As part of the new section on Exits in the Second Edition of the book (order here), there’s a specific chapter around handling the post-sale transition and integration process.  

No two transitions are exactly the same.  If the buyer is a financial sponsor, you may have the same job the day after the deal closes that you had the day before, just with a new owner and new rules for you.  Sometimes you’ll stay on with a strategic buyer as the head of a division, or the head of your product.  Sometimes you leave on Day 1.  Sometimes you leave later.  

But the most important thing you can do is remember that once the deal is over, it’s over.  That’s why an honest answer to the question, “Are you ready to let go?” that I posed in an early post is so important. You may or may not be the CEO, but now you definitely have a new boss, and in many cases, a boss for the first time in years. And you are no longer in charge.

“Even though the deal was called a merger,” I once heard Ted Leonsis tell the Moviefone founders a while after AOL acquired Moviefone, “please remember that you have been acquired.” Your job is to figure out how best to set your team and products up for success in the new environment, regardless of how long or short you plan to stay at the new company. 

We tried to focus our transition at Return Path to Validity in a few ways:

• For employees, we spent most of our energy and our capital setting things up in the deal documents before closing, recognizing we’d have no control of things after the deal was signed.  Things like how much severance people would get if they were let go, and for how long post-deal, how much their comp could change, whether they could be required to move – those are all things you can negotiate into a deal
• For ourselves as leaders and me as CEO, knowing most of us would leave almost immediately post-deal, I wanted to have as elegant an exit as possible after 20 years.  Fortunately, I had a good partner in this dialog in Mark Briggs, the acquiring CEO.  Mark and I worked out rules of engagement and expenses associated with “the baton pass,” as we called it, that let our execs have the opportunity to say a proper goodbye and thank you to our teams, with a series of in-person events and a final RP gift pack.  This was a really important way we all got closure on this chapter in our lives
• For the new owners of the business, our objective was to be of service to them, knowing they’d want to run it differently.  So, for example, every time our new owners from Validity asked me a question (“Should we do X or Y,” or “Should we keep person A or person B?”), my answer was never simple. It was always, “What’s your strategy with regard to Z?” and then my advice could be in context, as opposed to thinking about what I would do in the prior context.

There are more details on this in the new section on exits in Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business.

As part of the new section on Exits in the Second Edition of the book (order here), there’s a specific chapter around the sale process itself.  There are some interesting things in it — the arc and timeline of a deal, working with and through advisors vs. principals dealing with each other directly, optimizing for different stakeholders, and a wonderful long sidebar by my friends and advisors Brian Andersen and Mark Greenbaum from Luma Partners on how to think strategically about an exit and how buyers think.  It’s probably worth buying the whole book just for that.

But what I want to write about here is coping with a failed deal – something my team and I unfortunately had to do a couple years before we actually sold the company and something I’ve never written about or discussed publicly.

In 2017, we almost sold Return Path.  You hear people talk about that from time to time, and frequently it just means “we had a good offer but decided not to take it.”  But in this case, I meant it.  We had a good offer.  We talked to a couple other potential buyers in the industry and ended up getting a great offer.  From a great buyer.  We decided to pull the trigger.  It was time.  We got through the entire deal process, I mean EVERYTHING.  Diligence was painful, thorough – and completed.  Both sides had signed off on things many times along the way.  Documents were done, lawyers had signed off on them, our Board had signed off on them, they had been posted to DocuSign, and our signatures were in escrow.  The press release was written and scheduled to go out in less than 48 hours.  Our all-hands meeting was scheduled.  The acquirer had already sent us their swag to hand out.  About 80 people out of 400+ employees at the company knew about it.  In the football analogy, we weren’t inside the red zone.  We were on the 1-yard line.  

Then the call came.  “I can’t believe we have to tell you this, but our CEO just decided to pull the plug on this at the last minute.”  Buh.  Bye.  To say this was a disappointment is the understatement of a career.  

That evening, I was staying over at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan while Mariquita and the kids were away at the beach with her parents.  After the call came in, I grabbed the two other execs who were still in the office, and we went immediately to a bar.  That calmed me down a little bit.  Then I wandered through Central Park up to the apartment and spent about 4 hours on the phone in a series of cathartic phone calls with the rest of the executive team, some of my closest friends and advisors, and Board members.  

