This episode features a masterclass on hiring a CEO, with guest Andrew Wilkinson, who shares his experience managing a portfolio of 40 companies. He discusses the transition from being an owner-operator to a hands-off investor, the importance of finding the right leadership, and the specific strategies he uses to vet and incentivize CEOs.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Hiring, CEO, Management, Scaling, Business Strategy, Delegation
Introduction [00:00]
Shaan Puri: All right, this is a guest masterclass with our buddy Andrew Wilkinson. We’re inviting him on because if you’re world-class at something, I want to learn from you. In fact, I had emailed Andrew a while back being like, “Hey, I have this company, it’s working. We had scaled into the tens of millions in revenue, but I just didn’t want to run it anymore. I was tired, I wasn’t the right guy for it, I was half in, half out, and I was just fantasizing about selling it or the day where I wouldn’t be running it anymore.” And he’s like, “Dude, you need to hire a CEO.”
And to me, that always felt like something that’s easier said than done. Hire a CEO, just find somebody to take over my baby. But he’s done it. This guy’s got 40 companies. He’s got a CEO that runs, you know, CEOs that run them. He doesn’t have to run any of them day-to-day. The portfolio is worth $500 million. So if there’s anybody to learn from, it’s Andrew on this. And so he comes in and he shares how he interviews them, what are the questions that he asks, who is he looking for, how does he structure the compensation. So he’s very transparent about, you know, how he structures it, how much is base comp, how much is variable, how to make sure everybody’s aligned. What to do after you hire them. And so we go into step-by-step how to hire a great CEO for your business.
This is not for a beginner. If you don’t even have a business, you’ve never done this, this is not for you. This is for people who actually have a business and they’re scaling it up and maybe it’s year five, it’s year seven, and you’re starting to realize you don’t want to do this for another five to 10 years. And that’s when you have to have this conversation to figure out how you can hire a great CEO to scale your business. It worked for me, it worked for Andrew. I hope it works for you. So enjoy this guest masterclass with Andrew Wilkinson.
Why Hire a CEO? [01:37]
Shaan Puri: Okay, we asked Andrew Wilkinson to come on and do one specific thing, which is teach us how to hire CEOs. He owns, Andrew, you own what, 40 companies now? The total portfolio is worth almost $500 million. And yet, you’re a pretty chill guy. Whenever I text you, you answer, you’re always having fun. You’re not stressed out, overloaded, overworked like every other CEO I know who’s a CEO of one company. But you have 40. And so, I think the way you’ve been able to do that is by hiring great CEOs for all your companies, and it’s actually worked. Me and Sam want to learn this from you. So you’re here today to teach us that. How did you even realize that you needed to hire CEOs?
Andrew Wilkinson: Yeah, so I would say, um, it’s not that it’s less, it’s not less stressful, it’s just different, right? So I just have different problems. So someone running a company might be, uh, you know, putting out a fire that’s that’s burning that day. I put out fires that burn over the course of a month or two, and they’re bigger fires. And then someone else might spend a lot of time dealing with company politics. I end up dealing with, um, you know, CEO comp packages. So I want to say to begin with, you know, this is not necessarily a greener pasture, it’s just a different pasture. Um, and I think it you you really only want to oversee CEOs if that’s your skill set. If you’re drawn to, um, being super, super high-level and hands-off, which some people, let’s be real, they’re not. They’re they’re like, they want to be Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi. They don’t want to be the guy who starts Chipotle. They want to be on the line, they want to be making food. Uh, and so it ultimately comes down to your personality. And for me, my personality has always been, I’m incredibly lazy. So from the time that my mom told me to wash the dishes, I was furious. I was always trying to find ways to, you know, pay my brothers to do it, find, uh, you know, systems to wash the dishes more effectively so I had to do less work. And so I always joke that I’m Teflon for tasks. And if you start delegating in your company, which most great entrepreneurs do, you ultimately reach this point where, uh, you ask yourself, was there anything else I can delegate? And that final level of delegation, that final level of abstraction, that’s hiring a CEO. That’s hiring one to hire 10. They go and they run the entire company and you just talk to them quarterly, sometimes annually. And there’s some CEOs I have that I haven’t even talked to in two or three years.
