In this compelling episode, Melissa Bloom, CEO and Founder of Expanse Strategists LLC, shares how her diverse experience in private and public sectors has honed her ability to drive organizational success.
You will discover:
– The unique challenges that prevent EdTech companies from scaling successfully
– How your sales problem may have nothing to do with your sales team
– How you can discover the root challenges and finally get ahead as a leader
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello Hello and welcome welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast and I am here with an awesome high demand coach actually a scale architect as well. It is the one and only Dr. Melissa Bloom. She’s the founder and CEO of expense strategist LLC. And she specializes in partnering with visionary purpose led CEOs to expand their businesses and achieve missions to transform society, her history and various CX o roles, and as president has cultivated a foundation of trust and empathy in her partnerships, Melissa is recognized as a business leader and in the education space and also as a women’s leadership expert. And as a respected thought leader and speaker. Her focus on predictable success allows her to personalize her coaching and consultancy, leading teams toward transformative growth. She’s the author of Queen Bee Chronicles, empowering women to challenge biases and spark change. And she’s here with us today, Melissa, so excited to have you here. We get to chat like this often as a scale architect, and we finally get to hit record on one of these conversations. I’m very excited about that. I mean, I know there’s a whole lot more to your story than than what we’ve got here in your bio, which was fantastic. But why don’t you fill in some of the blanks for us? What were you doing before starting expense strategist? And how did that ultimately lead you to make the leap?
Melissa Bloom
Yeah, I was thinking about that recently, Scott. And I think to sum it up, I enjoy chaos. And I don’t mind going into situations that are very undefined. My first real job out of college was I was hired to open and literally create an aquatic center or my local community. And there are many times I think, why on earth did they entrust that to a 21 year old who had never opened anything in her entire life. My own experience was being a lifeguard. But I didn’t know any better. So it was fun in and I really enjoyed it. And from there, I guess I just thought, there’s nothing I can do if I want to do it went into education, I really enjoyed being able to make a change for students and teachers. And then I went into corporate education at Tech, was able to scale the company using predictable success, which is what led me to join you as a scale architect and put that out there for other ed tech and mission based company to get the same sort of result.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, how would you say that entrepreneurial edge has has helped you as a coach or consultant? How has it shaped the way that you look at problems that that many of your clients are experiencing?
Melissa Bloom
I understand that I understand where they are, and that they aren’t doing anything that’s wrong, that it’s not wrong to be in this place of uncomfortability. Because when you’re in that moment, it can feel like it. And sometimes you just need somebody to tell you that right? Like it’s okay. You are where you are. You’re supposed to be but you don’t have to live here forever.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So a lot of our folks they know about the predictable success model. They’ve heard blessed teachers, or they’ve heard about it on this show. But what are what would you say are some of the unique challenges that ed tech companies face? You know, as they’re progressing through, maybe even specifically in Whitewater?
Melissa Bloom
Yeah. So education sector companies are, they face some interesting challenges, and then over themselves, just because it’s education sector, it’s got a lot of nuances. And Ed Tech, tends to start off as a small startup, a few people right in that early struggle stage, and they get to fun. And in order for an a tech company to really scale and have impact, they need to have a very clear understanding of education. Life, which means they ended up starting to bring people in that are usually former educators, and the former educators don’t always understand the business piece. So there’s a real need for those warmer siloed teams to be able to speak the same language and come together and it can create, you know, if not done intentionally, a lot of mess. And so I really enjoy being able to be the kind of the speaker that brings people together to understand how to accomplish that, that mission and goal from where they start.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So one of the challenges that pops up in the whitewater stage generally, is this this issue of complexity, right. And so when when you are helping lead, when did you start to feel that first what did that look like? Did you recognize it right away? Did it take a little while did it kind of hit you and like me, this has been here for years. What was that process? Just like for you guys?
Melissa Bloom
When I joined Learning Sciences International, they had already purchased particle effects that we had not brought in less. But it was one of the books that I read for my onboarding. And I was supposed to read it. And there were I thought the company was, and I knew right away, that they were in Whitewater that they had reached this complexity stage. And again, knowing that whitewater wasn’t a bad place to be, it was necessary. So I knew that the complexities came from the silos, like I was saying, Before the company had just grown, and there were more people and more leaders, and we hadn’t put in the foundation’s yet to have effective communication and growth, let alone the sustainable growth. And that impacts customers. And you know, that, that impacts bottom line?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah. What would you say, are some of the the ways that you’ve, you’ve helped overcome that, right, you have folks coming from such different backgrounds, you’ve got the tech aspect of it, which is its own culture, you’ve got the Education Act, which is its own culture. And then businesses in general tend to take on their own flair. How, how have you found the ability to really help bring those different spaces together and bring out the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses.
