Matt Mochary > Quotes

“Agreeing on what your values are is the kind of statement that needs maximum buy-in, so it should involve your whole company. Send out a survey, and gather contributions from everyone. Ask your team to suggest both a value and the name of an employee who exemplifies it.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“And when receiving appreciation, there is only one correct response: “Thank you.” Do not feign humility by downplaying the act with statements like “It was nothing, anyone could have done it.” No. The person is trying to make you feel appreciated. Anything other than “thank you” will rob them of their goal.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“But history tells a different story. The greatest risk of a startup is not that they moved too slowly in dominating the entire marketplace, but rather that they spread their scarce resources too thin and ended up securing few or no customers at all.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Making a Sale To make a sale effectively, you need to do the following three things: Build trust Identify the customer’s specific pain Sell results, not features”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“You and your team will likely have to spend one full day per week preparing for and participating in team and one-on-one meetings. These meetings and this system will feel like pure overhead. They are. And without them, your company will never scale successfully.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“It’s a good standard practice for at least two people to know how to do any given task in the company so that if the lead person is too busy, is sick, or leaves the company, they can request that the secondary person assume the responsibility. This way, no task should fall through the cracks.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Create and measure your metrics carefully and in context to give your team the best possible view of your company’s health.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“By seeing what decisions you make, based on what information you receive, your COS will soon be able to think like you and can truly be an extension of you (and magic will happen).”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Once you bring on remote workers and your team scales beyond fifteen to twenty people, it’s common for things to begin to fall apart.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“In my experience, the best person for this role has high EQ, medium technical understanding, and a fantastic work ethic. I’ve found a good indicator of their ability is if they understand (or can quickly learn) SQL.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“It’s often easy to make a decision, but it can be much harder to get your team to invest emotionally in that decision.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Even though conscious leaders get defensive like everyone else, they regularly interrupt this natural reactivity by pausing to breathe, accept, and shift.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Being a COS in this capacity is the single best training for becoming a CEO (or head of any department) that exists.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“To test this phenomenon, download an app like Sleep Cycle and use”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“The top goal framework will help you fix this. Greg McKeown, who wrote a phenomenal book on productivity called Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, boils this down to one key concept: Schedule two hours each day (i.e., put an event in your calendar) to work on your top goal only. And do this every single workday. Period.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“One of the most dangerous transitions that a company makes is going from fewer than ten team members to more than twenty in a short time.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Many members of Facebook’s original leadership team continue to be on the leadership team today. This is because Sheryl Sandberg brought a management system to the company that elevated all who used it. By contrast, Twitter has not developed a similarly effective system. Instead they have hired individual superstars. And while the people at Twitter are remarkably talented, the company as a whole does not function nearly as well as Facebook.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“If you check your email incessantly, multiple times an hour, you are wasting hours of productivity. Instead, batch your time and clean out your entire inbox at those times.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“KPIs are the one or two significant metrics for each major function that show the entire team in an instant how the company is doing and where the issues are.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“You create buy-in when you make people feel that they are part of the decision and that their input contributes to the final outcome.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“The mission describes the business problem and its solution. For example, “The operations lead will create and manage a world-class department that will support every team member by providing the environment, information, tools, training, and habits they need to succeed in their role and make the company a massive success.” • The outcomes are what the person must get done. There should be three to eight outcomes (target is five) ranked by order of importance. They should be measurable and have an accomplish-by date. For example, “Turn every team member into a ninja user of our internal tools (Asana, Salesforece, Notion) and methodologies (GTD, Inbox Zero, management by objectives, active listening) by October 31.” • The competencies are the traits or habits that are required to succeed in the role and fit in at the company. They are the how—the behaviors that someone must exhibit in order to achieve the outcomes. Here are some examples: ○ Organized: Follows the GTD method and stays well aware of all to-dos and events ○ Innovative: Seeks to make process improvements to make their role and the team more efficient going forward ○ Collaborative: Reaches out to peers and cooperates with managers to establish an overall collaborative environment ○ Persuasive: Is able to convince others to pursue a course of action ○ Coachable: Wants to improve and is open to feedback and acts on that feedback”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Setting vision and goals for the company, each department, and each individual on a regular basis (usually quarterly) Communicating that vision and those goals to every team member Tracking and reporting progress toward those goals on a regular timetable (usually weekly) Eliciting feedback from all team members on what is going right and (much more important) what is not going right and needs to be changed The system streamlines and organizes information flowing out, so the CEO can inform team members of the company’s priorities, and information flowing in, so team members can provide feedback to the CEO about what is and isn’t working.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“It is critical to objectively measure the performance of the company. You can only manage what you can measure.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Even against remarkable talent, the system inevitably wins.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“One of the measures of your having successfully implemented this system is that your original team members continue to perform as excellent managers even as their departments grow massively.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Why did you leave that job?” Was the candidate promoted, recruited, or fired? Get very curious about why.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“Most companies spend extraordinary resources of time, money, and equity to bring on a new team member, and then almost entirely drop the ball on quickly getting that team member onboarded and up to speed on how the company works so that they can begin making a full contribution. Don’t make this mistake!”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“How to Become Insanely Well-Connected,” Chris Fralic of First Round Capital says that he reserves one hour each”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“By law, C corporations must a have a board of directors, which must meet regularly in order to be informed about the company’s operations and provide fiduciary oversight.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

“You create buy-in when you make people feel that they are part of the decision and that their input contributes to the final outcome. The more influence they feel they have on the outcome, the more they’ll be invested in the final result.”
― Matt Mochary, The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building