311 - How Mejuri Runs: Operating Model, Biz Reviews & Decision Velocity (Kate Railton, Chief People Officer at Mejuri) 

Kate Railton: And then on a quarterly basis we bring a uh, people, what we call a people qbr. So people Quarterly Business Review. And our point of that is to look at all three divisions in the business and be like here are the signals and the metrics, right that we're monitoring that tell us that this is the overall people health in the organization is where we want it to be. The work effectiveness is where we want it to be. And if it's not, then we need to have a discussion live with those senior leaders and newer for us this year with the flattened org structure. But historically we had done it with a C suite layer. And so actually now, now we've grabbed about 18 SLT leaders who lead the retail team, they lead the fulfillment center team and then they're also leading in our corporate team. But they're all as accountable for the results in any one of those divisions and how we lead collectively where retail might be coming up against an issue. Is there anything there that the corporate team actually needs to do differently and how we are going to solve for that and what we're seeing from the retail engagement surveys that you know, we

Narrator: can help enable here you're listening to the modern people Leader podcast where we go behind the scenes with today's top HR leaders and work experts. We talk to them about how they've

Daniel: gotten to where they're at, what they

Narrator: do every day and what they see coming next for the future of work. Hope you enjoy.

Daniel: Kate, welcome to the pod. How you doing?

Kate Railton: Thanks so much for having me. I'm great, thanks. I'm really excited.

Daniel: As I was sharing before we hit record, I think you're the first person that's gone from MPL Live guest to full episode on the show. Usually it's the other way around. We have somebody on the show first and then we invite them back to MPL Live. So I'm really excited for this one. I'm glad we can make this happen. As you know we start every episode with good news stories and we like for our guests to go first. You wanna kick us off?

Kate Railton: Yeah, I was thinking about this one and it was actually just a feel good moment yesterday for me. But the team through the summer is doing like um, step challenge for the month of June. And it's interesting because back last year. So pull us back a little bit. I found myself out on a walk really early morning like Sunrise edition and I'm an early morning riser. Anyways, like everybody's got the ways in which their body works. Mine is an early morning like Productivity hack. And I found it towards the middle of the summer, but I was like, next summer I have to do this every day often as I can because it's such a fantastic grounding moment. And so I've been really focused on getting up and going out for a walk as the sun's rising in my neighborhood. And I'm fortunate enough to live in quite a like a treed area area right on the lake. And so it's, it's a really beautiful walk in the morning and like no headphones in, like just like, you know, sounds really idyllic. Birds chirping, you know, sun rising, like that kind of stuff. And so anyways, I've been really focused on it this summer so far, so I've been able to like capitalize on it. It's game changing when it's been for my mood. But what I found really fun was that part ah of the step challenge I had to report on for the team that I'm on like my steps and I'd hit so many steps and the team was like, how are you doing that? And I'm like, actually it's so interesting. This one thing I told myself that I had to comm to for next summer I'm now really good at and it's just like also then paying off for my team in the step challenge because I'm actually like getting in a lot of steps as it pertains to the course of the day. So anyways, my good news story is that I'm committed to that goal and it's been game changing for my mood.

Daniel: Is this solo or do you go with the family or a little bit of both?

Kate Railton: No, I go by myself. Oh yeah.

Daniel: Sounds nice.

Kate Railton: Yeah, it's really nice. It's 5:30 morning a.m. morning walk.

Narrator: Oh, wow.

Kate Railton: So like it's. Yeah, it's not. I wouldn't say like again, if you're not a morning person, I don't know if it's going to give you the, the benefits that I'm getting out of it, but I am a morning person and so I just like absolutely love it.

Narrator: Yeah, I love that.

Daniel: And what's like the, the step count that you have to hit every day?

Kate Railton: So there isn't a count. It's just like the team that hits the most at the end of the month.

Daniel: Oh, I see.

Kate Railton: But last week I got to like 85,000 steps and so it just was like, yeah, over seven days I was like, oh, yeah, something. Yeah. On average. But I also have three boys and so like I can get on the walk. I get to, like, you know, call it five, and then the remaining one comes between commuting to work and then chasing them around after work day's over.

Steven: Daniel. Daniel loves a little competition, uh, a little healthy. I do, yeah. Fitness competition.

Daniel: I get too competitive, though. Like, have you ever done those Apple watch challenges where it's measuring you on your steps, on your activity, on standing, and maybe there's like, it's all the rings, and the more times you close the rings, the more points you get. And I have this one friend who is ultra competitive. His name's Tyler. He's this like, six, six super athletic dude. And he, like, will talk crap to me if I'm not keeping up. And so I find myself, like, on my little walking pad, like, during work, like, trying to get steps in whenever. Yeah, I. I get way too competitive with it.

Kate Railton: I love that so much. I have a walking pad too, for winter months at home, because it's like, outside cold.

Steven: It's like, that's probably why Daniel's in great shape and I'm not.

Daniel: But that's not.

Steven: You're in good shape. My good news, I'll go next because it's kind of, you know, Daniel and I are very similar, but, you know, in different ways. And I feel like we are both like, once we get into something, we get really into it. And one of the things that I'm like, you know, feast your famine type of guy. And so for female five years, I journaled every single day. Every single day. I journaled for parts of the five years. I journaled in the morning when I woke up, and I journaled at night. And it was a really big thing. You know, I probably strung together, like 500 calm days in a row. Like, I have all these practices that at one point, you know, post Covid,

Daniel: probably two, three, five minute plank.

Steven: Probably, uh, five minute planks. I've, like, done headstands, planks. I've done all these different things. And, uh, about two years ago, I was like, you know what? I'm over it. I just want to sleep late, and I want to go to bed when my head hits the mattress. And I have not had any of those practices. And I got this book, it's called for the listeners. It's called the pivot year, and it's titled 365 Days to Become the person you truly want to be. And for me, all these practices were the intention was becoming the best version of me. My. You know, some would call that my capital S. Self. And so I have. I'm not doing this every day. I'm doing it when I can find the time and space. And I am m like three readings in and it's like one reading per day type of thing. And then I journal on it and I am like three pages into this thing and I'm like, holy smokes, why did I give this up? Uh, like, and I'm balancing. I don't need to over rotate and go back into like do the 365, you know, pivot year in 185 days or like what something I would have done in the past. But I can just sit and enjoy like the joy of having this kind of practice again. And it's been super awesome. So it's good to be back.

Kate Railton: I've always wanted to get into journaling. I tell myself I'm going to do it every year and for some reason it's just not clicked for me. But I feel like there's such great benefits.

