Whether you have a product-led SaaS or a high-touch SaaS, better onboarding doesn’t start with process it starts with vision. 

Don’t get me wrong, every SaaS needs to deliver a great customer onboarding experience. And that will require a process to ensure it’s executed well. But if you want to improve how you onboard your SaaS users don’t jump straight to process. 

A product-led company that wants to improve user onboarding usually looks for ways the product can do more heavy lifting so that new users have less work to do. Think automation, seamless integrations, usability, in-line help text, setup wizards, etc. There are many ways that product enhancements can, and should, improve user onboarding. 

But when a high-touch SaaS company kicks off an initiative to improve their user onboarding, they often start with the process. It’s a logical place to begin. But it’s not the right place. 

SaaS customer onboarding improvements need to start one level above process, with a vision.

And the SaaS customer onboarding vision isn’t company specific, it applies to any SaaS no matter the size, shape, industry, ICP or funding level. At the highest level SaaS customer onboarding should be:

* As friction-free as possible* As low-impact on your customer’s time as possible* Designed for the customer to get value from your product quickly* Focused on helping your customer achieve their desired outcome(s)

Everything about onboarding should be considered through the lens of this vision, with continual improvements made to get closer and closer to this ideal state.

Design everything—people, processes and product—with these points in mind.

The vision applies to low-touch SaaS, high-touch SaaS, enterprise SaaS, SMB SaaS and every other kind of SaaS. Hold your onboarding up against this list and constantly seek to get closer and closer to the ideal.

The vision applies to low-touch SaaS, high-touch SaaS, enterprise SaaS, SMB SaaS and every other kind of SaaS. Hold your onboarding up against this list and constantly seek to get closer and closer to the ideal.

Then you are ready to design your process, always mapping your process back to your ideal vision and getting as closely aligned as you can. Get your product to assist in helping reach this vision, and fill in the gaps with customer success and process. 

I’m a huge proponent of agile management being applied to growing technology companies. But there are many ways to execute against those principles. And some agile SaaS management devolves into plain chaos. In fact, in those cases, calling it agile management is a misnomer — and the lack of leadership becomes glaringly apparent.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen more than a few companies growing at breakneck rates despite huge gaps. Or are they growing at breakneck rates because of those huge gaps? That’s the argument that seems to devolve a well-meaning agile approach into madness. Unfortunately, that madness often translates into damaging business outcomes including weakened metrics, elevated churn, and high employee turnover. SaaS valuations are driven by more than topline growth.

Agile with Guardrails

Let’s just get this out of the way first — a lot of agile, isn’t really agile. In fact, a lot of fast-moving companies seem to wrap themselves in the agile envelope when really they just have no processes, no planning, and weak leadership. That’s not agile, that’s chaos.

I’m a process guy but like to think of that layer as just enough. More than just enough gets in the way and less than just enough can’t be iterated and improved. Since we’re building cultures of continuous improvement, we need just enough process to make that methodical and predictable. For me, my version of agile was just enough and not too much for my spread-too-thin, worked-too-hard teams to apply every day. Because the flip side of the no-process coin is the over-processed version that sucks productivity, morale, and ultimately capital.

Lite Agile Management

I’ve successfully applied versions of this to many a team in a SaaS organization. It’s thin, flexible, painfully simple, and it works. It doesn’t impede creativity. It doesn’t slow things down. It’s not over engineered. And it keeps the administrative/meeting time to a minimum. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t build it up to be more formalized if conditions warrant — especially in engineering. But here are my lite agile SaaS management guardrails.

Agile SaaS Management Sprints

Our lite agile SaaS management sprints consisted of three-week blocks of work to be done. We settled on three-week sprints after experimenting with 2-, 3- and 4-week lengths. In most cases, our teams preferred the three-week length. It was long enough that real work could be accomplished and short enough that scope could be controlled. You could experiment with 2-4 weeks and go with what works best. You can also change at any time, so no need to sweat it.

Sprint length is personal and based on the characteristics of the team and the work-to-be-done.

Agile SaaS Management Sprint Plannings/Retrospectives

This is where we got very loose with our agile methodology. On the last day of each sprint the team would meet for 90 minutes. In that 90 minutes, we would both cover the highs and lows of the current sprint (call that a retrospective if you must) — including unfinished work — and plan the coming sprint. We used Trello as our tool of choice and live-planned on the fly — dragging unfinished cards from the current list (not many); and recurring and backlog cards into new sprint. If it wasn’t included in sprint planning, it did not happen in the sprint. Only emergencies were worthy of interrupting the sprint mid-stream.

