← Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Ep. 559 - Fractional COO, Scott Levy - Why “Just Doing More” Is Killing Your Results
00:50:30
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- [00:00]
A
I think Layla Hormozy's content is great. I stopped consuming it because it's so good. I like, like when, when they're good creators, I like to just sometimes binge on their content to see how they're expressing it. You know, we, we, Cameron's one, we talked about, Cole Gordon's another. There's some great content out there. I don't think you're ever as a human going to be able to take out all of your emotion. But what having the, the goal of systems like that is take the cognitive load off of your brain, off of your prefrontal cortex. That's the part of our brain that, that does kind of the heavy lifts for us and just put as much as you can on autopilot, which is our amygdala, our habits that like tying your shoes or driving a car, make those automatic because you only get three to four hours a day of peak decision making in your brain and you don't get to game where those occur.
- [00:55]
B
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 co host, former COO of a multi eight figure remote company and alumni member of the COO Alliance, Savannah Brewer.
- [01:25]
C
We are live with Scott. Welcome to the show.
- [01:28]
A
It's a pleasure to be here.
- [01:29]
C
Yeah, I think this is going to be a fun one. I can already tell me and you have just been riffing back and forth. I think that was the word that you just used. I never use that word, but I like that we've been riffing.
- [01:40]
A
Riffing is a beautiful thing.
- [01:42]
C
There's something when you find common some things that you both have in common, but there's people, you know, experiences and we've been in a little bit of the same world but different worlds. And I'm excited to dig into all the things today because it's going to be fun.
- [02:00]
A
All the things are always fun.
- [02:01]
C
So all the things.
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A
I'm ready.
- [02:03]
C
Let's start off with give the people an overview about Result Maps. What do you do and who do you serve?
- [02:10]
A
So Result Maps helps CEOs, founders, business owners, leaders get more of what they want from their business. We usually tell them we're going to help them get more zeros added to their revenue or their profits or both. And we do that by helping them accelerate execution and eliminate a lot of the Friction that gets in the way. So they're really getting the results they want. We've got software as our core offering, and then we also support leadership teams and CEOs as companies get larger, helping them integrate the concepts, use the software better, overcome challenges. So that's what we do.
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C
Cool. And I want to give a little bit of a note to people who are listening, because you are the founder and owner of the company. And the reason why I still wanted to bring you on is because you specifically are working with a lot of COs. And EOS is a term that will probably come up in this conversation, which a lot of our audience probably knows as well. So there's going to be some points today where we're going to talk about you as an owner, but also you. You're working with a lot of COOs, so let's go ahead into kind of moving into that direction. Why did you start this? What was the need that you were seeing for CEOs or operators where you thought, I'm going to go spend a lot of time building a platform for this?
- [03:30]
A
Well, I was doing management consulting at the time and I was really passionate about SaaS. And I've always just. I keep gravitating back toward small and growing businesses for a lot of reasons. One reason is my family. Like my parents, both grandparents, all of my uncles, everybody's an entrepreneur, cousins, I mean, family of entrepreneurs. So I always understood the effect that I'd say challenging operations can have on a family because I lived it right. I've been the kid in the car waiting to go on vacation because dad had to take care of something, or mom was essentially the integrator in that business. So I know the effects, but also I know how much fun it can be when it goes well. And so I've done a lot of work with large corporates and just thought there's better ways of doing things. Everybody keeps pointing toward. We're going to get this new project management platform and then we'll start executing. And what they don't realize is project management, the whole discipline, the whole way that people plan comes from something invented in the 1920s, right? This whole financial planning model. And I can't remember when Henry Gantt lived, the Gantt chart guy, but it was all pre1950. It was all for businesses that manufactured things and went at a slow pace. When you're in technology or even just the modern world now, because we're all affected by technology, things move too fast to produce these massive Gantt charts and get, no offense, but like a book this thick that is the body of knowledge around project management. Like what are you going to do with that if you're that dad or that mom that needs to leave the office so you can make your kids practice a recital and people aren't executing right. So I got very passionate about that. And then the other half of it was I didn't think I wanted to be in business. I thought I was going to be, thought I was going to do other things and then just again, love of computers I programmed since I was 12 pulled me back in. But because I didn't have all the right degrees, I had to bring something different. And so what I brought different was I'll raise my hand and I'll get the gnarly stuff done. So that combination of factors just led me to go. I don't think I'm the only one having these problems. And the more I started sharing these tools and tips and techniques with everyone, the more traction it got. And that's kind of the long version. But that's what got me to start the company. I just felt like we were getting success for our clients and more people could be getting that success as well.