Daniel: It's so funny. I feel like, um, me and Steven are always on the same wavelength. Uh, we don't even. But we don't even talk about these things. Like yesterday I literally started. I never got as into journaling as Steven. But over the last like week or so I've been trying to get back into it. And yesterday I took like an hour long walk and I tried something different. Like rather than doing the traditional journal, I just like pulled up a voice memo and kind of like answered like a few prompts. And I'm sure similar ish to the pivot year where they give you like some templates and you answer these questions and it forces you to do some reflection and it's fun. So I guess my good news is somehow me and Steven are always. I don't know, I don't get how this happens, but it does.

Steven: You're saying, yeah, we are.

Kate Railton: That is good.

Daniel: Yeah.

Kate Railton: And you were walking.

Daniel: Yes, Anna was walking. Steps in. I've been trying to get 10 steps in a day and so it's probably slightly annoying for Steven and Regina on our standups, I'm like walking and like huffing and puffing and the camera's going up and down, but I love it. So, uh, before we get into the meat of the conversation, we both want to hear the origin story. You know, I think we've heard bits and pieces leading up to MPL Live, but you know, because that was a group conversation, we couldn't hear the full story. And I know you spent your early career in The Toronto tech ecosystem with companies like Achievers, Blue Cat, Gruba Cloud, and now you've been at Missouri for seven years. So just walk us through that journey. One thing keeps coming up on the podcast and that's leave. It's one of those processes that everybody

Narrator: has, but very few get right.

Daniel: And we just talked about this the other week with Kim Smith from Tilt, and she framed it in a way that really clicked for me. Not every employee experiences leave the same way. Some want every detail up front, others feel overwhelmed and just want you to simply tell them what to do next. But most companies deliver the exact same experience to everyone. It's one thing to have a compliant leave program, it's another to have one that actually works for the human going through it. And that's where Tilt comes in. Tilt is a leave experience platform that helps teams move beyond one size fits all processes.

Narrator: Using Tilt, companies can tailor the leave

Daniel: experience to each employee's needs, keep managers aligned on coverage and return to work, automate complex workflows like pay and compliance, and give HR the space to focus on support and not spreadsheets. In other words, the tech handles the complexity so that the people team can show up where it matters most. As a human, leave isn't just an HR process. These are life changing moments that can make or break the employee experience. If you want to learn more about TILT, go to hellotilt.com MPL that's hello tilt.com MPL thank you.

Kate Railton: Oh my gosh, it's such an interesting one. And I feel like every time I have conversations people about like starting out in your career and like, you know, how you got to today, you don't spend enough time reflecting back right on the decisions you made and what have you. So it's always a, I think a fun opportunity. So to your point, I started my real way back playback was that I didn't intentionally even know about going into hr. Like I didn't do business, you know, in, in undergrad and I spent more time on the human side. I was in a double degree of psychology and sociology. Like how humans work. I'm like always been really clicked into and so coming out of school I thought I was going to go into social work. That was kind of at least the plan and there was something about it that just, you know, getting in to do my master's really didn't feel right for me. So I deferred and wanted to wait for a bit. Ended up working through a family friend, their recruitment agency in Ottawa in the capital of Canada. And predominantly uh, staffing for government positions, which is a really interesting process in general. But what I found through my time there was, was that like I was actually pretty good at it and, and very quickly and. But what was always missing for me in the recruitment model was that I spent more time talking to my candidates afterwards about like how was the onboarding experience, you know, what's it feeling like on the project? And you know, I was very curious about like now that you've been placed, are you staying? Are you enjoying it? Are you productive? You know that, do you feel like you're adding value? And so then was like, okay, maybe I am actually particularly interested in the world of like humans at work. And so did my postgraduate and then I moved to Toronto which had. Ottawa's a very public sector, you know, city changed a bit. There's you know, a lot more private sector and tech that has come up through there like our dear friends at Shopify. But Toronto was, had a better ecosystem from a career standpoint and so moved here and in through that move met a VP who was looking at the time for an opportunity in startup. And so while I didn't end up placing him because I was in the recruitment firm at the time, he did find something and then called me and was like hey, like you know these guys are scaling and it's a really interesting opportunity. Would you come in and do recruitment here? And that was actually Achievers at the time it was called I love Rewards. And it was hands down to this day one of my top career opportunities because it's where I kind of got that bug for working in growth businesses that are constantly building and founder led businesses, you know, VC backed. It was such an addictive experience because like the pebble of who you are, right, like you can drop that into a small business and you can make impact really quickly, positively or negatively, but you can. And so it kind of felt like doing a little mini master's program because you're so close to the nucleus of how a business makes decisions, right? Supports its customers, you know, refines its product offering like all of those things. And so anyways, I was hooked. I was there for five and a bit years. They went through an acquisition and kind of post that acquisition I moved on. But again the other thing I would say just quickly about Achievers because I have such a huge place in my heart for it was that as an HR practitioner working inside of an HR software company, so cool because you get to be the users of the product, you get to spend time with the Account managers there who are working with you know, a version of you at another organization and helping them think through you know, their sales pitch, you know, the real value add, you know, all of those things. Right. Even like talking to the you know, the product team at times too. And so there's, there's so many ways in which what you do is not just about internal but it actually services the product as well. And so I think that's just an extra added value. And so from there yeah stayed inside of kind of like PE backed and or early stage venture backed businesses and growing their, their people operations departments and then when it comes down to Missouri it was wonderful experience but essentially a consultant I was working with was also supporting them. They were really early stage had gone through their seer just finished their series C no longer M to lie B And yeah it's almost seven years ago now that I started to have conversations with them and I was super excited, I mean obviously from a product standpoint and from a customer standpoint. But then what was interesting for me was I had yet to work outside of like a software in a corporate space. And so for them what was interesting is they were predominantly an E commerce business. They started an E comm and pivoted and added in retail as a channel for them over time. So my background in you know, product and technology, software engineering team, what have you was you know certainly a value and where my kind of learn forward if you will was I had yet to work in a business that had distribution center employees, you know and then retail was an early stage concept for them. They had their, they just opened up their third store and for a while their stores were just showrooms and so they weren't even transacting in the store. And so that was just coming in, you know as I joined the organization and so it was a really exciting moment for me. But I love the get in and build. There was one recruiter and an office manager when I started and so it's been really cool to actually like lay a lot of that foundation and then support scaling the business and unwind a lot of the foundation that you built and build it differently and so but that's the stuff that I like to sink my teeth into. I get lit up about that.

Steven: What a great story and I'm m so glad we're able to have you on just you Kate to get the full story. Couple of things before we move on. First, I love when our MPL world collides like separate NPL worlds collide and so shout out to uh, Hannah Yardley Achievers current chief people officer. Like we've known her for a long time. You know we met you at MPL Live Toronto and I was saying like

Daniel: also I learned some history. I didn't know that there were I love rewards before.

