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What does a Chief Operating Officer do?
100 Plays10 months ago
Rob Gibson trained as an accountant and rose to become a divisional Chief Operating Officer for Real Estate giant JLL. Today he’s a consultant, coach and Chair for Vistage (the world’s leading executive learning and coaching organisation).
In this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast, Rob explains the ‘classic’ COO role (how it should help formulate and then implement strategy, create culture, drive collaboration and ensure daily operations are effective, efficient & coordinated) but also how in reality every COO role is different. We also explore why the COO seat must be crafted to reflect each unique company, its breadth of operations, the strengths/weaknesses of the business and particularly the CEO!
Interested viewers can reach Rob G via https://www.linkedin.com/in/robgibson68/ or Rob.Gibson@vistagechair.co.uk and Rob L (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/) at Rob@mission-group.co.uk (or to book some free time with Rob L, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/rob-liddiard). Alternatively, if you’d prefer Rob L to send you a free copy of Traction (the book by Gino Wickman which explains The Entrepreneurial Operating System) just complete the form here: https://www.eosworldwide.com/traction-giveaway?implementer_email=rob.liddiard@eosworldwide.com
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Transcript
Introduction to First Time Founders Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome to another episode of the First Time Founders Podcast, the show where we talk about how to start a business from nothing and grow it into something meaningful. I'm Rob Lydiard. I was the founding CEO of a software business called Yapster that was acquired in 2022. I'm now a professional implementer of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS. That's my day job in my spare time. I love talking to entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial people.
00:00:23
Speaker
and folks in the advisory ecosystem around entrepreneurs. Together we come together and we have conversations on this podcast to talk about the learnings that we've experienced in the past and mistakes we've made so that entrepreneurs coming down the track can hopefully avoid our mistakes and go ahead and make your own mistakes as you go through that great adventure that is building your first time enterprise.
00:00:47
Speaker
If that's you and you're interested in these topics, please reach out to me. My contact details are always in the show notes.
Meet Rob Gibson: From JLL to Vistage
00:00:53
Speaker
Today, I'm speaking to Rob Gibson. So Rob's a great guy with a long and distinguished corporate career, rising to chief operating officer for Europe for a huge company called JLL, Jones Lang on the south. Rob now is the chair of a Vistage group. So Vistage is a peer coaching, learning organization
00:01:13
Speaker
typically for leaders of small, medium-sized enterprises. He's also a coach, so he works with business leaders and folks in actually various different executive positions. So he's got a really interesting perspective, both of what it's like to lead operations from a big company and what it's like to make the trains run on time and get everything you want from a small business. So I thought it'd be great to have him onto the show to talk about those two vantage points and what the big company CEO can learn from the small company.
00:01:43
Speaker
operator and vice versa. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rob Gibson. Rob, welcome to the First Time Founders podcast. Thanks for doing this, mate. My pleasure. My pleasure.
00:01:59
Speaker
So Rob, we've been connected by our friends at BCMS, the corporate finance folks that help entrepreneurs realize their dreams, get rich, sell their businesses for somewhere between 10 and 100 million quid. So it's a very exotic circle that we're both mixing in now.
00:02:15
Speaker
me because I obviously teach EOS and BCMS run on EOS and they encourage entrepreneurs looking to realise value from their businesses to get their shit together from an operational perspective and of course you are a VISTAs chair which I'll let you explain.
00:02:30
Speaker
The reason I really wanted you to have this conversation with me today is of course not just that you now specialize in working with entrepreneurs and small businesses through Vistage, but of course you come from a really interesting background running operations at an absurd scale. So your permission, what I'd love to do today is talk a bit about what it was like running operations at JLL and you can get into that. But actually what you're learning now working with entrepreneurs about what works from that megacorp universe and frankly what doesn't. Does that work for you?
00:03:01
Speaker
It's both sides to that coin. So should we kick off then with like, what does a COO at a place like JLL look like? You might want to set some context on what JLL is so people can understand the size of that gig.
What Does a COO Do?
00:03:15
Speaker
Sure, sure. Well, in classic terms, the COO
00:03:21
Speaker
is responsible for helping to formulate and to implement strategy. They're responsible for helping to set the culture and the resourcing in a company. And then it's down to day-to-day operations, which, as you can imagine, pretty much covers everything. That's the classic COO role. But in most instances, when you look at roles, they can be quite different. We'll come onto that later on, maybe.