- [06:16]
C
Who would you say is the ideal client for you now?
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A
It's shifted because we used to say 5 to 50 million in revenue business owner. So that the Persona hasn't changed that much but the range. Because we're finding, even though I thought we would do more early stage, we're finding that they tend to get closer and closer to 50 million lately. Even though we've got a lot of customers that are below 10 and we've even got customers now that are much larger companies like in the billions.
- [06:50]
C
Do you think with all this is kind of a little bit of a sidetracked question, but do you think with AI and what's happening with that, do you think small, these small and medium sized businesses are going to be really negatively impacted over the next decade?
- [07:05]
A
No, I think it's the big companies that will tell us about that. Yeah. So it's so fun right now. So I think a lot about teams. Right. The reason we didn't get into it like I'm just very passionate about teamwork is one reason why I'm drawn to all this stuff. If you look at the most highly effective teams, the most high performing teams, I think you're hard pressed to find teams that are more effective than US special forces. Most highly trained, highly resourced, resourceful, it's amazing. But the reason they exist is because the US military realized that a large organization, no matter how well run, can't do certain things efficiently. And so small, these small teams exist to go into really challenging situations. So there's a lot of agility you get if you're a well run small team. Traditionally if you've been a smaller company and you're trying to compete with a larger company, you could manufacture a few advantages. But now with AI, I mean we, I haven't even looked at how much we've accelerated our ability to deliver things. We were already faster than most of our competitors just cause my background software. But now you can really lean in and do a lot for the people who are, I think they call them the stormers. When you look at like who adopts technology, people that really dive in and find ways to leverage it can go so much faster that by the time the larger companies which tend to be slower to change get it, they're either going to have to acquire or they'll be obsoleted. And you can even look at big companies now. I mean let's see figma, which is a company a lot of people know they just acquired a new startup, right? There's a point where a company gets to a certain size that its ability to innovate changes. It becomes really hard. You know, you have a few outliers like Apple and some other companies that are, they, they make innovation their business. But a hungry young company that's well equipped, that's using the right tools can really outmaneuver some of those bigger boats, so to speak.
- [09:23]
C
Is there a tool recently that you found is working really well, you're really excited about that. You're also telling your clients about or maybe you're thinking of how to build that inside your own platform.
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A
Oh yeah, we've been building a bunch inside our platform. I mean just the whole idea for us of looking at how it changes the way you think when you're interacting with a conversation instead of entering information in a bunch of forms. That's a big game changer. But one of my favorite things like this is one any CEO I think can relate to. So CRMs are really bloated these days and there's some amazing ones and I'm a fan of software so even the stuff I'll say is bloated. I love what all the different companies do, but just simple things like tracking your activities and reporting on pipeline. That's an easy prompt to set up. In grok, it's a very easy prompt to set up like so we've we talked a little bit about both our sales backgrounds. I track all my sales activities through a GROK conversation and I just create a new one each week and calculates weighted pipeline it it. We have a point system we use that one of our clients developed called Connect Points. Shout out John Humphrey. That helps you make sure you're getting the right number of activities in. So just giving a prompt to Grok can take the place of like, oh, what CRM should we use? Or should we get a different CRM that does X, Y and Z? You no longer have to worry so much about. Does my software do everything? Yes, you want to have a source of truth, you eventually want to get that information into the source of truth. But you can do a lot of your own note taking with GROK and voice mode. And so Grok is the one for, for interactions via voice. I love. And if you've got, if you're fortunate enough to have a Tesla, Grok is embedded and you can do entire work sessions while you're in the car.
- [11:25]
C
Whoa, cool.
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A
It's wild. You can do research. But I mean we, we use it obviously heavy for coding. We use it heavily for marketing. If you check out our videos online, we have some great avatars that we just, we regard as our, our teammates that do a lot of our demos these days. There's, there's nothing, it's not touching.
- [11:47]
C
What are some of the things when a client comes in, they onboard, they start getting ramped up and using your platform. What are the things that they get most excited about? Where they're like, oh my gosh, this helped me so much with xyz.
