Matt Danner Named New Chief Operating Officer

As we continue to grow (we’ve added 5+ people in the last two months alone), we need to start establishing more of a leadership / management structure to help us do what we need to do in an efficient, productive manner at iThemes, PluginBuddy and WebDesign.com. For a while now, I’ve wanted to establish a Chief Operating Officer type of person that could be the “go-to” person when I’m out of pocket or busy attending to other things within our business.

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SolidWP Editorial Team
As we continue to grow (we’ve added 5+ people in the last two months alone), we need to start establishing more of a leadership / management structure to help us do what we need to do in an efficient, productive manner at iThemes, PluginBuddy and WebDesign.com. For a while now, I’ve wanted to establish a Chief Operating Officer type of person that could be the “go-to” person when I’m out of pocket or busy attending to other things within our business. To also help me with day-to-day leadership and strategic issues. As you might know, Matt Danner has been with us for over two years now (his anniversary was this month) and has grown immensely with us. He’s been a right-hand guy to me without having the official title or role …. in fact, many of our business friends already assumed he has been fulfilling this role for us. Matt’s a great problem solver. He understands the vision, direction and culture I’ve sought to implement here. He knows our team, our products, our business friends and our customer community extremely well. And overall, is just an outstanding human being who I’m fortunate to call friend. So after talking with our partnership and team leads, we’ve decided to officially name him as our Chief Operating Officer. I see him functioning much like a Chief of Staff operates — handling problems, being a buffer sometimes, and just helping stabilize things when I’m out of pocket. Here’s some of the main ways I see Matt helping me and his duties here specifically ….
  • Work with team leads on an ongoing basis to assist where they need help. (I want him to be a sounding board and partner with our team leads and our entire team like I have been and will continue to be.)
  • Be the first interview contact for potential new hires. (I envision him being the first person that interviews potential candidates and then gives a go-ahead for team leads to follow up. He’s got a good pulse on the right candidates and will help us save time and energy in that arena.)
  • Work with me and our team on crafting vision, objectives and achieving our goals.
  • Being a go-to person to help make decisions in the best interests of our team and business, internally and externally.
  • Handle conversations with potential partners, vendors, etc for the company. (I get a ton of partnership requests …. I will be steering many of them Matt’s way.)
  • Train and mentor team members and preserve and protect our company culture …. we have something amazing here and he’s been a huge part of it. Having Matt in this role is going to help me do this more and more. (In fact, he’s also our Chief Culture Officer.)
  • And of course …. other duties as assigned. 🙂
Adding leadership structure is going to be a big benefit for us and our community …. in particular it’s going to help stabilize and share the leadership responsibility of our growing company and allow me to do more of the things I need to be doing to steer this business in the right direction and cultivate the relationships we can leverage for maximum success. If you have any questions about the direction of our business, or just wanted to say congrats to Matt, please do so in the comments …. in the meantime, I’m really pumped to announce Matt as our new Chief Operating Officer to you today! [P.S. – Read more about the background story to Matt becoming COO on his blog here.]

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