Behind the CXO Title: Emily Kahn Reflects on a Year of Growth and Change

Tune in to this episode of Bigger. Stronger. Faster. and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform to receive updates on our latest content.

In this episode, Emily Kahn reflects on her first year with Shore Capital's CXO Fellows Program. She shares her transition from being a consultant to a private equity-backed executive, explaining the reasons behind her career shift. Emily emphasizes the importance of building relationships and the support she received from the CXO alumni network. She also discusses how her personal entrepreneurial venture has deepened her appreciation for the dedication and hard work Shore founders put into their companies.

Transcript

Introduction

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Bigger. Stronger. Faster. the podcast exploring how Shore Capital Partners brings billion dollar resources to the microcap space. This episode is part of a series in which we interview participants in Shore Capital's CXO Fellows Program about their experiences as a young executive in the microcap space and the role the CXO program has played in their growth and development.

In this episode, I talk with Emily Kahn of Hueman People Solutions. Emily talks about her desire to develop what she calls her operational toolkit as she stepped out of consulting and into the CXO Fellows Program. She talks about the importance of adapting to constant change when a company is learning and growing at the pace of private equity.

Emily also offers some important personal lessons learned. About building credibility as a young executive and learning to balance the necessity of developing good process with embracing what she calls intentional inefficiency.

Welcome, Emily. Thanks for being here.

Emily Kahn: Thank you so much for having me.

Anderson Williams: To get us started, will you just introduce yourself and say what you do and where you do it?

Emily Kahn: I am Emily Kahn. I'm Chief of Staff at Hueman People Solutions.

Anderson Williams: And what does Hueman do?

Emily Kahn: Hueman is a recruitment process outsourcing company, which most people aren't familiar with what that means. So I can describe that. We are in the category of business process outsourcing. For us, it is total talent solutions.

So a company who may not have expertise in recruiting or other Elements on the talent side, we will step in to support them, potentially do their whole house recruiting. We do everything from the earliest of candidate sourcing all the way up through onboarding. So we do all of your sort of pre-someone really starting and working day to day in the organization type of recruiting.

Anderson Williams: And how long have you been there?

Emily Kahn: I started on October of 23.

Anderson Williams: So tell me a little bit about what you did before. Were you in this HR sort of outsourcing space before, or how did you get into this?

Emily Kahn: Not at all. I, like most CXO's came directly out of business school, but before business school. I was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, so I worked in what we called our pipe practice, which is principal investors and private equity.

So I did a lot of strategic diligence, a fair amount of M&A strategy, other things revolving in that corporate development area. And I also did a fair amount of work with healthcare clients, particularly in the payer and provider space. Which actually ended up being a great fit for Hueman and for Shore, because this is a private equity partnership and most of our clients are in the healthcare space, particularly large hospital systems.

So it ended up being a great match, but it was particularly on the talent side, not at all, something I had done before.

Anderson Williams: I'm curious, based on your consulting experience with private equity, what's different or what's the same now that you're inside of private equity versus being in the consulting role?

Emily Kahn: I had thought that I had done diligence before, like I knew what diligence was.

Diligence was a very intense three week process where you looked at the overall industry and potentially a specific target and got some learning about that. That is not, as it turns out, what Diligence is. That is one small slice of the Diligence pie, which I'm now much clearer on.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, a little bit more intense on the inside, on that side.

Emily Kahn: A little bit longer, a few more things involved.

Choose the Program

Anderson Williams: Yeah. So when you were looking at the CXO Program, what other things were you considering? And why did this one in particular surface as the right opportunity for you?

Emily Kahn: When I went to business school, my thought for what I would do after was to go into early stage investing, be on the investing side, particularly for impact oriented investments in the education technology space.

So in addition to being an MBA, I'm also a master's of education and my undergraduate was also an education degree. It's a longtime passion area for me and when I was doing some of that private equity work, it was the first time that I'd been exposed to the concept of impact investing. And at the time I heard about it, I was like, this is everything I came here looking for.

Because when I started at BCG, the thought was there might be an opportunity for faster larger impact through public private partnership. And I had gotten a lot of public sector understanding through my education, but not a lot of private sector. And so I went to BCG to learn like what are the levers in private sector that are causing businesses to make decisions.

