Managing Change in a Hyper-Growth Company with Sarah Personette

Speaker 1: 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'm here today with Sarah Personette. Sarah is a longtime tech executive. She was at Facebook for a while. She was at Refinery 29 for a while. She's a board member, an independent board member, including Build a Bear Workshop, which is such a cool business. But most recently she spent five years at Twitter, the last few of which were as Chief Customer Officer, and she left Twitter recently. Sarah, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Sarah Personette: Matt, thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So the question I have for you, you were at an organization in the throes of what I think most people would agree is hyper- growth for many years, probably twice, probably at Facebook and then again at Twitter. So the question for you is how do you think about dealing with organizational change in a hyper- growth environment? What are your top three thoughts or tips on that front?

Sarah Personette: Absolutely. So to your point, I've been at multiple companies that have experienced hyper- growth and I've also been there at different stages of those companies. And one thing that's important to note is that organizational change theory actually suggests that structure, process and tooling or systems break in threes and tens. So for all of the founders and CEOs out there, when you're one person, you're communicating with yourself, you know exactly what your process is, you know exactly what your structure is, because it's just you. When you add two more people on you and you get to three people, you actually have to rethink how you're communicating, whether or not you have the right communication software in place, whether or not you have the right processes and rules and responsibilities to drive clarity. And that happens as you get to three to 10, 10 people to 30 people, 30 to 100, so on and so forth. But most of the time, companies in a hyper- growth stage fly through those threes and tens, and if you're not mindful, what can ultimately happen is that the operational excellence of your company starts to break down and can also deeply impact your culture. So the three tips that I would take away from this is first, always be mindful when you hit those threes and tens. Tip two, ask, do I have the right process and clarity around roles and responsibilities in your structure to sustain that pace of growth? Where are you right now and where do you want to be one year from now, three years from now, five years from now? And then last but not least, and this is incredibly important as well as we continue to think about building diversity, inclusivity, and equity into our cultures and into our companies, is ensuring that all disciplines have an equal voice to really avoid breakage and exclusionary tactics later on in your growth cycle. So I think if you're mindful of those three things, then you're fully off to the races.

Matt Blumberg: Let me key in on that last one for a second because that one is really interesting. For so many people diversity, inclusion equity, while important is frequently either an afterthought or it's something that, afterthought sounds very negative, but it might be added onto the end of a process, and is not yet woven into the fabric of how everyone thinks about roles, responsibilities, recruiting, et cetera. So I can imagine that one is really easy to fall by the wayside in a hyper- growth environment when you're just trying to hit the number one thing in your mind that don't care about anything else. In particular with that one, how do you make sure that doesn't get lost?

Sarah Personette: Matt, so I'll give you an example. Yesterday I was talking with a founder who has an exceptional annual ARR right now, annual run rate, and he was trying to think through sort of the next stage of growth. He was building out his sales team and he was thinking about the marketing discipline. And he was like, " You know what? I don't need a marketer. I just need someone who's going to be in total service of sales and churn and burn on content." So when we think about diversity, equity, and inclusion, we oftentimes think about it in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, religious philosophies, certain things like that. And when you think about equity inside of a company that allows for equality and equity across each function, it's actually the first part of starting to learn and build that muscle. So the guidance I gave to that particular founder and CEO is to really be thoughtful about how he structures his language and how he thinks about talking about that team and that discipline to others so that they have an equal place at the table to be able to share their voice and share their perspective. And that's how I think what some companies I think really get wrong today is they don't think about asking who does not have a seat at the table right now that we need to bring in? And that's where you can really expand it, not just around function, but even more importantly, to make sure that there's a diverse representation across all that are the consumer base also that you serve.

Matt Blumberg: That's such a great way to think about it. It backs up the scope and backs up the lens a little bit. So it has to be primary.

Sarah Personette: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Sarah Personette, operating executive board member, advisor extraordinaire. Thank you so much for being here.

Sarah Personette: Thank you, Matt. Appreciate it.