Deep Dive with Dawn Zier

Intro: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and we are here in deep today with Dawn Zier. Dawn is someone I am proud to call a friend. Dawn and I served on a challenging board together for many years. Dawn was a senior executive for a long time at Reader's Digest. She was chief executive officer of Nutrisystem. She is now a many time over public board member and advisor and mentor and coach. Dawn, it's great to have you here.

Dawn Zier: Great to be here, Matt. Thanks.

Matt Blumberg: Let's start very quickly, give everyone a sense of the arc of your career because you did some very interesting and sort of different things on the road to becoming a public company CEO.

Dawn Zier: Well, I always say it's rare the person whose career is a straight line and mine certainly wasn't. I started out as an electrical engineer, realized I didn't love it, but it was probably the best experience that prepared me for the way I liked to think and for the way that I think actually made me successful as a CEO, which is steeped in data and analytics. I then got my MBA because when you don't like what you're doing, you go back to school and get your MBA. I did that and ended up doing banking for two years, credit card marketing at what was Chase Manhattan at the time. And then Winter Readers died, just spent 20 years there, more than I ever thought. It was a changing company. Worked for four different CEOs over five years. Got tapped then to become the CEO of Nutrisystem. Did that, sold the company. In the interim, built a board portfolio. Today I'm doing a lot of board work, a lot of mentoring and coaching, which I love. That's sort of the Readers Digest condensed version.

Matt Blumberg: As it were. Well, let's sort of pick one thing out of each phase. Maybe we'll skip the electrical engineering one or we'll do that on a five minute version of the podcast some other time. With Reader's Digest, 20 years is a long time. It was a pretty good sized company, obviously an incredibly well- known brand, probably a very different brand when you got there than when you left.

Dawn Zier: Absolutely.

Matt Blumberg: I know you had some really interesting roles as a functional leader, as an international leader. One thing I'm curious about, I know anyone who's anywhere for 20 years runs into some difficulty, some hard moments. Quite frankly, when you became a senior executive, there weren't tons of female senior executives in the world. You probably, I'm guessing, have a couple of interesting stories of sort of facing down adversity.

Dawn Zier: I have to say I've been very lucky in my career. I've always had a lot of sponsorship, a lot of, and you're right, it was mostly a male led leadership team, but I felt they were sponsors and advocates for me. I feel like I was really lucky in that respect that I haven't experienced firsthand some of the things that many other people at other companies had.

Matt Blumberg: Sounds good.

Dawn Zier: I believe in the roles of mentors and sponsors and was fortunate I think because of hard work, dedication, passion to achieve that I was taken under the wings by several people and given opportunities, which were really fantastic.

Matt Blumberg: Oh, that's great. That's great to hear. I'm guessing something you've paid forward in your career.

Dawn Zier: Absolutely.

Matt Blumberg: As you think about the 20 years at readers, what are sort of a couple moments that stood out, flashpoints or difficult situations?

Dawn Zier: Yeah, there were a couple. I remember one of them was I worked for four different CEOs over a five year period. That was a lot. Learned things that I took with me as I became a CEO, as I created my own personal brand of what I wanted to be as a CEO. I was working with Eric Schreyer at the time, who was going from the president role to the CEO role of the company. He told me he wanted to change my job. I had always been in a role where I had vertical responsibility. I owned a whole P& L and I loved it and I loved being accountable. Engineers coming through again give me the accountability. He said he wanted to move me into a lateral staff role that instead of being responsible for the vertical would be responsible for consumer marketing across the board. It was interesting because I remember saying, " No, I like what I'm doing." I wanted to keep doing what I'm doing. He's like, well, he's the boss. That's not how it's going to be. He did say to me, he goes, " I want you to learn how to step outside your comfort zone." That was really a pivotal moment for me. He also said, " You're very strong with your direct power when you're an owner and I want you to learn how to use your power of influence. This role will teach you how to do that, how to bring up your soft skills in addition to your analytical rigor at achieving the numbers. I believe this will prepare you for greater things down the road. When I look back as I became a CEO, I think that role really was so important to me and learning as you move up in a company, it's about followership, being able to get followership, being able to influence, being able to have the right team around you to get things done without actually always having to be the one that does that or driving it directly in a straight line down. It was tough. It was tough moving into that role.

