(This is the second post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Introductory post is here.)

Tuesday, March 17, Day 1

• Extended stay hotel does not have a gym.  Hopefully there is one at work
• Walking into office for the first time.  We are in a government building in a random town just south of Denver that houses the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.  These are the teams who are on point for emergency response in Colorado when there is any kind of fire, flood, cyberattack, or other emergency
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• MAJOR Imposter Syndrome – I don’t know anything about anything
• 7:45 meeting with Stan
• 8:15 department briefing
• Met two deputies – Kacey Wulff and Kyle Brown.  Both seem awesome. On loan from governor’s health care office and insurance department
• Team “get to know you” was 4 minutes long.  So different than calm normal 
• Emergency Operations Center in Department of Public Health
• Small open room with over 100 people in it and everyone freaking out about not following best practices – no social distancing
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• Leader giving remote guidelines
• Lots of “Sorry, who are you and why are you here?”
• Local ops leader Mike Willis excellent – calm, inspirational, critical messages around teamwork, self-management, check ego at the door (turns out he is a retired Brigadier General)
• HHS call – maxxed at 300 participants, people not getting through, leader had to ask people to volunteer to get off the line (oops)
• Lunch and snacks in mass quantities here – it’s not quite Google, but this part does feel very startup.  I wonder if the Emergency Ops Center does this all the time or just in a crisis. Guessing crisis only but still super nice.  Also guessing I will gain weight this week between this and all gyms in the state being closed down
• Lots of new people and acronyms
• Multiple agencies at multiple layers of government require a lot of coordination and leadership that’s not always there, but everyone was incredibly clear, effective, low ego.  A lot of overlap
• Got my official badge – fancy
• Jared calls – just spoke to Pence, his guy is going to call you – tell him what we need…”uh, ok, now all I have to do is figure out what we need!”
• Fog of War – this room is healthy and bustling and a little disconnected from what’s going on, no freak out
• Kacey and call from Lisa about Seattle being on “Critical Care” because they don’t have enough supplies, meaning they are prepared to let the sickest people die – oh shit, we can’t let that happen here (or is it too late?)
• Got oriented, sort of
• Slight orientation to broader command structure and team
• My charter and structure are a little fuzzy, guess that’s why I’m here to figure that out
• Late night working back at hotel.  Thinking I will become a power user of UberEats this week

Wednesday, March 18, Day 2

• Gym at work is closed along with all gyms everywhere.  Looks like a lot of hotel floor exercises are in order
• Ideas and efforts and volunteers coming in like mad and random from the private sector – no one to corral, some are good, some are duplicative, all are well intentioned.  Lots of “solve the problem 5 ways”
• Shelter in place?  Every day saves thousands of lives in the model – credibility with governor
• State-level work is so inefficient for global and national problems, but Trump said “every man for himself” basically when it comes to states
• Not feeling productive
• Productivity is in the eye of the beholder.  Kacey totally calmed me down. Said I am adding value in ways I don’t think about (not sure if she was just being nice!):
  • Connection to Governor really useful for crisis team
  • Basic management and leadership stuff good
  • Asking dumb questions
  • Out of the box thinking
  • Liaison to industry and understanding that ecosystem
  • Arms and legs
  • People used to working in teams on things – different expectations in general
• Ok, so maybe I am helping
• Colleague tells me about Drizly, the UberEats equivalent for alcohol delivery. Good discovery.

