It’s been a long time since my Contour ceo days. Being 21 when I started and 31 when it was over, a lot of it has become a blur.

It started with two undergraduates in a shitty rental house north of Seattle. One person was hand making helmet camera lenses and the other was selling and marketing them. There was no ceo, just two kids with no idea what they were doing.

That continued for another 10 years, just with more people and nicer offices. We were still making cameras and trying to sell them. But somewhere along the way our titles changed.

I became the ceo.

Even today today that sentence makes me pause. It’s so matter of fact and yet my journey was anything but that. Instead it was a meandering of highs and unforgettable lows. Most of which was spent fighting for our survival as number two in a market that investors didn’t want to fund.

At the time I knew I was in the ceo position. In retrospect I didn’t know I was the ceo. I had never internally committed to the role and what it takes to be the best at it.

Now I know what it takes to make that decision.

It’s More Than A Job

Being the ceo is more than a job. Because to do it well you have to let it consume you. You have to emotionally internalize that people are counting on you to lead from the front, with consistency and decisiveness. Everything that goes well is because of your team and everything that doesn’t is because of you. Unfortunately those expectations aren’t just 9-5.

I often refer to being a great leader as being a great coach. The best coaches in the world are obsessed about their system of play, the players on the field, and how to keep a group of people moving forward. They are constantly iterating and finding small ways to make everyone better. You can’t do that from just 9-5.

Letting a cause consume you is’t a bad thing. You just have to realize what’s expected and the level of commitment that it takes. While you are the ceo, the role will always be there. Even on Sundays.

Money Is Stressful

It takes a lot of energy to get past the survival point. Either by raising enough capital or becoming profitable the stages of constantly running out of cash will consume you. Even if money hasn’t stressed you out before there is something to having customers, partners, and investors on the line that dramatically increases the concern.

Some ceo’s love raising money. The chase to have enough capital is what drives them. For others raising money is terrifying. Whether asking your friends or strangers, the thought of raising capital is too much to bear.

Learning to raise money is not a natural skill, it takes practice and just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean your company won’t always be on the brink of running out of cash. It can take multiple years until you have a sustainable company. That’s years of being stressed about money.

As the ceo it’s your job to make sure the company has the capital or the profits it needs to survive. You have to relish in this stress.

Learn To Contain Fear

Every book written by a ceo recounts their fears along the way. Hard Thing About Hard Things is one of the best. Ben is honest enough to share what it means to be a war time ceo and the decisions he had to make along the way.

Whenever you add growth, investors, and employees you carry a burden…what you created might not work out. Your combination of offering and delivery will fail and you’ll have to explain to everyone why you lost their money and their job.

This fear is real. It gets easier after you bankrupt a company as you learn failure isn’t the end of the line for founders. If you are honest, hard working, and self reflective about why you failed, someone else will give you another chance.

Everyone finds their own way to manage this fear. You will have to do the same. Thankfully the internet is full of ceo self help tutorials for how to manage this fear. From a personal coach to counseling to a private network of fellow ceos.

Have Zero Expectations

The way I deal with potential failure is by not having any expectations. I expect none of it to work out and therefore I’m obsessed in making sure we have enough swings at the plate.

Zero expectations doesn’t mean you expect it to fail. It just means being methodical in your approach in trying, measuring, adjusting, and trying again. The assumption is that your company is one giant experiment. Therefore you’re on a quest to figure out what does and doesn’t work.

This approach also helps to keep the peaks lower and the valleys shallower. Because as soon as you set expectations the only option is to disappointment them.

Want The Ball

Everything else aside the easiest way to think about the role is that you have to want the ball at the end of the game. When it’s all on the line you have to be someone that says I want the shot.

Every company has a handful of these do or die moments. As Ben calls them, sometimes you have to roll a hard six.

Conclusion

It’s ok to be a terrible ceo when you start. I was for a decade.

Being a ceo is an unnatural skill. It takes a lot of practice to be great, which means you need enough time on the field to develop at it.

Lots of great assistant coaches are terrible head coaches. It’s not the same thing. It’s a whole new set of skills you have to learn. This is why most head coaches are a twenty year journey. They start with small, unknown programs and move their way up over the years until they reach the top of the sporting world.

The same goes for being a great ceo. There is no practice for it. Even being a great startup executive doesn’t mean you know how to be a ceo.

I do believe you can learn to be a great ceo. As long as you think of it as a 20 year journey…the role gets easier over time.

If you have any questions dm me @marcbarros.