CEO Questionnaire

Please look at each item and choose Pass, In process, Don't Pass, or Not applicable. Give one point for Pass, 1/2 a point for In Process and zero points for Don't Pass. Lastly, don't count the item if you answer not applicable. Then add them up, divide by the total number of items and report your CEO percentage.

Name

First Name

Last Name

FOUNDER

I take time to understand our real customers each week.

I understand our customers problems. I renew this understanding often with real customers.

I work to solve customer problems.

I have a cofounder to avoid burnout.

My cofounder has complimentary skills to mine.

I share the emotional burden of the business with my cofounder.

My load is eased by my cofounder.

My partner is currently value-add.

I have hired people who have more skills than my cofounder.

My partner helped us find Product-Market Fit.

I am in an unequal partnership on purpose so we don’t waste time with daily unanimous decisions and can easily break a deadlock.

I am alone in my business leadership on purpose, but have a strong group of friends who support me.

TEAM

I know and manage the complexity of adding team members.

I make sure each new team member is clear on the priorities, vision and actions of other team members, so all efforts are in the same direction.

My founding team will stay at 6 people or less until we find true market fit of $1mm in recurring revenue for an enterprise company.

I manage morale as we deal with negative customer feedback.

I am aware of the potential need to pivot the company. We are a small team, and agile on purpose.

When our small team encounters challenges, chaos, and resistance, we meet it with glee. We are gladly in this battle.

Our small team craves the challenge and difficulty of new things.

Our small team knows what others are working on. We stay in sync on purpose. We do not require a formal management system for this.

Our 20+ person team cannot sit in a meeting room together. We have a formal management system we all use to communicate and monitor projects and progress. We take the time and the headspace and use the system effective and efficiently.

We are clear that we are at the prototype phase of product development. We crave and get feedback from customers. We use that feedback to alter the product. We are not married to our initial product.

We know it will change. We are not wasting time/energy/money to make the prototype perfect and beautiful.

We are through the prototype phase with customer feedback. We have an industrial strength product. It is easily altered and debugged. It can handle many users. It is robust.

We have discovered a large market, but are resisting the urge to raise significant capital too early. We are making do with a core team. We are bootstrapping even now. We are managing growing too early. We are on the path to product-market fit but we have not arrived yet.

PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

We have product-market fit. Customers have tested and then bought the product. They are recommending the product to others. We have revenue and renewal rates and we are measuring both.

We have real PMF, not metrics and slides that we use to fool people into investing and buying our product.

We market our B2B product to companies willing to pay to test it. We resist the urge to give it away for free. And we know that this is a test NOT evidence of product-market fit.

Long term contracts show us we have a valuable product that customers want to buy and use.

We have clear metrics of annual recurring revenue that demonstrate product-market fit. We measure and report these metrics. (for B2B, $1mm ARR)

SCALING

We are clear we have PMF and are in scale mode and are in action in the following areas…

▪ Marketing to create massive awareness. ▪ Walking many customers through the sales process. ▪ Helping and supporting customers as they use our product or service to ensure customer success. ▪ Focus time and resources on strengthening our infrastructure so we can support many users at once. ▪ Engineer the product or service so it is reliable and add features we promised in the road map. ▪ Focus on updating the product to meet the most urgent client needs. ▪ Apply time, energy and resources to support and evolve people (recruiting, training and HR), finance, legal and office administration. ▪ We hire people to a standard of excellence, core values, and fundamental operating principles which are in line with our company vision. ▪ We raise the money to hire the team first, and then we hire the team.

We manage the inefficiencies of scale by taking the time to do weekly planning with the team. We have a second weekly meeting to check in and support team members to be in clear and clean relationship with themselves and other team members. We plan, take action and then get complete each week.

We resist the urge to drive the executive team to work longer hours to control the teams.

We resist the urge to drive the teams to work longer hours to make up for the challenges of scaling an organization.

We resist the urge to simply work on the product. We manage, train and support the organization as we scale.

We allow people time to prepare for meetings. We encourage participation at the meetings. We meet so we can scale. We spend the time and money on meetings so we can create a business and a culture that will scale reliably.

Give one point for Pass, 1/2 a point for in process and zero points for don't pass. Lastly, don't count the item if you answer not applicable. Then add them up, divide by the total number of items and report your CEO percentage.

Example: 17 pass, 12 in process, 2 don't pass, 5 not applicable. 17+6+0=23 23/31=74%