How to Find and Hire the Perfect COO or Operations Specialist

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0:32I can't wait to see you there. Welcome back to the Jasmine Starr Show, a place where you talk about business, go-to-market strategies. And today we are going to be talking about finding a secret weapon, an ace in your pocket, an operator to bring your business to its highest potential and alleviate so much overwhelm as you are growing and scaling your business. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about how I was in the process of a search. I was looking for something very specific. I searched for a highly specialized doctor. I waited eight months to get on her patient list. She didn't take my insurance, so I paid out of pocket to see her.

1:13I drove from Newport Beach to Manhattan Beach through traffic, taking hours out of my day because she was the best of the best. She had built a highly covetable brand. Now, she was part of a private group practice. So what does this mean? There was a time where she worked in a hospital and took my insurance. That's actually how I found out about her. But somehow, my luck, she ended up going out and starting her own private practice. It was her and three or four other doctors. And what these three or four other doctors did is they got together and they decided, we're gonna share a front office manager and we're gonna share our ends.

1:51And we're gonna, instead of working for the man, we're gonna come together and have our own private practice. And that worked well for her for a couple of years. But there I was in her office and she admitted to me, Jasmine, I want to build my own practice. Now, I'm not going to get into the details, but let me tell you, she's a female doctor. And we're sitting there having this conversation. I was like, we are up and close to my business and I'm going to get up and close to your business. She literally had no idea. And I'd been working with her, goodness gracious, like eight months by this point in time.

2:20And so we'd kind of gotten to know each other. I was seeing her once a month for just highly specialized work. And I was talking to her. And when she said, I really have a dream of going out on my own. And I was like, oh. So then I started asking questions. In fact, I asked a billion questions. And I think it's somewhere along the line, she was just like, this patient has a lot of questions. I was asking her, have you ever been out on your own before? What are the exact financials of what you're trying to do? Are you trying to lease or buy your building? Do you want other doctors to work as part of your practice?

2:57Do you have somebody to manage front office and kind of be like a concierge when people get there? What does it look like for you to hire an RN? Does it need to be an RN? Are they part-time? Are they full-time? How much does a startup cost? How much does it cost to buy a chair or a table, like a patient table with stirrups, right? We're getting all into details. And so once she's answering all of these questions, and she's probably thinking to herself, what in the world did I get myself into? I started to share strategies. I told her, hey, this is what I do. I build businesses. I empower entrepreneurs to go out and take big risks, not foolish risks, calculated strategic risks.

3:37I talked to her about marketing. I talked about how is she going to take her client book from this private practice to her own private, privatist of practice. And then I begged her to get her financials in order. Because when I was asking her how much she's getting after her insurance payments, how many of her clients or patients are paying in cash, how many of these people are going to stay with her as she moves? Is she going to stay in Manhattan Beach? Is she going to go a little further south? How many people are actually going to follow her? What is the cost of being in business? And she said, I just dream, I dream of buying a building with my office in it.

4:14And I was like, oh, doc, I like that dream. But are you sure you want to buy as you're just starting for the first time ever? Because you're no longer going to be a doctor. You are going to be an entrepreneur with a medical practice. That's different. You have to now become an entrepreneur. And where you went to what, I don't even know, eight, 10 years of school, plus her residency, plus her specialization, years of training her to be a doctor. And now she wants to go in and be a business owner with no context of what it is. And so I had said, hey, here's a great place to start. You need an office manager.

4:53You basically need somebody in operations, somebody who's going to help move the ball down the field while you are taking care of patients, staying in your superpower. And she looked across from me in one of those like wheelie chairs with her clipboard and a laptop in her lap. And she looked at me, lowered her glasses and said, I don't know how to find an office manager. And I was like, oh, okay, let me show you. And then I brought out LinkedIn on my phone. And I thought to myself, huh, there's a bigger question here. There is a bigger underlying current that I have experienced. Now, here's the thing.

