I’m often asked what the hardest part of being a CEO is.
You might think right off the bat that it’s the huge responsibility of leading a company – keeping both the people side and the business side afloat – that keeps me up at night. After all, business is tough and people can be even tougher.
But what I’ve found time and time again in my time as both a founder and CEO of a startup and now the leader of a larger company is that what’s most important to me is that we live daily by our values. This was something that became even more clear to me during my time at The Walt Disney Company, an organization of people that infuse their values of happiness, magic and customer centricity in nearly every single thing they do.
At Softonic, after a time of some significant tumult, we began the exercise of re-examining who we are as a company and what we believe in. In some cases, this reexamination leads to an actual reinvention of the way we do things. In others, we simply needed to re-affirm what was important to us. A topic that came up, again and again, is values.
Corporate Values is a concept that is often written off as corporate fluff. For me, nothing could be further from the truth. A company without values is like a person without principles. If you’ve nothing to guide you in your decisions and steer you in the right direction you’re basically lost. So values are not a nice to have but rather an imperative for life and business.
I’ll give you an example. Shortly after Softonic suffered some serious setbacks in 2014, I joined the company and began looking closely at how we do things. Softonic had been extremely successful as a company and had done a lot of things right. But we also needed to own up to some truths about our business that weren’t very comfortable.
The main uncomfortable truth was that our most lucrative source of revenue, the Softonic Downloader, was caught up in some practices that were not good for our customers and ultimately undermined what our company is all about: helping people accomplish their goals through technology.
On my very first day as CEO, I discontinued the product. It led to an immediate and painful drop in revenue, but this was a huge “value check” for us.
It was a scary and risky move, but it showed us that we can balance living our values with growing as a business. Within a few months, we restored the company towards profitability, but even more importantly, we took the first steps towards restoring our brand and reputation.
Softonic was founded in 1997. 20 years later, Softonic is still here. We’ve won. We’ve lost. We’ve grown. And we’ve learned.
What we can take away from all of this is that a strong adherence to who we are as an organization is important not only to be able to sleep at night but also to ultimately be successful.
Transparency is important to our users, to our clients and to our business partners so it must be important to us. There is no choice there.