Elevate CEO Success: Proven Strategies for Leading High-Performing Companies with Katy Trost

There's an amazing tool I was trained in. It's called the ELI assessment, energy index, leadership assessment. And it basically shows you which levels you are in. And it's usually a combination of all of them, but you're between the victim mentality of blaming others, being super rational, being very caring and supporting others, being an opportunist, just looking really at the win-win scenarios. And then more of the spiritual level. It's that we all know we don't play and you just have a little bit more of a conscious point of view. You can see how people who are in the higher levels, who look at life from a win-win perspective, who look at the challenges as opportunities, who feel like everything they do is interconnected. We are all interconnected. Both people usually perform better in life. So I would say as a CEO, understanding how your mindset shapes your reality and also influences people around you is super important, it's basically conscious leadership where you know how to show up and speak and how to lead yourself, not only your people, but lead yourself to a great outcome and be super proactive about it and think in a certain way. It's a massive piece of success, building a company, building a product out there, having a market. That's one thing, but who you become in the process, it's very spiritual, very much a personal development journey. Welcome to Super Entrepreneurs Podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us Katie Trost. She is a coach and advisor to CEOs and founders at Series B and beyond. She helps them become more effective leaders and navigate the challenges of scaling people and operations. Her clients include some of the fastest growing companies. Welcome to our show, Katie. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. It's great to have you. So was this something that you always wanted to get into or were you in a different career, transitioned as a surprise into it? Can you give us a little background on how this happened, how you got into helping CEOs? Of course. I always wanted to get into coaching. It's about seven or eight years ago that a friend of mine told me about it, but I was thinking more of the personal development and leadership development angle that was fascinating to me. And then throughout the years, I just started working with CEOs and focused on that work and that's when it also became a little bit more advisory leaning, a little bit more practical and less coaching. So I would say it's definitely an evolution. But I always was fascinated with the personal development and coaching industry, and I had a branding and marketing business before for a few years, but pretty quickly I found this and I was sold. Do you actually help them with the marketing side as well then, if you have background in it? Not really. I think the only marketing piece would be personal branding, meaning the brand that they grow as a CEO, independent of their business, thought leadership, or just impact on purpose that they want to have themselves and that goes beyond their current business after they sell. Maybe they want to start something else or they want to get into investing in a certain space. On that side, I do help them, but it's definitely not the focus of my practice. It's more of a side thing. And your bio said fastest growing companies. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. Most of my clients are venture backed, so they have venture capital or private equity investments. And therefore the growth numbers are, instead of in the 10 or 20 or 30%, they were in the 100, 200, 300% range. And they scale super fast. And obviously there's a lot of challenges that come with that. On the people side, on the operation side, culture starts falling apart at one point. There's a lack of structure. Things just need to be more organized and strategic planning, formalize all of these things that if you have a regularly scaling company, we increase by 20% of the years, you can catch up quite quickly and you can feel the pain. And then if you don't do anything about it for six months, it's fine. You can still handle it. But if you're in a fast growing business and you don't handle those things, it can really get you in trouble down the line. And especially raising a next round can be quite tricky because you don't have certain things in place. So I focus exactly on that scaling stage from about a hundred to 500 employees. It's a, I would say usually about two to four years that they scale to that size and then help them navigate all of the challenges and just be a little bit. It's like organizing it instead of leaving it messy for their ability to scale. Yes. Yeah. So most of them already scale. I'm not going in because they have trouble scaling. They scale fast and they are usually in the 10 to a hundred million revenue range and just starting to put together the executive team or sometimes they already have it and they need to just focus on building a really strong and high performing executive team. Sometimes it is around the whole strategic planning piece and how can we formalize and structure things internally and have this planning rhythm and give clarity across the whole business. So everybody knows where we're going and everybody holds in the same direction, but I don't help them to scale if they have trouble scaling. So do you Katie partner with venture capital firms or private equity firms? Yes. So it's more of an informal relationship usually, but it obviously makes a lot of sense for them to give support to their founders. Oftentimes it's an introduction and they suggest it after a fundraiser. So it doesn't have to be a struggling business or a struggling CEO. It's usually more of a milestone. I find it actually very different in, let's say a Silicon Valley in New York and in London, because in London people still see it a little bit more of a somebody's struggling with the leadership or somebody's struggling as a CEO. Let's bring in somebody to help him or help her. Where in Silicon Valley or in New York, it's more of a badge of honor almost where once you can afford a coach and once you bring in a coach, that means that your business is in a certain place, almost like raising a round of capital. So it's interesting how it's different between the two. That's good. The reason why I ask is in my role, I fell into becoming a connector. So if you want me to introduce you to some venture capital or private equity firms to help them out and they can work together, I can do that. