Employee Number Four to a $1.2B Unilever Exit: Katie Cirulli’s Story

Today, we have a very special episode for you with guest Katie Cerulee. Katie is an incredibly dynamic operator. She was the fourth employee at Grounds in April of 2024, and in just two and a half years, she rose from Chief of Staff to President to Chief Emerging Brands Officer.

This is an amazing episode. Katie, again, is such a dynamic operator.

This conversation really gets into the weeds of how to structure teams to run five brands at once. How Rounds built a culture where everyone is the CEO of their own domain, and what it takes to scale a CPG brand into mid-9 figures and less than three years. Before we do that, we want to think the sponsor's motion,

house, neon pixel, rich panel, propel, and aftersile. Let's get into it. Katie, you have the post, the post to exit glow to you, that I will only see in a few times. Officer Grounds existed about two or three months ago. What's life post exit been like for you?

Yeah, it's been great. Life on the other side has been very nice. It's funny as soon as the acquisition happened. Like the day it was announced to the entire company. It felt like nothing had changed. Like we had a full day of meetings, and we're still marching towards super, super big growth goals,

and we're still doing that today. I think that there's obviously a bit of pressure that has been taken off of the team, which allows everyone to sleep a little easier at night. Maybe get some more time with family and friends. But outside of that, it's just been businesses usual,

and now it's like the added pro of having such an awesome company and Unilever, too. Really have a good two-way partnership.

“That's what's been most surprising to me about the acquisition.”

It's not just one way where they're coming to us with a bunch of really exciting opportunities to enhance our business, but they're also looking at us and asking how what are some of the ways that you guys grew so quickly and how could we replicate that with our other brand? So it's been a really cool partnership so far, but definitely nice to have a little bit more time and space outside of work.

Nice, yeah. I want to dig into that acquisition and some of the go deeper on some of those details. Before that, I want everyone to know that I was with Chad when this happened,

and the first post exit meal was drive through Taco Bell.

So that's how we celebrated it on the way to Aspen on the way out to Aspen color. What was the order? Who bought it? Did he buy it or did you buy Chad? Chad bought that one and we were driving out to Aspen. I forget what he got, but he goes, yeah man, because I'm hungry now.

What should we go eat and we pulled over to Taco Bell and that was meal number one for Chad. So, you know, immediately, you know, he totally changed as a human being. You know, only that, only that best stuff for Chad once he once he, I was acquired by Unilever.

“I think the next message came to Aspen, but we did it.”

So, all caps, very short and sweet message. So, I think that's in the Taco Bell parking lot. Yeah, probably on the drive out. But first Taco Bell priorities, yes, exactly. Check your kind of, you're making me a little nervous here, because he's like trying to drive and

text like, "Yo, me to drive." I was like, "Oh, no, no, no, I got it." He didn't want me to drive the the green green trivia, and I think was the main takeaway, didn't trust me, but then we pulled over, got the tea bell. He sent the message, got everything taken care, and then we were on our way. So, that was my proximity and experience with the acquisition

with Unilever, and it was amazing. I loved it.

We're off to Eddie, he doesn't even trust you with the self-driving Ruby, and I loved that. I know, I know, it's crazy. I know, and I will get there. We'll get there one day. Cool. Well, I want to dig into all the green stuff. Before we do that, I mean, you have a super interesting background. And it's actually something I've noticed now with a handful of operators,

“you know, Liz from Half-Days has a very similar, similar background. Like this path of, and I think”

actually, Keegan from David Protein, maybe has a similar background, but this path from like big consulting into EECOM operator, can you just like kind of run us through high level, like what your background is, and kind of what brought you into grooms, maybe starting with like, even college, like what would you study? Did you study business? Did you not study business? And I was like, what was your, what was your path to grooms?

Is the, you know, in the multiple roles that you've held over there? Yeah, absolutely. I guess starting from the beginning, I studied engineering and undergrad. So, it was industrial engineering a bit more of a focus on business principles, but also good amount of coding and other, you know, just big problem solving types of classes that I took. And then from there, I did go into work at McKinsey and Company. I was there for the classic

two, two and a half years, where you do a random walk and work on a ton of different types of projects. And I think, I guess by so many of these folks are doing that pipeline, is it's just such a good training ground for really anything you want to do next, like the types of training that they put you through. It's super rigorous. There's tons of in-person, you know, on this bot training,

lead a business and you're doing everything from, like, you know, sitting in a, I was, I can't say

“the client's name, but I was, you know, in a hard had in an orange suit, counting, you know, doing”

some more of like that type of work. And then you're in, like, a huge board room with these, like, super high up CEOs. And it was just a really great training ground for what comes after that. From there, I went on to, I actually joined meta in between my, so that was like, I guess the, the start into my, my e-commerce journey. I was in the sales ops and planning group, and actually was on the SMB teams at the small medium business team, where I was seeing all these

cool up-and-coming brands, like, in the disruptors, seeing, like, what their spend looked like, quarter by quarter, understanding, like, where they were investing their money and dollars on

meta. And very quickly, I, like, would always be looking up these brands and, like, I got to go

get on the other side of this. I need to go join a real brand and be a part of, like, this rocket ship that I see on the other side in the data. And so, um, yeah, I joined, um, I actually joined

“Ruggable as an early employee, so the machine-washable, Rug brand. I was one of the first 25 employees”

there, and ran all of our marketing data in analytics. And I always credit, like, that role to be in the training ground that I needed to be successful in an e-commerce company. And I'm happy to, like, dive in more there. But when I first joined the team was probably, like, four or five folks on the marketing team. And my whole goal was, like, build out the data warehouse to have the data to support all of our marketing leadership. So I had to, like, fund, I had no e-commerce

background other than my, my time at meta and had to, like, really fundamentally understand, like, how does paid media work? How does email and retention work? How does brand, you know, operate? What type of KPIs with the influencer team looking out of what kind of data data do they need to make the decisions that they need to make? And, like, how does all that come together in MTA and all the other attribution models that we were looking at? So, um, it was just, like, such a

good training ground for understanding e-commerce and has was, I always say that was, like, the best

role that someone could do if they want to get into it and then have, like, a little bit of that background. You were seeing all these brands through your role at meta, you were seeing a presumed, like, tons of different categories, tons of different products. It sounds like you were working on, like, a sub collection of brands that were, that were scaling. So you're seeing these, like,

“a lot of different brands have this, like, very interesting growth trajectory, like, what?”