The “Door 3” Strategy [04:03]
Shaan Puri: You have something between 30 or 40 companies. Do you have 30 or 40 CEOs reporting to you?
Andrew Wilkinson: No, the way that we do it now, so it’s crazy. At first, it was like five companies, so I had five direct reports, uh, that are CEOs, no big deal. And then over time, as we’ve scaled up, we’ve had to form operating groups. And so we have these operating groups and they have their own CEOs who report into us. So for example, all of our digital services businesses are run by a guy named Pradeep. I meet with Pradeep kind of bi-weekly, monthly, whenever I need to, uh, and he oversees a group of like six companies.
Shaan Puri: Even if you’re not going to end up with that kind of portfolio, 40 company structure, I’ve had this with you, which is I think a more common problem. I remember emailing you saying, “Hey, I have this great business, it’s working, so I can’t, there’s no there’s no reason to shut it down. However, I don’t want to keep working on it.” I liked it at the beginning, I don’t love it now. I want to go on and do new things. How do I do this? Do I have to sell this? Like, should I just sell the company? Do I can I hire a CEO? And if so, where the heck am I going to find somebody who I can trust to do this? So even on a one company level, I think that’s where most founders are going to be, that uh, you know, step one is abstract yourself out of a single company. So let’s let’s start with that. You you said something you’re like, it’s pretty common. Everyone loves their business in year one. I forgot. What’s your exact quote?
Andrew Wilkinson: So, yeah, every time I talk to a young founder, they’re like, “I’m going to run this till the day I die.” Doesn’t matter what the business is. They think they’re going to be, you know, they’re like a Mark Zuckerberg for 20, 30 years. And then you talk to them in year seven or eight, and almost all of them are just like, “How do I escape this hellish waking nightmare?” Like they just want to be there. What did you want to say?
Shaan Puri: I’m going to run this till I’m 28. Till the day I’m 28.
Andrew Wilkinson: Totally. So and it’s really interesting because, um, people generally think about it in a very binary way. They’re like, “Okay, there’s two doors. Door one, keep running my company. Door two, sell, get rich and live on Mojito Island,” right? Uh, but there’s actually a door three. And door three is hiring a CEO, right? So you’re you’re in a marathon and you can either ditch the marathon or keep running it. Well, it turns out that you can actually incentivize someone else to keep running the marathon on your behalf. And I mean, this just goes back to what I was talking about before, right? So there’s there’s all these different levels of delegation and we all understand, at least if you’re a good entrepreneur, that if you don’t like accounting, you just hire an accountant. Well, if you don’t like running your company, door three is you just hire a CEO. So, you know, my my story on this is I started Metalab, which is a design agency, uh, about 20 years ago. I feel very old to say that, but about 20 years ago, um, and I ran it for as CEO for almost 10 years, and I had a great exec team. Like I was able to delegate quite a bit of it. I was running other companies at the same time, but ultimately the buck stopped with me. And for the first three to five years, it was really exciting. Like I was learning new skills all the time. I was scrappily like, you know, sending the invoices and negotiating deals with clients, and I was flying all over the world, and it was all new and and exciting. But you know, at a certain point, you know, after like year eight, year nine, I didn’t want to fly to San Francisco anymore. I didn’t want to have to like shake hands and kiss babies and do that. And I remember Chris, my now business partner and at the time CFO, would come to me and be like, “Dude, you got to fly to San Francisco. Every time you go down there, you close like a million dollars of new projects.” But I didn’t really want to do it because A, I was exhausted, it wasn’t new anymore. I didn’t want to travel, it didn’t suit my lifestyle, but also, I was already rich. I was already making enough money. And so the business was kind of starting to plateau because I wasn’t willing to go that extra mile. I was just saying, “You know what, we’ll just do whatever comes in. I’ll do a San Francisco trip once a quarter and we’ll close what we close because I don’t want to do that.” Well, the beautiful thing was, there were young, scrappy people who, to them, the idea of flying to San Francisco and taking a client out for a steak dinner was a dream come true. They’d never done that before. And so, for me, I was looking at it and going, “Okay, um, running a five-person agency versus a 50-person agency, it’s a very different job and it was a job that I sucked at. You know, I really, to this day, love running five-person companies. I love running, you know, I can get to about 15 people comfortably. Um, but I I wasn’t enjoying it when we were 50 people. And I read every book about management, I did courses, and I just kind of whipped myself. Why am I not a great manager? Why can I not be like Peter Drucker reincarnate? And so I would always just fantasize about selling, and I kept trying to sell the business, and then we’d be like right at the last month, and then the uh the buyer would change the terms, or something would go wrong in the business. And so I was kind of starting to lose it. I didn’t want to be running my company. I wanted out, but I I I couldn’t sell it. And so around that time, I ended up reading a book about Warren Buffett, and I found out about Door 3. And here we are. I started hiring CEOs. I made a ton of mistakes, which I’ll talk about, but it’s it’s enabled me to create Tiny, which I never would have done before. I’d probably still be either miserably running my business or I would have sold for, you know, a much smaller amount of money.
