While I won’t go into any detail for obvious reasons, I am currently the COO for technology at a MegaCorp. This wasn’t my aspiration in life of course. Like most of you, I started out as a college student that wanted to carve out a career of any sort. My aspirations were on Wall Street and I had dreams of investment banking. For a variety of reasons, that career path didn’t work out for me. Armed with a bachelors in Finance, I set out to make some money in well, anything, really.
During the recession after 9/11, I took a job in accounting to pay the bills. I quickly realized that a “month end close” was not for me. It was far too mundane and the career growth outlook wasn’t great. I transitioned into a Controller’s job at a startup. The daily work was light and monotonous. I had the choice of dying of boredom while reading the internet every day or trying to get involved in something else at work. Luckily, startups are heavy on problems and light on people. I was assigned the task of keeping track of the growing technology budget and my path in TBM was forged. The budget at the time was small (circa $30M a year), which meant we needed to stretch every dollar. I’d argue that TBM is more important in small shops as you need to know where every dollar is going. After gaining some level of knowledge at this job, I decided I needed to go to a bigger company for more responsibility (money).
My next role was at a fortune 100 company as the business manager for one of the smaller technology groups. Total budget was around $70m a year with the people and politics to make it interesting. It was here that I started learning how to do the job well. Like most disciplines, it pays to have someone that takes you under their wing. That can’t be just anyone. It has to be someone who knows how to “navigate the org” and can move your career. I was very fortunate to have this mentor. I was also somewhat fortunate when he was eventually fired and I was given his role. In TBM, your pay has more than a casual correlation to the amount of budget you manage. When in doubt about a role, weasel your way into one with the highest budget you can manage.
About ten years ago, I moved to a larger role (based on title but not much else) at a Fortune 500 company. This is where my career took off. Based on my desire to grow my career (make more money), I raised my hand for every opportunity available. I didn’t waste anyone’s time asking for raises, I just decided to get myself involved in so many things they couldn’t help but pay me. I effectively created key-man risk for the company knowing it would grow my career. The title of “Business Manager” slowly gave way to COO. Looking after the financials turned into running large programs. Keeping track of accruals turned into preparing for the board. In general, it’s been a fun ride. Am I Indiana Jones? No, but it pays well and has a future. I think I’ve picked up a lot of perspective on the role along the way. Now, I’d like to pass along that knowledge with this blog. I hope you can learn a few things that you can take with you into your role or your company. Let’s learn together. If I post something that’s absolute non-sense, call me out on it and we’ll turn this into the place for no bullshit talk about how to make better TBM decisions.