00:03:49
Speaker
In terms of JLL, so JLL is a global real estate advisory company. I've been going for centuries, great company. I was there for 20 years, loved it. And I was the chief operating officer for the European and global capital markets businesses division within that.
00:04:11
Speaker
I've held many roles. I was there for 20 years, but yeah, big business, very successful business, great market share, very competitive industry. It was a lot of fun. In terms of operations, it had a matrix structure, and that's something you get in a lot of big companies, far less so, and probably for good reason in SMEs, because they have their strengths and weaknesses.
00:04:39
Speaker
You know when i first started the matrix is very much in favor of the geographies they really ran the business and the business lines skin across the best practice of management that's something so when you would see all of that business.
00:04:55
Speaker
It was a different animal to when JLF flipped its matrix over to being driven by the business lines rather than the geographies. And then you were more on top of all of the operations and the wider business. So it evolved over that 20 year period.
00:05:11
Speaker
And was it common, you have a finance background before that, don't you? Is it common for operational leaders in businesses at the scale of JLL to come through finance so you can express operational initiatives in hard numbers? I think I might have been the first one at JLL, certainly in the European business that came through to be a COO.
COO Qualifications and Backgrounds
00:05:31
Speaker
which was great fun. And typically, certainly in the early days, a lot of the people you came through were from a finance background. And there's good reason for that, because if you don't have strong finance skills, I think a COO role is really quite challenging. But I've definitely seen, whether it be in JLL or elsewhere, a bigger variety, diversity of skill sets,
00:06:00
Speaker
coming through to take on COO roles. I mean, really, you know, if you're going to have a COO role, and I would question in quite a few SMEs whether they should have that role, but if you're going to do it, then you really need to look at your overall skill sets as an executive team, see where the strengths and weaknesses are. And then when you bring in either promoting through from outside of COO,
00:06:29
Speaker
you really want a professional background which is maybe one which you're weaker on already within your company and that might be HR, might be legal, might be sales, whatever.
00:06:40
Speaker
make sense. Can you talk a little bit about without like let's let's let's protect the innocent or guilty don't need to name any names but you talk very briefly about the relationship between the COO and the CEO at a megacorp level because I'm fascinated by that dynamic at an SME level and we'll get into that but just to set the stage at a big company level like what type of skills does a CEO have to rise to that position at a place like JLL and then how did you complement the CEOs that you work with? I'm just curious.
00:07:08
Speaker
I think it's probably fair to say that whether you're a CEO or COO, particularly in really big companies, by big I mean multi-country, multi-business line, you can have a big revenue number but not necessarily be huge companies that were in terms of
00:07:30
Speaker
staffing and geographical spread. But most big companies, if you're CEO or COO, you're not going to have all the skills to do that job. Nobody does. They're huge, huge roles. And so what tends to happen is that people will have certain criteria or characteristics where they're really, really strong.
00:07:51
Speaker
And those that are given time for that company are really particularly important. And that's why that person might rise to the top and sort of drive the business for a certain period of time.
00:08:03
Speaker
Um, but then as the business of, Oh, she might want someone with different types of skill set. No, no one's got the whole kit bag. Although I have worked with chief execs who were, were, you know, fantastical operations, you know, a very tactical rather than strategic. So it's something that weren't, I assume. So without naming it on, can you give some pen portraits? Can you just port portray a couple of different CEO types with a number of genuinely.
00:08:28
Speaker
I worked with a lot of really fantastic people. I really do mean that. But they were different. One of the first people I worked for was really charismatic, really dynamic, was very strong on the business and client side.
00:08:47
Speaker
and you know wasn't as focused or interested in some of the operational side or the financial side. He understood it, it just wasn't what necessarily excited him and quite right too because he was better focused that's why and that's why he brought me in and why he created that role. I worked with other chibisex later on who
00:09:13
Speaker
you know, might have made a better CEO overnight. I did. You know, they were really, really, you know, it's quite tactical in the way that they did things. And what I used to do as a CEO is I tried to be a bit of a chameleon, so almost to fit in with where the weaknesses were and evolve my style. But certainly the relationship between the CEO and CEO, and I'd argue FD and other exact roles,
00:09:42
Speaker
It's really crucial. You've got to get that gel right both in terms of personalities, but in terms of strengths and weaknesses. There's an alchemy there that you need to achieve.
