The Lucent Perspective

How to Effectively Scale - Leading Acquisitions and People

• Rebecca Hastings • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Are you looking at scaling your business through acquisitions? My special guest, Richard Quinn, is here to share strong insights about this subject. Richard has worked on seven acquisitions with a combined transaction value of $400m in a 3-year period. 


Some critical topics that Richard and I covered in this episode are:


  • When scaling through acquisition is the best option
  • Challenges and focus areas when scaling your company
  • What to look for in a company that you may acquire
  • What could be holding your company from scaling
  • Leadership qualities that you must cultivate now to scale your business


Richard is the Managing Director of Hahei Consulting Ltd. He was the Chief Operating Officer of Kpler, a fast-growing data analytics business of the commodity markets and has worked for Trustpilot and Wood MacKenzie. 


Episode Outline and Highlights


  • [02:10] Richard’s journey to the C-suite role.
  • [03:26] Key focus areas when scaling a company.
  • [08:41] Case Study - scaling up Trustpilot.
  • [13:58] What you need to focus on when scaling.
  • [17:00] Insights on mergers and acquisition - when is acquisition key?
  • [21:00] What are the things you should be looking for in a company that you might potentially acquire?
  • [24:30] How to proceed with a smooth integration during mergers and acquisitions.
  • [33:27] Insights on restructuring the leadership team. 
  • [39:40] Trust building, clarity, and setting of expectations.
  • [49:15] What could be stopping companies from scaling?
  • [57:09] Leadership qualities for someone who looks into scaling and acquiring.


About Richard Quinn

 
Richard Quin is an accomplished professional with a diverse and impressive career in the tech and analytics industry. As the COO of Kpler, he was responsible for leading critical functions across the business to ensure smooth operations and continuous improvements. Prior to that, Richard served as Chief of Staff for Trustpilot a customer review platform in which he contributed to strategic transformations of the business leading to growth ahead of their London listing in 2021. Richard's expertise in scaling operations and driving business growth has made him a sought-after advisor and consultant.



Rebecca Hastings, Founder and Director at The Lucent Group

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hastingsrebecca/

Would you like to be a guest? Book a time to speak with Rebecca: https://calendly.com/rebeccahastings/discovery-call

The Lucent Group Ltd website - https://www.thelucentgroup.co.uk/

The Lucent Perspective website - https://thelucentperspective.com/

Rebecca has extensive talent and executive search experience supporting digital and technology businesses through complex changes and fast-paced scale-up periods. She works with businesses advising on C-level, technical, sales and commercial appointments, workforce planning, strategic talent management, recruitment processes and associated technology and employer brand development.

Unknown:

