Author: Matt Blumberg
_Matt Blumberg_
Reading time: 19 minutes
Synopsis
Startup CXO (2021) is a detailed guide for growing the key leadership jobs that manage a company’s most important teams. Written with help from other writers, it explains how different leader jobs – like finance, marketing, product, and people management – must change and work together. This helps a business grow from a small team into a large, successful company.
What’s in it for me? Grow your top team successfully.
Starting a company is one thing. But making it grow? That’s a much harder task. In the early days, you can manage with hard work, quick thinking, and strong will. But as your company gets bigger, the casual way of working that helped you find your first customers now slows you down. It stops you from growing further. At this point, you need clear plans and expert knowledge. Most importantly, you need leaders who can create the systems and teams to turn a good idea into a lasting business.
The problem is that most founders learn as they go. They often make costly mistakes that get bigger later. What seemed like a small shortcut in the first year becomes a big problem when you want to get more money from investors or hire many more people.
This Blink helps with that. In it, you’ll learn how to build and grow five important jobs in your company. You’ll discover how leaders in finance, people, marketing, sales (revenue), and customer service should change how they do their jobs as the company grows. You’ll also learn which early decisions will either help or harm your growth in the future.
Blink 1 – The CFO
Let’s start with your CFO, or Chief Financial Officer. Their job in a startup needs a difficult balance from day one. Every decision means choosing between doing things properly – being very careful, taking enough time, and using proper resources – or taking the quick, cheap way. These early choices have a much longer effect than most founders expect.
Think about something as simple as notes from board meetings. When your board has three people sitting around a kitchen table, keeping very detailed notes seems like too much work. But five years later, when you’re trying to get a lot of money from investors, those same notes are looked at very closely. Lawyers for possible investors will check them carefully. Your carefulness at the start – or lack of it – suddenly becomes very important. Small decisions about paperwork made in the first year become the base that either helps or harms your growth.
Before those lawyers even open your files, you need to get investors interested. This brings us to getting money (fundraising). This is perhaps the most basic step for any growing business. As CFO, supporting your CEO through this key process means becoming a great storyteller using numbers.
This leads us to the pitch deck – a document made to get investors interested before a meeting, or to sum up main points after it. This isn’t just a finance paper where the CFO puts numbers. You are collecting and putting together information from the whole company. You turn it into an interesting story for investors.
So, what information does a good pitch deck have? Most start with the opportunity and business. They clearly explain what makes your company special and how your business works. Then comes your product. This includes screenshots and a plan for future product growth that shows you are moving forward.
The fourth part is about market size. This is called your Total Addressable Market (TAM). You can figure this out in two ways. The “top-down” way starts with big economic signs – like how big the country’s housing market is. Then you guess how much it will grow and how much of that market you can really get. The “bottom-up” way starts with details. You might take your average product price and then multiply it by all your possible customers.
The fifth part in your pitch deck is your current business status. Show your current partners and customers, highlight important results, and include anything that proves you are making progress. Next are your financials – current numbers with believable plans for the future. Finally, your seventh part is introducing your senior team. This highlights their jobs and the experience that makes them right to achieve your goal.
These actions are just the start of what it takes to grow successfully as a CFO. Get these basic steps right, and you build the system that allows your company to grow steadily.
Blink 2 – The CPO
The role of HR (Human Resources) has changed a lot in the last twenty years. It was mainly about rules, payments, and office papers. Now, it has become much more important. It affects all parts of the company and helps achieve real business goals. This new way of working earns a new title: People. If you lead this, you are the Chief People Officer, or CPO.
Your main job as CPO starts with creating a culture where everyone feels welcome. Culture is the total of how your employees act every day. These actions come from your values. But this only happens if what people do matches what you believe. If what you say your values are doesn’t match what people actually do, your culture will either grow strong or die.
The first people you hire have a very big effect on your culture. If they don’t share the CEO’s and company’s main values, they bring problems and disagreements. This mismatch wastes money, lowers output, and uses up valuable time. To stop this, you need to be clear.
