John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the Female Startup Club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guests today are Todd and Laure Fisher, their husband and wife co-founders of Call Tracking Metrics company. They found in 2011 in their basement, and together have grown it into an Inc 500 rated top ranked conversion analytics software serving over 30,000 businesses around the world. So Todd and Laure, I don’t often have multiple guests, so I’ll try to not fumble my questions to, to either, or you just take your turns. Whoever’s whoever wants to jump in next, go from there. So welcome to the show.

Laure Fisher (01:26): Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Todd Fisher (01:27): Yeah. Thank

John Jantsch (01:28): You. So, so I’d love to hear about your journey. You know, every entrepreneur has some unique, uh, journey that brought into this point. I do know in looking at a little bit of your background, you’re not software engineers, you didn’t grow up in, in that necessarily. Um, you came from other professions, so I’d love to hear what led you, uh, to where we are today.

Laure Fisher (01:46): Well, that Todd has a, his is more technical

Todd Fisher (01:49): I was gonna say, I have a technical software engineering background. Lori does not.

John Jantsch (01:53): Ah,

Todd Fisher (01:54): Okay. So, but that’s part of what I think made it work really well for the two of us. So Lori has a, a business background. I have a, an engineering background and so the two of us together, we can also kind of split what we focus on, uh, which I think also avoids conflict, uh, which is good.

John Jantsch (02:09): Oh, it absolutely awesome. You kind of have your strengths that you bring and your balance yeah. Was the idea to create the company one that you said, gosh, there’s this huge need out here and, and a gap in the market, we should create it. Or were you trying to do this in your own careers? And couldn’t find the right tool.

Todd Fisher (02:29): I think I’ll take that one, Laurie. So, so I think that it wasn’t sort of something we sought out to do. It was more of Laurie and I were both sort of running it. I’ll say I’ll call it a fledgling consulting company. We were trying to make things for our customers or provide AdWords support, SEO support. Okay. And a handful of them. I think two, we were very explicit and they would not take our business unless we could track and compound that with the fact that we were just coming out of that really nasty recession and, you know, still sort of, it was very raw, right. That, you know, people, after you finished a job for them, maybe we built a website and then they would be like, sorry, I can’t pay for, you know, that website cuz uh, we’re going outta business. So we dealt with a lot of that.

Todd Fisher (03:09): Right. And then, you know, so part of it was also like, Hey, the appeal of really sort of the appeal of having a, a, a software business that we could charge upfront. And we could also focus our energy instead of it being spread, you know, from one project to the next being completely unrelated from each other. Yeah, sure. There are things lessons you can carry forward, right. With what you, you know, suffered in, you know, learning for one customer to the next. Right. But it’s not, doesn’t compound as effectively as, Hey, it’s one software platform. Right. And we’re still kind of consulting, but we’re doing it in the context of one platform. So it’s has a much, it, it works better.

John Jantsch (03:47): Yeah. I’ve been throwing call tracking out here and, and call tracking metrics the name of your company, but we’re probably ought to back up just a little bit. And you know, a lot of listeners of course, are very savvy, understand what that is, or at least have experienced in some fashion, but maybe give an overview of, you know, what call tracking is and how, you know, marketers use it.

Todd Fisher (04:07): Sure. Yeah. Do you wanna take, do you wanna, I can. Okay. Uh, so, so call tracking, you know, the early days started out with here’s a phone number, put this phone number on your billboard and we’ll measure how many times that phone number is called. And that must mean that billboard is worth X, right. And it sort of evolved with Google ads to, you know, okay, now somebody clicked on an ad and if they made a phone call, can you tie that phone call back to that particular ad in a particular, but over time, I’d say the real value is that now we can help you answer the question of not just which phone number, uh, and which click, but was there a sale, right? Yeah. Was there meaningful conversion that occurred? And if there was, well, let’s make sure we can communicate that back to Facebook, Google, whatever ad platform you might be using.

Todd Fisher (04:53): Right. And to me, that’s more of the, the value story here. Right. And, um, and then the mere fact that we’re handling this phone call means that now we have a call recording, we have speech intelligence. Right. So we, we could say, Hey, somebody was pretty angry on that call. You might wanna work on that aspect of your business as well. Right. So it really kind of is interesting that it, you know, sort of all started with wanting to answer the simple question of how many people, how effective is this ad. Yeah. And it sort of trickles into all of the impacts that, that one ad and that led with all the customer interactions that occur right back to

John Jantsch (05:30): Yeah. And I, I think it really, it does kind of answer that like, uh, the phone companies used to talk about the, the last mile, you know, question was that there was a whole lot of data we had, but we couldn’t really understand. I mean, it allowed us to weed out stuff that just totally didn’t work, but we really couldn’t refine what was bringing us revenue necessarily. And I think that that’s, you know, for a lot of marketers, obviously, you know, the old joke kind of about, I, you know, some of my marketing works, I just dunno which, you know, part it. And I think a lot of marketers still take that approach of if I throw enough stuff out there and, you know, I think the thing that’s really missing from that approach, of course, you could be very successful and grow a business. But if you knew that 20%, that was really working, you just double, triple, quadruple down on that and you’d really have a business wouldn’t you

Laure Fisher (06:15): Mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm I know. And now we started with it being about phone calls, but now it’s all these other communication channels. Right. Keep getting invented. Right. And so we’ve, we have to keep kind of weaving in all of these other channels and it really, it, you know, companies had all these different platforms for all these different channels. You know, they had like their email service, they had their, you know, text message platform. They had their chat platform. And now it’s really about bringing those all together so that you can see that journey all the way through all of the different, you know, mediums that people are communicating through.

John Jantsch (06:47): Yeah. Well, in forms even, I mean, I, we have clients that half half of their contacts, phones calls, and half of them are, you know, consultation form fills, you know, so I mean, being, you really do need, uh, to bring many of those things to together. You, you we’ve kind of talked about it, but maybe you could cite a few examples. I mean, the obvious one is, you know, are my ads working or paying, but what are some other uses or maybe what you would call best uses for, for this type of tracking?