Welcome to the Listen perspective. I'm your host, Rebecca Hastings. I've spent over a decade working with executives in the tech sector, and help successful companies build their leadership teams and scale. During my career, I've been lucky to have the privilege of learning from many exceptional leaders. In these conversations, you'll get perspectives from peers, be inspired, and learn what it takes to become one of the best. This is your chance to listen to experts talking about the challenges, solutions, and the vital insights they've gained in their careers to date. diversity of opinion, diversity of background and experience is what I think builds the greatest and most successful team. But it needs to be a team that is sufficiently consolidated that they can actually work together and they can't just be pulling in completely different directions, otherwise, you won't make any progress. I'm joined by Richard Quinn. Until recently, Richard held the role of Chief Operating Officer at Kepler, which is a fast growing data and analytics business serving the commodity markets. Prior to this, he was the chief strategy officer. And he led a strategic transformation of the business which opened up new areas of growth. Interestingly enough underpinning the firm's first fundraising, which was $200 million. Prior to kappler, Richard was Chief of Staff for Trustpilot, the customer review platform there, among other things, he was responsible for helping to develop and implement Trustpilot strategy ahead of their London listing in 2021. And before that, he worked for Verisk analytics and wood, Mackenzie and a number of senior roles, devising and executing strategy, undertaking m&a, and leaving some quite substantial teams there. So I'm super excited to have Richard as a guest. And I think there's loads that we can learn from him about leadership, mergers and acquisitions, and scaling businesses. Richard, obviously, you've had a career that involves some really fast growing and rapidly evolving companies. Tell me, first of all, a little bit about your journey to the C suite so that people have that context. Thank you very much for the introduction, Rebecca, it's a pleasure to be here. My my journey to the C suite as many people it's not a linear straightforward, and one role leading to another there have been periods where there was the opportunity to see ahead. And so I think of my early years, there was a bigger a team's bigger teams more responsibility and complexity. But there was a pivotal moment at Wood Mackenzie, where I went from an A leading functional teams to working with the CEO of that business. And the transformation there of perspective, if you like, was to go from one part of the business and understanding it to understanding all parts of the business and how you bring those elements together. And that role of wood Mac supporting this chief executive, now then opened doors into various Analytics, which you know, refined my approach to how do you tackle strategy formation? Now, what does execution really mean? And particularly m&a, and unveiling my first C suite roll into Trustpilot? Allow me to bring together those two pieces of the puzzle, how do you help run a business? And what does growth look like? And how do you accelerate it, I guess it would be good to like find out a little bit more about your insights around scaling, transactions and leadership, as I've said, so first of all, I'd like to start with scaling. There's a couple of companies you've worked in, that have scaled, so it'd be great to know first of all a bit about the kind of like, common obstacles you saw. And any warning signs, the leader who's listening to this could be vigilant for their company. Greed and scaling is one of the buzzwords of the industry, and something that all companies are looking to do where you know, you deliver more product that are more efficient, right than you previously did. That at a really tactical level that is often hard to define and describe. And so when as a leadership team, you are looking to scale and given the challenge to scale by the board. And then one of the first steps is what what does that really mean for us? Right, as we as we think about the next hire, is the best way to get somebody into sales. Is it better to get someone into into technology and engineering? Where is the greatest opportunity to scale across our organization? And, and often it's it's very unclear where there that scale can come from. And particularly when you think of all divisions will be asking for more people, and you need to break the cycle of more people delivers more growth. And that because that is a classic mindset. Know, that then leads them to the challenge of how do you determine the priorities? You know, there will be like all the businesses to hundreds good priorities, and you need to be able to whittle that down to a manageable number that actually allow them to Make the definition of a priority, and that you can't do everything immediately. You know, not everything will deliver the same benefit, though some will be fixing a hole in your your back office, some will be opening up a new market or a new product. Which of those is more important? And which gives you confidence to scale sooner. And that is that is not a straightforward question. And that they need leads to alignment around that, does the business really work together? To deliver that? Yeah, totally. And it's great to hear you say that more people doesn't always deliver growth. Because there's companies that I've worked with over the years, they think they're scaling because they're throwing bodies at the problem. They're not getting any, like, increase in productivity, that's more that like, you know, it's above the regular proportion, it becomes a little bit linear. And I think people think that that's, you know, like quite a bit of success attached to having a big team rather than, you know, the opposite of how could I have done that with fewer people, because that would be more cost effective, probably faster sometimes. And more more, more people means longer communication chains, more complexity, more buy in. At the same time, more people brings diversity of opinion. And so new expertise. And so if you're entering Asia, having someone who has been had lived through that experiences is absolutely critical. So, so some some new employees and new people to the business is a very logical addition and others is much more difficult to determine how that's going to fit in and how that's going to add to the growth. And the other thing that shone through to me was really, that kind of like strategic prioritization. And I think like when you're busy, is it's easy to forget to do those things. But you know, before you're adding headcount to things, I guess it's always good to think, what's the beyond? What's the purpose of the role? What's the business needs, you know, how does this enable growth? But then, how does this enable me to go faster and better than any of my competitors and gain some kind of advantage? ingredient. And then there's a real balancing act between prioritizing down to three to five things that you think are worth investing in and putting people in time and effort and focus behind without losing the flexibility to deal with market change. Right? And depending on the nature of the business, things can come and go in their enthusiasm? And is this really going to deliver what we imagined it to? And so what you're not, you need to create an opportunity to come together and deliver on the plan without losing flexibility that you can adapt to a regulatory change or competitor does something, and you need to be able to respond to that. So it's not a determining the strategy to how do you deliver on a goal needs to be really flexible and constantly reevaluated. So that you know, he spent enough time making progress on a new product development, versus no, flip flopping so much that you never get anything done. And then there's visible magic. And then when you're at Trustpilot, one of the things that we discussed was how you helped really