What Outsiders Bring

Though most start-ups and small companies won’t be able to get an experienced media conglomerate president right off the bat.

But it never hurts to ask. There’s a vast pool of university professors, retired corporate executives and other business entrepreneurs who willing to serve on boards if asked. Look at the following boards:

Bethesda Softworks has Leslie Moonves, President & CEO, CBS Corporation, Harry E. Sloan, Chairman & CEO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Robert S. Trump, President, Trump Management, Inc. Stormfront Studios recruited Tony La Russa, the manager of the St Louis Cardinals Baseball Team, and Seth Williams, formerly of Paramount Television Group, New Line Cinema among others. Limelife asked Terry Wheeler, the former President and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) and the former President of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA).

If it sounds like name dropping, it is. Each of those names has a huge amount of business experience, contacts and networks behind it. Unlike a board completely composed of company owners and employees, these businesses chose to attract a wide range of expertise to help guide them forward. They stand outside the corporate politics and are free to ask very tough questions of those that bring them information. Their experience brings a refreshing energy and solid ideas to a company.

Upgrading Executives

The executives are like game leads. They are a company’s think tank, architects of its design, guardians of its focus and cheerleaders. They also must be a company’s conscience, using clear eyes to bring the truth, both good and bad to the forefront. Drawn from the main prongs game development they often include programming, art, production, sound and design. It goes without saying that the team needs a business development executive, someone who’s sole job it is to bring in the customers, be they publishers, venture capitalists, government grants, advertisers or end users.

Equally important, though often dismissed, are finance and operational executives.

Every company must have its financial geek. The Financier, often a called a CFO, is not an accountant, just as a programmer is not the chief engine architect. A successful company must spend the same amount of time and energy on their money as they do on their main product. And the expert running the finances should be as talented. She or he must create a financial model which is the economic engine of a company. At any moment the CFO must be able to give a true picture of how much money a company has, what it’s spending it on, where it potentially will be in three, six and nine months, and what assumptions lie under those predictions.

Every company also needs to have its operational geek. Legal philosophy, human resources, marketing, facilities, IT and a host of other structures grow within a company regardless of whether or not someone is guiding them. Successful companies think about how they implement each one instead of allowing their budgets and policies to sprout in the wild, getting them to all work together instead of undercutting each other and creating possibilities for endless rework. Operations mirrors production. Though game development can survive without production, it doesn’t thrive. So the last role that needs to be filled on any executive team is operations.

As the saying goes, size doesn’t matter. A company exists to make money; otherwise it would be a social club. It produces something somewhere by someone. All those “somes” need resource, time and legal management outside their duties. Therefore, tiny companies have financial and operational needs. Huge companies have more layers, spreading out the subsections of finance to support their various substructures.

Ultimately, the best chose to have one person at the helm of each of these business areas to provide consistent, strategic vision. What small companies don’t have is a single person filling these roles. Often time these are additional duties. Taking the time to recognize them as independent functions, finding someone with the skills and drive to do them and bestowing them with high level responsibility and power goes a long way to ensure success.

All executives, regardless of their specialty, must have a basic understanding of company economics and operations just as all leads fundamentally know how their specialties interact with the game engine. They have to know how to put a budget together and read a spreadsheet. Otherwise they make poor decisions.

An art leads know how to enlarge their textures without slowing the game to a crawl. Lead Designers must understand the fundamentals of scripting well enough to guide character behavior. In the same way, every executive must have a fundamental grasp of finances. They must understand what the real cost of an employee is including hiring costs, insurance and salary, what the financial relationship is to a day of slip in dollars and cents, and exactly what is generating the company’s profit at the moment and what will generate it in the next year.

Preparing For The Next Steps

A company doesn’t need a passionate businessperson at the helm, a robust and diverse board, and a talented executive corporate team to survive. Companies survive well enough without them all the time. What they fail to do is thrive.

Those at the top tier ground themselves first by defining these roles then recruiting the best people to fill them. Then they must take on the next challenge: pin pointing the focus. We'll visit that topic next month.