- [12:02]
A
We will very quickly get them to confirm their vision in a way that teases the vision out. And shout out to Cameron Herold, because vivid vision is very inspirational to me in what to ask to do that. So that's one of the things a lot of in particular CEO's love. Like, wow, I've been meaning to get this out. And then the software literally takes them through and you can select whether you want to use an EOS type system or you're using okrs or whatever the case may be. But it takes them from here's my vision. Here's what's really important to me. Here are my guardrails expressed as chord values. Now what does that mean for three years from now? Okay, I have three years from now. What does that mean for this year? And that sounds like a really challenging, stressful thing. We can pull it out in minutes, like 30 minutes. You work with the software, you can have that laid out with your goal for the year and all the 30 day milestones, whether you're using rocks or okrs or any other system, you can have all that visible where it's probably 85 to 90% of the way there for you versus oh my God, I need to go into an all day session and we're going to have to do all these other things and maybe we'll throw in some trust falls, you know, it's like, you got it. So people love that. They can see that right away. Now what coos love is we also plug all that into a weekly dashboard. So if you're running EOS, it's your level 10 dashboard. If you're not, it's just your weekly dashboard. But now we can look at execution, we can raise our issues, we can make decisions week in and week out. And I've got one place where I can see it all and it integrates with all my software.
- [13:46]
C
So that's pretty cool. How do teams feel about using it? Like is it just the CEO using it or is the whole team in there?
- [13:55]
A
The best, our best customers, the whole team uses it. There's always people that use it more and less. And it's always a little surprising. You know, sometimes I, early on, because I was mostly in COO type of roles from my clients at the time, I expected the CEOs to be a little more reluctant and they're our most avid users. A lot of times leadership team members especially, I find the younger, more open ones really like it because they can use the same format that's in your weekly to run one on ones and just keep an agenda and have data and be able to give data driven feedback instead of just going, instead of it just being like a confession of these are my feelings today, which those count. But it's. We underestimate how much we just let our current emotional state cloud our discussions and our interactions on a day to day basis. You know, and we talked a little bit about this in some ways right before we started recording. But like, I mean, I don't know, I may not feel it today. I might be sick. What if I'm, you know, what if I'm in a bad mood? That shouldn't be coloring my one on one at all. If I can keep it to the agenda and by the same token, if I'm angry about something that a direct report did, if I can have a dashboard that lets me go, look, here's what I'm seeing in the numbers we talked about. And here's this thing you committed to last week. Where is that? It just makes it much easier. So the people that embrace that love using it. And when I go in and look at the roles that are using it in our analytics, we see it used across the board. Now, some people just don't like technology and we've had, we've had beer distributors as customers and you know, it's hard for, it's hard for some of the drivers to log in, but they would like once a week before the Level 10 and other places where I think people are going to be completely impatient for the technology. They're in there like every day.
- [15:52]
C
I love what you mentioned about kind of having the agenda. I just watched this video from Leila Hermozi a couple of days ago where she's like, which sometimes, I mean, this is my one thing that like most all their content is great. I do think from a feminine health perspective, I don't agree with this fully, but I can pull from it the things that are beneficial. And what she said is f your feelings, follow the plan. And she talked about when she's got this crystal clear plan that she's already planned out her year, her quarter on Sunday, she plans out her week, she gets to show up in her day and it doesn't matter how she feels, she can just follow the plan. And that's kind of what I'm hearing you say with some of the pieces baked into this, is that your team can follow it without needing to show up perfectly and feel amazing and be like, oh, how do I rock this meeting today? There's already kind of a system for that.
- [16:48]
A
Yeah. So, yes. And I think Layla Hormozi's content is great. I stopped consuming it because it's so good. I like, like when, when they're good creators, I like to just sometimes binge on their content to see how they're expressing it. You know, we, we, Cameron's one, we talked about, Cole Gordon's another. There's some great content out there. I don't think you're ever as a human going to be able to take out all of your emotion. But what having the, the goal of systems like that is take the cognitive load off of your brain, off of your prefrontal cortex. That's the part of our brain that makes decisions, that does kind of the heavy lifts for us and just put as much as you can on autopilot, which is our amygdala, our habits that like tying your shoes or driving a car, make those Automatic because you only get three to four hours a day of peak decision making in your brain and you don't get to game where those occur. So everything you can do, you know, and I'm one of those guys, like, I'll have this shirt on all winter. I've got seven of them. You'll see me like in most podcasts between now and whenever it gets warm again. That's Texas, so it'll get warm again soon. I'll probably have the sweater on. I don't, I mean, I like to change my clothes, but I don't want to think about that. And the more we can eliminate cognitive load and, and that having to go, oh my God, is this. Am I just stressed because I had to get ready for this meeting that frees you up if now if your brain surfaces an intuition, you can trust it more. And it's a lot less likely that you're going to be tired or worn out just from, you know, going from meeting to meeting. Although, you know, meeting filled days. And I know you're probably having one with the podcast because of our conversation earlier. They're draining. Don't make them harder.