Matt Blumberg: No, it's super interesting when you're used to having the P& L responsibility, waking up one day without it has got to be a little bit jarring. What's interesting is that that proved to be a springboard to being a CEO later and having a P& L again, but with maybe a little more empathy or a different skillset.

Dawn Zier: It's the matrix, it's the classical matrix organization. I'm still responsible for the P& L across all of marketing, but I wasn't the final voice in the verticals of how that got executed. It was different, but good. In retrospect, good, as most things are I think when you get time to reflect on changes that happen that may seem really pivotal at the moment. When you reflect back on it, there's probably a lot of good that happens in those, even though it may be a transition and a little painful at the time.

Matt Blumberg: Now you moved from that role into an international leadership role, if I remember correctly the sequence. How did you get from A to B?

Dawn Zier: You're tapping into several of my more challenging moments here, but again, where good things happened. We had another CEO transition at Readers Digest, and the CEO at the time had promoted me into the global consumer marketing role. Essentially chief marketing officer across the entire company. Again, working within this matrix organization with different pillars of leaders that had the ultimate P& L accountability. We had a really good year. It was probably one of our best years. Then I remember being called into her office and she said, " We're bringing in somebody that is going to be driving innovation and marketing that you'll report into." I was like-

Matt Blumberg: Layered. You were about to get layered.

Dawn Zier: Blindsided. I never saw it coming, never had happened to me before. My career path was always up, and this was the first time it was something that I was viewing as negative was happening. I remember thinking about it. I remember definitely not liking it. And then I remember talked to my husband a lot and we thought about what would be best for me. I thought, I've been at this company a long time, maybe it's time to leave. My husband, I remember having the conversation that, " Well, you don't fake resign." A lot of people think it's a negotiation tactic. Anybody that does that, it's not. It should not be.

Matt Blumberg: Maybe it turns into one.

Dawn Zier: Right but that's not the go in.

Matt Blumberg: Your head has to be in that.

Dawn Zier: I remember reflecting on it for about a month, being unhappy and then decided, I'm going to go do something else. I am young, I've been successful, let me try that. I went in and essentially said I wanted to resign and wanted to have it be amicable and let's work through the details. I remember being told, " I'm not going to get rid of this person that I brought in." I said, " No, that's not what this is about. I'm not asking you to do that. I'm serious. I just think this is no longer the right role for me, time for to go spread my wings, do something else." I went back to my office and the phone rang literally 10 minutes later and she said, " Well, maybe we can go have breakfast tomorrow and talk. I'm thinking maybe would you be open to running Europe?" Again that came totally out of the blue, totally unexpected. I said, " Well, let me talk to my husband about it." She said, " Would you move to London?" I said, " No." Because my kids were in high school. I said, " But what I'll do is I'll be there, I'll go." It's a lot of different countries. Ultimately I ended up accepting that offer. Ended up running all of international for Readers Digest, 26 different countries. You can't be every time in every place at one time. Where you're located doesn't really matter if you don't need a lot of sleep. I did it from New York. Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me that came from a moment of extreme disappointment and was in my early forties, biggest time of professional growth for me turned into my biggest time of personal growth. I think shaped my kids into who they are today because they got a love for travel and a respect for the world that the world's a lot smaller place than you think when you're just sitting in your hub in New York or something like that and was the best thing. Again, I think from these things that seem like crushing at the moment, really good things can happen if you're open to that opportunity, open to the doors and open to conversations. I really give that CEO a lot of appreciation and thanks for, didn't love that she made the change, but then it wasn't to get rid of me. It really was as she thought through it, maybe do this other role, which turned into something that I think benefited the company and certainly was one of the best experiences I ever had in my professional career. It's thanks to her. Really grateful.

Matt Blumberg: One of the key things you just said was being. Open to new things, open to thinking differently, open to new opportunities and you add that to talent and good things happen in your career for sure.

