When to run your business from your smartphone?
We are a twenty-strong person business, located in three countries on two continents, and we have not yet reached the tipping point where I need to throw out my Macs and Laptops, but there is a tipping point in the next couple of years when I should and go 100 % onto my smart devices - either my Android or my iPhone.
When you are an entrepreneur CEO with a start-up you are by definition a creative type; with a lot of your creativity expressed through your Mac/laptosp upon which you create content be it designs, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, code, websites etc. There is a point where you have grown your business to the point where the sum of the talented team you have put in place far outweighs anything you can create, and it’s time to ask the question, ‘if I stop creating and instead focus on nurturing and championing the creativity within my team will we grown revenues faster,’. Clearly a well-motivated team is far more creative than the creative entrepreneur who founded the team. At the point where you, the CEO, senses the team is strong and matured then it’s time to put away your primary creating tools, your PC/Mac/Laptop, and instead focus on being the mobile guy around the business, who consumes most of the content on his smartphone/iPhone/Android. By doing this you can no longer create long document/detailed designs/1000s of lines of code etc, instead you are forced to consume, listen, judge and champion the creativity of your team.
As I write this article I have not taken my own advice 😊, because the business has not reached this critical point, but I can see it coming and so I am mentally and practically preparing for the culture shock of being a founder who is no longer the primary creator.
What are the practical steps you need to be taking now?
1) CLOUD - Go to the Cloud - All your primary functions within your business need to be on the Cloud, by definition Cloud database creator expect people to be viewing content upon small screened smart devices so they naturally have dashboards which summarise the key information. For example, we use Sage for our accounting. The first screen of Sage shows revenue, our biggest customer by sales and our top biggest overdue accounts, etc. This gives an instant snapshot of the financials of the business. Similarly, we use a number of Zoho databases/products which all have great smart device browsing interfaces.
2) SMART DEVICE - Choose your smart device - I am on an Android and an iPhone, I love the reliability of the iPhone, but Samsung makes great cameras. For me it is going to come down which is better at transcribing dictation, as small keyboards is going to mean a lot more speaking into the phone in order to ‘write’ an email.
3) STAY CONNECTED - Stay in communication; as the CEO you should be in constant communication with someone in your team be it: directing, advising, mentoring, deciding. You therefore need to have ‘cracked’ easy-communication on the go. We very are biased as we use our own product CeeCloud, which provides Cloud Video Conferencing on our smartphones, but without it we could not be operating on two continents with offices in three counties.
If you want to know how we use CeeCloud as our primary Cloud Video Conferencing Tool to lead our business then please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Now it’s time to shut my laptop, fasten my seatbelt and prepare for landing.