Welcome to the Second in Command Podcast, produced by the C.O. Alliance and brought to

its founder Cameron Herald.

In the second-in-command podcast, we talked to top COOs who share the insights, strategies,

and tactics that made them the chief behind the chief.

And now here's your host, Cameron Harold.

So I thought I would just riff a little bit today on the role of the

C.O. and how to actually go out and recruit and hire and retain and

on board a great C.O. I've been asked a lot over the years to help people

with that.

So first off, a COO really is the second in command to the CEO.

So it can have different titles.

You could have a director of operations or a general manager, maybe a VP of operations or perhaps a

C.O. but the chief operating officer or chief operations officer tends to be the second in command

to the CEO. Often you'll have the second command and they may play the CFO role or CMO role.

The reality is the COO takes on all of the roles that the CEO does not like or is not good at and they try to become almost that

yin and yang partnership with the CEO. So for definitions purposes on today's podcast, the

COO let's talk about it as the second in command, and again, it's title agnostic.

So you want to be careful with the titles that you give out in your organization because the

higher the title is, more the expectations of the person have of what their role is and also the compensation demands they start having as well.

So be careful with giving around titles that are too big too soon.

You also want your second and command to be able to earn some of those titles.

So if you can see you know if you're a smaller company, you know maybe a million two million revenue, give them a director of operations title first.

...