1. What have you found most challenging as a leader of a small or medium enterprise?

Managing work-life balance and keeping up with all the details as we've scaled up to 20 employees.

2. How did you become a leader of an SME? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I started BizzyWeb as a hobby in 1999, and grew it to the point it could support itself in 2008. From there I was solo for a couple years, and then started slowly adding team members as the need arose. We started with web design, then moved into marketing, advertising, Inbound marketing and CRM / business automation.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

Wake up, quick reflection/meditation, review goals, prep for the day, head to the office, check emails, dedicated work time on projects, meetings as necessary, lunch, sales meetings & presentations, emails and return calls, Prospecting calls, Head home for dinner, family time till 10, off to bed by 11.

4. What's the most recent significant leadership lesson you've learned?

Be very clear on expectations and ask your team to confirm details (repeat back) of your agreements after each meeting. Always encourage your team to come to you with recommended solutions whenever they present a problem.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Traction by Gino Wickman helped me setup a structure for the business and better clarify expectations. The biggest win was creating dashboards and scorecards to help us identify issues at-a-glance, and keeping a regular cadence of working "on the business" and staying on track with our goals.

6. How do you build leadership capacity in an SME?

Making sure everyone is solving their own problems as much as possible, and giving your people authority to make their own decisions is essential. There are limits of course, and I expect to be kept in the loop, but I can't be the bottleneck in serving clients.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader of an SME so far?

Watch your internal culture closely and remove/resolve bad-fits as quickly as possible. We had a member of our leadership team who was combative and argumentative, and generally unhappy in their job. It took us far too long to remove them from their position. It was painful when we let them go (they had been essential to our growth in the early days), but the entire culture opened up after we got rid of the negative influence. Our productivity went way up and it was a joy to come into work again.