Thursday, March 19, Day 3

• Weird – my back feels better than it has in months.  Maybe it’s the pilates, but still, seems weird.  I wonder if the higher altitude helps. If so, we will be moving to Nepal. Have to remember to mention that to family later
• Governor Policy meeting 9 am – “Cuomo is killing it” – words matter – “shelter in place” and “extreme social distancing” debate
• “The models are wrong – so let’s average them”
• We need 10,000 ventilators. We have 700.  Uh oh.
• Raised issues around test types and team capacity…Gov expanded scope to include app and still pushing hard on test scaling.  Gov asked for proposal for expanded scope and staff by 4:30. Guess that’s the day today!
• Recruited Brad to lead Private Sector side of the IRT’s work. Important to have a great counterpart on that side. Glad he agreed to do it, even though he’s already vice chair of another state task force on Economic Recovery
• Senior Ops leader interrupts someone during daily briefing – quietly says to the whole room “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” – incredible.  In the moment, in public which normally you don’t want to do but had no choice in this circumstance – 6 words gave actionable and gentle feedback. Great example of quiet leadership
• Private sector inbound – well intentioned and innovative but overwhelming and hard to figure out how to fit in with public sector (e.g., financing to spin up distributed manufacturing)
• Team huddled and created proposal for new name, structure, staffing, charter, rationale, etc.
• Present to senior EOC staff for vetting, feedback
• Feels like I’m adding value finally – plan creation and “bring stakeholders along for the ride” presentation/vetting AND getting the team to stop being hair on fire and focus on thinking and planning and staffing
• Present to Gov – “brilliant” – then after, Kyle says “I’ve worked for multiple governors and senators, and this is the first time I’ve heard something called brilliant” (not sure it was brilliant)
• Now to operationalize it, stand up a team, replace myself so I can get home once this is marching in the right direction at the right speed
• Transferable skills (leadership, comms, strategy, planning) – not just missing context here but missing triple context – healthcare, public sector, CO
• Day 3.  Feels like longer
• Still, feels like adding value now.  Whew.  
• Dinner with a Return Path friend who came down to my hotel’s breakfast room, picked up takeout on the way, and sat 6 feet apart. 

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader

After I spoke at the Startup2Startup event last month, one of the people who sat with me at dinner emailed me and asked:

I was curious–how did you make the transition from CEO of a startup to manager of a medium-sized business? I’m great at just doing the work myself and interacting with clients, and it’s easy for me to delegate tasks, but it’s hard to have the vision and ability to develop my two employees into greater capacity…

I’d be interested in reading a blog post on what helped you make that transition from founder/builder to manager/leader

It feels like the answer to this question is about a mile long, but I thought I’d at least start with five suggestions.

1. Hire Up!  The place where I see most founders fumble the transition is in not hiring the best people for the critical roles in the organization.  Sometimes this is for cash flow reasons, but more often it is either due to subconscious fear (“will I still be able to control the organization if this person is in it?”) or due to bravado (“I can do engineering way better than that guy”).  Lose that attitude and hire up for key positions.  Even if you COULD do every role better than anyone you’d ever hire, you only have so many hours in the day.
2. Learn the magic of delegation and empowerment.  You can never get as much work done on your own as you can if you get work done THROUGH others.  Get comfortable delegating work by setting clear expectations up front in terms of timing and quality of deliverables and giving your high level input.  And never be a bottleneck.  If people are waiting on you for decisions or comments, that means they’re not working…or at least that they’re not working on the highest value or most urgent things they could be working on.
3. Don’t fear some elements of larger organizations.  Larger organizations require some process so they don’t fall apart.  Make sure you pick your battles and accept that some changes, even if they feel bureaucratic, are critical to ensure success going forward.  I still get a queasy feeling in my stomach half of the times I see a new form or procedure or a suggestion from a lawyer, but as long as they are lightweight and constantly reviewed to make sure they’re having their intended impact AND ONLY their intended impact, some are inevitable.
4. At the same time, don’t lose the founder/builder mentality.  Your company may have grown larger, but if you’re still running it, people will naturally look to you and other founders for much of the energy, vision, and drive in the business.  You will also likely be more inclined to be scrappy and entrepreneurial, which are good traits for any business.  Don’t lose those qualities, even as you modify them or add others.
5. Look to the outside for help.  In my case, I’ve consistently done three things over the years to learn from others and to prevent myopia.  First, I have worked on and off with a fantastic executive coach, Marc Maltz from Triad Group. Second, I have always had one or two “CEO mentors,” e.g., guys who have built larger businesses than Return Path, on my Board, at all times, as resources.  Finally, I do a lot of CEO peer networking, some informal (breakfasts, drinks meetings), and some more formal (a CEO Forum group that I established) to make sure I’m consistently sharing information and best practices with others in comparable situations.