Dawn Zier: I think luck is made. I think there are people that are lucky, but I also think it's taking advantage of those opportunities that create luck and luck is a lot of hard work. Also there's luck to luck, but a lot of hard work and discipline that go into that.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, for sure. All right, so let's fast forward now to Nutrisystem. You get hired as a public company CEO. You've never been a CEO of a freestanding company, let alone a public one. Let's start with that transition. What were a couple of the things that were either challenging or were easy fits or things you had to learn as you were transitioning to be a public company CEO?

Dawn Zier: I never was a public company CEO. Did not have Wall Street experience. Had to get that under my belt really quickly. I remember one of the first questions investors would ask me, and investors generally don't mince their words is, "Why you?"

Matt Blumberg: Nothing like making you feel welcome. Right? " Why you?"

Dawn Zier: You're from publishing, you're from a magazine company. I said, " No, I am from a data analytics company, probably one of the most sophisticated data analytics companies at the time, and we happen to publish magazines. What we do is we build revenue per customer, we build continuity, we do all these things that are really relevant to Nutrisystem and it's taking that skillset and bringing them forward with leadership that is going to make the difference here." It's the marketing and the combination with data and analytics and building out Nutrisystem, which really was primarily an e- commerce company and bringing that to light. That was the first thing was addressing, do you belong here? Very quickly the investors saw how it actually did make sense, but you had to reframe. Sometimes a lot of what you're doing when you're talking to the street or talking to teams, it's about reframing it in a way that really makes sense. No, I wasn't the magazine executive, I was the data and analytics executive with a marketing experience like inaudible and we needed to dust off a tired brand, which is what Nutrisystem was.

Matt Blumberg: Well, and that's actually, if I remember correctly, it was kind of a turnaround.

Dawn Zier: It definitely was.

Matt Blumberg: Would love to hear, what was that like doing a turnaround with the eye of Wall Street on you? A lot of times that's when companies decide to go private, they find a private equity firm so they can clean up in the quiet and then come back out again. What was it like running a public turnaround?

Dawn Zier: It required a lot of discipline. Again, I think this is where that engineering mindset came in. One of the things we had to do was dust off the brand. I remember thinking if we were number two in the space behind Weight Watchers and we were never mentioned, if there was news, it would be at the time Bloomberg was looking to ban large gulp drinks at 7- Eleven or something like that, and they asked Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig to weigh in on that, no pun intended. We weren't even part of the equation. Number one was to get ourselves back on the map in the consumer eye, and we had to also change what weight loss was about because the company had been run successfully for many years, but they never had a female CEO before. They never had a female CEO that had, like most of the population, struggled up and down with weight and had to change the mindset from it being a vanity play. The commercials I inherited were women in bikinis with fans blowing their hair back in stilettos that certainly were not aspirational to any 40 plus woman because it was unattainable for us. Really had to change the messaging into it's about your health, it's about your being the best version of yourself. It's not about the vanity play, although that always is underlying, but we changed the messaging and that was really important. Next is bringing in the right team or having the right team I correct myself. It was having the right team, which one of the things I learned during my time at Nutrisystem at Reader's Digest having the benefit of working with many different CEOs is you have to be really careful not to create an us versus them culture. You need to bring in new blood, but you also need to celebrate the people that you're going to keep in the organization and really blend it into one team. I put a lot of effort into that and a lot of time into making the right leaders and making sure that we have the right team in place. That's probably my proudest moment. Then the discipline of where are we going? We had to go get back to the fundamentals of marketing. It was a performance- based marketing organization. I love that stuff and really being able to measure, have the right moments, bring a little science into it. I think we were the first company that used weight loss claims with our Fast Five. It was really targeting the consumer message. It was a marketing play, it was about product innovation and having the right team in place and getting it done and making sure that we measured and it was phenomenal. It wasn't easy. It was really hard, but we had a team that wanted to be in the boat, we sweated the details and we got it done and we created a lot of shareholder value. Stock went from 7 to 42

Matt Blumberg: It's so impressive you did that whole thing while public. There must have been moments where it wasn't going well. Right? There must have been hiccups along the way. How were you able to bring the public markets along with you for a ride that took a while? It wasn't a turnaround overnight, it was a few years of pretty hard work.