like scale their sales and marketing operations. And like, I would say that what you did there is true scaling. So can you tell me a bit about that? And what happened there? Yeah, the the businesses an enormous and a factory of data if you like. So it was collecting consumer reviews across 1000s of different businesses by 10s of 1000s of consumers, and organizing that information internally, not just for consumers to understand the review profile of a particular vendor that they might be interacting with, but making it available to the sales force, so that they call the right business at the right time to effectively help someone they know the customer to scale right. Now, when does a customer who's currently collecting 10 reviews a month, but they think they can get to 30? At what point do you call them to say we can help you take that jump from 10 to 30? Is it a 15? Or is that a 27 reviews a month? And so the internal data and analytic tools that were built was partly around dashboards that allow prospects to be high graded across all geographies where, you know, you would put in front of a sales executive and the best 10 companies to call and then that was meeting though each of those customers each of those prospects would be at the right stage in the room. purity and the use of the free version of the product to then be able to convert into a paying customer. So it was bringing in unearthing that information to effectively empower ourselves to be more effective. The second piece of the puzzle was a simplification of what we were selling. And the sort of the ethos of that project was, how do we make it simple to buy and simple to sell. And they previously, there was lots of iterations of the product and there was complexity where the modules were in or out. And now am I going to be able to get automatic reviews collection at this scale in this geography, and our new packaging and pricing took away a lot of that complexity, it was a lot more transparent to the customer of what they were actually getting for a particular price point. It better matched and know the range of businesses that Trustpilot serve, whether they be, you know, very, very small businesses where there are no two employees, all the way through to large enterprise global businesses with hundreds of 1000s of employees. And the product was adaptable to their, in the way that we sold, therefore scaled alongside those. So it just it just transformed. And over time to acquire a new kind of paying customer win from many, many days and often weeks to months down to and we improve that to two hours, in many cases. Amazing. That's the salesperson stream, when they really got on to it, and you worked out how to do two lives if it made them a lot more effective. So yes, the Commission's Commission's are bolstered in the process, but I'm sure that makes you very popular simplifying processes is, I sometimes think, much harder than make than overcomplicating them I completely agree with and it's no by the definition of simplifying, it's actually not simple at all. And so therefore, how do you do it effectively? How do you design to the majority not to the very low the all of the the exceptions to the rule, there are things in there that you can, you can follow, but it's often takes a lot of common sense to make work. Yeah. And it's not just about having access to the data, and the data being good. Or as simple as knowing how to analyze like, like being able to analyze the data, I think it's sometimes about knowing the right questions to ask, in an ever changing environment. That's really tough. I completely agree with you. I think the other part of it and I this wasn't my responsibility. But no, there was a gentleman who was incredibly effective at doing this was effectively treating our own sales team as the customer. Now how do you put an internal product in front of them, that they have been part of the journey of designing it, they have been part of the journey of how, so that they feel empowered, rather than being given an yet another software tool that they've got to use. And then the resistance to using internal tooling was, was often pretty high, because it was seen as being. And I've got to fill in more data into Salesforce, for example, one of many, this was this was a real stakeholder management piece to get them buy in, rather than just thrusting any new product and saying, use this, this will be making more effective. That was both insulting and you know, we needed their input into making it work. And there was a particular gentleman who I won't name who did that incredibly well, at interacting between two parts of business, those building and creating the internal product and unearthing the data and then working with the Salesforce global organization to make that actually work. Interesting. So, overall, you know, scaling is not simple, what would be the main thing that you would advise a company to watch out for or to focus on? Christian? I think you're trying to strike the balance between having a healthy debate around what is the best thing to do? So anything that looks like false harmony is something to be really mindful of, nor do you want misalignment to, to provide when nothing gets done. So you're looking for creating an environment where the senior team and then everybody who does does all the real work is able to see that there has been a healthy debate around should we do A versus B, we've decided to go for B, right, let's all get behind that. And so creating an environment where there is no distinct differences of opinion and that's entirely healthy. And Patrick Lencioni has described this as healthy, which the reason why I'm using that word of how do you create that trust and humility across your senior people, so that they can say look, I don't understand why that would be the right thing. Please help me with with why you think Why you're so committed to that. And then person not feeling that as a personal attack, but actually just an intellectually rigorous discussion of one one option versus the other? Yeah, it's and I think it's often overlooked in terms of attributes and leaders is that ability to have dialogue rather than just communicate that they're totally different skills. But they're, you know, easily confused. Completely. And bleeding in business is all about really driving change. And, and fundamentally delivering change meets resistance by people who, who perceive or are right, and recognizing that change will mean loss, right, it'll be a loss of influence, or a loss of control or an idea job needs to change. And they're quite comfortable working with exactly how they're operating. And that my example of using the sales people, they were a key stakeholder in delivering the scaling of, of that operation. Why because they were quite happy operating with their existing process. Right, they didn't want to have to work in a different way, they needed to be gently given the opportunity to make that transition into a new way of hydrating who they call and their prospect less than I mean, he thought they were very good at it. And they know some of them were, but as their has an enterprise and an organization, and we needed the majority to transform in the way that they identified who's who they should call in at the right time. And in all of this is a transformation of the organization. And there are always 100 reasons why change is sort of resisted by by individuals at the C suite, or the masses who don't understand or resistant to it. So moving on, like while you were at various GMAC and Kepler, you were involved in a lot of strategic m&a activity. I think at one point during a three year period, you're involved in the acquisition of seven companies with a combined transaction value of $400 million, whilst also being involved in preparing for the sale of WetBag to various. And I know that more recently, you've been involved in more acquisition activity and more transactions. So it would be great to get your insights into the following. So like, first of all, when should a company seek to grow via acquisition? Because