The “Green Pasture” Fallacy [09:26]
Shaan Parr: We’ll get into like the actual tactics. Really quick though, the green pasture thing you talked about, it’s always the grass is always greener on the other side. And like you and I joke where you’re like, uh, well, I don’t want to say what you said, but you’ll just like be teasing about uh running a small company and how that could be way more fun and being the CEO of a small company uh for a long period of time versus trying to like go big. What’s the grass is always greener for you?
Hiring a CEO: The Process [10:16]
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, I mean, I think um I there’s a great Bob Seger quote, um which is, “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” right? So for me, I I think think about it like this. I might have given this example before, but imagine if you love chopping wood, right? You just do it because it’s fun, you’re in your backyard chopping wood, and then your neighbor pokes his head over the fence and says, “Hey, dude, can I get a cord of wood? I’ll pay you for it.” And you realize, “Oh my god, this is a business. I’ve taken my passion and I’ve created a business, and now I’m selling wood door-to-door, I’m working with my five best friends, it’s a blast, right? I’m suddenly making money, I can afford to go to the bar, life is good.” And then you flash forward 20 years and you wake up and you’re a lumber magnate. You own five sawmills and all you do every day is you sit in a little air-conditioned box looking down at the the floor. You have all these robots working for you and all these hundreds of employees and most of your time is spent doing doing Excel, right? I think that is the sadness of building a large business and delegating. Your hands are not on the tools anymore. And so, for me, what’s been sad about building the machine is I’ve built the machine that’s freed me to do what I want, but the irony is I end up doing things I don’t want as a result because ultimately, I was a designer. I loved putting on headphones and being in Photoshop and designing websites and writing. And so, for me, it’s been searching, where do I get the flow state that I used to get running a five-person company?
Shaan Parr: Let’s let’s roleplay it here. So I have a company, I want to hire a C I I’ve realized I can do this third door and I’m like, you know what, that’s the right move. I should hire a CEO. But where the heck am I going to find a CEO that I can trust that’s going to not only not ruin it, but actually, you know, hopefully grow the business in some way. What’s the what’s step one?
Andrew Wilkinson: So, step one, you have to really assess is your business big enough, right? Is this the right thing? Is this the right time? So ultimately you want to ask, does your business have product-market fit and can it actually afford a CEO, right? Is this a is this a corner store like where it’s kind of an owner-operator kind of business where you just kind of have to run it and if you leave, all the profit gets eaten up by somebody else, or is this something that’s really scalable? So I generally, as a rule of thumb, will say, you probably shouldn’t hire a CEO until your business is doing $300,000 or so of profit. And if it is, that means that you can swap yourself out and you can afford to hire someone a reasonable base salary and then you can incentivize them to grow the business. And so one of the one of the really interesting things that people kind of obsess over is they say, “Well, you know, a CEO could cost 500,000, but my business is only doing $3 million and $300,000 of profit.” And what they kind of miss is that generally a CEO is paid a base salary, but most of their comp comes from bonuses. And the bonuses are based on the business growing. And so it’s one of those things where it’s like, if your business is doing 300k of profit, you can basically take two or 300k of that, invest it in the base salary for the CEO, and then all of their additional comp will come from the growth of the business. And so you’ve aligned them with your goals.