Like, what was your take on that? Like, what made you excited about that? And, like, ultimately, what, like, how quickly and what made you know that you wanted to be on that side of the equation and not unlike the ad tech side? Super quickly. I was only at meta for about five months. And, you know, at the time early on in my career, like, your super nervous to make a quick jump for you like, oh, and you don't work at every brand, but I go to for, for at least two years, make sure I

get the experience. But I was very certain after I would say at least two, two and a half months that the brand world was much more interesting. I wanted to be, you know, the one on the other side, making those decisions, pulling those strings and seeing how to actually grow that brand all the way through. I think another big piece of it, too, is like, when you are in that consulting world, you're obviously working on so many different clients. And you do this big project,

you complete the project, you do the readout. And then you never actually know where the results

go from there. If the project was implemented, what was the actual impact from that project that you spent? God knows how many hours on. And so that was another thing even working on the meta sides, you know, you're still working across a number of different brands, different categories. And so I was really excited to see a brand from start to finish and not be a part, you know, just splitting my time across so many different things. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's kind of the

same with meta, right? Like, your reps can give you the advice, but they can't actually they're not going to go by the media. They can actually, you know, force your media buyer to go and do the things that that you're recommending that they do. So you just want to, you want it more, kind of more A to Z control over the outcome. Yeah, exactly. And the bigger picture, too, I think is was so interesting to me, especially with my operations background and more of that engineering

side. You know, there's one side of the business that focuses so much on marketing and you want to grow. But there's a whole other side of like how do we actually keep up with that demand? How do we make sure the margins are right? How do we, you know, really make a business that is scalable? And so I was excited to build out that other side of the, yeah, the business. Motion just dropped their 2026 creative benchmarks report and it's been getting shared everywhere.

Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same four questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should be actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate in which formats really win? The report

been to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings. Like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become winners in over half of ads actually lose. And for motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your motion dashboard with their run-eth AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks.

Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionap.com

until the marketing operator sent you. So what did that at, at Rougable then? You were really owning the data function. Like was that? I just want you to like talk us through kind of what you were doing there and what that like tactically looked like. And then were you like do you feel like you're your background, like what you studied in school, gave you the skills to do that or were you kind

of like, I need to go figure out how to build a data warehouse here and then like build the front end and then like how to make that usable for the team. Like can you just like, what did that look like? Were you kind of parachuting into each marketing function then and building like a

“different data analytics thing for them? Like what did that all look like?”

Yeah exactly. So when I first joined like many early stage companies, all of the analytics and

data was being managed in Google Sheets or a lot of like export files doing that whole thing where you're now we have cloud. So it's a little bit different and not as not as exciting but at the time we were just downloading Shopify files trying to connect them all and then you know have the right analytics to be able to make decisions across the company. So when I came in the very first thing was we needed to build you know a centralized data warehouse that actually has all that data

we can connect it all and behind the scenes and be able to create like the dashboards and you know data sets that we need to make our decisions and and also do a quicker like Excel is is helpful for a lot of analyses but being able to do it in SQL and having you know quicker access to the data was super important to us. To your question around yes like in in college I did do a bit of you know I learned SQL I did some of that but was really on the job at nada that I

“like honed in those skills so it doesn't take long but now it's not as important so I wouldn't”

recommend go spending your time doing that but yeah from there to your point diving into each marketing function it's like I hired obviously agency like I could have built the data warehouse on my own but we hired a great I would say an agency a consultant to work with on the build out and then it was very much to your point diving into each function I also I reported to the CMO at the time and you know really understanding like what are our marketing strategic priorities and how

do we build the data sets that we need to be able to make these decisions so one day it might be like you know we really want to be able to track our influence or program better and so how do we actually like what data points do we need to integrate it like actually build on a post purchase survey might be like the very first thing that we do and then it's collecting that data putting in the data set and then connecting that to you know other data sources to make sure that we're

happy we have like a more complete view of each function. You're coming to you know slightly more established businesses, ruggable stuff like that obviously here seeing a meta. How would you think about it now especially like right with it with like AI for a new brand just completely hypothetically if you're setting up a new one because when Jones Road was launching a family friend who's you know well-known like venture capital of like a lot of like the early D to C brands like working with VCU he's like

you your first role should be a data person where I was like we don't need that like we're bootstrapped

“like we're gonna install lifetimely and stuff like that and then like I think it was the right”

thing at the time like I don't think we would have known what to do but now with AI I'm such a very proponent of context engineering and getting everything in one place like I would almost do it from the beginning if there is a really easy and cheap way to do it how how do you think about it like do you think that's something a brand should get from the beginning or just at a later stage when they have more resources. It's a great question I I don't think you need it right away like I think

for the most part for it especially the early early stage like you're under one two three

million like I think you can easily operate with like the downloads and then I'm sure there's a great

pipeline so you can build just with cloud on on its own. I do recommend like even as you scale like I do think having in a data person and maybe not just data but the ideal archetype and I think it's really hard to hire for is like this data engineer slash bizzops like has a more you know they lean more like they they're a data analyst and it like a strategist and can actually work with you on like how do we not only set up the data but it's more important in my opinion of like how

you analyze it and how you utilize it across the org so I'm not up to data unfortunately on all of the cool data AI tools that exist today I imagine that like most of the early stage you can just build with pipelines into cloud but it would be I still think having some type of data bizzops per cent to to lead that function is so so important as you scale it's been like one of the best investments we made at groans. And where do you find that person if you're if you're like

all right we actually need to have this this data warehouse function built like where where we

because it's not a it's not like a traditional it's not a marketing role obviously it's like a heavy data analytics role like what's like the type of person that or the type of company you could go in and find like a a contractor of data or a head of analytics or whatever you would want to call the role. Yeah um on our end I mean unfortunately when you're hiring for this for all you're typically getting a lot of folks who are like hard core data data analytics folks or data

scientists and I don't think that that archetype works great depending on like how scrappy or startup is um well it was that why do you not think that's a good a good fit generally they're just so focused on like being in the weeds on the data making sure everything in the data is exactly

“how you want it like they're doing the an amazing analysis I think there are some folks in that role”

that have the the tie to the larger business but I think finding someone who can like I understand the business's goals I understand margins I understand all of these other things that are important not just like getting the answer to this data problem so they can actually connect yeah connect the data analysis that they're yeah yeah that they're doing to the larger picture. Katie tell me if you like agree with this or disagree but it's kind of like growth that in earlier stage tell me like

you're not just like a media buyer you're not just like you kind of have to wear a bunch of hats and that same thing it's like you can't just get an engineer like yes that's important skill for later like you need an analyst who can write sequel you engineer who can write Python and set stuff up but then you also like need to analyze that stuff and actually be like a partner to the rest of the teams and early you kind of need one person who can wear all those hats right.