5:30You might be sitting here being like, just in Jasmine, I don't care about your personal problems. I don't care about your doctor. You might not even be looking for an office manager. But soon, and I am talking about very soon, I'm gonna suspect that you're gonna need somebody to handle more of the operations in your business. Why? Because you got into the business to run the business, to stand in your place of power, to deliver on your purpose, to do something that you're really excited or wildly passionate about. What you didn't get in business of, which is the sad reality for many people, is you got into business and you gotta run the business.

6:05What is the business of your business? So I interviewed over 25 seven-figure entrepreneurs in preparation of this podcast episode. And then I interviewed a lot of other eight-figure entrepreneurs and six-figure entrepreneurs. I interviewed a lot of people. But I was really focusing this conversation on seven-figure entrepreneurs. And I started asking them, I said, listen, I am your Latina fairy godmother. And I have a magic wand. And I can grant anything to happen in your business. What could I just, bing, what could I do right now in your business? And it doesn't have to make sense. I am literally telling, I can make up dragons to slay if you tell me that that is a thing that you would need.

6:44What is the magic wand in your business? And if you could believe it, more than 60 % of the people said they were looking for somebody to help them with their operations. Why? Okay, well, for most CEOs and visionaries and founders, somebody who is handling operations, well, when somebody's handling that, it keeps you in your place of power. There is a very clear line of I can create the vision and I can build the culture and I could talk about strategies, but actually the minutia, the doing, the planning, the assigning, the who's doing what, who's on first, who's up at bat, who's warming up, who was our pinch hitter, all of that, that should be handled by somebody who is a specialist in operations.

7:25Because when we start a business, we have like a grand vision. And then on the back of the grand vision, we realize we are all the hats. We're doing customer service. We're the janitor. We do marketing. We're front-facing. We're back-facing. We're fulfillment. We're shipping. We're support. And you're like, great. Okay, I got this thing off the ground. But then we grow. And that's amazing. It's what we want. We want to grow. We want to scale. But with that comes more people and more processes. And the more people you add, the more processes you need. But a lot of times what happens is we're like, we need to hire and we need to hire fast because we're scaling.

8:01But without the processes in place, we end up doing a lot of the same things over and over. There's a lot of miscommunication. There's a lot of wasted time. There's a lot of unnecessary meetings. And then you become overwhelmed and you become totally distracted because you're caught in the weeds. And then you raise your head up and you realize, oh, it's me. I'm the bottleneck to my business. everybody is coming to me asking me all these questions and all these things and then you're like I'm pressured I need to hire somebody I need to hire anybody and so all of a sudden you get to this place where you're like I know I need to hire somebody for operations I actually don't know exactly what I'm looking for I've been there but one thing that I'm going to come straight out and tell you is if you got your business to this point I firmly believe you know how to ask questions This episode is all about asking questions that will help you find that coveted third arm, that Oz behind the curtain, the person who loves organization and systems, the person who loves to hear a crazy idea, put a lot of pressure on it, push back on it, and then say, all right, let me see how I can make it happen.

9:16And then this person comes back to you because they're all about operations and they'll say, you know that big crazy idea that you had? Well, I mapped it out. I think this is what we're going to need to make it happen. These are the people that we'll need. This is how long I think it'll take. This is how much I think it'll cost. Furthermore, based on your projections, this is how much I think we're going to make. That description. The person who comes in and does operations. Now, I get it. Maybe your business is at the size to where you're like, really, I really just need that like third arm. I'm actually not calling them my COO.

9:50No problem. I actually think that I love to hire somebody who's operationally minded. I love hiring somebody who doesn't come in as the COO or director of ops. That's totally fine. They don't come in as an office manager. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. It's not important to me. What I'm looking for is can you think operationally? Can you think in systems? Can you look at a project and say, hey, I think I can do it this way and it'll get us there faster, better, or less expensive? Can you think like that? Because if you do, ooh, you have a definite place on my team. I want to cultivate a team not just of doers, people who follow, plug in, plug out.

