In the Season 3 finale of the Start-Up Diaries, Chris sat down with the Head of Tech Services at Beauty Bay - Rob Black. Beauty Bay are beauty focused e-commerce platform, that source hard-to-find brands and products for customers, with over 7000 products on site with new launches every week. 

In this episode, Rob talks us through his decision to leave his comfortable job in an established business to take on the challenge of a scale-up. He also dives into the challenge of influencing a team with an established culture and how he went about winning hearts and minds. Rob explains how he went about instilling mission-led values that his team live and work by and how Beauty Bay demonstrate what 'good' looks like to junior staff. He also shares one of the biggest challenges he’s faced during his time at Beauty Bay when it came to an influencer with over 2 million followers sharing a link to their website. It’s definitely an interesting one and hope you enjoy!

Questions covered:

1. Tell us about yourself and your background in tech?
2. When making the decision to join Beauty Bay you jumped in with both feet, coming from what could be seen as a comfortable position in an established business. What made you take on the challenge of a scale-up?
3. What made you join Beauty Bay over other opportunities? 
4. You’ve joined an established team within the business, how as a leader do you go about winning hearts and minds?
5. You mentioned that you’re passionate about creating a mission with your team and building standards and values that they can live & work by. Why was this so important for you to build and how did you go about doing this?
6. When preparing for the podcast you spoke about teaching junior people “what good looks like”, what do you mean by this and why do you enjoy doing it?
7. Previously you’ve scaled teams from 14-40 people whilst restructuring to align with business growth as you go, can you talk us through this? (We have people scaling teams listening and I’d like for you to explain your method).
8. For those listening who might currently be in comfortable job roles or well established companies, can you give some advice or even a sell for jumping into the challenge of a scale-up?

Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.

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