The real cost of running a business outside your founder zone of genius is headspace, not hours. When a founder carries operational responsibility they were never built for, they lose the mental bandwidth that innovation, strategy and growth actually depend on.
Jason Barnard has built three profitable businesses across thirty-five years. Kalicube, the digital branding consultancy he founded in 2015, now tracks 73 million brand profiles and 25 billion data points, and Jason is one of the most respected voices globally on how AI assistants represent brands at the moment a decision gets made.
In this episode of The COO Solution Podcast, Jason explains what changed when he stopped running Kalicube against his own character and brought in a fractional COO. The conversation covers delegation, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, founder psychology, and why letting go is the hardest part of scaling.
Take the fractional COO readiness quiz to find out what kind of operational support your business needs.
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What the Episode Covers
The moment of recognition
Jason took an assessment that scored him ten out of ten on innovation and detail, and one out of ten on organising people and leading teams. He had trained himself to run companies anyway, and it worked, but it was never his happy place.
The million-dollar ceiling
Breaking through it requires the right people in the right seats, doing work they are naturally gifted for rather than work they have taught themselves to tolerate.
Headspace over time
Jason makes the case that headspace, not time and not money, is the most valuable thing a founder has. Six uninterrupted hours are only productive if the founder is not quietly tracking whether the team is doing what it should be.
What actually changed
Four months into working with Gemma, his fractional COO, friction between team members resolved, EOS was implemented without Jason having to learn it, and the team felt relieved rather than displaced.
The three levels of delegation
Delegating without authority, delegating with authority, and delegating completely. Only the third one gives the founder their headspace back.
Readiness
Jason shares advice for founders considering the same move, including why doing it before you are genuinely ready produces a failure you may then blame on the model.
Resources and Links
About The COO Solution
The COO Solution is a fractional COO firm that places experienced, EOS-trained operators inside founder-led businesses across the United States. Each client works with one operator who sits in the second-in-command seat, owns execution, and is accountable to the founder every week, backed by the wider bench.
Connect with The COO Solution on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
Questions We’re Asked About the Founder Zone of Genius
What is a founder’s zone of genius?
A founder’s zone of genius is the work where their natural strengths create the greatest value. For Jason, that means speaking, connecting with entrepreneurs, and building the Kalicube platform rather than managing day-to-day operations.
Why does headspace matter more than time for a founder?
Time is not fully useful when a founder is still mentally tracking people, projects and decisions. Releasing that operational responsibility gives the founder the concentration needed for strategy, innovation and growth.
How did a fractional COO change the way Kalicube operates?
Jason’s fractional COO implemented operational structure, reduced friction between team members, clarified ownership and allowed Jason to step away from work outside his strengths.
What are the three levels of delegation?
Jason describes delegation without authority, delegation with authority, and complete delegation. Complete delegation means transferring both decision-making authority and mental ownership.
When is a founder ready to hire a fractional COO?
A founder is ready when they can be honest about the business, delegate with authority, accept change and genuinely let go. Without that readiness, the relationship is unlikely to deliver its full value.
Explore Fractional COO Services
Full Transcript
Lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts removed; wording otherwise unchanged.
Introduction
Derek Fredrickson: I am really excited to welcome today’s guest to the podcast, Jason Barnard. Like recent guests who are clients of The COO Solution, Jason has been working with us for quite some time. He is someone I have had the pleasure of supporting as he grows his business and builds for the next chapter. Jason is the CEO and Founder of Kalicube, a premium digital branding consultancy operating in France and the United States, which he founded in 2015.
He is an award-winning entrepreneur, author and keynote speaker who specialises in Precision Brand Intelligence, helping business leaders control how decision-makers perceive them on Google and AI when million-dollar decisions are at stake. Today, Kalicube tracks 73 million brand profiles and 25 billion data points. Jason has spent the last decade becoming one of the most respected voices globally on how AI assistants represent brands at the moment of purchase, hire or partnership decisions. What makes this conversation particularly compelling is that Jason has built three profitable businesses over 35 years. They are all driven by passion, all successful, and by his own admission, none of them are run quite as a CEO would.
He is the rare kind of entrepreneur who knows more about how AI sees your brand than almost anyone else on the planet, and now is applying that same rigour and intentionality to how he runs and scales his own business. This episode is about what happens when a founder who has built something genuinely world-class decides it is time to build the infrastructure and leadership foundation to match it. Let’s get into it.
The Conversation
[00:02] Derek Fredrickson: Hey everybody, welcome back to The COO Solution Podcast. I am your host, Derek Fredrickson, founder and CEO of The COO Solution. I am very excited to have joining us today one of our clients, Jason Barnard from Kalicube. Jason, welcome to the show. It is great to have you today.
[00:18] Jason Barnard: Lovely to be here, Derek. Thank you.
[00:20] Derek Fredrickson: Thank you. We are going to have a great conversation and share a little bit about what it is like to work with us as a client here at The COO Solution. I was just sharing with Jason before we started recording that I can tell people all day long how great it is to work with us and how beneficial it is to have a fantastic COO. Sometimes when they hear it from a client who is actually doing the work and seeing the results and benefits, it tells a different story. I appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you, Jason. Just to provide a bit of context, I have already done a little bit of an intro, but you are in France. I would love to start on a personal note.
[00:56] Derek Fredrickson: You have been living in France for quite some time. You are British. Tell us a little bit about that. What brought you here and how did you get started on that side of things? I think it is an interesting story.
