Hello everybody, I'm an IT project manager in a large international company with over14 years of working experience in IT industry. Besides, I have over 4 years of experience in general
Career path advice - from an IT project manager to an entrepreneur, CEO
Answers
Hi Winnie. Here is a general rule of thumb: The closer you can get to bringing in revenue for a company, the closer you can get to the top of a company and the more influence you will have. This may not be true everywhere, but it is generally true. For a new company, the first thing you want to do is get clients/customers. If you cannot do this, your company won't last long and everything else is irrelevant.
Back to your question: You want to be CEO of your own company (meaning you own it, or at least part of it) - so what is the best path? Well, generally you will need to learn sales, because without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company. You can hire a competent book keeper when you first start a company (and part time at that), but it is much harder to hire a good sales person. Also, without sales knowledge, how do you negotiate skillfully with anyone? Furthermore, if your good sales person leaves, it is much harder to replace them in a small company than it is to replace a competent book keeper (many temp agencies can help with this). Strong finance knowledge comes into play when the company gets larger and you have money to strategically utilize... but first you have to get that money... so back to sales.
Please note that I am assuming we are talking about small companies here. This means you want your initial people to be classed as "jack-of-all-trades" to some extent because the small team will have to fill all roles until you can generate enough money to grow and hire specialists for specific areas... so again we need money, and we come back to sales which definitely should be in that general mix of skills for "jack-of-all-trades" for a small company.
I hope this helps.