Ask HN: Approaching my CEO about a bad decision of his | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Approaching my CEO about a bad decision of his

6 pointsdimarco6 comments

I work for a small(~6 full time people) startup web company, with 3 developers, 1 CEO(founder), and a few other HR/Admin people. I'm the latest hire, however I have very good rapport with the CEO.

About 9 months ago, a very good saleswoman for a rather popular company came into the office and sold our CEO dry on some software as a web service. The software basically takes reviews of our product and stories from our site's visitors.

We only have 1 product to review, and the code to write a 'story submitter' is trivial at best. Needless to say, the tech team didn't find this useful and campaigned hard against it. The saleswoman was very good, though. She promised that her company would help us with social marketing.

I know we spend at least $40,000 a year on this 'stories & reviews' company, and they are sucking us dry. They have not helped us with social marketing, other than telling us 'You guys should blog'.

I recently asked for a budget to do some advertising on Facebook, and the CEO told me I could create 2 ads at $20.00/day. The ads hit their limit every day, but the data we're getting isn't enough to make an statistical decisions.

I feel like he gave me a nickel, pinched my cheek and said "Don't spend it all in one place, kiddo".

I think investing more in advertising and tools like Mixpanel are worth 50 times more than 'stories & reviews'. And with the little traffic we generate anyways, not many stories and reviews are being submitted.

I've asked him for more money, and he tells me "It's not in the budget right now."

How do I approach him to tell him that we should be using the 'stories & reviews' money on more appropriate things, like advertising and adwords, without saying 'You messed up.'?

When I get a new customer, I usually tell her something like this:

"It is very possible that sooner or later we will not have the same opinion on a topic.

I am always open to change my mind, but until this happens, I will fight for my opinion.

But: Any time during the discussion you have the right to stop me with the words 'I am the boss and now playing my boss-card.'. I will accept that without any harsh feelings, as it is your business and not mine.

I see it as an obligation to prevent you from doing, what I consider to be wrong. But in the end you have the last word, even if I totally disagree, I will do my best to help going your way."

This worked several times. I have the feeling that it even helps to calm down a heated discussion when I say, 'hey, you are free to play your card..'. I guess this makes my customer feel that I do not argue just to be against her but to help.

Another thing: It happens that I do change my mind, as I was not aware of the whole picture. This might not be true for your situation, but I try first to understand why somebody has a different opinion on a topic.

And: Sometimes you just have to accept that you can not rescue everybody.

"We only have 1 product to review, and the code to write a 'story submitter' is trivial at best. Needless to say, the tech team didn't find this useful and campaigned hard against it."

Alternate approach: get the tech team on board. Build a custom version of the software (if it's so trivial, you should be able to build it quickly, right?) Take that to the boss, say, "look, this does everything that we pay $40k / year for! Why are we using this external service?"

Alt alt suggestion -- talk to your boss. Say that you can build software with features X,Y,Z for the company in 2 weeks. Build it, show it to them.

If he's an approachable person, who doesn't try to lord it over you due to his ownership / position in the company, then I'd recommend taking a direct approach and meeting with him, data in hand, to prove your POV. Specifically, get the costs and benefits to do a simple ROI analysis. If you're in tech, you should be able to parse the logs to figure out how much traffic / revenue / other stuff you've gotten from your costs. Find or discover some (reasonable) social media metrics that you can use to break through the opacity of their "social media" benefits.

Take all this to the CEO. Lay it out in front of him. Suggest that the investment is now a sunk cost -- he may just be protecting his ego at this point, so approach gently -- and that you think repurposing some of that money to facebook ads / etc. would result in X% better numbers. But that at your current budget ($20 / day), you can't bring him well-supported conclusions. Tell him that you need $Y to actually run the experiment, and that you can find that money by taking some from your SaaS cost. After a month or two, or whenever you have sufficient data, meet with your founder again with your data that supports your conclusions (if it doesn't fit, also realize that you may be wrong in this instance).

If he doesn't seriously consider what you've brought him, then make a note that your CEO is somewhat clueless, ego driven, and stubborn. If your CEO is unable to see through snake oil salesmen, your company is in trouble.

You gotta sell him - you were outclassed/outgunned by a salesperson and now you have to outclass her. Make a presentation - put in stats and numbers that prove your case. Own the results - "This will work - I am willing to put my job on the line."

If you put together a quality presentation and offer to own the results and your CEO still doesn't go for it, one of two things is true:

1) You aren't as clever as you think you are (i.e. your CEO is correct)

2) Your CEO is clueless and you need to move on

3) You are as clever as you think you are, but your convincing-skills are not the best.

Worst case scenario: CEO is correct, but your awesome presentation skills changed his mind. :)

scnr

First, and most importantly, you could be wrong. Unless you really believe that, don't do anything.

Second, learn from the politicians. They never make mistakes: you have to get rid of the subject of the sentence: it's not "you made mistakes" it's "mistakes were made" Never have a conversation with somebody about what "they" did. But always have conversations about "what happened" This is another point that if you don't get, be silent.

Finally, go with principles and data, not personalities and opinions. If you admit you might be wrong, and perhaps mistakes were made, the logical next step is to ask to collect data on a couple of theories. Who knows what the data might show? The real question is not who is right or wrong, it's whether you want to collect more data from a different hypothesis. After all, we're all open-minded, right?

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