Christine Hopkins, CEO at ASCI, on Email vs Slack and CEO Focus

As your company scales past $1M in revenue, communication chaos quietly becomes one of the biggest drains on your time and your team’s execution.

Having helped 40+ CEOs and fuel millions in revenue growth, in the next 60 seconds I’ll help you decide where work should live so nothing important slips through the cracks.

In a recent Wisdom From Wizards conversation, I spoke with Christine Hopkins, CEO at ASCI Family of Companies, about a deceptively simple question: would you rather have 1,000 unread emails or an empty inbox with 50 Slack threads?

Her answer reflects what strong operators instinctively understand. Not all communication is created equal. Quick questions, fast context sharing, and back-and-forth clarification belong in Slack or Teams. That’s where speed matters and visibility is shared.

But tasks are different. Tasks require ownership, follow-up, and completion. When tasks live in chat threads, they disappear. They get buried under new messages, reactions, and side conversations. Email, when used intentionally, creates a natural forcing function. It signals responsibility and makes work harder to ignore.

For CEOs leading teams in the $1M to $5M range, this distinction matters more than ever. Growth stalls when execution becomes noisy. Clarity returns when communication has rules.

The takeaway is simple. Use chat for conversations. Use email for commitments. Your inbox should not be empty. It should be intentional.