Why we decided to look for a COO

We decided to plan the biggest change yet to our management team by looking for a COO to join quintly as soon as possible. So far it was Fred and myself running the company as founders from the first day to now. We have learned so much since we started quintly in 2010 and have gone through many different phases of the company, from good times with heavy growth to bad times with stagnation. The last two years haven’t been the easiest in our history as growth slowed and we needed to reinvent ourselves both from a product perspective as well as from a general company perspective, all while maintaining our profitability (we don’t have any external investors).

In times like these, we questioned our current roles that we hold as founders and came to the conclusion that it’s best to bring someone else to the core management team so that we can focus on our strengths to make sure we do the best for the company.

With this article, I want to share the reasons why we believe this is the right decision and what our plan is going forward.

Broadening leadership

We have never been born leaders but learned the ins and outs of leadership in the last 9 years while building up quintly. Therefore we needed to learn a lot which slowed us down and created a bottleneck for the company. By bringing more leadership experience to the team, we believe that we can develop much faster as a company and also create an environment where everyone in the team can grow to the best version of themselves.

Focusing on where we are best

We started the company as builders and we were always best when we could work on the product and be really close to customers and prospects. As the company grew, our leadership and management roles took more and more of our time and it reduced our focus on the product and customers. As I thought about my personal goals, it became clear to me that managing more and more people is not my main motivation, but having the best product and serving the customers best is. Therefore Fred and I want to have enough time to go work with our team to speed up the development. Fred will be focusing mainly on our product development while I will be spending the biggest portion of my time with company growth, working really close with prospects and customers. I’m a big believer that doing a few things perfect brings much more value compared to doing a lot of things in a shallow way.

Spending more time on company strategy

Together with the focus mentioned above, we also want to spend more time on strategy and making sure that we are moving the company in the right direction. We know our market for nearly 10 years and by having more time to think about positioning and our value proposition, we will be in a much better position to take the right long-term decisions.

Freeing us from operational responsibilities

In the last years, I have been leading many of our operational teams like finance, people/HR and general company backend services. As the company grew, these areas became really important, but in the end, I could not fulfill my management responsibilities in the best possible way because of limited time.

What do we expect from a COO?

We believe that broadening the core management team can help us with all these points and that’s why we are looking for a COO to join the team as soon as possible. The future COO will take responsibility from our shoulders and will help us run the company smoothly together with our circle/team leads, for whom we are really grateful as they push hard for moving us forward. Having someone join the “Geschäftsführung” will be of great help and it will share the core responsibilities of running the company. We believe that this is the best decision for ourselves and especially for the company.

What does this mean for our customers?

There will be no direct effect for our customers, but if you are one of them you can expect to see us more often and be more confident with a much faster pace on product development. We believe that our customers are one of our most valuable assets that enable us to continue to build a great company with a great team. Therefore we want to make sure they get as much of our attention as possible.

quintly is positioned in a very unique spot in the market as a specialist in social media analytics and we believe that we have the right strategy for a very promising future. That’s why we are really excited for the years to come and for shaping the company with a slightly different setup.

You can find the job description here and if you are interested or know anyone, it would be great if you get in touch with me directly.

I’m personally looking forward to the quintly years to come and to learn even more.