- [18:37]
C
True. It's kind of funny as you were mentioning that I just going through my memory log of all of the people in my life that wear the same color shirt all the time. All of them are tech related. My best friend from college, he works for Google DeepMind and I just stayed with him recently. I opened up his closet just for curiosity's sake. If anything's changed since college and it's pretty much 95% black T shirts, two black sweatshirts, black shoes, and like a couple white pieces, you know, but what he's told me, same thing. He's like, I want to eliminate as much as possible. And I, this was a big learning for me. When I went traveling, we were talking about our sabbaticals. When I went on my sabbatical, I went from living in Scottsdale, Arizona, making, you know, pretty good money. And I had a fashion business in high school. So I've always loved fashion and making money and having a love for fashion, you just end up accumulating a lot of things. So when I went on my sabbatical, I was really burnt out. I was like, you know, I am going to eliminate as much of the things that have been associated with my identity as possible. So I took off my fake nails, which still have no fake nails on, didn't bring any makeup except mascara, and packed my one suitcase and I traveled like that was supposed to be for six months. I ended up traveling like that for about two years. And in that time, I realized how much, like, lower my stress was. I didn't have to decide and spend an hour on my makeup and my clothes. Now, I do think when you're working, there's something about getting kind of dressed up as a woman. Layla's.
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A
Oh, there's a lot. There's a lot. And it's not just women. I can. I got. I got data for you, but you keep coming.
- [20:28]
C
I was going to say Layla has some data where she shared that women who show up to work with makeup and put some effort into their clothes make significantly more money, which makes sense
- [20:38]
A
to me, I think. So Somebody really close to me was very high performer at one of the greatest companies in the world and went to a leadership training and tells this story. Like, at the beginning, everybody's organized into tables. It's like four tables of eight people or whatever it is, or five tables, however big it is. And they start with an icebreaker. Write down on a piece of paper which person at your table you think is the most senior person. And to a table, to a person, it was always the best dressed person.
- [21:12]
C
Wow.
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A
Gender, regardless of role. And she told me, like, from then, and this was somebody that didn't grow up, like, you know, having a lot of money to do a lot of different things. But she was like, you know, I went to Nordstrom that day and even, like, working from home. So even though I don't put effort into what I'm going to wear, I do dress for work. It's very rare that I'm wearing sweats or anything like that on a work day, like, because it helps your mindset, it helps your confidence, and it helps your perception. So that's my spiel on that. You're hitting all my triggers.
- [21:54]
C
I love the little rabbit trail we just went on for that. That was great going back to some of the data. But in terms of your software, does it help people pull out reporting and key metrics also?
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A
Yeah. So we think of it as a gps, right? Where do we want to go and how are we going to get there? And now that requires us to know our vision, our core values, which are our decision guidelines and our behaviors. Like, it's a very behavioral definition of core values. What our targets are and what. What are the. Our standards are, what are the numbers like on our scoreboard that we're going to make sure are there? And then when we say targets, we're usually referring to growth targets. And in My view, like if you've got rocks or okrs or anything else, if it's not about growth, it's not a good one because you should have like your scorecard or your scoreboard telling you what your standards are. Like your standards are your standards. That's the floor we never go below. But how are we going to grow? Is it profit? Is it revenue, is it whatever? What our software then does, our core atomic unit for the software, our Lego brick, if you will, is action items. What are you going to do? What are you going to work on? So yes, you could think of that as tasks, but think about task based systems and I used to work on these for some of the biggest companies in the world. They assume every task must get done and they measure efficiency in terms of the amount of tasks you process. The highest impact activities may not require a lot of tasks. So what we do is we've got your context set up for you, we've got your dashboards that can help you run your meetings. So you're saving time. But then you have a personal command center, we call it, with a prioritizer. So you can see all the competing deadlines, all the requests from people. Let's make a decision on what's most important. You're only going to get three done in a good day, maybe you'll get five, but I'd argue if you're starting to get 10 done, you might start seeing the impact of those go down. So the software helps you do a little less, but obsess about what you are going to do.
- [24:08]
C
Do people who are using this, are they also using ClickUp, Asana?
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A
Some of them, yeah. We have ClickUp and Asana integrations. Got some people that use Notion too. I always love for people to use our stuff exclusively, but the world is what it is. Usually the complaint they have though is yeah, we're tracking what I see happen with our customers. But I've seen this. Independent of which project management tool name you put in independent of them, they're purpose built to be project planning and task automation tools and we're talking about decisions and results and result maps. Right. So I might have 50 tasks that I maybe I don't need to get those done. This is the thing I learned from Tony Robbins. Like if you obsess about your task list, you'll develop a little bit of discipline and some confidence from that. But it might be more important to do the thing that you figure out that day is going to be even more impactful so you can get your result which is why we focus so much on the targets. If I need Sivana to increase her bookings by 20%. I don't care how you get it done. I mean so long as you don't violate our decision guidelines and standards. So we build in that kind of flexibility and, and make it easy to see. Yeah, I pushed some things down on my list, but here are the things I got done.
