The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

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3 Sentence Summary

This book has distilled the best advice from business management classics like High Output Management, Getting Things Done, The One Minute Manager, and others and combined them into a down and dirty playbook for tech startup entrepreneurs. Matt Mochary has written a bare-bones, no-frills, pragmatic instruction manual on how to manage your email, make rapid decisions, get alignment, document processes, measure KPIs, solicit investors, build an effective team, and everything in between. You don’t have to be an aspiring Silicon Valley founder to appreciate much of the valuable management and leadership advice.

5 Key Takeaways

1. You need to learn how to manage yourself before you can manage your business.
2. Communicate ideas and proposals in writing during the decision making process.
3. If you do it twice, write it down. Documentation is the key to building scalable processes.
4. Don’t ignore conflict. Be transparent, give/take feedback often, and be an active listener.
5. Be obsessed with learning about your customer. Do so by asking better questions.

The Great CEO Within Summary

The Team

• Find a partner who has complementary skills to yours. 
• Give up a large percentage of the company.  It’s worth it.
• Do not create a 50/50 partnership. While 50/50 sounds like an ideal, it actually leads to real pain if there is no easy way to break a deadlock.
• Founding teams should never grow beyond six until there is true product-market fit. 
• PMF is having created a product that customers are finding so much value in that they are willing to both buy it (after their test phase) and recommend it.
• Metrics that show whether PMF has been achieved include:  revenue, renewal rates, NPS (net promoter score).

Getting Things Done

• The majority of successful CEOs that I know use the system outlined in the book Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity, by David Allen.
• Inefficient leaders waste a lot of time reaching out about, or responding to, one-off issues in real-time. A much more efficient method is to batch your issues and discuss them all at once.

Inbox Zero

• Think of your combined inboxes as a single triage room at a hospital. Some cases that come in are urgent, others not so much. It is critical to notice the urgent cases immediately and get them in to see a doctor now. To do so, you must keep the triage room clear. If you use the triage room as a waiting room as well, then a new patient can enter the room, sit down in a chair, and bleed out from his stab wound before you even realize he is there. For this reason, every well-functioning hospital separates its triage room from its waiting room and keeps the triage room absolutely clear. To be efficient, you must do the same with your inbox. This means addressing all the urgent cases right away and maintaining Inbox Zero every day.
• Check email only twice a day: morning and afternoon

Top Goal

• Schedule two hours each day to work on your Top Goal only. And do this every single work day. Period.
• The earlier in the day you schedule this Top Goal time, the better, so as to avoid other issues (and people) from pressing for your attention.

On-Time and Present

• Do not waste other people’s time. It is disrespectful and counterproductive.
• When you anticipate being late, let the other party know as soon as possible.
• Be present. Be focused on what’s being discussed. Do not check your messages. Phone and computer away.

When You Say It Twice-Write It Down

• This is the policy you use with your team to document all of your processes.
• What do you need to document? EVERYTHING.

Gratitude

• Focus on the positives.
• We perform our best when we are having fun and feeling good about ourselves.
• Say or write down one thing that you’re thankful for each day.
• Be appreciative. Tell people when they’ve done something good.
• Set aside 1 hour a week to be intentionally appreciative. Follow up and outreach. 
• And when receiving appreciation, there is only one correct response: “Thank you.” Do not feign humility by downplaying the act with statements like “It was nothing, anyone could have done it.” No. The person is trying to make you feel appreciated. Anything other than “thank you” will rob them of their goal.

Energy Audit

• If you can spend 75-80% of your time doing things that energize you – magic will occur.
• Audit your time and figure out how much of it is spent on activities that energize you and what activities drain you. Outsource or delegate the things that drain you as much as possible.
• Zone of incompetence = other people do better than you
• Zone of competence = you can do it just fine, but others are just as good as you
• Zone of excellence = things you are better at than others. You will want to keep doing these things, but this is dangerous. You need to move away from these things.
• Zone of genius = these are the things that you are uniquely good at in the world and that you love to do. This is where you should be driving toward spending most, if not all, of your time. 

Health

• Your physical health is paramount.
•  Take care of your mental health. Build a support group.
• Get a therapist, even if you don’t think you need one. You will find it invariably useful.

