66. COO Superpowers Revealed Part 1

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Operation through a podcast for Close. I am Brandon Metzger. Alongside my co-host, Bethany airs. How are you, Bethany? I'm just tired. It's Christmas time almost. And I find this time of year really hard because there's so much we have to do work wise. And all of the planning and all of the next year stuff and closing all of the deals and go, go, go and parties and silly season. But at the same time, the sun's going down at, what, 330?

Sunrise this morning was eight. The world is cocooning and sleeping. It's dark all the time. And yet we're trying to force our bodies to be the most active. Last week was so busy because we had our board meeting for provisional budget approval, so we've had to be doing the budgets. We have end of year reviews and pay rises to talk about. And you're still working on closing deals. And then also on top of that, because I'm on other boards.

I had one board meeting and one meeting at 645 in the morning, the day after the Christmas party. I'm sure you were on point in terms of your feedback to that company. And that was talking about a fundraise. And so just like the only time they could fit in. And then we recorded this podcast after that. So I was just broken. So I spent the entire weekend doing nothing. I have both boys back home. They've taken over our lives. We don't have a single glass in the house. I don't know where they go.

They were home less than 24 hours in every single glass in the house that disappeared. It's a skill. I'm not quite sure what kind of skill that is, per say, but that is a skill. It is a skill. And then also just having four people instead of two people in the house means the dishwasher is going all the time. I feel like I'm ever doing is unloading the dishwasher. So no, not feeling particularly relaxed or ready for this. And then I absolutely love my in-laws and I'm serious.

I'm not somebody who doesn't like their in-laws and they're coming for Christmas. But right now, the idea of preparing Christmas is wildly overwhelming. And so I spent the weekend trying to find places to maybe go out to eat, but nobody's keen. Nothing looks great. And also, like set menus for 95 pounds a head. That is standard these days. I think we want to set Christmas dinner. I mean, you're looking at at least 100 pounds per person. Which is crazy.

And then like I was looking at them and they didn't even include the sides for that price. It's like, what do I do? You have to pay staff extra. But yeah, so because that's like 600 pounds for six of us to go out and although I really don't want to cook, that's maybe a bit toppy, although it's great to just have that break because every Christmas I do everything because gender And so over the years I've gotten more and more efficient. So I buy everything pre-made, so you just have to hit it.

Except I still need to make the meat and it still takes a whole day because of timings. And I have this list and I have to think about it and our kitchen is separate to the rest of the house. And so everybody just sits in the other room having a great time. And I'm in the kitchen for the whole day. Bethany, where is my eggnog? What's happening? Yeah. It's because I'm the only one who actually cares about Christmas.

Like this year, I was saying to my husband that he's going to have to help because although I'm the only one that cares about Christmas, everybody else still benefits from Christmas. And I don't want to just be there all by myself and I'm exhausted and I can't quite imagine it right now. So, yeah, so Christmas time for relaxation. So on that note, why don't we flip on over to what is a wonderful topic today we have. What is a CEO's strengths and gaps?

And we have an amazing guest for this, which is David Angels. She is the founder of the CEO Roundtable, which we are part as well, and the former CEO of Wayne County. And more broadly, David is really the CEO coach of note, I would say, in London as it stands right now. So before we get to the he wanted to talk about the strengths side of things.

So I'll go through the strengths one by one and I'll just kind of quote them as the way that she described it and maybe just get your view on how do you learn that particular thing or get better at it. And the first one that she talked about was being highly adaptable and flexible and approach listening to the opinions of others and seeking to understand with empathy.

So if you want to get better at being adaptable and flexible in your approach, what are some things that we could throw out there to folks to think about? Well, it's funny because part of

Wind Avenue was going through the strengths and the weaknesses or the strengths and the gaps, I would say is that a lot of the strengths seem to be attributes, whereas the gaps are like gaps in knowledge. So I didn't think we were comparing apples and oranges. And so some of that is just an attribute to some extent you're born with the ability or not, but then you can get better

at it. I was not a particularly patient person and I've definitely learned to listen more as I've gotten older, and that has been a combination of noticing. I was impatient and exploring why I'm not patient. And what does that mean about me and what are my insecurities that are feeding it. So that's part of like therapy and doing the work and introspection. And then the other part is just practice.

So just listening and see what happens when you're not trying to jump in with your ideas and have faith that your idea will come up, you know, when there's time. But otherwise just hold on to what the other person is saying and the number of times where somebody has an idea and I'm like, Ooh, yes, that's a really good idea for all these different reasons. And in my head I just go and we'll wait.