Melissa Bloom
Because I love that predictable success model, fall back on that the the LPS assessment was really key was a key starting place for us, because it allowed us to understand where each leader was coming from, and what leadership styles we might be missing, I ended up being the synergist, which I guess I didn’t anticipate that going in. But that was really interesting, as I climbed through the C suite, that was sort of a natural fit for me, but it was a piece that was missing, when, when that leadership team was developing. And also having the enterprise commitment, that concept of worry, we all are representing the good of the company, instead of our individual departments who really digging into what that meant, for each of us, became such a powerful, grounding point of the open every meeting with it. We said it out loud. And people were given the authority and autonomy and empowerment, to say to other people, Hey, that’s not in the best interest of the enterprise, that’s going to be the best interest of your department, not the enterprise. And that became the cod, that allowed us to start working on the story levels, or the management in levels for better communication, and understanding who owned what, in terms of autonomy. So people want, one of the frustrating things is people end up doing double work when you’re not communicating effectively. Right. And it maybe it’s not even double work. It’s somebody’s doing this thing over here, and something’s doing this thing over here. And then you get together, and you both worked on something, and you didn’t even come up with the same thing. So that is frustrating. But going through that process, we were able to really eliminate a lot of that. Which makes a sales cycle in education a lot faster, because it’s a very long sales cycle. And in that way, it increased our, our revenue line significantly.
Scott Ritzheimer
I think that’s one of the fascinating things, particularly about the whitewater stage is that the things that you do to fix the problems that you have have almost nothing to do with the problems that you experience right now. There’s so many times that you know, folks, we’ve got a sales problem, or we have a profitability problems, a really big one, and they want to show you their p&l. It’s like, okay, that’s great. I can take a look at that. But that’s not where the root issues are. Why is that?
Melissa Bloom
I think it’s just really easy to say we’re not making the money that we want. So let’s look at the sales team. And we definitely did that and multiple times, or let’s look at the marketing team. What aren’t we? How are we not marketing this? Which I think is it’s leftover from that early struggle fun stage, because that is the focus of the early struggle fun stage, right is sustainability of your market product and buyer moving into Whitewater, that’s not the issue. It’s an issue with the chaos that’s created by not having effective systems and processes. And so once we fix that, we’ve stopped putting band aids on things and sometimes it does mean that the sales team needs to do something differently. But if you just continue to fix the little piece that you’ve always suspect and ignore everything else, usually not the right answer.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. One of the challenges that I see is you kind of mentioned this is like go This is how we’ve done it. Right. This is how it’s worked. And, and one of the places I’ve found that that that kind of shows up as as ineffective, right or just incomplete? Is this this idea of, is it? Is it that person not keeping up? Or is it the team not keeping up? Or are we asking them to do something that they can’t actually do? How do you help teams to start to kind of create some clarity around that?
Melissa Bloom
That’s the one that but the principles best model starts with the org chart. And really having that conversation about heads versus hats, or roles versus people. It was really critical for us and for other companies that I’ve talked to because it’s not often a conversation they’ve had to begin with the org chart has sort of kind of layered itself as the company has grown. But the concept of how those roles are represented had not, nor nor their roles or responsibilities, and what they actually are entitled or authorized to do. So doing that, in combination with looking at the best fit for that role, the leadership styles is very enlightening. Sometimes, as you know, people aren’t in the best seats, or that particular need, and they can be moved to a better fit role. Sometimes, and I just had a conversation with the founder about this. Sometimes when you’re moving from that button stage, who whitewater knowing you want to get to predictable success, there are people that aren’t going to enjoy that stage at all. And that honest conversation, the allows both the founder of the company and the person to decide if this is the track they want to be on?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. And, again, it’s one of those things where I found you can’t really address that until you’ve laid the foundation until you know, you’ve created the clarity in the first place. And that’s hard work. How do you help a team to kind of what would you say to a team, let me ask you this way that say they think he, you want us to work on an org chart, like you want us to spend that when we’ve got all this real work to do? What would you say to a team that just struggling with that right now?
Melissa Bloom
Honestly, that’s sometimes the first reaction. But then when we start to dig into it, there’s real value in it. Because it, it began to see how that leads out the rest of the organization to follow. One thing that I really liked doing with teams, once the roles are defined, is, is really launching them, so to speak, into their, their new or what should have been in the first place their roles and responsibilities. And we actually talk about if you’re hearing the role of a manager or a leader at your level, what does that and what does that look like? What decisions do you have the authority to make? What decisions should you pass up to the next leadership level? Which ones need to be communicated down? And really, what is that authority and autonomy and then having communication with the levels above and below that, that we begin to understand that that low a communication and that can’t happen if the org charts not right? Because it doesn’t represent the flow communication?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of folks, a lot of folks that have an org chart at all. But you know, some do maybe they call it an org chart and an accountability chart a people chart whenever it’s called, different names for it. But I’ve seen a common mistake where folks use it to describe kind of what is or what happened like nine years ago, the last time they touch it, what is the what is the real value of an org chart? And and can it be more than just kind of a flow chart with some names on it?
