This video explains whether a COO or CEO is a better option for your company.
I talk a lot about building a real company that can run itself and that doesn’t require your daily involvement. I really do believe that’s the ultimate goal of business. You want to build this asset that can generate wealth for you and it becomes an investment in the sense that you don’t have to actively participate in it every day to make this thing run and operate.
The goal for many is to get a president or a CEO or someone to run this company. But, here is an alternative thought. What you really need is a COO. You could be CEO or president, they’re almost interchangeable terms in most cases. You could be the CEO and still create a pretty exciting, amazing lifestyle and still generate a lot of wealth and not completely relinquish all of your duties within the company.
The number one position that you need in your company so that you have some time and freedom to get away is a COO. It’s a Chief Operating Officer. This is the individual that essentially runs operations.
Now, when you’re smaller, your operations manager generally isn’t the same person that can grow into becoming your COO. COO is typically a term you’d use for a bigger organization. So, your operations manager when you’re doing $500,000 or $1 million probably isn’t going to be the COO of the company when you’re doing $10 million, unless that individual is really learning and studying and growing as an individual. A lot of times you’re going to have to replace that individual and bring in someone that has some experience in that area.
The COO is going to run operations. They’re going to do a lot of hiring. They’re going to do a lot of firing. They’re going to make sure the processes and procedures are in place. They make the engine of the company run, whereas the CEO, which might be you, is more the strategy, the strategic thinking, the big ideas, the moving the company forward, leading, and recruiting. A lot of those roles, they can take 60, 70, 80 hours a week, but most of the time they don’t really. What I mean by that is if you have a great COO, operations manager, you as CEO could really get away from your company for three weeks. You could get away from your company for four weeks and the company will still keep turning and running.
I created the video because it’s very easy to think you’ve got to hire a president or CEO to run your company. You believe that until you get to that point, you won’t have built a real company and that’s not necessarily the case. What I’m suggesting is that what you really want to focus on is operations and then hiring a COO-type person to run the operations of the company. You don’t have to completely walk away from this thing to be a great company that can sort of run itself to be a real company. Rather, you could put yourself in a position where all you do is the core CEO-type activities of strategy and some money and key hires and things of that sort.
When that’s all you have to do within your business, now you have a lot of time to do other things. You have a lot of time to go on trips, a lot of time to be involved in your family’s life, or to start another business or to do something else. Now you’re not consumed by the daily grind of everything that goes into building and running a company. Think in terms of COO versus CEO.
