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

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast: Episode 124

"Employee Number Four to a $1.2B Unilever Exit: Katie Cirulli’s Story"
Date: August 11, 2026
Hosts: Cody Plofker, Connor MacDonald, Connor Rolain
Guest: Katie Cirulli (formerly: Chief of Staff, President, Chief Emerging Brands Officer – Groons)

---

Overview

This episode dives deep into the operational playbook behind Groons’ explosive growth and its $1.2B acquisition by Unilever. Guest Katie Cirulli—who joined as employee #4 and rose through several executive roles—shares a behind-the-scenes look at building high-performing teams, scaling multiple brands simultaneously, the “visionary vs. integrator” dynamic, leveraging AI and automation, and fostering a unique culture of ownership.

---

1. Life Post-Exit & The Unilever Acquisition

[00:58–03:33]

• Post-exit glow: Katie describes life after the $1.2B Unilever acquisition as “business as usual—just with less pressure and new opportunities.”
• Key benefits: Increased stability and energetic two-way partnership with Unilever, with learning going both ways.
• Memorable moment: Chad, Groons’ founder, celebrated the announcement with a Taco Bell drive-thru on the way to Aspen. “[He] sent the message, got everything taken care of, and then we were on our way.” (A, 03:09)

---

2. Katie’s Path: Consulting & Data to Ecom Operator

[03:33–09:50]

• Education: Industrial engineering, with focus on business principles and problem-solving.
• Early career:
  • McKinsey: “Such a good training ground for really anything you want to do next.” (B, 04:22)
  • Meta: On the SMB sales ops & planning team, seeing ecom disruptors’ ad spend and “craving being on the brand side.”
• Transition driver: The need for direct, end-to-end ownership (“You just wanted, you wanted more, kind of more A to Z, control over the outcome.” – A, 09:03).

---

3. Ruggable: Building Data Foundations

[10:42–15:09]

• Initial role: Owned marketing data/analytics; first task was building Ruggable’s central data warehouse so “we [could] create like the dashboards and…data sets that we need to make our decisions and also do it quicker.” (B, 11:20)
• Advice for New Brands: Don’t overbuild too early; focus on basics until ~mid-7-figures. Then hire a hybrid “data engineer / biz ops strategist” who can translate numbers into tactical action.
• Quote: “I still think having some type of data/biz ops person to lead that function is so, so important as you scale. It’s been like one of the best investments we made at Grooms.” (B, 14:03)

---

4. Operational Archetypes: Data, BizOps, and Growth Roles

[15:09–17:49]

• Hybrid archetype required: The right person is “not just a data scientist…[but] one who can understand the business’s goals…connect the data analysis they’re doing to the larger picture.” (B, 15:55)
• Analogy to growth: Early hires need to be hybrid, flexible, hands-on analysts with strategic chops.

---

5. Katie’s Leap to Groons: How She Got In

[18:55–24:27]

• Networking: Passion for health & wellness led her to stalk the aisles of Whole Foods and, ultimately, to Groons’ LinkedIn chief of staff posting.
• Hiring story: First round, asynchronous Loom video; “at first I was like, this is really weird...now I think it’s an incredible tool.” (B, 20:40)
• Initial skepticism: “I was actually pretty skeptical of the gummy supplement market…But after spending even 30 minutes with Chad, I’m like, this is the guy. I have to work with him.” (B, 20:45)

---

6. Chief of Staff at Groons: The Ultimate Operator Role

[24:27–31:44]

• Day-to-day: “Anything and everything”—from CX tool selection to automating supply chain systems, to partnering on growth and attribution projects.
• Hands-on: Wrote email flows, built Zapier automations, fixed influencer seeding zaps still running years later.
• Cultural driver: “You have a great idea, you high level make sure that we can execute against it…When you have people who have that mindset, we’re just like working hard towards the same goal—you just get it done.” (B, 43:01)

---

7. Visionary vs. Integrator—And Why It Matters

[31:44–39:05]

• Chad’s dynamic: “A visionary and an integrator…but loves the visionary side much more.” (B, 31:44)

• Key to scaling: Katie became the “integrator,” freeing Chad to pursue “big swings.”

  • Ex: Chad’s LTO/limited time offer ideation—starts as a high-level Notion memo, passed to Katie/team to model and operationalize.
  • They embraced “paper walls”—perceived impossibilities that can be broken through with creative thinking.

• Quote: “If you are a visionary, get yourself an integrator. If you are an integrator, you may not need a chief of staff as badly.” (Note via A)

---

8. Building a Culture of Extreme Ownership

[39:05–44:33]

• Empowerment: “CEO of your own domain” is a mantra—functional heads own outcomes and move fast without constant buy-in.
• “Move as quickly as possible...not an organization where you need to go to your manager…If you can model out the impact, move forward quickly.” (B, 41:01)
• Translated directly to other brands (e.g., Hexclad, Jones Road): “It’s such an empowering lens…creates this one plus one equals five dynamic.” (A, 43:41)

---

9. From Chief of Staff → President: Growing from 25 to 130 Employees

[45:27–49:16]