The next couple of days were awful.  We had to tell a huge number of employees “Uh sorry, just kidding.  You know all those stock options that were just about to turn into cash?  Sorry.  The new company we were all excited to join?  Psych!”  The worst part was scrambling to turn the already-scheduled all-hands meeting to announce the deal into just another quarterly update.  Everyone in the room for that meeting who knew about the failed deal just looked at each other with disbelief. We were still in shock.

Eventually of course, we bounced back.  I am now an even more ardent believer in the expression, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  The company ended up recovering from this and doing a number of things to make us even better in the years that followed, leading to our eventual sale.  But I will say, it was just terrible, and nothing about the recovery was easy.  I talk about some of the specific steps we took in the book.  But mostly, I hope no one ever has to go through anything like this again.  This was too big, too close to the end, and too well known.  Our team will have deep scar tissue from it for a long time.

As part of the new section on Exits in the Second Edition of the book (order here), there’s a specific chapter around Preparing Your Company for an Exit.  That’s pretty different than Preparing Yourself (last week’s post).  

This chapter really focuses on two things.  One is how to think about who within your company knows about the possible deal, which conversations you keep private and which you have more in public.  I’ll save the details on that one for the book.

But there’s a second topic that’s important as well.  And it’s about due diligence and disclosure schedules.  What fun!  I call it “Begin with the end in mind.”  The advice in this section of the book, which is “get a full and complete due diligence checklist from your lawyer before you start a sale process” is something I wish I had done the day I started the company, not the day I started the sale process. 

Knowing what things buyers will want to see, in what form, and how well organized, would have influenced me and my CFO to be more orderly about corporate records (things like shareholder votes and board minutes) as well as client contracts. It’s not that we were disorganized, but over 20 years we put things in several different places and didn’t always migrate old records to new systems. When it came time to put together due diligence and load things into the data room, it was a lot more complicated than it needed to be.

As you can imagine, we are doing this very differently at our new company.  Even if you aren’t well organized now at your company, put on your to do list some kind of spring cleaning of corporate records.  The earlier you do it, the better. Besides, when you first startup you won’t have a ton of details to keep track of so it ought to be easy to do. As you scale you’ll have systems and processes in place as well as, hopefully, ONE PLACE where you store all this information. The time NOT to do it is when you’re in the middle of a very time consuming sale process and simultaneously trying to run your business.

One of the new sections in the Second Edition (order here) that I’m excited to share is a deep dive with several chapters on selling your company.  The next few blog posts will share some of my thinking on the subjects as they’re arranged into chapters in the book.  For many startup CEOs the culmination of their life’s work is an exit of some kind (other than being fired!). Personally, there were a range of emotions surging through me when we got to the point of a sale and while the financial reward can be enticing, there are a lot of things that you start to think about, like all the things you created, all the offsites with your team, the good and bad times and, especially, the deep relationships you’ve developed over the years.

If you’re a founder entrepreneur who has led your company for several years, the odds are you have a significant amount of emotional investment in your company, too.  For many entrepreneurs, the company is a deeply embedded part of their identities as a human – right or wrong, for better or for worse. 

I said in the First Edition that entrepreneurship is full of extreme highs and lows and the most difficult thing to accept is when they happen at the same time. Nothing describes the process of selling your company more accurately than that saying because you’re gaining some financial reward, but you’re losing your life’s work. You’re also creating some chaos and uncertainty for all your employees.

One of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, “Am I ready to let go?” For me I used a simple litmus test to help answer that question and I used the answers to these four questions to figure out the sell-don’t sell dilemma:

• Am I having fun at work?
• Am I learning and growing as a professional?
• Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short-term or in the long-term?
• Am I having the impact I want to have on the world?

You can turn these questions into a scale if you want to be more sophisticated but there are two important points: one, you have to do it and two, you have to look at all four questions as really just providing one piece of information. If I walked into an executive team meeting and said, “I’m not having fun at work,” my team would probably look at me and say (or think to themselves), “Hey, buddy, suck it up.” They’d be right, but if you have low scores on all four questions, that tells a different story. 

