Susannah George’s Most Valuable Perspective
MVP Episode 4 | A podcast by State of Social & Dear Storyteller
In this episode of MVP, Susannah George, founder and CEO of Urban List, joins Dear Storyteller GM Mike Drysdale to discuss the key takeaways from her speech at State of Social. Susannah shares the strategies she uses to build a strong, passionate team and explains how her decentralised workforce retains a collaborative and supportive culture.
During their conversation, Mike uncovers several of the ingredients that Susannah has used to create the 2021 Media Brand Of The Year, including a non-hierarchical structure, focus on creativity and content strategy, and consistent communication through the Slack app. They also delve into the wisdom of author Patrick Lencioni and how his ‘ideal team player’ framework transformed her leadership methodology.
And in a particularly insightful session of quickfire questions, Susannah reveals a surprising business person she would like to spend time with, gives a valuable book referral for fellow founders, and passionately explains why the news media bargaining code is not championing the future of independent media. It’s an episode filled with eloquent and deeply considered thoughts, and one that sheds light on the incredible success that can be achieved – both personally and within a company – by putting your employee experience first.
Read the transcript below or click to listen on your preferred streaming service.
Mike:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of MVP, The Marketer’s Most Valuable Perspective, recording here at Optus Stadium and State of Social 2022. This is a podcast on behalf of State of Social and Dear Storyteller. Joining me right now to deep dive into her most valuable perspectives, after a talk that was just inspiring, exciting, and full of insights, is none other than founder of the Urban List, Susannah George. Susannah, welcome to the show.
Susannah George:
Thanks, Mike.
Mike:
I want to kick this off by being a little hyperbolic. I just sat in that show and something that I noticed… That show. That’s kind of how it felt. Something that I noticed was the energy that you had when you walked on stage. There’s a great story that I remember about Whoopi Goldberg describing an old acting teacher that she once had, where she said, “She’s like a force of nature, but she’s not a typhoon. She’s more gentle than that. She’s like the summer coming.” And when you walked on that stage and you stood on stage and had that presence, I just felt the summer coming. I just felt like there was… I mean, maybe it was this dress, which is just such an incredible colour, but it was also just the calmness and the presence that you had to tell your story. And I just wanted to say thank you for doing that.
Susannah George:
That’s among the most generous and beautiful compliments I could have received. I’m so grateful. I love people, I love the opportunity to connect with people, and over time I’ve recognised that it’s kind of being willing to share your own guts and grit and ugliness and shadow that the greatest connections come. So, I’m really grateful for that compliment. That’s what I try to do. I try to be present. I try to connect with you in this moment that you are, and I’m glad I was able to bring some of that today-
Mike:
I think you definitely did.
Susannah George:
… and along with the summer, the Queensland summer.
Mike:
I wanted to touch on something else that’s obviously quite close to your heart. It’s a story that I’ve heard you tell a couple of times, but you are a fifth-generation entrepreneur, and you tell a story about your father, going to work with your father on Saturdays, dressing up in your school uniform because you felt like that was the formal and right thing to do, and sitting in on meetings and kind of learning by osmosis. I have a question for you to delve a little deeper into that.
Susannah George:
Sure.
Mike:
If there was somebody who did not grow up in an entrepreneurial family and they were to come into your office and sit on a few of your meetings at Urban List, what are some lessons that you hope that they would learn by osmosis, by sitting in with you?
Susannah George:
That’s interesting. The first thing that you would learn is that as an organisation we are very keen to understand the stories of our traditional custodians, and that is the very first thing that you would notice in coming to any meeting. As you would have heard, decentralised workforce. All of our meetings are remote, they’re all on screens, and somebody opens with an acknowledgement of country and shares what they’ve learned recently about the dialects or the place that they are currently in or from.
So that’s the first thing you would learn, that we are really engaged in learning the stories of our place and of our culture. And then from there you would move into what we call crew assemble. And here you would learn that we are an organisation truly about people and connecting with one another. So crew assemble is intended to bring us into that place for a moment together, and so it’s one minute and somebody prepares this crew assemble, which is all about getting to know one another or framing up our mindset for what’s to come.
