Scale Like a CEO

From Strategy to Execution: Insights from Render Networks CEO Stephen Rose

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 63

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Want a real playbook for scaling without hiding behind a 90-day plan? We sit down with Stephen Rose, CEO of Render Networks, to unpack how he makes faster decisions without sacrificing rigor—grounding every move in customer conversations, employee insight, and hard data. From the brutal economics of fiber and utility builds to the messy reality of changing a go-to-market thesis, Stephen shows what it takes to steer a scale-up through real constraints.

We dig into the two levers that matter most in software—innovation and marketing—and why aligning those creates downstream momentum in sales and cost to serve. Stephen explains how he assesses leaders using pipeline health, conversion metrics, and employee engagement as a proxy for followership, then maps leadership skills to the company’s stage. The method is disarmingly practical: get individual feedback on a strategy thesis to reduce bias, bring the team into one room to synchronize context, and run a dynamic RevOps cadence so the org responds to signals in days, not quarters.

One standout story: entering the U.S. market with a transformative technology only to discover most buyers weren’t ready. Rather than force adoption, Stephen reoriented the product to meet current workflows, then designed a path to move customers forward. It cost time and money—and built long-term traction. We also explore how to empower the middle layer of management with clear guardrails, tie responsibility to accountability, and promote at 50% readiness to keep learning curves steep. If you’re scaling a product company, leading a transformation, or trying to turn engagement into execution, you’ll walk away with concrete steps you can use this week.

If you enjoyed this conversation, follow the show, share it with a colleague who leads teams, and leave a quick review to help others discover it.

Stephen:

So bottom-up feedback is incredibly important. In fact, it's it's really where you get you you can go to your leaders, but your leaders are going to give you their own assessment. Well, that's marking your own homework at the end of the day. So not particularly useful. But when you are able to go to your employee base and and get an understanding, and it's it's really trying to find um, you don't need truth tellers. Truth tellers aren't very much use because truth tellers are generally just downloaders. You really want people that are that are actually able to say, hey, I see a part of the problem here. By the way, I'd love to be actively engaged in solving that problem. So those are the kind of people that you want to really get some some into intel from.

Speaker:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. On this episode, we sit down with Steven Rose, the CEO of Render Networks. Steven shares his journey of taking over the role, conducting leadership assessments, and the strategies he uses to align teams during a scale-up. Let's jump in.

Justin:

Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a quick intro to you and your business.

Stephen:

Yes, so I'm Stephen Rose. I'm the CEO of Render Networks. I've took over the role in March of this year, so March 2025. And I've been in this industry for about 25 years or so. So I'm giving away my age. Excellent. Tell me a little bit about Render Networks. So we we provide construction management software, predominantly and operations management software to large-scale infrastructure. So mainly fiber, telco providers and the construction firms, but we also work with utility companies as well. And the idea is that we enable those firms to understand in real time what's going on in the deployment of the network, and that's using various different types of AI within the application to do that.

Justin:

Excellent. Tell me, I just for those of you who aren't familiar with that industry, what what specific problem are you solving and why is it important?

Stephen:

So I think there's there's a few problems to solve for one is just being able to get networks deployed in a way that is the most productive and the most efficient way to do that. And if you can imagine there are tens of billions of dollars that are spent every single year on those networks. So when you get it wrong, you then actually have a very expensive network to deploy. And unfortunately, less than 10% of those networks generally get deployed on budget and in time. The second thing is you really want to be able to get that speed to market. So again, you want to be able to know what the state of the network is, and you want to be able to actually have the time and motion of your crews and the technologies that you're trying to deploy and have them actually sequenced in such a way that you then have uh a lot of operational control, insight, and foresight as to what the state of your network deployment is. So quite a number of problems, but it really is about cost management and speed to market if you wanted to fundamentally get down to two problems to solve for.

Justin:

Excellent. So you took over back in March, and oftentimes when a new leader comes in, there's some challenges in that leadership transition. I just want to start with talking a little bit about how you approach that transition and kind of where you're at today.

