Transcript
Speaker: Maddie, hi. Hi. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm excited to chat with you. For folks who are not familiar with you, could you say who you are and what you do? So my name is Maddie Niebauer, and I am the founder and co-CEO at V Chiefs, which is a fractional executive firm.
Speaker: i have a lot of questions about your day-to-day. What got you here, the work you guys are doing. But to kind of set the table before that, can you give us your career journey up to co-founding? Yeah. So my career started in the Peace Corps. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa doing water and sanitation work. And I just loved that experience as a life experience. And then I ran a tutoring center for a few years. i went to business school. I worked in strategy consulting for nonprofits and foundations. And then I was a chief of staff for a large nonprofit called Teach for America.
Speaker: And while I was at Teach for America, my former boss left to start a new nonprofit. And after she had been gone a few months, she came back and was like, I need you back in my life. Will you moonlight with me five or 10 hours a week?
Speaker: And so I became her part-time chief of staff. And that was the seed that was planted for V-Chief. So I decided to build this company that provides part-time talent to leaders.
Speaker: We actually interviewed a woman maybe two weeks ago for this podcast and maybe you've heard of it. They do essentially like a membership for chief of staff that's like support for them.
Speaker: So it's a professional group because the chief of staff role, it's a hard one. Yeah. And it's so amorphous and can look really different in different places. It's been interesting, even just in the 10 years that I've been in business, there's been a lot more organizations that have popped up that either train chiefs of staff or associations where they can network with each other or or other things like that.
Speaker: I think anyone who's a really good chief of staff is like a good person to know and to have in your life. I also think of it as a role that requires so much emotional intelligence. And to your point, it's amorphous. And sometimes you are doing what needs to be done. What do you think makes a really good chief of staff? And I'm so curious about what five years of chief of staff at Teach for America was like when I saw that in your background. i was like, oh, that's very interesting. What's interesting is every chief of staff has a different job and that's by design because the best chief of staffs really compliment the skills of their leader and more importantly, the gaps of their leader. So where a leader is not strong is where the chief of staff is often leaning in. And so the chief of staff job could be a lot of running meetings or sitting in meetings on behalf of their leader or running quarterly reports or prepping slide decks. that the leader is going to use or writing speeches or so many different things. But I think the main goal of a chief of staff is really helping leverage that leader's time so that they're spending it where they can have the most impact.
Speaker: And the chief of staff is taking things off their plate that they would otherwise be doing. And so it really just allows the leader to be the best leader that they can be. So what makes a good chief of staff is someone who is a servant leader, someone who's happy to be in the background while someone else shines, happy to really focus their entire day on making this other person's life easier, right? That's a little bit of a mindset piece and it requires someone being not quite so ego driven and really just in a supportive role. I think also people who have really good skills in building relationships and influencing others because so much of a chief of staff's job is making people do things who you don't manage, right? So it might be all the people who sit under the CEO, who report into the CEO, you need them all to do different things all the time. And you need to convince them to do that without having any managerial influence over them. And so just understanding how people are motivated, understanding people's work styles, really being able to intuit the best ways to lead in those situations, I think is really important. You also just need someone who's killer at project management and not letting balls drop. yeah There's just a million things happening at once and you need to have real top notch systems in order to create order out of the chaos that is any executive's life.
Speaker: There's so much there. I had never thought of it in those terms. A great chief of staff is a servant leader for sure. As you say that, I'm like, yeah, no doubt. course, they probably invented it. Servant leader. Yeah. But what do you feel like are the rewards of being a chief of staff? Because as you express it, and I've never actually been a chief of staff, but I will say in previous roles, I was in director or VP level roles where I There was a chief of staff-esque element that you're describing where it was like at the behest of a C-level exec, I was needed to influence and cajole colleagues into things. And I found it like really hard and at times like frustrating and a little thinkless, but I'm just a great fit for that type of role. What type of role do you find it rewarding and what are the rewards of that role?
Speaker: I think my biggest... reward that that I took out of it was just getting to deeply know and support an incredible leader. Right. So I think a lot of it has to do with who you're supporting and your relationship with them. Yeah. But the chief of staff has access that a lot of people don't have access to. Right. Both in terms of like knowledge or things coming across the desk of that person, but also just knowing that person intimately as a human and building a relationship that is obviously a professional relationship, but
Speaker: I think can go beyond that. I think it can also be a really great launching point into other leadership within an organization. There's a lot of companies who will use it as like a rotational role. Someone will come sit in that role for a year or 18 months and then launch into other leadership roles in the organization and they will have gained all this knowledge because it's such a generalist role and it touches so many different domains within the organization. it just gives you a base of knowledge that you don't often see in more siloed roles. right If you're just overseeing finance, you're not always going to know what's happening in HR, but like as a chief of staff, you get to know all of these different things and you get touch points with so many people. So for someone who is really relationship driven,
Speaker: Like, I just get to build relationships with all different people within the organization. And yes, it might be ultimately to serve a purpose that I need you to get me to do something, right? But it's also just, I like you as a human and we enjoy interacting with each other.