we've covered off the throwing bodies versus scaling? When When do you think acquisition is key? Good question. I think, particularly with the businesses that we were looking to buy from it is where, through m&a you can get access to assets faster, or faster, more quickly, more convincingly, or cheaper than if you were to build them. And now the data and analytic world that I've worked in for many, many years, there is often enormous value attributed to the historical aggregation of data over many, many years. So you know, you can't just restart being competitive in a new space, if you're missing the previous 20 years of commodity data or fiscal data in Algeria, or whatever the example might be. And so as as an m&a play, that would make him Verisk, we were looking for data assets that would were truly unique and proprietary. And the often, the only way to get access to them was to buy the business who had spent the previous decade or more building that data that was unique in the market. And when we when we spent a lot of time, discarding things that didn't meet their criteria. And if it doesn't have proprietary data, let's not do it. Now that that philosophy, and that strategic logic doesn't apply to every business. And certainly the m&a that we were doing at Kepler. We didn't follow that sort of routinely. No, that was the first year was partly our customer acquisition. And we were winning with a better product in the US market. That is going to take time. And each contract as it renews. You know, we might want it or we might not we were doing pretty well. Wouldn't it be better if we just by the competition and get it done and all in one fell swoop and that's the opportunity we so that was an acceleration point, rather than a proprietary data. And it turned out that clip a date ahead fantastic data that we ultimately benefited from by getting access to as well so so it's context is everything, right? There's there's no sort of, you know, we've had a certain size and scale. And part of the m&a is seeing it beyond just getting the deal done. Right. There's clearly an enormous excitement and enthusiasm and everybody wants to be involved in make the sexy bet of getting the deal done. And that's not where the value is. created. And I think the value is created in the months afterwards where you deliver on the plan of integrating intelligently. So things that are going to get you to your end goal faster and cheaper, but also kind of like give you that leap or something that propels you forward. I'm gonna classic individually uses analogies all the time, right. And so if you think about the ingredients of a cake, right, if this is the only place to get eggs, or flour or milk to bake your cake, well, then you find find a way of doing that, rather than pretending you can get it elsewhere. And that's how you aggregate more data. And the one plus one equals three philosophy was how we tended to operate. So beyond that, and you know, making sure that you're, I don't know, getting the eggs for your cake to use your analogy, what can what kind of things should you be looking for in a company, you know, if you're thinking about acquiring them, like say, anything you think that is easy to overlook, or forget about. I think the whole business is made up of people. And so you can take a very, very financial microscope to a business and look at its growth in its quality of earnings and net dollar attention, and, and make a judgement of the quality of the business. If you're thinking of the business being sustainable, next series of assets within your organization, you know, you need to be evaluating the people as well. And that is a cultural assimilation. And as well as a sort of, are these the right people to take the business forward? So so it's, it's a very in my world, we we took a very structured approach to evaluating businesses, we measured the rightness of the management team to grow, we measured the the penetration into the market, and how, how embedded as it into it into the ecosystem or selling into? Is there a steady state of innovation? Are they continuing to redevelop? And all of those are nothing more than sort of key indicators of innovation as a great culture of reinventing yourself? Right. So it points to people creating good things and thinking about how do we remix the ingredients to come up with a different a different outcome? And part of that then also points to expertise. Now, is the business that is up for sale genuinely expert in their space. And know do you sort of slightly intimidated by how much they know. Because that's a great sign rather than people who haven't been around long enough and don't really understand the the power market or the oil and gas market or whatever the space that you're exploring? Yeah, so there's some great things there to think about if you're going to look at acquiring company, but also, if you are a tech company, or a data company that's looking to be acquired. I think that the people don't always think about articulating all the aspects of value that they offer. I agree. And I think I think younger companies are getting very good at it, I think there is a lot more emphasis about an A designing your business with an exit in mind. But for more established businesses that have been around for 20 years, where they have been run, and typically by a founder who is an expert in their particular than a part of the industry, and then they've built a business around her or has their expertise. And they tend not to think of the expert until it actually happens. And therefore no, then there's a real opportunity for thinking about how do you not just talk about what you've done up until now. But now what does the next 10 years look like? Because as a buyer, you're looking to the future, right? It's progress to date is good, right? It forms the foundation of an investment thesis, but actually, it's what comes next. And the more more the balance of growth comes from the target from rather than the acquire, the better. Right? Yeah. How do they enable you to take that leap? Yes, yes, exactly. Not just the assets that they have totally agree. How do you make the integration process of you know, these acquired companies a bit more Smith, like it can be quite hard to merge different corporate cultures and make it easy to get value from people, you know, especially if you've identified that that is part of where the value is in that company, completely vary and integrations, the sort of the collective word for uncertainty and chaos. Right and in my my personal experience of having bought a number of businesses As an employee of the business sold, the first reaction you need to address is, is my job on the line? And what does this mean for me, right people personalize the the corporate announcement immediately. And so therefore integration starts with people, right? If you don't, if you don't immediately connect with the salesperson, the person in HR, the DevOps guy, all of those people will be thinking about it from the single lens. And I'm not being disrespectful of that there's a very logical place as the buyer, you need to re address that recognize it and reassure otherwise, you lose the cloakroom, in a heartbeat. Yeah, and so integration starts with the people, and then the sort of the more technical, tactical and technical steps can then follow. And they tend to, you know, my my view, tend to follow the people that you need to get people because those communication access immediately. So whatever, whatever internal tools you're using to allow your own employees to communicate, you need to throw that into the new business. On day two, right? Now he has access to a new email system, he has access to our Slack or team's platform, whichever you use, and you are a new part of the acquiring company, we're welcoming you rather than that, taking two weeks, because they will feel like second class citizens immediately. Yeah, it's like joining a new company and not having a laptop on day one just is the same thing is, is the start of a new job for people, you see it in how people update