Scale Like a CEO

How to Scale & Pivot Your Business: The 5 Ps Framework with Dr. Georgette Zinaty

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 56

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Growth doesn’t stall because ideas run out. It stalls when leaders can’t pivot fast enough. We sat down with Dr. Georgette Zinaty—Chief of Staff for Myant and founder of Women Helping Empower Women—to map a clearer path from promising idea to durable scale. She breaks down the Five Ps framework—People, Purpose, Profit, Planet, and the often-missed Pivot—and shows how “stragility,” the strategic ability to be agile, turns shocks into momentum.

Across candid stories from transportation and medical sectors, we explore how to prebuild runway before you need it: small test pilots in new segments, fractional talent to unlock the next milestone, and lightweight experiments that validate channel and pricing without burning cash. Georgette explains why most companies falter on pivot, not purpose, and how to spot inflection points early enough to act with confidence. We connect this mindset to practical mechanics—option sets, success thresholds, and iterative resource shifts that keep teams focused on outcomes, not inertia.

People remain the engine. We dig into hiring for potential over pedigree, screening for growth mindset with real behavioral questions, and avoiding the costly revolving door of mis-hires. Georgette shares her go-to prompts to reveal ownership, creativity, and resilience, along with a frank take on “hire slow, fire fast” in unionized and startup contexts. Then we zoom out to leadership scaling: using a coach to get unstuck, building a personal advisory board for honest feedback and high-value connections, and “networking up” to accelerate capital access and opportunity—especially for women and BIPOC founders whose growth moves the broader economy.

If you want a playbook that blends principle with practice, this conversation delivers: test before you bet, build options ahead of time, and staff for curiosity and grit. Subscribe, share with a founder who needs a pivot, and leave a review with the one P you’ll act on this week.

Justin:

In this episode, Justin sits down with Dr. Georget Zinaty, Chief of Staff for a MedTech company and founder of Women Helping Empower Women. They explore the challenges of scaling a business, the importance of the five Ps framework, and how leaders can cultivate a growth mindset for long-term success. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a 90-second intro to you and the work that you're doing.

Dr. Georgette:

My background is a bit different. I have spent 30 years working at the University of Toronto, top academic institution, then moved into an EVP role, doing consultancy work, and then now I'm working as the chief of staff for a medtech company. In addition to that, I run my own organization called Women Helping Empower Women, or woo, as we like to call it for short, that helps I partner with organizations to help them grow, scale, and develop their own businesses. So that's what I do in 30 seconds or less.

Justin:

That's great. Why does that matter today?

Dr. Georgette:

A number of things. So women entrepreneurs are driving the economy. And certainly I think in the United States, the numbers are significant. There is a lot of underrepresentation of women in BIPOC communities. That's sort of my focus, but I help everybody. I mean, there's nobody I turn away. And so what we do is we actually work with organizations to help them grow, scale, and develop. And so that's really the space that I like to play in. And so the issue often is there isn't a lot of mentorship training, networking, helping people think about structure in a way when they're starting to grow and scale. So people have a great business idea, they might be starting, and then they kind of get to a place where they're not having turned the corner. That's the space I play in to help them figure out how to do all of that and put them in the right spaces, help them develop what they need to develop in companies in order to be able to go to the next level.

Justin:

The conversations we have on the podcast of CEOs growing and scaling businesses, as you're coaching and working with the folks that you're working with, what are some of the challenges they find in transitioning from founding businesses to then scaling and kind of growing them?

Dr. Georgette:

So there isn't a shortage of great ideas. I think that what I have found a consistent thread in is figuring out how to scale properly and grow. Access to capital often is a real problem. And we see a lot more of this, especially for women and BIPOP groups. And so the question is, how do you do that? And then also I talk a lot about building a runway. And what I mean by that is if you're a company or even as an individual who's got a small business or a bigger business, if you're figuring out where you want to go, you've got to sort of create that runway. So I wrote an article on Forbes a few years back and I talked about the five P's. And so we often talk about people and having the right people in the team and building capacity and in talent. We've talked about purpose, having shared purpose and being able to sort of stay close to that. Profit, of course, we don't always talk about profit, but that's so important for us to get to the next level. Talk about planet, sustainability, everyone wants to have a sustainability angle. And it becomes incredibly more important with our current generation where that's aligned. But pivot is where most people fail. And so most people aren't talking about the fifth P, which is pivot. And we saw companies fail and not being able to scale properly during COVID. This was particularly in Canada. This was huge for us. And I know we saw a lot of this in the US as well. And so I would say what we need to be thinking about is something I wrote about a year ago called Stragility. The strategic ability of an organization to be agile or not. And most companies are in the knock pile. So strategity and being able to pivot is really what I think helps. And being able to plan for that is what helps companies go to that next level. Because if you've got a great idea and something happens like a COVID or the economy's downturn, if you're not ready to pivot and to be able to have some strategity in the organization, you're going to have layoffs, you're going to have all sorts of things that are not going to allow you to get to the next level and be able to see an opportunity that might be in front of you because you're so busy just sort of staying the course. And so that's what really, when I talk about strategy and pivoting, it's being able to see the world and opening up that avenue.