“That's how I see it and I like that I think it's so hard to find that archetype to the point”

of like where do you find them? I do think there are several e-commerce companies that have that type of function. I feel like they generally sit more in like a centralized role so maybe aren't as marketing focused but at least how we've built out at Greens and what I find really helpful is and hiring under that person for a more like marketing focused biz ops role who they have the

data skills that can analyze data especially in cloud now being able to like build these amazing

dashboards that we can use and also be like a really good strategic partner like they're not only analyzing data they're truly the ones proactively calling out like hey we're noticing this in like on-metto or we're noticing this in our MTA like let's shift spend here so much more of like a partnership from a strategic standpoint and less so on you asked for what is our gross margin yesterday like go find the answer and then put it up okay so that was your time at Ruggable

“and so you're a Ruggable for how long? I was at Ruggable for a little over five years so”

I did that role for about two and a half years and then we actually started launching other brands under the Ruggable umbrella we launched a washable furniture brand and then we launched a wallart brand and I was on the leadership team for both of those brands so I actually led e-commerce and so the website and then the finance team on our washable furniture brand and then on our wallart brand I led physical product development so I really got a good sense of like that was sourcing

operations like a bit more in the weeds on how do we actually build a product and make sure we can operationalize it and make sure we can sell it that was like early early stages and so through the Ruggable journey I felt like I really rounded out my full understanding of the different functions of any commerce business and was super super excited to get into the health and wellness and like CPG space and so yeah I started networking pretty hard to get into that space

and eventually landed the job at grids so yes you were I wanted I want to know more about that to your employee number four you've had you weren't a lot of have tech rooms you've been really involved with all the different stages of the company yeah like tell tell us about what you just said like how do you find rooms how do you connect it to Chad like why did you decide to join like what did that and maybe even zoom me back a little bit like why did why was it the

health and wellness niche that you were the most interested in and like you said you kind of network your way and do it like what did that look like and and then yeah how did you ultimately would land that rooms yeah so I guess going back like why health and wellness by CPG I would buy myself to my earlier point when I was at meta in island in Austin at the time I would go to the

big Whole Foods and walk through and I was always just like I love seeing all the new brands

that were a long gene and like the snacks face and the health and wellness space and so it was just that was for many reasons but that was one of the biggest ones of like it's something I love and I had always dreamed of like actually you know putting together like what I love and what I talk about on the day-to-day basis with my actual job and so yeah I'd networked quite a bit just trying to get it understanding I was thinking about BC I was thinking about being an operator again

and yeah I actually came across the role for Chief of Staff at Greens on LinkedIn and applied

first round interviews a sync with loom which I thought was like a real like at first I was like

this is really weird and now that we've utilized it a bit more I'm like this is an incredible tool

like you weed out so many people through a 10 minute loom that he can watch on 2x speed what like take five minutes of his day versus studying up you know 10 30 minute meetings and so we did the same by the way because you know in 30 seconds sometimes when you get on a call yeah we just told her exactly and we do it a lot for like contract work too as well as

“like a lot of our virtual team like I think it's such a I mean I could go on and on about loom”

we use it all the time in our day-to-day business too and I think it is such an unlock for for any business but yeah going back I interviewed on loom then obviously had like a bit more in person time with Chad and I mean happy to go through all of that I will be honest I was actually pretty skeptical of the gummy supplement market it wasn't something that I was particularly excited to to get involved with but after spending even 30 minutes with Chad I'm like this is the guy

like I I have to work with him I want to soak up like the way he thinks the way he works the way he operates and you know luckily as I got into the business and learn more about gummy supplements learned about how we were doing things that grew into how different it was from a lot of the other supplement companies that I had seen before now I'm like a you know rider die on the gummy supplement train but yeah that was the early I guess if it is for how I found and joined the group and yeah

it was an exciting time at the very beginning you know the difference between hitting your numbers and missing them clear signal on what's actually driving growth it can get really really noisy there is so much noise you got platform data you got blended data MMM all the acronyms MTA experiments all of it all pointing in different directions the more you're spending the faster you move

“the more the bad signal can cost you that's why we use house and we've been using it for years that's”

why the other marketing operators do as well they're the best tool on plan earth for measuring what we call incrementality we talk about a lot on a podcast what is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business we have causal MMM for channel level budget calls causal attribution down to the ad level and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go and the results speak for themselves stock it's all 41% lift in iRos using house and you're not stuck with

a help desk you get an embedded measurement strategies who actually helps your team make better decisions their whole team is great we've worked with a lot of them they are world class there go to house.io/operators h a u s dot i o slash operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data

how long wasn't from that first loom interview to you getting a job offered and starting

like were you were you were you with rockable still at the time are you in between

“I just left I think I was out for about a month or two doing some travel and other things and then”

yeah found found that and was hired I think within probably we can have and it was go go go yeah exactly and you know no looking back from there for sure so when I first met you Katie Chad had introduced us because he's like I think you guys were looking at like you were looking at measurement tools or or something and I forget what we were talking about but I just remember coming out of that conversation being blown away a I was like oh this this like I love how like this

list like working relationship Chad and Katie have but also just blown away I like the scope of what you were what you were doing like I really felt like you were just creating a list of things that you all needed to go and attack and just going and doing it one by one or probably like five at a time in reality but it really I it became what really imprinted on me was like the breath there was like really the entire the entire like growth function that you were kind of like

involved in so I want to dig into that a little bit like what did your chief of staff role look like on a day today yeah it was the most fun role I think I'll ever do as we mentioned for employees at the time so we had a head of growth we had a head of ops and then we had a head of CX and then Chad so very very small team at the time and truly the very like as you said anything and everything

and not just within the growth function like one my very first project when I joined our CXC was

having trouble keeping up with all of the tickets that were coming through and we needed to think through like what tools should we use you know how can we like automate a lot of what the you know what the team works on and then how do we make like a CX function that is actually you know a little bit more proactive and also you know just enjoy to work with and make that really a core part of the brand so that was an early project I worked on and then the next day you know we're barely keeping

up with the demand that we're seeing so it's working really closely with the head of ops of like

like the internal tools from a supply chain system to make sure that we have enough inventory at each skew and make sure that we are you know looking out six 12 months and not just right you know

when I first joined maybe looking out more of those two to three months so and then as you said

like tons of work in the growth growth phase it was anything from like big met new like greenfield projects that Chad wanted to take on so diving into like maybe a CPM arbitrage opportunity to looking at I'm sure we were talking out we were talking about MTA so it was like working with our head of growth to really understand like what tools should we go after from an attribution standpoint so that role was just like a constant like what is the most urgent thing what is the

most impactful thing and like you know throw myself at that while I try to keep the the wheels on the rest of the the company it sounds like so much fun and I feel like in my next phase that should

