Recently I’ve been thinking about hiring and managing a team on an almost daily basis. Metorik is still so young and new, but if things go to plan, I’ll likely be making my first hire in around 6 months. That’s a very scary thing to face when you’ve never hired anyone before. Fortunately, I do have some experience managing small teams and projects, so I’m not going into it completely in the dark. But there’s still so much to learn.

This article really spoke to me. I’ve had team members/leaders that I’ve admired because I know they could do the same work far better than me, and others that I hated working under because I knew they couldn’t.

Of course it’s unfair to expect a CEO to be able to carry out the duties of every single employee, but I think it’s important to only put managers in place that can do the work of those below them. I’m interested to hear how those of you in management/CEO positions feel about this and what you’ve experienced!

For a long time, I’ve demanded and admired company transparency. From Buffer’s transparency page to Baremetrics’ collection of Open Startups, I always watched from afar and thought to myself “if I ever have the chance, I’ll do the same”.

Of course, the actual level of information shared is up to each company. I don’t know if I’ll ever go as far as Buffer in terms of sharing employee salaries with the world, but I do plan on sharing employee salaries within the company. I don’t know if I’d post exact profit numbers, but I do plan on sharing revenue numbers. It definitely comes down to how comfortable you are as a founder and CEO, and a myriad of other factors like your competitors, company size, employee wishes and future plans.

But I am confident that the benefits of being transparent often outweigh the negatives, especially for startups, where the experience of building a company can often be quite lonely and scary. Having an audience helps, far more than most people probably believe.

So now it’s my turn. I’ve started a small blog & collection of milestones for Metorik. There’s not much there yet, as Metorik is just getting started, but you may find the two posts, Building in silence and The first 10 paying customers to be of value.