So those are the first two things that you would learn by osmosis about our company and our organisation. I would like to think that you would also learn the power of curiosity and of teamwork. Earlier today, and I think it has merit, there were some disparaging comments around co-creation and collaboration and how lengthy that process can become. And also I think that that’s something that you would certainly learn the benefit of if you were sitting in our meetings. We are not an organisation that is particularly hierarchical. It doesn’t matter what your title is, it matters the quality of your idea and your willingness to learn. So I really hope that you would learn those things if you were sitting in a meeting with us.
Mike:
That’s amazing. They’re such great answers. I’m so glad I asked that question because that was a great answer. And I kind of want to dive into something that you said there. Being a decentralised workforce and talking about the importance of collaboration, I find those things to be almost at odds with each other a lot of the time, because one of the things that I love personally as an individual is a tap on the shoulder, is that, “Hey, what do you think of this? Can I just run something past you real quick?” And I feel like the resistance and the tension and the blocks to do that in a decentralised workforce, it’s just that much more of a commitment to reach out to someone and say, “Hey, can I get on a Zoom with you real quick?” Is that just a discipline that your team has learned or do you do it in a different way?
Susannah George:
I think it is our culture. I think it is the thread of the organisation because it has always been that way. So it’s less disciplined and more is. It’s not something that we’re trying to unlearn or relearn. It is just the culture of the organisation. We have certain norms that help make it more possible. So we are prolific users of Slack, and more specifically the little status emojis that you can set on your Slack profiles. So people understand what space you’re in within your workday. So we don’t have that interruptive culture, which I think actually happens more in the workplace when you’re tapped on the shoulder-
Mike:
Yes. Absolutely can be.
Susannah George:
… and you’re in the zone, or in flow. Nothing worse. Time waster. So we use them pretty prolifically. It’s always cameras on. Always, always cameras on. And if there are multiple people in the same place, it’s one laptop per person, one camera per person. So everyone is an equal participant, instead of having two or three big heads and then a sea of eight. So we have certain norms that we’ve found make it easier to collaborate and it’s about trying to mimic the human condition as much as we can or the face to face condition as much as we can.
Mike:
I love that you brought up Slack, because I just listened to the podcast that you did with the CMO Show back in 2015, and when you brought up Slack that you said, “This little startup that’s just kind of getting its legs called Slack,” and now it’s the behemoth that it is today. And it’s also a wonderful full circle moment for me, because before I was working with Dear Storyteller, I actually worked with Filtered Media.
Susannah George:
Did you really?
Mike:
Yeah. So this is a wonderful thing, to be interviewing you just like Mark Jones did back then, but that’s a side point. I want-
Susannah George:
Can I tell you a little story about how we use Slack?
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely.
Susannah George:
You can set channels in Slack, and seven of our channels are dedicated to our values. We have seven values. And so when things happen across the ground, we’re massive celebrators, celebrator of achievement and of gratitude. And so whenever something happens across the company, they are always shouted out in Slack under their channels. It sounds a little contrived. To see it in action is just so magical. It’s one of the best ways that I have seen in a remote workforce to make sure that those values are clear and present every day. So I just wanted to share that, about a way that we use Slack that might be useful for people.
Mike:
I think that’s incredible and I think it leans into something that is a kind of key perspective of one of the other speakers that spoke today, Adam Ferrier, who says, “BX before EX before CX.” So, brand experience before employee experience before customer experience. And we talked in an episode that people will have heard a little bit before this about how employee experience is often the missing thing in that, and when it’s fulfilled they become such great ambassadors of the brand. And it seems like you have a really fulfilled employee base that live and breed the brand, which again is an enormous asset for Urban List.
Susannah George:
Our employee proposition is right there in our brand proposition. Our brand proposition is good life, good company. So if you’re going to put it out there that overtly, you’d better be a good place to be.