“be my job I think I'm gonna start applying for some chief of staff jobs it sounds like so much fun”

actually like just like get to dive in and do a bunch it's so fun I think the the trouble with two of staff roles as you just don't quite know what it's gonna look like until you join some of them can easily be more of those admin like calendar manager attend meetings with Chad and take notes for him but so I think obviously if you are applying not you could be but just like generally if someone's listening applying to those two of staff roles making sure that they're actually you know diving into

like what does that day to day look like and they set up really strong boundaries from the very beginning to say like if that is what they want is that more strategic role where they are like a coerced strategic partner in that in the in the business to make sure that they're studying those boundaries and they're not getting into the habit of like doing those smaller admin tasks that can definitely come with the job yeah I also think is because we we had one for a few years of

chance road and you also have to be very clear if it's like a like a strategic partner like we we a lot of the people that we talked to were like I mean a lot of them were business school like consulting but it was like hey I want to be like a strategic advisor but I don't really want to get my hands dirty not yet on admin stuff and some people are like hey I want to be a partner to you but like whatever you need me to do I'm going to go and like roll my sleeves up

that's the part that sounds so much made but it seems like you were pretty split it seems like

“yeah but each I would say honestly in the early early days like forum plays way deeper on like hands on”

like I am like in the email flows on Clevio like actually you know putting the footing the new welcome flow together working with the team there so um or like building out of flow and and um ZAPR like it's you know there's there was a lot of in the weed stuff that I was doing and then just so as much looking at like more forward thinking how do we how do we make sure we're growing six to twelve months the way that we want to. Do you look back at that finally like

is that like your favorite part of your career? I feel like that's for me those early days are the most fun. Oh that is where I thrive like I love the early stage if I could like you know not have

to jump around so much but always be joining that super early stage I mean you can see in my career

are too like at ruggable we launch new brands it's like go jump on those new brands like I want to grow from zero and then at greens we haven't gotten to this part but I ran our emergency brands most recently and like it's just so for me so much more fun to be in that early scrappy stage

“doing anything you need to do to get the brand to grow it's just like so fun.”

Quick gut check for the operators listening. If you're spending on TV or CTV today can you actually say what it's driving incrementally? This is exactly why we work and have worked with neon pixel and hexclad for the last three years. We've grown with them a lot over time in CTV has become one of our top growth channels they help us treat premium living room TV like a real performance channel it has smarter household targeting it has suppression of people who already know us it is a very

robust analytics back end so we feel really good about the measurement and ultimately and most importantly it is a strategy that is built around incremental growth not just claimed attribution we look at incrementality is the true north star on measuring channels and they're a really measurement that agnostic they don't force us into their own black box dashboard they work inside the measurement systems we already trust and help us understand what TV is actually doing. If you want to check it

out go to neonpixel.co and ask them to design a controlled CTV test on your numbers. I feel like that's something that Chad really brought to the table was big swings like

he was just always thinking of like what are new ways that we can that we can build this business

that aren't in the typical ways of like having to spend a ton of money on meta to grow. Chad sent me a loom of like the influencer seeding thing and again this was early as the product like two years ago and like now it's like you know you like you guys were duct tape and like sat there and a bunch of tools like now like there's probably you could build this with club but I was like it was so cool and so automated and so tactical and like I remember Connor

was telling me when he joined he's like yeah like you know that video there's a bunch of these

just seems really cool. I put that as one of the funny like a thing that I own in the

“chief of staff days that I still get things about today because everyone's now wild as Apple fail or you”

know something like like I have I don't even want to know how many apps we have running in the background right now but I'll go and like you know I'll get an email like this app failed and I have to go and still and then go check it which is so funny because I'm like how am I yeah like how is this thing that I built almost two and a half years ago still running in our business it's pretty cool. That's awesome. Kit I want to I want to before we move on to like the next phase phases of

your rollout at corona's I want to talk quickly about you you just briefly mentioned like chads like coming up with a lot of big swing ideas to continue to grow the business in unique novel creative ways so we have the note here like about chief of staff I want to use whole hire for early stage founders you added you added some additional notes here on the idea like a visionary versus integrator which is something I've been reading a lot about recently

what you wrote here is if you are a visionary get yourself an integrator if you are an integrator you may not need a chief of staff as badly so can you just talk about that like relationship between you and Chad it sounds like in this situation like Chad was a visionary you were really the integrator like what did that look like how did that work why did it work I can just fill us in on that that relationship from that lens yeah absolutely I think Chad is unique because he is

both a an visionary and an integrator but definitely I think at least from what he shared loves the visionary side much more than he loves the integrator side and so I think that was one of the biggest reasons that he brought me in as chief of staff was pretty much like hey like I want more time in my day to be thinking of these big swings that our company is ultimately going to have to do to grow as fast as we want to grow into and to succeed the way that we want to succeed so

I eat all these new brands that you guys continue to launch over and over and over again when you know having someone who has those big ideas that feel super confident in them and

“can push them you know I think it's it's so important to have someone like that at your company who's”

always thinking you know two five ten years out but yeah in terms of the visionary versus the

integrator I had heard it on a podcast a little bit ago and same with you Connor have been looking into it more but I do think that that I've talked to so many founders who are much more like I just like love how to do innovation I love being this visionary that thinks about like really big swings for our company but I don't really care to be the one that's actually like executing and and operationalizing them and so I think for any founder who's like that who you know

I think a chief of staff is such a good first hire it's like kind of growth for me if you are driving more of a D to C business or a such a chief of staff because that relationship between me and chat friends and so I think like worked so well where he was coming up with all these amazing ideas and then it was my job to figure out how do we actually execute against them and I think it's such a valuable role and and what is that like tactically speaking so like this LTO idea that that

chat came up with like first off what is that but maybe it just has an example how does something come

go from Chad's brain to now he's like having a discussion with you or the team about it to

“now you and the team are actually executing on it like what's that what's that like I think we all”

understand like what's that process look like like tactically speaking yeah absolutely I mean there's so many different ways that it comes about but I think the most helpful ones were when he would generally like come up with a day and then put together a notion doc of like hey this is exactly this is the high level strategy like I want to launch a new product every month or I want to launch an L I'm going to get to the point where we're launching like LTOs are limited time

offer products every single yes and so it's like high level like that is the goal that I want to accomplish and like here are some reasons why like she's like writing a memo yeah writing a memo basically of like here is exactly what I want to go after and why and here's like he may even like get to the point where he's like early stage going through here's how I would think about operationalizing it but I think generally it was very high level of like this is the goal this is what I want to

get done and this is by when and then it's like okay 80 go over look at this and let me know if it's possible or not which most of the time if I came back and said no it's not possible he's like think again which we can talk about the notion of table walls is something I don't know if you guys have read anything about that I don't even know who coined the term but it's something that we talk about constantly in within grooves um basically like there are these walls that you think

gar you know you know hard and maybe made of cement that you can't get through where you are given a problem or a task and there's just like there's no way that you can all like ever make this happen um but really it's like a paper wall that if you just keep asking the right questions and keep getting creative you can actually like push right through that wall and it's something that like Chad is just phenomenal at and something that he like pushes throughout the entire

organization where we're always like you think something is just totally impossible but the