00:09:55
Speaker
That's awesome. So before we bring it down to then transition this to what it's like in small company land that we both live in now, can you give us a picture of what like a day, a month, a quarter looks like for you typically as the COO at that operating at that scale and level?
Essential Skills for a COO
00:10:11
Speaker
What it looks like is relentless, Rob. What does that mean? What it means is that I think COO roles have got uniquely
00:10:23
Speaker
interesting and also challenging. And the reason for that is sort of three dynamics I tend to pull out. The first is that you have to have a very broad skill set.
00:10:39
Speaker
Okay, you're a bit of a jack of all trades. You might be a master runner, might have come through finance or whatever, but you need to be a jack of all trades. You need to be across legal, compliance, finance, HR, sales operations, et cetera. And that's a lot in itself.
00:11:00
Speaker
The second is that all of the stakeholders in your business are your priority and relevance, whether it might be the finances, equity or debt, it will be your executive team, it will be clients, it will be regulator authorities. They all are very important to you, so you're across all of those. So that was the second thing. And then, you know, it's the relentlessness of the role in terms of
00:11:30
Speaker
Operations covers everything. Think of something in a company that isn't operational. Everything is operational, right? So if you put all those three things in, it means there's a COO, every day you gain new things coming across your desk and it doesn't go away. So you have to find a way
00:11:50
Speaker
As you start, if you question about daily, monthly, quarterly, you have to find a way to sort of see the wood for the trees through that and prioritise, because in theory, the job's limitless. But you might say the same about a chief is that, well, it's even worse for them because they're sitting right at the top of the tree and everything's their responsibility.
00:12:08
Speaker
It is on one level, but they delegate out into staffing and different roles, all of which might be a COO to manage that. And if they're smart, they focus on what they're really good at and then get great people in to support them in other areas.
00:12:26
Speaker
COO roles just have this tendency to expand out and, you know, we'll maybe come onto it later on, but one of my strong recommendations for it, especially at SME level around COO type roles, other than do you need one, is to be really clear about what the scope is and what the priorities are so that it doesn't just become all encompassing and you end up doing lots of things not very well.
00:12:52
Speaker
As you were talking, it made me think about this time that we were doing a financing for Yapster, and I went and met this charismatic, must have been like mid-50s private equity executive, probably worth 100 million quid personally, rent this probability fund. And he invited me to his office because he was interested in Yapster.
00:13:14
Speaker
And he wanted to see me like that week. And he met me at half seven in his office because it was the only time I could see him. He was a German guy. And he said to me kindly, but he was authoritative, really powerful man. He said to me, listen, if this is the only time you can see me as CEO without needing to see anything else or without like my hunch would be that you're not doing this right.
00:13:43
Speaker
It was before EOS had come into my life. I grew up in a law firm where we did the billable hour and working every second that God sent is how he got promoted. And, you know, what I lack in brains, I make up an enthusiasm, as you well know. So I've always thrown my body and time at problems. It was the first time someone had stopped me and was like,
00:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, like your calendar, the mess that is your calendar suggests that like the way I like our investee companies to run via their CEO, isn't this? I remember I sort of brushed it off at the time. I was like, it's easy for you to say you're worth a hundred million quid and here I am in the struggle. But it's interesting now as when I look at, when I asked to meet
00:14:33
Speaker
CEOs and stuff and they just can't get you in for four or five weeks. I find myself thinking back to that and but it's interesting that some of these great CEOs do end up bringing finance leaders or an operations leader and then just pushing that pain to them and then that person has to be similarly self-aware to your point to not be swamped. Yeah and you have to be careful how you do it though because people will sometimes bring in whether it be a COO or other professional to
00:15:02
Speaker
to help them and think, right, well, they can take responsibility, accountability for certain areas, and that means it's off my plate. It's to say that, but then you've got to think, actually, in reality, am I prepared to let those things go? And another one of my recommendations for SME leaders who are looking at a COO type role or any other role like that is getting it through a little bit. Okay, well,
00:15:29
Speaker
This is what I wanted. Here's the role, here's the scope. Okay, well, if I'm actually giving responsibility elsewhere and authority for those things, I'm happy with that. Actually, it might take a load off me, but I'm not ready to let go. Because if you're not, why are you bringing in somebody you're just going to clash with and you're going to double up on projects?