Speaker: I want to pivot a bit. Talk to me about V-Chief. What is a day in your life like? So V-Chief actually, in many ways, i don't personally run anymore. So I have a co-CEO who manages all the day-to-day of V-Chief now. So I used to...
Speaker: manage all the things in the organization. I made every match. I would talk to every client. I would talk to all of our talent. I would match them together. And now, interestingly, we have whole teams who do that, right? Like we have a sales team who always talks to the client and we have a talent team that does all the interviews and talks to the talent. And we had to create systems for those teams to connect both technological systems and other more operational things to make those things all connect.
Speaker: And I, as time has shifted, have stepped back a little bit in my role. So my co-CEO manages the day-to-day of the organization, and I am in more of an external brand building role. I do a lot of networking. Like you mentioned, the Inc. Award that I won. We've also been on the Inc. 5000 list five times. And so every year I go to the Inc. conference and i meet up with a cohort of entrepreneurs. There's a group that I know really well because we went on this learning self-development program in Mexico and Baja. It was really amazing. And there were like 20 of us there and really just built some bonds. And so every year we get to see each other at the ink conference. And then I also just get to meet a lot of other entrepreneurs. And I'm in another entrepreneur organization called Entrepreneur Organization, EO, out of Chicago. I'm based in Madison, Wisconsin. So I go down there once a month and meet with other CEOs and talk about our business challenges. i do a lot of marketing and go on podcasts and do speaking gigs and things like that.
Speaker: Candidly, i took a step back from V-Chief a few years ago, and I just haven't leaned back in the same way as I had before. So now a typical day, I actually typically only work one or two days a week.
Speaker: And those days are calls and podcasts and connecting with partners or catching up with my co-CEO. And then I do a lot of other things that just are required by life. My mom is elderly, so I take care of her a lot. I have three teenagers who I'm a single parent for, so I drive everywhere all the time every afternoon. It's an exercise in driving or now watching my twins drive, which is a really challenging thing. I'm like, oh God, teaching two people to drive the same time. It's really more than i can handle sometimes.
Speaker: And I got certified to teach yoga. So I teach a couple of yoga classes a week. I do a lot of pottery. It's a little bit of my here there, and everywhere life these days. Actually, i don't talk about it much on the pod, but I'm also a yoga teacher. Oh, I love it. It's so good.
Speaker: I just feel like yoga instructors are good people. They're good to know. yoga are They're good people. Yeah. So that sounds, first of all, incredible. I bet a lot of the founders listening to this podcast are like, Maddie, how did you pull that off? I wish it was like so easy. i actually was in the middle of suck writing from my ex-husband and that was the forcing mechanism that made me take a really big step back. And then I just didn't want to step back in, which isn't to say I didn't love the work. I had been doing it for a long time and life was calling me in different directions. And so sometimes life comes and gives you a swift kick in the ass and you're like, oh, okay. Rearrange priorities. Let's see what we want to do.
Speaker: And it's interesting because I have thought about launching other businesses and doing other things. And I've had to slow my role in a way that is hard for me as a sort of type A person who is achievement oriented and driven. Like, okay, what company I'm going to start next? And I have half a dozen ideas and I'm like, let's go. And then I'm like, oh, but maybe i can just sit in this moment and drink in my daughter who's about to go to college and my mom who you never know how long older people are going to be with us. And so I'm learning to sit still in a way that's a challenge in and of itself.
Speaker: How are you doing that? Because for me, it's something I'm also working on. But I feel like if I do manage to sit still, I have to sit with and then work through a lot of negative emotions and self-talk that's been just like, oh, it's easier to just go do something. I know, right?
Speaker: are you pulling that off? What's your secret? Yeah. For me, what's been helpful is to find things that bring me joy, both in the things that I do at work and also the things I do in life, right? And so i enjoy talking to people. It is fun for me to come on podcasts or to talk to potential partners or things like that. So those are like pieces of the job that I've chosen to keep and chosen to hold on to things that are in my sort of zone of genius is something that we talk about a lot at V-Chief where leaders really can find the things that they love and they're good at and that drive the business forward and that nobody else can do just as well as they can. And so there's not that many things in that bucket
Speaker: for me, but those are the things where I spend my time. And so I've become really good at prioritizing and thinking about what I say yes to, because every yes to something is a no to something else, right? And so that is something that I think about both for work and in my personal life and perpetually reevaluating how I spend my time and who I spend it with and what I work on. And that's has really helpful. And it's constantly evolving, right? It's not like you get to the end state. People are always like, oh, you figured it out. You don't have to work. you have somebody else running your company. I'm like, yes and no, right? i don't want to not do anything. And there's always some challenge around the door, right? We had an incredible growth run. We 10X'd in three years, and that took a lot to make that happen. And then we've had up and down years since then. and
Speaker: Just always thinking about like, how is the landscape changing? What do we need to be doing as a business? And I do love thinking at a high strategic level about the business. And so my co-CEO and i we had a retreat in January where we just did a lot of brainstorming about different initiatives and different projects and just got real jazzed about it. Right. And that doesn't mean I had to be the one to implement the project.
