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.
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Appearances
You guys should be in and out of each other's offices in reality or virtually, however you're running your company. You know, you should absolutely be talking all day long and you should make sure that you've got a strategic CFO who's not just a bean counter. You've got your controller for that or whatever. You've got to have a strategic CFO who understands, all right, it's time to acquire.
I should always be looking for targets to acquire. What should I divest myself of? Or we don't really need these locations anymore. Let's dissolve those entities and we can let those folks go. Or, hey, you know what? This product line that's been our moneymaker for all these years, this actually shouldn't be in two years when we grow up. This shouldn't be what we're focusing on any longer. Right.
Think BlackBerry. You don't see those devices any longer, but you know that company makes a heck of a lot of money just licensing out its IP.
And the other thing I think as a CEO every single day should make sure to check in again with their chief legal officer and their, call it your CHRO, whoever's running your HR department. Not all day long, and you don't have to get super involved there, but they should be letting you know, generally speaking, all right, the culture of the company is good.
The culture of the company is turning to toxic. We're getting more and more claims through HR with respect to this one particular issue, so a theme is developing that we need to nip in the bud. Whatever the case is, they can give you a general sense of how things are doing and whether your tone from the top is good, is healthy. It's...
resonating throughout the company and people are continuing to be happy and productive or not. They're really on the front lines of, you know, are people happy or not? And if not, that's no bueno because that leads to lawsuits and claims against your insurance policies.
And then, look, as you're getting bigger and bigger, since we're talking big brands here, and all entrepreneurs want their companies to go from a seedling to being Apple. Yeah. You know, you got to check in with your board, at the very least your chair once in a while, not every single day, but your board should be in the loop.
The last thing you want is to surprise your board of directors with anything. Boards of directors are, and listen, I'm speaking in the first person here because this is what I do for a living now, were crotchety people. cranky, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. We're sort of grizzled. And when we get surprised by something, we get scared. And when we get scared, we get mad.
You know, we don't stay scared for too long. We're angry and we're irritable. So don't surprise us with stuff. You know, give us previews of coming attractions. Things that in three weeks you might need approvals on, you can't drop it on us in three weeks. You've got to start to lay the foundation for things.
And listen, the bigger you get, there are things that are going to require board approval. You can't ignore that. So I would say stay in touch with your chair, you know, regularly as a CEO.
Yeah, and to your point, you haven't always handpicked your whole board, right? Some folks you may have handpicked, but others, sure, shareholders who put a lot of money into your company, they'll have rights to appoint one or two directors, and you really don't have a whole heck of a lot of say in it, you know? So, yeah, you've got to learn right about that. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Boy, once you go public, if you're going to do that, you do that to avail yourself of all the dry powder in the capital markets, of course, and that's great, but it certainly doesn't come without its issues. Then you've not just got a board of directors, some of whom were designated as independent, so they're there just to represent all the shareholders.
But you've got big shareholder meetings. You've got folks weighing in constantly. You've got directors who know that they're being scrutinized by the public markets. And so they're really watching it. And then it becomes much, much more difficult to move things along or change things or switch up. And you're going to start to wonder why you went public in the first place. Yeah.
Yeah, you know, right, 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 can to a certain extent, right? You know, you can hire folks that have that spirit. But yeah, 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.
Again, like I say, stay in touch with your board so they're very prepared to make decisions as you plop it on their laps, you know, so they're not surprised and they don't when you ask them to approve something, you know, come back with 20 questions and 20 diligence requests and 20 information requests and that slows you down for the next four weeks.
Prep them way ahead of time so they're prepared to make that decision and then you can act on it. you know, have your strat plan laid out way ahead of time. That's not always, you know, that doesn't always happen in a startup because things are moving day to day.
But at a big company like that, if everyone sort of sees what you're planning for this year and they understand the tactical plan that went under it and they understand what their part is, then they're all sort of growing in the same direction the whole time. And it won't take, you might not even have to turn away from anything because you've been planning it this way the whole time, you know.
So again, it just comes back to Communications and long-term planning. It's a necessary evil that comes with getting bigger and we all want our companies to grow and get bigger, right? We don't want to stay on a jet ski forever.
Weekly. I was constantly visiting stores. I was always on these little pedal jumpers to different places in the middle of the country. And yeah, just, I would pop in sometimes with no warning. Sometimes I wouldn't even, they wouldn't even recognize me necessarily, you know, as I was walking around.
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