10:26I want people who are operationalist. These are people who look at a plan and say, I can optimize it. I can do it faster. I can do it better. I ask questions. And now I just think of like, how do I get from point A to point B in the fastest amount of time, doing it the most efficiently, doing it really well and have it be less expensive. So if you're here and you're like, that sounds like a dream. That is absolutely something that I want to do. We're going to do a little bit of a workshop. This podcast is going to look and sound a little bit different, but I'm literally just walking you through my process because I believe if you have just enough operation chops that you'll hear what I'm going to do.

11:00You'll watch what I'm saying, and then you can go and do it yourself. Do I think I'm a natural born operator? I wish I was. I wish I was. I have trained myself to be. I have learned. I have invested. I have studied. I have paid to be part of programs to help me think in this way when it is not natural. So I know enough about operations to be dangerous, but it is not something I love to do. And it takes so much dang time and energy for me to get there. So hiring my COO, our chief operating officer, has been the lifeblood of the business. I look at the way the business has grown, the way that the business currently is.

11:40There is just zero chance that I would have been able to build it without her because her operation skill set is off the freaking chart. So let's go through that process. I had hired a recruiter to help us look for a COO. We got very specific on what we were looking for and how we were looking for it. The goal for me was to find a COO that matched and countermatched my skill set. So I read an article as I was preparing to hire a COO. I read an article on Harvard Business Review, and they talked about how the role of COO is not as easy to identify the role as CMO, your chief marketing officer, or your CFO, your chief financial officer or your CTO, your chief technical officer.

12:28The COO really looks so different across any organization. Why? The COO is often complementary to the CEO. They have a totally different skill set. So when I was reading, they had said there's like seven types of CEOs or seven types of COOs. And like I went through each one and I was reading what type of COO relationship I would need to cultivate based on my skill set and what I wanted this person to really start driving within the organization. And so what I realized was the clear I got with my role description, the better candidates I would be able to source. So working with this recruiter taught me so much.

13:09She walked me through and said, Jasmine, I want you to list all the things you're doing. And then I want you to list all the things you want your COO to do. Now, I have to be honest here. There were some things that I wanted my COO to do. And I was really happy to be like, yeah, those are the things that I definitely don't want to be doing in the business. And I can't wait for somebody to operationalize this. Something like onboarding. I knew we needed to systematize our onboarding. We hire somebody. And at the time prior to this, I'd be like, I'd meet with them and I'd say, hi, this is what I want you to do.

13:42This is where you'll find everything. I wish you all the best. It's so great. I'll check in with 30 days. Here's our Slack. this is our onboarding meetings, boom, that was it. And I knew that we needed to systematize it so that when we hired somebody new, they would go in and they would watch a few videos like tutorials, SOPs. They would know about our core values. They would know about our mental health days. They would know about our vacation policy. I know we needed that. And I was like, I have no time to build it out. So that was one of the projects I said, when we hire the COO, this person's going to start with those projects.

14:10But then a crazy thing happened. Not only did she do the things that I wanted her to do, she came in and started finding projects and creating projects that I didn't even know we needed. And it seems like it's common sense, right? We needed a paternity leave and a maternity leave. We needed to know our vacation policy. She wanted to have an employee handbook. Why? So there was no confusion and we can ensure that every employee was treated the same way. So there is a skill set that somebody has to think about things operationally. And so I go back and when I think about what that job listing looked like and felt like, I was like, well, knowing what I know now, I probably would do things a little bit different.

14:48So as we get into this like quick brief workshop, I'm just going to walk you through a little bit of a process. So I went to a website called hireachiefofstaff.org. Now, a chief of staff is defined as quite honestly a mini version of the CEO. It's like the CEO's shadow. And in a very big organization, not the organization of my size, in a very big organization, most often, most often what you'll see is a traditional C-suite setup. You'll have the CEO at the top, the COO, and perhaps the CMO, the CFO, the CTO. Or depending on the structure, it would be the CEO and then the COO reports to them, the CTO reports to them, the CFO reports to them.

