Katrina Purcell Podcast Transcript
Katrina Purcell joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Katrina Purcell. Katrina Purcell is a growth operations consultant and former chief of staff who helped guide a PE-backed company through its IPO. Today, she partners with founders and leaders at seed series C, B2B SaaS startups, and scaling nonprofits to turn operational chaos into clear systems, realistic roadmaps, and teams that actually own the vision.
Katrina’s work lives in the messy middle of scaling, setting goals that stick, running cross-functional execution that doesn’t stall, building fundraising readiness, and creating the operational backbone a company needs before it breaks. She’s known for turning big-picture strategy into concrete mechanisms a team can run with on Monday morning without burning people out along the way.
Well, good afternoon, Katrina. Welcome to the show.
Katrina Purcell: Thank you so much for having me, Brian. I’m excited to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. And you’re hailing out of Brooklyn, New York today. I am in Kansas City, so luckily it’s just an hour difference, but I do appreciate the time navigating time zones and calendars to get here.
Katrina, let’s jump right in. Here we go. You climbed the corporate ranks across media and technology at companies like Bloomberg and IAS, moved fluidly between chief of staff and operational leadership roles, and even helped guide a PE-backed company through its IPO before leaving to start your own consultancy.
What was the moment you realized your true purpose was in translating strategy into results for founders, and what pushed you to leave the corporate world to do it?
Katrina Purcell: What a big question. So I, I think we, we all grow up and our parents have visions of what we should be when we grow up. My dad actually really wanted me to be an engineer.
He thought I’d be great at it. But in high school I took a media class where we actually produced the morning announcements, and I fell in love, and so decided that media was, was kind of my calling. But once I started my career, I realized I was actually really good at project management type things, right?
So getting stuff done that no one else wanted to do or took the time to do. And I slowly evolved my career over the course of my time at Bloomberg to really focus more on system implementations adjusting people’s roles and responsibilities and really around, things that have to get done in a business but no one wants to do.
And so people are really wa- ready, willing, and able to kind of throw them on your plate. And at that point I decided to go back to school because I had my undergraduate degree in media, and whether or not other people thought it, I had a sense of people not taking me seriously because I didn’t have a business degree.
So I went back to school and, and did Columbia’s executive MBA program. You go to school on the weekends for two years. And once I graduated, I thought, “Okay, let me go, see what else is out there,” and that’s when the chief of staff role at, at IAS kind of hit my lap. And six months later the pandemic hit, and it was time to reinvent yourself because you know, no one really knew what was happening or what was going on.
Everything felt very unsecure. And so I- Said yes when they said, “Hey, we’re gonna IPO, we want you to be chief of staff.” I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And I realized that I was really good at sort of bringing people together, helping people to understand what the goals were and where they fit within those goals, and making sure that we brought them along for the ride, right?
So the change management aspect of it. And I think over time I slowly realized that while doing that within s- inside a company was fun, it wasn’t exactly, building and ever-changing. Companies go through things like an IPO once in their lifetime generally. And so I thought, okay, what if I actually took my skills on the road and I could help more companies that were going through transitionary periods really kind of set the right footing and, and achieve greater growth goals than what they, they’d originally set out t- to achieve.
Obviously starting your own company is a little bit risky but it was a calculated risk, and so far it’s paid off
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Just love that backstory really do. The… where you started out, you were kind of bit by the bug after that media class and, and jumped in and, and you moved on.
You loved managing projects and complex tasks really well. What I heard is rolling up those sleeves, getting your hands dirty and doing the works that, work really that others didn’t enjoy, but that really led to your s- chief of staff role, which you excel that, leading teams and change, which I think is important, and obviously that has really catapulted you to what you’re doing today.
So thank you. Katrina, you’re known for turning big picture strategy into concrete mechanisms a team can run with on Monday morning, not just a strategy deck that collects dust. How do you actually make that translation, and where do most leaders fail at turning their vision into something their team genuinely owns and executes?
Katrina Purcell: I think as, as leaders, we tend to think that we shouldn’t tell our team about anything until it’s finalized. So it needs to be the prettiest deck, and it needs to all be well thought out, when in reality, change management requires people to be, to feel involved. It requires you to kind of open the door to their suggestions.
It requires you to, to think about how and where they fit. No team wants a, a leader who’s gonna come to them and say I solved all your problems, and here’s this new s- new system that we bought.” And you’re gonna say, “Well, you solved what you assumed were our problems, but you actually never asked us what our problems were.”
And that is the hallmark of a system failure. And it’s not because the system wasn’t great. It’s because you didn’t actually involve the people who were gonna be using the system in the process. And so I think we have to, as founders, step back and think to ourselves, we actually don’t know the full universe.
Once you get to the point where you’re hiring a team and where you have other people working on the business, you’re no longer the only stakeholder. They have a lot of, a lot of stake in the business being successful, and they also have their own unique perspective And where I see a lot of leaders fail is that they, they disregard the perspective that other people might have because they say, “Well, this business is my baby, and so I know kind of everything that’s happening.”
But as the business evolves and grows, it grows beyond you, which it should, just like a regular child should, right? Grow and, and move out of the house. Your business should grow beyond just you if that’s your expectation to, to, to scale. And so talking and listening to your team, bringing them in to the conversations is a much better way of ensuring that they’re gonna adopt and that they’re gonna understand what you’re trying to do.
It also means that your strategy is gonna be- become better because you’re gonna hear, “Well, what if this doesn’t go right?” Or, “What if this doesn’t happen?” Or, “You might not realize, but we’ve been doing it this way. What’s wrong with that in this new, in this new method of doing things?” And so you bring in those enriching viewpoints, but then you ignore them, and I think that’s the biggest mistake I see founders make.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Leaders, we, we know this, Katrina, I think we’re all guilty at some point, but I’m glad you highlighted that. Leaders, we tend to keep things close to our chest until we feel we have a polished product or message to deliver to our team. But in reality, leaders need to engage their team and generate maybe some consensus there.
