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Andrew Bartlow is the Founder and Managing Partner of Series B Consulting, which advises PE and VC-backed organizations. He co-authored “Scaling for Success”, published by Columbia University Business School and teaches at some of the world’s leading educational institutions. Over his long in-house career, Andrew participated in over a dozen M&A transactions, IPOs, bankruptcies, and successful PE sponsor exits. He advised scores of C-level executives, supported employee populations of 5,000+, built numerous HR functions, and learned from the best while at Pepsi and GE. His last in-house role was as the head of HR for what is now Invitation Homes, which he helped take from a small private organization to a public company with market cap over $20B.

 

In this episode, Jason and Andrew discuss:

  • Scaling businesses through mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, and private equity exits
  • Effective people management strategies for high-growth companies
  • Pitfalls of blindly following trendy management practices
  • Four C's of leadership: clarity, consistency, communication, and consequences
  • Leveraging AI and technology while monitoring its workplace impact

Key Takeaways:

  • Fuel both personal and professional growth by embracing ambition, taking calculated risks, and gaining diverse experiences. Success is achieved by aligning personal fulfillment with career advancement.
  • Effective people management in rapidly growing businesses relies on mastering the leadership fundamentals four C’s—clarity, consistency, communication, and consequences—while avoiding one-size-fits-all management trends.
  • Experiment with emerging technologies like AI to boost workplace efficiency but remain mindful of their broader impact on work environments and industry structures.
  • Remote and hybrid work models are shifting demand toward larger homes and home offices, while decreasing the need for traditional commercial office spaces.
  • Upskill HR professionals and structure teams around clear goals and accountability to foster growth, productivity, and long-term success in an evolving business landscape.

“Success is meeting your goals or achieving or surpassing your goals. But to have success, you have to have a goal. You have to have some destination in mind. So, if you don't have a destination, if you don't have a goal, you cannot have success. So, you need to be able to chart your course. You need to be able to articulate what good looks like for you. If that's a certain revenue number, if that is delivering a certain number of shoes to the undeveloped world, whatever it is, have a goal, and that will be a very important first step on your road to success.”

 - Andrew Bartlow

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Andrew Bartlow- Clarity is the Magic Wand

Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. This is your host, Jason Abell, and I've got a guest today that when he popped up on my schedule, gosh, I think I say this every time, but it's just the truth, I got excited because of the industry that this guest serves and the value that he adds to people like you, our listener. So, today's guest is Andrew Bartlow. Andrew is the author of “Scaling for Success”, and he's also the managing founding partner of Series B Consulting. So, what the heck does that mean? Well, that means when it comes to subjects like mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, even bankruptcies, private equity exits, Andrew is the guy. He's the guy that you want to call. So, Andrew, welcome to the show.

Oh boy. Thanks a lot, Jason. I appreciate it.

Andrew, we've got a question. We're going to get into M and A's, we're going to get into your thoughts on leadership, we're going to get into different insights that you have, but the first question that we ask every guest is, as you and I engage one another this morning, I'm on the East Coast, you're on the West Coast, by the magic of technology, we're together. As we engage one another this morning, who or What are you especially grateful for?

Oh, my goodness. Well, this is timely, and hopefully we don't hear them in the background, but my mother is in town right now from Arizona, and she's with my two little girls, who are about to turn nine and 11, in the other room. So, I am grateful that that my mom is here spending some time with the grandkids.

That just sounds like you just painted a picture. That's wonderful. Well, let's have this conversation and get you back to hanging out with them. I just that's really great. Ah, amazing. You know, you are in an industry, Andrew, that by any measures is kind of wide ranging and complicated. And I looked at a lot of your background. I mean, you've got, you know, coaching certifications from Berkeley, you've got different organizations that you've been heavily involved from an HR standpoint, you and I share a similar industry as far as our background go, in mortgage and real estate. We even worked with some of the same companies, by the way, very, very wide ranging. I mean, take us back. Like, how does somebody go from, you know, wherever it was that you grew up as a kid to where you are now in the bay area of San Francisco, in the middle of, you know, the M&A and IPOs and that type of thing? Like, how does that how does that happen?

