3 Tips to Scale Your Culture with Nick Mehta

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 I am here today with my friend Nick Mehta, who is the CEO of Gainsight. Nick is someone I've known for... what do you think? Probably 15 years?

Nick Mehta: Yeah, at least.

Matt Blumberg: I think in the 15 year time zone, and I will tell you, the first time I ever met Nick, our mutual friend and investor, Greg Sands introduced us. We had breakfast or lunch in New York when he was visiting from the Bay Area. And I came away from that breakfast, I think it was breakfast, saying, " Man, that is my kind of CEO. If I ever went back and worked for someone else again, that's the guy I want to go work for." So inaudible-

Nick Mehta: Oh, I felt the same about you, man. Felt the same, yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Well, I'm very excited-

Nick Mehta: 15 years ago means we were in high school, right, Matt? Is that about right?

Matt Blumberg: Exactly. Anyway, I'm very excited to have you on here today. And the quick hit question for you is what are three tips you have for scaling your culture? And the reason we're asking Nick this question is that Nick has done an amazing job of scaling his culture from founding team to, what do you have now? 1200, 1500?

Nick Mehta: Yeah, 1200 people. Yes.

Matt Blumberg: 1200 employees.

Nick Mehta: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: So what are your best three for scaling the culture?

Nick Mehta: Yeah, so we've been doing this 10 years, so definitely think about this a lot. The three things I think that are probably most transferable, number one is creating a regular communications routine that's really consistent. And this is the one that's all about habits, so I've got a routine, which is actually kind of a daily, weekly, quarterly, annual. And so the quick version of that is every day I actually do a Slack post to the company of what I did that day. And you don't have to do that, but that creates some transparency. Every week I do an email to the company, it's called Mehtaphysical Musings. My last name's Mehta, so a little pun about three things you need to know about the company and what's happening in my personal life, what I'm working on right now, my plans for the next week. Every quarter of course we do an all hands where we are going through a lot of detail about our customers, our values, things like that, we put a ton of work into doing them really well. And then once a year we do our annual strategic plan that reinforces our values and our culture. And so having a routine that all ties it together, I think is a huge thing. Number two... actually, do you have a question on number one?

Matt Blumberg: No, I love that, I love that, my name for that is the operating system, right?

Nick Mehta: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: You've got the operating system -

Nick Mehta: We call it Gainsight rhythm, exactly. Operating system, exactly right.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, all right, what's number two?

Nick Mehta: Two, is thinking about the chances to create powerful, memorable moments in your company's history. So there's a great book called The Power of Moments, which is all about the idea, we don't remember every single thing that happens, it's the really peak moments. And so I can remember there's a few moments in Gainsight history that people really remember. As an example, when we were doing one of our first big in- person company kickoffs, or maybe a couple of hundred people, I was doing my typical CEO State of the Union, everything's great, blah, blah, blah, but then I decided at the end to close with the moment of vulnerability channeling Brené Brown. And I talked about actually the fact that I was really lonely as a kid, and actually I ate alone every day from kindergarten through 12th grade, I just didn't have any friends, didn't fit in. And I talked about that, and then that just created this feeling of openness, and other people in that event were talking about their own stories and being vulnerable. And then people still refer to that, so this idea that you can find these moments when you can really go out on a limb as a leader, and I think that's where you make the culture really, really strong.

Matt Blumberg: I love that, I love that, I can picture five of those from the 20 years of Return Path inaudible, so...

Nick Mehta: I can imagine.

Matt Blumberg: All right, and what's the last one?

Nick Mehta: Last one is then is speaking of moments, not everyone's going to be there for all the moments, so try to capture the stories. And I wish actually one thing I had done is literally having kind of somebody be part- time historian at Gainsight, and writing them all down. Obviously you could put them into Slack, you could put them into presentations, but remember that not everyone in your company was there for the whole journey. So you want to remember those stories about the time a teammate got sick and everyone helped them out, or the time our team helped a customer find a new job, or the time that when we were going through a tough decision, how we made the decision, really having a way to remember those stories and teach them to new people.

Matt Blumberg: So how do you do that?

Nick Mehta: So the way we do it is I think through inaudible presentations. So for example, I have a presentation, it's called What Ted Lasso And My Mom Taught Me About Leadership. And it's literally this analogy between some stuff from my mom and from the TV show Ted Lasso. And I've got these stories and these slides about, okay, in our case, we talk about human first business, not forgetting that around us are just human beings. And so remembering the human being at the client and a story of a client in this case that got laid off and all the people at Gainsight that went to help her. And a different example where a teammate left Gainsight and we still celebrated them afterwards, and then kind of three years later we're celebrating them on LinkedIn, things like that. So actually making it inaudible so then you bring on new people, you can share all the stories upfront.

Matt Blumberg: I love it. So at Return Path, we did this probably the second 10 years, to do that we did new employee onboarding round tables, and I would do one a month with everyone who would join that month, and I would have three other old timers in with me, and we would go through each value of the company's values and tell a story about each one.

Nick Mehta: Ooh, I love that, I'm going to steal that one. That's great, Matt, thanks.

Matt Blumberg: All right, Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, thank you for joining me. Will you come back and do one of the Friday In Deep With Conversations?

Nick Mehta: Oh, I'd love to man, thanks again, I'd love to do that.

Matt Blumberg: You got it.