Today, I'm connecting with Emily Robinson, General Manager of Operations at Kic. Emily's an incredible people and operations leader who is passionate about doing things differently. Her latest project is Kic, a fitness app quashing diet culture—founded by Laura Henshaw and Steph Claire Smith. In this episode, we explore her journey from corporate to startup land; leading inside a unicorn to a bootstrapped company with year-on-year growth. There were so many, but highlights include: Balancing anxiety and mental health around leadership and the techniques that have defined Emily. Scaling from employee #90 at Linktree to leading a 20-person people and culture team through rapid growth. Reshaping Kic's strategy from product-led to a community and content-led fitness empire. Why community-led brands will win and how to embed a community-first mindset into your company planning. How mentors and coaches can 10x your personal and career growth.
Emily's an incredible people and operations leader who is passionate about doing things differently. Her latest project is Kic, a fitness app quashing diet culture—founded by Laura Henshaw and Steph Claire Smith. In this episode, we explore her journey from corporate to startup land; leading inside a unicorn to a bootstrapped company with year-on-year growth. There were so many, but highlights include: Balancing anxiety and mental health around leadership and the techniques that have defined Emily. Scaling from employee #90 at Linktree to leading a 20-person people and culture team through rapid growth. Reshaping Kic's strategy from product-led to a community and content-led fitness empire. Why community-led brands will win and how to embed a community-first mindset into your company planning. How mentors and coaches can 10x your personal and career growth.
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Connecting with Emily Robinson, General Manager of Operations at Kic:
Laura: Emily, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
Emily: I am great, Laura, thank you so much for having me so excited to chat to you.
Laura: So let's start by taking us back to your early life. Where did you grow up and what moments or people shaped who you are today?
Emily: I grew up in Sydney I am the youngest of three children. I was really fortunate. I grew up in a really happy household and we were just encouraged to give everything a go. We were that household that was going to five different sports of a weekend with school and different activities. I was the youngest by five years so I was copying whatever my brother and sister were doing at the time and I think they were the people that shaped me. My two incredible parents, they own their own business. They work together , which was amazing to see. And I just remember going into my parents' office. I would go in after school, sleep under their desk while I waited for them to finish work and I think that's what gave me my work ethic and showed me what working towards your goals could be so I was really fortunate to see that. My sister is an incredible psychologist. She actually was in PR similar to you, at 27 made the jump, went back to uni. Started again. My brother , completely differently to me went down the science route and is now an ecologist and is also a general manager there too. We've all been super fortunate in that we strive really hard to achieve what we have and I look at them as my absolute inspirations and role models from when I was younger
Laura: Out of interest, what was your parents business?
Emily: My dad is a project manager in construction and my mom is his accountant. He's English. My mum's Maltese. So I'm actually first-gen Australian, which is incredible, I've got three passports. Dad moved here when he was 21 as a quantity surveyor and he still does it to this day. Absolutely loves it.
Laura: How did these early experiences influence the way that you approach challenges now?
Emily: I think because watching my parents run their own business, they really didn't have any one else to lean on, but themselves. They're both from lower to middle-class backgrounds. They didn't have a lot of money when they started. so watching them and the resilience that it took to start a business. To see the highest of highs, but also the lowest of lows.
Dad's business depends on bringing in clients and sometimes those clients fall off, particularly in the construction industry. And so watching them navigate those challenges whilst also being so supportive of everything that we wanted to do, I think really shaped how I approach challenges. I always go in eyes wide open knowing that 365 different things could happen in that one project.
I think that's one of my key skills that I've inherited from him. To be a good project manager, you have to look at everything from different perspectives. You have to look at it from your own, from your clients, from the person that's walking down the halls perspective of how is this going to impact them. And you have to know that it's never going to end how you intended. That is exciting in a way. You know that always the start up analogy of build the plane as you fly it. How exciting is that you never know where it's going to go.
Laura: To pull on that thread, so you said you've inherited your project management skill from your dad, when you were young, what did success look like to you? Did you imagine yourself in the people role or was your vision entirely different?
Emily: It was so different. So when I was younger, I was super creative. I was quite a good dancer, but I wasn't good at art or anything like that. I just loved drama and singing and being creative and then I got into school and shaped my academics a little bit more.