Dawn Zier: I think it was about establishing credibility with the street, just like it's always about establishing credibility with your team. You have to be authentic, you have to show up as you say you're going to show up. I brought in an amazing CFO, Mike Monahan, and together we spent a lot of time with our investors, with our shareholders, with our analysts. And I think we built trust and credibility. We weren't the schmoozy type of executives and they trusted us and they let the story play out. Again, I brought in the right team and had the right team already in place and it made a difference. There were moments, the earnings call, they're fun until they're not fun. As long as their earnings call are going-

Matt Blumberg: Are they ever fun?

Dawn Zier: They are. They actually are. When the stock reacts after an earnings column goes up, it's great fun when it goes in the other direction, not so much. You learn from those experiences and it's just about being transparent and accountable and then laying forward a path. If you built that credibility and they believe that you'll deliver, generally it works out.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Well, so now let's fast forward again. You've moved from successful scaled public company, CEO to board member, and you're on some very large and some very well known boards. What's the inventory of boards right now?

Dawn Zier: I'm on a couple right now. I'm on Spirit Airlines, which has been in the news. I'm on Haines Celestial, which is, they do celestial tea, sleepy time tea, TeraChips, a lot of different household brands. I'm on Prestige Consumer healthcare and Purple Innovation. Those are my public ones. Then I work with Go Henry, which is a private company about kids financial education.

Matt Blumberg: Right. Pretty wide range, so interesting companies.

Dawn Zier: Yeah, I like connecting the dots across industries.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, no, I mean that's one of the things that keeps it interesting, I'm sure.

Dawn Zier: Absolutely.

Matt Blumberg: How did you make that move? I know you had been on boards before, but from being CEO, the one that's accountable to the board, so now being chair of some boards or chair of significant committees on boards and sort of holding a management team accountable, holding a CEO accountable while not owning the problem. That's the hardest thing sometimes about a board member. It's like it's not actually your problem. How do you make that mindset shift?

Dawn Zier: Yeah, the phrase is noses in and fingers out, which is sometimes easier to say than do, especially when you have operators on the board. When I was setting my board at Nutrisystem and working with my chair of the board who was fantastic, Mike Hagan, we were very deliberate in the type of people we wanted on the board. When I came in, we were able to make some changes and really wanted to have a board that helped double down in my skillset sets or provided skill sets that I felt I needed help with. And we wanted to make sure we had digital expertise on the board, which we didn't when I got to Nutrisystem. We added some retail expertise. These were things that as a CEO I found helpful. When I was looking at board opportunities, it's very easy to be on a board that meets four times in a year. I personally don't find a lot of value in that. I want to earn the place as a CEO's trusted advisor because that's where the CEO gets his or her most value, and that has to be earned. You don't just show up and have that. Really, when I join a board, I think what I bring to the table is having sat in the seat before, which sometimes you have to be careful that's not an overplayed strength because then you can be too preachy and not enough about advising. Really, really careful about that. Then it's about bringing the functional expertise. I always try to bring a cultural element to the board because I do believe one of the good things that's happened in the boardroom over the last couple of years is when you talk about people and talent. It used to be about compensation and maybe CEO succession or leadership succession. Now there's so many conversations about talent and the workforce that boards and culture, and I'm a big believer that culture is the foundation for success and setting that right culture. I try to bring that to the table and make sure that the CEO has a deliberate path or vision on that, because otherwise it just happens with unintended consequences.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that's certainly true. If you are not intentional about it, it all happens around you.

Dawn Zier: Exactly.

Matt Blumberg: Interesting that even at the size and scale of large public companies, the board is feeling the need to oversee management in terms of culture. I'm not sure that's intuitive or obvious. That's good to hear.

Dawn Zier: Yeah, I think what happened over the last couple of years with the pandemic, everybody learned to work from home. Then you have the quiet quitting, you have the great resignation, you might have great players, but they're not bringing the culture forward. One of the things I did, I went up to Harvard for a couple of weeks and studied a lot of board case studies in one of the courses they offered, which was just mind expanding for me. You never want to be that Wall Street Journal headline as a board, as a company. The number one reason you are is because there's a culture breakdown.