So how do you know when it’s time to sell? Usually there’s an inflection point of some kind–either positive or negative. On the positive side, you can receive an out-of-the-blue inbound offer, something you never expected and believe me, that will get the juices flowing! Or maybe when you look two years out you realize that your company is at its highwater mark in valuation, so it becomes a timing issue. Sometimes you can have a major internal problem related to the cap table–a founder with a lot of stock needs liquidity or you need to push this person out of the company. Institutional investors can require liquidity too, and while it’s possible to buy out shareholders or create a debt / equity financing, you might think about selling the company instead.

Other points on selling your company that I make in the Second Edition revolve around who you sell to (financial buyer, strategic buyer) and what the likely outcome of those types of sales are for you and your employees. You’ll need to brace yourself, your team, and your company, and your family for a major impact–the sales process is disruptive, non-linear, and intense and it’s not done until the final agreement is signed. 

Above all else, There is no right or wrong answer here about selling your company.  But there probably is a right or wrong answer for YOU.  That’s the most important thing to think through, deeply, at the early stages of working on selling your company.

My long-time friend and former Board member Brad Feld has become a prolific writer on the startup world over the years and is the person (other than me) most responsible for me getting into that scene as well. Startup CEO is part of his Startup Revolution series, which followed me writing an essay for Do More Faster, and then writing a series of sidebars call “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective” in Venture Deals.

All Brad’s books are listed here. If you’re in the startup universe, I’d encourage you to read all of them. I’m excited to dive into his newest book, The Startup Community Way, which comes out this week from our same publisher, John Wiley & Sons. I’ve gotten part of the way through an early copy, and I love it already.

The approach Brad and his co-author Ian Hathaway take is to evolve their Boulder Thesis from the original Startup Communities book. They dive into the topic and examine it from the perspective of a complex system, which of course anything as fragmented as an ecosystem of public, private, and academic organizations is.

The book — and the whole topic, quite frankly — remind me of a great management book I read several years ago by General Stanley McChrystal called Team of Teams. Organizations have gotten more complex and have had to adapt their structures, and the most successful ones are the ones that have shifted from hierarchical structures to node-based structures, or teams of teams, where individual, agile teams operate with loose points of connection to other teams that focus on dependencies and outcomes.

In the same way, startup communities and the broader ecosystems that touch them have changed and adapted, and the successful ones have learned how to stay loosely connected to other startup communities, prioritize collaboration, and remain focused on inclusion and entrepreneurial leadership.

As I mentioned the other day, the second edition of Startup CEO is out.  This post is a teaser for the content in one of the new chapters in this edition on Authentic Leadership.

As I mentioned last week, the book went to press early in the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to all the protests around racial injustice surrounding the George Floyd killing, so nothing in it specifically addresses any of those issues.  In some ways, though, that may be better at the moment since the book is more about frameworks and principles than about specific responses to current events. Two of those principles, which are timeless and transcend turmoil, uncertainty, time and place, are creating space to think and reflect and being intentional in your actions. In a world in which CEOs are increasingly called upon to deal with more than traditional business (pricing, strategy, go-to market approaches, team building, etc.) it’s imperative to approach and solve challenging situations from a foundation that doesn’t waver. 

At Return Path our values were the foundation that provided a lens through which we made every decision. Well, not every decision, only the good ones. When we strayed from our core values, that got us into trouble. The other principle, outlined in Chapter 1 of the Second Edition, is leading an organization authentically.

Let me provide a couple concrete examples of what I mean by “Authentic Leadership” since the term can be interpreted many ways.

One example is to avoid what I call the “Say-Do” gap.  This is obviously a very different thread than talking about how the company relates to the outside world and current events.  But in some ways, it’s even more important.  A leader can’t truly be trusted and followed by their team without being very cognizant of, and hopefully avoiding close to 100%, any gap between the things they say or policies they create, and the things they do.  There is no faster way to generate muscle-pulling eyerolls on your team than to create a policy or a value and promptly not follow it. 

I’ll give you an example that just drove me nuts early in my career here, though there are others in the book.  I worked for a company that had an expense policy – one of those old school policies that included things like “you can spend up to $10 on a taxi home if you work past 8 pm unless it’s summer when it’s still light out at 8 pm” (or something like that).  Anyway, the policy stipulated a max an employee could spend on a hotel for a business trip, but the CEO  (who was an employee) didn’t follow that policy 100% of the time.  When called out on it, did the CEO apologize and say they would follow the policy just like everyone else? No, the CEO changed the policy in the employee handbook so that it read “blah blah blah, other than the CEO, President, or CFO, who may spend a higher dollar amount at his discretion.”

