Risk, Red Bull, & Reinvention
Our exposure to the Chief of Staff model started in 2007 when Terrance became the Chief of Staff to the Head of Operations at Bear Stearns. Within a year the market had collapsed, and Terrance was on his way to Russell Investments as the newly created position of Chief of Staff to the CEO. This is where Terry and Ali met, and our story begins.
As the new Chief of Staff (CoS) one of the first things that he was tasked with was building his immediate team which started with interviewing for his Executive Assistant. Enter Ali, a Russell employee who had been moved multiple times due to internal reorganizations that resulted from the market crash. She recounts sitting at her desk (about 2 ft of space) on the trading floor, with paper planes and nerf basketballs flying overhead, and financial news on televisions everywhere. That's when the call came in. An EA from the Office of the CEO was reaching out to inform her of her scheduled interview time for the EA positions for the CoS, which was very confusing since Ali had not formally applied for the position. Ali was told that she was seen presenting to the Administrative Professionals Network and, based on what they saw, thought she would be a good candidate for the role. It was at this point that Ali informed them the only reason she was presenting was because they had fired the person that was supposed to present, and she was tasked with it last minute. Given all of the recent reorganizations and physical moves, she was disappointed at the thought of yet another change. After she hung up the phone, everyone around her started asking questions (given there was no privacy at her 2 ft desk) and she shared what had just transpired, which triggered all kinds of reactions from the entire floor.
At this time, Ali was going through a horrific divorce and battle over child custody and broadly her entire life in disarray. So, when her peers started coming to her with a yellow notepad and started writing down the issues and concerns they wanted her to take to the new CoS, it presented an interesting opportunity. Someone even brought in a check spindle from a local restaurant and people started placing money on it as a way to get their issue elevated in priority, as the issue list had grown to almost three full pages. There were Starbucks gift cards, Red Bulls, and tons of encouragement that flooded her that week. She openly admits to cutting about 8 inches off her hair, moving into a new place, and contemplating how to handle the influx of issues that were being raised (quite literally) on the notepad at her desk. It was a tumultuous time at the firm and suddenly this seemed to be a place for people to have access to the so called ‘ivory tower' and voice their concern. She recounts how she started out at the firm as an ‘assistant to an assistant' and being put in this position was incredibly stressful. Thinking that she really didn't have a chance at all going up against some of the most seasoned Executive Assistants for the role, she decided to go all in and take the chance of getting fired to make sure the issues at least saw the light of day before she left.
On the day of the interview, she was greeted by her peers with tremendous words of encouragement and thoughtful strategic partners that helped remind her how so many of the issues were related and insights on how to speak about them with facts and logic. She was prepped and sent to the elevator with a group of friends and 2 last minute Red Bulls added to her hands on the way up. One drink down on the ride from the 5th floor to the 12th floor. She had never been to that floor before where the Executive Offices were held. As she sat waiting to be let into the room she reviewed her notes and research she had done on the role and on this new CoS. She drank that 2nd Red Bull and when the doors were opened and she was asked to come in she was ready.
At the end of a long conference room table in a giant room with windows that overlooked Commencement Bay in Puget Sound sat Terrance Berland. He greeted her and introduced himself and that's where his role in the interview ended. Ali introduced herself and then asked the question "Are you here to make a difference? If so, then I have a lot to talk about." Terrance said yes he was here to make a difference and that is when Ali took out that yellow notepad and proceeded to share every single issue on the list. When she was done she thanked him for listening and got up and left. She recounts that coming back down to the trading floor she shared that the mission was complete! She shares that a large group went out for the best happy hour that night and she had the worst hangover the next morning. Ali came in the next day with a box prepared to pack her things and leave.
After the interview with Terrance and Ali was over, while Ali was preparing for her happy hour, Terrance was mulling over what had just happened. As a new Chief of Staff that truly was interested in making a difference in the organization, Terrance had just been presented with insights and connections that could take months and potentially years to acquire, and Ali did so with no regard to her personal circumstances, because under most circumstances, this would have likely led to Ali getting fired. But after this interview, it was impossible for Terrance to consider any of the other traditional candidates for the EA role as they all were very safe and measured in their responses, which may be fine for normal circumstances, but not in a situation where Terrance was trying to make radical changes. Ultimately, Ali's courage led to her being hired to join his team, essentially as Terrance's Chief of Staff. In one interview, he learned that Ali cared deeply about the company and its people, that she wasn't afraid to call out issues that she saw, and that she was willing to take personal risks to do the right thing – everything you hope for in a member of your inner circle.
During their time at Russell, the Chief of Staff office built out an enterprise program management function, helped launch the ETF business and helped sell the company's private equity fund of funds business, and oversaw the company's marketing, purchasing and offshoring functions. But ultimately, a conflict between Terrance and the Company's CEO led to him leaving the Company, and eventually so did Ali.
They continued to stay closely connected as mentor and mentee. Terrance went off to work as a Senior Management Associate at Bridgewater Associates and Ali eventually left Russell and joined Nordstrom Corporate to learn IT (something that she had complained for years that she really didn't understand but wanted to learn). During those stints, they would really engage to talk about management principles, particularly ones from Ray Dalio's Principles, and discuss how they could be applied in different business contexts. The discussions were particularly fruitful because both Terrance and Ali were coming from very different perspectives (East Coast financial services vs. West Coast retail/consumer), and yet they could often find a common ground regarding how best to apply those principles to the management challenges at hand.
Eventually, Terrance would leave Bridgewater and joined an early-stage technology venture capital firm that he helped fund and began working with different portfolio companies on their high priority management issues. It was from here that Terrance and Ali actually reunited, after Terrance called Ali from a cannabis trade show in Las Vegas (where he was representing the agricultural lighting division of a photonics company) to inquire as to whether she would be interested in "getting the band back together." Within a couple of months, Terrance and Ali had come to an agreement, and Ali joined the agriculture lighting division as a member of the senior team focused on building out that marketplace.
Her first day at the Company was the day that the United States quarantines started showing up for COVID, so after a single day of training in Florida, she returned to Seattle and was grounded in the State of Washington for nearly 8 months. She immediately started remotely building out relationships with the local and state community leadership as well as the regional university in Colorado, and eventually was able (completely remotely) to negotiate a research collaboration with said university which included the building of a dedicated greenhouse research facility.
By November of that year, travel restrictions had started to loosen, and Terrance was in desperate need of additional support to manage the rapid expansion of the company's core photonics business (due to COVID), as well as managing the expansion efforts that were underway for Europe and South America. He requested that Ali come join him in at the company's headquarters and become his formal Chief of Staff, overseeing the entire build out of the corporate infrastructure, as well as execution of the key elements of the business plan. This included helping build out one the company's business divisions as the interim COO, standing up IT and HR as interim head of both functions, conducting a public company audit, and establishing a regular sync routine with all of the senior executives. By mid-year, that list had expanded to include a $20 million Series B capital raise, and the hiring of a public company CFO.
They are now in transition and working on building out their own firm dedicated to bringing their combined managerial experience, particularly within the CEO/CoS model, to other early-stage and mid-stage companies either in an advisory or drop in management capacity, and to VCs and PEs that might be looking for due diligence support and/or management capacity for their portfolio companies.
This story was originally published for The Chief of Staff Association https://www.csa.org/csa-blog-risk-red-bull-reinvention/