00:15:52
Speaker
It's interesting because you're right, I see two things. I see that, not being willing to let go of the vine. And then the other thing I see a lot, which is what I was guilty of, is abdication rather than delegation. So you bring in someone that you think is going to solve all your problems as COO, and then you hand everything off to them. You never really knew how to do it right to begin with. You're not particularly good managers to begin with. So you basically just hope that person does everything the way to drive the outcomes that you're looking for.
00:16:19
Speaker
They may, they may not, but as the CEO, you're absolutely not in control of that outcome. So it's interesting. People lunge either way, don't they? You know, the other thing you need to gain through is not only am I prepared to, you know, give over responsibility for certain areas, but am I prepared to give authority? Because what will happen, one of the challenges of being a COO is at the end of the day, you're not the top dog. Right, there's someone above you,
00:16:47
Speaker
And what you will find until you've built up a level of trust and gravitas in an organization is that staff and other execs will sometimes go above you or around you because they'll ultimately want to go to the top decision maker, either because what you're saying they don't like or whatever it might be.
00:17:12
Speaker
And, you know, so again, if you're going to get value from money out of a CEO and you're going to have a coherent executive team, you need to really ask yourself as a business leader, an owner, a founder, you know, am I prepared to actually let these things go and have a certain level of discipline and trust so that we're streamlined the way we work together?
00:17:40
Speaker
Otherwise what happens is you've got continuous conversations going with different people at different levels in the company. And although I think it's super important that staff feel that they can talk to anyone in the company, it can become pretty inefficient and ineffective if it's rife all the time.
00:18:00
Speaker
Totally.
Understanding Vistage
00:18:01
Speaker
So would you mind talking a bit now about your your visage practice? Because what I'd love to do is transition to taking a lot of that experience and we've only scratched the surface of it and an understanding what elements of it are you finding is most relevant now to SME leaders. So would you mind giving people a sense of practice sort of where it is and what I've seen. I've been doing my own thing there for three years. I left JLL after 20 years, which was the right time. I wasn't part of the big retirement, I promise.
00:18:30
Speaker
But I was part of the big take a rest and refresh. And I know I've got four strings in my bow. I do my own business consulting work for clients across many sectors, including real estate and for jail out in the past.
00:18:49
Speaker
I do my own private coaching and consulting work focusing on CEOs, COOs in particular because of my background and finance directors. I do some network so if you want to just work with a better buildings partnership and then
00:19:10
Speaker
I've got Vistage, and Vistage are, for those who aren't familiar with them, are business learning and coaching organizations. World leading organizations started around 70 years ago in the US, now in 35 countries and have 45,000 CEO and leaders as part of their plant base, as part of their network.
00:19:34
Speaker
And so I'm at the moment building up a business with them. And this just has four key offerings for clients. And it's quite a unique balance in my personal view. The first is that we build peer advisory groups of non-competing SME leaders. So those groups tend to be eight to 16 in number.
00:20:03
Speaker
and they act like a private advisory board. So that's the first thing, it's really key differentiator. The second is we do executive coaching of those individuals.
00:20:15
Speaker
The third is that we have a world leading speaker and research program and events program. This is part of my point about learning and about, you know, developing yourself continuously. So that's a real, real theme. And we only work with leaders
00:20:37
Speaker
who are constantly looking to improve themselves and be open and learn. And then the fourth thing is obviously the network. So there's four elements to what we do in Vestige and we focus on SMEs. It is not for everybody, Rob. It's like EOS. It's a fantastic offering for the right type of client at the right time.
00:21:02
Speaker
Where is your group physically based? What type of folks geographically and otherwise are best suited to get involved with your group? So my group is focused from where I'm based down in Hampshire up and into London. So it's a reasonably broad geographical spread.
00:21:20
Speaker
The reason for that is because I want diversity in my group and where you're based is part of that. And of course you've got different types of industry which are based in different types of locations. So it's a reasonably broad spread, but it's within about an hour, hour and a half travel of wherever anybody actually is.