their LinkedIn profile or present their CVs and time knows psychologically, it's a, it's a landmark for the end of an era agreed, and they will have 25 legitimate questions on the note on things that pertain to the business and the acquires enthusiasm for the part of the organization. And they do we need to marketing teams? Are you going to invest in my office in Tokyo? And which operating system to use and they I really like Outlook? No, do we have to go to Google Mail? And there are dozens of little things that, you know, the more you can identify those upfront, and have the beginnings of an answer, even if it's we don't know yet. You You begin to make the steps towards trust, where they see you as transparent versus avoiding the question and the and all that that vacuum just creates more problems than you then you can imagine. So in the part of the integration is being very, very tactical once once once the transaction is completed, and it's being announced, you know, there needs to be sort of a very focused team of people who are there living and breathing it to deal with all of those things as they turn up. Because no matter how good the planning and the due diligence beforehand, someone will ask that you've never considered an A that server is about to expire, do we? Do we renew the license? What? What Why would hang on whatsoever when it's happening tomorrow? But what are we going to do about that? Right? No, but we're cloud based and you're talking about physical server, right, you need to make the Vagos, six hours as you make, try and make a good informed decision about what you do with a piece of hardware. And that will turn up immediately. So So there needs to be people dedicated for the intense amount of work for the intervening night, the initial weeks and timeouts to address all of those things as they pop up. And then it fades relatively quickly, and people go back to the danger. And again, sorry to oversimplify, but it you know, it sounds like the key takeaway I'm getting is really making sure that you've got the resources so that you can build trust with people to kind of like, calm down the chaos and, you know, give a lot of upfront transparency and information to mitigate that uncertainty. It is it's hard resource for a company to carry. And even in even big organizations like Verisk, the number of people who would absolutely dedicated to integration was was one, right. And the rest of it is flexible, where you come from a finance background or an IT background or an HR background, and you play a role for a period of time. So it is always flexible, but the bit you're absolutely right. It is it has hands on in a non physical sense with How do you tackle the challenges that turn up really quickly. And so if you're going to make a good example, and we're capable the business of Vienna, and we had to have people on the ground from the day it was announced, and that there was an individual who led that integration over the next six months and was there every week But it was just to reassure part of it was to provide certainty part of it was to get resourcing for certain equipment changes and lead the office transformation, and so forth and so forth. But it was, it was their day job every single day. And that, that that was a very successful process, because someone was given the task of leading, and recently a kappler, you helped raise $200 million of external investment, which in itself is really interesting. But poor, I thought was, like, pretty unusual is that they were only founded in 2014. And this was the first time that they had raised any external investment. Now, most people when they're going out to raise funds, for the first time, I don't know, it might be a small seed round of a million pounds or so completely different amount of money, and much earlier in their journey. So what kind of complexities did that add to the deal? There was a, there was a real discipline around how Kepler went from foundation to the scale that that has achieved, right, that that sort of element of bootstrapping is both recognition of the business model, which is in itself an incredibly value or creative. And then the discipline of the two founders from Swearengen, were incredibly disciplined in the way that they struggled dependency on technology, less focus on people and no ego about building scale just by adding more people because it would look look good on on on the, on the website and on LinkedIn. At the point of raising, it was clearly one of the sort of discussion points and the respect shown by the investors for exactly, you know, this is extraordinary. How did you get here? So there was interest in it? But I don't think it added complexity to the sale and it certainly didn't lessen nor increase their their normal scrutiny for is this a good investment for for? For the particular firm? Right, then they're still digging into tell me and tell me what customers are doing? And why would a customer review and who else you're going to sell to what else you building and growing? And Where's, where's the growth going to come from? None of those questions were less because we were bootstrapped. It was just it was just a bigger ticket size. And so if anything, they were no more as well as respectful. Very interesting. It sounds like there had been a lot of discipline over the years. The business. Thank you just just just absolutely, and sort of a relentless focus on on delivering value. And I like to build things people will, will look to buy rather than, you know, vanity projects or products that don't necessarily connect with with Valley. Yeah, there's and it's easy to get distracted. So that, like laser focus, obviously paid off completely, completely. And the business is very lean, right? It, it sort of no thanks to COVID is very, very remote. First, I know there is very few roles that are sort of ancillary to building your product and driving the business forward. And that leads to great economics. So I know that some of the companies that you've worked with, you've been involved in, like restructuring, and or they're one of the companies to help restructure our leadership team and stuff. I think people are actually looking at how their C suite is composed just now. And I can see some changes. And certainly there's, after a period of really low turnover, that that's starting to pick up. So what tips would you give to maybe a CEO, or whoever's been tasked with this process project around looking at the composition of a leadership team, if they're thinking about making some changes? Good, good question. And it sort of harks back to the question of how to use scale, and which which of the C suite roles do we need to put in place? And who home? Who owns what responsibilities? And it is a really difficult question and is the more value in one role versus another right, and the CRO role versus a head of sales and in that kind of debate? And so, without getting sort of tied up into each and every role and what they might or might not do? At a at a more general level? It's it's creating a team that can fundamentally work together. Right? And that sounds really, really obvious, but you are looking for people who are respectful of the team are respectful for the contributions of each of the various parties, but also have enough authority to bring their their self to the table and say I think we should do this versus this. And, and that sounds simple, but it's not. I know people, it's very natural for people to represent just their own function rather than seeing the bigger picture. And I think we should just invest in more salespeople. I think we should just invest in more engineers. And and therefore, how do you judge, which is a better investment doesn't just come from who shouts loudest at the C suite. And so having a team who think, as a collective rather than just representing their individual functions as, as part of the balance and, and so that was diversity has lots of meanings for different people. diversity of opinion, diversity of background and experience is what I think builds the greatest and most