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that's pretty good offer if you ask me so at a rich panel dot com slash demo they'll build an AI support team live for your business and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you was so before you was Chad like kind of acting in both functions as visionary and and integrator and then he's like I can't I'm splitting my time too much between both like because presumably

these things take a long time to actually build out right like Chad might have this idea in his

head and then be able to put it down on a notion doc in a few days but like for you guys to actually build a flywheel to produce these limited time offers like that's probably I've assumed taking months and months and months right and then so now he's able to like say okay this LTO idea is now officially off my plate and into Katie's world and she's executing on it and now Chad's over here thinking about the newest brand or the newest growth tactic and it's kind of this like that's

the cycle yeah I definitely spend more time on that but we're still coming back to him where it's like all right like here's where we're at with our LTO strategy now like this is how we're thinking about rolling it out this is the pricing we're thinking about this is what that would mean for margins

“this is like the customer experience like there's so much you have to think about obviously on”

like the website itself on our you know back in uh subscription platform all of that so he was like he's super involved in a lot of the details he really likes to get that stuff right and so he was still spending time obviously on like checking in with us and making sure that we're you know we're in line with what he was thinking for this like higher level goal but yeah to your point he can spend a lot more of his time then focused on what the next wave date with next wave

of innovation is or what the next thing swaying we want to take as a company and doesn't have to spend you know even like worry I think the biggest thing that like that can take off your plate is like the concern or worry like if you have a team that you can pass that off to in your confident that they can go execute against it it's not like he's in the back of his mind the whole time being like how I wonder how that LTO project is going you know it's like that is like valuable

space in your mind that you have to you can't be thinking about if you really want to clear mind to to innovate and and take those big swings yeah and and how explicit is his so like obviously LTO like UX is a huge one right and like what's the experience of how someone swaps their order and then they can see like their next order or what flavor it is and after that what the next one

is the second and third from then like is he getting pretty detail like when he's out like describing

or outline in this memo for these initiatives like is he getting pretty buttoned up and pretty detailed and like in here's how I envision like are like logged in state on our website and here's how I envision like the SMS flow and how people will like actually you know confirm they want this new flavor or is he kind of saying hey we're obviously gonna drive a lot of this through email SMS like life cycle person I want you to come to me with the plan like what's that what's that balance there

and then are you guys just setting up like review calls along the way where it's like all right every month we're gonna have a check-in call with Chad and like pitch him the progress that we're making on this initiative so he can kind of provide feedback and make sure he we're not getting

“like too far away from his vision yeah I think in that initial memo generally not getting in the”

weeds on any specific function like he may have some really strong ideas about a certain thing and to like maybe on SMS he's like this is exactly how I went in the SMS on this project but generally it's more high level at the beginning and then along the way is when we're getting a little bit more crisp on exactly what that experience will look like and it's really like the things if he cares the most about or the things he's like probably like when he's on his bike ride

or on a run he's like thinking through and he's like this is a really good idea like let me SMS over to the team and make sure that it's integrated into this like larger project and then to your question or on the check-ins we generally would just like send looms or send like an updated notion doctor him to review we try to keep that as like async as possible and it wasn't like a you know he's like I need a monthly update on this every single you know every month or

I need like I need these updates it's more proactive on our end of like hey like let let me keep you like in the loop on where we're headed to make sure that you're still aligned with the direction but most of the time it's like we can talk through CEO of your own domain is like a big thing that we say it grew in constantly because it is very much not an organization where like

“you need to go to your manager and get sign off and make sure that like the new initiative that you're”

doing is the best thing it's like if you can model out the impact of what you're doing and make sure

that you're that you like are so confident it's going to be right and you can prove that in fact

“it's very much like move forward quickly and don't spend a bunch of time getting buy and”

from every stakeholder and getting buy and from your manager it's like move as quickly as possible so the check-ins were definitely less of a force like he needs updates and more of a more of a like let's just keep him in the loop to make sure that we're still all aligned on where we're headed with this project. What was what was his framework for coming up with the ideas of he's coming up with these ideas of hey I want to run this this creator program in discord or

LTO's like did he share that I know it sounds like he was great at that and some ideas were maybe the team was like oh it's got to come up and I'm sure not all work because that's that's part of the game like do you know how much do you know and can you share about like the framework for coming up with these like larger swings and bets? That's a great question I wish I knew the answer I will ask him in our one-on-one next week because let's say if I knew how to do that the

way that he knew might be a different story but I do I will say like he's so up to date on all things like on all Twitter and like you know he's so well connected in this space as well so I'm sure there's a lot of you know a lot of that coming from what other folks are doing not copying but obviously thinking about how can we do the secrets way but truly he is just like one of one and how he thinks about things I you know the things we'll say and like a we're just at our

off-site in Park City and I'm just like how did you come up with this idea it's um he's just always

innovating always thinking through new ways to handle kind of problems but he has this like he's he's built the team to give himself the space you know like I think that's the that's the sauce right there when you're so in the day-to-day operating executing like ideas don't just come

“I think ideas come but you have to be like thoughtful about creating the space for those good ideas”

so and I think he's like a master in like controlling his calendar his schedule and in like creating like he knows what he's best at and he knows he's not gonna like I feel like he doesn't allow for like operation work calendar creep at all you know he's very diligent about that at these for my experience chatting with him and I think that's probably why he's able to come up with like these like very blue sky ideas and then in like over and over and over again it's not

like he's got one one good idea and then and then it went away it's like he's created the system for himself and for the team to like come up with awesome ideas which is which is very cool yeah I think that I know I've mentioned the CEO of your own domain already but like I will say that is like the biggest difference from like companies I've worked at in the past two groups of how quickly we were able to execute because it's so many companies in the past it's like get the

sign off from your manager you know get the stakeholder buy and you have this whole project scope and everyone's signing off and like I grew into it's just like you have a great idea you high level make sure that we can execute against it or we feel strong enough that like even if it's gonna be kind of hard to execute again so it's like definitely gonna move the needle for our business you and you have people who have like that mindset of we're so bought in and we're just like

working hard towards the same goal you just like you just get it done that's when I brought into that I learned from Chad that I brought into hexclad and I think it's been I just a game changer for it's it's like a simple idea but it does really change the way I think that people view their role and it like creates a culture of autonomy and and just like self being a self starter and yeah it's it's also changed how I handle like management and one-on-one with my team because I

used to meet and do a little more one-on-one to make where it was a little more involved with all of my team's own initiatives than I then I needed to be and I think when we started like implementing that I realized I didn't I didn't need to be and like the team's really like taking ownership and just because I'm not checking in as frequently it doesn't mean the team's not still pushing and making really good progress and I agree that's such like an empowering like lens to think through

and it really creates this one-plus-one equals five dynamic in an organization yeah I completely

