MFM x Trends: How to Hire a CEO to Run Your Company with Andrew Wilkinson

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Hey, what's happening? This is a special episode. So here's what we do, folks. With Trends, Trends is our subscription service, which you can go to trends.co to learn all about it. But it's our community, it's our research program. It's basically kind of like My First Million, where we brainstorm on stuff. It's way more in depth, and we show numbers and do all this stuff. And normally, every podcast we do for My First Million is free.
But with Trends, we have a ton of stuff that's for paying subscribers only.
And today, I wanted to actually give you about 10 or 15 minutes of a free episode that we did. So today's interview is with Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew Wilkinson, you've heard him on this podcast. He's a friend of mine, friend of Sean. We really love Andrew.
And Andrew has about 20 companies that he owns, and he installs or hires CEOs for each company. This is something that I'm in the process of doing because I want to work at my company, but I don't want to be the CEO. I just want to be creative and an individual contributor. So Andrew taught me how to hire a CEO. And in this interview, I asked him everything about that. And I've actually used it. I've actually hired someone who will announce soon, but I wanted to give you about the first 10 or 15 minutes of this episode for free.
So if you like it, go to trends.co and sign up and you can get the entire episode. It's well over an hour and it's really cool.
And when you sign up, you'll get access to this episode as well as a ton more, as well as our library of research and all the companies that we've deconstructed and broken down and all the trends that we're looking at. And you're also gonna get access to the community where I am part of and I pretty much live in that community. And we have over 10,000 people who are also part of that, like the founders of HubSpot, the founders of Grasshopper, which sold for $200 million, all types of interesting people.
Harley, who was on this most recent podcast, is in the group as well. He is the president of Shopify. So all types of incredibly fascinating people building really cool companies. So again, today's episode, you're gonna get 10, 15 minutes of free stuff just so you can kind of get a feeling and we can provide some value for you. And if you want the rest, and if you wanna join a community and be part of our research program, it's a dollar to sign up. If you cancel in those 14 days, it's free. So you just, or you only have lost a dollar. And you'll still get to hear the episode. But if we can provide value and convince you how amazing this is, it's $299. So not a big price tag, but we would love to have you. Check it out, trends.co. Right after signing up, you'll see this episode. So enjoy these next 10 or 15 minutes, and we will see you soon.
So the only folks who are going to listen to this, and we're live now, the only folks who are going to listen to this are the Trends subscribers. So say, if you don't wanna talk about something, just say you don't wanna talk about something, but I'm gonna ask a lot of details. But this will not be... I mean, it's gonna be public, right? If they listen to it, but it won't be like public, public.

**Andrew Wilkinson** (3:04)
Yeah, like a little more walled. I can be a little more candid then.

**Shaan Puri** (3:09)
So I just tweeted out. So we kind of planned this a little last minute. We were gonna do a normal podcast. Shaan couldn't make it. So I said, let's try this. You wanted me to do it.
So I said, we'll do it. So I just posted actually on Twitter, and I got a lot of replies. I'm gonna see which... I asked people if they want to talk about buying or delegating. Do you have... Is there one that you think is more interesting?

**Andrew Wilkinson** (3:34)
I think they're both very interesting. I think they're actually one and the same, if you think about it.

**Shaan Puri** (3:40)
Well, let's talk about...

**Andrew Wilkinson** (3:41)
Buying is delegating.

**Shaan Puri** (3:43)
Yeah. So let's talk about delegating.
I actually am in the process of hiring a CEO. And I want to work at my company, but I just don't want to be the CEO. And I did it partially because of you. When did you first decide that you didn't want to be the CEO?