They have some great ideas. They have… They’re, they’re in the trenches. They understand what’s really going on, and we need to trust that great talent that we’ve hired, right? So I appreciate that. Katrina, setting goals is easy. Making them stick is where most companies fall apart. You work a lot with these objectives and, and key results and cross-functional execution that doesn’t stall.
What separates a goal-setting process that actually drives behavior from one that becomes theater, and how do you keep execution from stalling across teams?
Katrina Purcell: Yeah, that’s the million dollar question, right? I think the first thing is understanding where your team is at the moment, and not applying a process that’s overly rigid or is a little too heavy for where you’re at at the time.
And so I see a lot of times people will say, “Well, this is how they do it at Amazon, so this is how we’re gonna do it.” Well, I guarantee you that’s not how Amazon did it when they were first starting out and they had a really small team. So, shooting for the stars is great, but where it fails is when you’re operating in a, in a place of, “Well, this is our ideal state.”
Okay, how long is it gonna take you to actually get to your ideal state? Because you should actually be measuring your current state in the, in the meantime. And so teams will say, “Well, this process is too heavy, so we’re not actually gonna do it.” Or, “We’re only gonna do this piece of it until we get to this point.”
But then no one’s actually monitoring or owning that. A lot of times it might be the founder who owns the process, but the founder owns about 100 other things and so they aren’t enforcing it. So first, getting an owner. Second, making sure that the process is actually something that fits where your company is at the moment and is not purely aspirational.
It can be aspirational, but it really should be something that you can already measure. It should be something that integrates into what you’re already doing, and it really needs that owner, that person who’s driving it, that person who can say, “Hey, guys, at this point it’s time for the process to evolve and this is what the evolution looks like, and this is how we’ll be monitoring moving forward.”
Because it shouldn’t stay static as your company scales and grows. We tend to build something that, that will work for us when we have already grown and then it doesn’t actually work while we’re growing, and so therefore it gets kind of shoved on a shelf after one one really nice company offsite where we all sit down and kumbaya.
But then we all come back and we realize, oh, that actually takes me more time and I don’t wanna spend the time on it ’cause I’m not being properly incentivized for that. So it’s really understanding where you are right now, and what are the exact things you need to do to get to that next level, and then you can adjust the process once you get to that next level.
But making sure that you’re monitoring the right things, and that you’re supporting your team and holding them accountable to those things.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. There’s some great insights there. Obviously, you talked about, shooting for the stars, having big audacious goals are great. But it can fail when you’re pursuing perfection or waiting for a particular moment to be right.
You did highlight, assigning an owner to that objective ensuring that the objective is attainable, measurable, and directly applies to the, that particular objective and company strategy. But again, adjusting and monitoring along the way to ensure that the outcome is, is really what you’re, what you’re after.
So thank you. And Katrina, the last question of the day, you have a front row seat to how dozens of high growth companies are scaling right now, and you’re constantly pulling tactical lessons from operators on your show. As AI reshapes operations and the pressure to do more with less intensifies, where do you see the art of scaling companies heading over the next five years?
And what will separate the founders who build durable human-first companies from those who burn out their teams chasing growth?
Katrina Purcell: I love this question. So we’d actually just did a series on this on, on my podcast around humans and, and how people are adapting to AI and how AI can actually help humans if you are communicating and talking to them.
So I think the number one thing is really the companies that are the most successful talk. They communicate with their teams, right? They ask questions. They maybe are not involved in all the tiny little nitty-gritty steps, but they are very acutely aware of what’s happening within their infrastructure and within their team I think AI is never gonna be able to actually scale your team for you.
You have to do that. There’s the human element, right? You’re always gonna need people. In, in some cases you’re gonna need people who can tell when the AI has gone off the rails. In other places you’re actually gonna need people to train the AI to ensure that it’s doing what you need it to do.
What I found is that when people want to have something automated, the first question I ask them is, “Great, where is your process documentation?” And they don’t have it. And so my hope is that AI’s actually gonna drive this wave of creating documentation purely because it demands it. A human can get around not having documentation.
They can, learn a process. They can do it in a way that they find comfortable. They can pass that process down kind of over time to other humans who have a brain who can sort of objectively think for themselves. But what’s missing when you go the AI route is the AI needs that process thoroughly documented.
It needs to understand exactly what’s happening. It needs to understand exactly what decision it’s gonna make if something changes, and it really requires a lot more upfront effort than we generally give our teams. We don’t… one of the things that, that a lot of startups I work with have trouble with is sort of training.
They bring on, they onboard someone, and then it’s like, “Well, what was their training?” “Oh, we gave them this thing, and then we had them sit and shadow.” Well, the AI can’t really just sit and shadow and suddenly learn how the human brain works or how the human brain thinks. And so it’s definitely requiring a lot more effort upfront to document, and I think that’s actually gonna be beneficial for everybody
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Absolutely we talk about AI here on the podcast probably every episode. And you talked about that automation, right? Is everybody wants that, of course, but you can’t necessarily do that. AI can… just won’t be able to ever fully scale your team. You need to have humans there, humans to manage a lot of that.
And most folks do wanna automate. They forget the important part of having that process documentation first, which you talked about. And if you’re gonna leverage AI, you’re gonna most definitely need that process documentation with detailed instructions if you want AI to augment in that space. So again, I appreciate your insights.
And Katrina, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Katrina Purcell: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Katrina Purcell Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