What does that say about the CEO? How engaged are employees likely to be, how much effort are they willing to devote to the company if there are special rules for the executives? You can make any rule you want — as you probably know if you have read a bunch of my posts or my book over the years, I’m a proponent of rule-light environments — but you can’t make rules for everyone else that you aren’t willing to follow yourself unless you own the whole company and don’t care what anyone thinks about you or says about you behind your back.

Beyond avoiding the Say-Do Gap, this new chapter of the book on Authentic Leadership also talks about how CEOs respond to current events in today’s increasingly politicized and polarized world.  This has always felt to me like a losing proposition for most CEOs, which I talk about quite a bit in the book.  When the world is polarized, whatever you do as CEO, whatever position you take on things, is bound to upset, alienate, or infuriate some nontrivial percentage of your workforce.  I even give some examples in the book of how I focused on using the company’s best interests and the company’s values as guideposts for reacting (or not reacting) to politically divisive or charged issues like guns or “religious liberty” laws.  I say this noting that there are some people who *believe* that their side of an issue like this is right, and the other side is wrong, but the issues have some element of nuance to them.

Today’s world feels a bit different, and I’m not sure what I would be doing if I was leading a known, scaled enterprise at this stage in the game.  The largely peaceful protests around all aspects of racial injustice in America in the wake of the murder of George Floyd — and the brutality and senselessness of that murder itself — have caused a tidal wave of dialog reaching all corners of the country and the world.  The root of this issue doesn’t feel to me like one that has a lot of nuance or a second side to the argument.  After all, what reasonable person is out there arguing that George Floyd’s death was called for, or even that black Americans don’t have a deep-seeded and widespread reasonable claim to inequality…even if their view of what to do about it differs?

I *think* what I would be doing in a broader leadership role today is figuring out what my organization could be doing to help reduce or eliminate structural racial inequality where we could based on our business, as opposed to driving my organization to take a specific political stand. I know for sure that I wouldn’t solicit feedback from a select group of people only, but I would create a space where voices from across the organization (and stakeholders outside of it as well) could be heard. That’s not a solution, but a start, and in challenging times making a little bit of headway can lead to a cascading effect. It can, if you keep the momentum.

And, in line with “authentic leadership,” it’s okay to admit that you don’t have the answers, that you might not even know the questions to ask. But doing nothing, or operating in a “business as usual” way won’t make your company stronger, won’t open up new opportunities, won’t generate new ideas, and won’t sit well with your employees, who are very much thinking about these issues. 

So, in today’s challenging times I would follow my own advice, be thoughtful and reflective, and intentional in searching for common solutions.  I’d try to avoid “mob mentality” pressure — but I would also be listening carefully to my stakeholders and to my own conscience.

In the coming weeks, I’ll write posts that get into some of the other topics I cover in the book, but none of them will be as good as reading the full thing!

I haven’t taken a poll to figure out the overlap between people who read this blog and people that bought the first edition of Startup CEO, but I’m guessing there’s a high degree of it. If you are familiar with the book, I don’t want to bore you with a recap of what I wrote, but I thought I would devote the next several blogs to new ideas in the second edition. First, the new cover art from the publisher is kind of cool:

The first question you might have is, “Why a second edition? Didn’t you say everything you needed to say the first time?” The answer to that is, yes, I did say everything I had to say at the time, and the first edition is pretty comprehensive as a field guide. But that was about a dozen years into what turned out to be a 20-year journey, and after we sold Return Path in 2019, I had time to reflect on all that happened. I learned a lot of new lessons between the first and second editions, we had a lot of first-time experiences, we scaled the company significantly, and we sold it. None of those things are, in and of themselves, worthy of a second edition, but collectively they help tell the story of startup to exit and tell it from a perspective of creating a sustainable business over nearly two decades. 

But there are other reasons, too, besides new lessons learned. Eight years is a lifetime in terms of changes to micro-trends, language, business in general, and the world around us. I wanted to update the book to make it contemporary so that it can speak to a new generation of CEOs. The second edition is more than a new cover and obvious updates on the number of employees or revenues. I added topics that reflect heightened responsibilities of CEOs around moral and ethical leadership in an increasingly transparent and socially conscious world. How do you navigate a politically charged and divisive society? For example, the State of Indiana passed a law intended to not force people to do things that contravened their religious beliefs but it had the side effect of legal descrimination against LGBT citizens. It was contentious, with rallying cries in business and society for one side or the other, and those same sentiments were found within our employee population. 