I was a super perfectionistic child and so I always wanted to do better and better and better. And. I ended up doing pretty well at school and speaking to the careers counselor and she was like I actually think he'd be a really good nurse. And so I actually started a degree in nursing at UTS. Absolutely loved it. I did a year and then what I realized was I probably couldn't get out of my own way as a nurse. I was so caught up in the people and their stories and it was so emotional and I give so much credit to nurses to be able to do that day in and day out. I just thought it's probably not gonna be for me longterm so after a year, I said to my parents, I drop out of uni and do something else and they said, okay, you have to work full time if you're going to do that. And so I did, and I went in as a receptionist and what I really saw through being a receptionist is the power of making someone's work experience the best that it can be and providing the structure around that.
And I had a few close friends that was starting in HR and so I thought. May as well give that a go, but to give myself options, I ended up doing a commerce degree at UNSW. Just so I could see what the whole business landscape was. That was my random path into HR, but yeah, no, definitely didn't grow up thinking I was going to be HR leader that's for sure.
Laura: It's so interesting, the emotions and the empathy that comes of being a nurse, but then you've pivoted to being a people leader, which surely comes with some of that feeling as well.
Emily: A hundred percent. You have to have empathy to be a people leader, whether that's in people and culture, whether that's just a people leader in general, you have to know how what you're going to implement or what you're going to say is going to impact that person. I think it plays pivotal role, but you're not dealing with life and death. At the end of the day. I can go home and what I do is not going to change the world. It's going to change someone's experience and so I hope that I can do that for the positive. That was the good line that I drew between nursing and people and culture.
Laura: So from there, your career has taken you from corporate to people and culture at Linktree to becoming the general manager of operations at Kic. What moments led you into the startup world?
Emily: To be honest, I actually got into the startup world by a complete fluke. So I was working at a corporate law firm as HR business partner. I led their well being process through COVID as well as an office move, which was super fun, but I got to the point where I really wanted to do creative things with people.
I saw the potential in what a people and culture function could do and as much as I learned a lot in my time at corporate, I realized that those big companies, things move a lot slower and your impact that you have as one individual isn't as large, particularly as I was in that middle management piece.
When I was looking for my next role, I was really looking for something fast paced in a smaller team where I could make an impact. The role for Linktree came up and I went through the application process. I met Isa Notermans, who became my boss. From the minute that I spoke to her, and she's an incredible, incredible people leader, but from the moment I spoke to her, I saw that passion for wanting to do things differently.
Through that process, I met with Anth the co-founder of Linktree, and he really mirrored that, and so I was like, I think I've found my home. I was fortunate enough to get the role and that's how I started in startups and I don't think I would ever want to leave it now. I'm really the sucker for punishment that is startups, but I absolutely thrive in it.
Laura: I love it. The unexpected transition. You had multiple roles at Linktree. Do you want to talk through your time there?
Emily: My time at Linktree was incredible and was an absolute whirlwind., so I started as the People and Culture (P&C) manager, as I mentioned, it was myself and Isa in P&C bucket and then we had an incredible talent function as well. That was a huge function of Linktree, given how much we scaled. I started as employee 90. Within six months of being there, we were at employee 300, so it was incredible growth.
I started out at our series B and then work through to the series C raise, which is where we became a unicorn. In the space of six months at Linktree, the entire landscape of the whole business shifted from grow at all costs to being really intentional and starting to put those more sophisticated frameworks into place that you start to see as the business matures, which is awesome. After six months, Isa departed the business, and we then had an incredible person, Jane Martino, who I still work with today stepped in as the interim head of P&C. She really honed my skills in operations and really started to get me to think bigger than just my role. I really enjoyed the business partnering component, but I'd never thought bigger. How do you scale people operations? How do you make an onboarding program that's going to work for 50 people and then how is it going to work for 300 plus and globally as well. She really started to get me thinking there and after eight months with her, she said to me, , I've got to step into marketing, I think you're ready to take on the team.
She is a true operator. And so she was just put where we needed her to be and at that point, the people team was a team of 20. That was a huge jump for me to just dive in the deep end and in the experience what it would be like to lead a people and culture team. So I became the senior director of people and culture. I reported into our president at the time, who was awesome and he was a great operator as well. I had so many great mentors around me as well as amazing coaches, that really helped me hone my skills. And yeah, I ended up leading a function, which is incredible.