Justin:

Yeah. And so let's just dig into that a little bit more with that fifth P of pivot. You know, if if we dig into that a little bit, you're talking about that kind of being the number one challenge. Do you have some more examples of how that kind of becomes challenging?

Dr. Georgette:

Yeah. So we saw a lot of, so when I think about companies, like I remember during COVID, I'm going to use that as an example. There were companies that worked in the food industry. And then, for example, here in Canada, we had companies that closed because restaurants were all these sorts of things. So the volume that you had didn't exist. Or for example, flights, maybe we didn't have as many flights. The people who had taxi companies were impacted. And so the question then becomes how do you pivot these businesses into something? Like I have a friend of mine who went had one of those businesses. And the reality was there were deliveries, but that's not what the organization was actually structured for. It was literally to drive people to airports back and forth. Like they were the competitor to Uber. And so I remember sitting and having a conversation saying, Have you thought about doing this? Yeah, well. And we thought it was only going to be six months, but of course it was much longer. So the idea is when you're thinking about your business, if you are not against a wall, do you sort of wait? Do you sit there and think, I think I'm going to crash through it? Or do you sit there and take a step back and say, well, maybe there's something else happening here that I need to be considering and how do I pivot that? With some smaller companies that I work with, for example, there's limited fees, more funds, and resources. And so one of the things that we work on is do we bring in some fractional staffing and training to help get you to go to the next level if you can't do it? So if you're thinking this is what I need, and these are the jobs that I need for me to go to the next level, but I don't have the money to pay them. And so you're stalling. I've said, well, let's talk about fractional. Let's talk about different markets. That's rather than going to 20, do we go to one? Do we rethink the problem differently in order to get us to that next level? And that's what I'm talking when I'm talking about pivoting. One of the companies that I work closely with is in medical space. And again, they want to be able to work just strictly in that. But the reality is what they've got offering could also work as a customer. And those are very different. Channels are different. I get all of that. The marketing is different. But they're always to try and test pilot certain things before you make a pivot or you expand to say, is there opportunity here before we go full on, full throttle on to what we want to do and spend a lot of money? So I think part of what I'm able to do is be able to come in and say, let's think about the problem slightly differently so we can scale it in the way that we need to scale it and putting our energy and resources in the right place to get the outcomes we're looking for.

Justin:

Yeah, thank you for that. I think that the last thing you said, get the outcomes you're looking for, you know, I think is so key is to keep your eye on that outcome, that objective. What are we driving this business forward for so that we can be successful in that? I want to go back up to the first P of people, because that's one of the things we talk a lot about is scaling a business through people. So tell me a little bit more about when you're working with some of your folks that you're advising.

Dr. Georgette:

Yeah.

Justin:

Um, what are the things that you work on around people?

Dr. Georgette:

So depending on the organization where they're at. So I'm gonna tell you as someone who worked for a really long time, my biggest focus, and I say this always jokingly, I say someone with a lot of degrees, they matter and they don't matter. Because what I would double down on any day is potential. So if you've got people who think it's great, because you just made a funny face dress, but I'm gonna tell you what I mean by that. Because you if you're a surgeon, I need your technical skills, right? Or if you're like a certain kind of engineer, I need your technical skills. But if it's in a job where someone is so set in their ways, I can't change them and they've don't have the growth mindset, that's a problem. I'd rather hire somebody who's willing to be open and learn and have a growth mindset and has potential and is hungry any day, because then I can we can run with all sorts of ideas. And and when I've had teams, even myself that I've hired, that's who I've done. And they I would say we were small but mighty. We could accomplish because people come in and say, we could do this. There's that excitement versus, well, it has to be done this way. And so when I work with some organizations, if they're looking for boards, obviously we do the whole matrix thing about do we have what skills are we looking for? Where do we want this to be now? What do we want it to be in a year from now? What does that look like? Who should be on that to help us get there? What are the expectations, et cetera? When it comes to hiring talent, that saying of you hire slow and you fire fast. And I will tell you what happens is most companies don't do that. They hire kind of fast because they want the talent they wanted in right away. And what I have seen often is I spent a bit more time up front and I became working in an organization that was very unionized. So once that person came into the system, after six months, once they cleared that hurdle, Justin, they were in. It was impossible to get them out. So I took that role very seriously in terms of documenting, but also just seeing that, but also doing a lot of the interviewing up front to be able to say, because part of what you want is not just one person for a particular role. That's great. And they may be good for that role, but you really want us to be able to have that person stay and grow with the organization. So when I'm looking at someone and interviewing them, and this is what I tell people, don't look at them for just that particular role. Like, do you see them growing with you in the organization? Because that's an investment that you're making. Because talent and the revolving door is very expensive, whether we realize it or not. We sometimes don't necessarily put a cost to it, but it's so expensive to organizations. So bringing in the right people changes the energy, changes the outcome, changes the performance. And so doing a little bit of that work up front and thinking about what do you want, what does that look like, the potential people have, that I think is really helps you get to where you want to go at the end of the day.