Steven: I didn't either.

Kate Railton: Yeah.

Steven: And um, just so, so cool to see that reference or to hear that reference. The second thing is you mentioned uh, you described founder led businesses as an addictive experience and that I'm gonna have to share this with my wife who has been on me for a long time to get a real job. Jk. She's fully supportive but the reality is once I tasted the founder led business life, I was hooked. I got, I mean and I'm still in this and I don't see myself live in like there are a couple of things already kind of have passed me recently that would have taken me back into, you know, taking me out of this founder, uh led business world. And I don't know, there's just something. So I'll just leave it at the words you use. I think you did a great job describing it and so that, that is super relatable. And so for those that have uh, you know, been under a rock or in some like you know, tunnel somewhere that have not heard of Missouri like you know, how would you describe you know, your core business to a stranger? And those that are watching this YouTube, there are not a lot of you but you know there's a spoiler alert because you have an amazing picture, um, or piece of art behind you which is literally the product which I also love. And my daughters are raving fans and they're still talking about the gift that and the note that your CEO gave to them. So thank you. But what, how do you explain the business to a stranger?

Kate Railton: Oh, so what I think is so incredible about Missouri, Nora secasia is the, is the one of the co founders of the business, the CEO, she's third generation jeweler. Right. So she's seen and understand the industry specifically then from her father but then went naturally to reimagine what that ultimately could be. And I think for me again it was founded in 2015 but it really meant to take you know, quality fine jewelry but make it then something that's an everyday accessible piece that you can wear and something that you can generally you're sweating in, you're working out in, you can feel like you've celebrated yourself and ultimately leverage that for the special occasions in your life and not necessarily wait for jewelry which had Historically, I think from at least my point of view, we've pioneered that statement that it really then was fine jewelry for every day that you are then buying for yourself and not waiting to be gifted from other individuals in your life. Right. And I think a lot of the marketing and jewelry had been very focused on it being a gifting experience from someone to you versus for you to again, celebrate yourself and do so with high quality. And so we have over 3 million customers across the globe. We've just launched our 60 first store. Our stores are in Canada, in the US predominantly, and then we've got stores in the UK and in Australia. But our online presence scales more globally than that. And so we've got, you know, lots of fantastic customers in Europe and sprinkling into Asia. And so it's really exciting to see the scale of the brand and the kind of like, overall ethos of it really resonate with our customers. And like, yeah, I can absolutely buy myself quality jewelry piece that, you know, fits to my personality. Stack with it. Right. I mean, the goal is that you're wearing multiple pieces at any point in time. And again, it's fitting into me celebrating those moments that matter to us. And so what I think some of the customers that have been with us for a long time would often say that they had our slogan that they loved. And this is probably a 2027, 2019, 2020 slogan that was buy yourself the damn diamond. And so, so many people that I know and who I've met have been like, oh, you work at me. Sure, I love the slogan that they had and it was so long ago, but it sat with so many early customers of ours. And I actually think that just like wraps up the ethos really quickly. But it's the merriment of celebration and doing that for yourself. And then with the fact that it's accessible price points and the quality that we are fiercely focused on, you know, those things altogether, again, it's a really wonderful fit into the market.

Daniel: And I'm one of your 3 million customers. I wear my maturi. I don't think I've taken this off in the last years, like two or three years since my wife got it for me.

Kate Railton: Oh, I love that.

Daniel: But, yeah, I mean, what a great. And I've had so many people ask me where I got this from, and they end up going to buy something as well.

Kate Railton: Thank you.

Daniel: Yeah. Big fan of Majuri over here. And so, you know, you've, you've mentioned the shift going from E commerce to retail. I think you Said when you started there were three stores and now you're up to 61. So that's a huge shift. Tell us about the transition that the company's been going through the last few years. Eventually we're going to talk about like the new operating model and you know, the way that the company has changed and the way that it's structured. But yeah, give us like the quick, the quick recap of the last few years and in that transition.

Kate Railton: Yeah, yeah. And I would say like we've, when I joined you know again a uh, well set up highly successful scaling e commerce business starting into you know, its retail journey. I think like anyone who's selling a product, your customers want to come in and see and touch and feel. I do think that you can be certainly a scaling e commerce business solely. And so that's not to say that that's not possible but we found for us it was really exciting for our customers to come in and actually experience the product specifically. And our retail experience is actually very much designed that we're not an under glass retail experience which I think is very different inside of the jewelry space. And so you do genuinely get to come touch, feel, try on uh, and work you know, with our stylists in the store to actually have that experience and have it not feel like you're being micromanaged through you know, a small dainty piece but you can actually understand if it fits for you, if it's something that you would wear, you would stack into and then understand the quality of the material, see it live. And so in doing that we've then very quickly realized that it's a really important experience for us. And so now with a setup e commerce business we've been able to expand then where our customers are and be able to give them that experience then again live in their city and major metros. And so over the past I guess like again fully six years we've been very intentional in scaling retail because of the value that it's adding to our customers and the growth obviously that's providing for the business. But it's a, a very different model than what you're used to. And it obviously wasn't the largest portion of our tail sal our sales channel but now it actually has moved over to being you know, our majority. And so it's really interesting to see that shift for the organization because not only do we have to scale then in a decentralized model in that their employees aren't all sitting around you interacting in the same way that you're interacting in a corporate standing, but now they're in different time zones in different geos, you know, inside the wall of their experience, frontline with our customers. And so figuring out how to do that at scale is something that, you know, we're still on. But I would say that it's been one of the biggest areas of focus for us as a business over the past few years. And I think that it's a wonderful model for us to continue to scale as we, as the business continues to grow globally.

Steven: Well, uh, the way you describe it makes it seem so seamless. And obviously you've been hugely successful like in that period of time to kind of flip. I built a lot of sales engines and I love it. There's like some nerdy aspect of like building a revenue model and evolving the revenue model that I just, I find super fascinating and fun. And so I know how hard it is to go from one revenue model direct to consumer and then six years later to now have flipped it not only launched a new channel that is arguably, I don't want to say more intensive, but it's a definitely a different model. And for that to flip the scales to where now the new revenue model is actually, you know, the main contributor. Like what a success story for the leadership team for your CEO, for you. And especially in a period where I'm not an industry expert, but I'm pretty sure a lot of direct to consumer brands tried similar pivots and failed disastrously. Like I just think of like all birds. I, I can't remember a few months ago, I remember reading an article about how they went to this like massive thing to try to pivot and it like essentially went to zero. And so what do you think was the secret to majority success? Like now looking back, right? Or you know, still with your mind's eye observing where you're at because you're not done. Like what have been some of the secrets to that success.

