I first heard of the phrase “cascade of errors” from a friend of mine who was a private pilot. As part of his desire to be a competent and safe pilot of private planes, he regularly read after-action reports of every airplane crash in the United States. His thinking was that crashing an airplane had […]
For decades, I’ve expressed the idea that if you want to scale revenue, you need to scale your skills as a CEO. Intuitively, it’s unrealistic to grow your sales by 50% to 100% per year while your own CEO skills grow 0% per year. All of the great SaaS CEOs I’ve worked with over the decades
Scaling the SaaS CEO Read More »
Over the last two years, I’ve been active in my local emergency response volunteer community. I’ve participated in several mass casualty training exercises (e.g., earthquakes, plane crashes, collapsed building structures). In several of those exercises, I had the opportunity to train in the role of incident commander (IC) and other leadership roles. It was a
Assess, Decide, and Act Cycle Read More »
The topic of when, how, and why to hire your first CFO has come up not once, but three different times this week. Once a business crosses $2 million in sales, there is a strong need for a CFO. But the problem is that most businesses can’t afford the cost of a full-time CFO. Most
Why SaaS CFOs Are Essential Read More »
Warren Buffett’s right-hand man is Charlie Munger. I’ve read transcripts from several of Munger’s speeches, and I really love the multidisciplinary way he approaches investment decisions. When he cites the idea of market niches as a way to build a durable competitive advantage, he borrows that concept from the field of ecology. In nature, it’s
Charlie Munger & Mental Models Read More »
Most people see the world through the lens of success vs. failures, or winners vs. losers. While our world certainly has competitive aspects to it, it’s worthwhile to ask the following: Is it useful? Is it useful to think in terms of success versus failure? Is it useful to think of winning versus losing? Regardless
You Win Some, You Learn Some… Read More »