Any other entrepreneurs who have made the leap have other advice to offer?

The Best Laid Plans, Part III

Once you’ve finished the Input Phase and the Analysis Phase of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the final Output Phase, which goes something like this:

Vision articulation.  Get it right for yourself first.  You should be able to answer “where do we want to be in three years?” in 25 words or less.

Roadmap from today.  Make sure to lay out clearly what things need to happen to get from where you are today to where you want to be.  The sooner-in stuff needs to be much clearer than the further out stuff.

Resource Requirements.  Identify the things you will need to get there, and the timing of those needs – More people?  More marketing money?  A new partner?

Financials.  Lay them out at a high level on an annual basis, on a more detailed level for the upcoming year.

Packaging.  Create a compelling presentation (Powerpoint, Word, or in your case, maybe something more creative) that is crisp and inspiring.

Pre-selling.  Run through it – or a couple of the central elements of it – with one or two key people first to get their buy-in.

Selling.  Do your roadshow – hit all key constituents with the message in one way or another (could be different forms, depending on who).

The best thing to keep in mind is that there is no perfect process, and there’s never a “right answer” to strategy — at least not without the benefit of hindsight!

People have asked me what the time allocation and elapsed time should or can be for this process.  While again, there’s no right answer, I typically find that the process needs at least a full quarter to get right, sometimes longer depending on how many inputs you are tracking down and how hard they are to track down; how fanatical you are about the details of the end product; and whether this is a refresh of an existing strategy or something where you’re starting from a cleaner sheet of paper.  In terms of time allocation, if you are leading the process and doing a lot of the work yourself, I would expect to dedicate at least 25% of your time to it, maybe more in peak weeks.  It’s well worth the investment.

Bad Side Effect of Tropical Heat Waves?

I love David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column called Fast Forward.  In his most recent edition, he talks about the connection between technology and world peace, which is insightful.  But it also led me to click on a link in the first paragraph to Wikipedia and its great map and listing of ongoing global conflicts here. 

I’m not sure if anyone has ever done any research on this — I’m guessing the answer is yes — but what jumps off the page for me is that all of the ongoing global conflicts today are clustered around the equator.  I do know that crime in urban areas swells in the summer when it’s hot out and tempers flare. 

Not to be too glib, but is it possible that we just need a giant air conditioner around the middle of the planet (an environmentally kind one, of course)?

B+ for Effort?

Effort is important in life.  If Woody Allen is right, and 80% of success in life is just showing up, then perhaps 89% is in showing up AND putting in good effort.  But there is no A for Effort in a fast-paced work environment.  The best you can get without demonstrating results is a B+.

The converse is also true, that the best you can get with good results AND without good effort is a B+.

Now, a B+ isn’t a bad grade either way.  But it’s not the best grade.  In continuing with this series of our 13 core values at Return Path, the next one I’ll cover is:

We believe that results and effort are both critical components of execution

We’ve always espoused the general philosophy that HOW you get something done is quite important.  For example, if the effort is poor and you get to the right place, maybe you got lucky.  Or even worse, maybe you wasted a lot of time to get there.  Or if you burned your colleagues or clients in the process of getting to the right place, a positive short-term result can have negative long-term consequences.

But when all is said and done, even with the most supportive culture that values effort and learning a lot (more on that in the next post in this series), results speak very loudly. Customers don’t give you a lot of credit for trying hard if you’re not effectively delivering product or solving their problems.  And investors ultimately demand results.