This 90 minutes every three weeks is the team leader’s chance to align the work-to-be-done in t...

You may be asking yourself, “Wait, does my company even have a renewal process?”

You aren’t alone. Many SaaS companies don’t have a formal customer renewal process. I was reminded of this at the Silicon Y’all event earlier this month when my session about fighting SaaS customer churn was followed by a fantastic presentation on designing SaaS renewal processes from David Cusimano, a principal at Accel-KKR.

My Silicon Y’all session went straight for the jugular—starting bottom up by getting scrappy to improve customer retention programmatically. David’s session worked from the top down, discussing the steps you take to execute a scalable, effective renewal process.

Both approaches are important. SaaS business fundamentals are built around recurring revenue, and you must have a process around the steps you take to ensure the revenue actually renews.

Whether you have 10 customers or 10,000, it’s probably time to take a look at your renewal process and give it an upgrade. Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.

Do document your SaaS renewal process

Sometimes people hear the word “process” and think it’s got to be something complicated. A process is just the steps you take to execute something. So, document the steps you take to renew a customer. The image I quickly sketched out above is just an example of how to start. Think about the customer lifecycle and when they need to be touched, how red flags will get surfaced (and what your red flags actually are), how you will continue to add value, and what you will do about adoption and usage issues. Then just write it down in a timeline from when the customer closes to when renewal happens—who does what, when, why and how. That’s a process. Don’t overcomplicate it. 

Do start from the beginning

You notice above I wrote, “just write it down in a timeline from when the customer closes to when renewal happens…“

If you approach your renewal process 90-days out, you are focused on the wrong aspects of renewal. Checking in with a customer 90 days before they are set to renew, and sending an invoice 30 days before renewal isn’t a process. Well, it’s a process, but not a good one. You should be thinking about renewal from the day the customer signs the contract.

Renewal depends on customers adopting your product. It also depends on your customer getting value from it, and achieving their goals. And you need to be ensuring that is what happens for your customer, from day one. Because 90-days out is way, way, way too late to solve for that. 

Do hold everyone accountable

A process doesn’t ensure anything actually gets done. A process is just words on paper until it comes to life by the people who are responsible to execute. When you document your renewal process be clear about who owns each step, how the steps should be executed, and how to escalate issues. Build in safety nets so the entire process can’t grind to a halt.

Don’t let your renewal process get stale

If your renewal process isn’t indoctrinated into your culture it’s going to get stale. And when it gets stale, the steps in the process will be perfunctory. Which means your renewal process will be executed without passion, care or attention to detail. The worst thing that can happen is that people ...

If you’re a $1M+ annual recurring revenue SaaS company, you probably had a pretty great idea. You also likely had at least a passable strategy to get to that first milestone of success. And you must have had some semblance of a product. But the odds remain very low that your $1M+ ARR will scale to $10M, $50M, or $100M plus. The reason is that executing against all that is really, really hard. You have to know what to do and then actually do it. And that usually means building, convincing and inspiring your organization to do amazing things — every day. SaaS execution is what separates ideas from successes, and you’re far from alone if you’re struggling with it.

There’s Plenty of What to Do

While there’s no shortage of execution risk, there’s also no shortage of people telling you what to do… increase your gross margin; reduce your churn; increase your usage; lower your customer acquisition cost (CAC); and so on and so forth. Even lower-level directives like hire a VP sales; increase marketing-generated deals; or improve culture; are fraught with high levels of execution risk. There’s a lot that can go wrong in each objective, and when they get combined, the number of ways they can go sideways multiplies.

And Less of How to Do It

In my experience, the shortage of information lies in how to actually execute. I’m not talking about the theory of how to execute. I’m talking about getting from point A to point Z without a major fender bender. I feel like there’s a predisposition to view SaaS execution as the low-level detail that’s far less valuable than high-level strategy. But I continue to see a whole lot of awesome high-level strategy that goes nowhere. You need both. Focusing ON the business instead of IN the business can’t mean spending all of your time on what to do rather than how to do it.