Shaan Parr: So first thing, is my business big enough? So you said two two criteria, product-market fit meaning we we know what the hell we’re doing. We’re not in the figure it out, figure out the product, figure out the market, uh figure out the what is the offering and changing that every three weeks because it’s not working. Like you have a reasonable continuous cycle of supply and demand for what you’re doing. And then you said profit around 300,000 as the kind of that’s the minimum bar?
Andrew Wilkinson: I would say so in there. I mean, occasionally you can, let’s say you’ve got a friend who’s super scrappy who wants to sink their teeth into something and you’ve got a small business that’s like a I always call them like an ember. It’s not really a fire yet, it’s an ember and someone needs to come blow on it. You could do that, but I think there’s a lot more risk there. You really want a machine that’s operating. You want a car that can drive on the road, um, before you put someone in. And then the other question is, can you make someone rich, right? Because ultimately, people who are good, great, exceptional CEOs, they’re looking for opportunity and upside. And by nature, the fact that they’re a hired gun CEO tells me they’re not necessarily an entrepreneur. They don’t want to take total risk, they want a nice salary, they want bonuses, they’re not necessarily willing to risk it all, but often they want to know they can get rich in a in a CEO way. So they can make single-digit millions for the first time ever, uh, if everything plays out, or maybe they can get a big payout if the business sells or gets to a large scale or whatever it is. But ultimately, you want to know that you can make someone wealthy with it.
Finding the Right Person [18:00]
Shaan Parr: So, generally, I like to I like to find someone who’s run a same or similar business that’s double the size. So, let’s say I have an e-commerce brand, um, selling candles. Well, I I don’t necessarily need to go find a CEO, um, who’s run a candle business before, but I want to find someone who’s sold a similar product online, and I will generally think about who are my who are my competitors or what companies do I admire, and then I’ll go on LinkedIn and I’ll just look for um president, COO, um sometimes CEO, but usually I will recruit a number two. And it’s that person who’s been eagerly awaiting getting, you know, knighted as the CEO and they haven’t stepped up yet. Uh, I find those are wonderful people to delegate the business to. Uh, and then separately, recruiters, and that’s a topic we can dig into. People have a lot of opinions. I had a lot of opinions about uh recruiters that I’ve actually changed over time. But yeah, you got to I I find like broadening the spectrum with recruiters can be really helpful.
Shaan Parr: We have to get a quick shout out to Ty Burke, my old roommate, and someone I used to recruit and I know you use them as well. You also use like crazy amounts of uh uh reference checks.
Andrew Wilkinson: So, here’s what we do. So we buy the business and as we’re buying the business, we start asking the question, as soon as we know we’re going to buy the business or we’re going to delegate, we hire a recruiter immediately. Now, recruiters really pissed me off before. It was like realtors where I’m going, “Man, why am I paying this guy $100,000 to open a door for me? I can just go on, you know, like Zillow and find the the the house I want to buy.” And here’s this middleman charging a lot of money and I kind of felt like, why would I pay some guy to go on LinkedIn and message a bunch of people for me? I can do that myself. But I realized that I’m distracted and when I need to hire someone, I will often just go on LinkedIn or whatever for 10 minutes, I’ll text a bunch of my friends, I’ll try and think of people that I have like in an Apple note that might be a good CEO. I’m not going broad. And so basically, um, I’ve come around on recruiters. There’s some really exceptional recruiters like Ty Burke who, um, from search partners, who Sam introduced me to. He’s one of my favorite. We also really like Matt Hollingsworth from Align. Um, and what I the way I use a recruiter is just to broaden the spectrum. So even if I’m going to go on LinkedIn myself and look for someone, I might end up bringing the person to the table who we end up hiring. We now have somebody who’s um reaching out to people I never would have spoken to, and then they’re also handling a lot of that administrative work of pushing the process along. They’re doing the initial interview. And one really fascinating thing I didn’t contemplate before is a recruiter saves you an insane amount of time. Let’s say that you have 10 candidates for CEO and every single one of those candidates you’re going to have to do a Zoom with and that’ll take 30 minutes to an hour. Well, I think we all know, we you’ve all had that experience where you interview someone and in the first 30 seconds you know they’re a dingus, right? And then you’re just desperately thinking like, “Okay, how can I get off the phone as quickly as possible, not waste time, but not have this person think I’m a total asshole.” And so now I have the recruiter do that call and I get them to record the Zoom and then I just watch the first couple minutes and if I’m vibing with the person, then I’ll move them on to the next stage. So if you think about from that perspective, your time is highly valuable and you’ve just saved 10 hours of time. What is that worth? I think a lot. And then in some instances, um, we’ve actually hired uh people that we brought in, that’s fine and I just pay the recruiter anyway, but in other instances, they’ve brought people in that we never would have found. So the guy that runs Aeropress, Gerard Meyer, we found him via Ty and he was a guy where uh he had run SodaStream US and he just wasn’t on my radar whatsoever and he’s one of our best CEOs. So I kind of look at the recruiters as a time-saving mechanism. Um, they broaden out the the people you look at, but ultimately, it’s just like a tax I pay to have someone else be incentivized to push everything along. Um, and so I’m actually a big fan of recruiters now, but you got to use the right people. I find there’s a lot of terrible recruiting firms and we’ve used a lot of really bad ones over the years.
