What happens if you switch places with a fellow CEO, manage their employees and live in their house for one week?
We’re about to find out. Seattle-based Moz CEO Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds — founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based SEER Interactive — will be doing a tech startup version of the ABC show Wife Swap for five days starting this Monday.
Yep, that’s right: Fishkin will call the shots at SEER, while Reynolds will do the same at Moz.
The friends are traveling across the country in opposite directions this weekend with their spouses and will soon arrive at each other’s respective houses.
Fishkin and Reynolds have agreed to share almost everything from their respective companies. They will swap calendars, emails and blogs, and even handle customer pitches.
The hope here is to inject new perspective into each other’s startups. Other than firing employees or making long-term strategic decisions, each CEO will be able to provide their expertise and share their thoughts to a brand new workforce.
Just like they do in Wife Swap, Reynolds just wrote up a list of rules for his buddy:
- Take out the garbage
- Client work first
- You will work at the Search Church and the Search Perch.
- Talk to clients as often as you can.
- Support F Yeah Friday
- Find out somewhere someone is volunteering that week and go with them
- Have fun
Fishkin compiled a similar list back in June, but more as groundwork for both of the CEOs. As for Fishkin’s specific requests for Reynolds?
“I’m hoping Wil can give a few product/engineering teams at Moz the benefit of his years in the field knowing exactly what kinds of reporting and investigation tools marketers at a scaling agency need,” he wrote.
And there might be one more …
@wilreynolds G just had a good idea. We should also swap paychecks this week :-)
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) October 4, 2013
I’m really excited to see how this experiment goes and how it benefits each company (or not). We’ll have more from the swap next week, so check back on GeekWire to hear from each CEO’s experience.
Editor’s note: Moz is an annual sponsor of GeekWire.