And then I saw this fusion of the two where it was like, wow, we are places that invest money to have a bigger impact and we do well, and do good at the same time. So I went in with that thought and I spent my first year thinking that was what I was going to do and I talked to a lot of VC firms and it turned out that wasn't the right fit for me.

It wasn't the type of impact I was looking for and also the types of businesses given the area that I wanted to specialize in within education. I wasn't finding exactly the type of investment thesis that I wanted. And so I had a little bit of a panic close to the end of first year where I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.

And I have always known, and I think this may come up later, I've always known that answering the question, who do I want to be when I grow up? Or what do I want to do? Is not a question I'm going to be able to answer. And so it reformulated for me as, what do I want to do next? And I realized and ended up being fortunate enough to spend a little bit of time digging in on this during my summer between first and second year that what I wanted to do next was The thing that I loved most was build my operational toolkit.

I had spent a lot of time building the strategic toolkit and I felt like I had a lot of tools to work with there and a good understanding of how to approach certain types of problems with a really linear element of problem solving. But then we hand the problem over and it's up to the operators to try to solve through that problem or actually execute on it.

And I wanted to learn, one, did I like operating? Did I want to be that close? And if I was going to be close, how close? You know, how much chaos was too much chaos, um, in this realm of early stage or small businesses? So I had some time over that summer to work with a couple startups. And discovered I was interested in building out that toolkit a little bit more.

And then that was a good next for me. Even if I ultimately wanted to take a different path, having both the strategic toolkit and the operating toolkit would put a lot in that toolbox.

Anderson Williams: So how do you feel about Chaos now?

Emily Kahn: It is exactly what I expected. And one thing I've learned is from a variety of experiences that I think Chaos reflects the organization more than the size.

So in many ways, I, you know, I've worked at large companies that have some chaos and small companies that are relatively, you know, have their shoes tied, you know, nicely in bows, but there's still definitely elements of that chaos and you get used to it. You just have to feel comfortable in the acknowledgement of constant newness, change.

And I think that's something actually that, All of the operators who we work with, or at least the experience that I've had, that they are also trying to get used to that comfort. They're moving and changing at a pace that they haven't necessarily changed at before. And so you aren't necessarily alone in the feeling of chaos.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. And I think that chaos reflects growth and change and creativity and a lot of things that I think we typically go immediately negative to that. And I think that back to the spirit of an early stage company, it's to be expected. It's part of the story because there's so much to figure out. There's so much change.

There's so much growth. There's new people. There's, you know, you have to embrace that as a matter of fact, not as something that's inherently wrong. Right?

Emily Kahn: And change or whatever the new next thing is, isn't necessarily bad, it's just different. And so it can also be good and there's some mourning of the loss that you have that comes from losing what it was when it was small or in the format that it was at one moment, but it also is great in a new format.

Anderson Williams: So I'm curious to go back to what you were describing before, just to put some color to when you talk about an operational toolkit and wanting to develop that. Based on your time with Hueman and just sort of lessons learned in that process. Give us a sense for anybody listening that what do you mean by that?

When you say you wanted to develop it and now, of course, you've have developed some of it. What do you mean by operational toolkit?

Emily Kahn: It's a little nebulous, but at the end of the day, it's the difference between saying we need 500 customers and figuring out how you're going to get that 500 customers. An example from prior to this role was I, actually, I needed 500 on a list.

I needed to put together a list of 500 potential customers. And I sent out a bunch of emails. And I thought to myself, I know lots of people. This is going to be easy. Like, I just have to get some percentage of those people back. And I think my list topped out at around 30 people.

And the difference between checking the item on the list off that was, I contacted a bunch of people. So, supposedly my list, you know, will fill itself and actually ending up with those people on the list is really vast. And so, what is it that needs to happen in between to actually get the outcome you're looking for?

The gap here from being an advisor, being on the strategic side, is I could tell you what direction it is that we need to go. And I could tell you how we could probably get there, but when we start to put those things in place and the emails don't come back and sign up on the list, what do you do? And that's the piece that I really wanted to be able to feel comfortable in pivoting, in changing the plan, in coming up with new plans.

Partly, this is a difference between convergent and divergent thinking. I'm much more comfortable with the convergent thinking, and particularly in a small business or growth minded business. You need to know when to do the divergent, then when to pull it back, and then when to widen it back out again.

