the low hanging fruit, right? Work on the critical few things versus the important many things. I think we have an opportunity that we could automate everything. But what's the point? Remember years ago when I was the COO at 1-800-got junk. We did an audit of all of the threats and risks that the company was facing and we ended up with about 15 different potential threats that the company was facing. So what we decided to do is look at the threats as a percentage chance that they could happen. And then what was the cost to the company or the cost to the employees or the cost to our customers if it happened? One example was that if there was an earthquake, you know, if there was an earthquake in Vancouver, could it shut down? The company was like, yeah, it totally could. Holy shit, that's crazy. What could we do, right? And they wanted us to put in place an earthquake proof, vibration proof floor in our server room. So our IT guy was spending some time talking about it. I'm like, wait a second. The chance of there actually being an earthquake is very, very low. And we run a garbage company. Like, even if we're down for a day or so, like, it really doesn't matter. Like, no one's life is at risk. So let's just take a look at how much it's going to cost us. It was $78,000 to put in this floor, and it was going to be like a week of his time doing it. We're like, you know what? Kill it. Like, it's just not worth. We're not a billion dollar company. I'm not going to spend $78,000 on this stupid project just because it could happen one day in the next thousand years. And even if, like. So I think we have to be careful with these AI consultants coming in and showing us the gazillion things we could be working on. Because the reality is we have a business to run. And if we can just automate some of the critical things because then we also have to spend time keeping it all up to date forever. Right. So they can end up building themselves into a kind of a career role with us where they become like Murphy Brown's painter and they're at our home every single day. Touching, right? For real. That's. That's the danger. All right, Chris, go. Do you have anything you want to add to it or was that yours? Great, Chris.
- [10:46]
Sami
Yeah.
- [10:46]
John
So kind of the basics you guys talked about. SOPs, job description. Analyzing data. I love taking Excel spreadsheets. You can anomalize, like, the specific data if you're trying to hide customer information, of course. But when you start asking it for visuals and insights and it's really a good idea generator. And I'll take that over to our data team. It doesn't always get data analysis on larger files. Perfect. But it gives me good enough information and kind of a different lens that I would have not thought of that I can hand over to our data team and say, hey, go tie this together and draw out this visual. We use it for, you know, just all the basic meeting stuff. Meeting notes and summaries to do actions. I think that's kind of stuff is pretty. Everyone's kind of doing that now. We do lunch and learns. So we've tasked each person to kind of rotate. Hey, what's something new you've learned about it? Our guys have done some pretty cool stuff on automation. They can write some basic codes that trigger when you check a box in a Google sheet, it'll automatically email out. It'll automatically do Google chats and automations. So slack all these things. There's some pretty cool things that we were manually doing that is now automated with the click of a button. We're now working with Jeff from CO alliance on, you know, potential project there where they can kind of help us. So we're, we're trying to get a lot more incorporated. It's kind of funny as you is, we. We sat back last April from a conference and said AI was this big thing. We're all, all into it. We got too many people involved, specifically our cfo, but like, we just got too many people involved. So it's like, well, let's get meetings and let's get a committee and let's get all this stuff instead of just getting started. So operationally, you know, we've gotten some things going, but as a company, it became a lot slower just because we got so many people and no one's an expert in it really. Right. Like, it's just evolving so fast. But I think the biggest thing I just use is an idea generator. Gets you like 70% of the way there. Hey, I'm thinking about this. Just give me some ideas and really trying to. I love that it was brought up on one of the calls last week. Right. But been using that. Like ask me one question at a time, up to five questions. That is the. It just helps dial in whatever you're thinking about and it becomes more thoughtful responses.
