Chelsea Grayson
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Chelsea Grayson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
You're never going to be able to be as entrepreneurial. And the best of CEOs say, oh, I want to maintain that entrepreneurial spirit within the four walls of this company. And, you know, it's like trying to turn the Titanic away from the iceberg. You know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It takes a minute to, you know, get things turned. But that's the key.
spotting that iceberg from really far away and starting to turn and starting to switch the engine. So I think the key to being able to be entrepreneurial and to getting things done the way you want to get them done is to have long, long term strategizing and planning.
Thank you, Rudy. I'm really privileged to be here with you. Yeah, so I'm Chelsea Grayson. I guess I can divide my career up into three chapters really quickly for you. First, I was a lawyer. I was a partner at a big firm. Now I'm a recovering lawyer. So I'm still weaponized, but no longer super dangerous. And I transitioned from that to become the CEO of three big brands.
So first, American Apparel, and then True Religion, and then Spark Networks, which owned a bunch of huge dating apps like JDate and Elite Single and Silver Single and Christian Mingle. And now in the third chapter of my career, I'm sitting on boards of directors, mostly public company boards, but some private.
So I currently sit on the board of Exponential Fitness, which owns Club Pilates and Pure Bar and Rumble Boxing and Lindora and Stretch Lab and a whole bunch of other fitness and wellness companies. boutique fitness brands. I also sit on the board of Beyond Meat, which fits in with that whole health and wellness theme.
And I've just joined the board of Sunrider International, which is a big MLM company privately held in the nutraceutical space. Previously, I was on the Morphe Cosmetics and Sugarfina board, also the Delta Dental board and a whole bunch of other boards. And Here I am, born and raised in Los Angeles, Los Angeles strong. I've got two kids who are up and out of the house, and that's me.
Yeah, you know, I will say that I think first and foremost, the thing that I learned, the most important lesson I learned was that communication is key. Frequent, regular, transparent communication. with all of the stakeholders. So if it's a public company, that means the market and the investors. It means your lenders as well.
And with any company, it means your customers, your clients, your vendors, your suppliers. But most importantly, with any company, but particularly with big companies, especially if you're dealing with, yeah, 10,000 employees globally, it's your employees.
you know they are your absolute most important asset i don't have a different way of characterizing it i don't like the word asset so much in that sentence but they are the most important thing that you've got in your company they are the folks that can make or break you and no employees like to hear about their company and what's happening with their company and what's going to happen with their company from a press release or a leak in the media or on social media
or from the CEO being interviewed on some TV show. They want to hear it as much as possible, first and foremost, from the leaders within the company. Because people don't like to feel like fungible billing units or cogs in a machine or use whatever analogy you want. They want to feel that they're in the know, that they're at the center of where things are originating.
And then they feel like they want to participate in the initiative that you're attempting to implement. And you should lean into that as a leader.
Try to communicate with your employees first, whether it's town halls, whether it's a quick email before the press release is about to go out, you know, whether it's just walking around to the different factories and, you know, different locations that you've got, even retail locations to try to communicate with folks as much as possible, you know, before it hits the public airways.
That's not always a perfect system because with public companies, as you know, if there's material non-public information, there's things that you have to disclose publicly at the same time that you're disclosing it internally. Otherwise, you've got a security abroad situation. But people mostly want to hear about it first so that then they feel like they're part of the solution. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, listen, they are the most natural brand ambassadors you've got. Whether you're a big public-facing brand, you know, or whether you're just a B2B, you know, supplier and vendor or whatever.
I mean, the salespeople, right, the people in the stores, the people that are flying around, the people that are participating on social media, if you can weaponize them as brand ambassadors, weaponize them with as much information as possible, they will want to be cheerleaders. They will be much more engaged in their jobs. And when the water rises, all boats float. Yes, I love that.
Yeah. First, I want to key on something brilliant that you just said, and I don't want to let it go past because it's a hugely important part of your day-to-day life as a CEO, which is at some point you get big enough where you can't, as the CEO, have 18 direct reports, right?
You can't have your fingers in every single pie in the company, even though it's your baby, you created the baby, you raised the baby, right, to teenagehood or whatever, in young adolescence, you know, whatever it is. You've absolutely got to learn the art of delegation. And that means, generally speaking, you've got to hire a great number two. So you'll always have your CFO reporting to you.
If you have a chief legal officer, for sure they should report to you. And probably your chief, whoever's in charge of your human resources, whatever title that is, CHRO normally. Yeah. But then you should have one person, maybe it's a COO or a chief merchant or whatever, to whom everybody else reports at the next level.
Because if you're constantly taking meetings with 18, 20 direct reports, you're never going to get anything done. And by that, I mean a high-level sort of strategic thinking that the CEO should mostly be consumed with all day long. Not meaning that you should be sitting in your chair all day long. That's certainly not what a CEO should be doing.
But you shouldn't be consumed with micro details all day. Somebody else should be in charge of the nitty-gritty of the business and operations of your company. So you should be, as a CEO day-to-day, linked arms with your CFO. Period. End of sentence. That's one of the very most important things.
Showing 1–20 of 46 · page 1 of 3
Next →