Laura: The power of stories when somebody has a sponsor in the business, it's just so incredible to see that growth.
Emily: A hundred percent. I will always say to everyone that asks me, like, how did you get to this point? I will forever credit my mentors from when I was a P&C intern up in Sydney and a real estate agent, you had an incredible manager belinda Carter and Sarah Martinya. And then I moved into ted law family, where I had incredible managers and then Isa and Janey absolutely shaped who I am as an operator now and who I was as a people leader back then. I will forever credit those people for getting me to this point.
I just don't think you can make it without someone, and particularly a female in that leadership space really paving the way for you. So I was lucky enough to latch on but they pulled me through.
Laura: Looking back now what are the lessons that you learned during that transition from growth from Series B to Series C?
Emily: I think the biggest one is, start with the why. I feel like such a token P&C leader when I quote Simon Sinek, but it is so true because as soon as you start adding more people into a business. They are going to look for a north star of where is this business going. Why is it going there. What do I need to do to help it get to that point? And so I think you're running so fast in startup and at a series B level, you've probably figured out what the product is and what its value is otherwise you wouldn't have raised. But you might not have figured out exactly how to get there and exactly how to help the team to get to that point. When it gets to series c and Series D and Series E and as you're starting to mature as a business, you're starting to bring in more senior leaders at that point as well, depending on what business you have, and so making sure that before you do that, and before you bring in 300 people within the space of six months, having a really clear roadmap of how you're going to get to where you need to be, I think was the biggest learning for us so that we weren't chasing our tails or working inefficiently or having to do things three times just to get it to the point we wanted it to be. I think that was the biggest learning for us, for sure.
Laura: What would you say was the one or two operator skills that you really developed during that time that you still hold to really high regard today?
Emily: Thinking 20 steps ahead. If you're working with a team that's used to working fast and there's a lot of hands on a project. You need to be able to set the direction for them to work really effectively and then think five steps ahead about where is that going to land and what do they need to be doing next?
And what do I need to be doing as a leader to prepare for them to hit that stage. For me, it was really about thinking. Okay. Here's the end goal. Hand that off to the team. What's the next goal? What's the next goal? What's next? And always making sure that the team knew what the next steps were. And then I was really clear so that I could articulate that as clearly and concisely as I could. The second part of that, and it's maybe not so much an operating tool, but I think it's just a leadership tool in general was being completely transparent with the team no matter where I was at. Being super honest of going, Hey, I actually haven't figured that out. Can we do a brainstorm and let's figure this out together and getting that diversity of thought in really collaborating well together to be able to produce something that wasn't just in my mind, but something that really came from the team, not only enabled them to be aligned and buy-in to that project from the get-go, but it also meant that it wasn't just on my shoulders. Being really transparent with where I was at, where the project was at, where the business was at, enabled the team to take so much more ownership. That's something that I absolutely live and breathe by as an operator today.
Laura: So from Linktree to Kic, is there a story there that you want to tell us about?
Emily: I was with Linktree for just under two years, it was an incredible journey, went through some amazing highs and we saw some lows, with the tech downturn as well. As you know, being in a startup is a roller coaster and what I didn't do, which I appreciate now in hindsight, is I didn't look after my mental health. While I was at Linktree, I was so focused on: do more and achieve more.
And got to the point where I had burnt myself out and it was completely on myself. I didn't look after my mental health and I wasn't exercising. And soI had a conversation with Alex and I built a really nice relationship with him at that point where I could just be completely honest, Alex is the CEO of Linktree I just said to him, I'm done. I don't think I can give this role what it truly deserves anymore and so I chose to step away from Linktree, which was probably one of the hardest decisions of my life. And I really went back and forth on it for a long time. It's a really amazing place to work. And so I actually stepped into consulting for six months.
I just sorta thought, I don't want to be personally in charge of one business anymore. I want to be able to just see what other businesses are doing and just take a little breather and the team at We Are Charlotte gave me that opportunity, and I'm so grateful to them for that.
And so stepped in there as a people consultant, worked with a bunch of different businesses. What I got from that business, more so than the people leadership side was an understanding of how a business runs. Jess, the CEO, said, here's the books, here's how we work, here is how we make sure our team are utilized so that they're not at capacity, but equally that the business is making money and it really stirred something within me that I hadn't seen before and I was thinking, oh, I think we can work a lot more efficiently. I think we can make bigger margins here. I think we can cut down here. And I was like, who is this person that I have created within myself and it really led me into operations. I was having conversation with Janey, who I mentioned before who stayed a very close mentor and friend of mine and said, I think I'm really starting to get interested in ops.