Laure Fisher (07:14): I would say one thing is what’s happening on the phone calls is really interesting. A lot of, a lot of companies think they kind of, they know what’s happening on the calls because their team tells them. But when you actually hear the calls and listen to them in person, you know, you learn a lot. And then also you can use machine learning and to have, you know, a system like ours, listen to the calls in a way and scan them for patterns. So you could figure out, you know, what words keep getting mentioned in the call, you know, where does your salesperson have to say no, you know, we don’t do that. What are the trends that you’re seeing in terms of, you know, voice tones in their voice and when they might be getting angry. And there’s just so much you can learn from actually what’s happening in the call when you actually hear it directly in the call versus relying on interpretation from someone else telling you

John Jantsch (08:00): Well, and I would, I would also say, I mean, we have clients that most of their phone calls seem to come on Monday, Tuesday . And that really has some decision making, you know, about what we better have, you know, ready on Monday, Tuesday, right? Yeah.

Laure Fisher (08:13): Yes, yeah. Yes. Like which agents are performing, you know, you see all sorts of interesting information about who answers their phone really quick and whose phone calls last forever, but the calls don’t seem to go that well, right. You know, you can see all sorts of interesting performance data and also understanding when you run an ad, how quickly do the phone calls happen. Right. So what should you be thinking about in terms of budgeting for advertising and how that translates into communications coming into to your call center?

John Jantsch (08:39): So, so we are, you know, my agency and the training that I do. I mean, we are big proponents of this for a lot of the reasons we’ve already talked about, but for those agencies out there listening, this is an amazing way for you to prove your worth. And I think a lot of people forget that, you know, they’re given reports with traffic on them and, you know, with, uh, keyword rankings and whatnot. But you know, when the client says, well, yeah, we’re not getting any more business. And then I go listen to five calls that just don’t get answered, or they go to voicemail or, you know, whatever it is. I mean, it’s pretty easy to say we’re doing our job , you know, but you’re not. But then O obviously, you know, the better scenario that is that, that, you know, you’re very, is very easy then to connect all the analytics together, to show, you know, this phone call was actually worth, you know, $12,473 this month, or, you know, or these group of phone calls. So it’s a great tool to, you know, to prove why you’re charging what you’re charging.

Laure Fisher (09:31): Yeah. It’s and it’s interesting. Cause a lot of times CU customers will say, they thought they’re surprised by some of the things that, you know, they might an ad, a particular ad channel might be driving. A lot of traffic might be driving a lot of phone calls. But when you look at like what types of phone calls is driving and what the long term value of those customers are, it’s surprising to people sometimes, you know, they yeah. Have all sorts of learnings around like organic versus paid and, you know, social media and what really is the value of that. So it allows them to just, you know, really kind of understand even further, like, was this really a good lead? You know, was this really worth it? You know, this channel that we invested in

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John Jantsch (10:59): So a lot of channels, email specifically, and certainly on social, uh, media and Google’s making some adjustments about, you know, tracking has actually become an evil word in, in some service, right. See, except for, uh, mailing lists, you can, you know, you can buy a mailing list that, that has anything you want on it. send it to anybody you want for

Laure Fisher (11:20): Everybody lives, drive it over to their house. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:23): You can know what diseases they have, what medications they’re taking. Right. But let’s get back to the, what we can talk about, you know, tracking in the, you know, in the email world in the digital world is coming under a lot of scrutiny. So how are you preparing for that? Or what do you have to say about, you know, the person that’s saying, oh, but we’re not supposed to track.

Todd Fisher (11:42): Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, I think there’s a lot of misconceptions out there around this, but you know, it is what it is. You know, first of all, one of the things that we say is, Hey, listen, like we’re, it’s first party tracking. Not only that, but somebody clicked on this paid ad. That was a very expensive, uh, thing for that business to, to put out all the businesses really asking is to understand whether or not that expensive paid ad is having some value. Right. So that they can better focus their effort for the next time. Right. And so I, I, I really think that if, if you, you know, it can explain to somebody, Hey, you know, for example, we, we had a, I think it was like a lawyer who was explaining to me, he’s like, you know, my, my ads cost $50 a click.

Todd Fisher (12:19): Right. I was just like, wow. So he’s like, you absolutely need to, I don’t wanna know unless these are turning into phone calls sure. Is what he told me. That was our, one of our first customers. Yep. And I remember being like, okay, well, that’s, uh, really important. Let’s make sure we, you know, we can answer that question for you. So, you know, often I hear is, you know, you know, people go down, the path of tracking is evil and then they start dropping words like deep state and, you know, you know, you know, foreign actors and all this kind of stuff. And I’m like, well, wait a second. Who are we talking about here? Cause the plumber down the street, when you click on their ad, I think it’s gonna be okay. Right. So what are we actually doing there to prepare for that? So, so first of all, um, there’s things that are just happening, right? So Google, um, has been forced to change how they track Google ads, right? So there’s something called GBRA w braid and only just recently were the APIs available for us to actually pass those tokens back to Google for conversions. But you know, we work with Google’s ecosystem, we’ll collect those tokens and we’ll pass them to Google in, in response to conversion events. Yeah. What else

Laure Fisher (13:22): Also giving customers tools to manage the data that they collect. Yes. You know, so whatever provider they’re using, they need to have the tools to get rid of things they don’t need control so that they’re collecting just what they need, delete things they don’t need. So a lot of it, I find even with service providers, we use, you know, that it’s, it’s all about the cus us being able to control what it is that we’re collecting. Cause a lot of times people find that they’re collecting all this information. They don’t even need half of it. So get smart about, you know, what it is that you’re collecting. It’s true. Also when you look at GDPR compliance as well, that you really need to be able to justify what you’re collecting and, and have a good handle over how you’re securing it and how to get rid of it, you know, when you’re done with it.

John Jantsch (14:02): And does your tool provide, you know, things like HIPAA compliance, you know, for people that obviously in that medical area that one’s probably touchier than GDPR for a lot of people,

Todd Fisher (14:13): It’s funny. It is. Yeah. But in a different way, GDPR and and HIPAA kind of have different kind of edges to them. So, but we cater HIPAA both.

John Jantsch (14:21): Mm-hmm, one of the things that is becoming increasingly popular maybe because the technology is caught up to make it increasingly easier to do is segmenting customers and leads and people that are on your list already, not on your list already. How does call tracking play into that, maybe that kind of personal segmenting journey.