Our “talent development” framework at Return Path – the thing that we use to measure employee performance, reflects this dual view of execution:

The X axis is clearly labeled “Performance,” meaning results, and the Y axis is labeled “Potential – RP Expectations,” which basically means effort and fit with the culture at Return Path.  We plot out employees on the basis of their quantitative scores coming out of their performance reviews on this grid every year.  Which box any given employee falls in has a lot to do with how that employee is managed and coached in the coming months.  We’re always trying to move people up and to the right!

The definitions of the different boxes in this framework are telling and speak to the subject of this post.  To be an A player here, you have to excel in both effort and results – that’s our definition of successful execution.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  We’re getting to the end of this series…only two more to go.

(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CCOs)

Very few startups start life with a Chief Customer Officer, even though customers are the lifeblood of every startup; instead, you’ll likely start your customer service organization with a “jack of all trades” account manager position. You’ll have one person who handles all customer issues from basic support all the way through to true customer success. Sometimes these functions will be handled by the product team but most often they are handled by a customer service team.  Specialized roles and multiple teams (e.g, support vs. professional services) with their own managers can emerge quickly in the life of a startup and these roles will usually come before a full-time CCO, unless one of the company’s founders happens to be playing that role.

But you won’t be able to scale effectively (or quickly) with a hodge-podge of customer support roles and there are some telltale signs that will let you know you need to bring in a CCO. For example, you’ll know it’s time to hire a CCO when you realize you’ve never measured customer satisfaction. You don’t have any metrics at all — no Net Promoter Score, no basic customer satisfaction measures, no product engagement levels…nothing. You’re just hoping for the best, and hope is not a strategy. Another sign that you need to hire a CCO is if you are spending too much of your own time putting out customer fires rather than thinking about how to make customers more successful by using your product.

A second telltale sign will come from your board, if you have one. If your board asks you which of your customer segments has the highest margin, or has the most opportunity, and you don’t have a great answer and aren’t sure how to get to one then it’s time to consider hiring your first CCO. Of course, you don’t have to wait for a board member to ask that question and if you want to be proactive you can create a list of questions that a board member might ask and see whether or not you can answer them. If you can’t, or if it takes a ton of time to track down the answers, you’re probably ready for a CCO.

The search for a CCO can be long and time-consuming and in a future post I’ll talk about what “great” looks like for a CCO, but if you’re at the point where you need a CCO but don’t have the money or time to bring in an executive, a fractional CCO is a great option. A fractional CCO can work well if you have a relatively contained or small customer success/account management organization, but it is already very diverse in its sub-functions (support, account management, success, professional services) and none of the team leaders of those teams have the range of experience to orchestrate the handoffs and synergies across the sub-functions. A CCO touches nearly every part of the organization, from sales, to product, to marketing and this person needs to be a collaborator, a champion for customers, and a strategic thinker that understands consumer trends and demographics. A fractional executive CCO can bring a lot of skills to a startup and help to grow both the customer organization and the individuals in it, including mentoring those in the Customer organization who can become eventual leaders, or helping to reorganize the Customer organization for greater efficiency, or even help interview, vet, and find their replacement.

If you’re a startup and you have potential to scale but seem to be spending a lot of time and energy working on customer issues—without being able to actually move forward—a Chief Customer Officer should be a role you’d want to fill as soon as possible. Almost nothing takes down more companies than poor customer support. 

You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here

How to Wow Your Manager

Last week, I talked about how to Wow your employees.  Now I am going to discuss the converse of that – How to Wow your Manager.  Why Wow your manager?  Even if you are senior leader in an organization, the Wow factor is still important.

What impact does a Wow have?  It sends the signal that you are on top of things.  Symbolism is important.  It also advances the cause further and faster.  Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team?  High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on.  If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner, better.