The “Hammer” Question [25:38]
Shaan Parr: I love the uh what’s their hammer question uh because it’s so true that the the more experience somebody gets and the more successful somebody gets, they start to develop this hammer and they try to they go run around looking for for ways that they can apply that thing they know to everything, whether it’s the right thing or not. Um, I think this is a good thing and a bad thing. Uh, I’ve seen the same advice given to it’s kind of um YC type companies or in Silicon Valley where when you hire a CEO, if you hire a CEO that grew their previous company by creating a giant sales army, but you’re trying to do product-led growth, it’s a total mismatch. You might say, “Oh wow, they grew that company from 10 million to 200 million.” And that sounds good, but if they did it in a way that’s totally different than yours, very few people can repeatably grow businesses using totally new methodologies for sales and marketing. And I’m curious also, what’s your hammer? Like uh if if if you’re a man, if you’re a man with a hammer running around, what what is yours?
Andrew Wilkinson: Well, I would say I’m a man with a lot of different hammers. Um, I’ve gotten really broad now because I’ve seen so many different ways of growing businesses and I think um I have a lot of tools in the toolkit. My old hammer was product. I would always just be like, “Oh my god, actually, you know what, I do have a hammer. Okay, so so my old hammer was product. So I would always do field of dreams marketing. I would say, we’re going to build the best product in the world. I’m a designer, you know, I was really proud of what we were doing, uh and that’ll solve everything.” And I realized that really doesn’t work very well. And now I would say my hammer is finance. So uh or operations. So really what I’m doing is I’m looking at a business and I’m going, “If one if we could just change one thing, what would that one thing be that would give the business leverage?” And often it’s something really simple. It’s like, “Oh, pricing,” right? Or they’re just not selling ads properly. Something really boring. And to to be honest, I feel a little depressed as I say that because You’re a sellout, bro. You’re a sellout. The designer from 20 years ago would be really sad and I still love, don’t get me wrong, like so when we buy let me give Aeropress as an example. I I just unboxed our new Aeropress clear and I just checked out the designs for a couple unreleased products and that was the best day of my month, right? I love building great products. I love being involved with that, knowing that if we hadn’t bought that business, that wouldn’t have happened. But when we bought Aeropress, the boring assumption I made was, I’m just going to do really good um online marketing and e-commerce. It’s really simple. They didn’t sell online. That was my one insight. That was my hammer on that deal. And now the bonus, the gravy is we get to do amazing products and I get to do product design.
The “Reference Check” Trick [28:39]
Shaan Parr: How do you negotiate and structure the comp package for the CEO?