Todd Fisher (14:41): Um, so yeah, so, so we have a lot of a attribution that we can apply to the contact. So one of the things we do is when you make a phone call into our system, we actually create two records. It’s the, the call activity. And then if it’s not already created the contact record, and then as that user kind of interacts with you, we collect additional information on that contact record. And one of the, one of the big use cases, I like to kind of say, Hey, is, this is good, right? Um, is let’s say you’re driving and to get ahold of, you know, business X, Y, or Z, you know, unfortunately you did have to go through a rather complicated voice venue, right? Your first time you’ve ever called them. Right. Right. You had press one and you had to listen, press two and maybe listen, press four or something.

Todd Fisher (15:23): Now you’re finally talking to a person who’s really able to help you. Right. You’re in your car though. The kids are screaming in the back drive under a bridge and the call drops, right. This is like tragic situation. Right? Well, if, if that business had known who you were and in our system set up a rule that just said, Hey, if it’s within, let’s say 24 hours, skip all the voicemail stuff and just go directly to the, the, the last agent who you were talking to. Right. Well then imagine how much better this would be when like 10 seconds later you come outta the bridge or outta the tunnel and you call back and well, wow. You’re talking to the same person again. Right.

John Jantsch (16:03): What’s interesting. I think even just knowing that somebody is a customer or somebody is not a customer, you know, that just that designation could certainly trigger different behavior, couldn’t it?

Todd Fisher (16:15): Yes. Yeah. And that’s been a big part of our product is just helping to cater to those kinds of use cases where it’s a repeat call. It’s an, you know, we know that this person was inquiring about product X, Y, or Z, right. Cause of the lead form that they filled out. Yeah. So now instead of routing them to a general queue, maybe we’re gonna route ’em to a specialist queue. And so in this case, you know, you can say, Hey, you know, tracking really gave you a better experience. Right? Yeah. Maybe it took some of the frustration of your day out of your day. Right? Yeah. That’s the way I try to position it is, Hey, there’s lots of friction points here. You know, when you call that business, you really feel like entitled so that they should know everything about you. Well, that’s part of what tracking helps do, right. Is give you that kind of white glove treatment.

John Jantsch (16:56): Well, and, and I think the, the beauty of what you just said is if it’s working well, you didn’t even know it did it. Yes. And that, of course that’s the frustrating thing for somebody that sits there and codes all day. Right. that’s right. You know how hard it is to actually make it

Todd Fisher (17:11): . Yes.

John Jantsch (17:12): Yes. So, so if somebody was looking at you and there are other players out there that, that do call tracking and whatnot as well, and you know, what would you say, Hey, but here’s our, here’s how we’re different or here’s, you know, here’s our super feature that nobody else has.

Todd Fisher (17:25): Sure. Um, what do you think Laura? I mean, I think what we really do and shine in our space is that we really bring multiple facets of the space together in almost the hub fashion, where we have other, we, so in, in a way, I’d say we have competitors in many different industries because we kind of bring many different industries into one platform. And that’s really our specialty is that we’ve brought these things together. So you don’t have to say, I want my call tracking company. I want my contact center software. I want my CRM software, you know, you can kind of just pull them all together into one place and it integrates better this way. Right. I’d say in our space, we, we are friends with everyone because we integrate with everyone, but, but we can also provide the, the feature as well. So you kind of get choice in that way.

John Jantsch (18:08): You, you know, one channel, I guess, that we haven’t even talked about that I meant to, because so many businesses, some businesses are using for outbound marketing, but I don’t think that’s really the true use. A lot of businesses are using SMS as a true customer service tool. Your point is coming up or, you know, it’s time to reorder, you know, whatever to just kind of, and people are expecting that and appreciate the text that way. How does, how does a call tracking tool play into that? Well,

Laure Fisher (18:31): You can, you can tie text message campaigns to, you know, a person and their pattern of interaction. So, you know, maybe they have filled out a form that, you know, they’re interested in a certain product, they clicked on an ad. They’ve talked to someone, you know, about that phone call, what happened in the phone call. You can now target your text message information to them in a whole different way. Obviously you need to have permission to text them, but you’ve, you’re able to segment them right. And target the communication. The other thing that I think is really important in text messaging, a lot of people think about when, you know, the, the blast text blast. Right. But what I think is really interesting is the conversational texting where you can actually have just a one-on-one conversation, whether it’s for service or a sales interaction, the, you know, the people are so much more likely to respond to a text message and open a text message. And especially if it’s easy, you know, schedule, appointment via text, or, you know, have like, I actually have like a conversation with a salesperson via text without having get on the phone with ’em. So that I think is really interesting. And, and something, I think a lot of companies are just starting to kind of scratch the surface on, maybe they’ve done their like text blast with their promo codes and all of that, but really figuring out how do we create kind of meaningful interactions with customers over text messaging.

John Jantsch (19:43): Yeah, absolutely. So Todd, Lori, thanks for, so by the duct tape marketing podcast, uh, tell us a little more about call tracking. Tell us, give us kind of the 32nd commercial or anywhere you wanna send people to find out more specifically about call tracking metrics.

Laure Fisher (19:58): Yeah. I would go to call tracking metrics.com. That’s the best place to go. And you’ll see that we’ve got three different plans you can sign up right on our website. We have an amazing support team, amazing professional services team. That’ll help you implement the service as well. So, you know, definitely feel free to call our sales team, have a demo, or you can sign up right on the website and get started.

John Jantsch (20:18): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for sound by the duct tape marketing podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you both, uh, somewhere out there on the road.

Laure Fisher (20:24): Thank you.

John Jantsch (20:36): One final. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@marketingassessmentdotco.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the salesman podcast, hosted by will Barron and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell, and frankly who doesn’t check out the salesman podcast, where host will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business ineffective and ethical ways. And if you wanna start someplace, I recommend the four step process to influencing buying decisions. Listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:44): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m gonna do a solo show today. It’s actually been a while, but I wanna cover a topic that is very high on a lot of business owners’ minds. And that’s the idea of retention of internal team members, internal customers, whatever you wanna call them, employees, staff, team members. This has been a really hot topic of the last year, and I think it’s not going away. There’s a lot of pressure for a lot of reasons on this. So I wanna talk about it as the subject that it is, obviously it turns into production issue or fulfillment or capacity issue for a lot of organizations, but it’s really a marketing problem, or at least can be solved I think, with a marketing solution. So that’s what I’m going to present.