How should CEOs handle a situation that conflicts with their core values? There are no easy answers, but avoiding them doesn’t make the problem go away. 

Whether it’s the #metoo movement, high-profile failures of leadership like airline employees dragging customers off of planes, or something as simple as unconscious bias in the workplace, the best CEOs now need to approach their jobs differently. I didn’t write about that in the first edition, but the second edition has an entire chapter devoted to “Authentic Leadership” and provides guidelines and advice to help CEOs. The book went to press early in the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to all the protests around racial injustice surrounding the George Floyd killing, so nothing in it specifically addresses any of those issues.  In some ways, though, that may be better at the moment since the book is more about frameworks and principles than about specific responses to current events.

I also added a new section with several chapters on the ins and outs of selling a business. Startup exits are the important culmination of the startup experience and something that the first edition only briefly touched on. Obviously, I was still CEO of a growing company and although we had an opportunity or two to sell within those first years, we never pulled the trigger. The first edition talks about that process at a surface level, but the second edition has far more content and detail since we had completed a sale transaction. 

The first edition of the book has sold close to 40,000 copies as of the writing of the second edition, which blew me away when I tallied it all up. I’ve received many notes of thanks from readers all over the world for the book, and I’m glad that the content has proved useful to so many people, noting from some of the more critical reviews on Amazon that it certainly doesn’t scratch everyone’s itch. I hope the changes in the new edition add even more value to the lives of entrepreneurs and startup management teams. That’s really who the book is written for.

Here are some places to go to pre-order the book:

• Directly from the publisher, Wiley
• From Amazon
• From Books-a-Million
• From Indie Bound 
• From BN.com

I have a limited number of free copies of the book that I can send out, and oddly, they are only print copies since the book publishing ecosystem hasn’t figured out an efficient way for authors to distribute free Kindle copies of books yet.  As a bonus incentive for reading all the way to the end of this post, I will be happy to send a free copy to the first 5 people who comment on this post on the blog and ask for one.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time (amazingly, it is over 16 years old now!), you know that my company and main professional life’s work up to this point, Return Path, was a 1999 vintage email technology company that we sold last year.  I then had a couple other interim leadership roles, first as interim CEO of another tech company in New York, then in March as the founder and interim leader of Colorado’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team, which I wrote a series of blog posts about (this is the final post in the series, which links to the whole series).

I’ve generally been quiet on OnlyOnce since last year, but I will be picking up the pace of writing in the weeks ahead for a couple of reasons.

First, I’ve teamed up with a few former Return Path colleagues and some amazing investors and partners to start a new company.  We’re still in quasi-stealth mode, so I’m sorry I can’t talk about it much yet, but I will as soon as we publicly launch sometime after Labor Day.  It’s a cool business in a totally different space from Return Path and plays to our team’s interests and skills around people, values, culture, leadership development, and team scalability. I won’t rename this blog OnlyTwice, but there’s definitely a lot to be said for being a second-time founder.

Related to that, I have also been working on a Second Edition to my book from 2013, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which is coming out in a week or two from Wiley & Sons, and which is available for pre-order now.  I will write a series of posts in the coming weeks that talk about the new material in the second edition.  Our team at the new company is also working on a sequel to that book – more to come on that as well.

For now, I am doing great, enjoying life as a brand new Startup CEO once again, and feeling quite privileged and a little guilty for it by being in this weird bubble of my nice home and yard and feeling safely isolated from the pandemic, from economic dislocation, from social protests, and from having to lead a scaled organization through all of that turmoil.

(This is the seventh and final post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.)

I’ll start the final post in this series by sharing the overview and retrospective deck that we created my last day and the two days after.  Governor Polis is going to share this with the National Governors Association in case other states are interested in our model or learnings. This pdf, which you’re welcome to download or just view in SlideShare, is a good overview of what we did and where things stood as of Saturday, March 28, noting that by the time you’re reading this post, half of it may be obsolete! 