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about five to six months okay five to six months so not not that long in the grand scheme of things and

“any new transition from chief of staff to president honestly it sounds like somewhat similar roles just”

based on what I've known presidents to do and what I know you were not doing his chief of staff which is

basically everything what what did that like like what did the role change actually look like going

from chief of staff to president yeah as a at one point I believe chat the way it went down timing wise but it's a little bit blurry is chat went out on paternity leave and I kind of filled in as interim CEO while he was out obviously still had great support while he was out and then he came back and that was really like the final thing in his mind or he's like look like I really want more space to do investor relations I want to do long-term strategy I want to have time and

space to think about these big swings and I don't get as much energy from running the data date business as you do and so I want to split up our roles you you know I will focus on that and then you'll be president and focus on all of the day-to-day operations so we moved over reporting lines

“the entire C suite reported up into me during that time and to your point like pretty similar in”

terms of like you know executing against a bunch of different initiatives but at this with that

president role you're actually much more of that manager you're the one you know obviously still doing those one-on-ones and checking in and making sure that the whole organization is executing against the larger vision and at this timing we're transitioning from a company of like call it 25 to 35 people to very quickly 70 to 130 employees like it was a super quick I was in that role for a year and a half and we went from about 25 employees to over around 130 and so just all the things that come

along with that I'm you know working with our chief people officer to manage culture and how we think about you know making sure that we have a great you know everyone's having a great time at grounds to in the weeds like you know if someone else is out on fraternity leave like Connor Dolt was out for a little bit I'm feeling in as in term CMO and actually helping that marketing team a bit more than and maybe not focusing as much on our operations team or other parts of the business.

So a lot more just manager heavy it sounds like you got a little bit out of the hands-on keyboard in the weeds execution now you're kind of managing the team kind of steering steering the

ship a little bit more versus early on in the first six months you're like going in your attacking

various specific problems initiatives but you're the one driving those for it as an individual contributor president and a lot more management would you say? Exactly and I would say like especially just as we were growing so quickly like at the time we didn't have a head of retail so it's like doing things like helping to like building out the economic model with Chad like working with our brokers going to those initial pitch meetings with like sprouts target Walmart like

it's basically filling in for any executive roles or teams that we didn't yet have like we didn't have you know a fully built out CX team we didn't have a fully built out even product team at the time like it you know it's it's pretty much just one person so it's a lot a lot more hiring and thinking through like what is the team structure how do we make sure that we're you know we have the people on the team that we need and then also any net new functions where there

were gaps like we didn't have a go to market team and we were launching these new products so for a while it's like even as president I'm in the weeds filling in this like a go to market S person and then we are hiring that person to actually lead the function. I imagine you had a lot of direct reports in this role. Yeah I had six so I feel like a healthy number. Yeah yeah and all executives too with big roles and presumably the team's on the team. Yeah CMO, CFO, Head of Sales

or Chief Sales Officer, Head of Product and Head of CX. Okay I want I'm curious I'm very curious

“how teams do this I think it's it's simple but it's so important I like every quarter we reset”

with within the growth team and every single person on the team has a list of all of their key results and the initiative is that they need to be focused on for that quarter and our goal is really to make it an exhaustive list like I want it to be reflective of every buddy's work for that quarter. How did y'all do that at grooms? How did you make sure that you and your all six direct reports you have or focused on the absolute top priority things they were saying no to the

things that weren't a priority is that literally just is it in motion is it a spreadsheet like what's the how often were you resetting that like I'm very curious how you managed that with the team going back to your CEO of your own domain like how did you ensure that their domain was really buttoned up and and like was aligned with the entire direction of the company. Yeah it's such a good question and I think that it's such a delicate balance like I've been at companies where it was

so okay I have to be like so many all you're doing is like admin updates and you know it didn't actually feel like you could move the needle as much as you want to do and you have all these guard rails where you have to get you know yeah approvals and things like that versus you know what I would say

this as scrappy as possible like keep moving forward while making sure that we're hitting our

goals and so um I will say when I was president there was definitely it was a bit more of the scrappy stage of like we were just starting to build out a pair as we had our CFO come on who felt very strongly about okay ours as well and so we worked to build those out together and make sure that we had like you know at least the high level goals and the initiatives that we knew we needed to tackle

“in a given quarter planned out and we were you know checking in honestly probably only monthly”

maybe even quarterly on those like it wasn't a ton of check-ins it was very much like keep track of this and make sure that we're doing a good job here um but like as we became that 130-person organization and I moved out of the president role um that was when we actually put in some really awesome infrastructure like credit to um the team there building out like an entire thing within cloud that has kept track of like every single initiative we all have our roadmats and notion that

connect up into cloud they update every single week it flags when things are behind you can like very quickly just things slack and say hey like move the date of this initiative to one week properly after I'm a little bit behind on this initiative and we can have those structured discussions every week in our strategy and execution meeting to make sure that we actually you know if we are running behind on things like how that's impacting the rest of the

board. Do you have a project management function occurrence? No we don't so it's pretty much all run through our bizzops um team all of these what I was just describing with like notion roadmats are owned by the functional leaders um the bizzops seems help with actually thinking through like what are the impacts of these initiatives making sure that they are the right things that we're going after and then that all rolls up through bizzops up into that like master planner. So

no pimo function. So bizzops is bizzops kind of your like your um analog though to like the closest thing you would have to like a project management function like they are the ones make like building out any infrastructure to make sure that all the tasks are being checked off to complete like a certain initiative. Exactly but I would definitely undercelled them if I said that they were pimo because they are literally be like core to our business like bizzops at grunes is

“is like the hottest excess roll you have to like they are the engine that keeps the business running.”