And so, it was putting some of those pieces together.

Anderson Williams: And by the way, you're doing that now differently from consulting with your company and your team, who aren't going to be gone in three weeks, but are going to be your company and your team moving forward.

Talk a little bit about that difference in terms of not only getting in operationally and learning those tools, but recognizing the difference in those relationships that you're developing and cultivating and sustaining from within the operator's position.

Emily Kahn: So it's funny that you bring that up because about four or five months in, I sent a text message to my CEO and said, "This is now the longest I have ever worked on one team in a professional setting", because I think my longest project in my prior role was four months and then I had switched to a new team.

And while there might have been some consistencies between them, like largely on a day to day basis, working with different people and for someone, I think he's been at the company for 22 years. Mind blowing to him, which I get, and it is different. In a lot of ways, it's the same, because you do need to figure out how to work together.

But you can't brush things off as, "Well, I'll just survive the next couple of weeks if you don't agree." Or if you find you have more trouble communicating. People have different communication styles. Certain ideas don't get across. Certain projects don't go the way you want them to. You are going to have to do it again.

And so as opposed to saying like, "uh, that was unpleasant, but I'll move on." It's, "uh, that was unpleasant. And how do I solve this for going forward?" This is actually now an imperative to make sure that like, it's better the next time around.

Finding Your Voice

Anderson Williams: And how do you think about that? Being a CXO, I assume you are at least one of the youngest executives or leaders in the room.

How do you navigate that when you're young, you're new to the company, and you're having a conversation with someone who's helped build the company over 20 years? How do you find your voice and your perspective in that so that you have the opportunity to develop those long term strategic partnerships with those other leaders?

Emily Kahn: Well, I'll say this, which has helped me from the beginning. One is my team has been incredibly welcoming and receptive from the outset. So I couldn't have been luckier in terms of them being open to change to new processes, to an additional voice with other ideas. And, and I think they would tell you the story, it comes up several times of me attending their board meeting before I had officially joined and asking some questions during the board meeting truly as an observer.

I have never been shy when it comes to speaking up or sharing ideas. So at least from the voicing the ideas, that hasn't been as much of my challenge. But in fairness, where that it then comes down to is credibility. And even if you voice it, is it something that is just spoken into the air or does it really become part of a thread of the fabric of the conversation?

And like I said, I've had some great opportunities with them and they've been incredibly thoughtful about incorporating my voice. And I think comes with listening first and speaking second, with showing how and why you have that thought process. And I will say the BCG experience helped me here in the like, "I have reached this conclusion and I think we should go in this direction, but let me lead you through why I got there."

Being able to share the reasoning often really helps ground in why your opinion might be different from the ones that have been shared. Or if it's the same, but it is being weighed differently from others, why it has that weight. The other piece is over time, credibility looks different with different executives.

And so while credibility with some on my team may have come more easily because our thinking style is similar, or the way we operate is similar, or even the way we communicate, which goes a long way. When you communicate differently. Similarly with someone, it helps significantly in translating those ideas across and building the relationship and the credibility.

When they're different, I've found having other voices on the team who do trust you as a way of showing additional support. So if you haven't built the credibility yet with someone on the team. If there are other members of that team who they trust, and you are able to build bridges and relationships to them in a way that you aren't to the main team member, that can go a long way in helping to bridge that through.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, and I think it's important to note that that's not just a magic wand of trust and that credibility that happens because you walked in the door. And because you earned it with one doesn't mean you earned it with everybody. Like, that seems like an important process to be kind of eyes wide open as a young executive in a room like that or in a team like that.

Emily Kahn: I think it's important to understand when you're entering a new team, and this is something that because I was only on teams for short periods of time, I got practice at over and over again. When you're entering a new team, understanding what it is that each person on the team cares about and being able to start to build a relationship with that is your grounding.

The Real Experience

Anderson Williams: Yeah, I love that. So is there an example of something you've done, something you've experienced that really captures what it's like in that first year of being a CXO for anyone who has any misconceptions about the glory or the glamour of becoming a young executive and a microcap private equity startup, rapid growth, all the things, is there an experience or an anecdote that captures what it's like to be in your first year in this role?