And she said, funny, you say that. We are now looking for a GM of operations at Kic, would you be interested? And I said, say no more. Sign me up. I met Steph and Laura, met the team and I was, you know, drawn into this beautiful business that we call Kic and absolutely loving it.
Laura: I'm so happy for you and thank you so much for sharing so vulnerably. I think it's really important. And anyone that's been through burnout, it's really a struggle to try and push your way through. You do just need to stop. I think the smile on your face, not that our listeners can see your smile, but the smile on your face says it all. How do you feel about where you've landed in your career now and at Kic?
Emily: I feel so fortunate to be where I am. I just feel it's an absolute privilege to have had the career journey that I've had. As I talked through the mentors that I've had, the speed at which I've been able to grow. I am just so fortunate and now to be in an environment that pairs my passionate health and wellness alongside an incredible team culture. I feel like I've hit the jackpot and know Laura did not pay me to say that it does sound like that.
Laura: So for anyone that doesn't know Kic, what is Kic?
Emily: Kic is a health and wellness app, and our mission is to change the relationship that people have with wellness in themselves. Our main form of content is our movement. So you can come in and work out, but there's also meals and mindset. So we have affirmations, meditation, sleep series and we have some incredible meals, but the thing that is really different about Kic, which I attached to straight away is that we don't promote anything to do with toxic diet culture.
So when you come into the app, you're not asked for your weight. You're not ask the before and afters, you don't know how many calories you've burned and there aren't any macros on the recipes and that is for the sole purpose to create that really beautiful environment to build confidence for peoples that are experienced to health and wellness journey, without the judgment that society puts on how you look, it's all about how you'd feel you as an individual. So that's all it is. And it's amazing.
Laura: Let's start diving into your role as GM of operations. Can you walk us through a specific day that encapsulates the highs and lows of your role?
Emily: I can. It's funny to think about what my role is and when people ask me what I do and I always steal a line from Michael Stocks, he used to be the VP of strategy and ops at Linktree, he's now at Squarespace. But he used to just call himself " generic business human". And that's what I feel like I am every day could be so different. For example, I'll talk you through one of my days last week.
I am in the process of planning our 2025 strategy. I did all the research that and created the deck to present back to our executive team. I then presented to our leadership team on a really exciting new strategy that we're just about to launch. I sat in on a retro for our last campaign that we ran and just gave some thoughts and ideas to the team. I inducted a new starter, incredible new senior product manager and organized some snacks for the end of the day the team to just come around and hang.
I think that's what makes me smile about the role, because if I'm stuck with strategic planning, I can go and grab some snacks to the team, go for a walk and bring the team together. Or I can go and sit in on a different squad meeting and talk about how they're working and ways of working.
So I can be super operational or super strategic or super people focused. It depends on the day.
Laura: I appreciate the snacks at the end. In your time at Kic, you've seen the company grow 100 percent year over year. Can you share a story that captures a moment in Kic's journey and your role in navigating it?
Emily: Very vividly and it's because they're about to do the same thing again. I started in October last year. As part of that. I went and spoke to the entire team and really worked out, what do you think drives Kic? Why are you here? What can we be doing to improve? Janey, who is the advisor for Kic, as I mentioned before, she also did the same thing. When we started Kic, was very much product led and it was very much about what features can we add into the app? very much followed that methodology.
And when Janey and I were looking at the figures, we both said, I don't think this is a product led business. I think it's a community and content led business so how do we reshape our strategy to align to that?
And we had strategy session with Steph and Laura and we presented on this concept of community and content led and what that could look like and who our competitors were, who was doing it amazingly in this space and Steph and Laura looked at each other and they said, yes, this is what we used to do.
And this is how we could see it growing. And from there, we brainstormed all the amazing things that we could do in alignment with that new strategy. We packaged it all together. We then presented it off to the team, they roadmapped, and we have had the most incredible year based on the fact that we just went back to why Kic was created in the first place, which was to foster that community environment through the creation of really incredible content.
And so back to basics, bringing it back to their vision and mission of the business and we were able to turn it around, which was incredible.