• Role transition: “He [Chad] wanted more space for investor relations and big swings…I would focus on all of the day-to-day operations. The entire C-suite reported into me.” (B, 45:55)
• Team scaling: Helped move from a scrappy 25-person startup to 130 FTEs; filled the most urgent executive gaps hands-on until hiring.
• Quote: “At this time, we’re transitioning from…25 to 35 people to very quickly 70 to 130 employees.” (B, 45:55-46:15)

---

10. Management, OKRs, and the Biz Ops Engine

[49:16–53:26]

• OKRs versus Scrappiness: Tried to stay lean on bureaucracy. “How can we keep this as scrappy as possible, keep moving forward while making sure we’re hitting our goals?” (B, 50:09)
• Tech stack: Eventually matured into using Notion & Claude to connect team roadmaps, weekly strategy meetings, and flagging behind initiatives.
• BizOps role: “Literally the core to our business. BizOps at Groons is the hottest, sexiest role…they are the engine that keeps the business running.” (B, 52:42)

---

11. Launching & Structuring New Brands: The Pod Model

[54:00–57:48]

• Chief Emerging Brands Officer: Katie left the “President” role to focus on scaling new/emerging brands. “I was one of the earliest employees at Groons…I love this early stage.” (B, 54:00)
• Team Structure: Adopted a “pod” model—media buyer, CRO, creative, plus dotted-line reporting for email/retention and influencer—enabling fast iteration but keeping functional best practices strong.
• Goal: “How do we build this out so we can do the same [as Groons] with these emerging brands?” (B, 54:00)

---

12. Scaling Early Brands: Back to Basics

[59:45–64:59]

• First phase: Get the basics in place—cancel flows, popups, retention flows, and lots of creative testing.
• Focus: “80 to 90% of our time is working on creative…just get good content up and see what’s resonating.” (B, 59:45)
• Learning: Offers, pricing, and cadence aren’t always a copy/paste from the flagship brand—each one requires tailored iteration. “We have to get pretty specific if we want to grow these the way we grew Groons.” (B, 64:59)

---

13. Website/Ecomm Tactics: From Single Page to Variation

[65:41–66:32]

• Update: Groons’ notorious “single-page” playbook is evolving; not every brand is on a single PDP—a “distilled,” non-traditional homepage-centric approach remains favored, but some brands now have category pages and multiple PDPs, for leverage and speed of iteration (C, 66:07).

---

14. Automation & AI: The Claude Advantage

[66:59–71:06]

• Strong AI culture: “The coolest part about how we’re doing AI at Groons is how we’re rolling it out…[Leadership] championed it from the very beginning.” (B, 67:32)
• Company-wide prompts: Monthly AI/Claude projects everyone participates in; sharing best use cases and building a “muscle” around automation.
• AI applications:
  • Automated diagnostics (e.g., “If conversion rate drops, Claude pings a troubleshooting workflow”)
  • AI for content/b-roll indexing (“I want to find a disco ball…Claude search tool”)
• AI as an organizational expectation: “It has to be championed from the top, and then pushed at every level,” but “putting the onus on individuals” is more effective than top-down audits. (B, 71:06)
• No Director of AI: Instead, biz ops/data leads evangelize and spread best practice, but adoption is grassroots and self-reinforcing.

---

15. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the visionary-integrator split:

“If you are a visionary, get yourself an integrator. If you are an integrator, you may not need a chief of staff as badly.” – A [31:44]

On company culture:

“CEO of your own domain is a big thing we say at Groons constantly…if you can model out the impact…move forward quickly and don’t spend a bunch of time getting buy-in.” – B [41:01]

On automation longevity:

“I have, I don’t even want to know how many zaps we have running in the background…it’s pretty cool [when] something I built two and a half years ago is still running in the business.” – B [30:26]

On organizational design:

“Biz Ops at Groons is…the engine that keeps the business running.” – B [52:42]

---

16. Timestamps to Key Segments

• [00:58] Post-Unilever exit reflections
• [04:22] Katie's path: engineering, McKinsey, Meta
• [11:20] Data/analytics function at Ruggable
• [14:03] When to focus on data hires
• [24:27] Chief of Staff role at Groons
• [31:44] Visionary vs. integrator dynamic
• [39:05] CEO of your own domain/ownership culture
• [45:55] President: day-to-day and company scaling
• [54:00] Chief Emerging Brands Officer shift
• [57:48] Team pods for multi-brand operating
• [59:45] Bootstrapping growth and channel mix in emerging brands
• [66:59] Automations, AI and Claude at Groons

---

Summary Takeaways

• Culture trumps structure: Radical ownership allows for speed, innovation, and trust.
• Strong integrator/visionary pairs enable explosive scaling.
• Biz ops and data are differentiators: Not just for analysis, but for strategy and execution.
• Automation mindset: Old zaps still running, AI applied everywhere, pushed from the top but owned by the team.
• Playbooks are not universally copy/paste: New brands—even under the same umbrella—require tailored offers, positioning, and operations.
• Leverage best practices but preserve speed: Dot-line reporting lets specialists learn from the core but operate nimbly in their pod.
• Final word on leadership:
  • “You have a great idea…Make sure we can execute or at least that it will move the needle. And then: just get it done.” (B, 43:01)

---

For operators, founders, and brand builders—this episode is a masterclass in building scale, autonomy, and innovation into every layer of a modern consumer organization.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to episode 124 of the Marketing Operators podcast. Today we have a very special episode for you with guest Katie Ceruli. Katie is an incredibly dynamic operator. She was the fourth employee at GR 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 Gruen's built a culture where everyone is the CEO of their own domain and what it takes to scale a CPG brand into mid nine figures in less than three years. Before we do that, we want to thank the sponsors, Motion House, Neon, Pixel, Rich Panel, Propel and aftercell. Let's get into it. All right, Katie, you have, you have the, the post. The Post Exit glow to you that I've only seen a few times. Obviously Gruins exited about what, two, three months ago. What's, what's life post Exit been like for you?

