Serving as a Business Co-Pilot to Improve Results
What is a CEO or founding team to do when the business isn’t making desired progress?
When company leaders needed to spend their time on the top initiatives only they could lead, I filled the gap, serving as a thought partner on the big customer and product questions we had to answer, while establishing, managing and evolving operations
Recent Project: Synervoz Communications
Synervoz has one of the strongest digital audio engineering teams in the world, and the Chief Executive Officer is an expert in creating consumer experiences with technically complex audio requirements, such as interactive voice and video chat, remote collaboration, making music, social audio and video, gaming and the metaverse.
The company began by creating a BtoC mobile app, Switchboard, and it pioneered many user behaviors that have become commonplace today in products such as Slack Huddles, Twitter / X Spaces and Voxer. A few years ahead of its time, Synervoz pivoted to providing BtoB custom engineering services and transformed its consumer app into an audio SDK designed to re-open the door to venture-sized growth and raising venture capital.
The CEO brought me on to scale his contributions to the company and gave him breathing room to dedicate time to the strategic projects only he could lead. That’s what I’ve done.
We iteratively prioritized and executed the highest-leverage activities, ensuring the CEO spent his time smartly. I took on other responsibilities, including tasks where the CEO had less prior experience. We constantly identified and explored assumptions critical to the business’ growth and closed learning gaps to be sure we were on the right path. We stood up and refined scale-able structures that were “good enough” for today and anticipated our growth curve.
More specifically, I took on day-to-day go-to-market operations and business operations, including HR (people ops), finance (overseeing bookkeeping, reporting, and analysis) and legal management. The CEO and I teamed up to build a brand new sales motion from scratch, and we split the related business development activities. I managed customer onboarding and collaborated with the Chief Technology Officer and VP of Engineering to manage customer projects. This included developing a new company-wide business- and technology security framework plus new practices to support our agile development process.
With the CEO and CTO focused on the most strategic aspects of the business—work that only they could do—in combination with my unique contributions:
We increased revenue materially in 2022 over 2021.
We secured R&D grants exceeding US $250,000 (and passed an audit) in 2023.
We closed a strategic bridge financing in 2023.
Going into 2024, we had a robust and increasing number of attractive sales opportunities, early product traction for our scale-able SDK, and a plan to accelerate growth in spite of the recessionary environment.
The company now has the breathing room and resources to pursue a compelling new growth strategy, building on its engineering prowess and leveraging its scalable SDK.
Case Study: The PTDC
Venture Lifecycle Stage. Build.
Approach. I conducted an initial, end-to-end analysis of the organization and designed a four-month project to eliminate major risks and score quick wins. Thereafter, I established and improved emerging human resources (policies, comp, etc.), finance (planning, reporting, analysis), and legal functions, as well as project prioritization and planning. Foundational customer insights research and follow-up analysis enabled us to build a customer experience (CX) map informing product, customer success and marketing.
Results. These efforts resulted in a crisp customer value proposition to align the team and business management system (budget, plan and KPIs tied to a CX map) to guide us and track progress.
Benefits included improving the performance of a key landing page by 22% after results had been stuck for a year.
A third recent project entailed supporting the Board of Directors and Executive Director (ED) of a scrappy, mission-driven non-profit with startup DNA. Our agenda has included improving Board-ED communications, enhancing financial practices and shaping a growth strategy.