- [13:09]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, it's. It's interesting. Like if. So it becomes. It comes down to kind of some of this prompt engineering and then starting to treat AI. I'll give an example. Like if you're using chat GPT. So I was talking to a CEO the other day on a coaching call, and the CEO said, what are some really good interviewing questions that I could ask somebody about tenacity? And in the old days, I had to keep these things memorized in my head. And now I'm like, well, let's open up ChatGPT and just say, what are some questions that we can ask candidates about tenacity if they're in a leadership role? And it pops out some questions. And then he goes, wow, that's amazing. I'm like, but do you know what to do with those questions? And he goes, no. I said, so then I go, how would you probe around each of those questions? So then it goes even deeper. So just ask the tool as if it's an employee who has a lot of skills. You know, if you had the world expert on interviewing sitting in front of you. Maybe Jeff Smart or Brad Smart, who wrote, you know, top grading and who, if they were sitting with you and you were getting to ask them questions for a half an hour, pretend that they're ChatGPT. Just keep asking ChatGPT follow up questions for what you're asking and the information gets richer. Could you turn that into an SOP for us? Could you make that a form for me? Could you turn it into a checklist for us? Could you create some graphical images for like, it's amazing to watch ChatGPT create images for stuff that you're thinking of working on. I was coaching another CEO the other day and he runs huge kind of conferences and kind of boat trips, I guess would be the best way to describe it. And so as we're sitting talking, he's taking like, oh fuck. He was doing the who's Margaritaville? Who's a fucking singer?
- [14:53]
John
Jimmy Buffett.
- [14:54]
Cameron Herold
Jimmy Buffett. Sorry, it's 7:30 in the morning here in Sydney tomorrow, so my brain isn't clicked in yet.
- [14:59]
Lacy
He was organizing somewhere Cameron.
- [15:01]
Cameron Herold
There you go. Exactly. He was organizing Jimmy Buffett cruise. He takes big people into the North Pole, he takes people to Antarctica. He's organizing something called the Peace Cruise right now over in Japan. And we were talking about it and I'm like, what are the dates? And he's like, he gave me the dates. And I said, you should just start running ads right now on Facebook and Instagram to a WhatsApp list and just at least start getting all the people interested so that when you launch the website you can pre sell everything right away. So as I was talking to him, I put into ChatGPT, can you create five images about a boat cruise called the Love Crew or the Peace Cruise? Use the Peace logo and some Japan images and here are the dates. And it's done by a group called Insider Expeditions. Boom. It did it. And when it did it, the actual work that it gave was pretty fucking unbelievable. I'll show you what it came up with because it was kind of like pretty crazy. So as I was talking to him, it came up with these images. Those are all pretty good enough to drop onto Instagram to build out a WhatsApp page. And those were designed by me, who has zero creative skills whatsoever. Literally as I was talking to him, it blew his fucking mind. So this is the kind of stuff that I don't know if it can do it, but if you just ask it if it can do it, you'd be amazed at what it can do, right? So I just said create some simple ads for social media for a seven day Japan cruise called Insider Expeditions and incorporate the Peace logo. I need five options. It gave me the first one and then it gave me the second. Here's the third. I'm like, those are all pretty fucking good.
- [16:45]
John
Yeah, so that's exactly like how I'll use it for creative stuff and then it messes the words up and so forth. Then you can go give it to creative person, say hey, here's the concept, go now make this look perfect but correct.
- [16:58]
Cameron Herold
And then your designer who could be like a fifteen or five dollar an hour person based in the Philippines can take that and Photoshop it or whatever. They use it in Canva and it can be popped out the door in three seconds. So that's what I mean is use the ChatGPT side Grok perplexity. Just use these as if it's an expert sitting in front of you and keep asking it follow up questions for anything. And I think that's what we have to get our employees doing is every day get your employees to use ChatGPT4 to just ask it questions. Hey, I do this every day. How could I do it faster? Teach me more. Show me. Create the sop. Whatever. Lacey.
- [17:37]
Lacy
We last year implemented the company wide requirement like we made everybody use a different tool for eight weeks, track an array of information from it and then after week eight they needed to. We set an expectation for people to choose one tool that they use daily to enhance their processes or themselves, what have you. And since then, I mean we've been paying for. That's kind of the tactical part for me. It's like paying for all these subscriptions for things we probably need to do like a tech stack and figure out what we're paying for and combine it. But I mean we just required everybody to do it. We tracked it and I mean it became an overnight thing really. I mean you had a couple stragglers, but it's so easy.