Speaker: yeah And it's funny because I feel like this has evolved over time because as a chief of staff, I was all about implementation and I am really good at taking an idea from idea stage to fully implementing it. Right. And that is my jam. But as I have grown as a leader and stepped back from that type of work, now i get more jazzed about the visioning and ideating stage, even though I think As a human, I am naturally more gifted at the implementation piece and the let's sit down and hammer out a project plan rather than like the big blue sky thinking. But we're all growing and evolving over time and getting to practice different things. So that's fun.
Speaker: Wow. Can you talk us through the early days where you were 10Xing? What were those years like? What did it take to do that? What was that experience like? Yeah, it was fun and it was chaos, right?
Speaker: So in the beginning, i was our entire central team. So we've always had consultants that support our clients. So I was our first chief of staff working with my old boss, right? That was our first team.
Speaker: client as the chief before B-Chief even it existed. Every client who came in after that, I became a matchmaker. So I never took on any additional client work. That I think was a really important strategic decision to make early on because it meant I could work on growing the business rather than working as someone's chief of staff. And it was a big scary decision because you make a lot less money when someone else is doing the work. But ultimately, I think it's one of the things that led to our success.
Speaker: But I still had to do all the things that it takes to run a business, right? I made our first website. There were a few things I handed off early on, like accounting. I looked at QuickBooks once and I was like, no. hu ah That's an outside of my zone of genius. I could do it. I really don't want to. so I found someone to help with that. I found a digital marketing guy.
Speaker: i found someone to help doing interviews, like first round interviews of candidates. So that I became the last step in every process. But I held on to new client relationships and business development for a really long time too. And I held on to matching. So like every client comes in with a list of what they want. Then we have to think about who from our pool of talent is the right match for them.
Speaker: And I was just really good at that. And I thought I was better than anyone else could be. Turned out I was wrong. But I was like, this is our secret sauce and like what we're known for. And I was insistent on doing it for like five years. And then finally, I let that piece go. i wore all the hats like a lot of us entrepreneurs do in the early days. And we built this pool of talent and I built a handful of contractors who were helping us running the business. And then.
Speaker: At some point I decided, okay, we've been growing really nicely organically, but what would it look like to grow strategically and really devote more resources towards growing and building more of a sales and marketing function? And so one of my consultants was doing work with one of our clients on business development and really helped them knock it out of the park. So I said to her, would you do that for us?
Speaker: And so she did. and then she built up our sales team and got us connected with a marketing firm that we worked with. And then just slowly, team by team, she took over. She would finish one, get that running. And then someone else would come, like our finance team all fell apart because we were switching providers. and she had to take over that piece.
Speaker: And then of a sudden you blink and she's touched every team in the organization. And so she is the person who ultimately became our co-CEO. And that has been a huge resource to us. But for the first five years, it was like me and a handful of contractors. And then as we were going through this crazy growth spurt, which was in year four to five, we grew our central team from just me to 20 people in nine months. It was insanity, right? And our pool of talent was like maybe 50 people. And then all of a sudden we're 400. We had this spike.
Speaker: I leaned in hard and was working pretty insane hours for a minute. And then we brought on more support and got the rest of the team rolling, right? But it was really a wild journey to get there.
Speaker: It's incredible. What were the levers you pulled that you felt like really supercharged that growth? Was it when you brought in outside sales and marketing or was there actually something else that happened that just was a catalyst?
Speaker: I think it was a few things. One, it was like being deliberate about it, right? Like we were growing before that, but this like 10X in three years happened over that period of time. And I think part of it was for external circumstances, right? It was just after COVID and everybody was like, I don't want to hire people because I don't know what the landscape is going to look like, but also we have work that needs to get done. So this like fractional concept or contract-based talent that we provide was really...
Speaker: a useful thing for companies and organizations at that time. And so I think that helped us a lot. I think we were really deliberate around referrals because that was our biggest source of growth and just being real deliberate in terms of asking for referrals, creating referral programs where people would get rewarded for sending people our way, partnership programs, things like that. And then ultimately, yes, like hiring a team to focus on sales and marketing. And we hired an outside firm to do the marketing and also had some internal team focused on that. But like, you can't just expect demand to keep coming from nowhere, right? Like it has to come from somewhere. So either you're like finding more people through referrals, which has still always been our biggest source of new clients, or And it wasn't like we weren't online before that, but we didn't have a real strong strategy around our marketing dollars and where and how we were spending that and ideal customer profiles and all of the other things that go into that. So I think the combination of those things really supercharged our growth.