15:37Different org charts look different. But where does a chief of staff normally sit? A chief of staff becomes an echo of the CEO, which means that the chief of staff shares the voice of the CEO. Now, the chief of staff is not making big sweeping company decisions. The chief of staff is making sure that they're implemented, deployed, heard, facilitated. Think of a chief of staff that is above an executive assistant. A chief of staff is literally a mini version of the CEO, but that person is not responsible for operations. However, a lot of organizations, specifically startups, will put job listings on chief of staff or job listings like maybe on LinkedIn.

16:19So what I wanted to do is I wanted to show like a slightly different perspective of what I would do now. I would definitely go to a site that's looking for a chief of staff, especially if you have a smaller budget looking for somebody who's operations. Because traditionally, you pay chief of staff a lot of money, but not traditionally as much as you might a COO. Now, of course, they look different in different organizations, but I'm just walking you through my process. So there is a company. I know nothing about this company, but I'm going to highlight this company because, dang, I think they did it right.

16:46When I look back at my job description, I was like, girl, you can get a lot better. If you are looking for a job description to find a head of operations or a COO, I'm going to read what I had gone through. And I don't know this company. I don't know what they do. So please don't come at me if they do something sideways. But they have a job listing for a company called Getro. And they had listed this title as head of operations on Getro. As head of operations at Getro, you'll be crucial in making sure the company is working well, like an oiled machine, owning functional operations responsibilities like legal, accounting, financial planning, HR, culture, and hiring.

17:20You'll have 100 % transparency on everything happening in the company and will work side along Evan, our CEO, to make sure the company is running smoothly. You'll learn how to run a SaaS company at cashflow positive alongside executing an ambitious and innovative growth plan. You'll work with the best tools in the market, making sure your time is being spent in the highest leverage way possible. Y 'all, if you are trying to attract a COO, you want this. You want to identify who are they reporting to. So in this case at Getro, the COO is reporting to the CEO. A lot of COOs definitely prefer that.

17:55An innovative growth plan, a COO wants that. They want a complicated puzzle to take apart and put that together optimally. They want to work with the best tools in the market. They want to make sure, I like this, that the company that they work in, a SaaS company at cashflow positive. Nobody wants to get into a company that's like a little uncertain. They're listing all the things that somebody who's highly qualified, looking for security and has experience is going to dive into. Now, then they upleveled it. This I thought was really interesting. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it was fascinating because they didn't just say, this is the role you'll do.

18:29What they said in big text, you comma as a person. Now, the reason I'm saying this, the reason we're talking about this, the reason we're recording this is because as you're listening or watching, I want you to think about every job listing that you're putting out. And now I'm just going to be real. My bar is now Getro. I look at this, not only are they describing the role with crystal clear specificity, they're also talking about them as a human. So here's a few examples. You as a person, colon, then bullet point. You're a high energy, passionate person. You bring lightness to the rooms that you're in.

19:01Next point. You care about culture of the company that you work in, and you like being productive and making sure people are being treated well. you as a person you love being in the details of things your friends would describe you as being highly organized analytical a planner and driven you know how to get bleepity bleep done and you're going to have a very high throughput and i said the bleepity bleep because on this show we're family friendly and i don't need somebody coming at me in my dms and saying i was listening to my we were podcast with my six-year-old and now they know how to say bleepity bleep okay you practice committed ownership you pride yourself in rational arguments and often search for facts before making judgments.

19:35You thrive in situations of high uncertainty and even chaos. You understand how fast things can change in a startup and you're not someone who will jump ship when things get messy. They literally said, you know you're right for this job, not based on your skills yet. They said, you know you're right for the job if this is you. Then what they did is they went in to describe a week in the life. I want to describe this very clearly. A week in the life. Monday, I'm not going to read all of it. Like I literally, it was so good. But Monday morning, you'll start the week with an async. Now people say, Jasmine, when you say async or asynchronous, it means that asynchronous means you watch it on your own time.

