The toughest thing anyone could ever do is founding and growing an industry-transforming company. The most ambiguous part is that no one has done your job ever before.

Startups have no fixed rules. You always receive conflicting advice from your mentors. In addition to this, the blogs and books are full of valuable tidbits that have become hard to know which things must be given importance. At times, you just find yourself wondering if you are going on a right track.

Many startup CEOs encounter this issue. To you stay focused, I have listed down four important roles of CEOs.

Here are those roles.

1. Cash flow

The importance of cash cannot be sidelined. You will not be able to operate a business if you run out of money. So, the CEO’s job is to manage expenses, external finance and revenues to uphold consistent growth of the company. CFO is always answerable to the CEO’s eventual direction on cash-flow related matters.

The effective cash flow management is a solid metrics-driven corporate culture, to begin with. The absence of a comprehensive and reliable picture of the company’s metrics will not give CEO a clear picture about the company’s performance. He won’t have the knowledge about the right levers to affect expenses and revenues. Then he cannot communicate growth opportunities to prospective investors.

2. Investor Management

That very moment when your startup applies for funds from outside, you get a new boss called “shareholder”. This turns out to be more poignant as keep on capitalizing your business. Informing your investors about each and everything is one of the most underrated things that CEOs often do to increase the probability of success.

A good CEO has the complete knowledge about the nature of updates and the right frequency to send to every tier of investors when it comes to startup solutions. They maintain a complete list of investor’s skill sets so that they ask people for favors. They at least make one phone call every month to the investors to keep in touch with them.

Gaining the enthusiasm and respect from your investor upturns the quantity that these advocates will evangelize your company in their circles. Your investors can play the role of rue salesperson if you influence them rightly.

3. Team Development

The venture capitalists look for these elements in a startup:

  • People
  • Product
  • Market

The absence of right captains required for leading the ship will decrease the chance of moving in the right direction.

It is the duty of a CEO to check if the people are moving in the right direction, reorganizing roles, performances of the team members, corporate team building retreats, need to create any new vacancies.

It is a difficult activity to repeatedly optimize team fit. However, it pays off really well when you put right people in the right places.

4. Brand Management

Nowadays, a product of relationship activities management and thought leadership in called “Building and Maintaining a Strong Brand”. These activities are easy to neglect but they can intensely increase your credibility for your target market.

In order to build a strong brand, it is important that you are unstinting and preemptive with your time. You have to show your presence at industry events, write blog posts, do favors for colleagues and become active on Twitter. You are the one who needs to decide about the brand you want to project and how secretly you want to scheme it.

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