Andrew Wilkinson: So, um, I always like to make the first offer, um, because ultimately you kind of know what you’re willing to pay and what makes sense based on who they are. And I think you kind of have to scale up or down based on their experience. So there’s times where I’ve taken a risk where I’ve said, “You know what, this person was um they’re a VP marketing, but they really have CEO energy and I’m going to take a chance on them.” I’m going to try and um, you know, pay less for someone like that. I’m not necessarily going to put them into like full CEO comp. I’m going to try and go high variable, low base. Um, but someone who’s more established, you know, I’m going to give them basically what they what they want and uh and whatever we think the range is there. Um, and then the most important thing is to use total compensation. So when you make the offer, so let’s say, let’s say I have a business that’s doing $300,000 of profit and I can comfortably afford a CEO base salary of 150 grand, right? So let’s say this person is worth 300 grand a year, 400 grand a year. I’m going to go to them and I’m going to say, “I’m going to pay you 300 grand a year, but it’s going to be $150,000 base and it’s going to be $150,000 bonus. And the bonus is if you get me to $600,000 of EBITDA, right? And so you’re basically using the profits that they’ve created to pay them the bonus and you’ve created alignment between the two of you. But it’s important never to just say, “Well, I’m going to offer you $150,000 a year plus a bonus,” because in their head, they’re going like, “No, I’m a $300,000 a year person.” Right? So I always lead with what’s the total compensation and then what needs to be true to achieve that compensation. I’m also a big fan of uncap bonuses. So for example, let’s say the target is, you know, $600,000 of EBITDA. Well, if they do $1.2 million of EBITDA, I want them to get double the bonus, maybe even triple the bonus. Um, and that’s worked really well for us. So the idea of saying, “Look, I’m going to offer you $300,000 a year, but it might be $600,000. It might be a million dollars a year depending on how you perform.” And then the other thing is equity is just hard. Um, I’m not a big fan of stock options. I like to try and find people who are willing to, if they want equity, they’re willing to write a check. So if a CEO comes to me and they say, “Okay, but I need, you know, I need equity, I need skin in the game.” I’m going to say something like, “Okay, so you want um $40,000 of equity per year. Uh are you willing to lower your compensation by $40,000? Or are you willing to write a check?” You know, do you have a stock portfolio you can sell and you can inject the money into the business and I’ll let you buy in at a really great valuation. And if they don’t want to do that, then sometimes I’ll even loan them the money. I’ll say, “I will personally loan you the money and then you’re going to write a check and you’re going to buy it and I have the right to buy back your if you leave, I have the right to buy back your stock at whatever multiple of their earnings at the time or whatever it is. How how do people react to that conversation? Because that’s very different than where a lot of people are probably coming from. Well, I want them to value the equity and they don’t value the equity when they get stock options. They just look at it. They don’t even consider it as part of total comp. So let’s say that like all here’s some here’s the kind of thing I’d hear. So they say, um, “I want to make 400 grand a year and and I want equity.” And I’d say, well, okay, how is the equity going to work? And they go, “Well, I think I should have 5%.” And let’s say the business is worth $100 million. So they’ve now said, “Okay, I want $5 million.” And you’re like, “Okay, well, you’re you’re worth 4 to 500k a year based on your track record and your experience and all that kind of stuff. How am I supposed to give you $5 million of equity? That just doesn’t make sense.” And so I always try and talk about it in terms of what’s the cash value of the equity that they’re receiving and then how do we create a scenario where we have shared downside. And a lot of people in Silicon Valley are used to stock options. And the way stock options work is, let’s say Sam, you joined my company and the stock price is $100 and I say, “Here’s uh $100,000 of stock options at $100 share price.” If the shares drop to $50, it’s a lotto ticket and it’s a zero. It’s not worth anything. If it goes up, then it’s worth a shitload. And so you end up with this kind of binary situation where they have this lotto ticket that pays out big or is a zero. And so what that means is if your value of your business goes down even 10%, they’re basically at a zero and so they’re disincentivized. So I just I don’t love stock options and in general, I only like giving equity to people who are willing to sacrifice something for it. Otherwise, you know, why why wouldn’t I just pay you a really fat bonus? If you get down to it, that’s usually what executives want. They want to do an addition to their house, they want to go on crazy vacations, they like cash most of the time. Quick kind of question as we round up to what the downside of all this is is like everything you’re saying I think sounds