Now What?

Just over three years. That was what it amounted to for me at Agillic. Now I’m ”taking time off” to use an already tired cliché. My time with Agillic has been pretty eventful: I was hired to facilitate fairly significant change following a few years of not hitting targets. As anyone who has ever been involved at management level in a VC-backed company will know, those kinds of owners are pretty tough on failure, so I was part of a new management team consisting of the technical founder serving as CEO, a new CFO and myself serving an oddly undefined role spanning strategy, business development, operations and running the commercial organisation. In essence anything that wasn’t directly related to product development was under my wings. It’s been a huge challenge and a lot of fun. I’ve been responsible for developing a new corporate strategy, a new go-to-market model, and a new customer support model.  I’ve shut down sections of the company that didn’t make sense in the context of the new strategy – in essence having to let people go or re-assigning them to new roles. Some of them very talented people that just didn’t fit into the new model but who have gone on to deliver lots of value in new positions. And I’ve had the fun of also building the new teams to execute that new strategy. I’ve made hopeless mistakes of hiring wrong people because of time-pressure, inexperience and other factors that – at the end of the day – aren’t really excuses at all. And of course have had to fire those that fell victims of my recruitment inabilities. But I like to think that I’ve learned from those mistakes. I’ve also hired exceptional people, who have helped transform the operation and put the company on it’s current positive trajectory with two (soon to be three) years of +100% year-on-year revenue growth and a positive bottomline.

So – why did I leave if it was all so great? Well, the big change had been made. We had developed a new sales channels with digital and direct agencies that’s working (over coffee last week, the Danish CEO of a large network agency let slip that Agillic had definitely changed the way that the Scandinavian market does CRMin the digital age – I’ll take the liberty of calling that a big acknowledgement of our achievements). Our UK managing director, Turlough Martin, and his team are - after a start that was a lot tougher than it looked in my powerpoint presentation to the board before launching – doing great and are adding new clients to the list every month. Our Partner Support team is well-established and are delivering outstanding customer satisfaction ratings. The business is fundamentally working. So after long discussions with the CEO and founder, Carsten Hyldahl, is was becoming evident that the time to move on was now. Genuinly after mutual understanding. Really.

Back to the opening question: Now What?

In short, I feel like the time has come to try being the boss. At Agillic I was running the shop with Carsten in what was always a very very close partnership between two people who spent many hours a week debating and arguing about the direction and decisions. But at the end of the day there’s only one person making the final decision. In Agillic’s case it was Carsten. And now I want that to be me. Obviously, there are many ways of getting to be in charge. There seems to be broad agreement among the carreer advisors that I have spoken to that I’m not yet in a position to fill a CEO role with a large global company – bit of a blow to my success-inflated ego. The short route is to start your own thing. So I’m giving that some pretty serious thought.

When you spend a few years in the technology space you get exposed to so many people and ideas that you eventually tend to get a few of your own. I’m no exception. So far those ideas have been sitting in a drawer at home, but I’ve spent the last few days going through them and speaking to a few select individuals about some of them. It feels exciting, even exhilarating. I think that one or two of them might have legs if further developed and enhanced. Are they mind-blowing technical innovations? No. Are they pragmatic ideas for solving big needs in the market in a new and novel way? I think so. And that’s what feels so damn exciting. But is also feels like jumping off a huge cliff. So the rational part of me is trying to be as cynical and analytical about my own ideas as I’ve been about clients’ or colleagues’ ideas in the past, trying to figure out if one of my ideas have the potential to become a business. The emotional part of me is screaming that it’s the certain route to endless debt, sleepless nights, a divorce and all other things awful and terrifying.

Weighing the comfort and security of a monthly paycheck against the almost uncontrollable urge to give myself the challenge of putting my self-perceived greatness to the test. It’s scary stuff.

As I’m sure it’s fairly evident I’m undecided. But writing a few words about that uncertainty is supposedly therapeutic and in this social media age any idiot with a blog is a writer, so here it is. Maybe some of you have been going through the same thing and find a bit of comfort that you’re not alone. If that’s the case, please share your thoughts.

Either way, I hope to keep posting as my thinking matures. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have thoughts, ideas or questions that you want to share.