The 3 Hires That Run My $50M Business | 345

Download my FREE 8-Figure Playbook

This playbook walks through the exact process I used to build from $0 in 2016 to $50M+/year today across multiple franchise brands

Grab it here: https://brianbeers.kit.com/b79cf77012

Let's connect:

Find me on X
Instagram
LinkedIn
YouTube

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Business of Beers Podcast, your daily dose of strategies, tools, and tips to help you build an eight-figure business. Today's episode is a clip from one of my YouTube lives. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, there's a link below in the description. Cheers. And then finally, you know, above this, right? So to above 20 million, what happens at a certain point is it really becomes it comes down to a couple things. It's building out a really strong C-suite, which is like, you know, COO, CFO, you know, if you if you do real estate development, uh CDO, chief development officer, assuming you stay in the CEO role. For me, you know, I decided at a certain point that I didn't want to be the CEO of our auto division anymore. I have big aspirations of of what I'm of trying to build and impact millions of people through through through content, building portfolio, building more of a partnership. For me, I view our auto repair business as kind of the foundation to then catapult into uh multiple other things, right? And and so whether I made that decision or if I decided to say, hey, I am gonna stay and like all I'm gonna do is is is in this business is is auto. Either way, you have to build out a solid C-suite. And so uh and these are some of the hardest hires that you will ever make. Because you you really have to let go of the the reins, not only from like um down here it's a little bit easier, right? When I and I said how this was really hard for going one to five, right? These are the the direct people like leading, like hiring the stores, uh dealing with customers, right? It's all the operational things. But when you get to the top here and you're like, uh I want to build out this C-suite, these guys are setting sail for the entire direction of the company with you, right? These are the guys who like you have to feel like it's kind of like ride or die, right? Uh because if they mess up, right, or if if they do things that just aren't aligned, or you you don't have the synergies, like it's a total cluster because this is this is the entire leadership of the company. So it really matters to to nail these. And uh what's well I'm gonna kind of go through them um as the way I see it and uh and the maybe the order of of importance um and we we kind of go from there. So you know the CEO, so this is gonna be you. And and the context of this maybe could apply to larger businesses, but you know, I'm assuming for you guys and me, like it's smaller businesses, people who've built this thing from the ground up. Uh you know, you could see these uh labels and you think of like publicly traded companies, these big companies and all this stuff, and you know, it's similar, but like listen, I don't I don't I don't run that, so like my perspective of what this may be a little bit different, but um this is for somebody who's like actively building it. So the CEO, right? So in most of the cases, this is you know, this was me for for many years. Uh this is gonna be you, right, whether you give yourself that title or not. Where the j the job of the CEO is is really comes down to vision, right? It's the vision of the company. It's what direction are you taking us in? This is your this is your job, this is your North Pole. Like people want to be part of something bigger, right? People want to know that their efforts are towards something. And really great CEOs do an excellent job in that, in terms of like that direction, that vision. For us, it's about getting customers home safely. It's about leading leaving cars safer than they arrived. Like, we're huge on like on our impact to society from people's day-to-day, right? Like, that's the vision that we have from like that that we talk about all the time with our people is like our job is to help customers get home safer than when they arrived. And if we can't do that, then like, you know, we're we're doing terrible. And that vision resonates with a lot of our people. A lot of our our our technicians and our managers, you know, in confidential surveys and all this stuff, uh, that's the feedback. They're like, we really love the like customer-centric and safety-focused, and and like everyone's on the same page. So like that's your job as the CEO to establish of what's the vision of the company, where you're taking it. Uh you know, you might have heard the term visionary, right? Like you you're the one that sees it, right? And then and you're going from there. Then the CEO or the COO, which stands for Chief Operating Officer, um, is all about execution. Okay? So it's like you the CEO is the one who has the vision of what we're gonna do, and then the COO is gonna be the person who then runs the playbook. So this is like the person if you're like back down to these like dis districts. If you think about it from like a company structure, but you think of it like you've got these pods, like these are your stores. How many can I uh fit on here? That's 15. Oh, hold on. I gotta I gotta make some space here. Um, so pretend you've got, you know, these these are these pods, uh districts, whatever you want to call them. All right. So each one of these has like a district manager, so the key person that's over it, then your COO would be the person that like generally these these people would report to, right? In this in this simplified model. Now, it