From a management perspective, some of this comes down to design. For example, CAC is not an execution metric. It’s too high level for that. CAC is incredibly important, but it’s the result of lower-level execution metrics that result in CAC changes. As a team, marketing can’t optimize for CAC each week. They have to focus on execution metrics they can change like cost-per-qualified-lead, or conversion rate, or inbound-to-qualified-opp ratio. But someone has to set expectations around each of those execution metrics and ensure that they are exceeded. Those expectations are the hows linked to the what of improving CAC. And the ability to manage to those expectations is executional bliss.

5 Big Areas of SaaS Execution Risk

If 80% of what makes SaaS companies tick is ubiquitous, then it makes sense that SaaS execution risk areas are pretty consistent. From my perspective, these are the most critical executional soft spots that we see over and over again.

Sales SaaS Execution Risk

The first place we see growing SaaS companies falter is in sales hiring and process. Playbook maturity — including methodology, comp structure, measurement, management style, and culture — directly impacts performance and scalability. And all of that tracks back to who gets hired and when they get hired. If that critical sales leadership hire is botched, everything suffers. That means sales execution depends on defining the right candidates for leadership, finding them,

There, I said it.

As a SaaS founder who led sales, customer success, product support, and professional services, I fully believed every customer retention issue was squarely on my shoulders. And every customer retention win was because of the product. 

I LOVED our product and the value it brought to our enterprise customers. I passionately believed. So when people would try to lump product into discussions of churn and retention I staunchly defended the product.

And who has to take the sole burden of churn if the product can do no wrong? Customer success of course.  With maybe a dash of sales thrown in for good measure.

My customer-facing teams were amazing and could do little wrong in my eyes. But when we needed to solve any retention issue I fully grabbed it, put it on my team’s shoulders and went to work. I thought we could solve any customer retention problem ourselves. 

I was wrong, of course. And it was an unfair burden to put on my organization. Particularly the leaders of each department, who felt the emotional blow every time they couldn’t save a customer from churning.

SaaS customer retention must be a shared KPI across the organization

What I eventually came to learn is that customer retention must be a fully shared KPI across the entire organization. And it must be shared equally. Operations, engineering, product, sales, marketing, customer success, etc. No single department can have a greater responsibility for hitting the customer retention KPI. That’s full alignment and that’s when teams win the SaaS customer churn war. 

Many of us “know” this to be true. It’s no news to say a great product is a fundamental pre-requisite to high customer retention. But even though we know it, I see a lot of companies not living it.

Customer success helps customers gain value from the product

Customer Success is the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service.Gainsight

Note this definition doesn’t describe a department, or a team, or even a function. It describes a business methodology. 

And yet we often describe customer success as a set of activities a department handles. It’s common to see the customer success team responsible for customer engagement, product adoption, renewals, and expansion.

How can a single team be responsible for so much?

They can’t. They can be responsible for building strong relationships, communicating well, helping customers achieve their desired outcomes and facilitating the customer’s day-to-day engagement with your company and product.

It’s time we stop trying to solve customer retention by brute force of the customer success team (even though that’s what I did with great success). It’s time for retention to be a fully aligned, shared KPI. It’s time for it to be treated as a business methodology and not as a department. That’s what the best companies do and it’s something that needs broader adoption across the SaaS industry.

It takes a village to actually retain customers

From a product perspective, we can influence customer retention with

Sometimes things just fall into place. Like this post. I had nascent inspiration to write it last week, but couldn’t quite find my passion for it. Then I had a couple of clients surface some things that really focused my thoughts on the SaaS CEO role. My personal experience as a tech CEO for 20 years is part of it. But because we were largely bootstrapped, I wasn’t beholden to raise round after round of capital. (Granted, I had a whole different set of responsibilities that filled the fundraising void — like sustainably growing from cash flow.)

SaaS CEO Role: Chief Fundraiser

Many SaaS CEOs have cyclical roles. Chief among those cycles might be the chief fundraiser role. If you’re a startup or growth stage SaaS and dependent on outside capital, this role never goes away. But it does cycle through some pretty acute peaks and valleys. When you’re not actively raising, you’re preparing to raise — managing to metrics to ensure that your next raise is on track. And when you’re actively raising and pitching, you could be spending almost all of your time on that task. So let’s say that a funded (or aspiring to be funded) SaaS CEO spends 15-90% of their time as chief fundraiser.