John Jantsch (01:34): Hey, I also wanted to let you know that I have been working very hard on a unique marketing strategy assessment. A lot of people have these, uh, marketing assessments out there that that really are just measuring your tactic approach. What you’re using, what you’re doing. I’ve created something that really is heart and soul to the idea of strategy before tactics marketing as a system. And I’d love for you to check it out. Uh, the URL is marketingassessment.co. So it’s marketing assessment.co go on over there and, uh, check it out to go through. It takes about, I don’t know, five minutes to answer the 20 questions and, and the report that you get at the end of it, frankly, is, is enough gold to, to have you actually, uh, improve or find area of for improvement in your, in your marketing strategy. So, uh, check it out, marketing assessment dot C.

John Jantsch (02:29): All right. So let’s talk today about rethinking the recruitment journey. You know, one of the things that I think that certainly I’ve said this many times to anyone that will listen, one of the things that I think the pandemic and, and a great deal of what went on with the, the, the chaos of the last couple years is that, you know, a lot of businesses do pretty well in good times just by being in the right place at the right time. A lot of businesses during the pandemic learn that, but boy, in tough times, growth comes from being important in the lives of your customers and your employees. And it’s a constant, uh, battle. It’s constant shifting there’s the leverage changes, you know, so to today we work with a lot of folks that are saying, Hey, I don’t need more customers. I need more people.

John Jantsch (03:12): So the leverages in many cases is, has gone squarely to the employee. And I think that changing dynamic, I think does have a tendency to allow people or, or to get people in the habit of thinking, oh, this is just a vending machine approach, need more customers, put some money in run, some ads, run a funnel and create more customers, oh, need more employees just go run. Some ads, go to the job boards, put in some and voila pops up some new employees. And I, I wanna share, I’m gonna rifle through. ’em pretty quickly a few statistics that should shed some light on how we have to be thinking about this in a much different way than the vending machine or the funnel approach. Apparently less than 15% of the, of every job that’s advertised on those job boards, you know, monster indeed, et cetera, gets filled by candidates who actually apply through the job board.

John Jantsch (04:07): So we’re spending a whole bunch of money there, and it’s not really producing the results. 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation, even for a pay increase S true of customers coming to us. Why wouldn’t it be true? Of course of employees as well, 79% of candidates use social media in their job search. We have to be where they are. That’s, that’s true. Again for customers as certainly as much as it is for staff. 92% of consumers will visit a brand’s website a first time for reasons other than making a purchase, guess who is visiting your website for reasons other than making a purchase people you might hire, or you might wanna hire 71% of employees say that they would accept a pay cut for a better working experience. A flip side of that is I know I’ve paid more or a product or a service when I got, or was expecting to get a better experience.

John Jantsch (05:05): I think it’s just the flip side of that exact same thing. 89% of employers think employees leave for more money. That’s why everybody defaults to more money. That’s why everybody defaults to lowering their prices when, uh, they’re trying to attract new customers. It, again, it’s the flip side of the exact same thing, but according to a very large gala poll, only 12% of employees actually leave for money. And I think the thing that, the point that I’m really trying to drive home here, in fact, if you’re really in a hurry, just take note of this idea and, and you’ll have the essence of where I’m gonna go with this, uh, today. People really aren’t candidates or consumers. They’re both, there’s no distinction. I mean, people are just people. So the vending machine approach of let’s put money in and get more customers, put money in, get more employees, lower prices, you know, advertise bonuses, you know, for getting employees.

John Jantsch (06:05): I mean that, that approach will draw some people, I suppose to you, but you know, people who come to you for a price increase or price decrease, or employees that come to you because they get a dollar, two more, an hour are gonna leave for the exact same reason. So when I talk about the customer journey and the employee journey, or how somebody, uh, comes to, to join an organization, it, it it’s really in a lot of ways, it’s not even a marketing issue. It, it is a strategy issue that I think can be solved with of the marketing approach. So here’s the three steps for creating the perfect recruitment strategy. First one is to know who you’re trying to recruit. And I know everybody says that, but what people forget to say is that you probably already have some ideal employees in your organization.

John Jantsch (06:51): Just like I talk about narrowing your focus to the top 20% of your customers, look at your team. You can do the same thing. What is it about your highest performing, uh, folks, the people that thrive in your organization? What is it about them that you need to understand? What behavior, what characteristics, what objectives, what problem can you promise to solve as an organization? That’s always been true from a, an attraction standpoint for a, a differentiator for your customers is going to be true, certainly for employees. So how can you create an end to end customer journey? Think in terms of employee recruitment pipeline, it’s something that doesn’t, it isn’t meant to be an event. Oh, I have a position to fill. We need to do X that’s. What gets people in, in the mindset of, oh, I have to offer more money. That’s the only way to get more people or I have to spend more money on the job boards.

John Jantsch (07:45): That’s the only way to get more people. It has to be something that becomes part of the DNA of, of all of your marketing. So look to your current employees and I’m gonna give you four questions and you might come back to this, uh, part of the recording. I’m gonna give you four questions. If you need to write these down to, to try to either think about, or even even ask your employees sometimes asking is tough because it’s the boss ask asking. And it’s like, is my answer really gonna ? Is it gonna be used for good or bad? But here, your question to ponder, what does their current work life situation look like? You’ll find that they probably have certain goals or in a certain point in their life that they, you know, have certain values. Now that doesn’t, I, this is not an appeal to say everybody in your organization needs to think and look alike.

John Jantsch (08:35): It’s just that there are gonna be certain situations that I think might be keys or might be signals to, you know, what you’re looking for, or, or at least what you start promoting. If you find that many, uh, folks in your organization enjoy a certain type of work or a certain type of environment, they Excel in, then you wanna start talking about that. That that’s what we do here. All right. Second question. What do they enjoy? What frustrates them in what work environment do they Excel? Number three, and number four, what factors were involved in them making a decision to come to your organization? If you could start to understand doesn’t mean you have to have all the answers, but if you can start to at least think about the answers to those questions, you’re gonna have a better idea of the message you need to take out there to the world and start talking about why your place is a great place to work.