Laura: At a really tactical level, how do you move from being a product led business to a content and community led business? Is there process that you had to go through to get to that outcome?
Emily: It was probably a really good learning for me in that we ended up creating cross-functional squads through doing that. The reason for that is that our teams weren't necessarily talking to each other and so we've wanted to force a mechanism where they would really deeply understand what each other we're doing and the value, the incredible value that each of the functions had. And so we created that we had the overall strategy we then got them to roadmap. We then approved it. And then the team started working. We have two really great leaders in that space. We had a product leader and we had our creative director was leading the content squad. I think through that, cross-functional way of working, it enabled the team to switch their mindset as to the value of both squads. The team started working really well together to the point where after the first quarter of doing that, we actually went back to functional squads with cross-functional projects, because the team really had built that empathy and that respect for the function that we didn't need to force it anymore.
Laura: And you recently shared about an incredible offsite experience. Was this story weaved into that delivery or how did that offsite experience shape those team dynamics too?
Emily: That was the second off-site we ran. The first offsite we ran was really about introducing the topic of what our strategy was, what our goals for the year were going to be, how we were going to work. Then the second offsite that we ran in the middle of the year was really about looking back at the first incredible six months that we'd had, celebrating that, calling each other out, opening up to each other about how we were feeling given we sprinted for six months. We were just about to launch a campaign in the middle of the year that was centered around feeling a bit "mid" and because we'd worked so closely together in the first six months, everyone was super open and vulnerable. And it created that really tight-knit empathy between the team, which was awesome.
And then we said, okay, well, this is what the next six months are gonna look like, and we brought in our community members to talk to their experience with Kic. Kic has a unique business in that you can so quickly see the impact that your work makes on the community and so being able to bring people in that experience Kic day-to-day to share those stories. I think it was a really feel-good moment for the team, as well as for the team to be able to ask some questions looking forward. How can they improve? You're hearing it straight from the source and so that was super impactful and then we really worked through the strategy with them. At the end, we had the CEO of Linktree, Alex speak to how he sees value in Kic and how he sees Kic becoming a player in the startup space and the things to focus on and what he'd learnt through growing the business.
And again, I think it just gave the team a really cool roadmap to see what we could do and the impact we could make for the business. It was an exciting day.
Laura: Yep, that sounds like master facilitation right there.
Emily: I learnt it from the best, your boss Maxine. Absolute Queen of facilitating offsites, and that's where I learned it from.
Laura: Amazing. I'm going to have to get her special hack. And interesting that you said that story about Alex given that he's scaled the business to Series C now. I'd love to make that a natural segway to talk about managing Kic as it scales. What strategies have you employed to ensure sustainable growth while staying true to Kic's values?
Emily: I think the first thing is always going back to our why and our mission and vision for the business, which as I said, is to change the relationships that people have with wellness in themselves. That is our north star that will always be the core of what we do. And so for us, scaling is not so much about our head count.
We are super intentional with the amount of people that we bring into the business because we're bootstrapped. And so we do it very intentionally, we do it well, we know there's going to be a significant return. And so for us, in terms of scaling the business, we look at the growth of our community and our subscribers, and what's going to bring the best return, and to be honest, we know that that growth comes from being who we are and having that unique voice. We're one of the only voices within the health and wellness fitness app space that has this voice. It's being able to leverage that through our storytelling, through our brand and through an incredible product experience to be able to scale.
And we've seen, I think 20% year on year growth just in June alone. That was just because we had a really authentic mid-year campaign where we said, we know everyone's feeling a bit meh at the moment so let's leverage that and do five minutes a day. It's actually pushing heavier on to our mission is what is going to see us grow.
Laura: An interesting point in terms of bootstrapping, how does bootstrapping play a role in your decision making? Because it'd be very different if it was a venture backed business, especially in balancing the resource constraints with those ambitious goals.
Emily: I've company that had just raised 110 million and worked for a company hasn't raised anything and it's really different in your decision making. You can make super quick decisions in a venture backed company for the most part, because you have the capital to see, if it doesn't work, that's okay we've got the capital to spend. What it doesn't do is it doesn't force creativity because you just keep going at the same thing or leveraging agencies or contractors to bring in knowledge. And so what we've seen with our decision-making with Kic and being bootstrapped is that we're really intentional with our bets. We still make strategic bets, but it is something that we do a lot of research, and we're pretty confident that we're going to see that payoff. Because we're bootstrapped, we've seen such an incredible amount of creativity come out from the team.