20:17So you're going to start the week with an async Luma alignment with our CEO to prioritize open projects and flags any business risk with your mitigation plans. Because you have experience reporting to the CEO, you've been there and done it and you've seen it before. You'll be able to synthesize on all fronts and be open in less than five minutes of the content aimed at driving approval and awareness to ensure you get a quick response back. That's an average Monday. I read this and I was like, heck yes, this is the kind of CEO I want to be. I want to work with this person. Tuesday, you'll run a meeting with our external accountants and dig into the recent 30 % jump in software expenses that you saw last month.

20:51You're going to collaborate with the engineering team to understand the drivers of this jump and how we should forecast the cost going forward. Wednesday, prepare and finalize vendor order form to assist the sales team in closing a new deal. You'll realize this task is repetitive and frustrating. So you build a new process to automate this next time. Let's go. I'm looking at this and I'm just like, man. And they went through Monday through Friday. They said some projects that you've worked on in the last two or three months, the legal suite update, tax compliant billing practices, business continuity documentation.

21:22Dang. They said before you even apply, you will know what your week looks like. You will know who you report to. You will know the constant projects that you're working on. Now, I will tell you that of all the job listings that I looked at at higher chief of staff, none of them were that narrow. So props to Getro. I don't know what you do or who you are. But Evan, good on you for your recruiter, your HR, or whoever is doing that hiring process. You have challenged me and invited all of the podcast listeners to do the same. Now, let's go back to my doctor. She said, but Jasmine, I don't know how to look for an office manager.

22:02Okay. I went to LinkedIn and I typed in medical office manager. Now, what came up for me was dental office manager, medical billing manager, nurse manager, dental office manager. So then what I decided to do was like, okay, well, maybe a medical office isn't, I probably would have listed like an OBGYN office manager or something along those lines if I was being really specific with the type of doctor. But I clicked on dental office manager and there was things that I really wanted to see. So I clicked on one that was for Cave Creek. I don't know where Cave Creek is. And I clicked on another, a dental office manager for Santa Barbara, California.

22:44But it was the same company who was hiring an office manager. So let's go back to why I was doing this. I was saying, I'm going to pretend to look for an office manager, somebody to help me with my operations. The same way that I was pretending to hire and look for a director of ops or a COO on hire a chief of staff. And what I'm finding here is even if there is not a direct comparison, I could find the language. I can find how much I should be spending on average for where I live. So the office manager in Cave Creek for the same dental office practice, it's like a branch of them. It's a national chain.

23:21If you work at a dental office manager in Cave Creek, I just noticed it's in Phoenix, Arizona. They'll pay you$50 ,000 to$55 ,000 a year on-site, full-time. Now, for the same dental brand in Santa Barbara, California, you will get paid $75 ,000 to$90 ,000 on-site, full-time. So if I was my doctor, I would be looking at this and saying, a dental office manager in Santa Barbara, which is comparable to living expenses and rate what you would be paying people as Manhattan Beach, she's probably going to be looking for an office manager between 75 and 90 ,000. So let's read their job description for an office manager.

24:06Are you highly organized and passionate about supporting a team dedicated to providing top notch dental care? Do you know the ins and outs of managing the daily operations of a busy dental practice? Do you enjoy managing employee and patient relations and helping give patients an exceptional dental care experience? If these questions make you smile, read on. Okay, that was really cute, right? Because our dental office and you're smiling and that's what they want. They became clear. Were they as clear as Getro? No. Do I think they're paying as much as Getro? No. Do I think that they're needing somebody with as much experience as Getro?

24:39No. But let's kind of flip the switch now. That was as much as their job description was listed on LinkedIn. Okay, it was enough. It was enough to get somebody who was looking for a dental office manager or medical office manager, enough information to say, maybe I'll decide to apply. Now, in the digital marketing world, people use different words that are industry specific. You have your COO, you have your chief of operations, you have a director of operations. And sometimes in the digital marketing space, specifically after a book was written called Traction by Gino Wickman, he defined what he calls an integrator.