The GM role is a tough but transformative one
Everybody has an opinion about your product or your business
Everybody. But they don’t have the accountability
In a GM, or revenue generating role, you truly learn to move from theory to practice on so many things, including:
How to sort through the noise of everybody’s opinions: treating opinions like data that enable you to make the necessary tradeoffs and quality decisions that enable progress - not be consumed with them to the point you lose your north star,
How to spot value for your customers, colleagues, and business quickly: you don’t have an infinite bucket of money to play with and every dollar needs to be spent wisely - you need to invest in the right experiments, not implement every opinion that’s thrown at you, or
How scary it is to be responsible for keeping the doors of a business open, to be responsible for paying every single employee consistently and on time, or to be responsible for paying every bill to your suppliers or for licenses so things don’t stop working - you need to balance blue sky dreams with practical reality.
And the hard truth is…
No one ever teaches you these things to prepare you for being in this seat. Sometimes not even after you get this role and you have to learn it all by trial and error
I was lucky enough to learn these hard truths from the age of eight when I went through the whole lifecycle of starting up, managing, and shutting down my family’s hospitality businesses over a period of 15 years - all because my migrant parents couldn’t speak English as well as their kid who also didn’t speak English until she started school at the age of five… 🤦🏼♀️
The GM role is a lonely place to be
Especially when you need to deal with the people and politics that come with the job. If you want someone to work with you alongside this journey, to teach you the things that would have been handy to know before you got the role…