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. No problem. What kind of qualities you have seen or observed from exceptional CEOs that kind of set them apart and you notice it, you pick that up when you meet them, when you deal with them, when you work with them, can you share some of those? Yeah, absolutely. There is a massive difference between different CEOs, I would say. Yeah. And all I do is around CEO excellence. If I would have to summarize everything I do, it's around becoming an exceptional CEO. And I think the first thing I notice is when I speak with the rest of the team, how they talk about the CEO and how engaged they are and how seen they feel and how they just feel empowered and feel like I'm part of something amazing. And I would not want to let go of this job because this person is leading me. Or it's the influence that they have on their team. And that goes beyond the executive team. That's in the VP level, in the director level and middle management and across the entire business where you can just feel that there is loyalty and commitment to the CEO, I would say the confidence that the board has, that the investors have in the CEO, where they just feel like this person, he's got it. Usually it's a he in the tech industry. And obviously the performance of the business, they are just insanely capable. And the moment you put a CEO, I just spoke to a friend of mine yesterday and they put him in and within a few months, the business just accelerated so much and it's okay. You're a great CEO and the board loves him. And so there's definitely some of my clients and friends where I can tell that they just mastered the art of being a CEO. Others, they have the willingness and they want to learn and they want to become great. And those are usually the people who come to me and they say, I really want to master this role and I want to obviously build an amazing company that performs, but also an amazing company internally, which is things run smoothly and everybody's engaged. Everybody loves working here. And I have a team that's committed to me. And so they fill these gaps. And then obviously there's a bunch of CEOs who don't really care. And some of them are lucky enough that they have an amazing product in the market or they have great investment. And so the company just performs very well, but it doesn't mean that internally the business runs smoothly or that there is alignment within the business. So there's definitely lots of difference. That's wonderful. Katie, there's a lot of research on feelings when it comes to leadership, how they feel, how they are within, what are they feeling within about their role, about their product, about their company, about their team, about overall life. Is that something that you help CEOs with that you find might be on the more frustrated side or they get cornered very easily, for example, the belief system within of what they're capable of doing and how they can manage that role? Yeah, great question. Actually, I really liked that question because lots of the CEO stuff I do is very tactical and it's very much, there's frameworks and tools to it. And then there's the mindset side. There's an amazing tool I was trained in. It's called the ELI Assessment Energy Index Leadership Assessment. And it basically takes a snapshot of your mindset. Basically it shows you which levels you're in and it's usually a combination of all of them, but you're between the victim mentality of blaming others, being super rational, being very caring and supporting others, being an opportunist, just looking really at the win-win scenarios and then more of the spiritual levels that are, we all know we don't play and you just have a little bit more of a conscious point of view, you can see how people who are in the higher levels, who look at life from a win-win perspective, who look at the challenges as opportunities, who feel like everything they do is interconnected. We are all interconnected. Most people usually perform better in life. So I would say as a CEO, understanding how your mindset shapes your reality and also influences people around you is super important. It's basically conscious leadership, right? Where you just know how to show up and speak and how to lead yourself, not only your people, but lead yourself to a great outcome and be super proactive about it. And think in a certain way, it's a massive piece of success. I feel like most company building and most of business is really a personal development journey, right? Building a company, putting a product out there, having a market. That's one thing. But who you become in the process, it's a very, very spiritual and very much a personal development journey, I would say. Yeah, definitely. It changes the dynamics of doing business when you start feeling oneness with everything, then when you become a lot more understanding and guiding them in a different kind of way, it changes the quality of the energy of the company. So anybody coming in and out of the company, not just the staffing side, but the customer side, they sense that, you know, there's just even words they sense it, even the call center, they sense it, everything. The dynamics of the executive team, I don't have any evidence on this, but just from my personal experience, the dynamics and the performance of the executive team are definitely in correlation to the performance of the business. If the exec team has a weird dynamic, people blame each other, there's constant turnover, people are constantly leaving, there was no trust, people blame each other, et cetera, you're really not going anywhere as a business. It's really hard to then get everybody pulling into the same direction. And that is, there is an amazing book, it's called The Advantage. It's all about organizational health and the dynamics of the executive