To gain this clarity, as CPO you’ll need to start what the authors call the culture conversation. This means asking your fellow leaders clear questions: How do they see the company’s levels and how decisions are made? Do they like working from home or not? What do they think about having a good balance between work and personal life? Together, these questions act as tools that show where your leaders really agree.
So, once you can explain your culture clearly, it’s time to start writing down your values. Research possibilities, make a list, then help your leaders choose the most important ones. With culture and values set, your job then shifts to keeping things aligned. This means checking regularly, supporting the values yourself, and making changes if actions don’t match the values.
Sometimes, however, a problem cannot be fixed – and you’ll need to let people go. This can be necessary at any stage, whether people stop performing well or the company changes its main plan. And how you manage people leaving is very important. So, instead of making decisions in secret, make the process open and clear. Where possible, talk with your employee to see if they might fit a different role or choose to leave with a payment. When you have to let someone go, offer time to get ready and a good payment package. Consider adding help finding a new job and more money for those who find it hard to get a new role.
The rewards for treating employees well grow over time. That person you’re letting go today might be exactly who you need tomorrow. When you’ve managed their departure with respect and support, they’ll actually think about coming back. If you treat them badly, you close a door you can’t open again.
Blink 3 – The CMO
Everyone thinks they understand marketing. Your CEO has opinions. Your engineers have opinions. Your investors definitely have opinions. But as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of a startup, you have many ways, methods, and tools to choose from. This offers chances but can also make you stuck. Your real job is choosing what is truly important.
Marketing has three main goals: creating and keeping your company’s image (brand), getting people interested so sales can sell, and helping the company culture.
Start with your brand. After all, if you can’t explain what your company believes in, selling becomes impossible. But brand isn’t just your logo, name, or messages. It’s the total of what people say about you. It changes and grows with every time someone talks to your company.
It all starts with a conversation. Ask yourself and your colleagues basic questions: Who are we? What do we do – and why does it matter? What’s our brand’s personality? Work with everyone in the company on this. The more different ideas you get, the more likely you will find good, repeated ideas that become your true brand. A brand made alone often doesn’t connect with anyone else.
Next comes getting demand – the process that turns possible customers into actual buyers and keeps them interested. This work starts with market research. If that makes you think of hard school papers, don’t worry. Market research includes everything from official studies to talking to customers to looking at what other companies do online. Special agencies exist if you need them, and many easy-to-read books explain the basics. The important thing is simply starting.
Once you’re deep in getting demand, you’ll find a huge number of tech tools. The trick here is to start simple and add more tech as you really need it. Begin with a good system for managing customer relationships (CRM). Many CRM tools now include features already for things like making your website easy to find and managing social media. This gives you many tools in one place.
But when it comes to CRM goals, don’t think too much about the numbers. Set a few goals and stick to them. Whether they are possible customers, how much profit you get from marketing, or how much it costs to get a new customer – each measures something valuable. So, pick the numbers that match your current business goals and start tracking them. You can always improve, mix, or change your ways of measuring as you learn what truly leads to success.
Finally, remember the People team we talked about in the last section? You’ll need to build a close relationship with them too, all to help support the company culture. Marketing brings very helpful creative ideas for keeping employees happy, finding new staff, and talking within the company. This makes sure your company is not just good for customers, but also a good place to work.
Blink 4 – The CRO
Money (revenue) is like air for a company. Without it, your company cannot live. As the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), you are in charge of bringing in this money.
The first lesson every CRO needs to hear is a tough truth: it doesn’t matter how much hard work you’ve put into your product, or how deeply you love it. The only thing that matters is whether people want to buy it. And whether you can actually sell it. This difference between creating something great and creating something people will buy is what makes a startup succeed, not just be a costly hobby.
In the very early days, the whiteboard becomes your best friend. You should literally go to the offices of potential customers with a whiteboard. There, you can draw ideas to find out what problems they have – and how you might solve them. As you grow, you’ll move from using a whiteboard to a professional sales presentation, because by then you’ll have a clear and proven understanding of what your customers really need.