Emily Kahn: I'm not sure if this captures the year or my particular experience more, but I think on my second day on the job, the whole team was up in Chicago doing our strategic planning, and we had an additional set of time on the following day after the full strategic planning had finished for us to just work together as a team.

And we started a little bit later, so we had been starting at a very prompt 8:00 AM with the team here with Michael's team. And the next day we started at 9:00 and people kind of wandered in and we were chatting and we were chatting and stories were happening and I don't know what was happening. And I also didn't know what we were talking about for the day.

And this is how they've operated. They are masters of divergent thinking. And it's, I think, credit to the creativity and the avenues that they've explored before, but we're sitting in the room and it's, Like 9:20 and I decided to get up and there was one of those big easels that had the sticky paper on it So I ripped off a piece of sticky paper and I started writing like 9:00 to 9:30 friendship time 9:30 to 10:00 like talk about XYZ 10:00 to 11:00 and the room goes quiet. I don't remember who said this, but I'm, I think someone said like, "Emily's trying to put a cap on our friendship time."

And the reason I tell this story is because it was really emblematic of, I think that I came in with the instructions and the thought process around implementing process. And you know, a lot of CXOs are told one of the things that a lot of these companies need as they scale is more processes for being able to repeat the same type of action over and over again and consistency.

And it also shows how much the culture and these relationships were already there. And here I am as a new person, like, hey, I'm putting an agenda on the wall. And I have put in a lot of processes over place. And fortunately, we've met a very happy medium on, you know, there are days when we will go wildly off track and someone will say, "Emily, get us back on track."

So it definitely, that's part of my role. But it also was a really good learning for me. And I learned over the next couple of months because Hueman is known for their culture. It was one of the reasons why I picked them in the first place and was fortunate that they picked me as well, but they just have a phenomenally strong culture.

And I am a very efficiency driven person. It's part of my profile. I really like to tick things off the list. And the list as in all of these microcap companies, and honestly, kind of everywhere all the time is ever growing and you can always add more things to the list. And I have learned from working with this team how important what I'm gonna call intentional inefficiency is because of what it allows for the relationships between people.

That's where the culture gets created and my inclination is to just bulldoze right through it. And so while we do need to get on track and while we, you know, do need to have plans and agendas and processes. Having the space for not being efficient all the time is what makes the place special. And that has been a really great learning for me so far.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. Your first book can be titled, Intentional Inefficiency. I like that. Yeah. Sounds like a bestseller.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Anderson Williams: So I read in your LinkedIn profile that you're also the founder of a company.

Emily Kahn: This is true.

Anderson Williams: Tell me a little bit about that and then a little bit about any insight that that experience has provided for being in the microcap space and joining and even though the company has been around a long time, it's in a new era of rapid growth, acquisition, and so forth.

Just tell me a little bit about that experience and the company and sort of how that's informed you.

Emily Kahn: The company I started is called Chaku Apparel. It is an anime apparel company specifically for female fans. And I started it as one of the summer projects between first and second year at Darden, and it started as a passion project.

It was something that I realized through talking with some other friends who watch anime that purchasing anime apparel was difficult for a variety of reasons. There's a lot of small vendors. And so finding what you wanted is like combing through a haystack. And that also a lot of it is like unisex t-shirts.

And that wasn't necessarily what I wanted to incorporate into my, you know, daily apparel. And so I started with this idea that there was probably an opportunity for that. And I spent the last two years putting those pieces in place. And it definitely informed the way I have thought about these early stage companies.

I think the main way is the amount of respect and empathy I have for the amount of work it takes to go from zero. And as much work as we're putting in right now to go from, you know, what we were at purchase to our exit at five years, getting from zero to where they are now, the number of things that you don't think that you have to do, talk about rolling your sleeves up

Anderson Williams: Well, I love hearing you say that, and I've had a couple of early stage startup experiences, and I don't think anybody who sort of likes to read about the cult of entrepreneurship realizes what it means to start from zero. No momentum, no customers, no product, no team. And it's one of the things that I really appreciated about coming to Shore is the respect for our founders' legacies that did start these businesses, and why we have been recognized, and rightfully so, as being founder friendly, this was part of the real draw to me from here, because you have to understand that deeply, or you just gloss right over it, and that's the heart of it.

