Make Money. Have Fun.

What four words taught me about business, people, and clarity.

What’s the most memorable thing a CEO ever taught you?

For me, it was four words:

“Make money. Have fun.”

That was the entire vision statement of one of the best CEOs I ever worked for. No paragraph-long mission statement. No corporate language that required an explanation. Just four words that everyone could remember and understand.

Make Money

We weren’t there just to stay busy. We had customers to serve, margins to understand, cash to manage, people and equipment to invest in, and a return to produce. The company needed to make money.

And our CEO paid attention to whether we were doing it.

Every month, he reviewed the companywide bonus calculation to make sure the results were where he expected them to be. There were several steps behind the calculation, and he knew it well. If something looked out of place, he wanted to know why. That day.

That meant going back into the details, understanding what drove the number, confirming the accounting treatment, and getting him an answer that was both quick and accurate. None of us wanted to be the person who went back to him without knowing the answer.

He knew the business well enough to recognize when the financial results didn’t match what he expected to see. If the numbers didn’t make sense, we had to understand why.

That expectation influenced the way I came to view financial leadership. Financial statements can tell you what happened, but good financial leadership has to understand the business behind those numbers. What was happening with margins? Where was cash going? Was inventory moving the way we expected? Were the decisions being made throughout the business creating value?

Those are finance questions, but the answers rarely live only in the accounting department. They live in purchasing, operations, engineering, sales, inventory, production scheduling — everywhere decisions are made.

We made money while he was our CEO.

But what I remember most about him was how seriously he took the other half.

Have Fun

He wanted work to be a cheerful place. People smiled. We talked about our weekends, sports, our families, and whatever else was going on outside the office. And he joined in.

One of my favorite things was watching him walk around the company talking with people — not just the executives. He’d stop and talk with the security guard, the facilities team, people in the plant, and employees throughout the organization. He knew people, and people knew him.

The memory that probably captures him best, though, happened outside the office.

At our company Christmas parties, he and his wife would make their way around the room and sit down at every table. They didn’t just stop by for a handshake or a quick hello. They sat down and talked with employees and their spouses about whatever they wanted to talk about — work, family, Christmas, life. They didn’t leave until everyone had an opportunity to say what they wanted to say.

My wife still remembers it. She once told me that she had never seen a CEO be that open and friendly with his team. Years later, she still tells me she wishes he were my CEO again.

He wasn’t working the room because somebody told him CEOs should be visible. That was simply how he treated people. The same CEO who expected the company to make money genuinely enjoyed spending time with the people who helped make it happen — and their families.

And none of that lowered the expectations. Problems still had to be solved. Customers still had to be taken care of. Deadlines still mattered, and the business still had to produce results.

“Have fun” wasn’t permission not to perform. It was part of how we performed.

Four Words Everyone Could Understand

What strikes me now is how little explanation those four words required.

Make money. Have fun.

We knew the business had to perform, and we knew the people doing the work mattered.

I’ve seen organizations spend a great deal of time developing vision and mission statements that few people inside the company can repeat. Ours was different. Four words were enough to tell us what mattered.

There’s a lesson in that beyond the words themselves.

Businesses are complicated. Leadership doesn’t make that complexity disappear. But good leaders can make the things that matter most clear enough for people to understand them and act on them.

That CEO did.

Years later, those are still four of the most memorable words a CEO ever taught me:

Make money. Have fun.