Oh, boy. Well, I think a lot of it's just following your nose. It wasn't the path of least resistance, not at all, but it was having some ambition and, you know, trying to do interesting work and be useful along the way. So, I grew up in East Peoria, Illinois, and there was never really a question whether I would end up there or not. You know, great place to be from, but not a lot of opportunity there. And yeah, the dead center of the Midwest and among the cornfields. So, I was looking for a great start to a professional career, and I just continued to look for the best company and the best job opportunity where I could grow my skills, and I think that's led me, you know, I know it's led me all over the country to a lot of different companies and a lot of different industry sectors, sizes and stages, from startup to, you know, Fortune 50, and now doing my own thing, you know, self employed as a as an advisor and consultant. I'm able to leverage the learnings from the school of hard knocks along the way. And so now I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I work with venture capital platforms and private equity investing platforms as well as some companies individually as well, but I get to do this whole smattering of stuff that is a collection of the learned experiences over the last three decades.

Well, so much so that you end it up, writing a book “Scaling for Success”, and I can see it in your in your background there. Well done, by the way, from a background standpoint.

No accidents, no accidents.

And we'll make sure that a link to the book is in the show notes. But tell us a little bit about the book. I mean, you know, as an author myself, I know on one hand, it seems like everybody has a book these days, but on the other hand, well, I've been through it. It's no easy task. And so, one, why did you write the book? And I always like to know, what's the what's the big idea of the book?

Well, I was at a pretty special, pretty unique point in my life, in my career, where I had pulled my parachute from being a C level executive at a public company that was market cap of over 20 billion, and the headquarters moved, and I wasn't moving. I was already commuting from the Bay Area to Scottsdale, Arizona, five days a week, and then headquarters moved to Dallas, and so it was just too much. So pulled the chute and had my equity vest and had a nice landing package and that gave me some flexibility. And so, I had a lot of introspection around, okay, well, what do I do with myself now, you know? At the time, I was early 40s, you don't retire in your early 40s, and, you know, I tried, and it didn't stick. My girls were really little at the time, and I was thinking about how to be useful. I was thinking about how can I draw on these experiences? And an awful lot of, you know, nose to the grindstone over decades, what could I do to be useful and relevant? And I hung my single shingle as a consultant and started my series-B consulting website, but I started this big project of writing a book and the book really came from a place of I think disappointment, which is a weird place to come from. So let me unpack that. I'll try to do it briefly.

Please.

Yeah, I'm an HR guy. I went to grad school for HR. My whole career has been in Human Resources at companies large and small, and in various facets of it, but most people, most business leaders, in fact, even most HR professionals, don't really understand what HR is and what it can be and how it can be valuable. And so, living and working out here in the San Francisco Bay area, with the tech boom and venture capital funding, and you see a lot happening in this Silicon Valley crucible, and I was just really disappointed at the people management practices of these high growth companies. I saw the ubiquitous foosball tables and the kombucha bars, and then people were working from home, and they were getting mail practices to their houses and like, is that really driving productivity? Is that really helping companies meet their goals? Like, what are we doing here? And so, the book came from a place of trying to help leaders, whether it's a business leader or a functional leader like me, understand what good looks like. This is what people management can be in a high growth I change environment, and so I tried to collect the best of experiences over my decades and learnings and provided in a hopefully pretty palatable way for people to understand that they could then apply at their company.

I know that there's a story or two in that book. Would you mind relating a story that, just as you and I are talking right now, that comes to mind that might be interesting for our audience to hear from the book?

One that pops to mind as we talk about it is, is that, you know, the bright, shiny objects, the progressive practices of the moment are usually the worst possible thing you could you could do. So, I used to dread Monday mornings when my CEO, founder would come into the office having been to some event with other founders, and he would have all these ideas and say, let's do them at our place. That's great that he's exposing himself to other ideas. But I found myself using a lot of political capital to try to talk him off the ledge. And one example in particular, I won't name the company and the and the HR leader or the CEO founder, but he had been to an event with Tony Shea from Zappos, and Zappos, at the time, was promoting holacracy, which was essentially self-managed work teams. And that's nothing new for those of us that have a background in manufacturing and industrial businesses, more self-directed work teams have been around for decades, but it was this idea of kind of a leaderless organization that decides what they're going to work on and what the metrics are, and no managers, and we're seeing some of that today with some tech companies. You hear about Nvidia's CEO founder with 60 direct reports, and he doesn't have one on ones and stuff like that. So yeah, like all these kinds of flashy ideas I collect in this basket of maybe it's great for that one company and that one leader, but it's probably not great for us. And so, you know, holacracy at Zappos kind of worked. It got debunked, but it only kind of work because they had 1000s of people that were co-located doing a very similar, easily measurable job. It was a call center in Vegas. They had 1000s of people that they empowered to treat customers really well and give refunds, you know, kind of no questions asked. And in a call center environment, you can track customer sat and refunds and call time and like all this very easily measurable stuff. And when my CEO founder wanted to bring this concept to our organization that was operating in the cloud with, we had construction superintendents and leasing agents and property managers that were spread out across 40 something markets across the United States, that we didn't have as many metrics, and it was lots of different types of jobs. It just didn't make sense. So that that's an example of kind of the flavor of the day, of management practices. You've really got to apply some critical thinking before bringing it to your work.