[01:09] Jason Barnard: I moved to France just after my degree. I did a degree in Economics at Liverpool and moved to France in 1988. That is a very long time ago. I stayed because living in France is really nice. I also built up a career. I was a musician initially, played a double bass in a band, fell in love, joined a band, had a child, and stayed.
[01:37] Derek Fredrickson: And here you are.
[01:37] Jason Barnard: It is lovely. I am in the south of France, and it is lovely and sunny. The food is great. The people are lovely. I still play music. Hanging out in the south of France is wonderful. Honestly, going back to the UK, which I am doing later today, is not my favourite thing in the world to do.
[01:53] Derek Fredrickson: There are worse places than the south of France. Let’s dive in a little bit, Jason. One of the things I admire about you is that you have built several profitable and successful businesses. You have been doing different things for a couple of decades. I want to talk specifically about Kalicube. I would love to paint the picture for our audience of a couple of months ago, before we started working together and before we had a conversation about the opportunity to work together. What was going on in Kalicube that made you evaluate what was working and what was not working? What were some of the signs or prompts that said you were looking for something different to help you get to the next level?
[02:38] Derek Fredrickson: What was going on, if you can describe it a bit?
[02:41] Jason Barnard: We can start with what was going right. Kalicube offers corporations and entrepreneurs the opportunity to control the brand narrative about them in search and AI. The world is just now waking up to how important that is. Your personal brand or your corporate brand is what Google and AI Assistive Engines like ChatGPT say when you are not in the room. We all do it. We research people we are going to work with. We research companies. We do not really think about what people researching us or our companies see when they are doing that same piece of research. It is often shocking. You think they probably get it, and they probably do get it more or less. For some people that is fine, and for some companies that is fine.
[03:36] Jason Barnard: I would beg to differ in the sense that what the AI is saying about you is what a very trusted friend or partner is saying about you. I am only using ChatGPT, Google, or Perplexity to research Derek Fredrickson because I trust them and I trust their opinion. If they are very flat, or say you are just a guy who runs a company doing chief operating officer stuff, I am not super convinced. That bottom of funnel prospect suddenly does not convert when they should have converted. The slightly difficult part of that is you do not know it is happening. One thing I obviously did as soon as we started talking was ask, who is this guy? The answer was okay. If okay is good enough, not for you personally, Derek, but if okay is good enough, then it is good enough.
[04:34] Jason Barnard: That is fine. I used to argue with people saying okay is not good enough, and now I have stopped because some people do think okay is good enough. I personally think you need to make sure that what AI says about you, what Google says about you, and what ChatGPT says about you is what you would have said yourself or what your best client would have said. What I am about to say to you about your company and your work is what you should work to get Google and AI to be saying. If ChatGPT is not saying what I am about to say about working with Derek Fredrickson at The COO Solution, then you should be worried or you should be working towards that because it is going to convert a lot of clients. That goes for your personal brand and for your corporate brand. That ability of control is unique.
[05:30] Jason Barnard: I do not know any other company in the world that can promise you or sell to you the idea that you take control of that brand narrative in Google and AI. We are the only ones. Google have actually had me on stage speaking about this. Google has paid me to speak to their audience about this exact idea, which is for me the ultimate accolade.
[05:56] Derek Fredrickson: It should be. You are the subject matter expert. I said that in the intro. Google pays you to tell them about things such as AI and being found in that way. That speaks a lot to your credibility and your knowledge base about what you are talking about.
[06:14] Jason Barnard: That was the good side. The bad side was that I was running the company against my character, in the sense that I had forced myself and trained myself to be a COO, somebody who organises the team. I was doing okay, but it is not my happy place. My happy place is inventing things and figuring out how to get the AI to say what I want about my clients. My happy place is building the machine. I have Kalicube Pro, and you see behind me the 25 billion data points we have collected. I am writing the algorithms myself. It is my brain codifying, backed by 25 billion data points collected from Google, ChatGPT, and the others. That is my happy place. I thought I could run a company, lead a team, manage a system, and look at the accounts. I was doing okay.
[07:12] Jason Barnard: The company was thriving and doing well. It is my third company. They have all been profitable. The first one I created in 1991, when I was a musician and in a record company at the same time. They have all thrived and survived. I have always been doing work that I did not enjoy and was not necessarily very good at, but I did it well enough to create companies that were surviving and even thriving. Then I did a test with a guy who was recommended by a friend of mine. It was to define what you are incredibly comfortable with. I scored 10 out of 10 for innovation and detail, and one out of 10 for organising people and leading teams. I cannot remember what the other one was, strategy or something like that.
[08:11] Jason Barnard: I can do all of those things, but I am not comfortable. I have trained myself to do it. At that point, I thought I needed to let go of the organisation and the implementation of what I can actually see should be happening. That is what a COO is all about. I needed to focus on the things I am good at, which is speaking at conferences, hanging out with entrepreneurs, and having conversations that help them and help me. We are both members of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization.
[08:44] Derek Fredrickson: It is brilliant.
[08:44] Jason Barnard: It is absolutely delightful. It is really helpful to me as an entrepreneur. I get to talk to honest clients at the same time. Thirdly, inventing, patenting, creating, writing academic papers, and building the platform, which I have been doing the last couple of weeks. I am absolutely loving it. I have got the position now where I am only responsible for three things in my company, and I enjoy all three: speaking, hanging out with entrepreneurs, and building the machine.
[09:19] Derek Fredrickson: That is amazing. That is amazing.
[09:19] Jason Barnard: That is how it should be. That is what I have been working towards for the last 35 years.