team. And actually, I think there was evidence that there was a direct correlation. Great points you just shared. I feel that by having personal development as a primary focus for the individual within just developing themselves, the work that they do, the actions they take, the efforts they make, the ideas they implement, you'll see the more conscious companies, their quality is just different. There's something about it, right? So it's super important. I'm grateful to hear that that is a focus of what you do, because there's a lot of companies that are still struggling with this and it's surprising, but there are a lot of pointing the finger and me mentality. But it's shifting, especially since COVID. In which direction? Towards the mindset work, the internal work is creating that foundation. People are becoming like, Hey, wait a minute. The outside is always changing. It's a roller coaster. Let me make the inner stronger. Especially in the leadership team. It's all about compromise. It's all about, can you help me with this? Can you fill in here? The we mentality. It's the we mentality. If we don't have that because there was no trust, everybody looks out for themselves. You're not really going anywhere. It's no, it's just, it's just a family driving with the brakes on. It's yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Driving with the brakes on. That's right. So can you share some of the common challenges CEOs face when they're scaling their organization and how you help them overcome those challenges? Yeah, of course. I would say over the years, I found three components that I usually work on and everybody's a little bit different. And usually I always have an intake form in the beginning. And we look at all of the areas and we say, okay, where are the gaps at the moment? What do we want to focus the next three to six months? Let's say, and usually they pick from those different components. They pick different topics and then we work through those. And then three months later, again, we look, okay, what do we need to focus on now? And actually as the business doubles and if you get as your headcount doubles, you probably have to revisit many of these areas again, because they need to be built out and need to be a little bit more sophisticated because a business with a hundred people, a business with 600 people has a little bit of a different need in terms of processes. But I usually, the three components are CEO coaching, which is their leadership. It is the conscious leadership and their executive presence and also coaching leadership. There's a lot of coaching tools I usually share with them as well. So they can coach their team and become a facilitator to the executive team. There's their performance. So that's the CEO responsibilities, their productivity, self-awareness. And that's what we just talked about as well. How do I become really productive as a person? And the mindset is one of those factors and their personal brand, thought leadership, their purpose and impact and networking. I think networking is so crucial when it comes to strategic partnerships, fundraising, even if you're not actually fundraising, just to always keep that network. So that's mostly focused on the individual CEO. So I would do one-on-one sessions with them. Usually every other week we have an hour or 90 minutes and go through different topics that they are currently working on. But then there is the business coaching aspect and that's usually involving the rest of the executive team. So we have the strategic planning where we just create clarity and alignment on the long-term and the mid-term strategy and implement OKRs, which is objectives and key results and get the KPIs and everything in place and have clarity on responsibilities and roles on the executive team. Do the execution planning, standardize all of that across all departments, have a meeting rhythm, have all of the same meeting agenda. So we just know that the rest of the team does it in a very similar way and you have a standardized way of doing things and the whole accountability, like monthly tracking accountability, also fundraising falls under the business piece because you just have the investor relations that need to be nourished and fundraising strategy, et cetera. And then the third component is people and culture. And that's all about scaling people and the executive team, making them perform well, also developing your C-levels as individuals, so the leadership development, lots of these assessments I do with them and just depending on wherever they want to develop, just helping them level up as well, because then obviously the whole exec levels up. On the culture piece, I would say lots of people want to implement values and want to operationalize them so you can really scale culture beyond the two or three hundred people and hire well and onboard well and just have all of that set up. And also the performance management, I would say it's, it becomes a big topic because you want to obviously promote and fire and hire based on performance and also based on values and based on the culture you want to build. So there needs to be this constant feedback loop such as, oh, once a year we give a performance review and then you get your bonus or you don't, but it has to be this continuous feedback culture where people know where they stand. And I would say the last part on the people and culture piece is the board and it comes up quite a bit because boards can be quite dysfunctional and to just set a strong foundation for the board to set almost like a standard for them. And have productive meetings, which is not very common, have really good dynamics on the board and create these strong one-on-one relationships as well with each one of the non-execs. And I would say that kind of sums it up, but there's obviously other things that happen on a daily basis, but I have to go, let's say hire a certain C-level and then I go through the interview process with them, or they have to sometimes lay some of the, some of the company off and just navigating through those conversations. It comes up quite a bit as well. Understandable. Can you share some practical strategies for building a more healthy and aligned