Focus on the core and not go wrong.
Alpha said: CEOs of startups have a lot of opportunities, and many inexperienced CEOs have been overwhelmed by various problems and forced to become firefighting captains. But as a CEO, you should eliminate interference and focus your time and energy on the most important things. This article combs the three core tasks that the CEO of a startup should focus on. Below, Enjoy.
The startup CEO is probably one of the busiest careers. Many CEOs are like firefighting captains, constantly solving various problems that arise in the company, such as operations, technology, recruitment, financing, and so on. For startups with a shortage of people, this situation seems difficult to avoid, but the more the CEO manages, the more likely it is that his company is in a mess and is getting farther and farther from the original goal.
The well-known investor Fred Wilson has explained his definition of the CEO role of the startup and the tasks that the CEO should focus on: the CEO should focus on three tasks, setting the company’s vision and strategy, and effectively communicating it to All stakeholders; hire and retain the company’s best talent, arrange them to the right place; make sure there is always enough cash in the bank.
There are of course more than three things that the CEO needs to do, but they are the core, and they can’t do it well, and the company will probably be in trouble.
Set up a vision
The CEO of a startup company as a leader, an important task is to look up the road, he must know where the company is going. So in the early days of the venture, the CEO has to set up a vision and strategy with the founding team members of his company, and insist on it for a long time.
What characteristics should a good company vision have?
First of all, the vision should be future. It is based on the reality of the situation and logical inference to make a reasonable imagination of the future, targeting a Red Sea market is obviously not as good as a blue ocean market.
Second, the vision must be clear and realistic. Being reconciled and not pragmatic when setting up a vision is impossible to unify team thinking and guide the team. It must proceed from the market reality and the company’s own business, in line with the company’s characteristics, and must be easy for the company’s current and future team members to understand and implement, such as Alibaba’s “Let the world have no difficult business.”
Third, the vision must beRealized. Former US President Kennedy stated in a speech in 1961: “The United States must let a person land on the moon and send him safely back to Earth within ten years.” After several manned space flight tests and landing attempts, in July 1969, the United States really sent Armstrong to the moon. What Kennedy puts forward is not only a great vision, but also a concrete, measurable, achievable, and time-bound goal.
Setting a good vision is not enough. It is possible to communicate the vision to stakeholders to make the vision a reality, and the most important stakeholder is the company’s employees. The CEO of the Alpha Commune has shared his own detour: The CEO thinks too far ahead and too far, but he does not synchronize his thoughts with the team members in time. After discovering the problem, he finally changed his practice, communicated and explained the results he had thought out with the team members, and ensured that they fully understood before turning the vision into combat effectiveness.
Group team, management talent
No matter in the early or growing stage of a startup, talent recruitment and organizational team building are important tasks. For the CEO of an early startup company, 50% of the time should be spent on this.
Before recruiting, the CEO should know what kind of person he wants. The principle we recommend is: people who are technically appropriate, culturally appropriate, have strong learning ability, and have entrepreneurial passion.
Skilledly suitable people already have the experience of struggling in the corresponding positions in the relevant industry, and have the skills to solve the problems encountered in this position. They are more likely to help the company quickly develop effective combat capabilities and ensure that the company can run in the early stages.
Culturalally appropriate people will more fully understand and agree with the company’s vision, goals and values. To find a culturally appropriate person, you can’t hope to cultivate a reversal in the later stage, but you should choose the right person at the beginning because you can’t afford that much time and cost. On the contrary, if they choose the right people, they will become seeds and help the company to form a long-term stable culture.
People with strong learning ability and entrepreneurial enthusiasm can better adapt to the working environment of the startup company and grow with the company. A startup is running on a road with few people. There is not much experience to learn from. Many things need to be explored by themselves. Frustration is inevitable. If the members of the startup company do not have entrepreneurial enthusiasm, they will retreat if they encounter more difficulties; if the learning ability is not strong enough, they will not solve many unfamiliar problems.
With regard to group teams and management talent, there are a few things to be aware of.
CEOs need to spend energy in this part, not to do everything, but to find and develop suitable professional members in the early stages, and give them responsibility when they are mature.And by managing them to make sure things go smoothly.
After the talented people are recruited into the company, it is more important for them to fully exert their combat effectiveness. This aspect requires the company to have a suitable incentive plan, on the other hand, to allow employees to move and transfer jobs, and to avoid talents being tied to inappropriate positions.
In addition to letting the company introduce fresh blood, the CEO has to work hard to dismiss those incompetent team members. Such a decision can be difficult, but the later the response, the greater the negative impact on the company.
Manage cash flow
There are countless examples of companies that are in crisis because of poor management of cash flow, and every period is happening. The most recent example is a shared office and an e-commerce company. When the CEOs of the Alpha Commune were jointly shared, they also emphasized the importance of managing cash flow.
Cash flow management is the basic homework of every CEO, and its principle is not difficult, it is open source and throttling. Open source, for startup CEOs can be broken down into financing and sales; throttling, it is necessary to use cash more systematically, do not burn meaninglessly.
The CEO’s preferred open source approach is financing. Putting too much time and energy into dealing with investors, ruining the company’s internal management and business improvement, and even some CEOs use the company for the next round of financing. This is not a lot of cash to burn money to do data, the result of this behavior is mostly to drag the company to the abyss.
Financing can help companies reduce stress over time, but to survive for a long time, CEOs must find ways to keep the company profitable. CEOs who once had a technical background put too much time on improving technology and products (this is a path dependence), but while the products have advantages, the income is not as good as that of friends, and financing is not smooth. Later, he changed his strategy, handed over technical problems to someone else, and put more energy into sales (and also cultivated sales teams). The company’s income doubled and passed the crisis.
There are many ways to throttle, but what’s more important is the idea of not burning money in a meaningless way, not making bubbles. Every era has a company that has risen by burning money, but most of them disappeared after the bubble burst and could not last long. And those companies that can create real value for users and customers and run through the revenue model may not have experienced explosive growth in a short period of time, but can live healthier and longer.
This article is compiled from Medium, original author Dave Bailey.