CEO Monthly Issue 11 2018

CEO MONTHLY / ISSUE 11 2018 25 , Most companies desire to focus onwhat matters and ignore what doesn’t. A founder or CEO does this through organizing the teams, strategizing, promoting top-level management and influencing the company culture Improve a Business at Its Essence to Get Ahead of the Game, Says Brandon Frere They get problems out of the way to enable the teams to do their best. In essence, CEOs improve the company to allow teams to focus on improving the essence of the company. This often means CEOs focus on capital, acquiring capital, making sure the product is working very well for the users and hiring. Brandon Frere, CEO of Frere Enterprises and other ventures, suggests that entrepreneurs may be able to improve every aspect of this by focusing on the growth question at the company’s core. “Every decision changes the way the company works, which ultimately affects the revenue,” said Frere. “An entrepreneur enables their company to thrive by understanding the essence and interpreting what it is at its core.” Much of an entrepreneur’s responsibilities eventually come down to interpretations to questions like: • What does a client want? • How can this be monetized without breaking the company’s fundamental tenets? • What foundational principles will lead to a company’s growth? • What are the board’s desires? • What are the customer’s desires? • How can each answer to these questions lead to behavioural and cultural changes? For example, with Firefox Mozilla in 2005, their growth hypothesis may have been “Internet Explorer sucks; we want to make something that people can use quickly and simply that they can share with their family for personal reasons.” Or, more succinctly “community is the way to grow.” After their company started taking off, the hypothesis was effectively confirmed. Since their company was based around the community, the question became “How do we incorporate the community into our business culture?” In Mozilla’s case, that may have meant there was a need for distributed companies in different countries. This means the company needed to make a business plan around allowing employees to travel and meet one another so the team can truly be a community. It also meant that they wouldn’t have competitive salaries compared to Google or elsewhere. They lost some top talent because of this decision, but if someone wanted to work for Mozilla, they needed to care about community beyond the pay. This could be how Mozilla made an effective business model out of interpreting community. It is important that entrepreneurs realize that the product or service that the company is built around is the most important thing for the clients. The entrepreneurs may be a part of that development team in a start-up who are literally designing the product, or they might be designing how the product is imagined. It’s important that an entrepreneur realizes that their interpretations of the product, and bringing into reality everything that vision implies, may be the core of the art of being an entrepreneur. “A founder defines the way that the company solves the problem it was built for,” said Frere. “It is important that leaders realize that we’re all trying to make things better for our employees and our clients. And the best way to do that is to find the question at the core of the company, then improve that.” About Brandon Frere Brandon Frere is an entrepreneur and businessman who lives in Sonoma County, California. He has designed and created multiple companies to meet the ever- demanding needs of businesses and consumers alike. His website, www.BrandonFrere.com , is used as a means of communicating many of the lessons, fundamentals and information that he has learned throughout his extensive business and personal endeavours, most recently in advocating on behalf of student loan borrowers nationwide.