And they might talk longer than I want and they might be a bit rumbly, but the nine times out of ten get to all of the different reasons why it's a good idea and the interconnects that I also had. And it's just like, okay, look, I can have faith that other people can figure out these interconnects too, and that they might not realize why their idea is a good idea and they have to think it through out loud. But they get to all those points.

And so it just becomes an ability to let go and trust other people more, because over time it's proven over and over again. So it's kind of like practice, see that it works, reinforces it, continue to practice. So the second one she'd spoken about was a high resilience threshold, working through barriers arising and committing wholeheartedly. So what do you make of this in terms of getting better at that? I just laughing at my preamble, which I think is all about I was. Really.

Digging deep, being resilience, ignoring your own needs. Yeah, maybe not the healthiest way of doing that, but I think resilience really is one of those that you have a certain amount that you're born with and then you can reinforce it. Some people are just not as resilient as others and maybe sometimes not just resilience, but also like questioning ambition and what you want in life, because it's fine to choose different levels of grit and hard work.

So I have been born and blessed and cursed with a massive period and work ethic. You know, I work hard, I do my a star. I am not lazy, but the resilience for me comes from not just working hard because they'll break yourself, but taking time to reflect after something shitty has happened and seeing that I survived it. So the next time something shitty happens, I know I'll be able to survive it again. I guess it's like I just really like empirical evidence.

So I take the time to review my empirical evidence and I have empirical evidence that I'm resilient and therefore believe I can do it again. I've had this conversation many times in the past where at the end of the day, there's been some massive issue within the company. A single person or several people have freaked out about whatever is going on and, you know, sitting down with them to talk them through what has happened. And the fact of the matter is we live to fight another day.

And regardless of what's happened, things are going to move on. So as long as we kind of anchor ourselves to what we're trying to accomplish for the purpose of why we're here and why we're at this company, why we're bothering to wake up the morning and we'll get past this. I think that kind of mentality and mindset, kind of sharing that with individuals I think usually tends to help.

So you're actually building resilience within your team rather than talking about how to build resilience within yourself. I guess kind of both in a way, because I tell myself the same thing. I think as you get older and more mature, I think these machinations of company tend to impact you less and you care less about them in a sense. Like you care a lot about your career and your focus and delivering good results. But it's like.

Holding everything quite lightly, I guess, in terms of how it actually impacts you. And I feel like only through experience and time I've gotten to a place where the minutiae of what happens in these companies does not impact me or affect me elicits, you know, crazy dramatic, I suppose. Take it for what it is. It's a software company. Nobody's going to die. We're going to move on. I can have a great career regardless of whether this company succeeds or

not. But I'm here. And because I'm here, I want to make this work and I want to do my best job to make that happen, I guess. So I think it's a bit of like that thinking that I'm trying to like plant in myself and also plant in others where we're here eight hours a day working our asses off. Let's make an impact. Perspective is always very good. I think just because of the year that I've had. As everybody knows, my resilience wasn't actually necessarily work related.

Like, there's just been a lot of deaths this year to get over and a lot of health issues where there's still a level of resilience and understanding that life can throw a lot at you or a lot at me and I can survive it. All right. Number three, gap filling. So overseeing and managing areas where there may be functional leaders missing and filling those gaps for whatever time period. How do you get good at that? I don't know how you get good at it.

I don't know if you should get good at it, but it just seems to be, again, something that happens a lot. I like that has been the number one story of my career at New Voice Media. I was SVP of Strategy, but I basically did all of the bits of other people's jobs that didn't know how to do and was like the unsung hero of all of those things. Or as our very scary French chair called it, I was in the shit list. Right. Okay, that's that's. That's great. Yeah. It was like, so inspiring.

And then even now at peak, we have our head of account management going on maternity leave. And guess who's now the acting Matt leave cover. Nice. Right on top of everything else. Yeah. What was the most random function you've ever led for a while. The marketing one does bring to mind because marketing is probably where I'm least knowledgeable but have the biggest opinion. So it's a bad. Nightmare for the marketing team. Exactly.

But in fairness to myself, I try to hold all that stuff in check and do my best job to be a proper CEO, which is listen to what's happening. Listen to the experts that are on the ground list, experts that I know outside the company that are good marketers and try to ask really smart and useful questions to make sure that we're thinking about the right things where whether I'm the expert or not in that case doesn't matter.

But as long as I'm kind of holding people to account, asking good questions, driving the program forward, let the experts kind of do their thing, then generally speaking, you're in a decent position. So what's your most random backfill? For me, it was s.p.a.. So financial planning and analysis, because I didn't know it was a thing. I didn't know it was a discipline. I just was self-taught into figuring out how to build models.