00:21:39
Speaker
Fantastic. Okay, cool. So now that you're a part of SME Land, what are some of the themes that you're just seeing? What are the things that you just observe again and again that either are similar or different to running something like JLL? Well, that's a big question, Rob. It's been a great journey. I've learned an awful lot.
00:22:03
Speaker
Actually, in big businesses, although they're big, they're often made up of lots of small business units and JLL certainly was. So you actually had more appreciation of the SME type mindset than might be typically obvious, certainly in JLL with the way it operated. But of course, what you don't have is the
00:22:28
Speaker
infrastructure, the level of resourcing, the organizational structures. Some of these are positives and some of these are negatives. It's a different ball game. What I see in SMEs is I see real invention. I see genuine entrepreneurship. It's interesting because people talk about entrepreneurship as if that's just having ideas.
00:22:56
Speaker
That's ideas. You can have ideas sitting in your shed. It's no use unless you implement it. Entrepreneurs implement, and that's what SME leaders do. I think sometimes in bigger organizations, even though they've got the resource, they can't implement as quickly. They're not as nimble. So I see faster decision-making typically. These are generalizations, but typically in SMEs, I see a little bravery.
00:23:22
Speaker
You know, I was advising or coaching a client yesterday, he was going, going home, looking to develop a quite an institutional style board and to bring in lots of resources into his SME business.
00:23:41
Speaker
And, you know, yes, it's his decision and we had some really good discussions around it, but an element that was saying without wishing to be negative was okay. If you thought about other options there, do you need to do that now or do you need to give that maybe five years time when you're, you know, when you're a big.
00:24:01
Speaker
But that's great, it's fascinating. And I think actually one of the tricks with whether you're doing consulting or coaching or whether it's via a vestige is how to be positive but in a balanced way. Because you don't want to be a naysayer that says, oh, hold on, oh, be careful. And sometimes in bigger businesses, without the meaning to it, it always can encourage conservatism because people don't want to get things wrong.
00:24:31
Speaker
I think in SMEs, people spend less time worried about getting things wrong and more time thinking about what can we do next and what's the best way to do it. You're so right.
SMEs: Operational Strengths and Weaknesses
00:24:40
Speaker
One of my observations has been that most SMEs are actually really badly run. And I say this in a loving way.
00:24:51
Speaker
Because it drives this crazy survival of the fittest in that what you see is a lot of the businesses that thrive have high enough gross margins and dynamic enough markets that they play in that it can cover a multitude of operating sins. When we first start working with SMBs putting in the entrepreneurial operating system, we explain that we use a scientific but subjective scoring system of zero to 100% strong across six components.
00:25:19
Speaker
And a company that graduates and stop using an implementer has got through 80% strong across the six components, vision, people, data, issues, process, traction. That's all there is to it. But you'll have these great businesses with these quite wealthy entrepreneurs sometimes that are like 15, 20% strong in some cases through four of the six components. And it's like,
00:25:42
Speaker
They would be absolutely flying at 80% strong across their six components. But they're doing pretty well at 15, 20% strong. It's really interesting. And the ones that stumble into businesses where they're lower margin, harder markets, and then operate at 20% strong, they're the ones that die and never hear about it.
00:26:04
Speaker
you know what I mean? But like the entrepreneurial world actually has loads of brilliant entrepreneurs running quite dysfunctional businesses because they've just got this incredible DNA that allows them to in some cases thrive in a crazy way. Yeah and look the people are different and that's the reason why you get new businesses and new ideas and you know there's lots of different ways of growing a business
00:26:29
Speaker
And that's a good thing. And there's also here, we use the term work-life balance or workflow, but people have different views on what good life is, what good business is. I mean, my view is as long as your client service is high quality and adds real value,
00:26:57
Speaker
and that the client gets that and you make money from it. How you're spinning the cogs in the background is slightly secondary, especially when you're initially building the business up.
00:27:09
Speaker
But actually, if a person, rather than just wanting to run it their own way and are kind of happy with whatever size they want to get to, if they actually ultimately want it to be bigger, want to be the dominant market player, want a fantastic exit,
00:27:33
Speaker
then you have to backfill and you have to make sure that the machine that drives this client service is really efficient and effective. And you may not have resourced everything, you may not have covered every base, but you need to be aware of it. And interestingly, one of the things that
00:27:51
Speaker
we do in this stage that we really focus on is that journey of how you want to grow your business, what you want it to look like. I know that's what you do in EOS and that's what the PCMS corporate finance guys do as well. It's the whole journey. And if you go back to where we started with PCMS,
00:28:12
Speaker
then I know that when they're looking at the exit value on a company, they know that there are certain pieces of information or certain operational things that if you aren't on top of those, even if they don't, they're not particularly interesting to you, they don't stimulate you as the boundaries or as the visionary behind your company. If you're not on top of them, you're going to earn less money, not just in profit right now, but in terms of your exit value.