I am normally a small government guy.  But not when this kind of thing hits. This whole thing calls for consistent national government response to the disease – potentially even global government coordination at a level we’ve never seen before (let alone the level that’s fashionable these days).  I’m not sure I’d want a Chinese style lockdown (although that may prove to have been effective), but South Korea’s pattern of learning from SARS and MERS, bulking way up on labs, reagents, epidemiologists, ventilators, etc., and then passing legislation that allows for deeply intrusive tracking in case of a public health emergency like this seems to be the way to go.  

Certainly, leaving responses up to individual states, counties, and cities is a problem.  It’s inefficient and on average ineffective, although I think our group made some extraordinary progress on a few fronts.  But the scale of the effort in an individual state of 6mm people with the associated resources just pales in comparison to what a strong federal response would be.  Of course…the federal government has to actually believe in the need for a rapid and comprehensive response and have the wherewithal to pull it off for that to work.

As for our federal government’s economic responses, that’s a different story.  At some point, the government literally won’t be able to afford to fill in the economic holes left behind by the virus (you could argue that we can’t even afford the $2T we’ve already ponied up since we are terrible at saving money when times are good and run huge deficits even then).  I’m not sure what will happen then.  

But government aside, I hope the response across the country and the world is enough to take the edge off this disease long enough for supply chains and healthcare systems to be able to properly respond.  I hope that people who have the means will continue to support local businesses and individual/freelance service providers like housekeepers, gardeners, music teachers, tutors, and coaches through this stretch, even if those people aren’t able to provide those services.  And I hope all the people who are on the ground working the problem – from frontline healthcare workers to my new friends in the Colorado state government and on the volunteer side – get the recognition they deserve for the extraordinary efforts they are undertaking to drive solutions and get everyone through this.

Special thanks to Governor Polis and his staff for the opportunity to do this work, to Brad for roping me into it and then letting me rope him into leading the private sector side, and to Kacey, Kyle, and Sarah, my new friends, for making it all work and for continuing the work after I left.

(This is the sixth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

As these posts have been running, a few people have asked me to quickly compare this experience to the experience of being a Startup CEO.  And that’s an interesting way to think about it. In a lot of ways, the couple of weeks of getting the IRT up and running felt like starting up a new business, only a lot more intense.  Following the outline of sections in Startup CEO:  a field guide to scaling up your business…

Part One: Storytelling.  The whole timeframe was super compressed.  It took us 2 days to be able to spend 4 hours writing our initial pitch deck defining scope, structure, and staffing request – and that was while we were working hard on our first two workstreams.  In a startup environment, that process would have taken much longer, involved more customer discovery and product/market fit research and spending 100% of our time on that. But then we got our “approval and funding” in about 45 minutes – that would have taken weeks and involved dozens of pitch meetings.  In terms of creating the organization’s Mission, Vision, and Values, we didn’t even bother, although I think it helped that the three of us were generally on the same page with how to work and that urgency was the essence of our job. The larger emergency operations team that we were more or less embedded in also had a very clear set of values and operating principles on display…although we didn’t actually go read them, I think they were in sync with our view of our team’s mission and principles.  In terms of “bringing our story to life,” that was wholly unnecessary!

Part Two: Building The Company’s Human Capital.  Like a startup, getting it right with the first handful of employees means everything.  In this case, the first two deputies on the team, handpicked by the Governor’s staff, were awesome and critical.  Bringing someone in from the private sector to run a public sector team only works when the rest of the team is incredibly knowledgeable about how the machinery of state government works.  And in the end, I think Sarah will be a better leader for the team than I was because she had a combination of private and public sector experience (and within her public sector experience, she had a lot of emergency response experience).  In general, the recruiting process was soooo different than private sector and public sector normally are. The first two team members handpicked the best people they knew in other relevant parts of the government. People were brought onto the team after one short phone call.  Other state departments heads loaned their people willingly. No such thing as a comp negotiation or a reference check. There were a bunch of other things under the “Human Capital” heading that are interesting notes/comparables as well. First, feedback in a compressed-timeframe emergency is something that you absolutely can’t skip – and you can’t wait for a formal process either.  Our team was pretty good about giving feedback at least daily in a semi-structured way as well as in the moment. We didn’t really have time to get into things like career pathing and compensation and firing. We did, after about 6 days at the suggestion of Kacey, our Chief of Staff, move the team to almost entirely remote (other than leadership and occasional critical meetings). This worked surprisingly well for a workforce probably unaccustomed to remote work.  The rest of the world is also learning how to do a lot of that now, too.