- [25:48]
D
Hey, it's Cameron Herold, your high energy leadership guru here to pump you up on the Second in Command podcast. If you get frustrated because your managers aren't leading like you want them to be, check out my game changing leadership course@investinyourleaders.com that's investinyourleaders.com for just 347 per liter. You get 30 years. My proven experience straight from taking 1,800 got junk from 2 million to 106 million as COO and it's packed with 12 easy modules. Learn situational leadership coaching, delegation, conflict management and more all in under 6 hours. @investinyourleaders.com with straight to the point videos, worksheets and real life scenarios. Your team will master time management, be able to hire a players and get aligned with your vision. It's all backed by a 30 day money back guarantee and raved about by hundreds of CEOs and thousands of managers already learning from the content. Grab this now and watch your business soar.
- [26:48]
C
What have you found to be some of the the things that you notice and how the best operators who are using your platform, what are they thinking? How do they think differently?
- [26:59]
A
It's that laser focus we do a lot in the software behind the scenes and then if we're doing our team integration plans where we're doing a little coaching as well on using it, we are very big on don't have so many goals. Like people have way too many goals. And I think, I think all the literature out there just does it a disservice. I think the traditional way people coach and I get why is like okay, go ahead, come up with all your goals and now you've got 90 days to figure out that you were too ambitious. We want people to be successful so we'll just tell them even up to 50 million and beyond, like pick one maybe a second goal and organize around that. And usually what you can find is anything that you might be calling a rock or a key result. They'll usually fit under a couple of them if you've chosen them right and if they don't. I just never see people succeed. So the best operators are embracing that. They got two goals. They're also not cascading those goals. So a lot of methodologies have you like, okay, I've got a, let me slow down. I get excited about this. A lot of methodologies have you create a company goal and then you're going to create a team goal and then you're going to create a personal goal and they're all going to create a cascade. Well, that's a Gantt chart with a lot of dependencies. And any system that has a lot of dependencies is easy to break, which is why most Gantt charts get broken and aren't used by anybody except the planner that owns them. No disrespect if somebody loves them, but that's just the reality I've seen. So what the most successful operators are doing is they're keeping company level goals and they might distribute like, let's say you're using rocks, it's rocks and milestones. If you're using objectives, it's objectives and key results. Right? Those are kind of the two. You have your, your target, then you have the ways you're measuring whether you're hitting that target. That second level you can delegate, but there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of cascades underneath that other than, hey, this week, here are the things we're doing. So what it does is it they're, they're choosing to make the result the focus and they're remaining flexible in how they get that result, even though they're committing. It's not that they're not being disciplined, it's not that they're not being accountable. They've got the accountability, they've got the discipline. That's what they're doing in their weekly meetings. So they're running their company almost like, like what an agile team says it should be. Where you've got like these Sprint boards and you're prioritizing them, but they're doing it weekly instead of every week. And so they're able to move very quickly.
- [29:42]
C
There's three things I wrote down as you were saying that they're just popping into my mind. Of all things that I've heard from other people that have really helped me with exactly what you're mentioning. One is something I learned from Cole. I don't know where he learned it, but the idea of monumental thinking versus incremental, which is when I was building so quickly, I mean, we were just on a rocket ship. There was all these opportunities to put band aids on things. And sometimes we did put a lot of band aids on things. And then I eventually was like, okay, now we need a whole lot, whole different system. But when I went back to starting to really learn that principle of instead of adding on all these band aids, what's the one big thing? That if we focused on the one big thing, cascades all of the ripple effects. So that's one thing. The second is diversion of focus. The reason why I believe Cole was able to scale closers IO so quickly in the time that I was there, part of the journey was his commitment to not diverting focus. And the only times that I really saw him divert focus are also the times that we've talked about. Man, if we would have just stayed going deep and narrow in terms of what we are, our product offering, or even the projects we were really committed to working on, staying consistent. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that I've now done fractional work with are spoken to where they become more. They try to solve the problem by innovating new things when really just going deep on that one would have potentially been. It's like the mining for gold analogy. You might be just there. The third piece is around key metric, which is kind of like same with the goal. I learned this from Rohit, who works with Grow Rev. He's the CEO of Grow Rev. They do all of. I don't know if they still do, but they used to do Tony Robbins marketing.