Stephen:

Yeah. So yeah, there was, I mean, there was a reasonable amount of change to put in. I think the first thing is I think the classic 90-day plan. But the first thing that I've come to realize is in my career, you don't need 90 days to figure out what to do. Some of the decisions that you make can be made in day 20. Yeah. So, but I think what you have to do is you have to anchor your decisions in good intelligence and a good understanding of what's going on. And the formula that I use for that is pretty basic. It's walk the floor, talk to customers, hire friends, fire enemies. Now, that is a pretty brutal change management process. But and of course, the points are in it in their extreme in a way, just to get you to stand up and take notice. But really, I mean it is about talking to your customers, finding out what's going on, finding out from your employee base what's going on in terms of they're happy with their role, they're happy with their leadership, they have the desired levels of autonomy and mastery and those types of things. And then it is getting the right team in place. Yeah. And so there's a number of different things. But I think as a CEO, your number one job is get the leadership talent in place because then a lot of the other problems get solved for that.

Justin:

Yeah, let's talk about that. Tell me a little bit more. You mentioned hire friends, fire enemies. Tell me a bit about that assessment process.

Stephen:

Yeah, I mean, and again, it's when I say hire friends, listen, make sure that we're clear on the definition. Hire friends is really making sure that the leadership you've got in place is able to take you to the next two, three years, whatever it happens to be. And I think there are different skills of leaders. So you can have some people that are great at handle turning and they're wonderful, maybe some innovation work or whatever it happens to be. And then others are actually great implementers of change or whatever it is. So you have to really understand where you are in your business lifecycle. For us, we're in a scale-up. Yes, we're not a startup, but we're definitely a scale-up. We needed to make some changes in terms of we needed better technology implementation, we needed better innovation in the way we were going. We needed a change in the way that we went to market. And so we made a number of those changes. And I think in in software sector, there is there are two areas you really want to focus on. How much innovation you're actually able to get out into the marketplace, and how well you're able to market that. Because if you get your innovation right, you get your marketing right, you ultimately the rest should follow. Your sales should follow, your cost of serve should follow. There's a number of different things. So getting those two things right with the first imperatives, and that's what we that's where the first wave of change came in. And then the secondary and the tertiary sort of waves come after that.

Justin:

Tell me a little bit more then about assessing. I'm guessing when you when you came in, there were some existing leaders in place. And so, how do you go about sorting who are the ones that can get us to the future we want to get to versus those who may not be able to?

Stephen:

Yeah, and and again, I think it's back to the problem statement. Getting a good understanding of first off, empirically, where do you stand? What do the stats tell you? So if you're looking at pipeline, or if you're looking at innovation pipeline, or if you're looking at conversion rates from inquiries all the way down through to the final say, there's a whole bunch of stats that you can do. So statistically, getting an understanding of what's going on. And I think that gives you a lot of insight. At least it doesn't necessarily tell you why things are happening, but it tells you what is happening. And so you're able to then dig in and find out where to go from there. Then you want to find out why. And that's really when you're then talking to your customers and you're talking to your employees and you're talking to leaders. And that is really trying to get a 360 understanding of what is happening and again, fundamentally, why. I think that's a a range of just discussions, leadership assessment. But I think the most important thing about that is you have a strategy. Once you have your strategy and you you clearly understand where you're going, there should always be the tightest fit between your strategy, your organizational design, and your leadership competence. And like I said, some leaders are great. There's many great leaders, but they're just in the wrong organization at the wrong time. And so if you're in in our situation, in the scale-up situation, we needed people that actually understood how to build structure, how to build teams, how to build innovation cycles. And though those were the skill sets that we were really looking for, that we decided, okay, those were the changes that we need to make. It didn't mean that the people were bad leaders. Inherently, they weren't. They were great leaders, but they were just different leaders for a different time. And so that those were the those are the ways that we made the assessment.

Justin:

Yeah, and I'm curious, I'm gonna I want to keep digging into this a little bit. I'm curious how how did you observe when you've got a leader who's really great at building that structure that you're talking about? What are the things that you're observing that know that they have it or they don't?

Stephen:

Is they have a following. So employee engagement scores will tell you a lot about that. If your employee engagement scores are lower than you would prefer, you would you would normally dig into that. I think employee engagement scores typically give you an indication on things like the the aggressivity of a change curve. So if you've got leaders that are unable to put a lot of change in in a quick space of time and get the organization running with them, then naturally that's where you're gonna get a lot of disharmony in the organization. So bottom-up feedback is incredibly important. In fact, it's it's really where you get you, you can go to your leaders, but your leaders are going to give you their own assessment. Well, that's marking your own homework at the end of the day. So not particularly useful. But when you are able to go to your employee base and get an understanding, and it's it's really trying to find um, you don't need truth tellers. Truth tellers aren't very much useful because truth tellers are generally just downloaders. You really want people that are that are actually able to say, hey, I see a part of the problem here, by the way, I'd love to be actively engaged in solving that problem. So those are the kind of people that you want to really get some some into intel from. But yeah, employee engagement, your customer feedback is obviously gonna be gonna be a big part of that. But I'm always looking for how much change do you have to implement? How much of a following do you have? And if you have the following, then you know that you're gonna get the change in. But if you don't have the, if you don't have the following, you'll you're kind of done at that point.