could you can get more complicated as you grow. You can have regional people, like if you if you've got like East Coast, West Coast, or North South, or like whatever. There's like multiple layers that this can go, but this is like the basic structure. Um right, and then you've got like CEO. So this is this would be like your super basic structure to start, and I'll like I'll like build this thing out so you guys can see it. But CEO, that'd be you at the top. CEO, so you got the vision, this is the direction of the company, this is where we're going. CEO is gonna be the guy who's like focused on execution, so the day-to-day, like this is the guy who's like gotta have the playbooks, have like hold everybody accountable, who's gonna like see the things and like see the problems and get solutions, and they're really leading the the district managers who are then gonna be you know the the the guys and girls in the field who are then like taking that those messages and ensuring you know they get dispersed and um followed in their um you know in each one of their their pockets. So that's the role of the COO. And you know, these these two people have to work, have to have a really, really great relationship. Because if not, like if the if my vision of of what I think the company should do is is doesn't match the execution, or or vice versa, like there's gonna be a lot of friction, right? And there's gonna be like, well, he wants Brian wants me to do this, but like, you know, Colin's our uh COO slash CEO right now, but um you know, but Colin wants me to do that, right? Like, but Brian says this and Colin says that, and like you get all this friction, right? And then they don't know who to listen to. And by the by default, most people are gonna listen to the ball, like the CEO, they're gonna listen to the boss, the boss boss, uh the owner, and totally undermine then the COO. So then if you constantly do that to any of your, I mean, this this applies to like anybody who has people below them, like in some sort of org chart. If you if you constantly undermine people below you uh and override them, then people are gonna lose respect for that person. They're not gonna listen to them, and then they're gonna constantly refer back to you. So all that power that you want to delegate and all those things that you want to do to get completely thrown out the window the second you undermine them. So it's really important uh to not speak poorly of anyone below anyone who like reports to you, especially to somebody who reports to them. Uh and if you if you if you have problems, if you have friction, you address it one-on-one in a private setting, you don't make it public, you don't do anything to to undermine that. Otherwise, like like their credibility is gonna be thrown out the window and you just like shot yourself in the foot. Um and like and if you continue to do that person after person that you hire, they're not they're never gonna listen to the new person you put it either, because they're gonna be like, oh, well Brian's just gonna fire this guy in six months, so I'm not gonna listen to anything he says, and I'm just gonna do this, I'm just gonna do this, this, and this, right? And so then you gotta like whatever. Don't just don't do it. Okay. So execution. Uh specifically related to operations. So the operations of the business day to day, of like the the execution. All right. Then you've got a CFO that stands for chief financial officer. Now, uh the CFO is gonna is gonna vary tremendously in a company depending on the um how do I say this? Like, it's like what really makes the company like tick. All right. Um so for example, our CFO, uh we we have a pretty big backup. So we have like 15 people, as I mentioned, they're all global, uh, that that do all of our books. Now, we have like a decently sized team with a lot of bills. So like we do, like we do, let's say we think about this, 20, 20% to be 10. So we buy like 10 million dollars or so of what I'm gonna say, just cost of goods, like lots of little parts, and and that ten million dollars is spent in roughly hundred dollar increments. Okay. So just imagine the number of bills. Uh I can't do the math, but it's like, what's that? Uh 100,000 bills, I guess. That CFO, he needs to plan out every single, every month, they need to look at the cash flow that they cut that they have coming in on a recurring basis. He has to build out models that say, you know, uh, we're gonna spend X amount of dollars per month on here's here's all the operating expenses, and then we're gonna need X amount of down payments, and we have a line of credit to tap. And like, you know, he's kind of playing this chess game between all these different um, you know, all these different timelines and periods and things and ramp up periods and pre-sales and like think of like the massive financial like uh spreadsheets you'd have to build to be able to project all this stuff out. So um that's that would be the role in a CFO. So as you get bigger, you start to learn like these are the different types of people we need. And um there's other roles too, but these are the big ones, these are the three big ones uh that that people generally do. The other ones are related to real estate development, right? There could be a role that's like leads development. There could be someone who drives sales if you're like a heavy sales organization. Um there could be one who does admin, so if it's like especially if it's like lots of insurance and admin and like things like that. So but somebody at a C suite level, so like leadership of the cover, that uh really drives um drives things forward. So um those those are you know the the levels of the game.