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A
Yeah.
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C
He was in COO alliance, and so I was asking him what was one of your major takeaways from the alliance. This was before I enrolled myself. And he said that he learned about every single department should have one key metric. Even if you don't think that it could have a metric, it does.
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A
That's it. Yeah.
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C
And once I. Once I started thinking in terms of key metric operationally, it completely changed the game for me.
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A
And you know what's interesting? We were talking about emotions. It ratchets down emotions. Like nothing has helped me deal with frustration and what I like to call poutyness. Sometimes better than going, okay, what's the number that we can associate with this? What's the number we should be measuring? And it, like, I have to continually remind myself because you just think there's so many things that come up where you don't immediately think it can even be measured. But the more you can reduce it to something you can measure, the better you can manage it.
- [32:44]
C
What's the one goal that you guys are focused on now as a company?
- [32:48]
A
Growth?
- [32:50]
C
What's your key metric for that mrr.
- [32:54]
A
That's it. I mean, we focus on that and we break that down into, you know, we look at our funnel and all the things that a SaaS will do. We also, I think where we're different than a traditional SaaS is we believe our support offerings, our white glove support, the team integration plans that I mentioned, our lead integration plan, it keeps us attached, it keeps us in touch with the front lines. Where I think a lot of software companies in the old model, you get to a point where you've got so many users, you're no longer like, really everybody loses touch to some degree or you don't have everybody in touch is what I should say. So having those support offerings really help us see what are companies really facing. Because with software like this, that's for your operations, it's, it's nuanced and you've got to understand where, where operations are falling down and we just focus on how teams operate you. We're not going to replace CRMs. We are. If you've already got Asana, we're probably not going to replace that because you probably love it, even though you might be able to. We don't do the automations, they do, but we're not trying to replace those. We're trying to say, look the way that you can have all those systems. But the fundamental issues that are getting in the way of people working well together most of the time that I see are clarity of what the outcome is, context for what the situation is and what are the challenges getting in the way so we can remove them and work better together. It's more often emotionally based. I'm frustrated with this person. They just can't deliver. I think one other cool thing about AI is you can't just go, I'm going to throw out AI, it doesn't work and be successful with it. You have to go, what's it doing? How can we improve? I think, and my hope is that does away with the whole age of I'll just throw people at this problem until one of them sticks. Right? Can I give people the clarity they need so that I know that if somebody is a culture fit for us and they have the capability, they're going to be successful at our company and I give them that much clarity or do I have to just hold my breath and hope? I find that right magical person.
- [35:13]
C
I read in your form you said decent people create train wrecks through poor operations. Some people can. What is usually the root cause of that and what do you mean by that?
- [35:25]
A
Yeah. So I've met a lot of very good humans who have created train wrecks in their ops. Unwilling to focus and choose a niche. Changing, continually changing, unwilling to commit to that clarity and that context or they don't. Sometimes they don't know how. And a lot, most of the time nobody teaches us this stuff. Nobody teaches us. And I don't know that I'm kind of making this up riffing. But what I find is if people have real context on what the situation is and they have real clarity about the results you're trying to get just that nips so much stuff in the bud. But what I see people do is they're well intended. They read all the books, they read all the blogs, they talk to all the experts. We're going to have smart goals. Can't tell you how many times I've seen train wrecks with smart goals. Not to mention, it's just a weird thing. Smart goals are just weird. They're like a guy in a water treatment plant or something invented this acronym and everybody misquotes the A and now they're like the savior of execution or something. What do you have assignable? The A for him was assignable. If you find the original paper and everybody uses what do they use? Attainable, Achievable. It's just some blog post somebody wrote and got it wrong. The other one, I have other triggers like this like Eisenhower quadrants which Eisenhower never used. But so back to your original question though. Because there's so much bad information and because there's not a lot of just hey, here's how you lead a team, here's how you manage a team effectively and there's precious little. Here's how you do that and have a life. You get well meaning good people that try to do all the right things and you still get a train wreck
- [37:19]
C
when you bring people into the platform. Are you also consulting to a degree or how much of it is your team's consulting involved versus hey, you're in kind of good luck to you.