successful team. But it needs to be a team that is sufficiently consolidated that I can actually work together and they can't just be tearing each other apart and pulling in completely different directions, otherwise, you won't make any progress. Yeah, going back to what we were discussing earlier about communication, if that is not strong, and a leadership team is going to filter down throughout the business, people will pick up on it, the messages will be inconsistent. And really, you know, I guess what you're what I'm picking up from you is just about making sure that how your team is constructed should be like aligned with what is the fastest way to grow? And how do we get to where we need to be? What adds the most value to the business right now? Alongside? Yeah, but then you can just look at those are the roles, you actually have to think, is this new team going to work the same way? Because there will, you're going to have to like mix up their dynamics, if you're changing the type of jobs profiles that you have in that C suite, completely agree, you have an impasse of going to creating a collaborative team is being very clear on who's doing what, right. And you set up an unnecessary conflict. If you if you give overlapping responsibility, who owns the voice of the customer? As a great example? Now, is that a product only responsibility? Is that a marketing only responsibility is that a sales only? No, everybody has a very different touchpoints and then not forgetting customer success and the types of business I've worked for. And so you know, you need to disentangle that kind of, I'm the single owner of the customer voice of the customer. Now, I'm sorry, but there are lots of people that can contribute to that understanding of who we are serving as a business. And to therefore being very clear that even though we're appointing a chief marketing officer, and an A, they bring all sorts of expertise. Now they don't singularly own in what some businesses is where, where the voice of the customer, no, no, you know, you're part of the discussion, but you're not Yeah, that's not just your gig, and being clear and upfront on that as best possible because that that that creates unnecessary tension and the business where it should just be well, what all the signals mean, that one part of annoy one part of a customer saying, Listen, I'm saying this, I've seen this, what does that actually mean? And how should we best react to that? Interesting. So I guess at this point in time, I like going down a level from the C suite, I think there's a growing sense amongst middle management and leaders, her nurturing that talent, or working alongside them, there just seems to be a real increase in pressure and longer workers. I think people feel like, you know, there is a difference, like there is a bit of tension, like they really have to show their value, and is your stress levels are maybe slightly higher. I think you can see it in the way that some people are just responding to changes and you know, workstyle, between you like return to the office, it's not that they're being asked to do it's like how they are managing that. But what do you think the C suite can do to that get more out of their team and their leaders without compromising their conflict, wellness and mental health further? Good question. I, I've been with two businesses where more than that sorry, is where trust is a critical sort of ingredient and how do you how do you get the best out of people? And in creating an environment where no somebody can no Excel, share their views be and bring to the table what they really are rather than creating an environment where they are seeking guessing what you really mean or what you really are looking for. And so creating clarity of expectations is one of The most valuable things you can create as a leader, right? You know, this is what good looks like this is the outcome that we need. I'm going to partly delegate this because you've got all the skills through that completely without me, but this I'm going to be involved with. And this is how we're going to work. And this is and allowing somebody to bring their approach to the problem. So how we're going to get to the goal is the problem. being super clear on that, and, and critically clarity and what's important changes all the time. So it's not it's not that I'm not talking sort of objectives over a whole year that it can be written in January, and you talk about intermittently. And then it's finally ticked off in December, I'm talking about things that change on a weekly or a monthly basis, where at one point, it's this is the most important thing, but then next week, it's going to be something else because of an external environment. And I've been clear around that so that people can respond to know why. And then the clarity is also in a context, right? Why is this important? Right? And so what would strategic articulation to the businesses? In my experience, it's just partly about giving context, why is this important. And the more more people understand that, the more they can make well informed decisions of what they are going to do to contribute. Rather than going, I've just been asked to do this, I don't know why it feels boring. Me for that moralizing totally. And context is absolutely crucial in, you know, as a dimension, helping people to, like, feel like they're more in control of what's happening around them. And a lot of stress, pressure, you know, for many people, it comes back to will certainly for me, it's when I don't have like, I feel like things are out of control, but it is the most stressful, you know, if you don't have any, if you if you're not able to have any autonomy and make those decisions for yourself, then it's really hard. But I guess all of those things are just about building trust, and not throwing, like fancy wellness offerings. And you know, what, well washing your business completely? Sort of, at a very tactical level of understanding the people you work with, right? What motivates them? What's going on around their, their, their work version of themselves? And are they happy at home? Are they getting fitter Are they not and what's driving them, and then no supporting how that connects with what you need to achieve as a business. And then that's, that's part of the you know, it's not not bending everything around, and everybody gets to do what they want. Because that's not how organizations achieve great things. But it's connecting what somebody brings, on a Monday morning with what the business is trying to achieve. And so putting the right people onto the right task at the right time is part of the decision of the leader. And if you get that, right, it's incredibly impactful if you get it wrong, and you will, and I have then and it creates all of the stress that you're talking about. And you need to try and address those as quickly as possible when you realize you've made a mistake. But as part of the downside of thinking you can create clarity and context is often you don't know. Right? And often it is not clear exactly where things are going or why things are changing. And that that uncertainty can affect the C suite. And then the CEO just as much as everybody else in the business. And so recognizing when you don't know the answer, and I don't know if we're going to do this or this. Let's just keep keep working on it until that becomes clear, is often held that somebody needs right. Yeah. Totally. And again, you know, you keep coming back to, like worse, like clarity, and simplification. And these are, I feel like we need to have a separate discussion one day, but the complexities of those simple concepts. Exactly. And so things that I have learned over many years of too much adherence to business jargon, rather than just trying to speak plainly and dealing with your own uncertainties, let alone the the uncertainties of your team. And that all of this is a long term accumulation of skills and experience that we're all going through. So it's not done nor as a diamond expert versus not. It's it's been they need to give people