Melissa Bloom
Yeah, I think I think a flow chart has sorry, I think that org chart has the ability to be a living document. And just like, we should be doing strategic planning, not just one time a year, but over the intervals of the year. I think, looking at the org chart several times a year is also important. Because it needs to manifest itself to support the organization of your organization, whitewater and your kind of grow. You should. It’s okay. It doesn’t have to be bound and laminated and but you know, behind class. So I think it’s a really powerful tool to say, Are we operating daily the way that this kind of document has laid out and if not, which one needs to change?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. We’ve, we’ve I just realized we’ve kind of mentioned this Whitewater, and a lot of our audience knows about the different stages but I’m wondering for you because you’re special He’s in the ad tech space. I’m wondering if you could just kind of lay out someone’s listening today, what are some symptoms that they should be looking for that might indicate that they’re in Whitewater as a team?
Melissa Bloom
Um, so I always think about that a company has has been successful, they burned profit for several years, usually their team has figured out how to do things. But then they get stuck in terms of trying to get it past the point that they reached before. They always started hiring more people and really seeing the benefit of having hired those people. So that complexity starts to get going, balls start getting dropped with customers, because oftentimes, a founder is still very involved in sales, and is trying to kind of operate the same way they used to in terms of selling things that may not even be products yet. So there’s there begins to be a lot of frustration, and, you know, some disengagement within the teams. But that just sort of breeds from that complexity.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah. And and so we talked a little bit about the org chart, we talked a little bit about lateral management, getting people to work together across functionality for a moment, what’s it look like? On the other side, if we get this right now? What what’s available to us as leaders, especially in that edtech space?
Melissa Bloom
It’s completely a different world. I mean, all of a sudden, things are more efficient. Your meeting is your you don’t have calendars completely chock full of meetings that you’re sitting in and wondering why are there in the first place, because you know, who’s supposed to be making decisions at certain levels, you as the founder know that you’re going to not be out of the loop. Because there are people in place to pass along which you need to know. You, you know that your revenue is going to continue to grow, because people are in the right seat doing the right things for that to happen. It’s just, it’s a place where you can actually sit back and see the fruits of your labors without pulling your hair out every night or working, you know, well, 13 hours a day to get things moving.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. So there’s a question I like to ask all my guests. And you may have heard it before it is this, what is the biggest secret you wish just wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching you’re listening today knew?
Melissa Bloom
I would say that there’s a there’s a better way, and that no one should go through that phase alone. That it’s worth it to reach out and have somebody assist you. Because once once you do that better side, the sky is the limit.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think what’s so hard about, especially for a lot of founders, just their first time doing it, right? They may have worked in bigger companies, they’ve may have even worked in smaller companies. But that whitewater stage is is just it’s so uncommon in one sense, right? Because you’re not there forever. It’s just one of the stages of seven. But it’s, it’s it’s all over the place, every single organization has to go through it. So I know, for me as a founder, whenever I was leaving my previous company, it did it feel isolating, I guess it felt like, you know, if we can’t figure this out, and we can’t find what do I Google, you know, there’s, it’s there’s too many albums. And that feeling of loneliness, it sounds a little triply trivial? A lot of people say it, but it’s so real in that stage, and it doesn’t have to be.
Melissa Bloom
No, it doesn’t. And there’s a lot of Googling, if there’s a lot out there, that makes you think you’re doing it wrong, or you can get out of it. That’s one level in bulk. But beyond that, think a lot of people stay in that stage a lot longer than they need to, or they stop and give up.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so true. It’s so true. So for those who don’t want to give up for those who, who, you know, they’ve just got that inspiration that they needed to get to predictable success and take their ad company there with them. But they need help doing it. How can we find out more about you in the work that you do?
Melissa Bloom
My website is www.expansestrategists.com and it’s it has information about me and my services, but you know, my purposing and working with ad tech and education companies to get them to predictable successes because there are so many great missions and I do believe that are a education that needs those. And they need to be able to scale to do that we can’t do it alone. So that’s, that’s how they can reach me. That’s really the purpose behind my work.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s amazing. I love that there’s some great resources on the site, I’ve had a chance to check it out, I’d highly recommend it. The report there in particular is fantastic. And, Melissa, just an honor and privilege having you on the show. So fun to finally hit record on one of our conversations, doing phenomenal work in this space. And I’m excited to see more companies really flourish and thrive with your help. So check it out expansestrategists.com If I remember correctly.
Melissa Bloom
It’s just one word or one word.
Scott Ritzheimer
Got it. Yep, we’ll get it in the show notes you can click on it there it stopped listening to me and and we just it’s a fantastic site and I know folks will find it very helpful. Thanks for being on the show. For those of you watching and listening you know your time and attention means the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Melissa Bloom
Dr. Melissa Bloom, Founder and CEO of Expanse Strategists LLC, specializes in partnering with visionary, purpose-led CEOs to expand their businesses and achieve missions to transform society. Her history in various CXO roles and as a President has cultivated a foundation of trust and empathy in her partnerships. She is a recognized business, education, and women’s leadership expert. As a respected thought leader and speaker, her focus on the Predictable Success model allows her to provide personalized coaching and consultancy, leading teams toward transformative growth. She is the author of ‘Queen Bee Chronicles: Empowering Women to Challenge Biases and Spark Change.”
Want to learn more about Melissa Bloom’s work at COMPANY? Check out her website at https://www.expansestrategists.com/
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