John Jantsch (09:25): And speaking of that, one of the greatest marketing messages, this is to attract customers is to talk about your people is talk about how exceptional your place is to be an employee. In fact, we’ve actually moved many of the marketing messages to be, you know, for example, a remodeling contractor, our people make your remodeling experience exceptional. That is a very positive, attractive message for the people that want to remodel their kitchen, because maybe they’ve were worked with not such so exceptional people, but it’s also a great message for the potential employee. You’re leading, talking about the fact that your people are exceptional. Hey, I wanna work there now. Also, don’t forget. As I reminded you many times, don’t forget about Google reviews. If you’re getting some amount of Google reviews, pour over those word for word first off, what you’re probably going to see is that if your people are truly exceptional, your customers are going to be noting that they’re going to be actually naming them by name.

John Jantsch (10:29): In fact, they might not even name your company, but they might name somebody who works at your company. So start understanding what they about your people, about the experience that they’re having. Those are some real cues to what maybe you ought to be saying. The promise that you ought to start making, uh, to, to demonstrate that you can deliver a better experience. You know, customers don’t actually change comp I mean companies, I mean, I don’t think we want to jump around and say, well, that didn’t work outs, or maybe it did work out, but I’m gonna go look for a new one. Uh, I think we want to stay with companies. And so we don’t really leave them. We leave the experience that we’re having with them. And now let’s hear from our sponsor. Look, if you’re tired of slowing down your teams with clunky software processes and marketing that is difficult to scale, HubSpot is here to help you and, and your business grow better with collaboration tools and built in SEO optimizations.

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John Jantsch (11:52): are the third component of this strategy idea is that is, is to think about this end to end journey. You know, a lot of handing these days about all the things that have changed in, in, in marketing and in business. But, you know, I think the thing that doesn’t get talked about enough, the thing that’s changed the most is how P people choose to become customers and employees. They have so many options today and how they decide on the company that they’re going to, to hire is, is all about the research that they do.

John Jantsch (12:24): And they go out there and, and in a lot of ways are making a decision, you know, before we even know that they’re looking at our organization and this, this is certainly true of some be coming to be hired as, as an employee. So we have to think about the marketing hourglass as we apply it to the employee journey. And so, uh, as a reminder, I know I talk about this all the time, but the marketing hourglass for us is, has seven stages. They are no like trust, try by repeat and refer. And so what I’m asking you to consider is what is, what are you doing to intentionally guide somebody to come to know about you and, and start to think, Hey, this is a place I might wanna work, but then as they start to dig in, you know, what message are they seeing as in terms of a story, are, are they connecting with your values?

John Jantsch (13:10): Who do they meet first? Is it easy to find out more information? If for me, how often people will have a, Hey, come, you know, we’re hiring and then you click on a button. And before you ever find anything out about the company, you have a, a five and a half page application to fill out. That’s like going from, Hey, you know about us now, I wanna buy you wanna buy and, you know, skipping the steps of trust, building that, that really make you, you, the obvious choice, obviously reviews, employee stories, your values and actions mentions in the media. Those are all things that are part of the employee journey today. And in fact, as I started to say, I think the, the beauty of this idea of branding your organization is a great place to work is it’s a killer marketing message. I mean, how could that possibly be a, for anybody who wants to hire you or, or buy your products and services?

John Jantsch (13:59): So promoting, uh, part of your content strategy ought to be in fact, a huge part of your content strategy ought to be, to promote things that your employees, your team members are doing, how they’re advancing, the fun that you’re having at your organization. I mean, these are things that go in many cases in the early part of the journey, they go a lot farther than the benefits that I’m gonna actually receive, because I think people, uh, more and more are, are leaving organizations maybe even for pay cuts or, or certainly not staying at organizations because the 401k is the bonus is great. If the environment is not great, if the experience of being an employee there is not great, then none of that really matters. So then if we slip over to the try and buy and, and obviously substitute higher for buy, if you like, , it’s not a real stretch in my mind.

John Jantsch (14:53): So the try process, what, what is that application process look like? The phone screening, you have so many, and again, what happens is a lot of organizations don’t have an HR department, don’t have a professional who’s charged with the hiring experience. It’s the manager or the VP of something that actually has another job, and this is just something they are doing. And so the follow up and the experience, and, you know, once they come on board, the onboarding, the who, who their manager is, you know, how they interact with current employees. I mean, all of that, their training plan that’s laid up. The statistics are pretty crazy about when people leave organizations within the first night days. It’s because there was, there was no onboarding. It’s true of customers. You know, you’ve heard me talk about Joey. Coleman’s great book, how to keep, I can’t remember now the title, but how to keep an employee no, how to keep a customer for life.

John Jantsch (15:43): Although he is actually working on the employee one too, he tells me, but the idea behind it is make the first 90 to a hundred days an amazing experie. And you will not have the turnover that many organizations, uh, experience today. And speaking of that, you know, just like keeping customers is, is a far better way to grow a business. Keeping your employees is a far better way to grow, not just your team, but your organization. You know, the number one, uh, reason people are citing now for leaving organizations is a lack of respect, a, of a growth path or any kind of personal development. I mean, pay and benefits certainly shows up on the list, but it’s way down from things like respect and, and personal development. And then finally refer, I work with a lot of organizations that have happy, happy employees and happy customers.

John Jantsch (16:30): And, and we always scratch our heads say, well, why aren’t they referring us? And most of the time, it just comes down to the process. The, you know, it’s almost with, with employees, a lot of organizations almost treat it like, uh, you know, an expectation, a part of the job, you know, they offer a bonus. So it just becomes part of the pay. But the biggest reason people don’t make recommendations or referrals, both as customers. And it lawyers is they don’t understand or worse don’t trust the process. Maybe the hiring process for them was kind of wonky. Hey, they like being there now. but the, uh, the process itself was a little bit stressful. Do they wanna put their friend or, or neighbor, you know, through that kind of thing. And last thing about retention people don’t change jobs. I mean, they change about, so the, again, a lot of it has to do with the experience that they’re having, you know, maybe with the person they’re directly reporting to, and not necessarily with the organization, I’ve been running recruiting ads, a skilled labor positions for a number of years, and we test different headlines in different approaches.

John Jantsch (17:32): And the number one recruiting a for the past two years simply just says, respect with a question, mark, you know, do you feel like a respected member, uh, of a team in your current, uh, position? And it beats everything else. We try, you know, time and time again, because that is the, that is what’s missing for a lot of people in the, uh, positions. And I don’t care what type of job it is. I think that’s, uh, the piece that’s really missing. So think in terms of this idea of the marketing hourglass and, and applying that journey to the recruiting process, intentionally helping move people through the stages of no, like trust, try higher retained and refer. All right, that’s it for me today. Um, again, I wanted to remind you to check out the new assessment that, uh, I built it is a marketing strategy assessment.