SaaS CEO Role: Chief Recruiter

Another of the cyclical roles, chief recruiter is largely focused on attracting key leadership talent that aligns with the culture, vision, and needs of the organization. Like fundraising, this one also seldom goes to zero. And in startup mode, chief recruiter may well consume a very high percentage of the CEO’s time. Once the core leadership team is in place, the chief recruiter portion of the SaaS CEO’s role will diminish. But there’s usually someone needed somewhere that’s going to need CEO-level vision and passion to woo them into the company.

SaaS CEO Role: Chief Visionary

This is about leading the company, providing and reinforcing a point of view, and keeping everyone in the boat and rowing together. This is less volatile than fundraising and recruiting. In fact, volatility undermines the very nature of being the chief visionary. The real value in this role lies in consistency, predictability, and quite frankly, repetition (or reinforcement if you prefer). This means reinforcement in every meeting and casual conversation, and it means reinforcement in all-hands and town-hall meetings that take place on a regular and frequent cadence. The hardest part of this role is remembering that everyone is not in your head. The leadership needed may feel too obvious, but it’s not.

SaaS CEO Role: Sales

Sales is a role that doesn’t come with a ‘chief’ for me as a SaaS organization should be building a scalable, predictable sales machine that’s not dependent on the CEO or any other whale of a rainmaker. Yes, a sales-focused CEO is beholden to sell like crazy until the right sales leadership and team are built. But that’s a temporary role of necessity, rather than an intentional and permanent one. So the sales portion of SaaS CEO’s role may be higher at the pre-revenue/startup stage and diminish from there to near zero. Like recruiting, the charismatic CEO’s ability to jump into a big deal and get it closed will never go to zero.

And now the reason for this post…

After 20+ years as a tech entrepreneur, I see the SaaS CEO’s most critical startup or growth-stage role as minding the gaps.

 Aside from the acute needs articulated around fundraising, recruiting, vision, and sales,

It’s safe to say that in the last few years, the SaaS industry has experienced unprecedented growth. According to OpenView Labs, the industry is on track to close 2018 with a 21.5% increase to $71.2 billion. But with that growth comes some pretty serious competition. In 2013, SaaS companies reported, on average, having just two competitors. In 2018, that number had jumped to nine.

With competition growing ever more fierce,

vertical SaaS has become a strategy for getting a foot in the door of a crowded

marketplace.

So what is vertical SaaS, anyway?

When we think about SaaS, horizontal SaaS is

generally the go-to idea, since it’s the more mature model. For example, one of

the most commonly cited SaaS companies is Salesforce, which offers cloud-based

solutions for sales, service, and marketing, kind of a one-stop-shop

subscription service. Which is great! Who doesn’t love Salesforce?

However, as business face challenges unique to the digital age, solutions often need to be industry or company-specific. Even Salesforce recognizes the need for more specific, vertical SaaS. That’s probably why Salesforce partners with companies like Veeva, which provides SaaS cloud-based technology created specifically for the life sciences industry, such as pharmaceutical companies and biotech startups. While businesses of all types use Salesforce, Veeva focuses on the specific needs of one type of client.

As the SaaS industry continues to grow,

vertical SaaS has a few advantages over the older, horizontal model. Here are a

few reasons vertical SaaS offerings stand out.

Vertical SaaS means less competition

We’re living in a golden age of SaaS, which is great. Except for the fact that it seems like a new SaaS company is born every minute. Some estimates say there are as many as 100,000 SaaS apps out there, and even if you think that number might be a little high, we can all admit the market is a tad crowded.

Vertical SaaS cuts out some of that

competition by offering specific solutions for a very particular type of

client. Think of OpenTable. Who knew one little idea could revolutionize the

way we make reservations? But the company solved a very specific problem:

customers needed to know when they could get reservations at their favorite

restaurants, but they didn’t want to go to multiple websites (or, worse yet,

make multiple phone calls) to figure out where they were eating on a Friday

night. Enter OpenTable, which offered an incredibly relevant solution.

Another way that vertical SaaS cuts down on competition is by going after markets that may not have been taken over by the big guys. If Microsoft, Salesforce, and Adobe are your competition, it’s a pretty tough fight, but if your solution is tailored to restaurants or clothing retailers, you may have an easier time making a sale.