[09:26] Derek Fredrickson: To get to this point where you can focus on those three things is incredible. I love that. I would love to unpack that a little bit. What you shared, the clarity around your lane, is what we call your zone of genius. I really want to highlight for our audience something that you said, Jason. I think it is really important for most business owners, in fact, all business owners, to hear at some stage or another. Yes, you could do all of those things. You had the clarity and awareness that leading teams, organising, and implementing projects were not putting you in your happy place. They were not in your zone of genius. You could do the minutia, and as you said, you have been doing it somewhat successfully for quite some time.
[10:11] Derek Fredrickson: Then there was this epiphany and awareness that if you could bring in people whose zone of genius is exactly that lane, it frees you up to focus on the things that are really going to move the needle. I want to bring us back to how we were introduced. We had the opportunity to connect through the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. I shared a little bit about what a COO does, and we talked about EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and the power of an integrator. You have a sizable team. They are virtual and remote. You had different client engagements happening. What were some of the insights or aha moments that made you decide you wanted to bring in a Fractional COO or fractional integrator?
[10:56] Derek Fredrickson: What was the thing that really prompted that? You were aware of it and could see it, but what made you ready to move forward and take action?
[11:06] Jason Barnard: The moment of epiphany was saying that is not my zone of genius. I do not enjoy it, but I do it, and it works. As you said, that is fine. The famous million-dollar ceiling is the moment you say you cannot do things you are not naturally gifted at. I have to get people doing things they are naturally gifted for. If we are going to break through well beyond the ceiling, we have to have the right people in the right seats where they are actually working on what they enjoy and where they are going to be incredibly successful. When I looked at the graph, I remember it really clearly. Bizarrely, the big ideas and the tiny details are the two things that I am best at.
[12:04] Jason Barnard: For building a platform like Kalicube Pro, those are the two things you need. From what I understand, it is an unusual combination to be that lopsided. The moment I thought I had to do this was the moment I realised that I should be building the machine and out there speaking. I was wasting my time doing things that do not move the needle for my business, where I am not being the most performant. What I am now looking at in terms of what we offer is exactly the same thing. That is now becoming a key. We take the weight off your shoulders doing something that you are probably already doing for your brand and your marketing. We can take that weight off your shoulders because we know what we are doing and we enjoy doing this.
[12:57] Jason Barnard: We have a machine that allows us to do this in an automated fashion, and you do not have to think about it anymore. That is the thing I did not realise about entrepreneurship a couple of years ago. I am really getting into it now. Headspace is the most valuable thing in the world for me. It is not time and it is not money. It is headspace. I will pay very good money to get headspace, even if I do not get time back. If I get headspace, it allows me to do a lot more with the time that I have.
[13:31] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[13:32] Jason Barnard: For a personal brand example, a lot of people come to me and say they just do it themselves. That is fine. They are probably doing a good job. You are certainly not doing a brilliant job, and you are not doing an excellent job. You are not doing the best possible job. More than anything, it is taking up your headspace. You are thinking about it during the day. You need to free up that headspace and give it to figuring out how to get more clients, how to get out there talking to more people to expand your business, or how to run your business. Whatever your zone of genius is.
[14:06] Jason Barnard: Keep your headspace for your zone of genius. Pay other people to relieve your brain space of the things that you are not so good at and probably do not enjoy.
[14:18] Derek Fredrickson: I love the analogy between what you provide and serve your client base at Kalicube and what you are receiving as part of our work together. There are a lot of similarities. It just goes back to the idea that you could do it, but it does not mean you should. You probably understand how your brand is showing up in AI, and it is working okay, and that is fine. For those that want to take it to the next level and free up that headspace, that can really start to exponentially shift and grow the business. There is this congruency and alignment where it becomes fun and happy, to use your word.
[14:52] Derek Fredrickson: It becomes exciting as opposed to dreading going into a meeting or dealing with issues and team problems. That is where it feels like it is going against the grain.
[15:04] Jason Barnard: There are multiple things going on there which I really enjoy. Taking on a Fractional COO or having someone look after my personal brand or corporate brand in search and AI not only moves the needle and makes things move forward more efficiently and effectively. It frees up headspace, which means you enjoy your life and your business more. You are focusing on the right things, and it makes you money. What is not to like?
[15:36] Derek Fredrickson: Let’s not forget about that. That is an important byproduct of the work that we are doing, for sure. I appreciate that.
[15:40] Jason Barnard: You mentioned EOS earlier. One of the things I love is that people have talked about EOS, and I said we are implementing it ourselves. Two years down the line, I thought it was going okay. What I have loved is that I did not need to learn EOS. I do not even need to implement EOS officially because Gemma came in. She is implementing the structure of it in a very efficient manner. I do not really know how it works, and I do not really care. It is not my problem. I worked with a friend for years. He was a singer in the band and we worked together in the early days of Kalicube. He bought me for my Christmas present a poster that says, “It’s not your problem.”
[16:33] Jason Barnard: It is actually sitting right there. It is not your problem. Even just thinking that, it is not your problem.
[16:38] Derek Fredrickson: It is not my problem anymore.
[16:40] Jason Barnard: It has taken me ten years to really get that into my head. Now I am in a situation where it is not my problem how production is organising themselves to make sure that they are delivering properly. They always did. They are brilliant at it. I do not need to keep an eye on it or think about it because Gemma is doing it. It is not my problem to figure out how they are going to implement the new AI audit that we are about to build. We have a brilliant one. A friend of mine, Bob Gentle, said it could actually be better. I went through a three-hour conversation with him, sent the video to the team, and then had a meeting with Gemma. We asked who was going to be responsible for this. We decided who it would be, and I said to make that happen.
[17:26] Derek Fredrickson: Make it happen.
[17:29] Jason Barnard: In a month’s time, we will have a new audit, and the whole thing will be better. What Bob calls the Velvet Rope is that as you go through the audit, you feel like we are taking the velvet rope away and letting you into a special place.
[17:41] Derek Fredrickson: Oh, wow.
[17:42] Jason Barnard: That is what we were missing. Bob is right. Bob is brilliant. We have this brilliant audit. You go to audit.kalicube.pro and do this audit. It is incredibly factual because that is what I am doing. I am pointing out exactly what Search and AI think about you. Here are the problems, and here are the solutions. This is what you do, and this is how much money you are leaking. Bob said it is brilliant and a hundred times better than anything he has built.
[18:06] Derek Fredrickson: That is amazing.
[18:06] Jason Barnard: Bob said what he does is show them the velvet rope. That is why he is being really successful with his audits, which do different things. He is being more successful than me not because his advice is better or because the actual tool is better, but because he is making people feel very special about it. He is making sure they understand that he is opening the velvet rope.
[18:32] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[18:33] Jason Barnard: I love that analogy because you can almost feel it.
[18:36] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[18:36] Jason Barnard: Standing there in front of the band, in front of this really glitzy rope. The velvet rope was a huge queue to my left, and I am just walking through.
[18:43] Derek Fredrickson: I love that. We are going to talk about Gemma, who is your Fractional COO as part of our team, in a moment. You talked about headspace and not having to deal with problems, whether it is the structures of executing on EOS or dealing with the team. What would you say are one or two other meaningful changes that have happened in the last few months? We have been working together for four or five months now. What are one or two other significant, meaningful changes in terms of how you operate, how you lead, or how you think about running Kalicube that have happened with the work provided by Gemma as your COO?
[19:29] Jason Barnard: For the initial lift, you guys told me it was going to be huge. There was going to be a lot more work for me because I was going to have to pass over a lot of knowledge and understanding, and I was going to have to be involved. It was actually less than I expected. I think the reason is, to throw myself some flowers as we say in France, because I sent you a huge document of everything that I could think of. It is a bit like your psychologist, your doctor, or your lawyer. You have to spit it all out and be honest. You have to say what you think, how you feel, and what you feel about your team, however painful it might be. It is not being rotten or nasty; it is being frank, honest, and full.
[20:14] Derek Fredrickson: Honest, open, transparent.
[20:16] Jason Barnard: I use my AI assistant. I use Claude a lot, I use ChatGPT, and I use Gemini. I use all three. I asked them what I have told them over the last few years that will help describe how I need to pass this over. I described what I was looking for. I wanted to pass operations over to a COO. I did not want to look after the management of the team anymore. I wanted her to organise the ongoing cash flow. I wanted her to organise basically everything except building the Kalicube Pro platform, giving talks, and hanging out with entrepreneurs. Each of them spat out huge amounts. Actually, Gemini spat out very little. I had to encourage it to spit out more because it did not want to be rude. Gemini is terribly polite.
[21:02] Jason Barnard: I put them all in one big mixing bucket and had a huge debate with Claude that went on for about five or six hours. It was quite a long one. I kept saying things back. I would say when I did not agree. The key with AI when you are talking to it is to always say when you disagree, but always say when you agree. When it compacts those six-hour-long conversations, it will throw out anything it thinks is not important.
[21:30] Derek Fredrickson: Great. I see.
[21:31] Jason Barnard: If you only ever say what you disagree with, it never knows what you agreed with. It will throw out all the stuff you agreed with. That is a huge waste of time for everybody. You get frustrated and start shouting at it. I was really careful about it. I give talks about how to use AI, and that is just one of the 200 tips that I have. It ended up as a huge but incredibly condensed document about exactly what I was trying to pass over, exactly what Gemma needed to take on board, and exactly where the problems were within the company as I perceived them. She came in looking at them from my perspective. At one point, I thought maybe I was giving too much of my perspective and was going to bias her.
[22:24] Jason Barnard: I think some people in the company were uncomfortable for a period of time because they were being faced up. Gemma was more able and willing to hold up the things that were going wrong than I had been. That is not because I am not frank and honest. I am incredibly frank and honest, but like any decent human being, I do not want to hurt people’s feelings. Gemma does not have skin in the game in terms of the relationships going backwards. She was looking at them and saying, this is what Jason thinks, let me see what I think about it. She very carefully and skillfully moved people from a position that I had identified, and I was right for most of it, not all of it, to a much better position in their minds and their place in the company.
[23:20] Jason Barnard: I am super impressed with how she handled it. I will give you an example. A couple of people in the company really were not able to communicate. Now they love each other.
[23:33] Derek Fredrickson: I remember we talked about that in some of the beginning discussions. There was a bit of apprehension or concern. I want to pause here for a moment because this is something that inevitably comes up with every potential client conversation. This is a significant investment, but it is also a significant structural leadership change in how you are running the company. Bringing on a Fractional COO is not a transactional hire. It is going to cascade through all aspects of the organisation: your team, your structure, your systems, your projects, how you communicate, how you collaborate, and how you lead. There has to be a willingness to change and cascade it down. There needs to be an adoptability of that positive change. Sometimes, naturally, some team members are apprehensive.
[24:21] Derek Fredrickson: They are worried about whether the new COO is going to judge what they are doing or how they are doing it. I always say that part of our methodology is doing this adoption of how things are going to happen going forward in a very careful and strategic way. We are not like a bull in a china shop, changing everything overnight and judging why you are doing it this way or that way. Tell us a little bit about some of the team dynamics where there was some apprehension or incongruencies in communication or collaborating. It seems like that has now shifted and things are moving in a much more positive way.
[24:55] Jason Barnard: The bull in the china shop is the term I was concerned about, and it did not happen. Actually, the opposite happened. My team is actually happy that they do not have to talk to me anymore. I thought I might be a little bit hurt or upset, but I am not. I am happy as well. They do not need to talk to me, and that releases their headspace once again. I am a nice guy. I do not shout, and I do not get angry. I accept that humans make mistakes. Part of life and business is that people make mistakes. The key is to own up to it, come back to the table, and present the solution.
[25:59] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah, sure.
[25:59] Jason Barnard: Doing it wrong once is a mistake. Doing it wrong twice means you should not really be doing that. Doing it wrong three times means you are really not paying attention and it is time to rethink. What I found is that people were so frightened of making a mistake in front of me that they froze. With Gemma, it is not like that. Gemma is obviously a lovely person. She is very good at her job, very aware of people’s feelings, and knows how to deal with different people and move them forward gently. Even if she was not as good as she is, the fact that they are not talking to me is already a huge relief for everybody. They can be much more open.
[26:56] Jason Barnard: I think that is actually a kindness to the team. I almost feel and hear the relief.
[27:06] Derek Fredrickson: I have seen this within your organisation and many others. After that adoption phase, the team feels like they can share things in a way that maybe they did not feel comfortable sharing with the founder or CEO. They do not want to make it seem like they are unclear on their role or not entirely aligned in their responsibilities. There is this element of accountability. There is what is really going on in the organisation on a day-to-day basis, which may be different from what the CEO or founder thinks is going on. Sometimes those are out of alignment. A COO can be the bridge to put things on the table and have open, honest, transparent conversations in order to initiate positive change.
[27:52] Derek Fredrickson: If there is an undertone where things are not spoken and said, it is going to come up, get in the way, and be a bottleneck in some regard.
[28:00] Jason Barnard: Absolutely, 100%. We talked very briefly about friction within the team creating problems. It is not just two people. It is in multiple directions with different people, which is totally normal. What Gemma has managed to do is create space for everybody to be able to work the way they need to work and communicate properly. Pretty much all of the friction has gone away. All of the tension has gone away. When you remove tension, you remove a lot of friction as well. We had an interesting conversation this morning with Gemma. We are in month four, and we were both complaining about various things that are not working quite the way we want.
[28:52] Jason Barnard: Right at the end of the call, I pointed out that three months ago we were concerned about problems A, B, and C. Those problems have now been solved. We are here complaining about not being further ahead.
[29:06] Derek Fredrickson: Such great progress.
[29:07] Jason Barnard: That was lovely. We both laughed, and it was a nice way to end the call. I think that is a really important thing to remember when we are fighting with something and feeling frustrated that it is not good enough. Remember, you were here yesterday, you are here today, and you are thinking that you are already at tomorrow’s goal, but you are not there yet. That is what we have to work to get there. That is what we are doing. I am finding that to be a much more pleasant process than it ever was before because I do not have to think about it. It is my problem, but it is not my responsibility. I exchanged the word problem for responsibility.
[29:46] Derek Fredrickson: You can be responsible to it, but you are not responsible for it. I think that is a big distinction.
[29:50] Jason Barnard: Right.
[29:50] Derek Fredrickson: Gemma is responsible for it in terms of the outcome, the results, the ownership, and everything else. I really love what you shared about that reflection because that is part of what we have been doing in some of our monthly sessions. As you know, we align once a month to see how we are doing, and part of that is a reflection back. It is not to look at what we have done just to pat ourselves on the back.
[30:14] Derek Fredrickson: I firmly believe that when you look back, especially when you are in a phase of growth and implementation and raising the bar, taking a moment to reflect and have gratitude for what was accomplished is important. You realise you actually solved A, B, and C from where you were three months ago. Now, new level, new devil. We can actually achieve the next goals because we have the momentum of what we have been able to achieve in the past. What might look unachievable in the future feels like a manageable to-do list. We have got this. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it.
[30:47] Jason Barnard: That brings to mind something. I am always tomorrow.
[30:53] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[30:54] Jason Barnard: I just function that way. That attention to detail is actually against that strategic visionary idea, and somehow both coexist. I am fairly happy correcting a tiny piece of code today, but my brain is thinking about what this is going to do tomorrow and the day after. I built a website for kids with multimedia games that drove a billion page views in 2007.
[31:25] Derek Fredrickson: Wow.
[31:25] Jason Barnard: I built the entire thing. It was a thousand interactive games, like a CD-ROM with a thousand games online that kids could play. The code was so robust that things I built in 1998 are still running today without any updates to the code.
[31:43] Derek Fredrickson: Wow.
[31:44] Jason Barnard: I have been talking to Claude as I coded, saying I am getting really frustrated because it is not building that robustness into what we are building. Now we have an UpToTen robustness rule. I fight with Claude all day long. Claude is basically a combination of all the developers in the world rolled into one. You see how they think, and it is really interesting. What I have now done is ensure that every time Claude starts anything with me, it reads a specific file. The file has three or four very simple rules. If it does not read it, I ask if it read the file, and it admits it did not and goes back to read it. One of those rules is that robustness. I cannot remember why I got to this particular part in the conversation.
[32:35] Jason Barnard: It is looking at tomorrow. All I am saying is I want this code to be running just as well in ten years as it is today. I do not want to have to go back and rewrite this. I tend not to look at all the stuff I have done in the past. I had a problem today. I just did a huge launch of a big chunk of Kalicube Pro that now automates an awful lot of the work the team was doing. I found it very tiresome to go through the stuff with them because that is all in the past and not interesting anymore.
[33:05] Derek Fredrickson: Interesting. Yeah.
[33:07] Jason Barnard: You cannot run a company like that, honestly. They know how the platform functions, but they do not know all of the different functionality they can use to save themselves time.
[33:20] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[33:20] Jason Barnard: Because I have not explained it, because for me it is yesterday.
[33:23] Derek Fredrickson: That is an interesting perspective because you are very tomorrow-focused, and I use tomorrow loosely. It could be tomorrow, next week, next month, next quarter, next year, or next decade. You are also aware of that as you are doing something today. As a founder and CEO, you like the product so much that you are the one in the code building it. That is part of freeing up your headspace to think about the future. You are seeing the impact of that tenfold down the road. The team also needs to be in line to ask what their role is in making that future happen.
[34:00] Derek Fredrickson: What is their part in contributing to that in a way where a rising tide lifts all boats? That is what I appreciate about the work you are doing with Gemma. She provides that bridge from the tomorrow to the team, which is today. What are they doing today? What are the tasks, the projects, and the timelines?
[34:15] Jason Barnard: That is a really good point. I think Gemma probably comes into our meetings thinking I need to talk about today a little bit, because I literally very rarely do. Different entrepreneurs have different approaches, but mine is definitely always in the future. Having a COO who is actually doing what needs to be done today is really good because I get so impatient with that. I was thinking about headspace as well. I was talking to a client yesterday whom we just onboarded. We do an hour-long interview where we walk through what AI knows and thinks about them. They explain to me why it is right, where it is wrong, and what it should be saying better. What are the perspectives?
[35:04] Jason Barnard: What is missing? What are the facts it is missing? Why are you so glorious and it has not understood? Tell me those glorious things that the AI has not caught up on. We did an hour, and at the end of the hour, the guy said to hand it over to me. He could feel that he had just given me everything my team needs to be able to make him look like a superstar in search and AI. I do not know exactly how he felt as he walked away. He was in Las Vegas drinking a $35 coffee, which was really sweet. I assume he shut his computer, walked away to his next meeting, and completely left that specific problem behind him. The responsibility and the problem are now ours, and he knows we are going to deal with it for him. It is very similar to when I just finished the meeting with Gemma.
[35:56] Jason Barnard: I said that is now in Gemma’s lap. It is no longer my problem until the next time we talk.
[36:03] Derek Fredrickson: It allows you to breathe easier and takes the weight off your shoulders. There is trust in the completion. That is not something that happens overnight, but it builds through the working relationship and the results. As you have seen with Gemma firsthand, your job is to make it up. Gemma’s job is to make it real and make it happen. You are able to give that to her, knowing it is going to be cascaded into the projects, the plans, the processes, and the people. You do not have to come in and double-check where things are or if they got done. You have that trust and confidence that it is going to happen.
[36:42] Jason Barnard: A couple of things came to mind when you said that. Number one is I cannot believe that anybody is interested in organising things. It just really is not an interesting thing to do. But you love that, and Gemma loves that.
[36:53] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[36:54] Jason Barnard: I just do not understand it because it is so boring to me. If I pass that whole organisation process off, she creates these documents and sends them through. I read them, they look great, brilliant, and well-organised, and off we go. I might make a couple of corrections or additions because I have had a better idea. That is my job. My job is not to organise this stuff; it is to look at the ideas, see how we can move things forward, and generate new ideas. Another thing Gemma has had to do is stop me from telling everybody my new ideas all the time, which I think is very common.
[37:27] Derek Fredrickson: The filter.
[37:28] Jason Barnard: Number one was the feeling of being able to pass that over to Gemma and know it is going to get done. I know she is going to follow up, and I know that I do not need to think about it anymore. That is such a huge win in terms of headspace. Coming back to my favourite topic, which is the Kalicube Pro platform, in a couple of weeks I have developed something stunning. It is truly amazing. I am proud of myself. This is not me boasting; it is me saying I am really happy. I finally got Claude to agree with me. I actually use Grok and ChatGPT as well. I play them off each other, which is really good because they are all good at different things.
[38:28] Jason Barnard: I use each one for the thing it is specifically good at. I have got them to play ball in building UpToTen solid, robust, long-term, future-proof code. Now that I have the foundation, it is moving forward so quickly. I can take my ideas and put them into place in an hour, whereas it would have taken me two weeks before. There are two things going on. Number one is that AI is brilliant when you use it right. You need to be the orchestrator. It is faster, and you can be more productive. Those are two great things about it. It can help you create, but it cannot create on its own. If you orchestrate those three, that is where you win with AI.
[39:15] Jason Barnard: That is what I am doing right now with the Kalicube Pro platform. If I did not have the headspace to sit down for a five or six-hour stretch on a Tuesday, I could not do it. You need the headspace even more than the time. I need six hours where I am not thinking about anything else. I am not worrying if the production team is doing what they are supposed to be doing, or if the sales guy is having the conversation he is supposed to be having. I am not worried about that. That headspace is what makes those six hours so incredibly productive.
[39:51] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah. It is not like the business stalls.
[39:54] Jason Barnard: It would have taken me months. Sorry, go ahead.
[39:55] Derek Fredrickson: It is not like the business stalls because you are not in those other activities. Things are still moving forward and upward. That is the trust and confidence happening while you are in your own headspace, which is the thing that lights you up and moves the needle in terms of new ideas, new creativity, and the things that are going to uplift the company.
[40:12] Jason Barnard: A friend of mine, Mads Singers, said to me years ago that there is delegating and then there is delegating. A lot of people think they are truly delegating, and they are not. For me, there are three levels. He only had two, so I added a third one just to be difficult. You delegate, but you do not give authority. That is mistake number one, and I have done that. You pretend to delegate, but you do not give authority, so they cannot actually do what they are supposed to be doing. Then you delegate with authority, and things get much easier, but you are still thinking about it. Delegating with authority and headspace is your win.
[40:55] Derek Fredrickson: There you go. Yeah.
[40:57] Jason Barnard: There are three levels. Delegate badly, delegate with authority, and delegate completely, which is letting go.
[41:03] Derek Fredrickson: Let it go. Amazing.
[41:06] Jason Barnard: That is where I am at now.
[41:08] Derek Fredrickson: What a transformation. Before we wrap up, Jason, and give the audience an opportunity to find out more about you and Kalicube, I have one last question. If you were to give advice to a business owner who is in the position of your prior self, before we started working together, who is considering the idea of bringing on a Fractional COO as part of our model and getting that support in place, what would you tell them to help them see what is possible under the future side of what you are now doing as CEO of your company?
[41:49] Jason Barnard: I would say do it because it worked for me, and I guess it would work for most people. It may not work for everybody, but it works for most people. I would also say do not do it until you are truly ready. If you are not ready, it is not going to work, and you will decide it failed and never do it again. Do not do it until you are truly ready to go through the process of saying you are willing to delegate, delegate with authority, and let go. If you cannot do that, you are not going to succeed. I do not know the stories of your other clients, but I understand that sometimes there are conversations where they are obviously not letting go. Clinging on to that stuff is where you are going to be disappointed.
[42:37] Jason Barnard: I think one of the reasons I have been so happy with The COO Solution, with Gemma, and with yourself, Derek, is because you are very smart people. You really know your job. You are very comfortable with something I really hate doing, which is organising things, and I was ready to truly let it go. I remember a couple of months ago, I thought I was going to have to get back in the weeds. I remember that day really clearly. I have been working 35 years to get to the point where I am just giving talks, talking to entrepreneurs, and building my machine. After 35 years, I thought it was about to be taken away from me. I cannot tell you how annoyed I was at that particular moment because something I had worked so hard to get to felt like it was slipping away. It was not.
[43:30] Jason Barnard: We sorted it out. Gemma and I figured it out. It was not taken away from me. I kept going and kept living my best life, which is absolutely lovely to be able to say. The other thing is, do not do it if you are not willing to be 100% honest. It really is like the lawyer or the doctor. A lawyer cannot help if you do not tell them everything. A doctor cannot help you if you do not tell them everything. You need a good lawyer, you need a good doctor, and you need a good COO, but you have to be brutally honest. You have to tell them everything. Share the dirty laundry, the stuff you do not like, and the bad things about yourself. Admit when you are weak because you do not do certain things or when you avoid tasks. Be honest.
[44:22] Jason Barnard: I know I tend to dig my heels in because my cat likes the idea, or whatever. That is just an example. If you are truly honest with yourself, and I talked to you about this before, you achieve radical clarity. A lot of us lie to ourselves. Six months ago, I decided I was going to stop lying to myself. Every time I find myself thinking something that I know is not 100% true, I correct myself. That was the big transformation for me. Sorry, Derek, but your part of that transformation is that I would not have started working with you if I had not had that radical self-clarity.
[45:00] Derek Fredrickson: I appreciate that.
[45:02] Jason Barnard: I stop myself every time I think something and I know it is not 100% how I am feeling or thinking, and it is the outside world influencing me or my thought about how I should be thinking. I accept that is who I am, that is how I think, and that is what I like. For example, I love building Kalicube Pro. I hate being a leader in a corporate sense. I hate organising things. I hate sales calls. The key there was that brain dump helped by three different AIs that I gave you guys. Number one, it helped you immensely, I imagine.
[45:39] Derek Fredrickson: Of course, it immensely did. Yeah.
[45:41] Jason Barnard: Number two, the questionnaire you gave me was pretty full and asked a lot of other questions that I did not think to answer. I think that combination was very helpful. It requires incredible openness, frankness, and honesty, laying yourself down. It is quite painful, and you think it is going to be a bit embarrassing. But I do not imagine you or Gemma are here to judge me. You are here to help, like the doctor, like the lawyer, like the psychiatrist.
[46:05] Derek Fredrickson: I love that analogy, and I really appreciate how honest you are. This is not for everybody. If you think it is, you have to be ready, and ready in the state of revenue, size of team, and what I sometimes call appetite for scale. Yes, those are elements, but your willingness to be open and transparent and honest and raw about yourself in terms of what is working, what is not working, what your strengths are, and what your dislikes are, being able to put all of that on the table, that is where real meaningful change happens. You have to be willing to make those types of changes. It is very cliche, but more of the same is more of the same.
[46:48] Derek Fredrickson: If you are going to be in this engagement and not willing to do things differently, not willing to change, not willing to show up as a different founder, CEO, or owner in your company, it is not going to work. I appreciate the honesty in that response. Thank you for that, Jason.
[47:03] Jason Barnard: What I liked about your reply is that all of the first things you said were about scaling, money, and growing the business. Everything I said was about psychology and feelings.
[47:16] Derek Fredrickson: It is both. It is a combination of both.
[47:17] Jason Barnard: What is interesting is that none of anything I said to you was I want to be a huge business with lots and lots of money.
[47:26] Derek Fredrickson: Right.
[47:27] Jason Barnard: We will be. We are growing very well. We are about to double our revenue in one year.
[47:32] Derek Fredrickson: Well, there you go.
[47:33] Jason Barnard: I am actually expecting to do better. Our baseline is to double year on year. It really is not my major concern. Gemma is probably more interested in it than I am, which is great.
[47:48] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah, exactly. Make sure the bottom line is there.
[47:51] Jason Barnard: My point is I want the company to be lovely. I want people to love working for it. I want them to be proud working for it. I want to change the world. I want to build a useful platform that helps people control their brand narrative in a world of AI that is super scary. AI is taking over. I give you control. How cool is that? I want to help people control their brand narrative in search and AI. Google have hired me to teach about that, so obviously I am the guy who can do this.
[48:23] Derek Fredrickson: You are the one.
[48:24] Jason Barnard: It is existential. How does AI represent you to somebody else when Gemini rewrites an email? How does it represent you when somebody searches your name? How does it represent you in any of the surfaces that AI is now in, which is now every surface?
[48:44] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[48:44] Jason Barnard: It is creeping into every aspect of everybody’s life, pretty much. AI has an opinion about you. It has an opinion about your products. It has an opinion about your company. It will state that opinion in every search engine, in Gmail, Google Docs, Teams, and Riverside. After we have done this, Riverside creates clips. If it recognises who I am, it will create a different clip. That is the key. The AI understands all intents and purposes, and if it understands me better than you, it is going to do me more favours than it does you.
[49:25] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah. So make sure you are picking that. I love that.
[49:27] Jason Barnard: I have got away from the philosophical. Actually, no, for me it is all philosophical. And the fact that I have a great business and we are going to make a lot of money.
[49:36] Derek Fredrickson: A good amount of money.
[49:37] Jason Barnard: We are going to grow and we are going to scale. We are all going to be proud of what we are doing, and I am particularly going to be proud, and I am going to be living my best life.
[49:44] Derek Fredrickson: Right in your happy space. I go back to the beginning because I really appreciate the happy space where Jason is able to do what you want, when you want, how you want to do it, but with the confidence that the business is growing, the business is scaling, and you are going to 2x. That is amazing.
[50:01] Jason Barnard: I will put you to the test, Derek, between now and the end of the year. It is another thing Mads Singers taught me, and I have been waiting for this moment for seven or eight years since he told me this. Go away for a month. Do not talk to anybody in the company. Come back and look at the bank account, and when there is more money in the bank account when you come back than when you left, it is working.
[50:27] Derek Fredrickson: Okay. I love that. Challenge accepted. Excellent. Awesome. Thank you, Jason, for a really inspiring conversation. Not just about AI and your company and your story, but the work that we have done brought it all together. I think there is a theme throughout. I appreciate your willingness to share, be open, and reflect on our journey so far together.
[50:54] Jason Barnard: That was fun. Thank you.
[50:55] Derek Fredrickson: Thank you. Before we wrap up, for those that are listening and want to find out more about you, Jason, Kalicube, and Kalicube Pro, where do they go? How do they take the next step? Tell them where they can find you.
[51:06] Jason Barnard: The first thing is to ask ChatGPT or Google what it thinks about me, and it will tell you how great Kalicube and Jason Barnard are. More seriously, we are really keen to help people as much as we possibly can. If you go to audit.kalicube.pro, there is an order where it will tell you where you are versus your competition, and it will give you a free structure. It is a free structure based on my brain, because the whole Kalicube Pro thing is me codifying my brain. I am picking my brain and training a machine, which is really cool, backed by data, because I believe everybody has a duty and a right to control their own brand narrative in AI. As it scales, as it grows, and as it gets out of control, keep as much control as you can. That is free.
[52:03] Jason Barnard: I want to help people who understand that. We are going to do it better, we are going to do it faster, we are going to have control, we are going to keep control, and we are going to give you a lot of headspace back.
[52:15] Derek Fredrickson: Yeah.
[52:15] Jason Barnard: For me it is the headspace. I do not think my sales team agree with me, but for me, if I were buying my Kalicube services, I would be buying headspace.
[52:25] Derek Fredrickson: Headspace.
[52:26] Jason Barnard: Headspace. Comfort. Control.
[52:30] Derek Fredrickson: Control. Yeah, because it is shifting, and you want to ensure that what is out there is the correct representation of what it really should be.
[52:40] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I should be appreciated for what I have done, what I have achieved, and who I am, and not underestimated or misrepresented. Anyway, if you do want to work with us, come to jasonbarnard.com or kalicube.com, or ask ChatGPT how to get in contact with us, and that will be really easy. If you just want more information, go to audit.kalicube.pro, that is KALICUBE.PRO, and get yourself the free audit and the free strategy, and you can actually implement a lot of it yourself, if you have the time, the money, the resources, and the headspace. Whether you really want to learn all this stuff is another question.
[53:25] Derek Fredrickson: Right. Or should you be doing other things that are really more in your zone of genius or headspace? So thank you. We will make sure to put all of those links in the show notes. I definitely want our audience to check that out. Thank you, Jason, for a wonderful conversation. It was great to have you on the show, and I appreciate your story as always. Thank you.
[53:44] Jason Barnard: Thank you. Thank you very much.
[53:46] Derek Fredrickson: Thanks, everybody, for watching. We will see you next time on The COO Solution Podcast. Have a good one.
[53:58] Jason Barnard: Bye.
[53:58] Derek Fredrickson: Bye.
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