We allow them to manage their own budgets. I don't get too involved unless I see it start to tick up, but what we started to see is they'll go, Hey, I actually think we can reinvest this money in this way. We're going to reduce our spend here, but we're going to increase it here and this is what the return is. It really forces everyone in Kic to think super commercially. And they think like an owner of the business.
Decisions start to get made a lot quicker in that way, because they know what our bottom line is. They know they're going to go "no, that's not going to cut it, we're not going to go with that". Or look at this research. I've got so much conviction that this is going to push the business forward. And here's why. It really pushes that critical thinking that creativity, and so, I've loved being bootstrapped.
Laura: That's such a powerful bottoms up example.Let's dive a little deeper into who you are as an operator, if you had to describe that in one sentence, what would you say?
Emily: I am an impatient problem solver. I am always thinking of once the problem solved, what's the next big thing that I have to tackle and how am I going to do it? As I said, I think about five steps ahead. Right now I'm thinking about seven months ahead in terms of where is our strategy going to go and how are we going to replicate this kind of growth again, and I just want to get to the answer. I want to work my way through it.
Laura: In your inpatient problem solver persona what would you say are your most valuable skills?
Emily: I would say I am extremely solutions focused, which our product team die over because they like to sit in the problem, really dig deep and I liked to go, okay, that's the problem. How are we going to fix it? And how are we going to move forward? And what's going to make the biggest impact. I would definitely say problem-solving is my thing.
But also I've connected really, really well with Laura and Steph, and so I know implicitly what they're going to say about a project that's being rolled out. Because I have that thought process, I'm able to dive in with a team early and to go, okay, here's the feedback. I think we need to fix this, this and this. So that when it gets presented back to Steph and Laura, they only have to tick it off. I really learned that from being a people leader and I'd say that's a secret skill I have.
Laura: When I spoke to Laura Henshaw before this call, she did say , your solutions based mindset is your genius zone and the fact that you just make it so easy for them to get across context and make decisions. So, go you.
Emily: Ahh, thanks. Laura.
Laura: It's a feel good for the day. How would you say some of these skills play into your sense of purpose?
Emily: I have always been someone that puts a lot of purpose on what I do for work, and I've actually started to try and separate myself from that because when things don't go well, then you automatically don't feel amazing. I think that's what I learnt the most from departing Linktree is I am not my work. Again, I feel like I'm obsessed with janey. I mentioned her all the time. She's now my coach. She's incredible coach and what we started to work on was you need to find that sense of purpose outside of who you are as an operator, because you can't tie yourself to a business. Things happen, things go up, things go down and you can't follow that same rollercoaster because you're going to end up where you were at the end of Linktree which is burnt out. For me, it's about understanding what are my personal values, which, it's a lot about belonging and my family and feeling like I'm at my best every day and just generally finding the joy day-to-day. I've been able to find that purpose from outside of work, which gives me a whole new perspective operating in Kic because I don't sweat the small stuff.
If things drop, I don't drop with those things. That helps that solution orientated mindset, because I can stay that even keel to be able to deal with things as, and when they come up. You need to be able to do that as a leader because the team are looking to you particulary in those times of chaos as that stable pillow to go: okay. Cool. Here's the plan. You need to be able to think clearly in chaos and having my purpose outside of what I do has been really powerful.
Laura: I'm really proud of you for that. That's amazing. What has Janey advised, in terms of like a small exercise that somebody could just do on a notepad and paper, what would you recommend just to help them get started?
Emily: There's a couple of books that I listened to that have been so powerful. So the first one is The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and those four agreements are be impeccable with your word, don't take things personally, don't make assumptions, and try your best. I think it really reshaped who I was as a person, because I started to realize that I was putting a lot of my own assumptions into anyone else's head that I was working with.
So I would present something and I'd automatically think, oh, they gonna think that I'm an idiot, or whatever. And what I started to realize through understanding, reading and listening to this book is that people have their own stuff going on. And it doesn't matter as long as you're impeccable with your word and you do what you say you're going to do. if you don't take those things personally, don't make those assumptions, and you try your best, you're always going to come out on top. That was a really incredible thing to listen to because it reframed a lot of my own thoughts. I'm quite an anxious person. There's a lot going on up here, and so for me, it just reframed. How I look at approaching those meetings or how I look at showing up at work.