Decision Making

• If you want the most effective and efficient decision-making process, require that anyone who wants to discuss an issue write it up, along with the desired solution, ahead of time.
• Two ways to do this:
  • The hard way: Write an extraordinarily thorough analysis from the get-go.
  • The easy way: Write a draft, circulate it to the meeting participants before the meeting, and invite comments and questions. Then write out responses to all of these comments and questions prior to the meeting.
• This method, though time-consuming for the sponsor, yields extraordinarily thoughtful decisions in a very short amount of time. The extra effort and work by one person creates a net savings in time and energy across the whole group.

Getting Buy-In

• You get buy-in when people feel they are part of the decision and their input matters
• When people are given more influence, they feel more invested.

3 Methods for Getting Buy-In

1. Manager decides, tells the team, answers questions.
2. Manager creates a straw man (hypothetical answer designed to inspire discussion), shares with the team, invites feedback, facilitates group discussion, then determines final answer.
3. Manager invties team to meeting with no straw man to discuss the dilemma from scratch. Final decision is made by consensus if possible.

For the vast majority of important decisions, method 2 is optimal.

Issues and Proposed Solutions

• Don’t discuss issues verbally. It is both inefficient and ineffective.
• Instead, require that anyone who presents an Issue at a team meeting do so in writing.
• The write-up should include both a detailed description of the Issue as well as their Proposed Solution. They cannot say “I don’t know.” They must at least present a guess. It must be phrased boldly, in direct terms (“Do this…”).
• All issues should be presented at the weekly Team Meeting
• Allow 5 minutes to discuss each Proposed Solution. If consensus is reached in that time – great. If not, don’t spend more time debating. instead, use the RAPID framework.

Loudest Voice in the Room

• Be aware of who is in the room when you have a group discussion. Know that work titles will influence other people’s answers.
• To avoid influencing other people’s ideas, have people write down their vote or thoughts before you share your perspective.
• Let junior people speak and ask questions first.

Sloppy Agreements

• Sloppy agreements are when people don’t show up on time, don’t complete the goals that they declare.
• The antidote is Impeccable Agreements. They are 1) precisely defined and 2) fully agreed to (which almost always means written) by all relevant people.
• There must be consequences to breaking agreements.
• If you can’t meet the agreement, then you have an obligation to let other members of the agreement circle know as soon as possible.

Transparency

• Don’t hide negative information.
• Our imaginations are much more powerful than reality
• Share all relevant information with your team, both negative and positive. Let them adapt.

Conflict Resolution

• Interpersonal conflict is almost always due to people
  1. Not fully sharing their thoughts and feelings
  2. Not feeling heard
• Prove to people that you have heard them by summarizing what you just said back to you until they say “that’s right!” Once you assure them that you’ve heard them, then, and only then, will they be open to what you have to say in response.

Issue Identification

1. Ask each people to pretend that they’re the CEO and answer “What are the most important issues (max 3) for me to solve in the next 90 days?
2. Ask people to write down their thoughts about the company when they source their Joy, Excitement, Sadness, Anger and Fear

Conscious Leadership

• Be more interested in learning than in being right.

Customer Obsession

• You are not making a product. You are solving a customer problem.
• It is critical that you continually live that customer problem.

Culture

• You don’t choose your values. You have them.
• Use your values as a guide to who you hire and when you fire.
• Print and distribute your values
• Don’t underestimate the value of FUN as a value.
• Don’t forget to celebrate. Make an effort to publicly acknowledge achievements
• Don’t measure hours. Measure output. However, it’s still key that there is a core period of time when everyone shows up to the office so that collaboration can happen.
• You prevent office politics by never allowing lobbying to be successful.
• Use Tesla’s model for Grade Level Planning for setting compensation levels.
• Do not let team members work out conflict on their own.

Company Folder System and Wiki

• Have a company wiki and make it mandatory that all new hires read it.
• A well-run company documents every aspect of its operations, so that its team members can easily step into a new role when needed.
• Whenever you find yourself doing something twice, write down exactly what it is that you did. Everyone on the team should contribute. 
• Write down one process per week.
• Link all processes to a documented spreadsheet.

