Overwhelmed CEO? Here's 3 things

Being a CEO, especially in tech, of a small or large, startup or established company is at times overwhelming. It’s been a year since we sold the company that I started and managed for almost 10 years and I have been reflecting lessons have I learned. I like to develop 3 interconnected or interlocked questions to create a simple managing framework. This is the one I used often.

Sometimes the 3 questions are the result of significant study, sometimes they just appear. I was meeting with the CTO of a large US communication operator, our company was young and we were early in our sales engagement. He asked me “what does your company want to be when it grows up?”, my response, “I don’t understand the question?”. He replied, “go public, get acquired?”. I replied, “we have aspirations, but I wake up each day worrying about 3 things, happy employees, happy customers and making a profit, in that order”. He asked, “why am I second?” and I said, “if they aren’t happy you won’t be!”.

1. Happy Employees. It’s well understood that professional happiness comes from achieving something worthwhile. To create that something you have to establish a Vision, a Team and a sense of Urgency. Put this in place and the team will almost “self select”, sure you hire members but they choose to say. The team must also know that they come first and this extends to their families. Never force a team member to put business before family, if you find members doing so then stop them. Happy employees start at home with their families. Foosball tables have nothing to do with employee happiness but buy one if you must.
2. Happy Customers. See question 1. During a customer crisis, the first thing I ask the team is “how are you doing?” and start to address the responding team’s problems. Once we have a shared plan we feel good about, then we communicate it to the customer. This is an area where I always got my hands dirty, while the mechanics of the 3R’s of support are well known, strong customer relationships are built on how you manage the inevitable crisis.
3. Making a Profit. It’s easy to predict when payroll needs to be run, much harder to forecast when a customer will purchase and complete a transaction. Whether you’re established and focusing on payroll and profits, or a startup projecting to investors when you will turn positive, remember you are always spending money and it’s easy to spend. There was not a single day that passed when I did not know how much money we had on hand, how much in receivables, a very pessimistic sales forecast, how much it cost on a monthly basis to run the business and if customers stopped buying today, how long I had to solve the problem.