- [18:28]
Cameron Herold
I love that. I just dropped in and you've heard this before. I know Sami's heard it before. There's an AI for that. This is a dashboard that shows I don't know how many tools it is. Something like 15,000 different AI tools that exist for 28,000 different AI tasks. That's a way to just let your employees play with different tools to see and then come back in and do that five minute book report right on Monday. Show me. Just do a screen share and show me Something you used one of these tools for. Like imagine if every week, John, when I showed you those little ads and everybody goes, wow, that's pretty cool. Imagine if every week every business area did a five minute demo. Each employee in a business area did a 5 minute demo on something they used any AI tool for or something they use chat. And they had to show one thing they use ChatGPT for every week. That alone would catapult our company. Right. Even if it's, I wrote an email. Cool, that's great. Somebody did it to, I don't know, write a follow up sequence. That's even better, right? What are we using it for? Just sharing what we. Because right now nobody knows. It's like we all walk around with this going, hey, this is cool. But we don't use any of the functionality that's in here.
- [19:37]
John
I think people that are using ChatGPT make sure employees are on the paid version. Cause it's so much better on the $20 a month version. And then you can use it as a search engine. So I run multiple Google Chrome browsers accounts. But like if you use it in your main one as a GPT, as a ChatGPT search, it's pretty cool. It comes up, it sources things just like you would Google something. But it really gets you in the habit of just trying to use the tool. But if it's not in front of you, then you kind of keep doing your normal task. But it's like, oh, wait a minute, just to get in. Like if you go look at your history and you don't have a lot of activity over the last seven days, probably not using it enough. Like just trying to really ingrain it.
- [20:19]
Cameron Herold
I'll show you. This is why I kind of paused was just to take a look at what my history was before I decided to fucking do a screen share. So my history was multiplication, Result Calculation, Dengue Prevention and Treatment Elon Musk's Harmful Comments Stargate Overview Hunger Games First Book I was at a bookstore. I'm like, What's Hunger Games first book? I could have Googled that. But I use ChatGPT for everything. I don't go to Google anymore. What's the way to the Sydney Harbor Bridge? We were walking under the Sydney Harbor Bridge and I said to my wife, how much do you think that weighs? She's like, I don't know. So we just looked it up for fun. I was off by £950,000.
- [20:56]
John
That's also a good tip too is using it for your personal life to organize Your calendar, your events, your travel. Hey, I'm going for this many days with kids or spouse or whatever. Plan a trip. I want to do the ask me a few questions of what you know. It's amazing the personalization and details. Again, route planning it can do for you.
- [21:13]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, like I, I don't even went to the point that my youngest son or my oldest. 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 your 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 COO. 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. And both my kids invest a lot in stocks. They both have fairly good sized portfolios already at 21 and 23, like substantial. And my, my oldest came to me at 23 and he goes, I'm worried about Google. Should I sell my stock? I'm like, no, they also own, you know, Waymo and they also like all this other shit they're developing. But he's like, yeah, but nobody's using Google search anymore. What's that going to do to their business? So we just kind of looked up what percentage of Google's revenue was related to Google search and Google Ads and you know, made a decision around that. But when everybody is now migrating over to open AI or using ChatGPT as a search. I remember walking into 1-800-got- junk in October 2000 and telling people about Google. No one had been using it yet. I was the first one with a wi fi, first one with a laptop, first one using Google and then everybody within a week was only on Google. Literally right now my guess is that 90% of the US population within three months will only use ChatGPT as search instead of Google. It's gone, we've moved. And then you start using all the others like Grok and Perplexity and everything else. When you need other kinds of CERT I was, Carl. I was just showing the team or the other clients here about when you and I were on the coaching call the other day and I created those ads for you about Japan. What was that like when you had someone like me who knows nothing about business, nothing about design, could design reasonably good ads for your cruise, your peace cruise.
- [23:42]
Carl
It made it incredibly obvious that we should be using AI way more than we are. I mean, it was awesome.