Goal Tracking

• Never assign someone an action without them agreeing to it verbally or in writing.
• Encourage people to use their own individual tool for tracking their specific actions. Keep the group goal tracker high level.

Areas of Responsibility

• When more than one person shares a responsibility, it often does not get done well, or at all. 
• Areas of Responsibility. One person is assigned to each function in the company. This is the AOR list. Maintain and update it as responsibilities shift.

No Single Point of Failure

1. Write down all processes
2. Cross-train a second person for each role

Key Performance Indicators

• Know your 5-6 most significant KPIs and track them religiously. Make them visible to the entire team.

Collaboration

• Every successful large company uses a system of “Objectives and Key Results”
  1. Set vision and goals for the company, each dept, and each individual on a regular basis (usually quarterly)
  2. Communicate that vision and those goals to every team member
  3. Tracking and reporting progress towards those goals on a regular timetable – usually weekly
  4. Elicit feedback on what’s going right and what needs to be changed

Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

• Target is 3 objectives with 3 key results for each
• For the company > department > team > individual…cascade them down so that they are in alignment.
• The Objective = “where do we want to go?” Not necessarily measurable
• Key Results = “how do we know that we’re getting there?” These should be measurable.
• Gather your leadership team and have everyone come to the meeting with their ideas for what the OKRs should be for the quarter.
• Much better to let individuals come up with their own OKRs. They will be more invested. 
• Tracking OKRs – Use a tool like 15Five or Betterworks
• Or create a traffic-lighted sheet to track status.

Feedback

• Never give negative feedback using a one-way communication method (email, text, voicemail). 

The Problem With Not Giving Feedback

• You will be in the dark about your company’s problems
• Operations will grind to a halt. Communication will break down.
• Your best talent will leave you.

4 A’s of Seeking Feedback

1. Ask for it
2. Acknowledge it – repeat what they said. Make them feel heard and understood.
3. Appreciate it
4. Act on it

How to Give Negative Feedback

1. Ask for permission
2. State the behavior (fact)
3. State how the behavior makes you feel (feelings)
4. State the thoughts, opinions and judgments you have around the situation (story)
5. Make a request – a change you’d like to see in the future
6. Ask if they accept the feedback

Fundraising

• Pick a partner, not a firm
• When you need to speak to an investor, ask 3-5 people in your network who know that person to send an email of recommendation to them
• Stack the referrals close together – all in the same week – so that you get noticed
• Wait to talk about your company until you know that the investor likes and trusts you personally
• Sell yourself, not the company

How To Brag While Remaining Humble and Relatable

1. Credit : “It could not have happened without [name the others involved].”
2. Hard Work : “We had to put in so much to make it happen, for example, [describe the hard work].”
3. Vulnerability : “It was most difficult for me when…”
4. Duty : “We were driven by our dream to [noble motive].”
5. Gratitude : “I am so proud and thankful that…”

📝 Click here to read my blog post on this topic.

Recruiting

• Be efficient, or risk grinding all other processes to a hault
• Spend as little time as possible with the candidates that you don’t hire (quick evaluation) and as much time as possible with the candidates that you want to and do hire (building a relationship, onboarding/training) .
• As the hiring manager, write out a ninety-day roadmap for the position you need to fill. This roadmap includes all the goals that the new team member will be expected to hit within the first ninety days of joining. This is critical for successful onboarding. During the interview process, share this roadmap with the candidate to make sure that she is excited about these goals.
• Be fast. In recruiting, you would make an offer to the candidate “pending reference interviews”.

Onboarding

• Give onboarding even more attention, time and energy than you give to recruiting.
• Assign each new team member a buddy with whom they’ll check in each day for fifteen minutes for the first two weeks.

Firing

• When you make the announcement, praise the person’s contributions to the company, and take ownership yourself for the fact that you weren’t able to match their skills to the company’s needs. DO NOT blame or criticise the person. Instead take responsibility for the situation.