when I hear it, I’m like, this is the way. Is a fair argument against this that founder-led companies typically have more innovation or more soul and things like that and that it’s better to have one thing go big versus many things that are potentially okay. Is that a fair argument do you think or no? Yeah, but I think like I said in the beginning, I think it comes down to personality. Like I think if you’re so for me, when I was running Metalab, I started five other companies in the first three years because it was irresistible to me, right? Now, I knew the right thing to do might have been to focus on the business, but my personality is that I want to go do other stuff. So Sam, like you seem super focused, right? And maybe you’re better off just having one focus. You wake up every day, you you think about one thing. But if you start finding yourself getting drawn into other businesses, it would be a huge disservice to continue to run that business, right? So I think ultimately it comes down to being true to yourself. You shouldn’t, if you’re listening to this, go, “Oh, I should go do this.” You should only go do this if you’re drawn to it. It’s the same advice I give to entrepreneurs. They say, “Well, should I go and work at a company or should I be an entrepreneur?” And I kind of go, “Well, if you have to ask that question, the answer is probably no, right? Because for me, I could never consider working for someone else. I if I whenever I had a job, I just wanted to shove the boss out of the way and take the wheel of the business. So I think to me, it’s just it’ll be obvious. If this is something that appeals to you, you’ll know. You’ll be listening to this nodding along and going, “Oh my god, I can I can do this. I just didn’t know I could do it and not feel bad guilty.” Well, dude, this is awesome. We love having you come on. Um, what do you think, Sean? Yeah, this is great. And it’s also um earned information. So this is not something that you, you might be able to read in a book, but a lot of the nuance of what you described is from hard lessons that were, you know, things that went right, been mistakes of things that went wrong and the lessons you’ve learned. So we all got to benefit from, you know, your 20 years of experience kind of going through this process yourself. And um, I know for me, it was a huge unlock to be able to hire a CEO and do that successfully and I was like, “Wow, this is cheat codes. Oh my god, I get the business is going to do well, it’s going to do better than if I was doing it, you know, I get all of the reward without any of that work and it’s a total great trade for this person because I kind of didn’t really appreciate how many people are entrepreneurial, but maybe not entrepreneurs. They’re people who are great CEOs, but they also got two kids, they don’t want to take full-on risk. So they they want that kind of medium upside, um, low downside. And uh, finding that fit has been pretty huge for me. So I think that’s great. A lot of the things that you said that stood out to me, the golden nuggets for me was find the find the number two at a business that’s two 2x bigger, but similar to to the one you’re in right now. Figure out what’s their hammer, because that that’s probably it. Everybody’s a man with a hammer and and you just have to make sure that that’s the right hammer for your your business. Um, and then pay up on the on the reference checks and the recruiter to make sure that you you get enough candidates and then you find the right person because that’s a it’s a necessary tax you have to pay once the business is big enough that you can support this. And then leave them alone. That’s the other thing. Most people don’t leave them alone. They say, “Well, it didn’t work, you know, in the first two weeks they did something I didn’t agree with, so I had to fire them.” Well, what’s the balance there? Like you leave them alone, but you don’t leave them completely alone. I think for you guys, they send you what a finance only update every every month. And then Yeah. Is there anything else to it? Like a strategy planning thing or do you do anything else? So what we used to do is we do a report every single month and they would write like, “Here’s what’s going on in the business, here’s the numbers.” And that was just crazy. We couldn’t keep up and it also wasted a lot of their time. Now we get just the numbers to head office and we meet the CEOs annually and then often uh there’s certain CEOs we don’t even meet because they’re within operating platforms. So we just meet with the CEO of that operating platform, uh usually like monthly or quarterly and check in. Um, by the way, this is the number one thing I get emails on, like literally like every single day I get questions about it on Twitter and on email. And so I actually wrote a PDF on here like a checklist basically on are you ready to hire a CEO and how to hire a CEO. And if you sign up for my newsletter, it’s neverenough.com/newsletter. Uh I’m going to post the PDF uh next week, I think. Awesome. Okay, great. I think that’s that’s the that’s the pod. Everybody should go check it out. Neverenough.com/ what? Newsletter? Newsletter, yeah. And we’ll link to it and yeah, we’ll link to it down here. Um, all right, dude. Thank you. That’s the pod.