Mike:
You spoke about the importance of team members being humble, hungry, and people smart. I just love the entire sort of segment that you did on people and I was like, “Oh, this blends right into one of the questions that I wanted to ask,” which is do you, in that process, have any key questions, key exercises, things that you look for to try to identify those early patterns, things where you can kind of pick someone ahead of time?
Susannah George:
Sure. So what you’re referencing there is the Ideal Team Player framework, and it was developed by Patrick Lencioni, so not my IP, but a beautiful piece of work. And we absolutely have it as part of our people process. So it’s built into our recruitment. So we do have questions that probe to what extent are these people humble, hungry, and people smart? We have it as part of our onboarding and we kind of reveal that these are the reasons that we were asking you these questions, and then we give them a self-guided questionnaire so that they can self-identify where they might have a little bit of scope for growth.
So it quantifies, it makes it a little bit more objective. We have something called You Learn. Twice a year. We do the refresher about how important this is within our culture. And we also, whenever we do a hot wash process after a project or an initiative, basically the postmortem to see what went well, what didn’t, when things didn’t… And we think that it had to do with teamwork. We often look to that model to figure out what went wrong in the context of that model.
So through the lens of humility, were people actively seeking their individual achievement or individual aspirations over the results of the team? On the hunger side, was this somebody who wasn’t really willing to step up and take on their responsibility or not truly accountable for the role that they were playing? And on the people smarts, did we create tension, did we create friction that was unnecessary by not being conscious enough of how our words and our behaviours were impacting others when things came under pressure? So we use it as a lens that’s trying to help identify how to do things better next time.
Mike:
I love that. And something that I’m picking up with here, and it sort of is threaded through everything that you’ve talked to me about, is that none of this is paying lip service to these ideas. There’s processes. There’s a kind of netted web of things that are put in place. And it’s not just one question, it’s a series of questions. It’s a self-guided questionnaire. And so, like I think a few people have said today, and this is so true in marketing in general, there is no silver bullet, but it’s really, if you are committed to this as an organisation, then what are you willing to put in place to ensure that that happens?
Susannah George:
I once read that CEOs should not in fact call themselves that, but rather CROs, and the R is reminding, so the chief reminding officer.
Mike:
I’ve not heard that before. That’s so good.
Susannah George:
So this espouser of the vision and the culture and the values, and of course, our people process is very, very much tied up in that, making sure that we’re really living it and that we’ve got the structures in place that even though it’s a people process, we do need to human proof it to some extent so that there’s longevity and legacy.
Mike:
I love that. I’m going to give you another compliment here. You appear to me to be a woman of great taste, and I think that in business and in marketing, having great taste is so important. And you’ve talked in the past about being in the business of knowing what your customers want three months before they do, because so often that’s the new cycle that you work to. You try to stay ahead of the game. If this feels like something that you identify with, how have you learned to cultivate your taste over your lifetime and career? And also, in some ways lead the idea of what people like us do things like this in the context of the Urban List, which you probably recognise as a Seth Godin-ism, “People like us do things like this.” Who are people like us in Urban List? That must have been something that you kind of cultivated over a long period of time.
Susannah George:
In the early days we tried to do some work around if Urban List were a person, who would that person be? And we always came up short. We never really nailed it. And the reason I’m going there is because one of the early personas was very much about that socially savvy, very connected best friend who always dresses the part and knows the right places to go, incredibly articulate and witty and funny, and you’d love to hate them except they give you that big warm hug every time you see them. So that was sort of the descriptor that we had in mind. But to what extent do I lead that, do I guide that? I suppose that every founder has their fingerprints all over the brand persona of their company and that’s certainly true in ours.
That said, I don’t create a single piece of our editorial content. I trust our editorial team implicitly, and within their content whips each week there is a whole section around trends. Some of that is influenced around social trends and anecdotal trends and some of it is really tied up in our content strategy. So to your point earlier, we’re trying to identify things three months out, and often that is about safeguarding our future traffic. So it’s trying to diversify our traffic source away from social and making sure that our content is appearing in those first one or two search results for the terms that will be trending in three months time, which means we’re starting to work on things for… What are we working on right now? Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That content will already be alive on site and it will continue to get updated weekly until that time.