Vertical SaaS means easier upsell

And by easy, it could be incredibly simple. For example, 1001 Menus, a SaaS company focused on adding restaurants to all directories, managed to garner 2,500 clients before it even had a product. In the digital age, where managing social channels, reviews, content, and search can be overwhelming, especially for smaller businesses, a simple, relevant SaaS solution goes a long way.

Since returning from Silicon Y’all, we’ve had several Beacon9 client meetings with something in common. They’ve all had adoption, usage, and retention challenges, and they all lack SaaS customer marketing basics. This is despite being quite mature (in SaaS terms) and despite achieving scale with double-digit millions in ARR. These are quality companies whose growth rates are being undermined by a lack of customer education and communication.

Two SaaS Customer Marketing Blockers

The fundamentals of SaaS customer marketing are relatively straightforward but often neglected. I lived this neglect and can speak to it firsthand. The reason for it is ever so simple — the marketing function in a growing SaaS is more than fully committed to customer acquisition. It’s everything to them. And typically where all of the incentives lie.

Before customer marketing can carve out 25% of marketing’s effort, values must be realigned from the CEO to the CMO and below. Adoption, usage, retention, and expansion must be understood as huge value drivers in revenue growth and organizational prosperity. So blocker number one is lack of resources and blocker number two is lack of incentives, rooted in underappreciation of the value of the function on revenue growth.

I was both the CEO and the CMO of our SaaS prior to its acquisition. So I was both the problem and the solution for customer marketing. Like many a growing tech company, ion interactive shared the myopic focus on capital-efficient customer acquisition. My marketing team was overcommitted on a daily basis and driven to deliver low-CAC. So when Anna came to me to say she wanted our Director of Customer Success to attend our marketing sprint plannings and standups, I wasn’t enthusiastic. We didn’t have the bandwidth to do more than the bare minimum on the customer side, and that’s what we were already doing. The bare minimum meant a customer version of our monthly email newsletter, an occasional customer-specific webinar, and product release communications — in-platform and email.

SaaS Customer Marketing Value Prop

Then we began to talk through the value proposition of customer marketing and the potential impacts it could have on our business — churn reduction, expansion revenue, reduced time-to-value, and increased usage. With a quick bit of revenue quantification, I went from cynical CMO to enthusiastic CEO in the blink of an eye. Marketing was ultimately in the growth business, and we could have more revenue growth by redirecting 25% of our effort to customers than by spending that same 25% on new customer acquisition. Yes, it was a bet and not a sure thing, but it sure looked promising.

So began the cultural reprogramming of our priorities that led to sizable benefits, not the least of which was a massive reduction in revenue churn. But before that could happen, customer success had to convince the CEO, who had to reprogram the CMO, who had to refactor his team to believe and deliver on the customer marketing promise. This is why so many SaaS companies have poor-to-no customer marketing.

But over the last week, I’ve found myself recommending a remarkably similar set of SaaS customer marketing initiatives.

Hiring mistakes are inevitable, especially when you are scaling fast and trying to fill many open positions at once. Here are a few of the most common startup hiring mistakes I’ve seen and some thoughts on how to avoid them. 

Hiring people who aren’t passionate about your category and/or SaaS.

When SaaS was just getting started it was impossible to hire an entire team of people who lived and breathed SaaS. But now, that’s not the case. Your team should be comprised of people who are totally passionate about what your company does, and the fundamentals of SaaS. This probably sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many times I meet people in SaaS who just aren’t that into (or who actually dislike) the fundamental aspects of recurring revenue business—like the fact that your customers can just cancel if you aren’t delivering real value.  Find people who like SaaS and like your category. You aren’t randomly filling open headcount with quasi-qualified people, you are building a tribe who will help your company grow. Find your tribe. 

Hiring too many people

Especially with funding, there is pressure to hire and fill many roles. In the hiring frenzy, it is easy to make mistakes in who you hire, and how many you hire. I hear founders getting advice to “overhire” all the time. Sometimes, it’s necessary. But it can be dangerous, flippant advice. Guidance here will vary depending on who you ask, but I am a cautious person. I usually recommend hiring based on actual need, not on anticipated need. If today I need two CSMs and based on customer acquisition I think in 6 months I will need four, I am not going out to hire four today. I will hire two, and try to identify a few others that I want to nurture and stay in touch with so in a few months when I see the trendline taking shape I can start recruiting for the other two (and ideally already have a solid pool of candidates from the last round of hiring).