a bit of bit of leeway with that in mind. And I think that in order to achieve any of those things, there's a couple of common like traits that will make that much easier. And a leader who likes maybe like humility and having a bit more of a mature Outlook to, you know, solving the, you know, whatever problem is at hand and looking at bit more long term, what what are your thoughts they're very different versions of leaders and the definition of a leader has changed through time. The strongest and fastest and loudest of the old days is no longer. No welcome nor, nor the most effective way to know if you're running a coal mine is quite different from working with knowledge workers who, or in any part of the business who have choices about where they work. And, and so no thinking in using some business for Nicola, I think and being a transformation, leader, transformative leader, right how my role as a leader is to help my team succeed, rather than thinking through the mindset of they are there to make me successful, or ask just to deliver goals? And so thinking about how I help them achieve that, what can I get? What can I remove, that's holding them back? You know, what resources do they need? What support do they need, which clarity context can I give them to allow them to flourish, and therefore their responsibilities to be delivered, is, I think, an incredibly effective way of working with and talented people who want to be empowered and want to have responsibility. And, and then that's, that's how the example was said to me and many of my, my, my work experiences over the years and something that inspires a lot later today is a is interesting, the, ultimately, there's a lot of stuff that goes into unpicking the complexity of a situation, completely agree. And I know there's the the wonderful literature around dance floor and balcony. And I can't remember the author of the book. But if you look up dance floor and balcony perspectives, you'll, you'll find it pretty quickly. But that kind of sense of being in the thick of anime on the dance floor, and you know, trying to dance well, and working with all the pair partners around, you're not bonded to each other, just one perspective. And most people are more naturally capable of doing that. As you get further up the responsibilities, you need to be able to sort of step back from that perspective. And let's sit up on the balcony, and observe how the whole dance floor is moving. And are they all on the same time? And are they all going the same direction? And and then working out how you intervene in the real skill is when do you do what right now? How often do you step back from the from the fray? How do you step back from the daily grind and responding to emails and being seemed to be on to something right now? Did you respond on Slack within two minutes of somebody seeing you're asking you for your opinion, versus you know, I can deal I can step back from the complexities of the tactical, and really understand what's motivating a colleague or motivating the business or, or dealing with the uncertainty. And I think this is a sort of a lifetime of, of learning to get that right. And the more effective you can move between those two states of mind, the better you are, because you have great awareness within business. So I have all the things we've talked about, you know, we've covered off scaling and acquisitions, and a bit about leadership there. And I guess another thing that I felt you had some strong insights into was, there seems to be a number of companies just now in particular, that have got like some really great products, but they're not achieving the success commensurate with the quality and the usefulness of what they have developed. What what do you think are the key things that are holding those companies back from scaling? But like, what, what is it that you think, is stopping them from achieving their potential? Top Top question, Rebecca? I think it's absolutely, yeah, exactly. They will be, they'll be a contextual element to each one of those. And it won't know there could be multiple reasons why things aren't working. And, and therefore, you know, you need to, you need to explore and keep turning over stones until you find the real reason something is not is it? Is it product market fit is that the price point is that the design is that the sales pitch, isn't the market is not yet ready to is to pick up your new Uber, whatever, to transform the way that they do things is that the resistance of the of the individual and I without talking specifics, I remember looking at a business that had this incredibly fancy technology, about how you would redevelop an oilfield. The problem is the person who would understand the technology and be able to utilize it would also be out of the job when the technology is deployed. So you're trying to sell them a Christmas to turkeys. And and they just, it didn't work because it fundamentally never achieve its full potential. Even though as an outsider, you would look at this and go, every bank and energy player on the planet should be deploying this alongside their very talented people. That's not how it worked. And so if your business is not accelerating, there is a really detailed review with without any biases built in, without any sort of emotional attachment of going, but this is what I want it to be and just going what's not working, right now how to how do we overcome why we are too slow to market? Why? Why our customer acquisition cost is too high. Why is the price point? And then and then you can presumably solve to that particular point, see if it works, right? And then iteration iteration iterate to refine the answer, because often that will be multiple things that need to be worked in coordination. Rather than that being one change. It's never as simple as one change. Interesting. So I think you're really doing a bit of an audit, if you're in that situation, and getting an external set of eyes to review things is always going to uncover some nutrients. I think so I'm reading the book at the moment. And it talks about how NASA on the back of Challenger and Columbia or Columbia challenged both the awful tragedies that those two represented, being much much more aware that they needed fresh eyes. And then a one of the process that they brought in was and as employees join NASA, which is supposed to be world class, everything that they do was assumed to bring in people who haven't yet been institutionalized, to look at the processes of designing and the look at the process of signing off on is this, this vehicle ready to go into space? Just so that they bring a non institutionalized approach. And and I know many companies will do this, but doing it systematically of every new employee after their first three weeks going in a safe environment. What do you see? That's crazy, weird, slow, stupid. What can we be doing better? How do we how do we tackle doing this? And particularly those people have a diverse background and have seen different things working in different organizations that can be incredibly valuable of going, why you manually enter data into into Salesforce and then have to manually enter data into another system? Why would you just log one or two? Ah, you can do that. Yes, you can. And your way, and you've got no, you've got productivity gains all the way through? Yeah, you don't know what you don't know, quite often. And I also find when you're taking that kind of approach, the there have been instances where some of the most meaningful insights actually come from some of the most junior people within the organization that you can't just think, Oh, I'm gonna get this person because they've been around they've seen a loss was sometimes that degree of naivety will really expose maybe, I don't know, like stupid work, for example, ya know, The Emperor's New Clothes was an all the lack thereof was pointed out by a child. And that whilst it's a book that you read to your children, it's there's a wonderful lesson in there to be able to call out things that are not optimum, and can be improved