The other one is You Can Heal Your Life, which is an incredible book. It was really, again, just about not taking my personal experience, who I was growing up and putting that into a work context. It's really about finding the value in yourself and building your own confidence as a person before you then go and lead a team.
It's that old analogy of put your oxygen mask on first, before someone else on a plane. If you don't look after who you are as a person and you don't show up for yourself, you can't show up for others or you can't show up in a business and you might be able to do it superficially, but it will come crashing down at some point. At the expense of yourself and it's your life.
Laura: They are both new recommendations , so I can't wait to get stuck in. And it's just having the ability to just quiet that noise.
Emily: It's so true. It's the hardest thing to do. Particularly, like me, if you have anxious or perfectionistic tendencies, where you're always like, I need to do better. I need to do better. I need to do better. You just can't show up when you've got a voice in your head that is that loud. I think what is worth knowing as I've alluded to a lot is: I do have quite a bit of anxiety. I'm a super anxious person in general and I've done a lot of work on that. What I've tried to really do is to use that to my strengths, rather than letting it stop me from doing things. . It's just a really good reminder to people that you can use your mental health issues as a real strength to keep going and to push forward rather than as a barrier.
Laura: So powerful. Thank you. Now we're going to look ahead. What trends do you think will shape the future of the Australian startup ecosystem? Maybe through a lens of what roles will become more crucial as it evolves.
Emily: AI is obviously going to be the biggest one. I think it just makes such a difference. Particularly as an operator in how you work and how efficiently you can work, how you connect, digest, research and information and metrics.
From a people leader perspective, I think it has changed the game of how HR practitioners work. We Are Charlotte, the consultancy I work for, Jess, the CEO that does this incredibly well. Her whole focus is how can we make this more efficient through the use of AI.
So things like position descriptions, learning and development, documents, making sure that plans are all updated. You can do that all in AI and I think it's incredible. We follow the 80 20 rule and let AI do 80% of it and then cast your human eye over it to make sure it actually makes sense and its personable.
Because of AI though, the other thing that's really gonna start to push is this community-led brand. Everyone's moved away from people telling them what to do that don't have any lived experience, and so I think brands that really cultivate their community to be able to send their message are going to do super well.
And particularly in the health and wellness space, we see community as being the thing that is growing the fastest so your run clubs are huge because they're a way for people to meet people, exercise, date, and they're absolutely blowing up. So I think the community led organizations are going to do, really well.
In terms of the roles That's grown massively as the chief of staff role. I think it was really niche to the US, and now we've started to see it come here. And I think if I looked on LinkedIn, there's so many chief of staff roles that are coming up right now because CEOs are starting to see the benefit of being able to focus on one area of the business and had someone else do the rest of it and think 10 times ahead so that they can sit in their genius zones and do what they were brought in to do.
So I see that role as being a really critical role.
I think the other thing that'll be really interesting is not necessarily a role, but it'll be how we work in the future. Particularly with the rise of Gen Z coming into the workforce. They want to work on a bunch of different things at once. Freelance or the gig economy is blowing up and I sort of stat in the UK, it'll be something like 60% of workforce will be freelance or gig in the next set of 10 to 20 years, and so it's going to be very interesting to see how that changes the landscape of how we work.
Laura: What are your goals for yourself personally and professionally?
Emily: I mean, I absolutely love Kic. I don't see myself really going anywhere else. I think I've found my home, and so for me, it's about what else can I be doing to essentially allow Laura to step out and do her own passion projects so I can support her in running the business. Being able to be the person that can plug into a business and change the way that people work and make it more effective so that the business is seeing results that to me is a job well done. As I said, I've done so many things with Kic that I've never done before, speaking to boards and speaking to CEOs of our major partners and just taking more in. I got married at the beginning of this year, which is super exciting. And so I probably at some stage being able to have a family, which is slightly terrifying when you tie that to a professional sense because they have so much ambition to continue to do more and grow, but I think you can absolutely do both.. I think that's where I'll see myself In the next couple of years, for sure.
Laura: So a topic for Janey: how can I remain ambitious and bring a little one into the world?
