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My first month as a CEO...in numbers


It's been a busy few months as I moved from a wonderful few years spent with the Photobox Group to becoming Chief Executive for Conosco.

Playing to my 'purple' nature, here are some simple numbers to tell the tale of my first month as a CEO:
  • 1 - organisational restructure
  • 0 - resulting redundancies
  • 4 - new members appointed to a newly-created Leadership Team spanning the UK and South Africa
  • 1 - tailored leadership skills course completed by the new Leadership Team
  • 20 - minutes that each leadership team member was asked by me to spend completing a self-analysis questionnaire
  • ~0 - the number of cynics asked to engage with the exercise
  • 1 professional lifetime - the time that the positive impact the individual questionnaire results that were presented to them will last on each of them (ask them, they agree.)
  • 62 minutes - the time it took us to escape from 'Escape Rooms' in London
  • 32 - the floor we ate lunch at in the Shard where we celebrated our offsite as a new Leadership team 
  • 7 - internal promotions
  • 7 - new career paths for those newly promoted members of the team 
  • 1 - new Personal Assistant...who reached their target career a little sooner than expected
  • 8 - the actual number of new career paths now that I'm counting properly
  • 1 - external hire
  • 7 - the days prior to joining that our new hire got in touch to tell us how excited he was to be joining
  • 6 - the number of women we have seen in a candidate pool for 3 more hires we're looking to make (a new business record - thank you Just IT and Sauce IT)
  • 1 - new business capability being readied for launch this month
  • 6 - new prospects interested in that new capability, pre-launch
  • 2 - new business partnerships formed (3rd on it's way soon...)
  • 702 - the number of views about a packet of mints
  • 20% - the prospective additional number of total client endpoints we've been asked to quote to support, in just the past 30 days
  • 1 - family happy to see 'Dad' enjoying his new life as a CEO
  • 9 - hours each weekday that I restrict my time spent working
  • 9 - hours, the same amount of time that I remind staff that I expect them to stick to working each weekday. Any longer and something is wrong.
  • 97.77% the new, higher pass rate our teams achieved on internal security awareness training to support our ongoing ISO27k standing
  • 911 my new favourite mode of transport
  • 8 - mph, said 911's average speed during my daily commute
  • 2 - weeks left until I visit our amazing South African team
  • 12 - donuts celebrating my first month anniversary
  • 1 - month of bad sleep as result of being constantly over excited and racing with ideas about the prospects and opportunities my team and I have ahead of us
  • 1 - completely different, personal business venture started in my spare time...thank you Conosco Board for being so open and visionary
  • 1 - blog post
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