💌 Community Mailbag #1: What does a Growth advisor do?

I answer a reader question from the first week of the newsletter!

Actual, live footage of me responding to messages from the community. I love it!

This is a community mailbag edition of my newsletter. I’ll address community questions that I think are interesting to a wider audience and I may follow-up with a longer post on the topic in the future. Got a question? Send it along.

Well my first full week as a newsletter publisher is in the books (get it?) and it has been quite the week. I published my first 🔥 Hot Take Alert and crossed 1,000 subscribers. I also wrote about parenting and management.

I started this newsletter to provide a no-bullshit, guided approach to solving some of the hardest problems for people and companies. That includes Growth, Product, company building and parenting while working. I also want to help out this community by answering your questions regularly.

And thus… Community Mailbag was born. Huzzah.

Our question this week came from an Engineering Manager at Amazon who asks:

There is a lot of content about how to do Growth as a full time leader of an org, but not much about Growth Advising. Can you write about your past experiences as an advisor, how do you advise a company without knowing its culture or strategy, etc.? Do you have any past success stories to share?

I’ve been a full-time advisor now since leaving Imperfect Foods (where I was Chief Product and Growth Officer) and joining Reforge as an Executive in Residence and now Program Partner. Depending on the company I help them with Growth Strategy, Product Strategy and Process, or scaling their company and culture. For me it’s more fulfilling work for a variety of reasons:

• I get to set my own schedule so I can spend more time with my elementary-school-aged-kids.

• I work only on the problems I want to work on — that means I work on Growth, Product and company-building problems and I don’t have to deal with internal politics (most of the time), performance reviews, and employee issues. I used to be excited about those problems but I’m not anymore.

• The cost of getting one of the pillars in my company evaluation framework incorrect is relatively low. We have a standard contractual relationship and everyone has a clear, low-risk exit option.

• I’m learning a ton. I have to be really great at extreme context switching and have been leveraging a lot of frameworks to do so. I’m tapping into a different part of my brain than before.

My good friend Elena Verna wrote about her journey as a full-time advisor almost a year ago and it was inspiring to me. We are both drawn to this work for many of the same reasons.

Elena and me were recently co-presenters at Amplitude’s Amplify Conference.

Advising is not without its challenges though. For starters, this isn’t the first time I’ve done this. In between my time at Lyft and Patreon I worked as a contract Growth leader with a variety of companies at once. I burned out. I didn’t know how to manage the context switching or the demands on my time and it ended up being a less flexible working situation than I was hoping for. It took me 7 years and a few companies to get back here.

My experience the second time around and at this stage of my life is vastly improved.

My experiences as an advisor and how I make it work…

I had to develop a good sense of what I’m actually good at and enjoy doing. For me that happens to be Growth strategy, Product process, how to build your team and culture.

If you’re hiring me to work on Growth strategy then maintain a fairly rigid set of criteria around the companies that I work with. Specifically, I tend to work with companies at a certain stage (scaling stage or late stage trying to modernize their approach), they must have reached product/market fit and be generating revenue or have a clear path to do so, and I tend to also spend more of my time with consumer businesses or B2B2C (although not exclusively). Finally, they need to be be a good culture fit with my working style.

Which brings me to this question:

How do you advise a company without knowing its culture or strategy?

The answer is that I don’t. I have to know their culture and their strategy in order to work with them. I’m typically able to suss out culture by running a “free-trial” workshop with the folks I’ll be working with. This is both an opportunity for them to evaluate me as well as an opportunity for me to evaluate them. I pay close attention to the dynamics “in the room” during this workshop.

• Who’s talking?

• How are the attendees collaborating?

• How are they disagreeing?

• How do they generate ideas?

• How receptive are they to each other’s ideas?

These behaviors speak volumes about the type of culture they have and you can also use this approach to evaluate a company for a full-time role.

As far as strategy goes I ask that they share with me as much as they’ve documented about this topic so that I can familiarize myself with their company strategy, their customer base, and their plans. I want to see if their strategy reflects an understanding the problems they face and the matches the reasons they’re bringing me on to help. I ask a lot of questions about these documents; it’s like conducting Product discovery (but on a company):

• Do they have a clear strategy that extends more than a few months into the future?

• Do they agree on that strategy?

• Do they know how they grow or how they should be growing?

• Are they focused on tactics they’re told to do or heard were the right ones OR are they operating on first principles?

• How do they handle the questions that I ask or if I challenge some of their assumptions? Are they receptive? Dismissive? Defensive?

What I’m able to decide at this point (usually) is whether or not I’ll be able to help them. If I don’t believe I can then I’m clear with them about why — maybe they need another type of person or maybe they need to get to alignment on something critical before I can help them.

The final part of the question was about success stories:

Do you have any past success stories to share?

I’ll share one success story and one failure story.

One company I’ve been advising for the past ~6 months or so is an earlier-stage startup called Elpha. I love talking about Elpha because it has such a fantastic mission — as an online community for women their mission is to help women succeed at work together. It’s sort of a LinkedIn / Reddit mashup: one part community and one part job seeking/recruiting.

When I started advising them they had a long list of tactics to drive community growth. We did a few sessions on growth loops and modeling, retention and habit formation, and dug into their data—thankfully they had a lot of it. What we concluded was that given what their primary growth loops should be (WoM and UGC) it made more sense to focus on a strong onboarding experience that led to more people posting, commenting, etc. Their incredible founder Cadran re-built the onboarding experience in about a week and by incorporating introductions into onboarding we were able to 7-10x the amount of new members commenting and improve member retention. What’s more is that this experiment showed us that we could reduce the barrier to posting and make it less daunting and scary for people. We can continue to chip away at this now and make further improvements.

My failure story comes from my first foray into advising when I was much less experienced. I worked with far too many companies that were pre-product/market fit and weren’t a match for my strengths at the time (two that come to mind were Shuddle and Homejoy). I was trying to help them with Growth when really I should have been helping them build towards PMF. Data was sparse, it was difficult to get customer feedback, and ultimately a majority of the work we tried was unsuccessful. It was hugely frustrating for me as someone who is motivated by moving metrics and achieving outcomes — and of course it wasn’t great for them either. I learned a valuable lesson about the right and wrong time to work on Growth strategy. Always after achieving some level of PMF.

As a bonus I want to add a couple of notes in compensation:

1. Most of my compensation is on a paid retainer. Companies pay me for my expertise, my time, and the years of experience it took to build that expertise.

2. Occasionally I’ll do equity + cash hybrid agreements. This can be harder to calculate because there is a lot of volatility in equity lately and company valuations. If I can calculate an equivalent value for equity then that can be a portion of the compensation. Equity as an advisor vests on a different schedule than as an employee - usually a monthly vest (no cliff) over a shorter time period (6 months, for example).

3. An all-equity arrangement is off the table for me. If I want an equity stake exclusively then I’ll usually invest in the company as opposed to being an advisor. I don’t make a lot of investments though without very high conviction so this doesn’t happen that often. The reason I don’t take equity only is because it doesn’t pay the mortgage, or braces, or buy food. At least not yet. And since my wife and I are equal contributors to the household budget this just doesn’t work for me.

Thanks for writing in with your question — I hope to hear from many more in the community!