The Operations Room: A Podcast for COO’s

In this episode we discuss a topic that is one everyone’s agenda: Efficiency vs. Growth: What does the new world look like? Our special guest is Reece Howe, CFO at C TWO. Reece tells it like it is when it comes to efficiency, ownership and organisational impact. 

• How do you shift the culture of a company used to “growth at all costs” to one of capital efficiency and prudence? 
• How should one think about the value and risks attached to sharing the cash burn and cash runway with the organisation?
• What does it mean to get “more from less?” and does this make sense? 
• What is the best approach to budget ownership and responsibility?
• What do you expect from the COO in driving efficiency? 
• Does it make sense for the COO to own operations across the organisation? 
• How do you approach ownership of SaaS software spend across functions? 
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References: 

• A company replaced all of its managers with coaches. Employees became 20% more productive–and much happier
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Biography: 

Reece Howe qualified as an accountant and started his career at Deloitte, working in Audit and Corporate Finance. After a move to Innocent Drinks, where he assisted with the exit to Coca Cola, he founded two of his own startups, in elderly care and digital marketing, seeing them through to exit.

Prior to his current role as CFO at C TWO, an Enterprise B2B SaaS company that develops an Automation Management Platform, he led finance at Signal AI (another Enterprise B2B SaaS startup) from Series A to Series D. Reece has a degree in Astrophysics from University College London and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

Follow Reece on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/reecekhowe/

In this episode we address the elephant in the room: Do OKRs work? Our special guest is Jenny Herald, Vice President of Product Evangelism at Quantive which delivers better business outcomes for companies providing a strategy execution platform based on the OKR methodology.

In this episode we get her experiences on the following questions: 

• What are we doing wrong and how can we do it better? (we sneakily asked this twice!) 
• If you have a good strategy, a series of solid plans and well understood KPI’s, what is the incremental value of OKRs? 
• How do you avoid the conflation of business as usual KPI’s and change with OKRs when a lot of organisations simply transpose their ARR target as the topline OKR.  
• If OKRs are simply a framework to help you do the right stuff, why not use any number of other goal frameworks? 
• Should OKRs involve all functions in the organisation? Should OKRs be cascaded down to every level?  
• We’ve all read Measure What Matters and Radical Focus and are still rolling it out wrong. If you want to make it work in practice, where do you start? 
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Speaker notes and references:

• OKR Program Failure Prevention Guide
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• IBM’s CEO expects A.I. to be so good at back office work that he plans to pause hiring humans for those jobs
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• What is the Modern Operating Model?
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• The Global State of OKRs Trends Report 2023
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• OKR vs KPIs, What is the Difference?
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• AMA with Christina Wodtke: Encouraging Autonomy and Writing Awesome OKRs
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• Felipe Castro: The Intersection of OKRs and Agile
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• Use OKRs to Set Goals for Teams, Not Individuals
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• The difficulties of cascading OKRs
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• OKRs Field Book Preview: 10 Universal Parameters
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As Vice President of product evangelism, Jenny Herald champions Quantive's vision and shares how customers achieve better business outcomes with the world's most powerful Strategy Execution Platform based on the OKR methodology. Jenny also hosts the Dreams with Deadlines podcast where she interviews business leaders on aligning teams and organisations around a common purpose, the ups-and-downs of goal management, strategy execution, and everything in between.

In this episode we tackle the question of: How do you scale from 50 to 500 employees? 

Our special guest is Kristen Shannon, founder and CEO of Highliner a consultancy that helps high-growth businesses scale across people, systems and processes. 

In this episode we get her experiences on the following questions: 

• What was the lesson in hiring 800 people in one year? 
• How do you get out of your own way when it comes to structure and process?
• What are the scaling inflection points? 
• How do you fight against the silos that develop in organisations? 
• What are those hires that you're just like, oh my god, how did we survive without it?
• How do you minimise the mini-celebrity status you have as COO in an organisation, where employees massively read things into what you say and do? 
• How much of your time is spent on rolling out processes versus helping people become better leaders and managing change? 
• How do you make an organisation more accountable? How do you hold a team to account in an OKR check-in? 
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Speaker notes and references:

Rocket Fuel - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rocket-Fuel-Essential-Combination-Business/dp/1941631150

Blitzscaling - https://amzn.eu/d/5J6EyBP

Kristen is a results-driven executive with over 10 years of experience in strategy development, operational execution, and organisational scaling. Her career focus has been working in high-pressure companies going through periods of significant and fast-paced growth.

She has worked for ambitious organisations that have doubled in size year on year, leading both recruitment of over 800 FTE a year as well as leading and scaling teams in multiple functional areas. 