All the while, don’t forget that a CRO is the company’s first salesperson. You should only hire additional salespeople once you have a very clear idea of what you are selling. Hiring before that point just causes more confusion.
When the time does come to hire, who you should look for might surprise you: people who have faced hard times in their lives. These individuals often become better at understanding others’ feelings. And understanding others’ feelings is key to good sales. They know how to listen – and how to tell an interesting story that people can truly relate to. Your sales hires should also get along with other departments, and those departments should be part of the interview process. Sales staff will work with teams across the company all the time, and problems there stop sales.
When it comes to deciding how much to pay them, it’s good to start with a fixed salary that is the same or more than what others in the field get. As you’re working towards your first big money goal, give a bonus for every dollar salespeople earn for the company. As the company grows, change to a system where bonuses get bigger as salespeople get closer to their yearly goals. These goals are split into three-month periods. This makes sure they think about the current three-month period, but also about the whole year.
Besides changing how you pay people, you also need to change your sales process as you grow. Start with the basics: learn about how your buyers decide, when they buy, and how they judge different products. Figure out not just what you’re doing, but how your actions affect the customer’s buying process at every step.
Combine these elements – salespeople who understand others, fair pay, and better sales processes – and you’ll be ready to grow with strong support behind you.
Blink 5 – The CCO
Every business exists to complete a job the customer is paying them to do. Your task as a company is to do that job better than competitors and make it as easy as possible for the customer. This is where the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) comes in.
As CCO, it’s your job to work with all teams and leaders. You keep the entire company focused on what customers need most. This means working with sales to make sure they are looking for the right kinds of customers. It means working with product teams to make it easier for new customers to start using the product. And it means working with marketing to explain product features clearly. This job is mainly about bringing things together – making sure every team’s work helps give value to the customer.
Many startups think they don’t need a CCO yet. But this can cost a lot later. Customer success is very important from the start. Regular feedback from first customers helps you fix small issues in the customer’s experience before they become big, lasting problems. Get it right early, and growing becomes much, much easier. You don’t need to call the position “Chief Customer Officer” – something like “Head of Services” works just as well. What matters is that someone owns this responsibility from day one.
One common wrong idea companies have about the service department is that only this team keeps customers and stops them from leaving. The truth is that customers leaving can be caused by many things. How customers were sold to matters. How easy the product is to use also matters. The responsibility spreads across teams. The CCO’s job is coordinating these teams for the customer’s benefit, which in turn naturally stops customers from leaving.
Another important part of making great customer experiences is dividing customers into groups. A customer paying one hundred dollars cannot receive the same attention as one paying ten thousand dollars. It doesn’t make financial sense. Trying to do this wastes money without giving enough value back. For customers who pay less, use a “tech touch” way. This means most service comes through things like automatic messages and a support team that handles many requests. For customers who pay more, create special “key moments” that are unique to them, with human support. These are big “aha” moments that quickly show customers how much value they get from your product.
Ultimately, a strong customer success plan changes your customers from just a source of money into a way to grow steadily. By making sure every team in the company works together for what the customer truly needs, you make sure customers get the value they were promised when they bought the product. That’s the key to keeping customers for a long time – and making happy users talk positively about your company.
Final summary
In this Blink to Startup CXO by Matt Blumberg, you’ve learned that growing a startup means making choices today that will affect you for many years.
Your early choices build either a strong base or cause problems as you grow. Finance leaders must balance quick, lean ways with careful work. People leaders need to create cultures where everyone feels welcome by hiring people with similar values and treating those who leave with respect. Marketing then starts with conversations that define your brand before you focus on numbers. This leads into sales (revenue), which relies on salespeople who understand others and sales processes that change as customers grow.
Finally, customer success requires working with all teams to put the customer first and give them good value. Get these basic steps right early, and you build the systems that allow steady growth. This stops you from always having to fix old quick solutions.
Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
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