Emily: I'm not sure if you've listened to Laura's podcast about having kids, Janey actually featured on there. She has had three kids while running her own PR agency and is such a boss and her kids are incredible. So I think she's a perfect role model to follow there..
Laura: Naturally goes into my next question, which I'm assuming will be Janey. , "why am I so obsessed with her" I love it. Find a sponsor, stick to that sponsor. Who or what has served you as a guiding star in the industry and are there any specific tactics or frameworks that have influenced your growth or work?
Emily: Yeah, I think Janey's been that person because she's been able to take me out of my own head and help me realize that not everything is so serious and we can have fun while we grow a business. For her the biggest thing is. Why are you doing something? And is this going to be a return on investment for the business and on your time. And I've talked about this a lot today is that is what I always go back to is why am I doing something? And what is the benefit of this and does that benefit outweigh the time and effort and money that it's going to take to be able to do that? Not necessarily like super deep frameworks, but it's just asking those questions always. I think the other thing that Janey has really taught me is radical candor and being clear is kind and so being super upfront with where I think something's going to work and where I don't, but doing it in a really compassionate and empathetic way.
Laura: I really love that as a piece of advice because it's translatable to wherever you are at in your operator journey.
Emily: Yeah we don't ask that question enough in particularly as we start out if you're given a task where CEO, you do it and you do it quickly and you do it to the highest standard that you can. But unless you start to ask why you'll often repeat that task about three times, because it's never going to be right, and so that's what I find saves me a lot of time. You can say what's the end result and how do you think it's going to get us from point a to point B and talk me through that because I really want to present something back to you that is going to kill it and we can roll it out straight away and have the biggest impact for the business. I think a lot of leaders really respect that view.
Laura: This podcast is all about lifting other operators up so who in the Australian ecosystem do you believe is making a great impact and why?
Emily: Well, I think not to hashtag ad or plug, but I think Maxine is doing this so incredibly well. I think she is taking the investment landscape, particularly for females to a whole different level. You know, when I used to speak to her, she'd say, have you thought about angel investing and she's such an advocate for wringing females into the investment landscape. How she works. I've always been a massive admirer of Maxine's, particularly how she runs an offsite and how she coaches. It's incredible to be able to bring that level of empathy and care into what do you do every day. And the other one, which I was just so impressed with was actually after listening to this podcast was Mikayla The way that she has been able to build such an incredible brand for Tracksuit, to be able to scale not only in New Zealand and Australia, but globally at the level they have, and not actually needing the investment to do that, but taking it on and being able to leverage that to something so amazing and being such a challenger brand, I was just so impressed listening to her speak. I think she's doing an awesome job.
Laura: Both great females in the ecosystem. For context, that's Maxine Minter. She's actually my boss. She's general partner at Co Ventures, which is a pre seed VC fund, and also the founder of Co Lab, which is a service helping high growth founders find an executive coach. There's my plug.
Okay, so we're onto our last question, which I love to focus on mental wellness. However, we have discussed that a lot today, but being a people leader is quite demanding. So I'd love to know what advice you'd give to others in similar positions.
Emily: Making sure that you have a really safe space to be able to talk to someone, whether that's a coworker, whether that's a family member, whether that's a psychologist or a therapist. To be able to take what's in your head and what's on your heart outside. We deal with a lot of really heavy stuff. We're dealing with people in their lives and people bring their whole selves to work, which is incredible to be able to have that privilege to see people's whole selves. But it does weigh heavy sometimes. And the things that you have to do aren't always, the positive, bring snacks to work type things, so having a really safe space to be able to talk those things through and let it out at the end of the day in a healthy way is super important. I'm a massive advocate for mindfulness. I start most days with a mindfulness exercise. That's not for everyone. I used to hate it. Fair enough if that's not for you. The other thing too, is actually exercising so whether it's going for a walk, whether it's being outside and just taking a step away from their computer is super impactful. I have it in my diary to get up and go outside for 10 minutes and have a tea and just breathe. Because without that, if you are continuously going and going and going, as I said, you can't look after yourself, you can't look after the people in the business, and it does catch up with you. So finding those little things that are meaningful to you that make you feel good like you can just have a breather. Breather is super important.
Laura: Emily, thank you so much for being so raw, vulnerable, and honest today. I've absolutely loved this discussion.
Emily: Me too. Thank you so much for having me. It's been awesome.