And for like three and a half years at peak, I was the FP and a function. So basically our CFO says looking at the future is what strategy does. You're looking at the future. In order to look at it, you need to model it. Go And I did because I was young and inexperienced in experience and didn't realize. And so I did it for three and a half years.

And then we got bigger and then we raised money from T V, and then we had like more sophisticated people come in and a new CFO who hired somebody whose entire job was FPGA. And I was like, this is a discipline. This is a job. Like this is one person's job. This is a just one fifth of my job. It was such an eye opener for me, and it was like we raised 120 million off the back of my mom. Really? Wow. Okay. That's impressive. No idea what I was doing. That was enough logic.

I was fine. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. Especially like fundraising. That amount of money based off a model with a nonprofessional at the helm of it. So for Bessemer and TCV both. Actually, this is a question for you. When do you need proper modeling, do you think? In 2024? I mean way, way before we had it, yeah. I think with your series A, given the size of Series A's now a days, you definitely need a finance professional.

You need it for the model in the future and you need it for not ridiculously spending your money on stupid things. Like it's just a good bit of experience. I think part of the reason why we could get away with me doing whatever I was doing was because we had a very experienced team except for me. I was the least experienced by far. And so although I was the glue that held things. Together and did everybody's shit jobs. They also gave me context and experience that I didn't know about.

And you also need experience and you need to find it somehow. You need a combination of people who don't have experience with people who do. And what I see a lot is companies that get to their series A where just everybody is new to the world. And now once you have a sizable amount of money in your bank account, you start to need to have some people who are not new to the world.

Typically, when you come in to a series A, the team, a lot of teams are pure newbies to the world, as you've described it. How many kind of like more senior executives do you think you need on the pathway from A to B? So we had to mix that team a little bit in terms of seniority. So I definitely go for some sort of finance person. I go for I hate the term, but I don't know how else to say it. A finance person with an operations fight. So you can get some amount of like, what's this leadership

team do? Who should be in the leadership team? The importance of meeting regularly, the importance of having clear reporting, plus a good model plus fiscal responsibility. And then I would put somebody in the technical area as well, because quite often technical co-founders are great at hacking stuff together, but don't actually know how to scale an organization as you tend to need somebody who knows how to scale on the product side, and those would be the minimal viable hires I would make.

So why don't we park it here and get on to our conversation with Tiffany and Ole's. So what are the strengths of CEOs en masse? What does that look like for us? So the ones that indexed most highly and you won't be surprised by some of these. Definitely. If I wasn't building strong relationships with key decision makers in the business. And that means anywhere, right, say board here below and rest of team.

And I feel like that's the real strength of CEOs generally like they're generally very humble servant leadership able to really connect and take people on the journey. Then you've got owning and managing their functional areas that lend well to their strengths. They're very resilient, as you would imagine, from all the things that they then have to do and go through.

And when they work through barriers, they tend to be quite consensus driven in their approach with others and then will commit wholeheartedly towards decided the highly adaptable, flexible. They love corralling other people's opinions, understanding what other people think situations and they embrace perspectives even when they're not their own. So they can be that person who really helps to homogenize and curate opinions and understand what different people are thinking. Gap filling.

No surprise there. So leading other functional areas when there's a leader missing, we get drafted into that lot. And then changing processes if they're not effective, but doing it in a very systematic, pragmatic way. And I often hear this spoken about as treating it like product. So internal stakeholders, your customer. So thinking about that way, those are the biggest drags. I mean, there are lots, right? And this is a certain segment of a population, but it is the segment of the

population. It was very mixed in terms of gender, so 5050 gender. And actually, in terms of the CEOs that we got responses back from, these are not incredibly early stage CEOs. These are actually people who are quite experienced in their roles. So this is why I thought was super interesting because some of the gaps then are interesting given that's the context. They're not newbie CEOs who are early stage of their career. These are folks who've been doing it for a little while.

Given that we're talking about fairly senior or senior CEOs, I don't know. How dare we have gaps because we're perfectionists where they start to kids. What are those gaps that you find in the CEOs? The first one and again, there are some of these where you're like, Yes. Generally speaking, this would seem to be a gap. But being an external spokesperson for the business and whether that's attending networking events, speaking at conferences.