Kate Railton: So I think it has not been easy. I still don't think that we've got the model the way we want to have it, right? Like just like in very, you know, full transparency. I. We have learned so much in through the scale, right? And essentially like doubling our store count what feels like every year, but in and around, right? And doing that again, like we didn't focus on just trying to do it in our own backyard. Like we've added international components to that. So now you're adding quite complicated time zones. And so operationally we've really challenged ourselves to try to do this in a way that, that we think it's best to kind of service our customer base. But when the macro headwinds are, you know, to your point, really complicated to navigate. Like when I started, I started uh, November 2019. In March 2020 we went into Covid and so we're trying to then scale a new revenue channel that requires you to be in person working with people, interacting with customers. And so a lot of our scale up through those moments in time. So while people were at home and you know, perhaps had the luxury of additional cash to spend that could be advantageous for us. But then there's this full component of like how do we actually operate our stores in this, you know, experience for multiples of years and then coming out of that and then seeing you know, quite a big switch in the economy where people are naturally fairly conscious about how they're spending their dollars. Add in tariffs, adding cost of gold, right. And so continued pressured moments on a business that's trying to scale consistently and repeatedly which I think is so beautiful about retail that it's fairly formulaic in the way in which can operate if uh, you get the formula going. But we've had to pivot the formula a lot and I think that that pivoting to adjust to the market. And so that's why, I mean when I say that I don't think that we are fully nailed that repeatable model for us just yet. And some examples of that are like our stores have different tiering, right? Like different you know, revenue models by door. And so that then requires an adjustment in the labor census, right? Like how many people do you put in, how many hours of operations do they have, you know again to hit their targets. And then what's the training model that comes into the support those stores? What is the selling model to our customers? Like all those things are brand new builds for us and then we learn a lot by doing. And the benefit is a uh, being a growth business, we're fairly, you know, used to and wired and energized on change, which is great. So we're like, you know, everybody's clicked in to be like what's the metric telling you? And then what are we now going to go do about it? But trying to now do that across a retail workforce is so different, right? You can't just do it through osmosis, through a meeting. You've got to really be clear on change management and then know that you've got a part time workforce that's then doesn't just flip to that overnight, like you're turning a ship and that takes, you know, time and deliberate change management. And so it's again, it's all of those things that are very different for a growth business that's moving into this space because of how it's wired from a corporate e commerce standpoint, it's a big learning to then understand retail because it does work differently. And I'm sure anyone who's listening, who comes from the retail space, they're like, yeah, Kate, no, you know, no. But like, for me, I didn't come from retail. And so I'm also learning that m myself, you know, as we go. It's a really. Drinking out of a fire hose is a wonderful way to explore.

Steven: Yeah. And so my part two of to that question, my follow up, uh, is, you know, more focus on the people team. Right. People team. It's a tricky thing, right, because we're a, uh, leading. We're one of the leading functions into a shift like this. Right. Because you can't do anything.

Daniel: Yeah.

Steven: Uh, that your retail strategy is great, but you can't do anything with it if you don't have people. Right. And that requires having, you know, and when you're making bets and you're working in an iterative kind of way, you can't just get any people. Right. We need to give ourselves the best shot to test out our hypothesis and see what all the lagging things that will then give us more data that will allow us to iterate. So rewinding all the way back, like, what were some of the shifts like the rewiring that you had to do for yourself, for your people team. You remember you mentioned like adjustment and labor senses. Like, were there any other, you know, comes to mind for me is like performance for an engineer is the way you measure it. The way that you work with your employees is different through the performance conversations. And so what ways did you have to kind of adapt what you were doing with the people team, what you were doing yourself, and then how your people team, you know, was operating to prepare for such a big shift.

Narrator: When I think about our recent Humans times machines conversations that we're having with Chros, there's one theme that keeps coming up. The vision is clear, the pressure is real, but the roadmap is a little bit less clear. It's one thing to talk about the future of work. It's another to sit down with your CEO and say, here's how work, the workforce and our organization really need to change.

Steven: But I get it.

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Kate Railton: I think there was a few things. I think if I go back to the beginning, it became very clear to me that as individuals, we all have our block blind spots or our gaps. Like, this is the scaling plan of the organization. My gap is in. Like, I don't have any experience here, so I, um, I didn't work in retail as a teenager and so there was a lot for me to, to learn and understand. And so surrounding myself with then some mentors and, you know, networking a little bit. So I got better context working then with, you know, our retail leadership to make sure I understood it as best as I possibly could. And then hiring into my team people who had come from that background was all very important. And so I think I tried to build scaffolding around my blind spots so that we can do the best we can. And then, you know, a lot of it is just the humility of, like, we're going to try and we're going to build and we're going to, you know, monitor the metrics that we know and had at the time to inform, you know, our next steps forward and what have you. And I think in many ways, looking back, we've built and scaled a lot, we've unwound a lot. Like we, you know, we've stepped away from stuff that we thought was going to be really important. And as, you know, as we go on and Build and whenever it's not as critical. And so I think that on one hand, I think for me looking back on it too, even just getting in a corporate business understanding as well of um, the differences in retail, it's still taking us on things that we need to be doing. We're you know, now putting our folks into the retail stores to actually work shifts. Like that's actually something that new that we're doing at this stage which is, you know, fairly standard in retail. And you can see why, because if you don't understand our customers experience inside the store, like everything from the, the product that we're designing and building straight through, you know, to the POS experience that the stylist has in checking somebody else, to what it's like in back of house, to you know, what the customers, the uh, objections that they have while live on the floor and how to help them navigate those. All of that you can't solve for if you're not genuinely understanding of that experience. And so it's all of that programming that we've had to help our corporate team understand while we're also learning it ourselves. And again in how we communicate inside of corporate Slack and Gmail and Google Meets and you know, it's like move, move, move, move, move. Again it doesn't resonate like that inside of the store experience. And so we're constantly needing to kind of tweak and command that uh, a little bit so that it lands as effectively as we can in the way in which our business needs to scale. So I think vaguely I might have answered your question. But like there's been a lot that we've needed to build to scale this the way we have. And then there's a lot that as we're scaling we're realizing that we actually it, it doesn't work, it doesn't make sense and, or we need to look at it a bit differently, you know, now that we're live in the moment and have something out to the business and that's specifically even to our, our programming like how we look at engagement surveys in corporate certainly is different than how we're looking at it in retail and in their distribution center. Right. And so all of those things need nuanced per the employees experience so that we can build effectively and actually help drive engaged and you know, performing teams.

Daniel: Yeah, no, you definitely, definitely answer the question. So we've, you know, we've talked about the transition from E commerce to retail and all of the tweaks that you've had to make to the business tweaks to the formula I think is what you're, is what we're calling it. You've also alluded to the fact that, that as market conditions have shifted, the company has needed a different operating model to maintain, you know, speed and efficiency. And one of those changes that you shared with us in the prep was that y' all made the decision to flatten the org. So tell us more about that and so tell us more about that and how y' all came to that decision.