[B]

Yeah, it's been great. Life on the other side is, has been very nice. It's, 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 you know, 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 business as usual. And now with like the added pro of having such an awesome company in Unilever, to really have like a two way partnership. That's what's been most surprising to me about the acquisition is it's not just one way where they're coming to us with a bunch of, you know, really exciting opportunities to, you know, enhance our business, but they're also looking at us and asking, you know, how, you know, what are some of the ways that you guys grew so quickly and how can we replicate that with our other brands? 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.

[A]

Nice. Yeah. Well, I want to, I want to dig into the 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 in our, in the first post exit meal was, was drive through Taco Bell. So that's, that's how we celebrated on the way out to Aspen. On the way out to Aspen. Color.

[B]

What was the order and who bought?

[C]

Did he buy or did you buy?

[A]

Chad. Chad bought. Chad bought. Yeah, Chad bought that one. And yeah, we were driving out to ask and I forget what he, I forget what he got, but he goes, yeah man. He goes, I'm hungry now. Like let's. What should we go eat? And, and we pulled over to Taco Bell and that was meal number one for Chad. So you know, immediately, you know, he, he totally changed as a human being. You know, only the, only the best stuff for Chad. Once he, once he was acquired by

[B]

Unilever, I think the next message came to us of we did it. So all caps, very short and sweet message. So I think that was in the

[A]

Taco Bell parking lot.

[B]

Yeah, probably on the drive out.

[C]

But first, Taco Bell priorities.

[A]

Yes, exactly. I like Chad. You're kind of, you're, you're making me a little nervous here. Cause he's like trying to like drive and text. You want me to drive? He's like, oh no, no, no, no. I got it. He didn't want me. The green grooms Rivian I think was the main takeaway. He didn't trust me. But then we pulled over, got the T Bell, he sent the message, got everything taken care of and then we were on our way. So that was, that was my, that was my proximity and experience with the, with the acquisition with Unilever and it was amazing. I loved it.

[B]

Rough that he doesn't even trust you with the self driving Rivian. I love that.

[A]

I know, I know. It's crazy. I know, I know. We'll get there, we'll get there one day. Cool. Well, I want to, I want to dig into all the Groon stuff before we do that. I mean you have a super interesting background. Um, and I, 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, this path of. And I think actually Keegan from David Protein maybe has a similar background, but this path from like big consulting into ecom operator. Can you just like kind of run us through high level like what your background is and, and kind of what brought you into gruins, maybe starting with like even college. Like what did you study? Did you study business? Did you not study business? Like what was your, what was your path to Grunds as The, in the multiple roles that you've held over there.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I guess starting from the beginning, I did, I studied engineering in undergrad so it was, it was industrial engineering, a bit more of a focus on business principles but also a good amount of coding and other, you know, just big problem solving types of, 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 do a random walk and work on a ton of different types of projects. And I think and why, I guess why 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 the spot training, tons of like live simulations of how you like can show up in meetings and how you can lead a business. And you, 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 hat and an orange suit counting, you know, doing some more of like that type of work and then you're in like a huge boardroom with these like super high up CEOs. And it was just a really great training ground for what comes after that. Um, from there I went on to, I actually joined Meta in between my, that was 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 team, so 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. I'm like, I gotta go get on the other side of this. I need to go join a real brand and be a part of this rocket ship that I see on the other side in the data. And so yeah I joined, 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 and analytics and I always credit that role to being 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 a 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 operate, what type of KPIs or the influencer team looking out and what kind of data data do they need to make the decisions that they need to make? And like how does all of that come together in MTA and all of the other attribution models that we were looking at? So it was just like such a good training ground for understanding e commerce and has was, I always say that is like the best role that someone can do if they want to get into it and have like a little bit of that background.

[A]

You were seeing all these brands through your, through your role at Meta. You were seeing, I presume, 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, what was your take on that? Like what, what made you excited about that and like ultimately what, like how quickly and what made, you know that you wanted to would be on that side of the equation and not on like the ad tech side super quickly.

[B]

I was only at Meta for about five months and you know, at the time, early on in my career, like, you're super nervous to make a quick jump where you're like, oh, I need to work at every brand I go to 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, you know, if the project was implemented, what was, 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 and different categories. And so I Was really excited to like, see a brand from start to finish and not be a part, you know, just splitting my time across so many different, different things.

[A]

Yeah, that makes sense. And it's kind of the same with meta, right? Like your reps can, can give you the advice, but they can't actually, they're not going to go by the media. They can't actually, you know, force your media buyer to go and do the things that, that you're recommending that they do. So you just wanted, you wanted more, kind of more A to Z, control over the outcome.