Hiring too few people

Everyone knows there will be lots of hard work in the early days, but expecting herculean efforts from your existing staff will burn them out, degrade the quality of work, create resentments and impact employee retention. If your team is nearing the edge of their breaking point you need more people, stat. If you can’t afford to hire more people, you need to look at what’s imbalanced (are you not charging enough, for example?).

Hiring the wrong people

When you are hiring for new roles you haven’t hired before, you won’t always know what to look for. Stay laser focused on candidates with relevant experience and demonstrable success. Look for people who can answer situational questions (“What would you do if X happened, and then Y went haywire…talk me through that…”), and can talk in detail about specifics of their experience. Look for strong fits based on experience and/or aptitude. And if at all possible find a partner who has experience hiring for the roles you are filling and ask for their input during the interview process.

Hiring the wrong people and keeping them around too long

Hiring mistakes happen. But when they do, you need to act quickly. The wrong person in a role can really cost you—lost customers, lost opportunities, lost revenue, lost momentum, lost market share and lost internal credibility. Trust your gut. If you think someone isn’t the right fit, they probably aren’t and the longer you ‘wait and see’ the more momentum you have lost. In my experience, you always know who’s really an A and B player. Those are the people you want. If you are on the fence about someone, chances are they aren’t an A or a B and they aren’t helping you run the ball down the field.

Not nurturing the talent pool

I mentioned in my first point above that I like to build relationships wit...

Everything a SaaS CEO does is steeped in urgency. We’re in growing businesses beholden to outpace fast-paced markets. We often run razor thin, allocating as much cash as we can to maximizing our growth rate. But if our outward CEO temperament crosses the line from urgency to stress, bad things happen. Teams lose faith. Investors lose confidence. Customers sense something may be wrong.

In my experience, outwardly stressed SaaS CEOs impede revenue growth. That’s the reason this is an especially relevant Married2Growth topic.

Quality SaaS CEOs push very hard. Managing with and from a sense of urgency is a requirement of short capital and big goals. That urgency can be highly productive and contagious to everyone from executive leadership to interns. It’s often a very positive growth force.

Stressed SaaS CEOs also push very hard. But their pushing comes with outward signs of negativity that can be destructive, and likewise contagious. This seldom lifts an organization to perform at its best.

Steering Positive CEO Temperament

In addition to constantly pushing, quality CEOs also hire people better than themselves. That in and of itself can be stressful. And higher and higher payrolls can result in a profound sense of urgency. Those investments must pay off and it’s on the CEO if they don’t. So there are some pretty good reasons to be stressed. Here are some of the tactics I used to show no stress, manage from a place of urgency, and remain even-keeled.

Transparency

A lot of outward stress starts with things kept to yourself. In running a SaaS, a CEO is privy to a lot of information that most others in the business aren’t. That can be a heavy responsibility to shoulder. And certain things don’t lend themselves to transparency.

But for everything else, liberation lies in openness. You may have read my article on transparency and accountability that speaks to the organizational dynamics of keeping metrics and KPI results in the open. Now I confess that the real motive there was not shouldering all of that in my own personal vacuum. That’s not entirely true, but it was certainly part of the impetus to move in that direction. When more people know and understand more about what’s going on, everyone is less guarded — including the CEO. Less guarded means more relaxed which looks a lot like less stressed on the outside.

Accountability

Loneliness is a very real CEO feeling that contributes to stress. Regardless of anything or everything else, the CEO is the captain of the ship and will go down if she sinks. That’s a boat-ton (sorry) of accountability and potential stress. Clear and consistent expectations lead to defined deliverables that are critical to having more people in the boat.

The best way I knew to reduce my loneliness in CEO accountability was to share some of it. That sounds selfish, and it is. But stress reduction is rather selfish, so maybe that’s okay. In any case, we chose to make everyone accountable and to have that accountability clearly relatable to the highest level of performance expectations of the organization. That meant that everyone understood how they were accountable and how their contribution related to what their boss was accountable to. That ran all the way up to me.

Like transparency, when everyone knows what everyone else is accountable to contribute, there are fewer surprises, less veils, and more understanding of hiring and firing. Again, that translates to less outward stress for the CEO, and everyone else for that matter.

Personal Management

Taking care of yourself is a requirement of being a SaaS CEO. What that means to you is likely different than what it means to me,