From the Operator's Seat
Why I Stay Close to Operations as CEO
My personal view on why a technology CEO should remain close enough to customers, technicians and workflows to understand what is actually working.
By Damir Grubisa, CEO of Group 4 Networks ยท Executive perspective
A dashboard is not the business
As a company grows, it becomes easy for a leader to see the business mainly through reports, meetings and summaries. Those tools matter, but they can smooth over the friction that customers and employees experience every day. I still want to understand where work slows down, which issues repeat and where a process depends too heavily on one person.
Operations keeps strategy honest
A strategy can sound convincing in a presentation and still fail in daily use. Staying close to operations gives me a practical test: does this decision make service clearer, faster, safer or easier to manage? If the answer is not visible in the workflow, the strategy probably needs more work.
I do not need to do every job
Being close to operations does not mean becoming the bottleneck or solving every ticket myself. My role is to understand the system well enough to ask better questions, remove obstacles and give capable people clear authority. Leadership should create ownership, not collect every decision at the top.
Customer context changes technology decisions
Technology choices are rarely only technical. A small professional firm, a growing company and a regulated organization may need different levels of support, control and documentation. Direct exposure to those realities helps me avoid recommending a solution simply because it is new or impressive.
The goal is better judgment
I stay close to operations because it improves judgment. It helps me separate a real problem from a passing complaint, a useful automation from a novelty, and an urgent issue from an important long-term pattern. A CEO should see the whole business, but not from so far away that the details disappear.
About the author
CEO of Group 4 Networks. I write about what I am learning while building and operating technology businesses across managed IT, cybersecurity, automation and practical AI.