I own a company with 12 employees with 2 other people and I'm technically the COO.
To be fair, there's only one company I'm involved with at the moment that has a cool CEO.
The guy is a Sicilian (don't ask if he's Italian "There's a difference Nintex!"), has a sort of mob boss accent and is cool to hang around with.
His workers tend to be nervous around him (he's their boss of course) and when everyone is seated and we visit to present something he always says: "Nintex, you have the floor".
After which he gives feedback immediately and it becomes a really interactive sort of thing.
It's a shame they are discriminated against in their field of engineering for being Italians.
"They always discriminate us Nintex. They won't say it to our faces, but they don't trust us to do their engineering"
"Especially the English, they're always rude, I don't like them. I like the Dutch you are all so very open and creative"
Otherwise company visits also show fun insights on how a company actually 'works' on the inside or rather doesn't work.
It's always weird to enter these big corporate buildings, end up in a meeting with management and learning that one of the 10 top global business in a certain field is a big mess with people who haven't got the slightest clue of what they are doing.
And the wife/nephew/son with no knowledge of anything has a ton of influence on the whole thing.
Me: "I won't bore you with the fundamentals of SEO but in short we can align your KPI's with analytics data and real-time recordings of your visitors and make improvements based on that data to increase conversion rates"
Director of marketing: "Sorry?"
Me: "KPI's, Key Performance Indicators. In other words, we can align your online marketing with your long term goals and work towards them across all your marketing channels"
CEO: "Goals? How does a website reach a goal?"
Director of marketing: "SEO? That's our Adwords right?"
Me: "[...] A website is like a goldfish. It has an average lifespan of 3 - 5 years before you have to get a new one and if you put it in a bowl and put it on your desk it won't go anywhere and people won't see it unless they walk into your office.
But did you know that goldfish in the wild are much larger and grow much older? In other words, if you give it a bigger environment to flourish and grow that same goldfish can become an important part of your marketing strategy and more people can see and find it. Especially when yours is the biggest in the pond called Google. But you have to take good care of it."
CEO: "Oooh! that's very interesting!"
Director of marketing: *furiously takes notes*
Me: "Now, someone heads to the pond and starts fishing. They're looking for your fish. So how do we get the fish to respond to the bait of the fisherman? How would you train your fish to get ahead of the other fish and bite first? What would you do?"
Director of marketing: "... errmmm ... get more fish so your chances increase?"
CEO: "Tell the fisherman where the fish is?"
Me: "You feed it the same type of bait the fisherman is using! In other words, your content on the website must contain the keywords that your visitors use to find specific products or services."
CEO: "WOW, that's brilliant!"
While a small business owner would ask me how local search differs, if tracking is GDPR proof and how we can better differentiate between global and local search queries.
There's one level worse than big dumb corporations which is massive [redacted] government. That's where you discover the 1% of the world population still using outdated versions of Internet Explorer.
Or better yet, IE11 set in the emulated IE6 mode.
