Q&A: What management strategy has changed the way you do business and why?
Focusing on what matters most. “As the CEO of the company, it has always been tough for me to delegate work. But at some point it eventually becomes too much for one person to handle. For times like these, it’s important to solely focus on what matters most and what you are best at. For everything else, outsource the work or hire a powerful team around you to keep everything seamless and in motion.” Zac Johnson, Blogging.org
Facilitating productive internal communication. “The pace of startup life is an exhaustive one. As our team grew, my co-founder and I received the suggestion from a team leader to run daily standup meetings. We had operated in our own little silo for too long, and it was a breath of fresh air when a new member of the team changed the way we run our day-to-day. The daily standup helps create a sense of community while staying deadline focused.” Brian Chiou, Enigma Systems LLC
Using agile project management. “Having worked with app developer clients, we started learning about the Agile methodology — working on projects in short sprints with frequent iterations — and adopted the basic concept in our marketing agency. We frequently check in to see how well we’re meeting our goals. And if we’re falling short, we’ll optimize for better results rather than sticking to a set-in-stone agenda.” Kathryn Hawkins, Eucalypt Media
Having a craftsman mindset. “I view software development as craft rather than manufacturing. This means we slowly hire the best developers we can find and have avoided introducing a large amount of overhead. With a development team of 20 people and a mix of skill levels, you need a lot of process to keep your code quality high. A team of three to five highly skilled craftspeople can manage that pretty easily on their own.” Rob Walling, Drip
Adopting a challenger sales methodology. “The landscape of sales is changing. A competitive sales team requires management to define an overarching methodology and have the best tools in place to achieve optimal efficiency. We prefer to use the Challenger Sales methodology as our overarching structure and actively seek out the best SaaS tools to increase our rep efficiency.” Nathan Klarer, Bridgecrest Medical, Inc.
Serving our people. “Early in the life cycle of Tiger Prop, I think I placed too much emphasis on trying to manage the day-to-day chaos spurred by our growth. Some of the issues were trivial and perhaps not worthy of the time I spent on them. I am trying to focus on being a better servant to our agents and employees. I want to remove the obstacles in their way.” Max Coursey, Tiger Prop
Using the collaboration strategy. “The birth of the sharing economy has led to what Richard Susskind refers to as the ‘collaboration strategy.’ Clients and firms now coordinate on cases like never before thanks to mobility and cloud sharing. It adds compliance risks, but these can be managed, and it’s well worth the effort. It streamlines the often convoluted legal process to a considerable degree.” Steven Buchwald, Buchwald & Associates
(Source: TCA)
