Been there, Done that

Summary: Why does experience matter for a CEO? Because longevity to identify market opportunity and change management lead to long term success.

It’s official. I’m old. And not old like those TikToks that say “anyone born after 2003 is old” but genuinely a mature experienced professional in her prime. And that my friends, makes me wicked good at my job. You want a CEO who is not risk adverse, nimble, and ready to adjust things but who also understands a decision's long term ramifications on the bottom line and the culture. In particular if your CEO cares about their people in a genuine way, and not just what they can deliver.

Death and Taxes and Change

Trends in business will always happen, just like death and taxes (and a great beer from Moonlight Brewing btw). From the designer’s production table to computers, from HTML to Wordpress, from Lycos search to AI — it’s the job of the CEO to predict the future and prepare their organization to navigate it. Here are some of the changes we’ve executed in the last 15 years

Is it a Business or a Hobby? 

When I bought the company, we were only doing fixed bid projects, which meant months with no revenue and then BAM, all the money hits at once. You need to be a conservative company that saves its pennies to weather that kind of revenue flow and it makes accurate forecasting and budgeting nearly impossible. So we pulled on our big boy pants, switched to cash from accrual, and started looking at seasonality for trends. We needed to run the company like a profit center, not a hobby.

When Opportunity Knocks, answer the Damn Door

As website technology became more complicated, we were at risk of being left behind. Instead we turned the technology advancements to our advantage by offering retainers for the websites we were building, creating a stable work process. Selling relevancy instead of tech debt was a no-brainer.  And we’re doing it again with AI; we’re not replacing people, but instead using AI to make our jobs more creative and improve workflow.

How to Ruin your Culture

The toll the feast or famine model takes on staff is unmeasurable. We’d be working like crazy, late night pizza slurping, and couch sleeping to get projects done on time. And then we’d have hours where we wandered museums to get inspired because we had nothing on our plates and no projects in sight. Retainers allowed us to keep a steady stream of work and analyze how much time work capacity existed in a month. You can plan vacations, doctor appointments, and meetings using a retainer model. It’s pretty hard to do that when you have no damn idea when work will hit. 

In the end, running a business like a business is important. The biggest mistake founders make is to think that just because they were smart enough to identify a market need, that it means they know how to run a profit center.