Kate Railton: And um, I would say that we called a few years ago in our corporate team. We were starting to just get specific signals and signals being like, you know, decision velocity or things, feeling like kind of stuck in this purgatory and unable to like really move forward. And we weren't really sure why things weren't moving the way they're supposed to move and ultimately started to diagnose that. We had a lot of, you know, managers of small teams, right. And then we had actually hired in over the course of a few years. Kind of what I was mentioning earlier, like people covering your blind spots, like if we were moving into a specific area or what have you, we're bringing in people with experience in that area. But that led to us having a fairly top heavy organization as well. And then a lot of people who are growing with us that we're also then promoting to be first time managers and then doing that through actually smaller teams. And so I think we're seeing an ineffectiveness in the way in which we're managing and driving work towards the outcomes that we're trying to achieve and that it, for a business of our size is taking too long and getting really muddy in the middle and needing then, you know, our founders involved in decisions to move things forward so that someone could make a call. And like, you know, it was those types of things we're seeing and then we're seeing, you know, in our engagement surveys, you know, folks like flagging that they're not clear right on, you know, where they're supposed to be going and what their objectives are, what their KPIs are. And so while not necessarily solely like an org structure related opportunity, there was lots of different things we need to get after to solve for that effectiveness. It became very clear to me that, that we needed to make, you know, an adjustment if we wanted to be able to move a little bit faster and deliver on some of our results. That felt a little bit, you know, um, yeah, less easy to get to for, you know, a company of our size. And so while it wasn't like a specific event, we just started really focusing on span of control for our managers and drawing a bit of a harder line and putting in a bit more of a mandate there. Now again, there's always nuances to this, right? Sometimes there's a team where it just makes sense that they're so deep in their area of expertise that it may just be uh, a one to two or even one to one reporting relationship because that, that's the size and state that we are in that function. But on uh, net really looking to move that needle of span of control an inch. Well we're certainly not a one to six. Like we are seeing kind of like you know, some teams in Amazon, you know, speak more specifically about getting over the like you know, three, four, arguably moving our way up that way so that we were flatter with somebody clearly architecting and directing the work that we were looking to do and then most recently actually doing it as well. So through attrition and you know, giving people broader scopes and really navigating that through the talent we have, have, we've got exceptional talent in our business and then similarly um, into our executive layer. And so it's been really fascinating for us to be able to tackle that. And I think the, what we were hoping to see was again like decision velocity clarity and outcomes clarity and KPIs, you know, calibration, reporting directly to the founders for people who are maybe like not C level but like director, senior director, VP level and what that does. And it I've really enjoyed seeing the impact that that's making and the team members themselves have been saying that they're a lot clearer, which is great and that they've got their partnership at kind of that like SLT senior leadership layer. You know, again director to vp. They're working really well cross functionally because they have to, they're you know, straight into the founders and so they need to be really clear on their point of view and uh, you know, and collaborate on the outcome at hand. And so those things have been very positive certainly uh, for us, love the

Steven: focus on decision velocity. I think if more companies focus on that metric decision velocity, they would probably be seeing, you know, they would be seeing the better results. I'll just leave it at that. And but with that like okay, so you want us, we're going to change the way we do work and we're going to become a flatter organization which will allow us to kind of of iterate more quickly, get more visibility from the bottom of the organization, all the way to the top, yada, yada, yada. Like, uh, you know, I can imagine the, the communication to the teams that we're going to start doing things a different way. How do you manage the perception of increased responsibilities that come. Because as an employee, you know, I've seen this where your people are like, whoa, wtf? Like, what you're really saying is I need to do more work. I know those aren't your words, but I'm pretty sure that's what you're saying and that is not what you were saying. Right. And so I'm just curious, like, you know, was that an issue or was that a factor at all? Like, you have to have some of these hard conversations and, you know, how did you approach that?

Kate Railton: Yeah, I think, like, yes, of course. Like, that's like, people do that, right? They like, read through the line and they're like, create their own narrative in the moment. And so we do have to try to be as transparent as possible as we're making changes like this. I think because it wasn't an overnight experience or an event, we've been able to kind of slowly but surely adjust and see a lot of benefit from that. So it doesn't feel like a stark pivot in ways of working. Um, again, being a growth business, we're after a lot. Our roadmaps are big, right? They're vast. They are, I think, for the size of people and the team, people are like, we're doing a lot. I'm like, uh, for sure, we are. We are. We're very ambitious of what we want to be achieving. And so we do look to stretch, you know, and really go after what we want to achieve. And even then, you know, not always delivering on that, but. But certainly wanting to be, you know, in a certain position on whatever the outcome is. So that ambition hasn't necessarily changed that size of the roadmap. You know, per the count of individuals in the business, everyone will always say, I think that they feel like, you know, they're doing the job of two people. But any growth business that I've been at, that's honestly the reality. It's kind of, again, that hook of like, frankly, what I love about it is that, like, you get to make such an impact as an individual. So that's true. But I also think, because it wasn't a singular experience or event, and it was something we chipped away at over time on a parallel path through some of these symptoms that we saw coming in through the business, a Year or two ago, we implemented a business review experience and strategic memo writing. And that was a big change because one of the things that we noticed in the organization as well, so people are driving through a lot of call it tasks versus like clarity on the strategy and the outcome that we're after. So we've hired in again, if I go back to what I was saying, a fair amount of senior leaders, all of which have, you know, fantastic experience and everybody's kind of moving their agenda, right. And what they're trying to get done. And it's pretty like, you know, ship the thing and did the this and did the that, but like ship the thing to do what? And then did it do the thing that you wanted it to do? And are we all clear then with this many people of what we're actually trying to do? When you get everybody into a meeting room. Right, right. Do we know what we're after? And so implementing both the business review system and the memo writing and that, the memo, most meetings kick off with a 10 minute read of the memo. And so like we are going into that meeting then very clear on what we're having a conversation around. And then people comment in the memo and then you're immediately addressing the comments and then moving into any additional aspects of the agenda that you're looking to solve for. Um, but those two things I think happening at the same time as us, like becoming aware that our org structure might be ineffective, you know, I think helped us then navigate that. As we've gotten flatter, you know, and scope has shifted a little bit, it's a lot easier for us to navigate into that experience because we put in some things in place that have helped us operate, you know, in a structure like that.

Daniel: Uh, so I want to talk about the quarterly business review process and some of like the weekly and monthly cadences that you guys have implemented. But before we do that, tell us about the memo template. Like, I'm, I'm envisioning something, but for people listening, if they were to take the transcript of this interview and like go create the template, um, themselves, like what needs to be in the memo?