00:28:41
Speaker
Sooner or later, whether you do it yourself or you get someone else to do it, an external advisor or a COO, use the EOS system. You know, if you want to maximize the financial value and I think the client impact, then you need to address most areas of a traditional business operating model.
00:29:04
Speaker
What I really like about what you do is my understanding of it. I mean you personally and then what you do through the Visage Platform is that it's very focused on helping the individual entrepreneur really get what they want from their life with and through their business. EOS is designed to help entrepreneurs get what they want, but I at least in particular personally
00:29:25
Speaker
very much focus on the greater good of the business. I think about helping the business kind of independent of the current owner's tenure of ownership. So I really like it that they might choose to use EOS as a toolkit to make the business the best it can be. But I think that peer learning that they do with you, the individual coaching so that they have a happy and fulfilling life during and after their tenure of ownership of the business that I might be working with,
00:29:50
Speaker
is really powerful. I see that as quite distinct actually. I didn't appreciate the value of
00:29:58
Speaker
coaching and diverse peer networks as much as I probably should have when I was on that eight year journey with the Appster. I'm the same. And when I was at JLL, certainly I could have done with some coaching myself, certainly in the latter part of my career there. That's interesting. And I think that's the case with a lot of zero type people, which is you're so busy
00:30:24
Speaker
all the time you're so busy helping other people and making sure that others are taken care of sometimes you can neglect yourself and that's a false economy both on the personal point of view and from a business point of view and you know if i look at you rather like you with your journey now i've sort of i suppose i've been in something much more over to being more focused on individuals and i really enjoy that and i've been quite
00:30:52
Speaker
pleasantly surprised how much you can really help somebody. And you're not there to tell them what to do. I mean, that's more of a mentoring or a consulting type. And sometimes that's appropriate. And often clients will say, well, what would you do?
The Role of Coaching and Peer Networks
00:31:10
Speaker
Stop asking me questions. What would you do? And you have to say, I'm not you. And I'm not in your business. I'm not an expert on your business. But I've done something similar, or you should maybe look at these other options.
00:31:21
Speaker
More often than not, when you're doing pure coaching, you're helping them to become better, to create new habits, and that singular focus, one on one with somebody, or in a business group where you've effectively got 15 people coaching each other in the room.
00:31:41
Speaker
is incredibly powerful. And the interesting thing is that when you're dealing with people who are founders of businesses, these are super smart people. They're brave people. They're very resourceful. But you can still really help them by asking the simplest questions or getting to reflect on something or increasing their self-awareness about something. And with most coaching sessions that I do, I always ask at the end, you know, could you get value from that?
00:32:11
Speaker
And I promise mostly they say, no, that was great. It's fantastic. And when I'm doing my notes, I think.
00:32:18
Speaker
We didn't necessarily make giant leaps there. They're often baby steps or whatever, but it sort of lifts the clouds a bit or it provides some clarity and it allows them then to move on and solve all sorts of different things. Most of the time, or a lot of the time, they've already got their answer or the idea in their head. They just want to sense check it or discuss it with you. So I've found it
00:32:44
Speaker
Going from very macro, which is what I used to do looking across operations and thinking, how do you get your head around this? What's the priority? Now your priority is the individual. And I find that really stimulating myself and pretty impactful.
00:33:01
Speaker
That's awesome, Rob. I know we're coming up on the time you've got allocated, but before I let you go, you're working with an entrepreneur, small business. You've helped them unpack what they want to get from their life, think about what their skills are, maybe what some of the gaps are in their organization. And they're ready now to go to market and they want to hire someone. And they've decided they don't want to hire enough. They don't want to promote an up and comer from within their organization.
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah. For whatever reason. So they go out to market and they find someone that they really like, but that's never worked in a small company before. And they ask you to maybe go for a coffee with this person coming out of the big company, looking to come into a small business like, you know, my old business, the Appster, or one of the businesses in your vintage group.
