John Bosch was a board member at Excelan. He was rough and gruff character but he was very matter of fact in his approach.

After I started to get my sea legs as the CEO and started to feel good about things, I got very excited about business prospects at a board meeting. John with his usual straight face, cut me short in a mid sentence. Yadi, yadi yah, he said! Spare me the story, show me the numbers. It has been 35 years but I have never forgotten the incidence. Your numbers have to tell the story! Everything else is just fluff.

Entrepreneurs have to learn to run the business by numbers and various ratios. Reveue, gross margins, costs, expenses, head count, growth rates, are minimal basics to start with. Changing/improving ratios are the first level of derivative nymbers. One has to set numerical goals for himself and one’s team members.

One of my favorite ratio was the revenue per employee. It reflected the productivity. I fixated on that and worked to improve it as my primary goal.

A good entreprenur is on top of its numbers and the numbers of its competitors. He must benchmark against the best of them. As the business grows, the only good way to manage is by the numbers

Customer satisfaction/customer success functions are fairly common now. Novell had a customer satisfaction unit (separate from customer service) in the CEO’s office back in 1989 when Excelan first merged with Novell. Ray Noorda, Novell CEO, was obsessed with the customer satisfaction. I, as a part of the my responsbilities, managed that function. It was very interesting experience. As a rule no complain was too minor to be ignored.

Customers are what businesses exist to serve. Repeat customers define the success for businesses. It is very expensive to acquire a new customer and in most of the consumer businesses, it takes several transactions before a customer becomes becomes a profitable customer. Customer churn can be disasterous for the bottom line. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), LTV ( Long Term Value of a customer) and Customer Churn are three metrics that a CEO must pay close attention to.

Business need employees to take care of the customers. Happy employees normally leads to happy customers.

A CEO must have a good handle on customer sentiment and must spend time first hand to have a feel for it. Happy customers and happy employees normally lead to happy investors.

This plaque was displayed widely at Excelan.

I hate a YAFO (yet another fricking opportunity). Yafos are distractions and wasteful. I am a strong believer in DAFTW (doing a few things well), rather than lots of things half-assed.

I don’t like to dabble either. Either I am all in or I am out.

For an entreprenure it is imperative that he stays focused on the opportunity on hand and not look for greener pastures, unless he has decided to fully pivot. Every opportunity has associated costs. These costs are immediate and while rewards, if any, are always delayed. Resource thin startups can ill-afford to waste any chasing yafos!

I have always lived by these values and they have served me well in life and in business. Here is button from an internal campaign in 1985!