If you are not part of the inner-club forget you are going to be someone that do tasks but will not be consider to participate on the strategical discussions, even if your position should be involved they will just communicate what they want to be done and that is it. Another issue here is the fact that this is small company where people want to be very burocratic about how to approach C-level people and how to communicate internally. Too much politics going on in a small company like this.