Kate Railton: Yeah. So I think similarly the whole point was that we're not doing a flashy deck, right. Everybody was coming out of and what we were starting to feel like, it felt a bit performative, like, you know, a lot of visuals, you know, and so you were like slides and slides in, trying to just be like, what is it that we're trying to achieve? What's our hypothesis essentially? Right. And if we do the following five steps. We think it'll go there. And so being able to turn that into a written form and having to explain it in written down narrative form was again really critical for us and has been quite game changing. But you have your executive summary, you know, you're clear on like, here's the executive summary, here's the problem statement, why we're here today, right? What we're trying to achieve, here's how we think we're going to achieve it, the timeline that it's going to do, the people that need to be involved, any sort of appendices of like, you know, read additional things or here's our content calendar for the year or you know, whatever. And again, anchoring in that framework was what we kind of went out with and started to train people on and we brought it to our leadership summit and then we brought it, we brought in a, you know, memo writing, narrative writing coach to like help people navigate through that, attend kind of sessions with them as well. And so doing those things helped people get the context of it. And then I, I was just talking to the leader on my team who runs kind of our, uh, our L and D side and we were just saying yesterday that even though it's been years, that since we started on this, it's so cool to see that it's just become kind of standard form and that the memo's taken a bit of its own, like per person, right? Per function. Like everybody's kind of doing it their own way. But the, the concept of I have a strategy, it's written down, we can read it, reference it and everybody can grab alignment from it as like, oh, this is a source of truth. It's again, it's, that part's been the most impactful, I would say.

Steven: I love this topic. Daniel knows and I want to make a prediction. And my prediction is that Kate, the team members that you have that have helped you develop this process, this is forever going to change their lives. And someday, hopefully not soon, they're going to go on and do other great things and they're going to be doing this. And the reason I say that is because we, my investor for my engagement survey company was obsessed with like, like these sorts of hacks for businesses. And we did Rockefeller habits, we did all sorts of things and we ended up with eos, a, uh, book called Traction. And we were fortunate to have an engineer that like built out jira, a custom JIRA build. This sounds so like dated now. A custom JIRA build that would allow us to Track all of all these rhythms and cadences and confluence in jira. And it was clunky as hell, but, man, we all, like, leaned into it. And Daniel and I, to this day, like, we have meetings and we've never talked about, like, oh, yeah, we, you know, let's replicate traction and create these new rhythms. It just was like second nature. Like, we found ourselves, like, in a rut, and we're like, all right, we know how to get ourselves out of this rut. And it was like, all right, now we need weekly cadences. Oh, we're not making decisions fast enough. Um, all right, daily standup. We know the solution to that. And so I'm just curious, like, if we can go deep on this a little bit, like, what are the review cadences look like for. For your team? Or just, like, imagery in general? If this is indoctrinated throughout the company?

Kate Railton: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So if you think about the strategic roadmap, right, the way in which we operate is we have our strategic pillars with corresponding KPIs, which is essential, like, top line of the business, right? This is the things that we think matter most and then cross functionally. And again, this is, to your point, like, it's taken many iterations, but I think with the premise being consistent the whole way through that, then our initiatives that we're after in, you know, driving specific outcomes and KPIs then ladder into those. Right, on a regular basis. And that's not that, like, any one team necessarily owns it. Right. And so the point then being that then we're monitoring the business in association with those pillars on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. And so we have nuance in that, obviously, within the people operations department. But then essentially what happens, there's the weekly cadence, students again, whether it's a function level, department level, you know, what have you. And then on a monthly basis, it's essentially the signal for two months of, like, how's the quarter going? Right. What are we seeing in the data and the KPIs? Is there any pivots that we need to be making? And then we. The monthly basis, we meet per strategic pillar, right? And so we have all of our kind of senior leadership team, and people come in and present, you know, how it's going, what we're learning, you know, and again, all good signals seem fine heading into the last two months of the quarter. Then we'll do it again. And then at the end of the quarter, there's the quarterly business review. How did it go? And anything we're Kind of adjusting or pivoting into next quarter with our goals and objectives. And so what I will say is it provides us a really solid cadence in reading and pivoting as we need to inside of the business. And while we kind of set an overarching intention for the fiscal year, a lot of those decisions for the initiatives and the outcomes that we're after do get made per these meetings. And so it gives us a lot more fluidity, if you will, and flexibility to make those calls in year as we go. And in many ways, thank goodness for them and the ability for us to pivot because of what we're seeing in the macro and because we're scaling as fast as we are. I think there's, you need to have those, you know, calibration and checkpoints on a regular basis versus getting a quarter or two in and be like, oh, weird. Like, you know, this isn't lined up. And now we're in the back half of the year and we've got to try to figure out a way to make, make this make sense. And so that's it. On net People operations, we operate a little bit differently with a similar structure. We have our, we currently support one of the pillars, but in partnership with a few other departments in our kind of like our, you know, drive performance pillar. And our retail programming is in there. Our, from our retail operations team, our people, you know, programming is in there. So we will come and present on our roadmap items that support that pillar, but then separately because kind of to our earlier statement, people underpins all things that, you know, the business is doing. While we meet weekly, my leadership team, to talk about like signals in the week. If something's stuck, like, what do we need to unblock? And the team reports out there in a narrative way. So we again read and talk about what happened last week and what we're after this week and then have that discussion. But then on a monthly basis, retail actually pivots the most from a KPI standpoint. So we bring that into specific commercial, um, meetings because again, people retail. Our ability to hit our commercial targets is, you know, highly hinging the retail workforce, you know, and the people that are there to deliver that. And so, and then on a quarterly basis we bring in, um, a, ah, people, what we call a people qbr, so a people Quarterly Business review. And our point of that is to look at all three divisions in the business and be like, here are ah, the signals and the metrics, right, that we're monitoring that tell us that this is you know, the overall people health in the organization is where we want it to be. The work effective is where we want it to be. And if it's not, then we need to have a discussion, you know, live with those senior leaders and newer for us this year with the flattened org structure but historically we had done it with a C suite layer and so actually now we've grabbed about 18 SLT leaders who lead the retail team, they lead the fulfillment center team and then they're also leading in our corporate team. But they're all as accountable for the results in any one of those divisions and how we lead collectively and we where retail might be coming up against an issue. Is there anything there that the corporate team actually needs to do differently and how we are going to solve for that and what we're seeing from the retail engagement surveys that you know, we can help enable here. So that's newer and we're kind of perfecting how that works now with a broader audience so that the meeting can become effective. And there's lots of learnings we had from the last one but that's overarchingly how we're trying to represent our area into, you know, the broader business and hoping that it helps drive the results that we're after after.