So, thank you for that. I'm smiling as you're talking about the story, because I remember when Zappos had a lot of headlines around the management style and all of that. I'm imagining the conversation between you and your CEO and how that all went. But if I were to go one level deeper on that, how does a leader of an organization figure out, disseminate, filter whatever word you want to use between the shiny object, because today man with technology, Andrew, and AI and different management styles, and, you know, we're all virtual and disseminated where five years ago, we weren't, you know, just all these different things and the rapidity with which things do change, and there's these shiny things, how does one, as a leader of an organization, figure out the difference between the shiny penny versus no, this is actually something we should take a look at and do. Like, I'm sure there's a variety of answers, but I'd love to have your take on the answer to that.

Yeah. You know that that feels like such a wonderful softball. Almost like we prepared it, but we didn't. Especially if you're at a growing business that's disrupting your product or service or industry, you should have a very high bar to create or advance some sort of new, progressive, disruptive management practice. So, you already have something new, different and challenging that you're trying to do with your product or service. Why triple complicate things, you know, layered risk by doing something unproven, new, hot, progressive in terms of how you manage people and organize your organization? This is much more of a settled science than LinkedIn or popular media would have you believe. So, a lot a lot of my work is bridging between academic foundations of management research, like what actually works, and it's kind of disappointing how few people know what actually works and what's been proven, even many of us with master's degrees and beyond. What actually works versus what can work in your situation. And so, building that bridge between the practical and the academic, I think there's some there's some good organizations that do that, some good advisories and consultancies, mostly at the enterprise company level, much bigger dollars to go get there. So anyway, back to your question of how do you decide what it is? Be brilliant at the basics. Clarity is the magic wand. So, clarity in goals and priorities at the organizational level. Why do we exist? What are we trying to do? What's most important this year, this quarter? You can overdo it if you try to do OKRs at an individual level. That's a rant I'm happy to do it at some point. Like you can get too granular in a way that doesn't make sense.

Yep, yep, yep.

But have clarity at the top of your organization. You should have clarity in terms of roles and responsibilities as well, like who will do what, and how do you make decisions? Like, the clarity is so important for any work.

Clarity is the magic wand. That's the quote of the day that I'm walking away with, Andrew. Man, it almost doesn't matter what we're talking about. Whatever project, whatever initiative, whatever job description, whatever feedback you give, like, boy, it really is the magic wand. So yeah, thank you for that. And then I also wrote down, be brilliant at the basics. We try to get so fancy schmancy these days with, like you said, the shiny penny, the new technique, the whatever. How about just picking up the phone, or doing what we're doing right now, or making an in person visit, looking somebody in the eye and being useful? Back to what you said, prerecording, and since we've hit record, you've, you've mentioned that term be useful several times. There is just nothing that takes the place of that, right? Clarity, being useful and being brilliant at the basics. So yeah, thank you for that. You gave a meta, you gave a specific, and in my mind, a meta description. You actually, you actually exemplified your answer with your answer. So yeah, thank you for that. When it comes to leadership principles, I know you have something called the four C's, and I'm going to guess one of the C's is clarity, but I don't know. Talk to me about your leadership principles in the four C's.

Sure. Well, I don't think I coined these. I mean, they're words. You can string them together any way you want. You can have more C's if you really want. Just about anything in terms of leading and managing an organization, starts with clarity. I think, linked to clarity, and I taught these concepts for HEC Paris to an executive education program just a couple weeks ago. Connected closely to clarity is consistency. One of the things that I find in many organizations, especially startups, that are seeking product market fit, that are pivoting regularly, that are responding all sorts of chaos in the environment, is that they might be clear and then they're not clear the next day, or things move around. So, consistency is important. Beyond that, communication is a third C, and communication is a two-way street. So, you can't have clarity unless you're constantly reinforcing it. Unless you're proactively answering the unasked questions. But the two-way street is encouraging those questions to bubble up as well and get some course corrections and get feedback from your org about what's important and what's working and what's not. So, a benevolent dictatorship will only take you so far. Yeah, a two-way communication is really valuable, yeah. And then the last C, I think, is consequences. And so, consequences can be positive or negative, but it's reinforcing what you want from your organization. What are the behaviors? How will decisions be made? You know, it's not just you know, the mission vision values that you might put on a mouse pad or on the wall. If your organization is trying to succeed, you can't get very far unless you're, you know, once you're at scale with managers, managing managers, unless you're able to delegate and empower. And so, consequences are a really good way to do that. Like, who gets promoted, who gets fired, who gets recognized? You know that that is the essence of culture. It's not words that you put on a wall, it's the consequences that you create.