- [23:47]
Cameron Herold
Yeah. I literally opened it up and showed them the ads and they're like, shit. I think John actually would go, yeah, I think that's the key, is when you see the tool, you realize it's the blinding flash of the obvious. Like, oh, fuck, we really need to be using AI way more than we are. So cool. Sami, how are you guys using adopting AI internally? Yeah.
- [24:07]
Sami
So similar to Lacie, we actually did a competition last year as well, so it was open to all employees. We created an AI channel in Slack and we gave a prize to the winner at each all hands meeting. Every month wasn't required, which. So the. The criteria was they had to use it, but they also had to teach in another employee what they were doing before they could be entered in for the prize. And that, honestly, is what worked and got. Once somebody tried it and. And saw how it made their lives easier then easier to get people on board, but me standing up in front of the room telling them how I was using it wasn't working. It needed to be their colleagues, but they use it. We use it now for SOPs, for notes. We do. We compare estimates. We use it for bidding, like you can ask it in our business here, instead of waiting for subs to get us bids for certain trades. You know, you can throw it in there, a general square footage, what our market is, you know, the zip code, even of the home. And it'll shoot back and is within, you know, less than a percentage accurate. Once we get stuff back from bids, we're using it. Just the speed in our industry, it's just increased that we're able to turn and burn stuff a lot faster than we were before.
- [25:28]
Cameron Herold
Awesome. If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. Sami, I love the couple things. One, that you created the contest. Two, that you didn't make it mandatory. So it allows people to kind of just get absorbed into the fact that it's happening. And then three, I think you identified something really important. When you were a teenager, you thought your mom and dad were idiots when I was a teenager, I thought my mom and dad were idiots. I probably would have liked your parents. You probably would have thought my mom was kind of cool. What the fuck is that? It's like this human thing inside of us that we don't listen to our own parents. Well, that's what happens inside our company. John, as smart as you are, my team would listen to you more than they would listen to me. And your team would listen to me more than they'd listen to you. And it's kind of fucked up. So it's the whole Uncle Cameron and I think there is something there, Sammy, that if you can bring in these outside experts and you don't even have to spend a lot, right, you can just find anybody who's willing to present or teach or show or whatever demo their product. Often you can also reach out to all these companies. You can go to Lindy.com and say, hey, can you just do a 30 minute demo for my team so that we understand the software even more and then we might be a client. And then you go to Zapier and say demo. And then you go to Gro. Like you can get all these software companies to do a demo for free. That's basically an expert teaching you how a tool uses because they know they're going to get adoption if your employees kind of like the idea. So I love that whole idea. Carl, last up, the question basically was what are you doing internally inside of your company yet, if anything, to get some adoption happening around AI, to get some exposure around AI?
- [27:03]
Carl
I mean, the answer is, I've only mentioned a few times that we need to be doing it, but we do not have a strategy in place that we should. But after our call, it was Friday. Thursday, yeah. We have a meeting on Wednesday about it to Dive Div. I love the idea of a contest. It's good. I mean we should be doing.
- [27:21]
Cameron Herold
So you're just more in the infancy stages with it.
- [27:24]
Carl
We are definitely infancy stages with AI.
- [27:28]
Cameron Herold
Yep. Cool. All right, next up is just open Q and A. So we've got 50 minutes. Open Q and A. Who's got questions? Again, my expertise is always around operations, execution, people meeting rhythms, strategic thinking, guerrilla marketing. The stuff I don't tend to get into are finance and it. But happy to go there. If I don't know, I'll say I don't know. Or we'll get somebody on the call to answer who's got some questions.
- [27:53]
Carl
I guess I'll go. I mean, we talked about this some cam and you referred Some agencies that do this. But as you know, I'm really trying to prioritize this week some very critical hires. And how do you pick if you don't have an HR department, how do you pick who runs that on your team? And what is your best in class process for hiring key hires as fast as possible? How much is it like all Stone's unturned approach versus let's just go to a place where we know we can find someone really good and get moving as fast as possible. What is your hiring ATT and CK plan from an internal team perspective?
