Startup CXO

Chapter 70How to Make the Biggest Impact as a CBDO

The CBDO team is one of the smallest—if not the smallest—in the C‐suite. As a startup it will probably be just you and even as you scale to $100 million in revenue or more, you'll most likely only have a team of one or two other people. If business development and partnerships are key to your growth, you may have as many as five or ten people on the team, but in general the CBDO team is small. Sales, Marketing, People, IT, Finance, Legal—all those functions will grow in headcount, budget, and complexity, while the CBDO team will remain small. But the impact you can make as a CBDO is massive and I've organized my thoughts into the key tasks or roles that you'll want to undertake to ensure that you make that big impact, right away.

I've already mentioned that the key traits of a CBDO are trust, relationship‐focused, generalist thinking, and an ambassador mindset. In addition to those traits, a CBDO will need to have one clear objective that underpins everything that they do. That objective is to increase the valuation of the company. Yes, everyone in your company has a belief that what they're doing will increase the valuation of the company, but they also have a number of imperatives that are focused on the here and now: they are responsible for weekly updates, quarterly reports, annual reports, budgeting cycles … the list is endless of things people have to do in a company.

The CBDO role is different. It's like solving a puzzle ...