- [37:32]
A
Depends on what level they come in at. We've got, you know, do it complete, do it yourself with you just jump in and you use the software. For some people that totally works. We've got kind of a done with you like a group coaching program very similar to what the closers guys use where you get trainings that walk you through it. And we have some companies that do great with that for larger companies where they're pressed for time and they're the Cost of their challenges starts to accrue for. You know, it's one thing when you've got a $3 million company and you're just trying to. I shouldn't say just that diminishes it, but you're trying to get to that next lily pad. Once you get above 10 and 20, you're starting to think, okay, I would need to not mess this up. They'll usually opt for more help. And a lot of times those larger companies are also trying to bring up junior high performers to become leaders, and so they'll ask for more support.
- [38:28]
C
How often do you find yourself telling an owner or CEO you do not have the right operator. This is not the system, it's not the platform. You have the wrong person.
- [38:41]
A
Not very. Because right now this is probably going to be a bias. I mean, I just don't run across that as often. Usually the operators that I run across, they're like, so stoked we're there. They're like, oh, my God. Like, there's literally places in the software where they're going, oh, thank God. Because, like, I'll tell you exactly where it is. In our weeklies, there's a column for park for later that you can move things from here to do into park for later because the CEOs got a thousand ideas, right? But it shows. It also forces the sequencing so that they're seeing the CEO can see if she or he is the one causing this thing here to keep moving down. So coos like that, I've run across, like, prospects where they've got somebody in the role of coo, where that person's more like a project manager. But if they're a prospect and they don't ask me, I'm not going to tell them. So it's very rare. If somebody doesn't ask me, I'm not going to tell them, oh, you've got the wrong person. But also would never do that anyway. What we would do is make them get clarity on what they expect from that seat. Get them to make sure they're comfortable with that clarity. Because more often than not, especially CEOs that I'd say are under 20 million, they actually have seven different roles in mind for every role in the company. Not always, but because they're not getting it out of their head.
- [40:16]
C
Right.
- [40:17]
A
And so a big thing that our software does, it gets it out of your head. You can see it. And now you can go, okay, what's reasonable for me to expect? So, yeah, that one actually, in all these years, that's not one. Is that true? I'm sure it's happened before, but usually it's more. This person isn't a good integrator. If you're running like, Eos or you're trying to give them that role, that's a thing that's happened. But usually the CEOs are coming to that on their own.
- [40:45]
C
What have you found with working with CEOs, specifically, what are the best CEOs do to make their COO as effective as possible?
- [40:55]
A
Clarity. They give them absolute clarity, which is one reason I think Vivid Vision is so powerful. So in anybody who's listening that hasn't checked out that book, I highly recommend it. Um, you can get some of the same things from our software, but getting clarity on where do you see this business in three years? Like, real clarity now in Vivid Vision. Cameron likes a big narrative, and I'm cool with that. We will ask people some of the key questions, and let's at least get answers to those. Let's at least know where we want our revenues, our profits, and those things. Let's at least know, like, some. Some Hallmark quotes that you want to hear from your employees, that you want to hear from your customers. That clarity, being able to come to agreement on what the numbers are that really matter. And out of all the issues that are in your head, because every CEO, like, I can't think of a good movie analogy, maybe the Matrix, but you're like, you're simultaneously in the future and here, and the future is really exciting. You can just get there. But today, there's probably two most important issues to your point about really identifying that one thing you're going to work on and finding the monumental one. So the best CEOs that I've seen equip their COOs, they're getting clarity on that. Yes, we have these 10 issues, but this is the one to focus on for the next 30 days and in the next 90 days. This is one I'd like to see. Having those dialogues and having that clarity, that's what helps the most. And then letting the COO do their
- [42:33]
C
job, letting the CEO do their job,
- [42:36]
A
letting the COO empower the coo. Yeah, I feel like that visionary integrator idea is very powerful, Although I don't think that people are either one or the other necessarily. But I think saying we're on a team, I'm going to. You snap the ball, I'll be the quarterback is way more effective than, I'll snap the ball to myself and I'll run and catch the pass. And if you really want a strong coo, you've got to empower them to take that role. I mean, they're essentially, I mean, I see the terms thrown around very fuzzily. Chief of staff, coo, integrator. I feel like a good COO brings all that together. As you get larger, they're going to have a staff helping them, but you've got to empower them.
- [43:29]
C
What do you often hear in terms like your maybe most common objection? Like maybe someone's listening to this and they're thinking, oh, this might be great for us, but this
- [43:45]
A
is busy. Yeah, we're just, we're too busy. Maybe when this project finishes or this, like sometime in the future we're going to be less busy. Like that's the most common objection. I just don't have time for this right now. And I'm like, cool. When the pain, when the pain takes over, you know where to go. But that's usually the, the, when people come to us is like, I'm done, I'm done. Like with this kind of struggle for the most part, I mean, we have people that come on the software I never talk to, you know, they sign up, they use it, they're happy, or we don't hear from them. But for the clients that we work closely with that are in our higher tier offerings, usually when we talk to people, that's when I know they have the wrong coo, by the way, that's my personal opinion. When I hear that we're going to, we just don't have time for this right now. It's like you're telling me you don't have the time to prioritize right now. I'm totally good. If you say we shouldn't have any solution like this right now, I don't know if I am either. Just, I've just seen too much, you know, like if you're, if you're just trying to stay heads down to deliver the project that's going to be your life and you're never really going to address your operations because you're always in the business.