John Jantsch (18:24): You can find it @ marketingassessment.co – not.com – marketingassessment.co. All right. Take care.

John Jantsch (18:32): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your clients tab.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roisin and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to, to action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Cameron Herald. He is the founder of the COO Alliance, the world’s leading network for Second in Command, and he is also the host of the second in command, the chief behind the chief podcast, where he interviews COOs and other seconds to share their insights with his listeners. He’s also the author of five books and a top rated international speaker having spoken on all seven continents. Probably not too many people can say that. So Cameron, welcome to the, the show.

Cameron Herold (01:22): Hey John, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

John Jantsch (01:25): So you are a little beyond the 800 got junk story. You’ve done a lot of stuff since then, but that was, that’s been a pretty good calling card. Hasn’t it?

Cameron Herold (01:34): It’s been a great calling card. It’s funny. I was speaking with guy Kawasaki a few years ago and I said, you know, do you ever get tired of, of speaking with, uh, about apple? And he, he said, do you ever get tired of speaking about 100, got junk? I’m like, no, it was just such a, a passionate thing. But yeah, it was 15 years ago. I think it was 15 years ago next week that I left.

John Jantsch (01:52): Oh, wow. Well, I moved four years ago or bought a house in Colorado about four years ago and slowly moved. And I can say we, we had to use the services of one 800 got, uh, junk because we’d been in this for about 30 years. awesome. So it’s still out there working, I guess.

Cameron Herold (02:08): Well, my, yeah, my youngest son got to work in the trucks last summer for the first time. So he is kinda excited about that.

John Jantsch (02:14): So, so that was early in your career in a lot of ways. And in reading your story, you know, that was a, you were when you showed up as a youngster, so to speak and in that role, that was kind of a stretch or a new role for you. So are there some things in those early days of kind of figuring operations out, I guess, that, that really stuck with you?

Cameron Herold (02:35): Uh, something changed. So one under God junk was actually the third company that I’d helped scale. So I helped build void auto body and Gerber auto collision and then a private currency company prior to that. And then I’d been involved in another group called college pro painters, which was the world’s largest residential house painting company. So I actually joined wing hundred Gott junk as their COO when I was 35. So for me, for the first four years, it was actually a little bit like, you know, I already had the expertise. I knew what to do. Let’s just crank through this. What really started to hit me was two things. One when scale started to kick in, when we hit the, you know, 200 employees at the head office, 2000 employees system wide, it started to get complex and a little bit outside of my sandbox. And then secondly was the text. I started to appear where we started to leverage or talk about technology and automations and optimization. And that was, you know, 2004, 2005 was, I was realizing that it was no longer about working harder. It was about working smarter. And then it was also about optimizing and automation that we could, you know, really scale.

John Jantsch (03:38): So the role or the title, job title, COO, how would you define that now? Because it’s certainly changed dramatically, hasn’t

Cameron Herold (03:45): It it’s changed in a few ways. So 20 years ago to be the COO, you had to be a major player at a major company. And I think we’ve had title inflation now where, you know, you can have a 12 person company. Sure. And they’ve given everyone a C level title. So I think there’s been a little bit of title in inflation. The CEO is really the second in command to the CEO. They’re the person that should be running the business. If the CEO was sick for six months and couldn’t come in, they tend to be the one that has kind of a bit more multidisciplinary, um, subject matter expertise. They could probably run marketing, they could probably run ops. They could probably run chart. You know, they could probably run some areas of the business, but they don’t necessarily have the pure domain expertise to be a chief marketing officer or a chief technology officer in a similar size company. So they tend to have, you know, good operational chops, um, and very strong people skills. But yeah, I think there’s been title inflation. What used to be a director of ops or a VP of ops has often become as COO. And then you still have the Cheryl Sandberg who’s, you know, been COO of Facebook for 15 years with the same title. So just a little bit of confusion.

John Jantsch (04:49): Well, and I would say the other way around too, I think some larger organizations there’s been maybe title fragmentation . I mean, you’ve got people, chiefs, happiness, chiefs, revenue chiefs, you know, I mean, so where, you know, how does the COO or second in command orient themselves then in, in that world? Or are you saying that the fortune 500 companies still needs or maybe needs all of those positions? And the operations job is maybe more limited in a hundred person, 200 person organization, like who you were talking about at home office. The, the CEO really is running the company.

Cameron Herold (05:24): Yeah. If you look at, in any size organization, the COO and CEO are almost in the same box, it’s almost the yin and yang where those two coupled together are overseeing the entire arc of the operations. And then you’ll have titles, whether it be VPs or co C level that are running the independent, you know, business areas, whether you’ve got people or finance or it, and then there has been some of that, you know, movement, like, you know, the head of sales used to be a VP of sales, but they didn’t get a C level. So now it’s the chief revenue officer, right. Instead of the chief sales officer , but yeah, there’s pretty much running the functional areas. If you’re a, you know, if you’re a 10,000 person company or, or larger, you know, a true enterprise level, you probably like I was coaching the CEO and the second command at sprint for about a year and a half. I think they had 42 executives that were senior VP executive VP level. Right. So they, they had a very seasoned C-suite, um, you know, they had multiple division presidents and it’s, it’s just more about roles and responsibilities in org chart and clarity. That really needs to be clear when you get to that size.

John Jantsch (06:27): Well, and maybe to, to where I was really headed with this, maybe the second in command, um, is more descriptive of the job title than CEO. So I mean, how we know that. Yeah.

Cameron Herold (06:36): I didn’t, I said now for the last year or so, I started the COO Alliance six years ago and I said, if I was to retitle it, right, it would be more around the second in command than the COO cuz we have members from 17 countries that we’ve got president titles, VP ops titles, CTO, titles, but they’re truly the second in command to the CEO.

John Jantsch (06:55): Yeah. So, so in a maybe a smaller, more nimble organization that doesn’t have that giant C-suite what is the second in command? How, how would you describe the second in command’s role? I mean, uh, I know you, you know, you know, ver Harish and, and the EOS folks and that, that whole integrator, you know, approach. Yeah. I mean, is it really almost a point of view, more than a, a job title?