Kristen is the founder and CEO of Highliner. At Highliner, we are passionate about helping companies design and implement practical, scalable solutions that are the highest leverage to the organisations. We work with companies both on codifying their organisational culture and strategy to support growth as well as auditing and designing the operational systems, processes and tools needed to accomplish their key business objectives at scale. Some of our clients have included iProov (raised £70m growth round), Oxford Ionics (raise £30m Series A), Cisco Meraki (post acquisition) and Sonantic (acquired by Spotify).

https://www.linkedin.com/company/highliner-technology/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-shannon/

https://highlinertechnology.com/

In this episode we tackle the question of: How do I hire a COO? Our special guest is James Mitra, Founder of JBM, an executive search firm that specialises in placing COO’s. 

In this episode we get his experiences on the following questions: 

• When a CEO comes to you and says “we need to hire a COO”. What is your approach? 
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• What is your take on “assignments”? 
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• What does that salary equity ban situation look like right now?
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• What advice do you give to women or to others who might not, who might be accepting less than they should?
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• What is your take on back channel references? 
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Speaker notes and references:

40 Minute Mentor – https://linktr.ee/40minutementor

COO Secrets - https://jbmc.co.uk/insights/category/coo-secrets/

Chief of Staff hiring guide - https://mailchi.mp/jbmc/the-chief-of-staff-role-uncovered

Ravio (real time comp data) – https://ravio.com/partners/jbm/ 

JBM have partnered up with Ravio, Europe's first real-time compensation benchmarking platform for Tech Startups (backed by Northzone). You can connect your HR systems to see what the market is paying today, including salary, equity and benefits. 

Our partnership gives free access to Ravio’s core benchmarking solution (and 15% off Ravio Pro for the 1st year). Apply to Ravio using the below landing page and entering the discount code; https://ravio.com/partners/jbm/ - WBGRDX.

James Mitra is the Founder of JBM, an award-winning executive search firm that specialises in placing COO’s and GM’s.

He’s also the Host of one of the UK’s most popular business and career podcasts, 40 Minute Mentor. It’s approaching 1 million downloads and features inspiring career stories and mentorship from world class business leaders, entrepreneurs and sporting legends. 

James has been recognised as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Careers and sits on the Board of 3 organisations: Foundrs, Ivy Rock Partners and Unrest. 

JBM - https://jbmc.co.uk/

In this episode we tackle the question of: What is a COO? Our special guest is Divinia Knowles, Founder of the London COO Roundtable.  

In this episode we get her words of wisdom on the following questions:

• What is a COO? What does a COO do? 
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• What are the differences between: COO, Chief of Staff and Operations Lead?
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• Which COO is more successful, those that are promoted internally or those people who have joined externally? 
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• How do you measure the success of a COO?
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• What is your advice for COO’s struggling with their CEO?
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Speaker notes and references:

HBR article - https://hbr.org/2006/05/second-in-command-the-misunderstood-role-of-the-chief-operating-officer

Allison Pickens article - https://allisonpickens.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-coo-role

Generalists vs Specialists - Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World https://amzn.eu/d/5Sxi43L

Divinia Knowles article https://www.publicover.co/articles/the-coo-problem-misconceptions-and-mistakes

Divinia was COO, CFO & a director at both Mind Candy and Pact Coffee, where she also served as interim CEO.  She has held or still holds chair and board seats at too many companies to list and is occasionally an angel investor. 

Divinia re-trained as a coach in 2017 and combined it with her previous experience to become the COO Coach, working with start up/scale up COOs/CEOs to help guide them through successfully starting up, scaling up and exiting.

And in addition to all that, she is also the Founder of the London COO Roundtable, a community that brings operations professionals together to define what it means to be a highly effective startup and scale up Chief Operating Officer.

Divinia Knowles references

COO Roundtable - https://www.cooroundtable.com/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/diviniaknowles/

Email - [email protected]

We are the COO coaches to help you successfully scale in this new world where efficiency is as important as growth. Remember when valuations were 3-10x ARR and money wasn’t free? We do. Each week we share our experiences and bring in scale up experts and operational leaders to help you navigate both the burning operational issues and the larger existential challenges.

Beth Ayers is a seasoned Chief Operating Officer and has helped raise over $200m from top funds - Softbank, Bessemer, TCV, MCC, Notion and Oxx. She’s built the GTM engines at Peak AI, NewVoiceMedia and Codility.

Brandon Mensinga is a veteran Chief Operating Officer and has successfully ramped four VC-backed startups, two of which successfully exited; one to Nuance Communications and the other to Microsoft.

Between us, we have over 30 years of experience building SaaS businesses with extensive FP&A, HR and operating model experience.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/operations-room/

Podcast website: https://operationsroom.co/

Brandon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonmensinga/

Bethany's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethanyayers/