Ideas for CEOs of Growing Tech Companies

After my experience at Harvard Business School’s Endeavor Program, I realized that we won’t be able to scale with the processes and systems we have in place now. From sales to IT, if we want to become a much bigger company, we need to have a much more solid foundation of highly efficient processes to build on.

A lot of questions arise when you’re planning for significant growth: how will this affect the company culture? Does our structure need to adjust? How can we keep in touch with everyone on the team?

To answer these kinds of questions, we needed to change the way we work: get more collaborative and more creative. I made some small, important changes to our office and our meetings that have worked for me. I’ve listed them here and hope you’ll find them useful!

Making my office a living to-do list

Every time I or one of my executive team members had a new idea or brought up something that needed to be addressed, I’d write it down. Now, I am a huge proponent of technologies that allow us to organize our thoughts and work - and I use a lot of them. But to keep track of everything at the same time, I would need to have 10 screens up all over my office to remember all the things we need to do.

So, instead of creating yet another folder in Google Drive (which is great for saving documents, but not fantastic for dynamic ideas), I painted my entire office with chalkboard paint. Now, during our executive team meetings, whenever there’s a new idea or problem we need to solve it just goes up on the wall with everything else.

It’s a simple change, but an important one. It’s a great tool for me, as a CEO: it’s hard to forget about something when it’s sitting right across the room from your all day.

Using the stoplight approach

Any growing company knows the pains of documenting processes. But it truly is make-or-brake. There were so many processes we had to figure out for every department and it was getting impossible to know where they were in the development and implementation stages.

So, we started using a “stoplight approach”: red for a process that still needs work; yellow when the process is done, but hasn’t been implemented; and green for a process that is already implemented.

This way, as the CEO, I have a big-picture view of all the processes that are being worked on. I can see where the bottlenecks are and where we need to put more people or dedicate more time. This methodology has been fundamental to moving the ball forward, sometimes slowly, but always in the right direction.

Stopping the endless meetings!

We’re all too familiar with the typical 1-hour meeting. First, there’s the chit-chat, then there’s the “why are we meeting?” conversation, and then you get to start addressing the whole reason you scheduled the meeting in the first place. You can find this fatal flaw in the most innovative companies.

But there is scientific evidence to support limiting meeting length: the average person can only pay attention for a maximum of 18 minutes in one sitting! Limiting your meeting lengths also sets expectations from the beginning: the person in charge of the meeting (many times, that’s me) has to make the most out of the time they have.

It’s also just a matter of basic respect - if there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s someone wasting my time. So, I’m hyper conscious of using others’ time well.

This is why we’ve created a couple of radical rules at Jobsity: (1) meetings can’t last more than 30 minutes maximum and (2) every meeting has to have a specific objective.

Now, we all know we can set all the rules we want, but if there’s no system in place to control it, then nothing changes. That’s why everyone on my team has Calendly, an automated scheduling software that create a link to your calendar so people can see your availability and schedule meetings with you accordingly. Our Calendly is set to only allow 30-minute meetings.

And for setting objectives? Our executive team has 1 objective always: identify what is keeping us from growth and what we’re going to do to address it.

Again, these are small adjustments (simple instructions, really) but they have made all the difference in making our meetings more efficient.

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These are ideas that have worked for me, but of course, I’m still learning. Once we decided nothing was going to keep us from growing, my team and I are figuring out ways to change our day-to-day activities to get better results. Surely in a few months, I’ll have completely new ideas, perspectives, and solutions.

I’d love to hear about how you’re addressing the growing pains of your company. Shoot me an email at agarzon@jobsity.com with your ideas and let’s talk!