Cameron Herold (07:19): It’s funny. I was at a Verne har event about 14 years ago and I came off stage speaking and someone came up to me said, oh my gosh, you’re Cameron. And I said, yeah, he said, everyone’s been running around the conference saying, I need a Cameron. He said, I thought you were a saying, I thought you were like a BHAG or a vivid vision. I’m like, no, it’s just me. And he goes, well, everybody wants what Brian, when Gina Rickman wrote traction and then wrote rocket fuel with Mark Winters, they talked about the integrator. That tends to be the role title or their title for usually kind of the 10 to maybe 50 or 60 person company. And then you really need to get into the more mature titles where you you’re back into that real COO title. Again, they have slightly different thoughts around the, the role as being the tiebreaker where I would disagree on that. I think the CEO is the tiebreaker. I, I don’t think the CEO really defers the operational decision making to anyone in the organization. It, it really has to unfortunately stop with them.

John Jantsch (08:14): It, at that point, it’s, it’s really strategy more than pure execution. Isn’t it? Yeah. So, and, and maybe you can expand the range. I’m gonna give you a couple scenarios that, that I’m guessing that you run into because you work with people in all sizes, you know, coming and going um, what is that organization that comes to realization? I need a CEO. I mean, I’m sure you run into a lot of companies that are still founder driven, very good at selling and they’ve grown. So, so what does that organization need to be thinking about?

Cameron Herold (08:46): Well, and there’s a few different reasons why you may end up needing a COO or that second in command. One is that the roles and responsibilities that are on the entrepreneur or the CEO’s plate, or just too many, and they need to kind of divide and conquer. So they need that partner, right. Or maybe it’s that you’ve got a really key player in the organization that if you don’t handcuff them to the company, they’re gonna leave. So it’s a title. It’s like an MVP, it’s that title where you know that you’re gonna lock them up because of that, it may be a change in agent, right? It may be somebody who you just know intuitively like I’m a 60 year old CEO of a company. And now we’ve got technology coming in. I need a change agent to come in and take us from the way we always did it to an optimization and automation and remote workforce.

Cameron Herold (09:30): And we don’t have that skill internally. We need that expert to come in from the outside. They’re the change age. So there’s often a number of different types of roles that the COO can play. It may be somewhere where the CEO has built the company and now they want to step away a little bit and let someone run their business. So they have, you know, the reason we start companies in the first place is to give us cash, to give us free time or to say that we did it right. So once we’ve done it, once we got a enough cash coming in, how do we get more free time? It’s to let someone run our business for us? Yeah. So there’s often different reasons for that COO role. It’s confusing.

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John Jantsch (10:57): I’m guessing I’m gonna throw out the other scenario that you also have people that come to you and say, I have a CEO. Oh, but we’ve outgrown them. You know, or how do we level up

Cameron Herold (11:08): That was me. So, you know, 15 years ago, next week, my best friend, Brian, who was the CEO and founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. We were actually supposed to go for dinner tomorrow night, 15 years ago. He me aside on Thursday morning at the Vancouver club. And he said, I think we’re done. I, I think you’ve hit the end of your six and a half years. You’re not the guy to take us to a billion. I took him from 2 million to 106 million, but he was right. I was not the guy to go to the billion. And I was the sixth member of our sixth member leadership team to get replaced. You know, we replaced every other leader of the leadership team. I was the last one and they needed the next group of true seasoned leaders. So Brian replaced me 12 months later with the former president of Starbucks, us and Lonnie walked in and said, what a cute little company. And meanwhile, I’m pulling my hair up going, oh my God, it’s so big. And she’s like, this is cute. What a cute little business yeah. At some point the business can outpace the skillset or the yeah. Or really the life cycle of, of that person. For sure.

John Jantsch (12:07): Well, that’s interesting then is the simple answer. You replaced them with somebody or can you actually level that person up? Can they gain this? The, the skills You have to be there?

Cameron Herold (12:17): I’ve talked to a few people about this. So Ben HTZ and I have spoken about this, who wrote the book called the hard thing about hard things. And then clay mask, who is the founder of, of infusion saw he and I have spoken clay, and I have said that it really a, a senior leader can go through two doubles in the size of the company before it gets very hard for them to do the third double. Right? So let’s say that you go from 5 million to 10 from 10 to 20. It’s very hard for that leader to be running a 40 million company let alone 80. Well, we did six consecutive years of a hundred percent revenue growth. So I was clearly by that year six, I should have been replaced. And then the, in Horowitz said, it’s one triple that if you go from 10 million to 30, it’s hard to take it to 90.

Cameron Herold (12:58): Right? And I think you can level up, you can work with them on their situational leadership and their coaching and time management and project and EQ and all the skills. But the business is different. You know, when I was leaving, we had 13 operational businesses operating in four countries, 3,100 employees, systemwide 330 cities. It was just big. And I didn’t have the depth anymore to slow down, to consider cross-functional matrix decision making. Like I was hearing terms, I’m like, I don’t even know what these mean, let alone how to operate within them. And then, you know, that’s all

John Jantsch (13:34): I was gonna say. So is it simply a matter of somebody else has been there? and that’s what they bring to the table or is it a different skillset? Uh, different personality.

Cameron Herold (13:43): It’s a combination of both. I think it’s not only the person has been there it’s that the person has taken a company there. Mm. Cause really what Brian didn’t want was someone who had run a billion dollar company. He needed someone who had grown a hundred million company and made it bigger. And then he needed a new cultural fit that fit the size of the organization. So strangely that, that woman, he brought in didn’t work, he ended up getting rid of her, but he’s then replaced her with a friend of mine who I’ve known for 35 years. We co-founded a fraternity together in Ottawa in 1987. I was president the first year he was president the second year of that fraternity. Now he’s the COO. He, Eric, would’ve been a horrible COO in the first six years as I would’ve been horrible in his tenure, but he’s just done 10 years as COO and has taken the company to 450 million. He’s the perfect DNA for the size organization. It is now and a cultural culturally really strong of it with Brian. The trust is really strong.

John Jantsch (14:39): So I had culture written down. I mean, how much of, how much of the job is directing or forming or creating or nurturing the culture?