Justin:

I think that the following and measuring that with employee engagement, you know, I don't actually in all the leaders that I talk to, I don't hear them referencing a lot about employee engagement and and that level of using that as an assessment of your leaders. I think oftentimes a lot of leaders, a lot of executives when they're assessing their leaders are are kind of just going based on their observations and what are they like. And so I really like hearing that you're gathering a data set from the employees and are people following this leader or not? I think is a is a really great, great way to look at that. So I would imagine, you know, again, being a new leader in the business, there's probably some tweaks or shifts in the strategy of the organization that you have been making. And so I'd love to talk a bit about that. How do you go about getting people enrolled in a new vision or strategy and then kind of maintaining that?

Stephen:

Yeah, it's and it's not easy. I want to be very clear about that. I mean, getting people aligned to strategy is probably the first, if you want to look at a CEO job description, that should be line one. Get the strategy right and make sure that people understand it. Yeah. And of course, Lyd, that that means that you've got to pick up on a myriad of decisions and opinions and data sets and whatnot. So first off, gather everybody and get them into the room. But before you do that, get everybody's opinion individually. Because the second, if you don't get everybody's individually, sorry, everybody's opinion individually around a particular thesis, then you'll actually get a ton of bias in the room. So if you put everybody into a room and there's somebody that's louder or they're more confident or whatever it is, they'll dominate the discussion. And then you've got a form of bias that's inherent to the discussion before you've even started. Yeah. So the way I like to do it is I say, here's a thesis of value or here's a thesis for our strategy. Not sure if it's right or not, but I'm going to give it a shot. Now, everybody, you have a look at that individually. Now you give me your feedback as individuals. Now we collectively assess everybody's opinion. So everybody gets a fair chance or a fair crack at the whip to get their say-so in. The second thing is get everybody in the room together. I know that that's expensive, and everybody will complain about, especially my C my CFO, who Paul, he's going to pick up the phone and say, Oh God, do we really need to do this? But yes, actually, because a stitch in time saves nine. And the other thing that it does is it corrals everybody to the same start point. It makes sure that there is some level of team cohesion that is accelerated, etc. And then and you'll solve the problem much more quickly. So those are the first couple of things is is getting the strategy aligned in an accelerated way. The second part to that, because maintaining strategy is also very difficult. You're going to come into in touch with data and you're going to get insight along the way that's going to contradict what your original assumptions were. That's problematic. So the way that we did that is we set up a couple of key processes, and one of them is what we call RevOps. So the RevOps process, rather than waiting for these kind of false quarterly cycles where you get to get together every three months as though nothing happens between month one and month three. So, which of course it does, what we do is we say we'll get together dynamically whenever we see something that's really important. And we'll scale up or scale down a meeting just to be able to solve for that particular problem. So if you see a big shift in the market, we'll say, hey, we need this week's meeting to go to two hours. And everybody understands that that's an important thing, it's an important piece of information. We need to strategize around it. And so we we put sales, finance, ops, and delivery and product all on the same call every single week. And then we'll scale up and scale down the meeting relative to the size of the problem that we're solving for.

Justin:

I like the kind of getting everyone's opinions before bringing everyone together. I think that's so key because you're right, you get everybody in that large group setting, and you're going to have some groupthink set in, and you're not going to get honest opinions. And so it's so much easier to do coalition building one-on-one before you get people together. And then you know where your dissenting voices are, you know how to manage that conversation. So I really like that. I I'm curious if you wouldn't mind sharing. It's been almost nine months and you've gone through this process. What is one of the biggest challenges you faced in kind of getting people re-enrolled in a new vision?