Here are my top 10 examples on how to WOW your manager, along with the intended impact:

1. Show up for every check-in with the full agenda – send it a day or more ahead (Give your manager time and space to prepare)
2.  When you are asking your manager to communicate something (an email to the team, a reference letter, etc.), draft it for him or her (Editing is much easier than creating)
3.  Do a start-stop-continue analysis once a year on all of your key activities (Make yourself as efficient and effective as possible – that’s your responsibility as much as your manager’s)
4.  Own your own development plan and check in on it at least quarterly (Those who own their own career paths progress more quickly down them)
5. Read a relevant business book and ask your manager to discuss insights with you (Staying current with best practices in your field – books, articles, blog posts, videos, mentors, lectures –  is key in a learning organization)
6.  Dress for success – even casual can be neat and “client ready” (Your presence has an impact on those around you.  There’s no reason anyone should ever have to comment on your clothes, your hair, or any aspect of your personal hygiene)
7. Respond to every email where you are on the TO line within a day, even if it’s to say you will respond longer form later (At Return Path,  you have to be in the jet stream of communications. Otherwise, you find yourself in the exhaust of the jet stream)
8. End every meaningful interaction by asking for informal feedback on how you’re doing and what else you can be doing (Again, part of being in a learning organization…and taking more tasks on is always a sign that you are ready for more responsibility)
9. Do something that’s not required but that you feel is a best practice (This shows you’re on top of your game.  One example:  I send the Board a summary, the details, and the YoY trending of all of my expenses every year.  I don’t have to, but enough CEOs out there have high profile expense problems that I decided it’s a good practice.  They all LOVE it)
10.  (If you have staff reporting into you) Show up for every check-in with  your manager with a list of all staff issues and highlights (You need to bubble things up, both good and bad, so your manager is on top of his or her overall team and (a) is never surprised by events, (b) knows how best to handle skip-level communications, and (c) can think more broadly about resource deployment across the organization)

Book Short:  Like Reading a Good Speech

Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, is a self-described “polemic” that reads like some of the author’s famous TED talks and other speeches in that it’s punchy, full of interesting stories, has some attempted basis in scientific fact like Gladwell, and wanders around a bit.  That said, I enjoyed the book, and it hit on a number of themes in which I am a big believer – and it extended and shaped my view on a couple of them.

Sinek’s central concept in the book is the Circle of Safety, which is his way of saying that when people feel safe, they are at their best and healthiest.  Applied to workplaces, this isn’t far off from Lencioni’s concept of the trust foundational layer in his outstanding book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  His stories and examples about the kinds of things that create a Circle of Safety at work (and the kinds of things that destroy them) were very poignant.  Some of his points about how leaders set the tone and “eat last,” both literally and figuratively, are solid.  But his most interesting vignettes are the ones about how spending time face-to-face in person with people as opposed to virtually are incredibly important aspects of creating trust and bringing humanity to leadership.

My favorite one-liner from the book, which builds on the above point and extends it to a corporate philosophy of people first, customer second, shareholders third (which I have espoused at Return Path for almost 15 years now) is

Customers will never love a company unless employees love it first.

A couple of Sinek’s speeches that are worth watching are the one based on this book, also called Leaders Eat Last, and a much shorter one called How Great Leaders Inspire Action.

Bottom line:  this is a rambly book, but the nuggets of wisdom in it are probably worth the exercise of having to find them and figure out how to connect them (or not connect them).

Thanks to my fellow NYC CEO Seth Besmertnik for giving me this book as well as the links to Sinek’s speeches.

Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B

Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005.

Thompson classifies the blueprint into “7 Essentials,” which blueprint companies do well on across the board. The 7 Essentials are:

– Create and sustain a breakthrough value proposition

– Exploit a high growth market segment

– Marquee/lighthouse customers shape the revenue powerhouse

– Leverage big brother alliances for breaking into new markets

– Become the masters of exponential returns

– The management team: inside-outside leadership

– The Board: comprised of essentials experts

As I said above, there were some nuggets within this framework that made the entire read worthwhile. For example, crafting a Board that isn’t just management and investors but also includes industry experts like customers or alliance partners is critical. That matches our experience at Return Path over the years (not that we’re exactly closing in on $1B in revenues – yet) with having outside industry CEOs sit on our Board. Our Board has always been an extension of our management and strategy team, but we have specifically gotten some of our most valuable contributions and thought-provoking dialog from the non-management and non-investor directors.