[B]

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, 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, of the. The business.

[D]

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 we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate? And which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over a billion dollars in ad spend 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 and 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 runneth 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 motionapp.com and tell the marketing operator sent you.

[A]

So what did that at. At Ruggable. Then you were really owning the data function. Like, was that. I just, I 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 your, your background, like what you studied in school gave you the skills to do that or, 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 like marketing function then and building like a different data analytics thing for them? Like what, what did that all look like?

[B]

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 Claude 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 need to build, you know, a centralized data warehouse that actually has all of that data. We can connect it all behind the scenes and be able to create like the dashboards and you know, data sets that we need to make our decisions and also do it quicker. Like Excel 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, 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 it was really on the job at Meta 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 an agency, like I couldn't build the data warehouse on my own but I, we hired a great, I wouldn't 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 influencer program better. And so how do we actually like what data points do we need? Do we need a integrate like actually build out a post purchase survey might be like the very first thing that we do and then it's collecting that data, putting it 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.

[C]

You're coming to the, you know, slightly more established businesses ruggable stuff like that. Obviously who you're seeing at Meta. How would you think about it now especially like right with, with like AI for a new brand. Just completely hypothetically if you're setting up a new one because like 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 D2C brands, like working with VC, he's like your first role should be a data person. We're. I was like we don't need that. Like we're, we're bootstrapped. Like we're going to 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 big 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, do you think that's something a brand should get from the beginning or just at a later stage when they have more resources?

[B]

It's a great question. I don't think you need it right away. I think for the most part, especially the early, early stage, like you're under 1, 2, 3 million. I think you can easily operate with the downloads and then I'm sure there's great pipelines you can build just with Claude on its own. I do recommend even as you scale, I do think having 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 biz ops like has a more, you know, they lean more like they they're a data analyst and 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 date 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 and decline but it would be, I still think having some type of database ops person to, to lead that function is so, so important as you scale. It's been like one of the best investments we made at Grooms

[A]

and where do you find that person if you're if you're like, let's say you're breaking into your, you're becoming an eight figure brand and you're like, all right, we actually need to have this, this data warehouse function built. Like, where, where are 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, like a director of data or a head of analytics or whatever you would want to call the role.

[B]

Yeah, on our end. I mean, unfortunately when you're hiring for this role, you're typically getting a lot of folks who are like hardcore data, data analytics folks or data scientists. And I don't think that that archetype works great depending on like how SC happier startup is.

[A]

Wait, why is that? Why do you not think that's a good, a good fit?

[B]

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 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, data. Yeah, that they're doing to the larger picture.

[C]

Katie, tell me if you like, agree with this or disagree, but it's kind of like growth at an earlier stage company. 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 the same thing. It's like you can't just get an engineer. Like, yes, that's an important skill for later. Like you need an analyst who can write SQL. You need an 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.

[B]

That's how I see it. And as I said, 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 it out at Grooms. And what I find really helpful is then hiring under that person for a more like, marketing focused biz ops role. Who they have have the data skills, they can analyze data, especially in Claude 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. In like on Meadow, 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. Unless so on. You asked for what is our gross margin yesterday. Like, go find the answer and then. And put it up.

[A]

Okay. So that was your time at Ruggable. And so you're at Ruggable for how long?

[B]

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 wall art 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 team on our washable furniture brand. And then on our wall art 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, you know, full understanding of the different functions of an e 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. To get into that space and eventually landed the. The job at Groons.

[A]

So. Yeah, so you were. I wanna. I wanna know more about that. So you're employee number four. You've had. You've worn a lot of hats at Groons. 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'd you find Grooms? How'd you get connected to Chad? Like, why did you decide to join? Like, what did that. And maybe even zooming 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 networked your way into it. Like what did that look like? And then. Yeah. How did you ultimately land at Grooms?

[B]

Yeah, so I guess going back like why Health and wellness Y cpg I would find myself to my earlier point when I was at at Meta and I lived in Austin at the time. I would go to the big Whole Foods and walk through and I was always just love seeing all the new brands that we're launching and like the snack space and the health and wellness space. And so was just that was you know, 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 a day to day basis with my actual job. And so yeah, networked quite a bit just trying to get an understanding. I was thinking about vc, I was thinking about being an operator again and yeah, I actually came across the role for chief of staff at groons on LinkedIn and applied there and my. It's funny because at the time Chad was so busy he was doing a lot of the first round interviews async with Loom, which I thought was like a really 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, like take five minutes of his day versus setting up, you know, ten 30 minute meetings.

[C]

And so we did the same by the way because you know, in 30 seconds sometimes when you get on a call.

[B]

Yeah, we did totally, exactly. And we do it a lot for our 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 yes, 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 get involved with. But after spending even 30 minutes with Chad I'm like, this is the guy. I have to work with him. I want to soak up the way he thinks, the way he works, the way he operates. And luckily as I got into the business and learned more about gummy supplements, learned about how we were doing things at Groons and how different it was from a lot of the other supplement companies that I had seen before. Now I'm, I'm like, you know, ride or die on the gummy supplement train. But, but yeah, that was the, the early, I guess, impetus for how I, I found and joined Groons. And yeah, it was an exciting time at the very beginning.