Yeah, I appreciate the way that you're saying consequences can be positive or negative. You know, you hear the word consequences, but it could be positive or negative. All of our leadership decisions have consequences. Sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not. And so yeah, I appreciate the way that you outline that. The name of your book is “Scaling for Success”. The book that I wrote many, many years ago, the subtitle was the passport to success and well-being, so that word success is another thread that connects you and me. What does success mean to you? It made the title of your book, so it means something to you. What has defined that for us? What's Andrew's definition of success?

Boy, that's a deep question.

Brother, we're there. We've been talking for 20 minutes. Time to go deeper.

Well, success is meeting your goals or achieving or surpassing your goals, but to have success, you have to have a goal. You have to have some destination in mind. So, if you don't have a destination, if you don't have a goal, you cannot have success. So, you need to be able to chart your course. You need to be able to articulate what good looks like for you. If that's a certain revenue number, if that is delivering a certain number of shoes to the undeveloped world. Whatever it is, have a goal, and that will be a very important first step on your road to success.

Another answer, I appreciate. In this world that we live in today, and probably it's probably always been this way, but you could easily get diluted into the definition of success, meaning any type of materialistic thing, power thing, money thing. But I really appreciate your answer, and it's really individualized. It's whatever it means to you. So, you're not here to define what success means for somebody else, other than pulling out of them, what is their definition of success. Great. Whatever it is. It's not good, bad, it's yours. And then now let's be useful and help you get there. So, yeah, thank you for that. I think you have a unique perspective with the experiences that you've had, and I can already tell from our conversation, you know, you said, hey, that's a deep question. I feel like you're a deep thinker that also produces some tangible results for people. You’ve been doing this for a long time. You've got a lot of background from your perspective, as you look up over the horizon right now, we're in the middle of 2024, and you're looking forward just five years, because I feel like that is a long time in today's world, business world, what types of things do you see that are either exciting and things that get you kind of motivated and excited, and then what kind of things do you see that you might go, Hmm, we might want to look out for that?

Well, the topic of the day is, AI, artificial intelligence and really, technology has been, you know, changing our workplaces now for quite a while. This is a rising technology. So, I think the jury still out. I haven't yet seen applications that massively change your workforce productivity, or eliminate jobs, or massively improve jobs. There are all sorts of potential. So, whether it's you know, good, good, bad, you know, or evil, we will see. And, you know, in part, it depends on perspective. Like, if you're trying to, you know, keep the horse drawn, uh, carts and, yeah, cars come along, you might view that as a bad thing and a threat. Or digital cameras versus Kodak, you know, there, there will be some changes due to technology. And I think AI is a, as yet, unrealized, rising technology. We will see what it brings and so I think that's useful for people in any function, for professionals at any level, to be aware of you don't necessarily need to go all in yet but dabble and experiment. And, you know, I have my chat GPT, 20 bucks a month subscription, and I do some sample prompts to see if it can help me in my work. And so, you know, I think, I think that's an area that is rapidly changing that we'll see what that brings to the world of work. Maybe one other area is remote work and hybrid. It's not at all settled yet. You know, with the pandemic and work from home, it was, you know, largely proven that most people can do their jobs remotely. And you and I are speaking from across the country.

That's right, yeah.

Does it really make sense to jump on an airplane and burn a day and a half going back and forth for a wonderful 30-minute chat? Probably not.

Yep.

So, I think that remote and distributed work will continue to increase, and as we think about the worlds of real estate and mortgage that would likely lead to more home offices and larger houses and commercial office buildings continue to be under pressure, and so we'll see how that reshapes the world over time, as occupancy changes and where people do their work continues to shift and settle for a while.

Yeah. I mean, by your answer, it sure does sound like you're looking at the horizon. You're dealing with the things that are in front of you, but I can tell you're looking at the horizon. Here's a selfish question. I shouldn't even admit this on my own podcast platform. I don't pay for chat GPT, and I'm using it. What's the difference between what you're doing on the paid version and what I'm doing? Do you know?