Another critical item that I thought was interesting was this concept of not just marquee customers (yes, everyone wants big brand names as clients), but that they also need to be lighthouse customers. They need to help you attract other large customers to your solution – either actively by helping you evangelize your business, or at least passively by lending their name and case study to your cause.

The book is more of a retrospective analysis than a playbook, and some of its examples are a bit dated (marveling at Yahoo’s success seems a bit awkward today), and the author notes as well that many of the “blueprint” companies faltered after hitting the $1B mark. But it was a good read all-in. What I’d like to see next is a more microscopic view of the Milestones to $100 Million!

Counter Cliché:  And Founders, Too

This week, Fred’s chiche is that "the success of a company is in inverse proportion to the number of venture capitalists on the board".

I’d argue that the same statement is true of founders or management.

Boards help govern the company and watch out for shareholder interests.  Boards give outside perspectives and strategic advice to the company’s leadership.  Boards hire and fire the CEO.  And — more and more every day with large public companies — boards keep management honest.  How can these critical functions occur when a Board has too many members of the management team on it?  They can’t.  We’ve had outside directors at Return Path from Day 1.

I’m not advocating that Boards meet 100% apart from senior management.  On the contrary, our most productive Board meetings at Return Path are the ones where we have lots of management participation.  But execs present and discuss — and don’t vote — and they generally leave the last 30-60 minutes of every meeting for just the Board to discuss issues in private.  I’m also not advocating that CEOs don’t sit on boards or that the CEO never hold the Chairman role.  I think both of those items are critical to unify the watchdog function of looking out for all company stakeholders — shareholders, employees, and customers — at the highest level.

But while the success of a company may well be in inverse proportion to the number of venture capitalists on the board, that same success is jeopardized by too many execs, too.

(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CPO’s)

 Most startups don’t have a Chief Privacy Officer and just rely on outside advice from external counsel or a privacy consultant. In Startup CXO our Chief Privacy Officer from Return Path, Dennis Dayman, strongly advocates for privacy to be baked into a startup at the very beginning. Some startups probably don’t have any help in this area at all but given the importance of privacy and security issues today that’s a mistake.

If your startup doesn’t start life with a Chief Privacy Officer you’ll have to heed some warning signs and here are some I’ve picked up over the years. First, you’ll know it’s time to hire a Chief Privacy Officer when you wake up in the middle of the night terrified that you’re going to find your company on the front page of the newspaper or served a subpoena to testify before Congress about a data breach. Even if you’re not waking up in the middle of the night you might be concerned about privacy if you are spending too much of your own time trying to understand what PCI Compliance, or HIPAA, or GDPR means to your business. Or if you really don’t see the connections between your business and privacy issues in general, then a Chief Privacy Officer can be very helpful.

You might get tough questions from your board on what your data breach client communication plan is, and if you don’t have a great answer and aren’t sure how to get to one, then it’s time to think about a Privacy Officer.

A fractional Chief Privacy Officer may be the best option for most startups…forever. Sometimes you can find one fractional executive for both the Privacy and Chief Information Security Officer roles. You probably can’t get by without a full-time leader in this area if you are large (>$50mm in revenue) and are sitting on a massive amount of consumer data, especially if that information involves PII, financial, or health information.  But if that’s not you, a fractional Chief Privacy Officer may be the way to go.  While a fractional executive is similar to an outside lawyer or consultant, an executive has a company title for external credibility and the personal commitment to the organization to ensure compliance. A fractional exeuctive is way more than a consultant since they’ll be able to provide guidance to employees and represent the company as if they were a full-time Chief Privacy Officer.

Not every startup needs a Chief Privacy Officer since you can cover your bases with lawyers or consultants, but if you’re collecting lots of data from jurisdictions across the world you’d be wise to get a Privacy officer, or a fractional executive, sooner rather than later.

(You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here)