[C]

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's 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 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 planet earth for measuring what we call incrementality, which we talk about a lot on the 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. StockX saw a 41% lift in IROs using House. And you're not stuck with a help desk. You get an embedded measurement strategist 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 IO operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data.

[A]

How long do you. Was it from that first loom interview to you getting a job offer and starting like, were you, were you, were you with Ruggable still at the time or were you in between?

[B]

I had 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 a

[A]

week and a half and it was go, go, go.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And you know, no looking back from there for sure.

[A]

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 remembered coming out of that conversation being blown away a I was like, oh, this, this, like, I love how like this, this like working relationship Chad and Katie have, but also just blown away at 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 y' 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, I, it became, what really imprinted on me was like the breadth, it 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 to day?

[B]

Yeah, it was the most fun role I think I'll ever do. As we mentioned, four employees at the time. So we had ahead of growth, we had ahead of ops and then we had ahead of CX and then Chad. So very, very small team at the time and truly the very first, like as you said, anything and everything and not just within the growth function. Like one. My very first project when I joined our team 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 a joy 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, you know, should we expand and look for a new co manufacturer? Do we need a new CO packer? How do we build like the internal tools from a supply chain system to make sure that we have enough inventory at each SKU and make sure that we are, you know, looking out 612 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 net, 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, yeah, 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.

[C]

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.

[B]

It's so fun. I think it. The. The trouble with chief of staff roles is 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, Cody, but just like, generally, if someone's listening, applying to those type 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 core strategic partner in that. In the, in the business to make sure that they're setting those boundaries and they're not getting into the habit of like doing those smaller admin tasks. That can definitely come with the job.

[C]

Yeah. I also think because we. We had one for a few years at Jones 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 hurt, not even 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 gonna go and like, roll my sleeves up. That's the part that sounds fun to me. But it seems like you were pretty split.

[B]

It seems like, yeah, a bit of each. I would say honestly, in the early, early days, like for employees, way deeper on like hands on, like I am like in the email flows on Klaviyo. Like actually, you know, putting the. Putting the new welcome flow together, working with the team there, so. Or like building out a flow in zapier. Like it's, you know, there's. There was a lot of in the weeds stuff that I was doing and then just as much looking at like more forward Thinking, how do we, how do we make sure we're growing 6 to 12 months the way that we

[C]

want to do you look back at that fondly, like, is that like your favorite part of your career? I feel like that's, for me, those early days are the most fun.

[B]

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 it on my career arc too. Like at Ruggable, we launch new brands. It's like, go jump on those new brands to grow from zero. And then at Groo, we haven't gotten to this part, but I ran our emerging 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.

[A]

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 at Hexclad for the last three years. We've grown with them a lot over time and 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 has 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 as the true north star on measuring channels. And they are really measurement 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.

[B]

I feel like that's something that like 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 just spend a ton of money on meta to grow.

[C]

Chad sent me a loom of like the influencer seating thing. And again, this was early. This was probably like two years ago and like now it's like, you know, you like, you guys were duct taping like zapier 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, like, tactical. And, like, I remember Connor was telling me when he joined, he's like, yeah, like, you know. You know that video. There's a bunch of these things just, like, laying around, like, all these, like, little, like, yes. Projects that were built. So it just seems really cool.

[B]

I put that as one of the funny, like, a thing that I own in the chief of staff days that I still get pinged about today, because every once in a while, the zap will fail or, you know, something will. Like, I have. I don't even want to know how many zaps 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 in still and 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. It's pretty cool. That's.

[A]

That's awesome. I want to. I want to. Before we move on to, like, the next phase phases of your role at groans, I want to talk quickly about you. You just briefly mentioned it, like, Chad's, 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 and why it's a useful hire for early stage founders. You added. You added some additional notes here on this idea of, like, a visionary versus integrator, which is something I've been reading a lot about recently. And. And you. 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 the visionary, you were really the integrator. Like, what did that look like? How did that work? Why did it work? Like, can you just fill us in on that. That relationship from that lens?

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I think Chad is unique because he is both a. An. A 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.

[A]

So I E All these new brands that you guys continue to launch over and over and over again when, you

[B]

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, 10 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 I've talked to so many founders who are much more like, I just like love product 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 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 D2C business or it's that chief of staff. Because that relationship between me and Chad, for instance, 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.

[A]

And, and what is that like, tactically speaking? So like this lto idea that, that Chad 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 under, like we just. I want to understand like what's that process look like? Like tactically speaking?

[B]

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 the idea 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, our limited time offer products every single day. Oh 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.

[A]

Like, so it's like writing a memoir.

[B]

Yeah. Writing a memo basically of like, here's 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, Katie, go over, like, go 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 paper 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 within grooms. Basically. Like there are these walls that you think are, you know, you know, hard and maybe made of cement that you can't get through or you are given a problem or a task and there's just like, there's no way that you could like ever make this happen. But really it's like a paper wall that if you just keep asking the right questions and keep getting creative, you can actually 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 more you problem solve and think through it, like, we like have, you know, really great outcomes that we never thought were possible.