Daniel: Thank you so much for nerding out on this stuff with us. It's crazy how similar the quarterly, monthly, weekly cadences that you guys have are to what we do. And we're a two person business so it's much easier for us to pull it off but like you know, every week. Well, we should be having this weekly. We have our weekly L10 and it's me and Steven. We have our metrics. We're looking at actually the first tradition of good of our L10 is good news stories. And I don't remember if that actually came from traction or if this was like an MPL add on but we have good news stories. Then we do metrics and there's like, I don't know, 10, 11 metrics that we're looking at on a weekly basis. We then look at financials and do like uh, a deep dive there. And then we have something that's called collective intelligence. We're sharing about something that is important to the business. Maybe it's something we needed to pivot on. Maybe we're using it as more of like a um. We used to have a different name for it, Stephen, and I'm blanking on it but like there was an acronym for it.

Steven: Yes.

Daniel: Ids.

Narrator: Yes.

Daniel: Identify, decide, solve. And I could be getting that wrong.

Steven: That's.

Daniel: And so you have. That's sort of how we use our collective intelligence. A little bit of both.

Kate Railton: Yeah.

Daniel: And by the end of that meeting, we have a game plan. And then, you know, until the next L10, we have our, our daily standup where we're talking about parking lots daily. And you start to pick up, uh, on those trends or that, those signals that that something might be broken or, you know, maybe some bigger changes need to be made. In some cases that happens. And so I think it's so important for a company to have a shared language. And so I'm just curious, like, you know, for us, we took this from a book and we, you know, created our own version of it. Where did this new business review process come from? Was this like a Kate special? Were there like a couple of books that you were pulling from? Like, who architected this and what was the inspiration?

Kate Railton: I will tell you that it was not me. And I'm. And our co. Our co founder, Majid, he has that. Many of us, I think in the commerce space, you know, have really found a desire to mirror in a way that's reasonable the Amazon culture in scale because of how fast and effective and, you know, result oriented they are. And I think that resonated a lot, lot with him and certainly with the rest of the leadership team here at Missouri. And then again, when we were noticing the difference of people being really focused on tasks, you know, how do we reorient that viewpoint? And again, what I will say is, well, I do not feel any of it is like solved in current state. It's like a constant iteration, you know, of how we want to do this, you know, better, better, better. But it was his brainchild and you know, him, and I got on a call, he's like, I really think we need to get into memo writing. I really need a scalable way to monitor and calibrate and read the business. And we don't have the right operating system. Right. Like, you know, again, for the what we're after. And so I think that mixed with like getting really crisp on our values and then, you know, what it looks like and what it doesn't look like to live those values kind of came hand in hand again a few years ago. And then we've just been after perfecting it and it's cool again. It's cool to see that it's been really helpful and that teams are making their own version of it so that they're able to come to their monthlies and their quarterlies and, and represent you their area of impact as it pertains to the strategic pillars. But yeah, it was certainly him. Um, and again, I think it's one of those things that, like, I'm happy that in that moment to help bring to realization and make it possible. But it's taken a lot of like, small tweaks in terms of dials to get it feeling like it's the operating system that, you know, will work and scale for us. And so it's, it's exciting to see it at that stage now.

Steven: And so, you know, one last question. Unfortunately, we're at that time where we have to bring this to a close. I really don't want to. This, this has been a lot of fun and so good. But we, we hit a groove very early on and I noted to Daniel in our, our async notes that we take. And so co founder was kind of the inspiration behind all of this. And I'm sure, you know, ELT quickly rallied together and got behind this. And so when you talk to your HR team or just you in general, like having now been exposed to this, um, for a while, you know, what have you learned? Are some of the like, signals or metrics metrics that, you know, the CEO or maybe the entire ELT actually care about that HR teams should pay closer attention to? Like, is there anything that you think would fall into that bucket looking back?

Kate Railton: So we, I would say that we monitor and change our metrics a little bit every year. And that's again, it needs to line up to the strategy. One of the things we've gone out and measured different things at different times. Right. Like, you know, we were after asking people on the ENPS was really popular, but ENPS just continued to be something that didn't really give me any signal on anything. I couldn't in asking that question to the employees. I didn't have an actionable next step to help build anything. And so, you know, as we started to accommodate the metrics that we care about and every year shift those a little bit based on the strategy, it really needed to be something that was going to tell us what we thought we needed to know and, or give us a signal to go look into it and then something that we then can build something actionable against. And so what we did with our metrics is tier them. There's a tier one metric which has to do with the strategy of the organization. And so if it's that, you know, we're, we're training our retail fleet On a specific, like clientelling as an example. And we believe that conversion in a certain tier of our group is what's going to be the top metric like of our customers. We're going to maniacally monitor that because then we know the training's working. Not that you took the training, you know, when you pass the test, it should be moving a metric in the business. And so because it ladders into that. And so I think for us, we have our tier one metrics that we're, that we're looking at responding to as we go in the year. And then we have our tier 2, which is what I think us all on, you know, listening to this would agree are kind of the things that we're always monitoring. Is attrition spiked in a certain store or in a, you know, in a department? Are we seeing, you know, any signals inside of exit interviews that are like consistent themes that we now need to get after? You know, is our hiring or offer acceptance rate changed and slowed down for whatever reason? Or is there time to ramp right within the time frame that we think, think makes sense for our business to start to drive results? And so we still monitor all the things that I think not all the things, but like the critical things that we think are really important from like a HR metric standpoint. But the tier one are the, like what we're putting in is actually helping us drive business results is the shift, um, that I think that we've had to evolve over time and so that we're not just reporting out and people are like, what do I do with that now? Right. Like it's, it's an interesting HR metric that we've had X much mobility in the business and X much whatever. But like, what does that tell me? And actually hitting the results. So I'm pleased to know that we've promoted and moved people into new opportunities. Right. But like, is that then doing something for us as a business and scales as well. Right. And then something in addition to supporting our employees.

Steven: I call that the. So what, uh, like, oh, we did this great thing and executives like so what? Like how is this helping us get to the North Star? I love that. And I hope, you know, we, we're out of time and we're going to. I'm about to kick off rapid fire questions. We have a couple more traditions. But before we do that, just so it's on the record, you know, I hope you'll come back and do this again. And the reason why is because I. There's this whole topic of Microcultures or subcultures that, you know, I know we touched on very briefly in the last hour, but we went a little deeper with you in the prep call and I just hearing how the solutions that you put into place, your transformation and the rhythms and all of this, I just would be fascinated to hear more about, you know, how you've approached the challenge of, you know, having new microcultures that appear within the business, which I think is normal. It's just like a function of any system with humans involved. And so. But we don't have time for Day Today to touch on that, so say

Kate Railton: anything to that, Kate? Yeah, okay, no problem.