And I actually love this one because this one is incredibly nuanced, I think, around the fact that actually some CEOs are incredibly comfortable being an internal spokesperson. That's why external is interesting. And even those CEOs who are incredibly comfortable being an internal spokesperson sometimes struggle speaking at board level, which again is the tipping point possibly between internal and

external. Maybe I'm wondering if it's struggling to speak at the board or this dynamic around disagreeing commit and then showing a united front in front of the board. This is something I definitely found difficult myself the last time around because I wouldn't necessarily always agree with the decisions that had been made that we were then representing to the board. And then if I was asked specifically my opinion, I would find it difficult because I didn't want to show not a united

front. And it's like, where is your loyalty? Is your loyalty with the board or is your loyalty with the exact team slash the CEO as I don't know if it's a discomfort so much as a hard place to be. And having to decide when you state your ground and when you disagree and commit. I also found it quite difficult sometimes in board situations, this when I was operating to know what my role was. And it sounds a bit weird, but it's like if the CEO

is updating on all of these different things and he's this sort of being the face of the company, it almost has to be pre-contract it's that you have a role at the board, otherwise you end up. Sort of. Sitting there. I think CEOs generally perceive themselves as very internal facing people, so they see themselves as that, you know, they do the all hands, the strategic golf sites and they may be wonderful speakers, but they don't see themselves as the external person

for the company. They're their audience. Sales are not the seat of the company. They don't feel like it's part of their remit, I think. So part of it, I think is partially a mindset shift to understand that the external side is equally as important.

And I think that customer centricity, really understanding some of the issues that they're having, you know, in much part of senior level, because you can bring that external relationship, that external kind of understanding back into the company and have much more of that real connection to the marketplace. And I think that's not a sales role and it doesn't have to be a CEO role. It can be a CEO role.

By the way, there's another gap in there, which is interesting, which we should come on to talk about. But I was having a fascinating conversation with Andrew Richardson recently. We were talking about the same thing. Lots of CEOs, the external spokesperson thing can also go to

customer, right? CEOs can have limited interaction with customers and therefore you then have less of a connection to a customer's problems are and so on. And you don't see yourself as a salesperson as such. And I think that could be quite problematic actually as zero because you get a whole different view, as you say, on the business by talking to customers and seeing it from their viewpoint. But I think there's two elements to

external. There's the external spokesperson versus having customer relationships and that spokesperson I can again see why the CEO might not always feel comfortable doing that, particularly if you have a co-founder, CEO or founder CEO, where it's their vision, their baby. They're the ones who are thinking five years ahead and evangelizing all the time. You're never going to sound as good. You're never going to be that founder who just, like loves it and thinks about it 24 hours a day.

And so it's around figuring out what kind of spokesperson you can be, where you are authentic and understand the business, but are not going to necessarily be emulating our corporate copy of a founder CEO who's just in a different level. Absolutely. And finding the things that you're passionate about talking about for you then will make the whole external spokesperson piece will be easier. But I agree with you, it's very difficult. It's a bit role based. Again, what's your role in doing

it? Why? What's the outcome? Was the desired outcome of you doing it? Because whilst it can be to raise your own brand, this has to be a business oriented, reasonable say to do it.

And when I was at mine, Candy, mine was a lot talent, a lot of talent related as an encouraging folks to understand that it was a great place to be and all of that kind of good stuff bringing people to us, which I felt like was a great role actually as an external spokesperson because I loved being so much that I could really evangelize that.

And it was a slightly different perspective to the see from the CEO who's talking, as you say, about why we do what we're doing, how we're going to go, the vision and the mission and all of that kind of good stuff. But it's a great one. And Brandon, you mentioned another gap. So Brandon, is all the gaps. Among the gaps and all of the gaps right now. But yeah, so that one was a great one. Would you like to move to another gap? Well, I want to know about the gaps that Brandon's mentioned.

What are these ones that Rand is getting? So this one around sort of being a negotiator, which is also related to the customer side of things, which came out of the gap. And again, understandably, because whilst you have a group of CEOs, you may have a spike in customer operations or go to market sales, etc., you also have a lead the day, right? They have a very different scheme, I would think, because so many CEOs come with a CFO background. CFOs are good at negotiating as

well. And really on the money, maybe it's the CEOs that come from a pure ops background that struggle with it because those of us from sales are used to negotiating and those of us from CFO worlds are as well, or at least should be like a good CFO really needs to know how to negotiate. True. I think it's yeah, as you say, it's pure ops because if you've come from a sales background, you have it already. CFO is an interesting one because I found that not all CFOs have that.

Maybe that would be a gap for other CFOs. I mean, because how else are you going to get really good? Well, first of all, to stand your ground and make sure that the deals that you're doing and that your sales team are doing are good deals, Sydney, to understand and actually be in deals or have a team that are in deals. And then also when you're buying major contracts, having the CFO in as that final bad cop to lower the price is just essential. I used to have a great guy that

worked for me. I called Alex, who was a very, very commercial finance person, and he would go and renegotiate things like payment terms and stuff, which from a financial perspective is incredibly important. It's slightly tangential, but like you tend to have some who are more commercial and some who are more technical and they tend to be camps, right? It's another little piece of opinion of mine is for scale up start ups and scale ups. You need commercial finance people and not technical finance

people. Yeah, because your actual technical is going to be quite low. Probably it's going to be quite straightforward versus the commercial side of things, which might be a lot more helpful and there's just no value add in. If you get somebody who's just straight technical because you need someone who can negotiate with fund fundraising, understand the best ways of structuring those types of deals, somebody who can work with your customers and structure deals well there and your suppliers.

So anyhow, if anybody happens to be listening who's hiring a CFO or a finance person, those are my $0.02. And I would also say for the CEO, I feel like I'm constantly negotiating in different forms. And usually it's more complex situations where the commission plan for the sales reps is broken for some reason, and the sales rep, the leader of the sales team has been

caught out. They need to talk to somebody about it in terms of what to do because person is really upset for whatever reason that VP of Sales needs to have a conversation around what we need to negotiate with with that person or, you know, other nonstandard situations where a leadership team has also either contractual issues or something that's happening in terms of. They're winding down and the terms associated to that wind down and how to get the best

out of that person. There's some level of negotiation that needs to occur. So I feel like for the CEO, there's often this but nonstandard negotiations, spectrum of things and pop up all over the place where, you know, it may not be strictly like a supplier negotiation, but there's definitely a lot of nonstandard negotiations that need to happen where we are involved to come up with the best outcome for an individual or for a team.

It's interesting because I think CEOs have the skills for negotiation, but when you put the label negotiation on it, we get a bit freaked out. So, that's salesy, that's external. That is an area, an agreement I'm not used to. Whereas if you think about the strengths that you mentioned, one of the first strengths was doing great stakeholder management, which is just negotiation. Well, and even company comms, right? A lot of company comms is actually objection handling really.

And so there's lots of kind of pieces of it that really fit in the internal piece. But maybe it's the external exhibit like this is sort of not known today is a bit more uncomfortable. So yes, that's an interesting one.

The other gap that Brandon mentioned was resource allocation. And this came up quite strongly and I have having been spoken to the CEOs about this one, I now realize why, because on the face of it, you're like, they should be really good at that. And again, out of my experience, married Theirs was, well, in these companies you're constantly having to rejig resource allocation. It doesn't just stay the same. If you're scaling, you're like, okay, where do we need people?

Or if you've got different parts of the business that are running some bits of working, some bits won't be working. So you might need to rightsize certain bits of it at different times or change the structure in different places. And I think they, they get the sense that they therefore are always sort of second guessing themselves, Michaela, to do it potentially a little bit, but quarterly rightsizing.

As for how I used to think about it, where every quarter I then kind of look at the organ and think right we good at the moment or we got some weird bits happening in different places. We've got the right structures, we got the right people. If we got the right levels of this stuff because of this thing. But I think it's it is a challenge and it's knowing when you've got the right balance as well, especially if you think about where you're investing versus where you're not.

If you're trying to be profitable, that means, you know. So I think it's quite tricky area and RMB ambiguity and they might be good at it but not think they're good at it. That's the other thing because it's really hard and it's changing like it's a problem that never ends. And so if you have to change, does it mean that you got it wrong? It just means that the company has changed. Yeah. And it kind of feels like there's two aspects to it.

Like what is the purely financial side of the financial modeling? Because you're trying to model out the future of the company over the next, you know, three, six, nine, 12 months and what that looks like and you're constantly iterating it based on actual revenue and actual budget and these sorts of things, you're thinking through how best to allocate funds for the future in terms of hires or what have you.

So there's purely that side of it that there's an entirely different dynamic around the actual people in the company. The skills that you have, the capabilities that you have or don't have. And it's much more really understanding, I guess, your existing employee base in terms of what they're good at and what they're capable of doing in the future type of thing.

But being able to combine those two things together and do it on this iterative basis with the functional leaders I think we're at, that's where it all comes together, where the CEO hopefully is connecting all those dots to try to think that through holistically for the company, working with whatever functional leader that they're working with.

And then I think the newest element to throw into that, which might also make it is I'm struggling with the moment is where does Jenny fit in and therefore where your allocation of resource of finding new skills, investing in technology and what can and cannot actually be done more efficiently. With Jenny, it's like a new resource to try and allocate. When I even found that I'm a fractional CEO, a very small business now, we still have the same challenges, just on a much smaller scale.

It's like we'll change things and do things and then like about a month later we'll be like. So the right thing to do or have we really so set ourselves up for success here? And then think about it again, so much so that as soon as I heard this from the CEOs in the survey, I was like, Yeah, this sounds just because it just keeps moving. You can't ever say you've done it. And then would you recommend on some cadence or basis thinking through it quite specifically?

Because generally speaking, as a CEO, I think about it when I need to think about it as opposed to setting some kind of time slot or something like that. But what do you make of that? I would if the company is scaling, definitely. And that's what the situation I found myself in, which was like, I feel like I am the only person potentially who is thinking about this in the holistic round in the same way, and the CEOs of making deals and doing other things and developing the company in different

ways. So it's like, right, this has to be me. So I'm going to think about I'm going to just deliberately time box it, just keep thinking about it and in different. Pieces. So, I mean, it worked for me, put it that way. That worked well in the situation I was in. And then quarterly works because that's when you're budgeting or you're trying to decide like, what's the hiring plan for the next

quarter? So it's an opportunity to pause and make sure that the plan from the last quarter is still necessary. Even in scaling territory, it feels like you hold your nerve for a bit just to make sure everybody gets it and then you so it kind of is a step to growth path versus can't just keep adding more and more and more and more people and expecting that's going to be efficiency. That also works well in a quarterly cadence. Yeah, it's an interesting one, that one.

So this is something that we're trying to do something about at the moment, but it's got two bits to it.

Understanding financial reports was one side of it and the other side of it. And this nuance, this whole talk

about, okay, of course it's always nuanced, understanding business metrics in businesses that you don't work in which different business models, but the metrics that drive success in different business models, what we talk about first metrics or financials. Let's go financials. Okay. So the financials on the financials one is interesting,

right? So I believe that, again, from talking to the folks at the events and afterwards, it's not that they don't understand financials personally, as in and I had this with a wonderful lady who's a client of mine who in her own health was like, This isn't a strength of mine, actually. Then we went through the financials, and the observations she made about it were brilliant. She's very astute.

It's all good. However, if you then went one layer deeper than that and you asked her or them off the back of a balance sheet or something like that, more complex questions around financial management. No, it wouldn't happen. And so I think that's where this comes in. It's like to a point where you could make strategic business based decisions off the back of reading your balance sheet, for example. That's where this I think falls down versus being able to read financial data.

And if you think in certain board scenarios where you've more often than not you've got more financially literate folks, possibly less operationally literate at times, then they're likely to have really in-depth knowledge of company valuation and how you do it, what you're looking for or funding mechanisms or any of these things that Sarah might not they may not have as much of a view or opinion on that dependent on their knowledge of what they've been exposed to.

I feel like in terms of the financial instruments, it's always there's always a new one. There's always like currently every person I speak to, I guess because of the avoidance of down rounds, are talking about Collins convertible, low notes. And like five yeadours ago nobody talked about it. And now, like every single time I go to a meeting, I talk to somebody and they're like, we're negotiating a clean and we all just know about

it. Now, every time I go to drinks, somebody is negotiating one and wants to know about something. But anyhow, I do agree that you learn it as you need it. And we're not CFOs unless we were CFOs to begin with, which is for me, it's not necessarily a skill that I would go out and desperately try and improve versus just having a good CFO or the ability to Google things.

I think it's important to know what your strengths are and where you need to know enough and to learn what you need to learn when you need to know it rather than like go out and just decide to learn it for no particular reason. When you're in a business, that's not going to be funding. The challenge here, I think, is that there's a level of proficiency that's expected. And so how do you get to that without then massively overdoing

it? I even think if I look back, I was a hybrid CIO, CFO, because I qualified in my evenings from just accounting because I'd sit in the board meeting sometimes and I'd be like, I know what they're talking about. This financial I'm not Rachel is like. I would say this, though, I kind of feel like to Bethany's point, I feel like I've picked up finance where I've needed to understand it to help run the business, basically.

So when I think about my financial acumen, a lot of it revolves around financial forecast, not the PNL staff essentially to help run the business effectively and think through how we spend money and what the revenue creation is going to look like and making sure that burn rates appropriate. Anything that revolves around that, I'm very interested in. And to your point, Bethany, you know, I've Googled, you know, ad nauseum, I've looked at all sorts of videos and stuff like that.

At this point in my life and career, I can very much pair with a finance person where collectively we can work together, where there are excellent. I'm modeling, I'm excellent at understanding the business and what happens in the business itself.

And you combine those two things together, then boom, you have like models that actually really represent the business and you can actually do some proper modeling to, to figure out how to spend money and how to ensure that you're ramping in a sensible way. And then if you talk about the board level conversations, because those are different to the modeling that Brandon's talked about.

It's much more fundraising strategy, corporate debt, different types of instruments where like balance sheet matters and what are you capitalizing and what are you, you know, kind of like the art of working on your financials so that you look the right way depending on what your valuation like. Is it a revenue based valuation? Is an EBITDA based valuation? How do you make it look the way it needs to or is close to it as you

can? But I guess for me, all of that's come through experience, through conversations. And I'm very much been a just in time learner and also on the boards that I sit on, my pitch is I'm the operator. I am like the friend of the CEO. I can understand what's hard in your life, but I've also done so many fundraising rounds. I've hung out with investors. I understand how they think. I know what an investment banker does, that I can help translate on both sides.

And what I am not going to do is help with your fundraising strategy and conversely, your board members, who have always been investment bankers, should not be trying to help you on your go to market strategy. You're like, if we understand our lanes and we can talk a little bit across them and know enough that if something sounds really wonky, we can intercept.

But I think it's very valuable in board conversations for people to understand where your level of expertise is and why you're sitting at the table. And I'm not going to try and pretend that I'm a financial expert and I'm going to understand the investment strategy in the way that these guys who do it all day long and for the most part, our guys, what they negotiate, how they think about it, all the ins and outs, it's fascinating to learn. No, I'm with you.

And I think to tie your points together 100% and I think this is a level of proficiency that even a level proficiency that gives you the just gives you the confidence to be in the room when it's being spoken about. I totally agree on the forward facing piece. And I think that's why the balance sheet side of it is interesting because that's more of the forward facing. We know what will we be doing with the business, how do we leverage our assets, all of that sort of thing.

And that's the bit that really missing. We talk about the business metrics side. I'm curious on that one. Yeah. So one woman's opinion, I just may as well like to cloak myself, say one woman's opinion since I sort of understood some different business models. I feel like I then got more of an appreciation for the business models I worked in, whereas I worked in subscription business models for a really long time. Right? So I know subscription business models like the back of my

hand. You could ask me anything pretty much maybe. And I sort of I'd have a view of whether it's right or wrong. I have you and then I start learning about other ones and was like, Hey, that's interesting because if I'd have known that you could apply some of that to that.

And actually just knowing one thing is all very well, but you then are in a complete vacuum and it's only after then, it's not like I've been seeing all the different business models out there, but just enough that I can then sort of have a bit of objective perspective.

And yet you tend to find that actually because people stay in certain industries, they may like me, just be one, they may have one that's they know inside and out, and then you throw something else at them and they have no idea how it works. So it's the informing of like one business model against another and actually sort of the importance of different metrics and different places. And even what you can beg, borrow and steal.

It's interesting because I have this emotional reaction of like, I'm in my space, I have my metrics, nothing else matters. And because I haven't looked, I don't know if I think it would be interesting. I think it's a fair challenge. And again, for me, it goes back to Jenny has captured my imagination. What are any of our worlds going to look like in five years, let alone ten years time? What are our new business models going to be?

So I can get the idea of going out and learning different ones now just to realize that there is many options as there are to help open my mind to what the future might be. Rather than beg, borrow and steal for what today looks like. Because I really I'm trying to see how are all of our businesses, what are our lives going to be like in five years?

Yeah. And I would almost double down on what you said, if any, because I kind of feel like the more you understand other types of businesses and how they operate from a business model point of view and their pricing and packaging and that sort of thing, it is helps inform how you think about your business and your context as to what's happening, because oftentimes things will come up or things will change, right?

So suddenly we're going from enterprise selling into product like growth and you're like, okay, well what does that mean? So, so product like growth. I found I was stealing bits from my past to think through the PLG side of things and product line sales and so on.

It's an interesting one. And even if I think about mine, Candy, so my Kelly was of course subscription, but we then went into licensing and licensing royalty went into music music royalties every time we went into a new piece. No idea. I was. Ooh, sounds interesting. I have to go figure out how that works then.

But then the more I got into it, the more I was like, Gosh, this is really fascinating because depending on the assets that you create, the value you create, you can monetize it in many different ways, but you may get so fixed in one space that you can't actually see that there's opportunity. You know, I mean, there are multitude of ways to create even more value for the business from this thing, this piece value asset we've created.