[C]

Most brands treat customer support as a cost, but with AI, every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention, recover revenue and grow. Your rich panel doesn't just use AI to answer tickets. They allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support. You can test different win back offers on refund requests, subscription save offers during cancellations, and product recommendations that turn chats into sales. Plus, they guarantee you're going to save money. 50% of your support volume automated in 30 days or your money back. That's a pretty good offer if you ask me. So enter richpanel.com demo. They'll build an AI support team, live for your business, and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you.

[A]

Well, 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, to actually build out. Right. Like, Chad might have this idea in his head and then be able to put it down on an ocean dock 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 mean, I assume 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.

[B]

Yeah, definitely spending 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 back end 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, 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 thing, next wave of innovation is or what the next big swing 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, 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 and you're 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, 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 a clear mind to innovate and take those big swings.

[A]

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, what flavor it is and what after that what the next one is the second and third from then like, is he getting pretty detailed, like when he's out, like describing or outlining this memo for these initiatives? Like, is he getting pretty buttoned up and pretty detailed? And like, and 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 going to 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.

[B]

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 like maybe on SMS he's like, this is exactly how I want to nail 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 that he cares the most about are 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 send this over to the team and make sure that it's integrated into this like larger project. And then to your question, around the check ins we generally would just send looms or send like an updated notion doc for him to review. We tried 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 day, 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 at Greens 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 it's like you know all the and and even like with other functions I'd say as long as it's an idea that you're, that you like are so confident is going to be right and you can prove that impact. It's very much like move forward quickly and don't spend a bunch of time getting buy in from every stakeholder and getting buy in 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.

[C]

What was his framework for coming up with the ideas if he's coming up with these ideas of hey I want to run this, this creator program in Discord or ltos. Like did he share that? I know it sounds like he was great at that and some ideas where maybe the team was like oh, skeptical of and I'm sure not all work but 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?

[B]

That's a great question. I wish I knew the answer. I will ask him in our one on one next week because if I knew how to do that the way that he knew it 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 this the groons way. But truly he is just like one of one in how he thinks about things. I you know the things we'll say and like a we were just at our off site in Park City and I'm just like how did you come up with this idea? It's he's just always innovating and always thinking through new ways to handle problems.

[A]

But he has this like, he's, he's built the team to give himself the space. You know, like I think that's, 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 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 least from 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. And 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 this system for himself and for the team to like come up with awesome ideas which is, which is very cool.

[B]

Yeah, I think that. I know I 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 to groons 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 at Gruins it was 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 going to be kind of hard to execute against, it's like definitely going to move the needle for our business. When 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.

[A]

That's when I brought into that I learned from Chad that I brought into Hexclad and I think it's been just a game changer for 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 just like self being a self starter and yeah, it's also Changed how I handle like management and one on ones with my team because I used to meet and do a little more one on ones and maybe was a little more involved with all of my team's own initiatives than I, than 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.

[B]

Yeah, I completely agree.

[C]

People are the most important part of your business and finding real a players is hard and incredibly time consuming. That's why I want to tell you about Propel. Propel is honestly the best recruitment agency that I have personally worked with. They are marketing and operations specialists. They source talent from us, latam and beyond for top e comm brands like Jones Road. Like many others that you know and love at Jones Road we've hired over 12 people through them. We've hired video editors, graphic designers, we have multiple retention managers, creative strategists from them. What I love is not only are they easy to work with, they're quick, but they work on performance. So you only pay a one off fee only once you hire somebody you don't have to pay, you know, any retainer, no ongoing fees. Plus every hire comes with a three month guarantee. So I highly recommend them. They've worked really great for us. We have a really great team that they've helped us source. Head to the link in the show notes and submit the form to get 10% off of your first hire.

[A]

You were in this chief of staff role for how long, Katie?

[B]

About five to six months.

[A]

Okay, five to six months. So not, not that long in the grand scheme of things. And then you transition from chief of staff to president. Honestly it sounds like somewhat similar roles just based on what I, I've known presidents to do and what I know you are now doing as chief of staff, which is basically everything. What, what did that like, like what the, the role change actually look like going from chief of staff to president.

[B]

Yeah, as at one point I believe Chad, the way it went down, timing wise, but it's a little bit blurry is Chad 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 where 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 day to day 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 time, you know, 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, 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 Groons too in the weeds. Like you know, if someone else is out on fraternity leave, like Connor Dalt was out for a little bit. I'm filling in as interim 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.

[A]

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 and you're attacking very specific problems initiatives but you're the one driving those forward as an individual contributor. President a lot more management would you say?

[B]

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 chat, like building out the uneconomic 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 as like a go to market esque person and then we are hiring that person to actually lead the function.

[A]

I imagine you had a lot of direct reports in this role.

[B]

Yeah, I had six. So it felt like a healthy number.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And all executives too with big roles

[B]

and presumably big teams under cmo, coo, cfo, Head of Sales or Chief Sales Officer, Head of Product and head of cx.

[A]

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 initiatives 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, of everybody's work for that quarter. How do y', all, how did y' all do that at Gruins? Like how did you make sure that you and your all six direct reports you had were 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 a notion? Is it a spreadsheet? Like what's the, how often were you resetting that? Like I'm very curious how you manage 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 like was aligned with the entire direction of the company?