- [28:32]
Cameron Herold
Yeah, so there's a few questions kind of linked there. So the first one for me is I've always believed that there's not a single problem inside of our company that writing a check can't solve. So if we have money, if we have gross margin, we can make all the problems go away. So I tend to hire people on the sales and marketing side first because they can actually grow revenue. So the easiest way to get profitability is to grow revenue. The second way that you can grow revenue is by decreasing your cost of goods sold and then by reducing some of your overhead. I was playing with some numbers the other day and this was actually after doing a coaching call with another CEO who's not on the call. And I was just playing with these for fun last night. I want to show you something and it's really kind of scary and crazy at the same time. Let's say that scenario A is that you have $5 million in revenue with 80% cost of goods sold. That might include your sales and marketing costs, your cost of the product or whatever. So you have a gross margin of $1 million left. You start with 5, 80% cost of goods sold. You got $1 million in gross margin. You got a million dollars in overhead, so Your profit is zero. Most CEOs are out there saying, we need to grow our revenue, we need to grow our revenue. Let's get our revenue up to 6 million bucks. That's going to help us. Well, now scenario B is you get your revenue up to 6 million bucks, but your cost of goods stole have stayed the same. Now you've only got $1.2 million in gross margin. And now your overhead hasn't changed. You got a million dollars in overhead still, and now you've only made 200 grand. So the CEO has pushed so hard to get our revenue up by whatever that is. 15% up to $66 million and we're still not making any money. So really, then what Are they going to do next year? We've got to get to 7 million, we got to get to 8 million maybe. Or maybe what we should do is get our scenario C maybe let's get our cost of goods sold from 80 down to 70. That drops $1,500,000 into gross margin. And if we could actually find $100,000 in waste inside of our company because there is waste everywhere, get rid of some of that overhead. Now we've got a net profit of 600 grand. So all of a sudden we've got three times the amount of EBITDA and we did the same amount of revenue. So I'm like, well, what if we actually did less revenue? What if we only did 4 million in revenue? What if we fired some of our bad people, we fired some of our bad customers, we got rid of the customers that cost us so much. We only dealt with referrals. We got rid of some of our marketing and sales spend, whatever it was going to be. You do 4 million at 60% gross margin, you got 1.6 million in gross margin, you get your overhead down because you fired a couple of the bad people, you fired a couple of toxic people. Now all of a sudden you got $800,000 in profit with doing less revenue. I think often, Carl, we end up focusing on hiring the wrong people. Every mid level manager's solution to every problem tends to be hire more people. If you take any junior manager, any first time manager, their solution to every problem is we need to hire more. And all that does is build out the actual overhead inside of the company. I just dropped into the chat, the invest in your leaders course and the promo code COOA15 which gets you 15% off for any of your employees. My starting point is first, hire more of the sales and marketing to drive revenue. Second, give your management team the skillset to do more with less people faster. And then third, try to hire some of the people that are, you know, able to, to get more done with less people. But I try to avoid more overhead. More overhead, more overhead. The second part of it is giving your management team the skills to actually do interviews. I don't like HR department as a department to do recruiting and interviewing. That's just more overhead. You know, if you're only hiring three people a year, what do you need overhead to have three people? What you need to do is have the base layer skills of the CEO and the people that are running the business know how. If you haven't read my newest book, the second in command, go grab A copy right now on Amazon and you'll learn how to unleash the power of a coo. And if you already are a coo, you'll learn how to really build an incredible partnership with your CEO. How to do interviews, know how to do job postings. Maybe you know which recruiting firms to use. Maybe you use recruiting firms that are looking for fractional or overseas people. So you've cut your overhead, right? You can actually hire people like I hired a full stack marketing manager who in the United States, if I showed you their job description as they'd be like a junior VP or a senior director, it'd be about 150, 160,000 a year U.S. i've got a full time and they're based in Argentina and they're $55,000 a year. I've decreased my overhead by 