Katrina Purcell: Great Strategy Means Nothing Without Execution | Ep 1314
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What is Katrina Purcell’s background and how did she end up as a chief of staff?
Welcome to Coruscnologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in Emergent Tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corrisant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Katrina Purcell. Katrina Purcell is a growth operations consultant and former chief of staff who helped guide. A PE-backed company through its IPO. Today she partners with founders and leaders at Seed Series C, B2B, SaaS startups, and scaling nonprofits to turn operational chaos into clear systems, realistic roadmaps, and teams that actually own the vision. Katrina's work lives in the messy middle of scaling, setting goals that stick, running cross-functional execution that doesn't stall, building
Building fundraising readiness and creating the operational backbone a company needs before it breaks. She's known for turning big picture strategy into concrete mechanisms a team can run with on Monday morning without burning people out along the way. Well, good afternoon, Katrina. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, Brian. I'm excited to be here.
Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. And you're healing out of Brooklyn, New York today. I'm in Kansas City. So luckily it's just an hour difference, but I do appreciate the time navigating time zones and calendars to get here.
When did Katrina realize her true purpose was translating strategy into results?
Katrina, let's jump right in. Here we go. You climbed the corporate ranks across media and technology at companies like Bloomberg and IAS, moved fluidly between chief of staff and operational leadership roles, and even helped guide a PE-backed company through its IPO before leaving to start your own consultancy. What was the moment you realized your true purpose was in translating strategy into results for founders? And what pushed you to leave the corporate world to do it?
What a big question. So I I think we we all grow up and our parents have visions of what we should be when we grow up. My dad actually really wanted me to be an engineer. He thought I'd be great at it. But in high school, I took a media class where we actually produced the morning announcements and I fell in love. And so decided that media was was kind of my calling. But once I started my career, I realized I was actually really good at project management type things, right? So getting stuff done that no one else wanted to do or took the time to do. And I slowly evolved my career over the course of my time at Bloomberg to really focus more on system implementations, adjusting people's roles and responsibilities, and really around things that have to get done in a business, but no one wants to do.
And so people are really what ready, willing, and able to kind of throw them on your plate. And at that point, I decided to go back to school because I had my undergraduate degree in media. And whether or not other people thought it, I had a sense of people not taking me seriously because I didn't have a business degree. So I went back to school and and did Columbia's executive MBA program. You go to school on the weekends for two years. And once I graduated, I thought, okay, let me go see what else is out there. And that's when the chief of staff role at at IAS kind of hit my lap. And six months later, the pandemic hit and it was time to reinvent yourself because you know no one really knew what was happening or what was going on.
Everything felt very unsecure. And so I said yes when they said, Hey, we're going to IPO. We want you to be chief of staff. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And I realized that I was really good at sort of bringing people together, helping people to understand what the goals were and where they fit within those goals and making sure that we brought them along for the ride, right? So the change management aspect of it. And I think over time I slowly realized that while doing that within inside a company was fun, it wasn't exactly building and ever-changing companies go through things like an IPO once in their lifetime generally. And so I thought, okay, what if I actually took my skills on the road and I could help more companies that were going through transitionary periods, really kind of set the right footing and
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Katrina Purcell’s background and how did she end up as a chief of staff?
0:08–1:31
2
When did Katrina realize her true purpose was translating strategy into results?
1:31–5:35
3
Why do leaders fail when they keep strategy hidden until it’s polished?
5:35–8:29
4
How can founders involve their teams early to own the vision and execution?
8:29–11:41
5
What makes OKRs stick versus becoming just theater for a company?
11:41–13:54
6
How should a growing company assign ownership and adapt its processes?
13:54–14:17
7
Why will AI force startups to document their processes before automating?
14:17–14:53
8
What does the future of scaling look like with AI and human‑first leadership?
14:53–14:54
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Digital Executive
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