Steven: I'll hold my seat and hopefully we'll come back and we can go deep on that. But now I want to take you through what we call rapid fire questions. Same set of questions we ask every guest on every episode. We'll tweak them every now and then, but. And we'll try to get through this as quickly as we can. Are you ready to do it? All right, let's go. What's one piece of advice you've give to someone starting in HR today?

Kate Railton: Be really clear and understanding of, uh, the value that your business provides to its customers and then ensure that what you are building and working on is in connection to that. And so everything else is noise. And so you need to make sure that you get what the value prop is. So if it's selling a certain software, what that is, if you know what that is to your customer base, then you need to engineer everything to support the business getting that direction through its people.

Narrator: Breach.

Daniel: Love it. Next question is your. If your team gave you a superpower nickname, what would be it?

Kate Railton: Be, um, if they're listening to this, they'll laugh and it'll be Kathy. And I'll tell you that's not going to be answering your question, but just I'll say that out loud in case they listens because they'll get a good chuckle. And they call me HR Kathy when I'm like putting on too much of my hr. Huh Hat. But I think it's noise canceller. And I just. Because I like to stay crisply focused and practical around on an ever evolving business. What's the information actually telling us? And not the sentiment of one person or something that may feel, you know, has emotional experience behind it, but something that's like really clear and a data set that represents a larger majority so that we can actually build and solve or we can just, you know, flip flop in a variety of different Directions. So I like to think I can cut through that noise and get more clear about what we're trying to actually achieve. Again, instead of like flip flopping, for

Steven: some reason, the woman emoji, like the emoji with the ha. And I know that's like, no or do not, but. But like, to me it's like, get outta here with that. That's noise.

Kate Railton: Yes, that's right.

Steven: All right, next question.

Kate Railton: That's it.

Steven: What's a strategy or practice from another company you'd love to steal? And I think I've heard a few like the memo from Amazon in here. So I'm very curious what your answer to this question would be. Again, what's one strategy or practice from another company you'd love to steal?

Kate Railton: So recently, the business remote, they talked about doing their performance reviews in 48 hours. Hours. Did you read about this? Uh, that I was like, you guys are my spirit animals. I love the concept of this. Now, I think from what I've read, they did a lot of work naturally over, you know, call it a year and a half or two years, if I recall that correctly, in laying the groundwork for how feedback was flowing in the organization. But to me, the fact that you can wrap something that typically for honest takes six to eight weeks, right. To truly like calibrate, like write calibrate, and then deliver those results into the people and deliver that kind of fulsome feedback. If you can do that in 48 hours, gosh, sign me up. So I think that I would love to learn more about that. I have it on my list of when you have a minute, go explore a little bit more about what that looked like for them, but that seemed fantastic.

Daniel: That's a good one. Last rapid fire. Who do we need to have on the show next?

Narrator: Fixed.

Kate Railton: Can I name two? Two people?

Daniel: Oh, yeah, okay. Or the marriage.

Kate Railton: So there's two people that I find really fascinating. And I'll be very honest with you, I've met one of them like once and another one I'd not met at all. And so to me, it's just more of like a maybe a personal fascination with what they're doing. So Karen Kwan's the chief people officer at Aritzia, and prior to that was at Lululemon through a lot of its scale. I just think her background especially, and maybe again for me, coming through retail as like a, you know, emerging into this industry and understanding it the way I have the scale that Aritzia is having right now, they're having like 30, 40% revenue growth, quarter after quarter, expanding into the U.S. like, it's really fascinating to see what they're doing and to do that then. I mean, by count of stores, they're astronomically ahead of us and started as a business years prior than we did. So, like, as they should be. But there's something right now that they're really catching on to that I'm watching from a far and think it's really, really, really fascinating because of how hard the macro is right now, because, you know, it's so. It's something that I just. I hold in sheer admiration. And so I personally would love to hear some of the things that she would say on npl. And then separately, an individual who I've never met before, Avery Francis was an HR operator here in Toronto and then moved over to start her business called Bloom. And in doing that, she was like, fractional HR recruitment support for scaling organizations. And so. So I've always followed her. She's had some really important, you know, direct shares around the experience in scaling, you know, strategically through your DEI practices and again, how businesses need to grow and develop and with their leaders. But recently she started an. A new kind of venture and called Nowhere, which is like a remote escape and reset for ambitious women. And I just. I continue to find it fascinating that she is stepping into spaces and being, you know, unlocking humans and helping them understand better ways of working and operating through really unique experiences and ways to do that. And so, anyways, I saw the Nowhere ad, uh, and I was like, oh, who's doing this? And then saw that it was, um, from her, and I would like to be able to attend. And so I just think that she's doing some really cool things in a really important space. And so, you know.

Steven: Yeah, awesome. Well, we would be. We'll reach out to both. We would be honored if they were open to joining us. Uh, and that brings us to our final tradition. And we call it one word or phrase. Close. It's. As we reflect on the hour and change we spent together, just a nice way of wrapping things up. Daniel and I are both ready, but we prefer for our guests to go first. So no pressure. Kate?

Kate Railton: Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm. I don't know. I feel like for a lot of what we talked about today, you need to be really clear and being able to, like, name the problem that you're solving and give it an accountable owner. And so, so that there is somebody that can then be fully accountable and driving towards that. And so, to me, I think that just like if you've named the problem, give it an owner and build a solution that feels really crisp and aligns a little bit to what we were talking about today. Flatter work structures faster, decision velocity. Right. As clear as you can be on your strategy and your method metrics, you know, those things kind of all then tumble together, if you will.

Daniel: I'll go next. I'm going to say speed.

Steven: I'm going to go. And mine's related. I'm going to go with this Decision Velocity. I changed it. I had retail, which I just love. No offense to all of our other guests. Those are all great conversations, but there is something about talking about something new or a new angle on the traditional conversations we've had had. And so this was a bit different and I think it's because of the retail, all the stuff we were talking about retail and that transformation. But decision velocity is like the number one metric that is on my mind leaving this conversation. I want to be obsessed with it and. And so I'm gonna go with that and with that. Kate, we're. It's a wrap. Thank you. Wow. This like.

Kate Railton: Thanks you guys.

Steven: Delivered in spades. Thank you so much much for joining us again.

Kate Railton: Yes, thank you so much.

Narrator: Bye.

Steven: Alrighty, Bye.

Narrator: Uh, guys, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Modern People Leader.

Daniel: We really, really appreciate it and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating. It would mean the world to us. And connect with us on LinkedIn. We want to know what you think about the show and you can find links to both of our profiles in the show notes.

Narrator: Thanks again for listening and see you on the next episode.

Daniel: Episode.