70%, 65%. Getting the same level of talent by getting an executive recruiting agency that's based in Europe that only hires Latin American talent. We've got two cold callers that are starting this week. One that is just doing outbound on all of our social media. So contacting any of the new followers, any people that comment basically and they're literally following a script. So there will be no phone calls, it's going to be copying, pasting all the messaging. We're giving them the script and the kind of the decision tree of what to send. So it's a very kind of entry level, almost data entry ish kind of role. We've got somebody who has done sales for three years. Super high cultural fit. They're $2,000 a month all in. That's 24 grand a year for a full time salesperson. So for me it's how do I hire people that are sales and marketing, how do I get them offshore, how do I save a bunch of that additional overhead? And then once I know I've got that gross margin revenue coming in, then I can put the better mousetrap in place. Second, then the third part, Carl, the third part is the skill set around interviewing. Right. We didn't have an HR department at 1-800-got junk until we got to about 100 employees at our head office. We had someone in finance who managed their payroll and their benefits and their sick days and policies and procedures and make sure we had the employment contracts all signed and dotted. That was a finance role that managed that. But we trained everybody how to do a job posting. Now we train them how to run a job posting through ChatGPT. We trained them where to post Them. We trained them on how to do interviews. I would literally video people doing a job interview, and then I would give them feedback and critique on how to improve. We made them read books. We brought in teachers around. So it was a core skill that we made sure that everyone got really good at. Just a really quick show of hands, like put your physical hand up. How many of you have had at least an hour's training on how to do job interviews? Oh, that's not bad. So now is that training? Like you've literally had a coach or a consultant? Gloria, can you just go, Everyone go off really quickly. Tell me what training you've had on running job interviews. Lacy, we'll start with Lacey.
- [35:38]
Lacy
I've done your interview thing through invest in your leadership multiple times, over and over and over again. And I've done a couple of YouTube videos and things.
- [35:49]
Cameron Herold
Yeah. Okay. So going through it, and that's the key, whenever you learn something, then go and practice it, try it, do it, then go back and learn it again, then practice it, try it, do it, then go back and read it again. Going through that interviewing module of invest in your leaders four or five times over the course of a year while you're doing interviews. That's where the real power comes in. Read the book who work on it for a year, then go back and read it again. Who else? Sami, what have you done?
- [36:18]
Sami
I took the 12 week top grading course. I've done your invest in your leaders. I've read the book who all tools I go back to on a regular basis.
- [36:26]
Cameron Herold
Awesome. Love that Again, I love the fact that you can take bits and pieces from different. You got top grading, which is Brad Smart. You got who, which is his son, Jeff Smart. You got my stuff, which is the invest in your leaders module. All of those things all kind of weave together. Awesome. Gloria.
- [36:42]
Gloria
Combination of what everybody's already shared. Invest, books, term, you know, whatever, workshops. Fine. I mean, it's been, you know, 10 years of that.
- [36:51]
Cameron Herold
So awesome.
- [36:52]
Gloria
Take what you can out of, you know, you take a big nugget out of everything. Right. Kind of into building your own thing.
- [36:58]
Cameron Herold
I. I did a keynote to the whole SHRM national conference in Detroit one February, which is a horrible thing to make someone do is go to Detroit in February. And I did part of my session was on interviewing and hiring at shrm. SHRM is the HR professionals. Massive organization in the us so, Carl, I think that kind of is our answer, right? Is train everybody that you have on doing interviews and then hire the right sales and marketing people. First and then even getting an executive assistant. Right? If you don't have an executive assistant, you are one. How many of you do not have an EA yet?
- [37:36]
Chris
Yeah, Laurie and I are supposed to be sharing one right now. Right. Gloria's offshore.
- [37:41]
Gloria
Literally just last week onboarded our first VA because mayor, like was insisting on it. And so I just started with virtual hub and I told him I'm going to try this out. I'm just so particular. I just don't know, you know, if it's the hardest seat for me to fill because it's like trusting. Right.
- [38:06]
Chris
My problem was I had an EA and before I turned around, she was my COO and runs everything.