- [45:00]
C
So true. When you really caught in the echo chamber of the weeds, sometimes making the decision that is the one domino, like we were thinking, this could be the monumental decision where it fixes so many of those problems.
- [45:15]
A
Did I cut you off too early? I got excited because I was like, oh, oh, I know the answer to this one.
- [45:20]
C
No, no, not at all. This is, this is kind of perfect to kind of wrap into the, the opposite of that. The People who come in most excited. What's the thing that drives people to be like searching? Is it breakdowns and efficiencies that them just not hitting where they would need to hit or what's the common reason why people are coming to you?
- [45:42]
A
In the first place, two categories. The most kind of rewarding category is people that are on their second, third or fourth business. They go, this time I want to do it without the headache. And some of our happiest customers are those. At the moment they're all guys. I was going to say guys and gals, but I think at the moment the one I'm thinking of, they're guys. The other category is, you know, interestingly this is also tends to be guys because I don't want to. It just is. When guys get to the point that they're in tears over their business, it's usually a bad sign. Right, because like we're so conditioned not to. And a lot of times that's what gets people excited to try this out. Like they may be reticent at first, but then they're like, oh my God, this is great. And then they get really excited because they've had like a really difficult moment. It's not always tears. I'm not going to say every customer, but they've had like, it's been the moment. Yeah. An employee left and they were really shocked. They're just, they feel like they have no energy because they're either working or trying to like, you know, they're snapping at their family and that's not right. Like I've heard, I've heard a range of things, but they're just, they've hit wit's end and they, they get really excited and unfortunately a lot of people are, you know, that's coming for them. But I don't know, I feel like that sounds kind of doomy and gloomy. But that's why the first group is so fun, because they're like, no, I get it. This time I can avoid all that.
- [47:17]
C
Speaking of fun and excitement, just to close this out here, what are you, what are you personally excited about in the next six months, either in business or personally in business?
- [47:28]
A
We're launching right now with somebody that'll be one of our biggest for result maps. Biggest customer. Not my biggest customer in the history of my career, but they're much bigger. They haven't hit the we're in tier's point. They're just excited to improve their operations. And that's really fun. Like usually something bad has happened. They Just got recommended by one of our other customers. So I'm really excited about that. I'm really excited about all the AI we've been weaving in. We've got an AI onboarding now where I talked about 30 minutes instead of,
- [48:04]
C
oh yeah, you went out for a second.
- [48:06]
A
Am I back?
- [48:07]
C
All right, you're back. 30 minutes is where you left off.
- [48:10]
A
So, yeah, just that, just being able to use AI, whether it's that or hey, here's how you set a good goal or here's some of the challenges you might have. Like, the ways that we can leverage AI right now are really fun and it's really amazing what AI is doing. Like, it's creating some really exciting things. Personally, it's just a good time. It's a fun. This is. I mean, I'm old enough that I was, I was here for PCs taking over. That's when I was a kid and I was starting. I was in my 20s when the Internet hit. And that got me really excited and got me wanting to get into technology. And this is more exciting in a way than both or it's sort of like a fulfillment of the promise. Like this AI search. This isn't going anywhere. For everybody that thinks there's a bubble, there may be market bubbles, but AI is not going anywhere. I mean, it's like those of us that have healthy companies right now are embedding it.
- [49:15]
C
Beautiful.
- [49:16]
A
Pretty cool.
- [49:17]
C
Yeah. Well, if anyone's listening and they want to reach out to you, they got a question. They want to see what this could maybe do for them. What's the best place for them to reach out?
- [49:26]
A
Resultmaps.com that's one result. Many maps. R E S U L T m a p s.com and I'm also on LinkedIn. Scotty Levy with one eye. Between the Scott and the Levy, I'm there a bunch. Reach out to me. Those are the two best spots.
- [49:45]
C
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was just as great as I was thinking it would be.
- [49:50]
A
I'm so glad. It's a pleasure
- [49:54]
B
you've been listening to Second in Command brought to you by COO alliance founder Cameron Herold. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like 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.