Welcome to the Second in Command Podcast, produced by the COO Alliance and brought to

you by 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.

I've had to do this with so many clients over the years and I'll tell you what I tell them first and I'll tell you where I learned a second.

What I tell them is once you listen to all the reasons why they can't fire somebody, I say if you got a phone call right now and you

just found out that Bob had just been hit by a truck and was dead, you'd have to replace him.

It's fucking dead. Like, sorry, you don't have any time. So you'd quickly make a list of the five things you'd have to do to cover for his ass and you'd start recruiting, right? So what are the five things you would do? Make that list, fire them, start working on the five things and

gay up recruiting.

Where I learned this was one morning at 1,800 got junk, 8 o'clock in the morning, the phone

rang and I got a phone call and Brian got a phone call at the same time and we both turned to look at each other and I was speaking to the

front the Portland franchise owners general manager and Brian was speaking to the

Portland franchise owner's wife and we found out that he just committed suicide.

And we didn't have a plan for what would happen if a franchisee died because we only had 12 franchisees.

So we weren't at the 330 franchises yet. We didn't have systems for this. So we literally Brian broke down

crying because he'd known him forever and it helped recruit the guy and for me I was pretty new so I went into

C. O.O. Roll and I went into the boardroom I said what are all the things we need to do to cover for this?

Realized Brian couldn't even handle that so I'm like you go home and decompress

I'll figure out the plan and within a week we had the whole thing like completely operational but to your point like you just have to rip off the bandaid right and like like a bandaid you know and guys understand this well I guess women still have a little tiny hairs, but like when you just got to rip the fucker off, man.

It doesn't make any of the hairs hurt any less when you're ripping the thing off, right?

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