Key Takeaways

• The CEO's involvement shifts from hands-on leadership to guiding a fully developed leadership team
• Scaling requires targeting larger customers and expanding support teams for enterprise-level sales
• Enhanced data and reporting systems become crucial as the CEO's direct involvement decreases

Topics

• Leadership
• SaaS
• Business Strategy
• Data & Analytics

Transcript

So, on the journey from 5 million to 20 million ARR, I think the role of the CEO evolves in multiple ways, but the three that come to mind would be, firstly, how hands-on you are. At 5 million, you're still going to be very much in the trenches. You'll be building out the start of your leadership team, but you're probably still very much being the main leader and coach. At 20 million, you really need to have your leadership team fleshed out, and you're working mostly with them rather than with the people who are working inside of those teams. Secondly, if it's B2B SaaS, mostly I imagine you'll be going into bigger customers and bigger contracts. If you're doing small contract values at 5 million, you need to do a lot more of them to be keeping your growth rate going at 20 million. So, it's much easier if you can attract bigger customers and be selling more to those customers than just doing a massive number of customers. Not everyone follows that path, but generally speaking, most of us will probably go upstream, and that has a load of other elements to it, not just the product improving for enterprise and being more applicable to enterprise, but you also have to build out success teams, finance teams, even have more legal support, et cetera, to do that. And the third one would be numbers. At 5 million, you don't really need that extensive reporting. You need to be on top of your numbers so that you know what's going on. But you probably don't have a RevOps team necessarily really going at that point. By 20 million, you need to have data and reporting extensively to give you what previously you would have understood everything a bit more organically because you were involved in most of those things. When you're less involved at the day-to-day level, the data and reporting helps you to identify what isn't and isn't working well. And if you haven't got a good handle on that, a data lake and a good reporting system, you're going to struggle.