Speaker: And the moment that you decided to invest and get really deliberate about marketing strategy, sales strategy, just general go-to-market work, there was also maybe a helpful moment for your services in the marketplace and they just kind of compounded.
Speaker: You've done something really incredible that so many people want to do. yeah if someone came to you and they're a founder in their first year or two in that organic just getting started stage and they're like i want to do what you did, would you say to them?
Speaker: I mean, I think there's a few things. One is like business is built on relationships. I will beat that drum to a dying day. You can have the best marketing, but at the end of the day, your network, especially as you're starting out, is your best place that you're going to find business. And it isn't always your first circle of network. It's often the second or third circle out. But the more you can stay top of mind for the people in the closer circles, the more people will know about you, right? And just being present and being...
Speaker: a helpful connector, right? I would take every meeting that people asked me for in the beginning, which I probably would not advise to myself now if I were going to do it again.
Speaker: and a lot of those meetings were not beneficial to me per se They were someone else wanted something from me or or wanted to learn from me or whatnot. And I don't take all of the meetings people ask me for now. But at the time, it was a way of earning goodwill and getting to know people and just like planting seats everywhere you go. And will this person become a client or will they tell someone about you?
Speaker: Who knows? But you're putting good out there, being a resource for other people in the world. And then ultimately, i think that can be helpful to come back to you. So I think relationships, network, critical, very important to just leverage them and not be afraid to tell people what you're doing. i think some people worry about what I dont want to come off as salesy. I told our first digital marketing guy, I was like, I don't want to send email newsletters. They feel spammy. He's like, not optional. We're sending one. It can be resource-filled. It doesn't have to be spammy, but that's just happening. And I was like, oh, okay. Okay, great.
Speaker: So also surrounding yourself with people who know what they're doing, right? And you don't have to be able to hire full-time digital marketing person. I hired this guy to help me five or 10 hours a week. And that was a great starting point.
Speaker: And was it a little more opportunistic and less strategic? Yes, but I didn't have 10 or 20 grand to spend building out some big thing at that point. Right. And so we, we,
Speaker: over time, built out the big thing. But I think being scrappy and using contract-based talent, and it doesn't have to come from an agency like Vicheap. You can find people on Upwork or people through your network, right, to do these specific things that you need to do.
Speaker: But just pulling people in for... places that you need help or support, I think is important. And especially in this day and age, what I would say to people is be AI first as you think about things that need to get done. Could you create a system through which technology does it for you? Anything that's manual, anything that's repetitive, do you need to be doing that yourself? Do you need a human doing that? Or could you have the machines doing it and save lots of time down the road?
Speaker: Because I think The technology is there that a lot of it is happening. And if you're not taking advantage of it for better or worse, like my kids tell me all the time, I'm ruining the universe using AI. And I'm like, there is a responsible way to use ai and it's coming whether you like it or not. It's like saying, i don't want the steam engine. It's coming.
Speaker: Yeah. Thank you. I'm just enthralled with what you've done. i agree with so much of what you said, especially around business being relationship based. And is there anything that I didn't ask about that you feel like you might want to say?
Speaker: i think one of the things that I'm always trying to talk to people about is working less. I think in our culture, we work so much and especially entrepreneurs have this hustle culture and this mindset that you have to be working a zillion hours to get ahead. And people are often surprised to learn that on average, I have spent less than 20 hours a week running this business business, even when I was doing it.
Speaker: like all the time before I stepped back. And the ways that I did that was to really think about where is my zone of genius? Where should I be focusing and how do I get everything else off my plate?
Speaker: And what that has allowed me to do is have a full and vibrant life outside of work that now I lean in more on that side. But I think by thinking about where you need to focus and then what you can either automate through technology or delegate to other people on your team or contractors or whoever you have at your disposal,
Speaker: The more you will find space both to be strategic in your business. I think a lot of times we just run so fast, like we don't take a step back and say, okay, if I were going to start over, what would this look like? What changes can I make? What else? But also to just not work, right? We don't have to work 40 hours a week. We certainly don't have to work 80 hours a week. And I think we as a society could use more of that.
Speaker: Yeah. I love that. Thank you. yeah For folks who want to follow you, we'll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. We'll also put the V-Chief website in there. Is there anywhere else that we should send them?
Speaker: No, I think LinkedIn and our website are the best places to find us. Thank you so much, Maddie. I really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you. It's really great to be here. appreciate it.