00:33:44
Speaker
How would you think about having that coffee with that person coming from their big job in their big company to get clear in your own mind as whether they're likely to be a fit for the new gig?
00:33:57
Speaker
So just to clarify, I'm having coffee with the potential.
Transitioning from Corporations to SMEs
00:34:01
Speaker
With the candor, yeah, with the person. Yeah, the visionary founder has fallen in love with this ex-COO from Megagorp. And the Megagorp person's like, this is going to be so exciting. And they're all ready to do it. And you just, they've asked you for some reason to go have a sense check. The first thing I'm going to be coffeeed up here, Rob, because the first thing is I'm actually going to be talking to the founder of the business to really understand what their thinking is.
00:34:25
Speaker
And how do you explain this role? What have you said are the responsibilities and the authority, et cetera? And you and I both know that in many cases there may not have been a huge amount of detail there, but you need to know the context. Having got that context, whatever it might be,
00:34:45
Speaker
then I'm, initially, I'm very much looking at the individual, the personality, because for me, someone coming into COO role as I rank it, it's personality and skill set and experience comes above
00:35:03
Speaker
the more the operational side in itself, I'm looking at that individual to say, do I think that they're going to fit the culture? Do they understand the culture either that they're moving into or that they're going to be asked to help create? Then having sort of rubbed below the surface on them as an individual, I'm going to want to understand how hands on they are.
00:35:27
Speaker
how macro micro they are because typically when you do a COO role in a big company you have to have the ability to do both macro and micro. You spend a lot of time at the macro level looking at things holistically and you've got teams around you that can do the doing for you.
00:35:46
Speaker
When you go into an SME, you got to roll your sleeves up much more. And people often say they're prepared to do that or they'll say, yeah, I used to do that when I was 25. If you're not 25 anymore, typically when you're coming out of a big organization. So you got to understand their appetite and their willingness to do that. Some people just want to get back to the cold face and they really want to do that.
00:36:08
Speaker
So that would be the next thing that I'd be sense checking. And then I think I'd be looking at whether or not I felt the individual is best off in a full-time role as the COO, or whether actually they'll add more value if they were fractional and they were helping to bring other people up through the organization.
00:36:36
Speaker
or maybe in a net position. Because there's more than one way of getting the COO experience you want. You don't necessarily have to employ the person full time and pay lots of money for it and take the risk of taking a big hitter out of a big company into a much smaller company that has a totally different cadence and culture.
00:37:01
Speaker
And then they bring, they actually help you develop that internal talent that I dismissed at the beginning of the question. That's an interesting approach. Well, yes, to an extent. I mean, and I think a lot of small businesses, they thrive through bringing talented people through. For sure. Absolutely. You've done the hard yards and lived it and breathed it. But they often need
00:37:23
Speaker
somebody to help and guide and advise them. And yes, if a founder is very paternal in their approach, rather, they'll give guidance, but it's not the same as getting external. I mean, one of the things that I do, for example, in my coaching, my private coaching, I coach a number of COOs who happen to be often younger and are on the sort of early part of their journey.
00:37:51
Speaker
And, you know, they don't need me full time to be in their SME. They just need me to spend a couple of hours a month with that person or whatever and just help them and help give them self confidence and guide them and give them a different perspective. But if you want to be more full gas on it, then you might say, OK, I'd like someone with CIO type skills as a net on my board, because I feel that for the next transition of growth in my business, I need to just, you know, I need to really
00:38:21
Speaker
create better foundations in my business. Or, you know, there's the fractional approach, as I said, which is, you know, I mean, we use the word fractional as part-time, isn't it? That's what we're doing. That's more prevalent these days, I think, than it used to be. And a lot of companies, SMEs, either can't afford a full-time CEO, especially if they're getting someone who's maybe been used to being, you know, pretty healthily rewarded out of a big company.
00:38:49
Speaker
or it's not the best use of their investment capital at that moment in time. They're better putting it into, you know, a creative person in marketing or whatever it might be. But if you want the COO support and advice, there's more than one way of getting there. Well, I've so enjoyed the conversation. Are you happy for people to reach out to you if I put your email in the show notes? Absolutely would be delighted. I'll certainly do that.