Matt Blumberg: That's right. Yeah.

Dawn Zier: Right. For me, it inaudible-

Matt Blumberg: inaudible like fraud, which is what brings down a lot of companies and their boards is a cultural breakdown.

Dawn Zier: Right, exactly. You always want to make sure you have a handle on that.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. If I think about the boards you're on, and I think about the phrase you just said of Wall Street Journal headlines, Spirit Air comes to mind.

Dawn Zier: inaudible Spirit.

Matt Blumberg: Obviously Spirit's been through a lot over the last few years. The pandemic was a nightmare for airlines. All the M& A activity, obviously there's some things you can't talk about. I don't want you to be uncomfortable with the question, but the question more sort of general or abstract is, in those situations, the high publicity, high pressure situations, everyone stops flying and you're running an airline or volume has dropped by 90% or there's a takeover bid. What's the role of the board at that point relative to the role of the CEO or the general council or the outside council or the CFO. How in it are boards when there's something really significant of profile going on?

Dawn Zier: Yeah, I would say Spirit Airlines, great board, great management team. A lot has happened, not just to spirit, but across the industry. Again, certainly with the pandemic and the CARES Act and then not passengers not flying. I think we've weathered it well. We then had a little love triangle going on between Frontier and Spirit that JetBlue then inserted itself in. We're in the process of actually going through a sales process with JetBlue that is awaiting Department of Justice approval. It's interesting and the board does get involved in those situations because CEOs can't buy or sell companies on their own, which is good. The board is very involved in those sort of decisions. And it's always about looking out for the fiduciary duty of all shareholders. It's complicated and you need to have the right set of advisors in there.

Matt Blumberg: You probably bring it, at least for the merger, you're bringing in a lot of external advisors, presumably the pandemic, maybe some health related advisors.

Dawn Zier: Yeah, pandemic's different, a sale company always have the advisors in there. There's a lot of moving parts to it. It's about ultimately doing what's what you believe is the ultimate right move for the shareholders. The shareholders will tell you along the way what they're thinking as well. Sometimes it gets played out publicly, sometimes it does not. When it comes to, I said earlier, you don't really want to be the Wall Street Journal headline. And I think in all situations, you want to manage things. You don't want to create distractions for the company and the leadership. The best that you can do to just do what's right for the company, do what's right for the shareholders, stay out of the headlines is always, to me, the best approach. With that being said, when you do get in the headlines, you need to know how to handle that and to take all emotion out of it.

Matt Blumberg: Well, I think boards also need to be disciplined and the discipline has to be exerted on the part of the company about not going rogue and not speaking to the press unless the company has cleared it and is advising it and you're on message and everything else. Presumably that's an issue that comes up in these situations too.

Dawn Zier: Right. That's correct. Yes, the board, generally what I've always done and what most of my companies have done is it's the CEO and CFO and then the chairman of the board that talk to investors or talk on articles and to journalists and things like that. The board in general is always no comment.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Dawn Zier: That's just the discipline. You need one voice, you need one strategy, and you need one person in charge, and that should be the CEO.

Matt Blumberg: All right, Dawn. One last question before we wrap up. If you had to give CEOs and founders one piece of advice for scaling themselves up as leaders, a lot of our clients are running 10 person companies or series A companies or series B companies, and look at people like you who've been successful as scaled public CEOs. One piece of advice for that audience about scaling themselves up as a leader.

Dawn Zier: Delegate and elevate. It's about having the right team around you and being able to empower them to do what they need to do so you can go on and do the things that you need to do as a CEO, which is different than when you were number two in the company. As you grow as a CEO, you need to make sure that that team is in place and you need to learn to let go a little bit, especially as a founder, you're used to owning it all. It's your baby. You need to be able to let some aunts and uncles in to take care of the kids as they grow up.

Matt Blumberg: Love that. Delegate and elevate. Dawn Zier, board member, mentor, coach, advisor, thank you so much for being here.

Dawn Zier: Thanks, Matt. Have a great day.