Part Three: Execution.  This whole experience was 97% execution.  In fact, we had a hard time finding time for things like strategy and planning because there was a crushing amount of work to do (welcome to emergency response), and a small team to do it.  We didn’t have to worry about raising money, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and some of the other major execution steps in the private sector. We did do a good job of creating goals and milestones for our workstreams, but even that took a couple of weeks, and in retrospect, I wish we’d been able to do some of those sooner.  In terms of how our work got done, we were very conscious of creating daily meeting routines to structure our day and work – but there was no such thing as even a weekly meeting (let alone monthly strategics or quarterly offsites!), only daily meetings, multiple times per day. One thing that was interesting – I talk in the book about being deliberate and consistent with your platforms, especially around communication.  Channel proliferation is a real issue today (much more so than when I wrote the book), but we had an interesting mismatch at the beginning. The public sector team was used to email, text, and Google hangouts for comms. Nothing else. The private sector team used those things but was a lot more comfortable with Trello, Zoom, and Slack. Thank goodness both teams used G-Suite and not a mix of that and LiveOffice. But getting everyone on the team to converge on a couple systems is a work in progress and was messy, as evidenced in this great moment where Kacey was holding a laptop up to an actual whiteboard to show one of our private sector teams how she was thinking about something. 

Part Four: Building and Leading a Board of Directors.  This is kind of N/A, although the proxy for it in our case on the IRT was the leadership structure of the Emergency Operations Center and then the Governor and the part of his cabinet that was keyed into the emergency response.  In this regard, the main differences between the private sector and public sector were speed/formality (no room for formality when you’re meeting daily or at a moment’s notice!), and, interesting, the need for integration. A company reports to its board on how it’s doing.  This team had to use its “board” to make sure it was integrating with other state agencies and initiatives. In this way, the team functioned more like a business unit within a company than an actual company.

Part Five: Managing Yourself So You can Manage Others.  This was obviously critical…and obviously quite difficult.  And within the overall Emergency Operations Center (outside of our team, the real emergency professionals), there were people, including leaders, who were working 7 days/week for multiple weeks on end, and long days, too.  At one point, the EOC leader posted this note on the wall, and he frequently took time in daily briefings to encourage everyone to take a day or two off and take care of themselves physically.  He role-modeled that behavior as well. You can only run a sprint for so long. Once it becomes clear it’s a marathon, well, you know.

Stay tuned for the final post in the series tomorrow…

(This is the fifth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, and 4.)

Thursday, March 26, Day 10

• Sarah continuing to take over and stronger by the day
• Sarah cleared me to go home, only one more person to ask
• Deep deep dive on Mass Testing – so good to spend that time 
• Pretty much got the strategy right – shocking we could get that close with so little public health experience – Kyle awesome – EOC leadership briefing
• That was most of the day
• Some downloads to Sarah and Kacey
• Feeling that two of our project teams are going sideways – that will be a big focus for me tomorrow before I leave
• Quick assignments for tomorrow
• Talked to Jared – he’s good with me going now that Sarah is in place and things are running.  Awesome!

Friday, March 27,  Day 11

• Download with a couple of the project teams to help get them back on track 
• This whole thing is one big exercise in Agile!
• Serendipitously might have found private sector partner for one of the teams in need.  Reminded of George’s great line, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”
• Gov briefing on mass testing plan
• Spent a lot of the day on strategy/overview/retrospective deck.  Have to review it with Brad and core team members. Gov wants to get it in front of the National Governors Association to share learnings/best practices for the states behind us in this fight
• Gov thankful goodbye
• Brad thank you Haiku – so awesome – “You see things others don’t see”
• FInal team check-in, lots of nice thank yous from people on team
• Close out drinks with Sarah, Kacey, Kyle – persevered despite lack of corkscrew.  Poor Kyle’s shirt looks like he was standing next to a shooting victim
• Incredibly thankful moment with team – really like and care about these people – we’ve done such great work together – 11 days but feels like months and months
• Close out email to Governor and Chief of Staff about team

Saturday, March 28, Day 12

• Check out!  Fly home! Happy to see Mariquita, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse!

Stay tuned for two more wrap-up posts, tomorrow and the next day…