The Powerhouse Role That Is Growing in Popularity

0:00So today we're going to talk about the powerhouse role that is growing in popularity. Do you know what the powerhouse role is, Neil? Of course you don't. Let me tell you what it is. So I've been talking about it. I have a strong sense you're going to hire once I drop more stuff on you and I keep bugging you about it. So let me guess. Can I guess? Yes. Chief of staff. That's it. That's it. Because you always bug me like you need a chief of staff. Yeah. Well, I don't. I bug you right now, but I am getting more and more convinced. I'll probably in three months or so, if it continues on this way, I'll be like, dude, dude, dude, look at all the.

0:35things we did blah blah blah and you're like yeah yeah yeah and so i started telling um sayed and yaniv about it our mutual friends and they're like yeah yeah yeah we got a chief of staff too right and and say it's like yeah get me a chief of staff help me help me and then um so let me rewind a second so i i one of my favorite ceo books is this book called the great ceo within and it's written by this guy matt moshari i think i'm pronouncing it correctly so he coached naval ravikant he coached Sam Altman, right? So the CEO of OpenAI, right? So he coached some badasses. And he's a VC now, he doesn't really need to work at all.

1:08And he just coaches because he likes it, right? And so, you know, Neil used to be like, if you're so good as a coach, and why are you a coach? Well, some people just like it, right? So anyway, this Matt guy... I still believe in that. If you're so well off, you know, why are you charging people for coaching? And if you want to coach, be a mentor or a coach and do it for free, if you're really that well off. I don't know if he charges. I'm not sure. But anyway, going back to Matt for a second. So the book Great CEO Within is awesome. He says this thing where I'm not going to work with you. So I'm not going to coach you.

1:41I'm sure he gets a lot of requests for coaching, right? And I'm not going to coach you unless you work with the chief of staff. I was like, that's a pretty big requirement. And so I started digging in more into it. And if you Google Matt Moshari, chief of staff, you'll see a write up. There's like a Google doc on why you need a chief of staff, right? Right. And the whole thing is this, a chief of staff is someone that's basically a smoke jumper. And what I mean by that is someone that you can put into any situation, like special situations. Right. And usually what you would do is you would hire someone for like management consulting because they have that strong background.

2:12They have a structured background. They have that training. Right. And they can jump into any situation. You know how to create financial modeling and all that, too. And so I was like, OK, that sounds good. And so, but I didn't do anything with it for a couple of years. And then recently, um, you know, hired a chief of staff. I looked for someone more junior than I thought had super high potential and seems super entrepreneurial to me. Cause the chief of staff is someone that you eventually want to put into like, um, running a department or running a business unit. Right. And I saw someone that had high upside.

2:39So I'm like, you know, I'm going to go ahead and gamble here. And, um, that's what we did. And so far, um, this person just tackling everything that I throw at her and coming with me, coming at me with more ideas. and I'm just like, man, this is good because it feels like such a lift off my shoulders. And it's not an executive assistant. I'll just put it to you that way. I used to think it was a glorified executive assistant. You can do that, but you're not going to get the most upside there. I just highly recommend that you go read the Matt Moshari document on chief of staff and then you'll figure out how to do it.

3:10And there's actually a firm that helps you get them. All right, so I will go and read it, but I don't want to read it. What are the main things? What are the main reasons why someone needs to actually hire? Like if you had to give like the top three reasons. So to me, it's so one, it's an extension of yourself. So imagine you had a mini Neo Patel with you, right? So a mini Neo Patel that has super high upside, that's very trainable, that's super open mind that will bring new ideas to you. Right. So number one, it's a, it's a, it's a mere version of yourself, right? Um, two, this person, if this role works out, you would create chiefs, like eventually they're going to move on to another role, but you want to keep the chief of staff role going.

3:48And so you will have a squad of chief of staff, right? This almost becomes like your business ops team where they go in and they tackle special projects. Right. And, you know, you and I, like younger, you and I would be like, oh, there's special projects all the time. Right. These are the people that can tackle it without you needing to tell them what to do all the time. So that's the second thing. Right. And then the third thing I think ultimately is this kind of ties in with number one, but it's you're, you're creating leverage. It like, here's the thing, the chief of staff, they're with me in almost every single meeting.

4:16They see everything that I do. They see every decision that I make. And it was a little risky in the beginning. I was like, okay, this person's a little, um, like they're going to see everything. They're going to see all my numbers. They're going to see the tough conversations I have with people. But in the, in the two or three months or whatever, since it's been, it's like, they're like, I, they're seeing the pattern recognition with how I do things and they're doing it with their own spin, but kind of my way. And I think that's super valuable. Look, all right. Maybe it's worth hiring a chief of staff.

4:43I still won't do it. but in three months, if you tell me that you're getting amazing results from it, I may be a little bit more open to it. But what I look at is a lot that you're describing. I don't want like a mini me. I want someone who's better than me at the stuff I suck at. And that's, you just hire people who are really, you know, good at filling in the gaps. But it also could be that my company's too small and we don't need to achieve the stuff. Maybe when we get to like double, triple, quadruple size maybe i'll need one then yeah the and also the reason i'm bringing this topic up right now is because we're seeing more and more talk about this on twitter for example you see a lot of ceos talking about like the chief of staff right so it's becoming more popular now i used to ignore it until i'm just gonna give it a shot right so in three months or so we might come back to this and neil might say hey like how's that going right now i might say hey didn't work out i had to move on right or i might say oh my god i need more right so we'll see anyway that's it for today please don't forget to rate review subscribe one actual thing is before we go keep in mind eric is a ceo of a company i'm not maybe if you're like in a managing role like a ceo or something like that a chief of staff may be much more valuable than someone like me who's not in a day-to-day managing that is a very good point all right everyone please don't forget to rate review subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow