That's COO

If there’s such a thing as a COO’s COO, I think Josh Renicker would have to be it. For starters, he knows his team inside and out, having hired just about everyone who works at his company, Energy Access. More to the point, though, Josh knows his business intimately and has a meaningful understanding of just about every role within the company.

Amazingly enough, this impressive tenure dates back 18 years to a fateful moment in a classroom. At that time, Josh was working full time as a draftsman and quality manager and also taking classes at ITT Technical Institute. 

One night, the founder of Energy Access “just happened to step into my classroom with a list saying he was looking for an operations manager… I’d basically grown up in manufacturing and he was speaking my language. It was like ‘I think I can do that, I don’t know what that means but I can figure it out.’ So his list, I knew about 40% of it. Another probably 30% I’d heard of before and then there was 30%, I’m like, I have no idea what that means. But I’m your guy, so I apply to the gig.”

It’s no stretch to say that that moment was a defining one in Josh’s career. Needless to say, he got the job and set about figuring out the things he didn’t know. 

“So I came in and basically started from scratch. There were no processes in place, there were no people, and I just kind of learned my way through it… It was like drinking from a fire hose on every subject and applying what I knew about manufacturing to everything else and just making it my own.”

In my opinion, a lot of Josh’s genius for operations can be traced to the end of the phrase. That is, he has an endless willingness to make things his own, whether he has formal training relevant to the subject matter or just enough common sense to figure it out on his own.

“When I came here I knew nothing about electronics, nothing about batteries, nothing about power really. And I just kind of figured it out… I just understood processes and I understood how to simplify things, so that’s what I hung my hat on.”

When I asked Josh if this ultra high degree of adaptability was innate, he said he thought so and cited the fact that he was a drummer in high school. At first this didn’t make much sense to me but then he connected the dots, explaining that learning to play drums meant that he knew how to do something different with both of his hands simultaneously

That meant that learning manufacturing equipment was relatively easy for him, starting with his first job. Eventually his boss there noticed noticed his high degree of aptitude and his consistent attendance and proposed that Josh take on a flexible role, where he would fill in for whoever was missing, which further accelerated his learning. In short, Josh had made himself valuable, which put him in a position where he could make himself indispensable.

“So that’s just kind of the way that I approached my entire career. It was like ‘I’m going to go in with the idea that I’m going to be second in command, that I’m going to be answering to the guy who makes decisions and he’s gonna know he can rely on me.”

Josh went on to make a critical distinction that’s important for anyone who might seek to replicate this approach. “I never jumped in and said, ‘Hey, I’m that guy.’ But I always just found myself in that position after a while…”

So, Josh didn’t impose himself as a leader, rather he put himself in a position where people knew that he had valuable experience and insights. Moreover, when it came time to lead people, he would lean on that wealth of experience to provide reasons why people should do what he was suggesting. “It’s amazing the difference in power that you have when you say ‘my experience is’ versus ‘you should’ Like, those are two vastly different approaches.”

As far as leading the company, the supreme degree of trust that Josh earned from his CEO led to an unusual reporting structure that makes him as the COO the most senior employee. 

“Malcolm [the founder and CEO] recognized pretty early on that he was not a manager by any means. So when he found somebody that could, he completely backed off and said ‘Josh, figure it out.’ So now, we’re in a bit of a unique situation, because he’s an engineer. His wife does the HR and accounting, but in the org chart they both report to me, and then above that is the board, which is me and the two owners.” 

Needless to say, it takes a lot of trust in someone to want to make them your boss at a company that you founded, but talking with Josh it’s pretty easy to understand how he has earned that trust over the years. 

First, he clearly brings very little ego to his job. He is constantly seeking to put in place the best and most efficient systems and solutions and he doesn’t care whether those ideas come from him or someone else. He has also been willing to operate outside of his comfort zone for long periods of time, confident all along that he would eventually gain the knowledge he needed to be effective in his role.

“I mean, I was probably here six months before I really understood what we sold. I thought, I know how to build it, I can figure out where to get stuff made. I can see that green light says it’s good. I can figure the rest of it out.”

In addition to his innate aptitude for the job, it’s clear that Josh’s involvement in the COO Forum has played a huge role in supporting his growth as a COO. Not only has his membership allowed him to interact with and observe a large number of COOs in a short amount of time, it’s also given him a list of people that he can reach out to for advice or input. “So it’s a quick email like, ‘Hey, you know, I’m having trouble looking at this section of my PnL, what do you think?’”

Having interacted with so many COOs across so many different companies and industries, Josh has a particularly well honed definition of what the job requires. 

“So the real super power of every COO that I’ve met—and I’ve met hundreds—is that we’re able to zoom in and out, and we’re able to zoom in and out in real time all the time. So if we’re asked a question that’s about the trees, we’re able to zoom out, see how that fits in the forest, then we can zoom back in and answer that question related to everything. And that’s really what sets a COO apart.”