[B]

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 OKR heavy but like so many. All you're doing is like admin updates and you're not, you know, it didn't actually feel like you could move the needle as much as you wanted to and you have all these guardrails where you have to get, you know. Yeah. Approvals and things like that versus, you know, what I would say was Chad's dream. And like what we really tried to push at Grooms is just like, how can we keep this as scrappy as possible, like keep moving forward while making sure that we're hitting our goals. And so 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 okrs. We had our CFO come on, who felt very strongly about okrs 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. But like as we became that 130 person organization and I moved out of the president role, that was when we actually put in some really awesome infrastructure, like credit to the team there, building out like an entire thing within Claude that has kept track of like every single initiative. We all have our roadmaps in notion that connect up into Claude. They updated every single week. It flags when things are behind. You can like very quickly just ping slack and say, hey, like move the date of this initiative to one week like 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 org.

[A]

Do you have a project management function at Grunds?

[B]

No, we don't. So it's pretty much all run through our biz ops team. All of these, what I was just describing with like notion roadmaps are owned by the functional leaders. The biz ops teams 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 biz Ops up into that like master planner. So no PMO function.

[A]

So biz op is biz ops kind of your like your 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.

[B]

Exactly. But I would definitely undersell them if I said that they were pmo because they are literally the like, core to our business. Like biz ops at Gruins is, is like the hottest, sexiest role. You have to like, like, they are the engine that keeps the business running.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

They make sure the work's getting done.

[B]

And just like they are like the brains, they are the strategic partners. Kind of what we're looping back to what we were just talking about or the beginning with data and analytics, 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 keeping us on track, but just like really opening our minds to what's possible within our, each of our, our functions.

[A]

Got it. So, okay, so you're in the president role for how long?

[B]

Just about a year and a half.

[A]

Okay. And then at some point you're, I, I, 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 process or thinking behind, Hey, I want to, I want to get, I want to move out of president role into chief emerging brands officer role. Like, what was the thinking there?

[B]

Yeah, so we, you know, we are launching all of these other brands. We have our nootropic brand on a separate website, separate ad 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 Grooms team kind of splitting their time. You know, here and there. They're like going into the new Tropes account and making some updates, but there was like never a core focus on, like, how do you know, like, it's a real brand? Like, we need to like grow this brand and not just treat it as like, you know, this the side side brand. So I kept finding myself really pulled into those and Chad And I were chatting about like we need to hire someone to own, you know, own these brands and really like bring that, do what we did with Groons and replicate the success we had there with these, with these early stage brands. So we are about to hire for the role and Chad and I were talking and I'm 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 startup that I love. So over a number of conversations we decided the best thing to do is to put me in that chief emerging brands officer role. And like, you know, I was one of the earliest employees at Groons. I watched what we did there and all the like different strategies and tactics. And so the goal was how do we build this out so that we can do the same with these emerging brands.

[A]

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 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 on the same team, all focused on the same brand. So they're. Because obviously like, like you can't just do paid, it's got to be paid and 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 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?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we have five now. Correct. And many more coming down the pipeline, which is exciting. Yeah, we went back and forth in this like Connor D and I, our head of chief 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 you mentioned, was on this pod structure where we had a paid media specialist, a CRO, like a head of CRO, head 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 the 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 con, 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 Groons 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 scrappier 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 you know, still remain super scrappy and move quickly

[D]

before Q4 hits. The smartest e commerce operators aren't just asking how do we spend more, they're asking how do we make every visitor more profitable? That is where aftercell comes in. After Cell helps E commerce brands increase revenue per visitor, contribution margin and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent cart checkout, post purchase and even the thank you page brands like Hexclad Ridge and Pilar increasing their AOV across every cohort using these zero risk upsells we've tested and they have no negative impact on conversion. It's just more free money in your pocket and with rocked thanks you can offset your after sale subscription. No redesigns, no risky funnels, just better economics. Want to see how much money you can make with after sell? Go to aftercell.com Rocket Revenue Forecast. Put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM start.

[A]

Okay so that, that makes sense. So step one was just figuring out like what's the team set up here that is going to 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, the core Groons business. So and like we're, we're dealing with the same thing internationally right now where the team's like well I want to do CTV and DSP and I'm like hold on 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 you weren't doing all the channels that you were doing for grooms for all these emerging brands. So you're like really focused on like meta and and some other like core channels. So what did like after you had the team set up and now it's like 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, offer merchandising, more landing pages. Like what did those early like once the team was established, like what are 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 what were they working on? Like what was your role in that? I'm just very curious about how you kind of got that function rolling.

[B]

It was super interesting at the very beginning because not much like the core, we had basically copy and pasted everything from Grund and I won't even say we copy and pasted everything from Groons. We copy and pasted 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 had 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 this super large grooms 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 it's just like get good content. Not even good content. Like get content up and see what's resonating with our consumer. Like, I mean that was one of the. Yeah, exactly. Like we learned that early on with Grooms. 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 it 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 Groons. But we need to, you know, keep that process alive for these early stage brands. So I'm hopping 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 Groons process. But we can move even faster than we are moving in the Groons process so that we could get more and more content tested on each one of these brands. And honestly, a big part of it was just like, taking a 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 it was a. I would say, like, like, in any new brand, it's 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 seeding and creative.

