When someone asks you a question, “what book do you recommend me to read?”, first ask the question – “What are you struggling with?”

The books you read to find answers to the struggles you have in life stick better and are more meaningful.

One such book is rocket fuel. I knew about this book some time ago; in fact, I already had it in my library.

Ok, so the struggle I had or still have to some extend is about following up with people on their responsibilities. I like to inspire people and think that it should be fine. And when I had to put the cart back in the rails, again and again, it somehow used to drain my creative energies.

Remember that my first company scaled, I became good at putting processes in place, but I was not running those processes, and I always felt that it was not my forte to do what I know as “row, row, row… ”

My struggles always lead to great discoveries, and this time, my search lead me to the book Rocket Fuel, and then I took the Crystallizer Assessment, and these were my results!

Ok, now that I know, I can work towards improving them!

My immediate reaction after this and reading the book was, “hmm… I need a COO. I had already implemented the OKR system in UPilot in 2019, and after the 1st two quarters, it had slid and was not updated! I had a call with Aaron McArdle, who told me about his success with Traction tools in his company. He was generous to show me how he implemented the system in his company.

I signed up for it, then a few other systems, the traction tool solution online was quite ok, but the UX is so terrible, I know I will not use it for long.

Then I went back to my regular method of mastering a subject, look at the top people in the domain, and model them. So I created a list of the top 3 COOs of saas companies. It looked like this..

David Sacks is someone I like to listen to more than to Sherly, and I had heard to him before, so I decided to dig a little deeper there, and there it was, a podcast and Medium article on The Cadence. I instantly translated it to a workbook.

Now I have the toolset to overcome my weakness. What remains is the understanding of the perfect mindset and acquire some skills in that area. I also reached out to Greg and told him that I would need his support in the cadence aspects of sales and support, and he agreed to it.

It does not mean that we won’t have a full-time coo role one day in UPilot. It only means I will have a perfect understanding of who it should be before and make a move.

I am beginning my journey a lot more inward, and the first months have been super rewarding.

Amazon affliate link to the book Rocket fuel