Justin:

Yeah, and we hear that a lot from the founders we speak with on the podcast of this a higher slow, fire fast. And so I want to dig in a little bit more because I'm with you on growth mindset. Like that has to, especially in in a small-scaling business, has to be one of the critical competencies. It's not even a competency, the growth mindset is really it's mindset, right? So, how do you screen for that? Like, how do you identify people who have a growth mindset?

Dr. Georgette:

Great question. So, what I often will do is there's the typical questions that you ask in an interview. And then sometimes I will ask people questions. And I don't want to say the word behavioral because you we hear that a lot in kind of HR terms, but it's more about tell me about a situation like this or walk me through an experience and it'll be very broad, but I want to hear from them that story and how they resolved it. And what I'm listening for is were they creative? Yes, you stay within the boundaries of like you don't want to be breaking any laws, but were they creative? Were they thoughtful? Was there an inclusive, empathetic lens to what they were doing? Did they come back and say, this didn't seem like it was going to work? But then I end up doing this and this and this, and then we were able to solve it, and this is what it looked like. That's what I'm looking for. So I think rather asking these very, very sort of text like questions in like a text box, I what I really am looking for is to say, I'm looking for that entrepreneurial spirit in their answers. And I think that tends to tell me, yeah, or I'll say to somebody, talk to me about a situation where things look like they were very bleak and we weren't, and then how did you sort of turn the corner? Were you able to turn? Talk me through that, explain that to me. And I do drill down because if they actually did the work, they can give you the details of that narrative. And then you can sort of think you can hear values, you can hear work ethic, you can hear all of those things. And that to me is aligned with my exat versus, yeah, I went to my boss and this is what that person said. So that tells me they're not gonna be able to roll up their sleeves and do the work if they're invoking like a chain of command, which I think is important. You got to respect that. I don't mean that. But I think at the same time, if you are in a business where it's entrepreneurial and you're trying to scale, you want people to be to be able to say, I have skin in this game and I want to see this company succeed and what's it gonna take? And you're gonna come to me with a solution, not just with a problem.

Justin:

Yeah, I love all of that. And what you are describing is behavioral interviewing, and it is talked about a lot, but I think that people mention it, but they actually don't know how to do it effectively. Yeah. Um, but research research shows that it's 50 to 70 percent predictive of future performance on the job, while typical methods of interviewing, i.e. hypothetical questions, are only 10 to 30 percent predictive of future performance on the job. And so behavioral interviewing is the way to go. We just have to learn how to do it effectively. And I wanted to add two of the questions that I love to ask around growth mindset. Number one is tell me about a time when you faced a challenge that you thought was insurmountable, and how did you work through it? And the way that they approach that is gonna tell you a lot about their growth mindset and grit. And then I also ask people about what's the last thing that you learned and why did you learn it and how did you learn it? Because that also, I think that shows me about growth mindset, but also curiosity. Am I driving or digging into curiosity, which for me is a big part of growth mindset, just wanting to know more about the universe, I think is helpful for startups.

Dr. Georgette:

Yeah, I call that resourcefulness, but yeah, same idea, right? The idea that you can figure something out. And if you don't know, you know who to ask. I've shared a story. This was years ago. I was being interviewed for a job, and the gentleman in the middle of the interview said, Tell me a little bit about your background. And he was actually just trying to dig into my ethnicity, which is a no-no, certainly here, not during an interview after, maybe, but not during the interview, because that's bias at play and it could cause all sorts of legal issues. So I sort of said, This is where I was, I grew up. And then he said, he asked me another question, and he didn't like the answer, uh, in the sense that he was just trying to get more personal information, which I thought was very inappropriate during the first interview. And then he sort of leans back and he goes, So how do you deal with the imposts at all? Not on the text sheet of an interview question, I just smiled and I said, Nothing's impossible. I haven't found him a solution yet. And he went and rolled his eyes. So I called him out on it nicely. And I said, Sorry, did you just throw your eyes at me in the middle of an interview? And he went, uh, did I went, yeah, you kind of did. So I said, let me tell you why I said what I said. And I went on to talk about successes I'd had, where I turned my department around from the bottom nine to the top and top three, all that kind of stuff. And so I said to him, Maybe I can't put a man on the moon by myself, but I can probably figure out who I need in the room to help me do that. And so that that was really the mindset I had years ago in sorts of I know I don't know everything. I know what I know, I know what I don't know, but I do know that if I had the right team and I have a sense of who I need at the table, we can achieve anything. But you have to be, but that to me, I think is another indication. Do you have a growth mindset or is all no, that's just not gonna happen? I mean, you'll never hear that out of my mouth ever. It's just not how I operate, which I think is why I'm able to help other people.