I think I know. In open AI ChatGPT, the model 3.5, you have a prompt window so you can only type in a certain number of characters for your request. In 4.0, you can drop in an attachment, and you can include links, and so you can be much more specific and directed with the input that you give to the model.

Well, thank you.

And I found that to be useful.

Well, there's your useful word again. Thank you. That's really helpful. That actually goes along with some of your previous answers around clarity, right? I may not be producing the same amount of clarity from AI that you are because of what you're doing with it. So, I'm gonna subscribe, because I want what you got, man. Come on.

Well, hey, for 20 bucks a month, yeah, you know, it's worth learning. And hey, I'll give you a sample use case. I'm kind of noisy on LinkedIn. I post several times a week. One of the ways that I do that, rather than having my timer go off Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I sit down and do it in the moment, I will do posts in the moment if something strikes me, but I schedule posts, and I wrote this book. And so, one of the things that I've done is get a PDF of each of my chapters, and I have loaded into ChatGPT the 20 page chapter and asked it to draft 15 LinkedIn posts per chapter.

Oh boy, that's good.

Now I don't take them and copy, paste.

I understand.

But it gets me started, yeah. And that's something that you know, having written a book, like it's a lot of work to sit down. So, it's all my content, and it's just repackaged by the large language model in a way that helps me do something that otherwise I probably wouldn't post as often.

That's good. I was starting from a blank page. What a great little tidbit there. Thank you. Any particular projects that you're particularly excited about these days that you'd want to share with us?

Well, there are two things that I'm really proud of, but there's a lot I'm really proud of, and namely my little girls.

I was just gonna say two of them are right in the other room, yeah.

Well, thank you. One is, and I shared that the book came from a place of disappointment with people management, but one is a project that I've had going now for four years, I've started an executive education program for other human resources leaders. Now I think of it like, you know, the book club 2.0, so take “Scaling for Success”, which is this model of what are the basics, and how can you operate your organization effectively? And we dig really deep into it and have a case study methodology, and you know, myself and my co-author, who's now the dean of HEC Paris, you know, top exec ed program in the world, we teach over half a year a cohort of about a dozen Human Resources leaders what good looks like, and they explore it for themselves. So, yeah, that's something I'm really proud of, is getting more hands on with a small group of people twice a year and really digging in. And the other thing is, through Series B consulting, I'm able to offer those sorts of services and support to individual companies. So not just the entry point to HR, but if you're a CEO or a business unit leader, president, and you want to think about, hey, how do I help my organization be effective and be productive? And maybe there's been some change or some growth, or whatever the triggering event is, how can you drive clarity? How can you drive accountability in your organization? How do you structure for success? And so, I have a list of offerings through Series B, where I can pretty quickly, and it's me, rather than a team, look under the hood and work with somebody to help their business be more effective. And so, it's been a lot of fun working with multiple clients on projects like that.

Well, with, with both of those things, I have a feeling people are going to reach out to you, and so I heard you say you're noisy on LinkedIn. I love that term, by the way. What's the best and easiest way for people to get in touch with you, Andrew?

Yeah, well, LinkedIn. I'm there a lot. So, you know, please connect and follow Andrew Bartlow, or go to my website. It's called Series B Consulting.

Perfect. Well, Andrew, you were useful today, my friend. Thank you for that. That's one guy's opinion, but I have a feeling when this episode airs a month or two down the road that there'll be others that agree with me. So, thank you for your time. Thank you for your expertise. Thank you for your usefulness today. We certainly appreciate it, and I sure do hope our paths cross again soon.

Jason, thank you. Really appreciate it.

So many insights from Andrew Bartlow. Boy, I have a just a sense of gratefulness for my conversation with him. Very easy going, very useful. And in fact, that's where I'll start with my own insights is just this idea of being useful, entering a room and figuring out, okay, am I going to be useful to this situation or to the people that I'm about to engage, or do they need to be useful for me? I think if you enter into a situation with the idea of, hey, I just want to be useful, ma, it just feels like things will go a lot better that way. So that was just a great insight. His 4 C’s of leadership with clarity being his top one, describing it so much so as the magic wand, I'm thinking about parenting. I'm thinking about leading Rewire. I'm thinking about my own coaching with executives. Clarity really is the magic wand, and so I know for me, I'll be looking ways to make my emails, my LinkedIn posts, my phone calls, my coaching conversations, just that much clearer. And I appreciate Andrew for that insight, but as we say at the end of every episode of The Insight Interviews, it doesn't much matter what me as the host, what my insights are, but what really matters is you as the listener, what were your insights?

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