Stephen:

Yeah, I mean, I think the hardest thing was that we originally came into the US market with a very clear understanding of how we thought we were going to add value, which was that we had a particular piece of technology, and that piece of technology we believe was going to change the way in which the work is being done inside the US market. I think what we underestimated fully was just when you're trying to change the entire market and you're a small-ish firm, you don't have that power or that influence. So actually, the first thing we had to decide was as much as our technology is great and there's a bunch of customers actually taking it up, 70% of the market is not ready. So we instead of us actually trying to convert 70% of the market, let's actually meet the market where it is. So we had to then change the way in which our technology strategy happened. It changed a number of key features, and we had to spend a lot of money reorientating for that. That took three months to get agreement on because it was almost a philosophical change in hey, we came into this market with this type of understanding. And by the way, I joined this company because of this technology. And now you're going to take me away from this. Of course, then what I had to do is do the convincing job. Yeah, but hang on a second. If you land them where they are, you can move them to where you want them to be. But if you try and change the whole market at once, that's not going to happen. And so that was the convincing story that I had to do. And of course, again, it's a lot of phone calls, it's a lot of convincing, it's a lot of data points because people that you're dealing with, they're senior, they're smart, they want to be proven to. And so you've got your work cut out. Yeah. So lots and lots of for stakeholder management.

Justin:

Yeah. And that is, there's a lot of challenge in that when you're shifting that vision of the organization, especially as is often necessary when entering a new market. There's a lot of, um, for lack of better terms, ego that's built around the way the organization operates today. Because people have invested their time and they identify with that work as a part of them. And so shifting that can be really challenging. So as you look at the future in growing the organization and where you need your leaders to be in the next two to four years, what are you doing today to prepare them for that future?

Stephen:

So, one of the things, I mean, what we recognize as well is that it really is the middle of the organization that actually is the grease between the wheels, if you want to call it that. Yeah. So the most important thing is actually ensuring that your next layer of leadership is able to scale the business and that they've got independent decision making or get sufficiently enough autonomy and independent decision making to be able to make decisions without having to continuously go northbound to their leaders and have decisions made on their behalf. So I think that's the first thing. The second problem that we have when you're trying to solve for that is getting them to understand the parameters in which they're able to work and where that autonomy lies as well. So again, incredibly important. Do you understand your KPIs? Do you understand to what agree to what extent you are responsible? And are you holding people accountable for that, whether it be budgets, headcount, whatever it is? I like to say to people, that is, that is what you're responsible for is also what you're accountable for. You can live within these two parameters. And that's a little bit like having children, actually, if you give them as a wider range of decision making as you can, but then as soon as you go over that, you're locking it down pretty fast. So the number of things that you can do to help the organization scale, I think the most important thing to understand in leaders, though, is arming them to believe that, and of course it's the classic, what got you here won't get you there, but it is about helping them understand that your skill set and your role right now is to make other people successful. And by definition, you become successful that way. Whereas always, of course, up until then, it was well, my effort, my results, me, me, me, me, me, it's no longer that anymore. So there's a number of things you have to do to get leaders prepared.

Justin:

Yeah, absolutely. And that is a challenging shift to make, especially in an organization where you have maybe promoted people who were individual contributors for a while and have done great work for the business. And now they're a leader or even all of a sudden an executive within the organization, because that can happen really fast in a small-scaling organization. Um, and so it's a really tough shift to make in that I just have to get work done through others and empower them to do it. It's not my effort anymore that is driving us forward. That's so crucial.

Stephen:

Yeah. And I think the interesting thing is though, is that when people do shift from into leadership positions, especially if it's their kind of first or maybe their second but bigger leadership role, is getting them to understand that you you don't duck away from the content. It's not like line management is now a full-time 100% of your activities. No, you're still going to be probably 70% of your time is doing similar work to what you were doing. And 30% is the leadership and the organizational development, the talent management and the performance management and all of those different things and the strategy work. But I think what people do is they get promoted into these roles. They don't have a mentor, they don't have any training behind them. There's just an implicit assumption that they can do the job already. And my view is I like I like to promote people that are probably just about 50% ready. Because why on earth would you take a job that you're 100% ready for? It's like the most boring job in the world, then clearly because you've already done it. The second thing is the learning curve for them is great. And then the second thing is that you're at least 50% comfortable that they can do the job. So yeah, that 50% ready is a great milestone if you're or great benchmark, if you ask me.

Justin:

Yeah, yeah. Well, Steven, thank you so much for the time today. Uh, if folks want to get in touch with you, what is the best way to do so?

Stephen:

RenderNetworks.com, r-e-n-d-e-rnetworks.com.

Justin:

Excellent. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for the time. I've really enjoyed the conversation today.

Stephen:

Me too. Thanks a lot.