- [38:10]
Cameron Herold
Right. I've had that happen too. That's Meredith. Meredith started as my EA nine years ago and now she runs operations and sales and the CEO alliance, but she started as my EA. Meredith is my fifth EA that I've had in 25 years. So, Gloria, one of the things you want to do with an EA is start getting all the stuff off your plate that you don't need to be particular about. Right? Get all the stuff off your plate. That is admin. That's like, I'll tell you right now, if I was paying you what I know John pays you and I found out you were doing minimum wage job, I'd be pissed off. Right. And if you knew John was making the money he's making and doing minimum wage jobs, we would lose our mind. Right. Like John, if you reported to a board. So the first thing to get off your plate is that minimum wage jobs, which Carl, what does that allow you to do?
- [38:56]
Carl
Oh, sorry. A lot of other things that I should be doing instead of the minimum wage stuff.
- [39:03]
Cameron Herold
Okay, well, can I say who you had discussions one on one discussions with a couple of weeks ago?
- [39:09]
Carl
Yeah, sure.
- [39:10]
Cameron Herold
Okay. So Carl's at an event and Carl runs big trips, like 150 person, 500 person, 1500 person trips. John, if you wanted to take 50 of your clients on a cruise to Antarctica, which would blow them all away, and then you got nine days with all of your clients. Carl's the guy to pull that thing together. And it doesn't cost very much. It's crazy. He does all these big events. I've been on one to Antarctica with him. I was on one up to Norway with him. I know clients that have used him to organize some stuff. So he's standing at a conference and his pitch is his new opening line when he's talking to one of these big thought leaders or whatever is have you been to Antarctica yet? So he's standing at this event. Was it at Davos?
- [39:52]
Carl
I was at the inauguration.
- [39:54]
Cameron Herold
Oh, yeah, sorry. He was at the inauguration in D.C. and he's at the insider circle at the inauguration in D.C. and he's having a discussion with Tim Cook. Like the fucking CEO of Apple. Not a discussion where Tim is on a stage, Carl is standing there chatting with Tim Cook and Carl's going, yeah, have you been to Antarctica yet? And Tim's like, yeah, no, I haven't. So they're engaged around it. And then guess who comes running up to Carl to say hi. Sergey Brin from Google comes running up to Carl going, hey, your event was amazing, blah, blah. But he'd also just had a discussion with Jeff Bezos. These are one on one discussions with some of the major potential thought leaders that could be running events. But you know what? Carl spends all of his day doing admin, thinking about hiring people, talking about hiring the same fucking marketing person for four months. I'm like, we need to get everything off your plate other than rainmaking and strategy so that you can stay in your zone of genius. So, Gloria, do you think it really should matter to Carl whether the email is written perfectly or the whatever? No, he should just be spending his time thinking about how do I land Tim Cook.
- [40:59]
Gloria
Yeah, I think one of the things that I am facing is one, confidential emails, which I think I'll be okay. Business persons Philippines or whatever. But we've grown as quickly as we have. But also through so many resources like COO and masterminds and everything else. Right? And it's like you're just hanging on with how quickly you have to be moving and then you turn around and you look. And like you mentioned a minute ago with the Rev cog presentation you just showed, and I'm like, ding, ding. Things that are going on in my head. Because then you turn around and you look, you look and you think, hey, there's a couple of people, you know, that they've reached their peak and say, for instance, like our HR man, right? Sweetest, sweetest person, lover to death. Culture fit perfect, I think, right?
- [41:53]
Cameron Herold
But they're hitting the ceiling.
- [41:55]
Gloria
But, but she's, she's, she's. In my opinion, you know, I feel like she's reached her peak. These platforms get hard, more challenging. You know, it's the, the head that's the resistance to wanting to learn the new platforms. And then you feel like, or at least I do. I feel like I can't step away entirely because you are making your life harder and this should take three seconds and here you go. So you can go move on. And those are the bigger things that I struggle with. So yes, I want an EA desperately. You've been listening to Second in Comm, 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.com.