My CEO Life

Have you ever had on of those days when things go right and more importantly, something great just pops up and you cant say no.

Well i had one of those days last week.  I was working away and received an email from someone in another country asking to help us enter that country.  Normally i wouldn’t give it too much attention as we get these all the time however the person happened to be from my country and we nearby during the week.  I met with them and it was a perfect match - they know the market, have the contacts but not the expertise or funding and we have the rest.

90 min later we had an in principle agreement to seriously look at working together to enter the market.

So what makes a simple decision for a CEO in whether to seriously work with someone else?

For me it comes down to passion / entrepreneurship / clarity of thought and market knowledge.

The person i interviewed definitely has passion.  They approached us and could clearly demonstrate how we can enter the market and how they can make it happen for us (therefore less thinking for me).  The person has a clear history of entrepreneurship and they currently work for a future potential customer so they can deliver some of the sales that we need to get started.

So … the next time a penny falls from heaven — GRAB IT FAST with both hands as it doesn’t happen too often.

So, for those that have been following my blog will realise that last week we had our half year annual conference.

Wed / Thurs / Fri last week we ran many sessions for people from all parts of the business.  The whole 3 day event is capped off with a gala dinner.

It turned out to be an amazing event.  All the staff became fully connected with the business.  We covered lots of topics from how we have been going, to how we increase our size 10x, to cultural issues and to just having fun!

The highlight was a run down of the financials by our resident CFO / comedien.  He managed in one 30 min session to clearly communicate how the business is going while laying them in the aisles with deft one liners and targeted comments about staff members and beer.

The other highlight was taking the time to get to know people.  I was pleasantly surprised by the number of folk who came up to me at the breaks and over a beer or even at 4 am at the nightclub and who wanted just chat and talk about the business.

The amazing thing is that they are now so connected to the business adn where we are going.  What surprised me most is that when we set the challenge of how we get to $500m in revenues, most said “too low” …

It is so easy to love a business when the team just love it so much too.  The bottom line is that by putting lots into the business and the people, we will get a lot out of it.  I would recommend doing this to all CEO’s.

I am not sure if you have heard, but there is an MP3 file doing the rounds of the internet of a customer trying to cancel his service with AOL.

It is an amazing call for two reasons

1. The sales person actually fights with the customer and makes it almost impossible for the customer to cancel
2. I dont even use AOL and have heard about it and will never use them - who wants to be treated like that.

Click here to check out the audio file http://www.jessejcollins.com/files/aolcancellationeditfinal.mp3

The bottom line is that we live in a world of amazing transparency.  The world of blogs, podcasts and social networking can fundamentally cause a business to boom (like www.youtube.com) or flop.  Public opinion is so transparent and everyone who has a public face to your business must realise that everything they say and do could end up in the public forum.  Nothing is sacred!

I was recently asked the question about who are the top paid CEO’s in the world.  The basic answer to the question is “i don’t know” but a quick search of Google turned up the Forbes Magazine top US CEO pay packages.

Richard Fairbank from Capital One Financial topped the list with a lazy $250m per annum.

To see the full list, go to http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/12/Rank_1.html