Justin:

Yeah. Well, that's incredible. I love that. So, what's one piece of advice that you would give to another founder about scaling themselves as a leader?

Dr. Georgette:

As a leader, yeah. So I think you have to invest in yourself first and foremost. And that I I hate to say this, I don't know a lot of people actually end up having what I call a coach, but you almost need someone that you could speak to that can help you do what you do. So there's a woman I'm working with right now, and it's just amazing to see the progress in a short amount of time because I get called in when she's stuck and then there's an issue, and we need to walk through it because she's too close to it. So I think that's important. You probably have heard about personal advisory boards. I think it's really important to have a personal advisory board. I'm not talking about the the advisory board for the company or the organization. I'm talking about four or five people that you can tap into that may not be in your space necessarily, that you could say, Hey Justin, I'm thinking of maybe taking this thing or thinking about this for the company or thinking about this for my brand. What do you think? And four or five people that are gonna honestly say to you, I'm not sure this is the right time, or maybe have you talked about this, or I'm gonna connect you with so-and-so who's done something similar, talk to them. I think we don't do enough of that. And that is absolutely critical. It's been critical for me, and I would encourage anyone else to do it. But I talk a lot about what I call networking up. So we tend to network with other people kind of in the same spaces as us and/or same level. And if you are going to scale your business and scale, whatever it is that you want to do, you've got to network up. So that means it's not the same. It's where who's who who are you eyeing up here that you want to be like? And then how are you ensuring that you're getting on some of these people's radars? So is that through a LinkedIn? Is that through an event? Are you prepared? Are you reaching out? Are you being active? Are you creating that runway that I talk about to get to the net to that next level? Because if you're not doing that, it depends small baby steps, but you're not gonna get that acceleration to get to where you want to really take off. So I would say that, and then just make sure you have the right structures in place to support the things that you're looking for.

Justin:

Thank you for that. I think having a coach is so critical. I have a coach myself and just someone to help me work through things, especially as someone who has a preference for extroversion. I just need to talk through things sometime. And having someone who understands and can ask thought-provoking questions based on what I'm telling them to help me work through things is so helpful. And I also love the personal board of advisors. I don't know that I have them on a list, but I could name them very quickly and tell you who they are when I need something and know the people that I tap into. So yes.

Dr. Georgette:

Are they your friends? And what I mean by friends is I'm sure they're your friends, but I mean, are these people that you party with or yeah?

Justin:

There, yeah, there are other professionals that I don't see regularly, but that's right. They are crucial to my own development and just when I need to get some perspective.

Dr. Georgette:

Yeah, that's exactly how we should be because sometimes people think, oh, wait, there might have friends that I'm like, no, your friends are gonna tell you you're great. Your friends are gonna be, yeah, yeah, yeah, because that's what friends do. These people are a bit more removed, and so they're more likely to ask you the tough questions that get you thinking about the decisions that you're making and give you the perspective because they're just they're they're just not as close. So they like you, they respect you, they are aware of your work, but are not so intimately involved in your life. That's a bit blurred.

Justin:

Yeah. Well, Georgette, I've really enjoyed the conversation today. Thank you so much. Folks want to get in touch with you. What's the best way to do so?

Dr. Georgette:

Yeah, so LinkedIn, I'm I'm there, of course. And then we have our website, w awwomen.com, and you can reach us there as well. And very active on LinkedIn on Instagram. There's not too many of me. So I'd love to help. And as I mentioned to you earlier, I'm a big fan of wanting to support women and and our BIPOC community. And when I look at the data, it's something that we'd love to help move on the dial, particularly in the United States. So we do know that if women have the same kind of impact on equity as men, we would be adding 1.1 trillion to the GDP in the United States. So let me help get you there and improve our GDP because your GDP improves. Our GDP improves.

Justin:

Well, thank you so much, Georgette.

Dr. Georgette:

Thank you, Justin. I really appreciate your time.