company so they're able to scale and making sure that everyone is on board with the same goals? Yeah, so that would be the OKR piece and the strategic planning piece. So usually with my clients, we would meet on a quarterly basis, either for a day or half day, or even once a year, twice a two days or three days, and the exec team comes together and we do, we revise the core strategy, the mission, the vision, the values, we look at the longer term, at the midterm, and then at the annual key KPIs, which is basically the milestones and goals, and then setting the OKRs in alignment with that. And I feel like many companies have that bigger picture figured out. Some of them don't, but let's say they have their bigger picture figured out. And then within the departments, people prioritize, depending on whatever their manager says, but you have this whole middle piece missing. And lots of the strategic planning is really about how can we connect the long-term with the short-term and have some kind of midterm where people don't just look at their team or their manager or what do I have to do next week or next month, but, okay, where's the company going this year and how do I align my decisions today and my priorities today with where we want to be in one year. And to simplify that and put it into very simple and understandable language for everybody, not just when an executive team, keep it very complicated and complex and super sophisticated when nobody really understands, it would seem like a no-brainer, but I feel like that is not feel like that was something that many people come to me for work and they just want to have that very practical strategic planning on the department level and on the midterm for the company. And they want to figure that out and just make it a recurring meeting and a recurring conversation. It's not something that usually gets prioritized because you can always do it next week. You cannot respond to the client's email next week. You have to do it today. So it's always this important versus urgent, but there is some things where I pretty much manage that whole process, the whole strategic planning and execution planning, and I always tell them, okay, a couple of weeks before, this is what you have to send in for prep. This is what EA has to do. This is when we come together. So they don't really have to worry about it because it is something that's not necessarily top of mind, but it is crucial for the rest of the business. It's crucial, yeah. And especially for people who are a little bit more removed from management, because sure, you see it in your one-on-one with the CEO. If you're the head of a certain department, you know what's going on. But two levels down, they don't have those conversations. They don't sit in those conversations. And so there is definitely a disconnect. It's almost like the exec team is a little bit of a black box. We don't really know what's going on, but I'm sure they have it figured out. But it's actually not the case. That's great, Katie. Thank you so much for sharing all that information because it provides clarity. Obviously, you need to go in there and just look at all the details. It's unique for each company, each situation, but it gives a nice foundation for audience. I appreciate you very much. Can you share with us what you feel your innermost superpower is that got you to this point in life? Great question. I would say I never doubted it. I don't know. I just set myself a goal and then I just get there. I'm not really a person who would skip the gym ever or something. It's, I just say, I'm going to do it and I execute it. I'm very German. That's a really good quality. I'm German. People spend a lot of time to become determined, to become persistent and to keep that word with themselves. We're very honest overall. But when it comes to ourselves, we make deals and then having that determination is super important in business because once you get in the habit of saying tomorrow, that just becomes a paradigm. Absolutely. But I think it's important, even though you're determined, you want to have fun along the way. Like I never wanted to sacrifice that. And even though I've been building up business for the past seven, eight years, I traveling a lot, I've been just trying to enjoy the ride. And I think that's super crucial. I don't want to look back and be sad about how I spent the last decade and not, not really having made the most out of life. It's very important to have that balance, to even work. If you make work fun, it doesn't seem like work anymore, but you just got to fall in love with the journey, waking up in the morning, taking those breaths, taking those steps, meeting other people. You just kind of fall in love with all the energy all around. When you do that, it doesn't matter what you're doing. You find that fulfillment in it. It's true. Yeah, it's wonderful work, but it didn't feel like work at all. Now, when you're in the routine, sometimes you're like, yeah, okay. Maybe I would take a week off, but I just have to remind myself that I'm incredibly lucky and to be able to do this work and it's amazing. Wonderful. Katie, it was a pleasure having you on the show. I appreciate your time and I appreciate you sharing all the wisdom and thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure audience. Thank you once again for joining us with Katie. If you're a CEO, you're running a company, it never, ever hurts to get that a professional, get someone that is pretty much focused their life in helping another person in a specific area, the information that you gathered today. If you find that it could help you don't hold back, just see, maybe there's an area where you benefit because whatever we invest, there is an ROI if you're investing in the right place. So definitely anybody comes on our shore, our top entrepreneurs, top enterprises, organizations that are out there helping each other and helping themselves grow. It's wonderful to have these guys on our show and appreciate them very much. And also I appreciate you guys for being part of this show, helping us grow. If you ever have any recommendations for any specific guests that you want to see on our show, let us know as well.