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OPINION: When people ask me what a professional director does, I tend to list three main things.

First, appoint a great CEO and lead him up or out. Second help in defining the strategy and monitoring its implementation. Third, maintain regulatory oversight of finances, risks, health and safety, compensation, and employees.

Of these three buckets, my guess is that the first is the most critical to growth. Appointing a great chief executive has the greatest potential for adding value and building culture, but appointing a bad one can be detrimental to both.

What makes a great CEO for a company also depends very much on what stage a company is in. Few managing directors have the legs to lead a company from start-up to a mature growth company.

CONTINUE READING:
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* Cloud software company Vend continues its hiring campaign while US business is booming
* From Vend to Populate: Kirsti Grant’s “bold” goals

That’s what concerns me at the moment as I’m currently looking for a new Chief Executive at Garage Project. Garage Project is one of the largest independent craft breweries in New Zealand and Australia and is dedicated to delivering breathtaking experiences with artfully made beer.

If you’ve tried Affogado Stout or Pernicious Yuzu Weed; then you know it’s dead serious

Kevin stent / stuff

Mike O ?? Donnell is a company director looking for a great CEO.

Our current CEO has been with us for four years and has done an excellent job building the company; But now he wants to take a breather and spend more time consuming products than producing them.

Ten years after three guys brewed 24 brews in 24 weeks in a draughty garage, Garage Project is now brewing a few million liters of beer a year and bringing more and more over the ditch.

We are now looking for a chief executive who is able to take over a company that is already growing but has the ability to add scalability and reach while also letting the creative spark shine; so that the growth curve can become steeper.

Russell Reynolds talks about three types of CEOs – attack chiefs who focus on growth, fortification chiefs who defend a patch, and Genesis chiefs who create new markets. I think more of startup bosses, product market fit bosses and scale bosses. And Garage Project is now about scaling. That and the intensive discussion with employees and fans.

The retail software platform Vend recently sold for $ 455 million. A handsome sum for a 12 year old local software-as-a-service company. In these 12 years, Vend went through three managing directors. All very different, but each suitable for the company at the time.

Vaughan Fergusson was the founder and first managing director. The disrespectful introverted Fergusson came up with the idea for Vend while taking a solo bike ride from Bluff to Cape Reinga. Then he built it with his bare hands.

Monique Ford / stuff

Brewing the perfect managing director: Garage Project produces a few million liters of beer a year and is now looking for the next man to run the company.

With his signature mustache and inflammatory sense of humor, Vaughan developed a run-through early on by blowing up cash registers and adopting green sneakers as a company wardrobe.

A few years later, Alex Fala took over the helm. With a background that spanned 10 years at global management consultancy McKinsey and three years as Head of Strategy at Trade Me, Fala refined and perfected the product / market fit of the Vend offering.

Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, Fala went deep rather than wide, putting a commercial filter on footprint and expansion. Sensible growth in the markets that worked, instead of growth at any price.

A few years ago Ana Wight took over the management. Wight came to the gig with government to government and government to business experience. After previously holding positions at Spark and Microsoft where scalability was everything, the board saw her as the person who got the company to a point where it was optimized for sale.

Then there is the exception that proves the rule. The founder who is able to grow and scale with the company but in a way that all the staff bring.

Here in New Zealand, the company that embodies this is the hair and beauty platform Timely. Timely was founded eight years ago by Ryan Baker, Andrew Schofield and Willy Berger. Baker took over the helm as founder and managing director.

Having previously worked with Ian Taylor of Animation Research to develop BookIt and sell it to Trade Me, Baker had some idea of ​​what kind of corporate culture he wanted to build. and was ready to support himself to do the rest.

As Chief Executive, Baker led the company from three employees at home to 125 employees on two continents and served over 18,000 companies in over 70 countries. And recently it also sold for over $ 100 million.

The remarkable thing about Baker is that as CEO he has grown with the company. The key to this was not to get cocky. Every year when he did his performance review with the board, his opening question to the board was, “Am I still the right person to run this company?”

Put that on the table at the start of a year in review and it will put things in a different perspective. As my old chairman Peter Chrisp likes to say; Trust binds us, honesty frees us. In Baker’s case, it sparked a wide-ranging discussion that meant that nothing was out of the ordinary. This, along with his humility, has been key to Timely’s success.

Perhaps that is the cornerstone of the search for the next General Manager for Garage Project. Humility and honesty must be the key.

Mike “MOD” O’Donnell is a professional director, writer and strategy advisor. While this is MOD’s personal opinion, he is the chairman of Garage Project and the past chairman of Timely.