Yeah they make sure the work's getting done. And just like they are like the brains they are the strategic partners kind of what we were looping back to what we were just talking about or at the beginning with data and analytics at even ruggable like they are the people who are just like your strategic partner proactively calling out you know where things need to go how things are performing and keeping yeah not only keep it us on track but just like

really opening our minds to what's possible within our each of our our our our functions. Got it so okay so you're in the president role for how long? Oh just about a year and a half. Okay and then at some point you're you had something some thought in your head that was hey I want to get back to kind of being in the weeds again being a little bit more individual contributor so you so you moved into chief emerging brands officer so maybe

let's like before we get into the meat of the role what like what kind of pushed you or like what was the processor thinking behind hey I want to I want to get I want to move out of president role into chief emerging brands officer role I was the thinking there. Yeah so we you know we are launching all of these other brands we have our new tropic brand on a separate website separate at account we have our immunity brand launched we're launching a

pre-workout brand at the time we already have our kids brand launch and when I was in that

president role I always was drawn to those brands like I they were never they they did well

for being brands that we put like very little bandwidth behind at the time we we just had people on the core groups team kind of splitting their time you know here and there they're like going into the neutropes account and making some updates but there was like never a core focus on like how to you know like it's a real brand like we need to like grow this brand and not just treated as like you know this this side side brand so I can't find you myself really pulled into

“those and tried and I were chatting about like you need to hire someone to own you know own these”

brands and really like bring that do what we did with greens and and replicate this success we had there with these with these early stage brands so we are about to hire for the role and um Chad and I were talking to them like you know this is where my like I love this early stage like

this is what I love doing I don't know if I love this like 130 person over 300 million

run rate business that I'm now somehow leading that I you know at the time that I took it over it was 25 people and still the scrappy start-up that I love so um over and number of conversations we decided the best thing to do is to put me in that chief emerging brands office are role and like you know I was one of the earliest employees at Greens I watched what we did there and all

can do the same with these emerging brands so let's talk about that how did you build it out I have

some notes here on like a pod structure where you kind of had a pod of marketers um dedicated to a

“certain brand I think this is very common in like the agency world if you're like a growth like a”

paid media growth agency you'll often have like a media buyer a creative strategist maybe an account manager analyst type all in the same team all focused on the same brand so they're because obviously like you can't just do paid it's got to be paid in creative and and CRO and like offer merchandising and it's like it can be a little tricky if you don't have the same people in the same brand so I've heard of this pod structure working really well at the agency that in an agency model

so can you just like how did you set up these teams for all of your different brands which I

think you have what five now is that right yeah yeah we have five now correct and many more coming

down the pipeline which is exciting yeah we went back and forth and it's like Connor Dalton and I our head of our two people officer you know we went through so many different iterations of what could this org structure look like to be able to support and where we landed as he mentioned was on this

“pod structure where we had a paid media specialist a CRO like ahead of CRO ahead of creative and”

then we had generally like email and retention as well as influencer kind of split across multiple brands and we decided to keep all of these folks in their functional department so they dotted line to me but core reporting line stayed within the marketing function we really wanted to preserve like your managers are the content like the functional experts and they know way more than I do about paid media way more than I do about CRO about creative like we need you to be learning from

the best practices of of grooms and from the team there but at the same time we like want to be able to move as fast as we can and we want to be a little bit scrapper and a little bit different so it was like how do we create you know these processes for emerging brands that can you know funnel up into that broader organization but also at you know still remain super scrappy and move quickly. Before Q4 hits the smartest e-commerce operators aren't just asking how do we

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no risky funnels just better economics want to see how much money you can make with after sell go to after sell dot com slash rocket revenue forecast put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts okay so that that makes sense the step one was just figuring out like what's the team setup here that is gonna allow us to do all the core functions that that we need to do which presumably early on you know these are obviously less a lot less mature

businesses than than the core groans business so and like we're dealing with the same thing in an actually right now where the teams like why want to do CTV and DSP and I'm like quote-unite guys like let's slow down here we probably don't need to expand out of our core channels for a while yet I think there's a lot of meat on the bone here so presumably you weren't doing all the channels that you were doing for groans for all these emerging brands you're like really focused on like meta

and some other like core channels so what did like after you had the team setup and now it's great now like what's the roadmap here like what's the strategy like we need to make more creative we need to be you know testing more off from merchandising more landing pages like what did those early like once the team was established like what did those early days in your role look like and kind of how are you how are you like setting the team up to success for success

and were they working on like was your role in that I'm just curious about how you kind of got that function rolling it was super interesting the very beginning because not much like the the

core we are basically copy and paste it everything from groans and not I won't even say we copy

and paste and everything from groans we copy and paste and maybe like 60% of like the website and the functionality with our subscription platform and like we did not have everything built out so for some of these brands I'm joining even the ones that have been running for call it two or three months when I joined didn't have like a proper cancel flow built out or like the email pop up was just like a general pop up that I you know I didn't feel strongly about and I didn't think was

really crushing it and the creative process was like definitely it was geared more towards a super large groans creative engine where we had to be much more thoughtful and like specific about what we were doing versus like early days as you guys know it's like test everything anything like

with our consumer like I mean that was one of the yeah exactly like we learned that early on with groans like we had some of the seating content that would come through that like we'd look at and we're like this is the worst content we've ever seen we put in the ad account it's the top performer so it's just like that but that type of stuff like generally isn't working anymore for groans but we need to you know keep that process alive for these early stage friends so I'm hoping around

a lot but it was very much just like what is the big like what are all the different opportunities that we have like some of it is just getting our like website and our like email and retention like a welcome flow like getting that to baseline and then some of it is like truly building out net new creative processes that like operate to like in parallel to the groans process but we can move even faster than we are moving in the groans process so that we could get

more and more content tested on each one of these brands um and honestly a big part of it was just like taking this step back who are the audiences for these brands like who are we actually targeting how do we speak to them what are the hooks that are going to resonate so is it I would say like

“and any new brand is just like ads that's what matters and so probably 80 to 90% of our”

time is like working on creative and like thinking through what actual what we want to test there and then spending a bit less time on like some of the other parts to your point like we're not trying to get into CTV like influencer we have super small budgets and we're like not really prioritizing those as much as we are just like core influencer CD then creative. So would you say you're moving more into like in this chief emerging brand's officer role

were you kind of playing wearing the visionary hat more on like hey here's like the like hey we need to go fit like we're even messaging with the juice gummies right and like are you the one kind of saying we need to figure that out and like you're going to kind of get that ball rolling and do some of that work and then that gets ultimately passed to your creative team who's in that pod and now they can go start creating ads against it is that is would you say you kind of shift

it a little bit exactly yeah I got to aware much more about how many of us still I would say

80 percent integrator work but definitely more on the visionary side like one of the biggest

projects when I first joined on the kids brand I noticed that our like license products just performed so well on on our kids product and so it was like looking down at the calendar we have like nothing in July August September and we're like you know that's a huge time for kids that's

“like a huge opportunity of restyline and so we have a really exciting one launching I think this week”

for kids but the early days was like okay go talk to our partnerships team and think about like you know this is I guess February or March at this time it's like how do we operationalize like an LTO with a license partner in the next three buds because we like need this for the kids brand to make sure that we're not we can actually hit our goals this for this year yeah are there any other interesting swings that really you really connected on so you said the licensing products for

the kids so that was like you know Disney gummies type stuff yeah exactly there's an exciting one coming out it's not on the site yet but but to your point yes that in that realm um and now they're

big one like you know I think when I first joined the emerging brands world I was like we're

gonna keep the same pricey and we're gonna keep the same cadence for all of these brands like I am just assuming you know replicate what we did with grooms but that was another big thing where it's like hey this price for this specific um product is it resonating with the consumer like if you baseline it against all the other products of market if you start looking at it on a retail shelf like we actually may be screwing ourselves over by offering at the same price that grooms is so

big swings like that that I think we're rolling out pretty soon um as well as cadence like you know some people aren't taking these products in the same way the same daily way that they are taking grooms and so how do we think about offering a cadence that you know make sure that we are still you know people are still pertain and they like are enjoying the subscription but they're not ending up with so much product that they're like we have no idea what to do with this we have to cancel now.