Cameron Herold (14:50): Oh, a lot of it, you know, I, I believe that the culture kind of permeates from within, so it starts with the C-suite, it starts with an obsession for core values and mm-hmm, obsession for vision. And, um, you know, really understanding that our people, our employees come first and our customers come second and really obsessing what employee engagement and then they’ll obsess about customer engagement. It’s really, it, it’s all those tenants that have to be kind of first and foremost, and then understanding that if you focus on that, the numbers come from there, you know, I think that’s where the truly great organizations almost build that cult-like environment while they’re obsessing about the, you know, the business processes and, you know, the, the KPI and the metrics and that kinda stuff as well.

John Jantsch (15:34): So you’ve talked about what it takes when we’re really growing that company, but for somebody that is out looking for COO role, or maybe looking to replace somebody, what, what, what do you see are some common mistakes, uh, that, that are that crop up

Cameron Herold (15:50): The most common one is that they assume, and I’m actually working on a book about the co relationship that’ll come out in about six months, but it’s the, the most common one is that they assume that if the person has had the role before they can come into my company and do the same role and they can’t because the company is very different, you know, not unlike having a spouse or a partner in a relationship if I’ve been married, just because that woman was my wife doesn’t mean she’d be a good wife for someone else, nor would I be a good husband for it, right. There needs to be a sync with core values and culture. And you know, if I love cooking, I probably want somebody who likes to clean. If I like somebody who, you know, you need to find the similarities and the commonality. And then also the fact that we don’t wanna get into each other’s lanes. So, you know, Brian did not need someone to run finance in it cuz he liked finance in it. Whereas I have members of the COO Alliance that two of their core areas that they run are finance in it. Right. So because their CEO doesn’t of those areas. So it’s very, it’s a misfit when they just assume, oh, they’ve been a COO, there’ll be a great one for me. Not necessarily.

John Jantsch (17:01): Well. So in some ways, are you saying a CEO should be looking for somebody that like for, in my case, I’m really, I’m not a system process finish line, kind of person, I’m a starting line, you know, think up the ideas kind of. So, so am I looking for somebody that’s going to shore up where I have weaknesses, so to speak?

Cameron Herold (17:22): Yeah. You’re looking for someone who’s your yin and yang, right? Who’s the match to like you’re Sarah is your second in command and, and correct. She is amazing at systems, amazing at process she’s very kind of inward facing and the organization. She didn’t even love being on my second command podcast because she doesn’t talk to the media much, whereas you’re always on stage and you’re the marketing person. And so she’s the yin to your yang, right? The trust is very high. The relationship is very strong. Those are all what you’re looking for.

John Jantsch (17:50): Yeah. Um, there seem to be a lot of organizations built around this idea of scale and helping people, you know, coaching people on that kind of growth. There’s not a whole lot of people that are doing, I think what you’re doing exactly. And that’s working with the second in command. So tell me a little bit about COO Alliance and, and you know, what somebody would expect if they, uh, came to look at that.

Cameron Herold (18:14): Yeah. You know, you, you mentioned I’ve been paid to speak on all seven continents. I’ve done a lot of work with entrepreneurial organizations around the world. So I’ve worked with Y P O in 10 countries. I’ve worked with the entrepreneurs organization in 26 countries. I’ve done large scale speaking events for Vista and 17 cities. And then there’s all these other groups for entrepreneurs like genius network and Maverick and baby bathwater and GoBundance and war room, amazing events. But those are all for the CEO and then there’s organizations for marketers and for lawyers and for dentists and doc, but there was never an organization for the second command. And I really wanted a place where the CEOs could go and spend two full days talking about interviewing and hiring and onboarding of people. Whereas if you put, you know, a hundred entrepreneurs in a room, they can only talk about recruiting for 10 minutes before they need to switch subjects. So we need, we needed a place for them to geek out on the stuff that’s more COO like, and as the whole impetus, we’re starting it. Do

John Jantsch (19:12): You feel like you are actually shaping the role as it exists today by doing obviously you, you have a fairly large reach. I know you’re, there are lots, the world is a big place, but do you feel like you’re giving some modern shape to the role in general?

Cameron Herold (19:27): I’d never thought about that. I guess I would like to now that you, you, I, I think that Gina WMAN and Mark Winters have done a really good job with getting the integr or the integrator brand for traction, and they’ve done a good job with shaping it at the smaller level. I think Nathan Benton, Steven Miles have done a really good job in their book. Um, writing shotgun and an article they wrote for Harvard years ago about the role the COO. But yeah, I think there’s been a gap in having a community for second in commands. And I don’t want to be their thought leader. You know, if, if we had a spokesperson for COOs, it should be Cheryl Sandberg, not Cameron herd. I just want to create an organization where they can learn from each other and be with each other. And so I, I guess, yeah, it would be cool if we could.

John Jantsch (20:11): So, so tell us a little bit of just about all the ways that people can engage, you know, your organization, cuz I mean it’s everything down to a self-study uh, program all the way through some high level coaching, right?

Cameron Herold (20:22): Yeah. So the invest in your leaders course is the self-study program. It’s the 12 core leadership skills that all managers and leaders need to get better at. So it’s called invest in your leaders. The C O Alliance is the clear one we’ve been talking about. We’ve got members from 17 countries. You need to do at least 5 million in revenue just to qualify. And then you have to be the second in command of the CEO. And that’s 12 events, uh, every year online and we do two in-person events a year as well. And then we have the second in command podcast and that’s just one that everybody should listen to where we never interview the entrepreneur. We only interview the second in command. Right? So I, I love you. I think your work’s amazing, but we could never have you as a guest, but Sarah, your second in command was a great guest.

John Jantsch (21:01): Awesome. Well, she enjoyed being on the show and I’ve great have, have gotten great feedback because you do have a, a large audience of pretty focused folks that listen to it. Well, Cameron, it was great having you on this show. I can’t believe it took this long, but I appreciate you stopping by and I do you wanna send anybody? I know we’ve been talking in generalities, but do you wanna send anybody to a website or anything that uh, they can learn more?

Cameron Herold (21:24): Yeah. If they go to COO alliance.com, they’ll find it everything. And then all five of my books are available on Amazon, audible and iTunes. Thank you. I just wanted to be there for your audience.

John Jantsch (21:32): Oh, well I appreciate it. And uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Cameron Herold (21:37): Thanks John. Appreciate it.

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