And yet it depends if I can see it or not, if it's even in my peripheral vision and it does come back to you, There's another gap on here, by the way, that's around future facing projects and opportunities for businesses. And again, I wonder if this is because normally it's seen as the purview of the CEO. No, no. This shows the development of the business is down to you. But actually, I think it's one of the most interesting bits. So I always loved being part of that as a CEO.

And so developing knowledge in that area. But interesting that it's a gap. A big gap as well. The gap is future. So defining future based opportunities for business, whether it be, I think, sweating current assets in a different way or M&A, corporate development ways to grow a business that may be slightly outside of your kind of experience, set Some of these gaps I think are just like a lack of opportunity rather than something that you need to go out immediately.

Like I guess I'm just thinking it's a just in time learning and you figure it out. You need to. I think there's like a step down situation where you have the same product repackaged, repurposed for a different marketplace.

Somebody needs to figure out how to sell it into that new space and not sell it in this space where we structure our program to go into that new space whereby you're pulling the assets of the company in a different direction and how you operationally pull that together, programmatically set it in motion and get the resources behind it to make it happen without distracting the company in a way that is not helpful, basically.

There is definitely an art and a science to that, and I think the operator having space and capacity to be able to focus on things like that is something is really important. Absolutely. Well, it's interesting and it always brings me back to this. And again, so tangible example, when I was at mind, Candy, we created a secondary product for children, which was a creative space that they could be creative in and sort of a community social network type of thing.

And because we then got to a point where we didn't feel like we the right people to run it, it got divested, we sold it to Super Awesome, who's clever because we sold it to them, but with a kickback that then meant that we then could keep cash coming in from it as they monetized and put it through their advertising channels and really sort of boosted its revenue. So the more they then did that, the

more money. We then got back for a period of time, which helped the business to sort of stabilize itself over time. I would have thought that not at the time. I was like, Well, and of course my clever, clever buy was a bit like, That's really good. That's just such a good thing to do. There's something about that skill set around spotting opportunities. I don't have it, by the way. That's not my natural mode of operation at all.

If we think about sort of CMO as being a true partner to the CEO founder, and this is where I got involved in this because I used to then love having conversations with them about it, or I was like, this, I didn't know anything about This is really interesting and stuff that they would then tell me and I'd be like, I wouldn't even have noticed that. Wouldn't even if that wouldn't have come into my brain. Different way of thinking.

So I wonder if it's that sage or trusted advisor, CEO, CMO partnership thing. Having a bit of kind of that way of thinking is sometimes helpful. I think it's also entrepreneurs are just rule breakers or not even a rule, not series. I don't even know if they're breaking rules. It's just like, yeah, there are no boundaries, nothing. And CEOs are quite often rule creators, enforcers and followers.

And therefore our brains are not always necessarily going for like infinite possibilities where as entrepreneurs tend to and everything has a plus and like a dark side and a light side. And so the light side is what you're talking about with a lovely kick back. And then the dark side are just deals that are horrible and you never actually see any money from or possibly illegal, you know? It's like it's always true, isn't it?

But I don't think that's I think the the relationship in that way is where the CEO can really be helpful to the CEO, which is sometimes, as we know, CEOs can have all sorts of crazy ideas about all sorts of things and drag the company in different directions that are super unhelpful and very destructive in a lot of ways.

So the question of having a sensible CEO sitting there to talk that stuff through, but also for the CEO to have some level of like ally element to them where they're not going to simply dismiss what the CEO. Saying outright, but actually having that open minded space to think it through with them, to bounce back and forth a little bit and to help the two of you come to a mutual conclusion. One, it's the worst thing you can say to a co-founder right now. First is, yeah, it's a great idea.

I'm not sure we can do it now, but let's put it on the backlog or something, you know, let's discuss it and actually see if we could. But the worst thing is, I know right then you are a blocker and a barrier and all of those things. So the old adage from improv, it's always the yes and response.

For our listeners. If they could only remember one thing from our conversation today, what would it be? I think this piece of string space management is actually really important. I mentioned to you I've been to all apps the session, I've been thinking about this where I was like, I love this because I now know how I can support my zeros further.

However, how do you build on your strengths and really lean into those and get proficient enough in the areas that are your gaps so that you are your perceived gaps in order that you feel confident in your role. Because I think that's the important piece about it. It's actually about, as you were saying, it's like just internal learning just in time. Learning is absolutely fine. Like that's a good way of going about things.

And how can you know enough that you just feel confident in those rooms and spaces where you need to hold a good conversation. So I think that's the takeaway. Lovely. So thank you for coming back on to the operations room. If you like what you hear, please leave a comment or subscribe and we will see you next week.