Effective Sales

• Build trust
• Identify the customer’s specific pain
• Sell results, not features

Build Trust

• Ask the customer about them
• Listen actively and reflect back what they say
• At the second meeting, show that you remember what they said at the first
• Be explicit about NOT talking about your company
  • “Before we talk about what we do, I’d like to start by getting to know your situation, to know if we’re even the right solution for you.”
• Ask for a limited amount of time, so the burden is low
  • “Let’s have a short introductory call for 10 minutes.”
• Invite them to a purely social event:
  • “We’re hosting drinks at ____ on ____. Please join us.”

Customer Development

• Identify the customer’s specific challenges by asking the right questions.
• You need to understand your customer’s pain before you present your solution.
• Over time, you will want to build an inventory of problem and solution statements for the different kinds of customers and different product features your product serves.

3 Things to Understand

1. What are their goals?
2. What are the challenges preventing them from reaching those goals?
3. What are their ideal solutions to overcoming those obstacles?

Sell Results, Not Features

• Most people don’t care about your product functionality. They don’t care about your features. They care only about their business results
• Focus on the why. Focus on painting the vision of a world where the customer’s desires are fulfilled with the help of your product.

Building A Sales Team & Pipeline

• Don’t hire sales people right away.
• In most cases, salespeople will never be able to sell better than the founders and they won’t be able to sell the product if you are not able to. To thrive, salespeople need to have a very clear product offering to sell and very clear direction on who to sell to.

Only Hire A Sales Team If

1. You have found an initial version of product-market fit. This means that a significant proportion of your paying customers are renewing their contracts.
2. You have figured out what you are selling and who you are selling to.

The Structure of A Sales Team

• Aaron Ross’ most important insight is the following: most executives think that the way to grow revenue is by adding salespeople. However, most often the main obstacle to growth is not growing the team but generating more leads. Only once you can predict your lead generation can you achieve predictable revenue. Only once you achieve predictable revenue can you achieve true scale.
• Generating leads and closing deals are distinct functions that must be split.
• Senior salespeople are expensive, so their time is best spent focusing on the most high-value activity: closing deals.
• The third function in your sales team are your customer success or account managers. These are the people who will tend to your existing customers, ensure their success, and grow the business coming from those customers

Ideal Sales Team Structure

• Qualifiers (aka Sales Development Reps) : these people are focused on generating qualified leads and handing these off to the Closers.
• Closers (aka Account Executives) : these people are focused on closing the qualified leads generated for them by the Qualifiers.
• Farmers (aka Customer Success) : these people are focused on tending to existing customers, ensuring that these customers renew, and getting these customers to increase their spend.

Lead Generation

• Generating predictable leads is the first step to achieving predictable revenue.

3 Kinds of Leads

• Seeds : Seeds are generated from word-of-mouth, usually from customer referrals or prior relationships.
• Nets : Nets are generated from your marketing, such as events, SEO, white papers, and ad campaigns. They are called Nets because you are going for “quantity over quality”.
• Spears : Spears are generated from direct outbound outreach by your Outbound Reps, usually through email outreach or LinkedIn mining. They are called Spears because they are hyper-targeted and you are going for “quality over quantity”.

Marketing

• The greatest risk is not moving too slow. It’s spreading scarce resources too thin
• Start by concentrating all of your efforts on the low hanging fruit – the small customer segment that has a particular problem that your product solves 10x better than the competition
• Only move on to the next customer segment after you have the resources to do so
• Be like the WWII Allies attacking Normandy before spreading out through the rest of Europe

Product Market Fit

• This means designing a significantly better solution to your target customer’s problem than exists in the marketplace
• But how do you know when you have achieved Product Market Fit? Ask your customers. They will tell you. They will also vote with their wallets by renewing their subscriptions, buying more product, etc
• For selling to businesses, PMF = long term contracts
• For selling to consumers, PMF = second purchase, renewing subscription, high NPS, sharing with friends on social media
• Do not go beyond 6 team members before reaching PMF

More Books Like The Great CEO Within

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• High Output Management
• The Effective Executive
• The Lean Startup
• Rework
• The E-Myth Revisited

Blog Posts Inspired By The Great CEO Within

These are the posts I’ve written that build upon some of the key ideas presented in The Great CEO Within.

• Reduce interruptions by batching issues
• How to brag while remaining humble and relatable