It starts with your appetite. Hunger and passion point to the potential to solve problems differently. You can possibly start a business with (almost) no help, some funds and a whole lot of passion and perseverance. However, you can’t scale a business in the same way, with the same skills, strengths or strategy…and you need finance to make growth plans happen.
Finance – cheddar or cheese
– whichever terms you use, can be derived from your own funds (owners’ equity), sales (revenue), investors’ capital (angels and sharks), business partners, shareholders, financial loans, agency grants, corporate sponsorship, go-fund-me donations, business competitions, estate inheritance, lottery/games of chance, family gifts and much more.
Once your business begins to find product-market fit, it is your responsibility to shed old systems and relinquish old ways of doing things. Just as in ‘adulting,’ it is your responsibility to unlearn behaviours that hinder your growth, so too must the Founder/CEO replace ‘doable but not sustainable’ systems and policies that stall growth or dilute value. The right structure and systems give your business permission to grow.
There is room for opportunity in a crisis. Hope is transformative. These may be trying times, but they are also strategic days. By tapping into your own spheres of influence, here’s how you get the cheese, find the cheese or make your own cheese:
Develop a curiosity about everything
– business, economics, history, food, advertising, mathematics, agriculture – everything. Curiosity will help you re-energize your business model when you need to start, pivot or scale. It will help you ask the right questions when you tackle market research. It will help you engage with prospective customers to improve your offer. When you grow in leadership, you will discover you need to learn a lot about other disciplines outside the core of your expertise. Pursue a habit of lifelong learning (not just education) and it will build your growth mindset to recognize opportunities and inevitably tap into more cheese.
Strengthen your ‘work muscles’
Startup unicorns may be glamourized for landing rounds of funding, but they can’t outrun a workhouse work ethic. When you start working at a young age, you learn skills through customer interfacing, data mining and general entry level (sometimes menial and often boring) work that help you appreciate and understand foundational work behaviours. Video clips and soundbites may give the impression that CEOs are fast-tracked-overnight-success-stories in dazzling office suites. However, you don’t often get to pull behind the curtains and see these leaders as the first ones to start the workday and the last ones to switch off their brain. Passion may be the motivation for what you do, but when passion wanes, perseverance is the discipline that keeps going. Like a proper fitness regime, work muscles need strengthening and resting to avoid the risks of burnout.
Lead by example in everything you do
Don’t put on a show to sabotage someone else’s efforts, for the benefit of an audience. Credentials may certify specific skills, but leadership is not a positional title that bestows authority to order others around. Your intellect is also not a hammer to brandish over others. Leadership is how you live your life. It gains strength from your behaviour – your self-awareness, traits, qualities, choices and actions. It is not derived from certificates or credentials. Your ability to lead by working hard, being humble, learning new things, staying close to family and friends, bringing positivity and influencing (never forcing) people to your side will bring you more cheese. True leaders listen, give credit, share credit, work in service of others, are inclusive, display grit and persist through setbacks.
Adopt a digital CEO mindset
Embracing the future of business is never going to be easy. However, as your customers’ needs change, so too must your business; what you did yesterday will not be sufficient for tomorrow. A competitive business grows owned, earned and paid assets, adopting a credo to always be innovating. Develop the discipline to build new habits and look beyond the distraction of “glitzy” new technologies to find and apply the underlying competitive lever (e.g. turn data into customer value). There is greater ambiguity than certainty and predictability in the marketplace. A digital CEO mindset doesn’t wait until technological breakthroughs are proven as other companies may already seize the opportunity. A mindset shift can be tough, but if you select the digital levers that can be sustained to grow your competitive advantage or become a core competency of your company…that’s the hidden cheese.
We should all know the power of our pocket, labour and consumption. Whether you call yourself a CEO now or you are assuming all the responsibilities as the Founder without the positional title of CEO, you are responsible for finding, getting and making the cheese. This may feel like a rapid detox of toxic patterns or poor behaviours. Therefore, be intentional with where you spend your energy, as negative messages will shrink your joy and steal your hope.
Wanting to do something about the problem you are solving is never enough; you must hunger for it, to want to change it…in order to excel at solving it. Moreover, you can’t want the credit without any of the blame. Remember the popular childhood nursery rhyme – the cheese stands alone!
What does a CEO do?
Firstly, there is no standardized list of the roles and responsibilities of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the scope may vary from a “hands-on role,” (e.g. hiring staff) to developing corporate strategy, depending on the size of the company. Secondly, every business Founder will have to decide if he/she will be the company’s CEO, grow into the role of CEO, hire a CEO or become a CEO.
Some of the chief functions and responsibilities of a CEO include:
- Communicator – Communicating on behalf of the company with shareholders, employees, the public and other businesses or organizations
- Visionary – Setting and implementing the company’s vision and mission
- Strategist – Leading the development of the company’s strategy and strategic goals
- Connector – Championing a culture of alertness of the marketplace, expansion opportunities, competitors, trends, innovations and industry developments
- Risk Manager – Ensuring risks to the company are continuously assessed, monitored, minimized or mitigated
- Principal – Evaluating the performance of the company’s leadership team including Presidents, Vice presidents, General Managers or Managers