and the basics of why are we doing this again, and that can happen and not just sort of a business level, but as a team. And I remember running in process, betting all the way back. And we've met Eric and had read somewhere something that this was a sort of a clever thing to do. So I tried it out on my team. It's like, what can we stop doing? My team looked at me slightly strange and said, What do you mean, we can stop Terkel? What do we do what what processes and documents and things that we just do? Because we've always done that we can just stop. And let's see if anybody starts screaming and shouting, whether it be a customer or an internal audience. And we came up with a list of all sorts of things that we just stopped doing. We didn't tell anybody about it. And everybody's job was just a little were better because we weren't doing this low value work that nobody was appreciating. And when we I don't know what the measurements were of ours recovered in a month, but it was it was meaningful. And it wasn't something that every business should be looking at sort of like what what can we just stop doing because I'm just doing it because we've always done it is not necessarily a good enough reason. Now in particular is a great time to take that approach, because there's so much happening with AI tools like out like way beyond chat GPT you know, that really, really, we should leverage that and turn that into an opportunity to have far more exciting, stimulating jobs that allow us to hit goals faster, we shouldn't be looking at that as, Oh, my God, it's, we're not going to do that anymore. My job won't exist. I don't think that that will be the case. If you, you know, you don't just you don't even have to learn how to leverage AI, you just need to make sure that you're adding the right kind of value for the future. I agree and nurtured check today is clearly sort of on the tip of everybody's tongue at the moment, but there are much more humble productivity gains, whether it be how do you process expenses and your annual financial system than ever, without naming any particular provider there are Fantasticks systems that are better than just entering it in a spreadsheet and submitting it through this painful process. You take your photo, you categorize and it's gone. And in the AI is there to automatically read the receipt, take the values, identify the currency, and all the things that would tend to create stumbling points for somebody having to process 1000 people's receipts every day. And all of a sudden, it's being automated because the quality of the OCR is good enough to deal with iPhones taking photos of receipts. So it's less groundbreaking, but at the same time, nobody likes doing their receipts in our organization, let alone the finance department. And so you can save months of frustration, by a very simple deployment of a good expense accounting process, rather than the missing the opportunity to do that. Totally. So with all of the kinds of things that we've discussed, what do you think are currently the most important attributes for leaders to be thinking about if they're if they're wanting to have that kind of high growth, scaling, successful company that may be acquired or list? What, what do you think is going to help them get there? Right? Like, what can they work on in themselves? Yeah, it's it's building on the dance floor balcony analogy. and promote leadership is about transformation, right now could be incremental transformation, or it could be much, much more radical than that. But ultimately, you're changing the way people contribute, when they whether it be just more or we use sort of in this way, now we do it this way, or your responsibility used to be this, and now they're going to be this. And, and that transformation. And that change represents a challenge to all sorts of people in an organization. So the greater awareness of who's affected how they're affected? And how do you support somebody deal with the loss of their responsibilities or so forth, the more aware you are, the more sitting on the balcony. And that means you can be more impactful and delivering what you imagine is the right thing to do. And this is this is a skill that I think takes now some seem to do well, early on in their career, and perhaps have greater awareness. And certainly, for me, it's taken a long time to really appreciate that. No, there's the technical elements of being effective in business and understanding how to read a balance sheet and knowing what certain acronyms mean, and how does it work. But it all comes down to really how to motivate people. And because everything is done at some level. And so how do you create the environment and understand that all the people around you, the stakeholders, and the people that they represent, how do you navigate that? And that is negatively called politics, right. But I don't mean it in a negative connotation. I mean, that working with people to get things done at the right pace of change that you're imagining, it's an I've made this mistake, it's very easy to imagine strategic direction, tech, we know where we're going, let's just go do it. And then takes you months, to build the momentum to create the case to get people to believe in it to actually then execute on it. So it might have been a great piece of work upfront, intellectually work out what you do next. Now, the real value is the next 18 months of what seemingly is like God, we should have done this too. I want to show them. No, no, no, that that's the real value, right? When you create that momentum of the change to focus on a new area. So So being aware of that is something you should be focused on as every leadership. Totally, you know, people first and work out, you know how you can get that momentum and accelerate things as much as possible. Agreed. And I'm not suggesting you go slowly, right now, none of this is you can do Take your foot off the gas, but recognizing that major changes requires people to come with you, and announcing something and then expecting it to be done as there's not enough. Yeah. And I think that taking that time upfront to think something through is really valuable, because you're going to have that clarity, you're going to be able to provide, like effective context to people, as well. And you know that you're not going to achieve anything without their trust. So this has been, like, absolutely fascinating. There's so many good tips around scaling effectively what that really means. And, you know, if you're, you know, if you're a CEO, or a CPO, in particular, and you're thinking about going through, like an acquisition selling your company, or if you're thinking about acquiring one, and whether or not that was right for you, and how you would go about doing that, then a lot there as well. I think that people can take away. Thank you. They've been interesting questions to try and succinctly answer, hopefully, we've got got somebody close. No problem, Richard. Well, thanks so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure. And really interesting, I feel we could talk for hours about leadership and all of the different, you know, frameworks and how to get the most out of people I think it'd be really fascinating is there's no end to the learning right now. Whatever you think might work, there's always a different perspective or something else that's emerging. social, social pressures on what's good, is not a static thing. Right, and as we seek to be equal and have equality and equity in this evolution is a big part of good leadership. Exactly. Well, thanks so much, and we will definitely keep in touch and hopefully have you back one day. Thank you very much for reminding me Allah. Thanks for listening to the Listen perspective. I'm Rebecca de St. Founder and Director at the Lucent group, a tech sector executive search and talent consultancy. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and review. If you're a company looking to hire top technology leaders, or you'd like to discuss your next move, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or send