Emily Kahn: It was one of the things that resonated with me so strongly, and had such a ring of truth about it, when Justin tells his story about how Shore Capital was founded. Having done some myself, you know, listening to them talk about being in like somebody's apartment or like all the meetings that they had and they didn't know whether they were going to get a company to be able to buy or not.

That's, yep, that's what it feels like. And so it definitely resonates in terms of what that feels like and that understanding is there.

Anderson Williams: And it goes back to something you were describing before about that list of 500 customers, right?

Emily Kahn: That was actually from this experience.

Anderson Williams: Was it?

Emily Kahn: Yeah, it was, it was from Chaku.

Anderson Williams: Because I've listened to hundreds of pitches from entrepreneurs and everybody's going to talk to you about their next market or their next state or their next, you know, how they're going to scale, but nobody tells you how they're going to get customer number one or customer number five or customer number 10.

But here's the next market and here's our total addressable market and all this big, glossy, sexy stuff. And it's like, but how are you going to get the first one?

Emily Kahn: It is a very hard customer to get customer number one.

Anderson Williams: Yeah.

Emily Kahn: Particularly if you reach outside of the mom, dad and best friends circle.

Anderson Williams: That's right. So the customer number one who's not blood related.

Emily Kahn: That's right.

Expedited Learning

Anderson Williams: So talk a little bit about your cohort, your group of CXOs and how being a part of that program and having your other fellows around you has helped expedite your learning or helped support you in challenging times. Just say a little bit about what this group has meant to your first year in this role.

Emily Kahn: I'm glad you asked that because it is one of the single most important parts of this experience for me. so much. And actually this goes to the last piece of how did building Chaku have an impact on this, on my CXO experience is you have to spend a lot of time saying, yeah, sure, I can do that. And knowing fully well that you have no idea what that is, but that you are smart and capable and we'll go figure it out.

But half the time going and figuring out is asking somebody who knows how to do it. And within the CXO cohort, both the class that came in with me and also. I have the benefit of having several years now ahead of me. There's a lot of experience there, and I can tell you I've tapped into that a lot since we've gotten here, both for materials that people have already created, for ways that they've approached problems.

And when you can see it across multiple different places, you're like, okay, this is a good way to approach this. It's worked for a number of people. Or, okay, I see five different ways for approaching this. What do I think will work for us in this situation? But it gives you a starting place as opposed to starting from zero.

And outside of that, this is a hard job. It is not always easy. It ebbs and flows. There are moments that are phenomenal, and there are moments that are a little bit lighter, and then there are moments that are really intense. And I would say particularly in my first several months, and I was fairly stressed out in the first several months, and talking to several of the older CXOs who'd come in earlier really helped me reset and come with a different mindset on give it the first six months.

Like, you have to remember this is a new job. And for me, it's been a while since I've had to reacclimate to a new job, a new set of people, a new set of culture, norms, and you'll get your feet under you, you will learn this, and also here's a bunch of practical advice. And also just, nope, you're not nuts, we all cried for the first six months, and that's, that's pretty normal.

And so having the group of people who are both going through it with you simultaneously, to talk to, to empathize with, And also having a group of people who has been through it, who's seen the other side, to be able to give advice, help problem solve, but also to be able to say, this is the course that this takes.

I couldn't be more grateful for having that as the backdrop. I think this would be a lot harder without having that resource.

Anderson Williams: I'm curious, as you look at this first year, what do you wish you had known coming in that you've learned in this first year that might be useful to somebody else to learn on your behalf?

Emily Kahn: I'm not sure if this is something that I didn't know coming in, but it was something that was absolutely reinforced, which is that the experience is entirely about the people. The comfort that you have on the team and the way that you interact with the team to this whole point of this is not a quick project that you're working on and then you can bounce out.

You're there for the long haul. And so how are you when you're looking at that company initially, how are you Creating those relationships, how does that feel like it's going to fit for you? In a little bit of the same way as, you know, when you, it's a little like dating, honestly. You know, what do you guys have in common?

What do you have that's different? What can you learn from each other? Is there growth for everybody involved? Do you respect each other out of the gate? You know, what is that dynamic like?

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes, specifically highlighting the CXO Fellows Program and Fellows Participants, at www.shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the Andrew Malone podcast studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams, editing by Real Audiobooks, recording, sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galoop of Real Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Emily Kahn.

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.