The CEO of DriveCam explains how he reads clients and why his family comes second.
Bruce Moeller is the CEO of DriveCam, a $23 million company, based in San Diego, that sells and installs video recorders that monitor the behavior of commercial drivers. Here--in the first of an occasional series of essays by company leaders about how they spend their work hours--Moeller talks about his obsession with e-mail, his technique for reading clients and employees, and why he's chosen to put his family second.
The first thing I do when I get up--before I even go to the restroom or anything--I'll grab my BlackBerry and see what the issues are. Then I'll take it with me to the bathroom and go through all my e-mails. I get 80 or 100 a day, and I have to know what's okay or what isn't okay. Then I'll brush my teeth and take a shower. Some mornings it's a struggle to get dressed before you're writing back different e-mails on the BlackBerry.
I get to work about 7:30. I've had to really force myself not to read the BlackBerry while I'm driving, though I don't always even succeed at that. And I'm the guy that's supposed to be about driver safety.
When I get in, I put my PC, which I've brought from home, into the docking station. I'm compulsive about my e-mail. That's my primary communication with the rest of the enterprise. It's a one-to-many communication so it's more efficient.
Then I'll start walking around and going to visit each of my direct reports: marketing, sales, engineering, operations, finance. The COO and I also have a meeting that lasts half an hour or an hour every morning--it might be, there's a compliment about this level of service, or somebody dropped the ball on this. I might also meet with the CFO. We just raised a round--$28 million--so there's plenty of cash, but there might be a receivables issue. Usually he's just making me aware of issues so I see the little warning flags if someone's not paying. Sometimes he's escalating it to me, saying could you call their CEO and request the payment, or ask their COO under what conditions they could pay. It's really just what's going on in everyone's world; all of us debrief on anything that's new. This is a pretty fast-paced place. We joke here if you miss half a day you've got to get caught back up.
I'm a kind of hub-and-spoke guy, so it's me with this person or me with that one. But because of that hub and spoke, various guys were having difficulty communicating with each other. I'm feeling totally in the loop, of course, getting updates on everything and everybody, but it became apparent that the different functions might not be aware of what the others were doing. So I just agreed to do a meeting with my direct reports every week. We go off-site from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. We call it Tuesdays with Moeller.
I like to keep my schedule fairly open so that I can be in the moment with whatever the hot issue is--a customer problem or some opportunity. During the day I'll typically have only two or three scheduled meetings. I just like to be very fluid and to force the organization to stay externally focused. If you spend a lot of scheduled time, you get fooled into thinking you're working when you're just playing with each other on internal stuff. When you could've been externally focused on the marketplace.
I like one-on-one meetings anyway. I like to be able to read people, read their eyes, and probe if I'm sensing they're pulling back on something or afraid of something. I'm reading signals all the time. Group meetings are problematic because people perform for audiences. Especially with the CEO in the room, it hampers full-flowing conversation because people don't want to look stupid and you tend to get managed information. To combat that, I tell them you never shoot the messenger. Whatever you're feeling, you don't show it. By reacting emotionally you're putting a brand on that news, and you're subliminally shaping behavior. Even when I'm happy, I try to control my emotions. Otherwise I would be telling people not to come to me unless it's with good news.
I encourage free-flowing conversation with other little things, too. A lot of times I'll dress really casually and speak very casually with the employees, trying to be just one of the guys--of course, realizing that I'm not and they don't see me that way. I also have an open-door policy, and my office tends to be a gathering place. I put candy and nuts in here to encourage people to come in, grab a handful of M&M's, and communicate. Everyone here knows that even if there are three people in here talking about something, you can come in and join the meeting, too. If we're talking about marketing and you're an engineer, you might have a good idea. If someone walks in, especially if I think he would be interested or could enhance the conversation, I'll take a quick 60 seconds to update him on what we're talking about. And if he's not interested or doesn't have time to talk, that's okay.
I've always resisted having a secretary. I like to do all the stuff myself and not have somebody keep me insulated from anyone else. Unless I'm really busy, I do my own travel. Expense reports--that's the one liberty I do take. I don't do expense reports. I take all my receipts and walk them down to accounting and say, here, this is from a speech I gave in New Orleans. And that's as far as I go.
I'm almost fully digital, so there's no paper at all on my desk. I do have a little desk calendar with a different French word every day--last year, it was George Bush malapropisms--where I can jot down a name and number. But I'm not a big note-taker. I think it distracts from really listening to and absorbing what somebody said. If notes are required, I make sure our COO or somebody else is there to take them. I just listen, engage, and remember what the salient points are. I find I'd miss certain nuances of the inflection in the voice, or body language, if I were taking notes.