[A]

So would you say you're moving more into, like, in this chief emerging brands 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, like, who are 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 shifted a little bit?

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. I got to wear much more of that hat. I mean, it was still, I would say, 80% integrator work, but definitely more on that visionary side, like one of the biggest projects. When I first joined on the kids brand, I noticed that our, like, licensed products just performed so well on. On our kids product. And so it was like, I'm 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 for us to lean in. 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 licensed partner in the next three months 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

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, another big one. Like, you know, I think when I first joined the emerging brands role I was just like we're going to keep the same pricing, we're going to keep the same cadence for all of these brands. Like I, I'm just assuming we, you know, replicate what we did with Groons. But that was another big thing where it's like, hey, this price for this specific product, is it reson the consumer? Like if you baseline it against all the other products in market, if you start looking at it on a retail shelf, like we actually might 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 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 retained 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.

[C]

Yeah, I was, I was curious about that because obviously it was just like from the outside your guys like funnels look very similar and I was curious like the offers, the buy box, stuff like that, if you just like by default launch it because that's worked on one brand and then like be able to share those learnings because there's probably a lot like, like is there? Do you, do you have a good sense of now of which learnings you can, you can share over and you can feel confident about implementing and which ones you need to test?

[B]

I think we're still in the test and iterate phase on that. Like I couldn't confidently say that 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 workout brand I would say is just like in my opinion going to be much more of an influencer play than a lot of the other brands that we've launched. So it'll be interesting like Once we have 10 or 12 brands running to say is there 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 in our approach for each one of these brands, which the more I dive in, we have to get pretty specific if we want to grow these the way that we grew Crohn's.

[C]

Makes sense. Totally makes sense.

[A]

Sense. Well, one thing that you have pulled across all your brands, the single page website and that's.

[C]

No, not anymore. Not anymore. Have you been.

[A]

Wait, what?

[C]

Yeah, breaking news.

[B]

No, it is breaking news.

[A]

Wait, which one's not a single page anymore?

[C]

Go to Groons Co. Oh, wow.

[A]

Yeah, no kidding. No, I mean the juiced one is still, right?

[B]

Yeah. Not all of them have been switched over yet.

[C]

It's not a traditional website, wouldn't call it that. But there's a little bit of a header and then there's PDPs now which are essentially buy boxes. So still non traditional, but yeah. Noticed a little change was on the site the other day.

[B]

I know. I was so confused when I first joined Grins from Ruggable where we had like the PLP, the PDPs, all, you know, optimizing every little thing and it's like, no, that's, that's not what we do here.

[C]

But it's also gotta 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 where we built so many landers and we overbuilt 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 one hand 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.

[A]

I want to wrap with one more topic. Y' all were. I mean just from what we've already talked about, you were really, really dialed in on like all the automations. He's using Zapier and just, just automating as much as you can. So obviously AI and Claude, is that on Steroids So I can imagine y' all are, 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 in, in Groons and in your day to day life. What does that look like at Groo? Like how are y' all leveraging AI? Yeah. Can you fill us in on that?

[D]

That?

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I think the coolest part about how we, you know, are doing AI at Grins is actually how we're rolling it out. I think that, you know, I've talked to so many different companies about how they're rolling out. A lot of folks are bringing in like an external agency to help, you know, drive maybe specific projects or things like that. But at Groons, you know, we built to the earlier discussion around data. You know, a data and biz ops team or a really strong data strategic hire. That team has fully built out our entire cloud, added all our 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, you know, we have to use AI at this company and like it is going to be the thing that like sets us apart and keeps us ahead and then finding ways to actually like operationalize that. Where for instance, in our we were 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 up upload it into notion to show what they had built. We did a big share out of some of the coolest ways that people were leveraging AI and then also really worked closely with the managers of each team to be make sure that you're just pushing the use of AI and making sure people know how to use it, what the best use cases are. And so it's just been awesome to see even super junior people at our organization be like, oh, I can use Claude for this or I'm going to set up this amazing diagnostic tool. For instance, on our emerging 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 rate's 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 and set up 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 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 cloud search tool to go through that, that B roll or go through all that content to be like, I really want like a disco ball. Like, how do you know, like, how do we search for that? A little bit easier than 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 AI or organization for it to be effective. It has down and it has to be like constantly like reminded of like, this is a tool that we need to use and, and you know, we, that we need to lean into to, to, you know, get the results that we want to get.

[A]

So what's your, what's like, do you have like a director of AI or do you have a AI lead?

[B]

Not necessarily, not in the title. Or at least our head of, Head of data and VISOPs who, who led the entire. Yeah. Roll out.

[A]

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 organization that will actually, like, either someone can reach out to them or that person will just go into like different functions and kind of audit all the work that's happening there. And then like they're being like, oh, well, you 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 claude. Is that kind of what's happening here? Like, is that person helping build out these, 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?

[B]

With claude, I think it's actually the opposite. Where we were trying that 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, like, how can 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 or like, you know, think about how to integrate this with Claude. 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 just had much better results than us going in and 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 and to free up their time for, you know, more exciting things. In in the org is driving a lot of folks like build these tools out themselves.