The Millionaire CEO

Lessons I Learned from My Millionaire CEO

After 3 years of working 10 meters away from his office

Joseph Mavericks
Entrepreneurship Handbook
6 min readNov 3, 2020

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My CEO spent nearly 10 years building his company. A few weeks ago, he sold it for $30 million. I have been part of our 30-people company for 3 years, and the small size of our offices made it easy for everyone to know each other and interact on a personal level.

I’ve talked personally to my CEO many times and have been in countless meetings with him. I’ve talked to him on the phone. My desk was never more than 10 meters away from his office, and his door was almost always open. He had this big window next to the door, so that you could aways see who was sitting with him at meetings.

In this article, I want to share 5 lessons I learned from his success story and him as a person.

Recognise the value of people

It was a bright Saturday afternoon right in the middle of last year. I was at home, relaxing, when I got a call from my CEO. I hesitated to take it, but I also knew that following the recent set of events at the company, he had to talk to me. I took the call. 10 minutes into the conversation, he asked me point blank: “Should I fire your manager?”

The answer was yes. It had been months and months of total mayhem at work, and the team dynamics were just not working. The main problem being the person in charge of the cohesion: the manager. It was nothing personal, it was a fact, everybody knew it, and it was starting to turn very ugly. Somebody had to do something.

I was expecting this call from my CEO, because I had sent him an email the day before, asking for a meeting. But I couldn’t believe he was literally asking me this question: “Should I fire your manager?”. We had a very open discussion about the whole situation, we explained everything to each other. It was honest, transparent, and at the end of the day my CEO made the right decisions, because he recognised the value of people.

He recognised that the 2 strongest components of the team (myself an another person), who had been here the longest and were performing the best, could not be sacrificed to bad management. What’s more, these 2 people were…

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Living with a purpose and improving myself is changing my life — I also make Youtube videos: bit.ly/3QAEXTm