In the early days of a high-growth startup, the organization isn’t intentionally designed as much as it is cobbled together based on what is most pressing at the moment. Teams tend to organically sprout up. Roles are added too soon, too late, and when the stars align, at just the right time. As soon as […]
SaaS Culture Best Practices
Read, listen and watch SaaS culture best practices for founders and leaders of growing technology companies. Join SaaS co-founders and operators for guidance on sales, marketing, customer success, culture, and institutional readiness.
How to Stop Solving Every Problem Yourself
In a startup, the early staff has to build literally everything from scratch, figure everything out, and solve every problem. There are no playbooks, rules, norms, or guidelines. There is just get stuff done, be scrappy and figure it out. It is a special breed of person who survives and thrives in very early start-up […]
You Hired a Bad-Fit Executive. Now What?
We don’t need an article to tell you what to do. If you hired a bad fit executive you need to have them exit the business. Doesn’t matter how long it took you to find the person. Doesn’t matter how much money you spent on a recruiter. Doesn’t matter than now you are questioning your […]
How to Hold People Accountable
How do you hold people accountable? I’ve written a little about it when I learned the phrase “Say-Do”. And I think OKRs help tremendously. I can’t imagine creating an accountable culture without OKRs or a similar framework. They are designed to be visible so that the entire organization can see objectives (goals) and key results […]
How and Why to do Quarterly Reviews
If you know me, you know I really dislike annual performance reviews. I think everyone dislikes them actually. No surprise there. And yet, formalized time to discuss employee performance, goals, and growth is important. I think a quarterly cadence is the right frequency that fits with the rhythms of modern work. Here are some tips […]
How to Bring New Leadership into Your Startup
Someone asked me recently what the best way to introduce a new sales leader to a team is, and it reminded me of an answer I posted on Quora a couple of years ago about introducing new leaders into a startup. Sorry for the rhyme, but bringing any new leader into a startup environment is […]
The Value of a Business Operating System
One thing many startups lack is a business operating system. A high-growth startup that isn’t using an operating system to run the business either isn’t familiar with the concept, or they are familiar but are afraid it will be too cumbersome to implement and restrictive to operate. An operating system might sound complicated to set […]
4 Essential C’s of Leadership: Communication, Clarity, Context, Consistency
There are many things that are essential to great leadership, but when there’s a people leadership problem it usually comes down to one (or more) of 4 areas—communication, clarity, context, and consistency. Let’s call these the 4 Cs of leadership. What is a people leadership problem? The symptoms look like this: Low employee engagement High […]
Does Work Suck? No, but…
I read “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It” by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson right before the Coronavirus hit. And because many business leaders are thinking about if, how, and when their staff will return to the office this is an interesting book to consider right now. Not sure how this one got on […]
An OKR Primer
Just when I think the world doesn’t need yet another introduction to OKRs, I talk to a company struggling to implement them. As an OKR convert (someone who didn’t like them, and now enthusiastically loves them), I think this stems from over complicating it and getting in your own way. While it can take a while […]