Yeah I was curious about that because obviously it's just like from the outside you're guys like funnels look very similar and I was curious like the offers the buybox stuff like that if you just like buy default launch it because that's worked on one brand and then like be able to share those learns because there's probably a lot like is there do you have do you have a good sense of now of which learnings you can you can share over and you can feel

“confident about implementing in which ones you need to test. I think we're still in the test and”

iterate phase on that like I couldn't confidently say like this same offer is going to work on every single brand we launch and even we're learning things as we launch like our pre-work out brand I would say is just like in my opinion gonna be much more of an influencer play than a lot of the other brands that we've launched so it'll be interesting like the ones we have 10 or 12 brands running to say

is they're like one thing that is just like always works is that 52% off offer like the thing

that just works for every single brand or is there you know are we gonna have to be like pretty bespoke and out in our approach for each one of these brands which the more I dive in we have to get

Well one thing that you have pulled across all your brands the single page website and that's my four not any more have you been right what yeah breaking news what no it is breaking news way what's one's not a single page anymore go to grins.co oh wow yeah no kidding no I mean the juice one is still right yeah not all of them have been switched over yet it's not a traditional website wouldn't call it that but there's a little bit of a header and then there's PDP's now which are essentially

bi-boxes so still non-traditional but but yeah notice little change was on the site the other day

I know I was so confused and I first joined Grins from Rockable or we had like the PLP the PDP's all

you know optimizing every little thing and it's like no that's that's not what we do here but it's also got to be so nice like we we went on this journey where we and I know you guys

“run a lot of landers and I think you guys have like the best landers but like where we built so many”

landers and we over built them and then it's like it's harder to analyze it's harder to make changes to test things and we started finding like homepage was performing well so it's like on what I had it sucks you're like we're spending all this time but on the other it's like we can just consolidate and have so much more leverage so it probably has to help for for that perspective and just having more leverage on on what you're focusing on. I want to wrap with one more topic

y'all were I mean just from what we've already talked about you were really dialed in on like all the

automations using Zapier just just automating as much as you can so obviously AI and Claude is that on steroids so I can imagine y'all or and I know you are because we talked about this at D to ski just super innovative and and forward thinking on how you're leveraging AI and in grounds and in your day-to-day life what does that look like at rooms like how are y'all leveraging AI um yeah can you

“fill us in on that? Yeah absolutely I think the coolest part about how we you know are doing AI”

grins is actually how we're rolling it out I think that um you know I've talked to so many different companies about how they're really not a lot of folks are bringing in like an external agency to help you know drive maybe specific projects or things like that but um I grins you know we built to the earlier discussion around data you know a data and bus ops team or a really strong data strategic hire um that team is fully built out our entire cloud out at all of the skills and

like things that we needed to just have a baseline of working in Claude and then like Chad just championed it from the very beginning and I think having someone at the top be the one that is like at you know we have to use AI this company and like it is going to be the thing like like sets of supporting keeps us ahead and then finding ways to actually like operationalize that where for instance and we were um doing like monthly projects where we had like there was like a prompt

for the entire company and everyone had to do that prompt and then upload it into notion to show like what they had built we did a big share out of like some of the coolest ways that people were leveraging AI and I and then like also really worked closely with the managers of each team to be like make sure that you're just like pushing the use of AI making sure people know how to use it when the like what the best use cases are um and so it just been like awesome to see even like

super junior people at our organization feel like oh I can use Claude for this or I'm going to

set up this amazing like diagnostic tool like for instance on our emergency brands we had someone

be like you know every time our conversion rate is down I go through the same exact steps so it's like why don't I create this diagnostic tool with Claude that I can say hey like today our conversion rates down like why might that be happening and it goes through the exact steps that I would take an hour of my day to do or even like take it a step further instead of an automation that says like every time our conversion rate drops like below this one thing like ping me a diagnostic of what

you think might be going on so it can like help guide where I'm going and all the way to like we have all this b-roll and creative and you know all this like content available how do we create like a AI like a Claude search tool to go through that that b-roll or go through all of that content to be like I really want like a disco ball like how you know like how do we search for that a little bit easier and don't what we've been doing you know with our current tools that we have so

“kind of two steps there's like so many cool use cases for it but I think it's all about how you”

actually roll out an AI organization for it to be effective it has to come from the top down and it has to be like constantly like reminder of like this is a tool that we need to use and you know we that we need to lean into to to you know get the results that we want to get so what's your what's like do you have like a director of AI or do you have a AI lead not necessarily not in the title or at least our head of um head of data in physics

who who let the entire yeah roll out and is that person because I think from talking with companies that are doing the best job of leveraging AI like they have someone inside of their

just go into like different functions and kind of audit all the work that's happening there

“and then like there being like oh we could you could make this more efficient or we could do”

this like you're doing this manually now like this could be automated with cloud

is that kind of what's happening here like is that person helping build out these these like use

cases with the team or what's that person doing that's like allowing you guys to just build so many

“different flow like workflows with cloud I think it that actually the opposite where we were”

trying not approach where we were auditing like you know some of our different functions and thinking through like hey this is exactly how you could use AI in your function now we're really like putting the excitement and like the onus on individuals and it's you know like just over and over I think they're seeing what other people are able to do and then like we're pushing them to think through okay like helping you apply this to the things that you do every day or as a manager if I

watch someone do something manually or they like show me an analysis or you know something that they do every single day like I'm pushing them to say like hey how about we use AI like you know

think about how to integrate this with cloud and it's just been incredible like putting the onus

“on those people and just you know I think you have to have the right type of people in your organization”

or just like hungry to learn and grow but it's just had much better results than us going in an auditing and like finding ways to roll out AI because people are just excited by what other people are doing and the opportunity to like make their job easier to free up their time for you know more exciting things and in the org is driving a lot of folks like build these tools out themselves.