Mike:
And feed search filters and things like that.
Susannah George:
All of that.
Mike:
Performance. I love that. Let’s jump into some of our quick fire questions. We’re asking this to all of the speakers here today. I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say. Question number one is, where do you go to learn about business and marketing?
Susannah George:
I am part of an organisation called YPO, Young Presidents Organisation, and more specifically, I have a wonderful forum who are very conscious of the impact of being a business leader on self and on family. So that network and the resonance for me about how I am growing as an individual and who I am being in this world and showing up as in all of those spheres has been game changing in terms of my learning. I’m a voracious reader. Absolutely love reading. At any given time I’ll be reading about three books and they’re always on referral from somebody else.
Mike:
Could you give a book referral to our audience today?
Susannah George:
If you are a founder and you have not yet read Traction by Gino Wickman, you absolutely must. Equally, if you’ve not read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni… He’s sort of my poster boy for business fables, if you will.
Mike:
Love that.
Susannah George:
I would highly encourage you to read those two.
Mike:
Awesome. And I know this one will hit home for you, but what is a small brand you love and why?
Susannah George:
I’m going to answer in the first thing that came to mind, which is Normal, which is actually about, it’s a brand that is sex toys, but of normalising and creating a much more inclusive environment for sex positive conversation. So I love the name, Normal, making it part of vernacular. I love that they’ve taken a very content heavy approach to product in that they’re very engaged in their communities having a much more positive and fulfilling sexual experience and doing away with performance anxiety and all of these things that I think come with growing up. And I think that’s incredibly brave for a brand. And it’s also been built to be not particularly ageist, so I think particularly brave through that lens.
Mike:
Breaking through all sorts of barriers. That’s very cool. If you could spend four hours with any marketer or business person in the world, who would you choose and why?
Susannah George:
My dad. He is my greatest mentor. He has this uncanny and painful quality of being able to identify exactly the problem that I am facing when I have been struggling with it for years. And ultimately, there is no person under the sun who is more invested in me being successful as a person, not as a business person, but as a person, than him. My dad.
Mike:
Parents have a great way of just being able to see straight through you, don’t they? My mum is exactly the same way. Is there an emerging customer behaviour you think will be highly influential over the next decade?
Susannah George:
Yes. I think that many consumers are going to do battle with to what extent will they lean into their values over a cost equation. So we’re clearly in an inflationary environment, even more exposed being in a place like Australia where our population is quite small. And I think that the younger generations who are mortified, horrified, by what’s been created by older generations will really need to do battle with to what extent can they really put their values first, when that might mean real sacrifice.
Mike:
That is such a good answer. I fricking love that answer. Okay, we’ve got two more questions to go. Is there a major public opinion that recently flipped where you felt marketing or communications played a crucial role?
Susannah George:
Yeah. It hasn’t flipped, but it’s still on the radar, and I think that that’s relevant too. So I’m going to talk about the news media bargaining code, and I think that there was a popularist opinion that Facebook had been called to task and had channelled $200 million now into the journalism industry. I think the story that was not told, and some are still sharing that story and enough people are listening, is that it was unfortunately to the detriment of digital first publishers, who were not invited to the table, were not given the opportunity to be part of the conversation, and as a result are at a significant disadvantage. So in essence, the news media bargaining code, however well intentioned, has handed an even louder megaphone to the biggest voices instead of really championing the future of independent media.
Mike:
Such an important conversation. I really hope that it kicks off again in earnest and continues to move in a positive direction. Last question, and it’s a bit of a fun one. When you think of the term “prized possession” what’s the first branded thing that comes to mind that you own? And follow up question while you think about it, do you remember the specific ad or piece of marketing that may have convinced you to buy it?
Susannah George:
I’m remembering a summer spent working in a quarry at the weighbridge, weighing gravel. I grew up in the country. Summer jobs were slim pickings. And I did this so that I could save up the $300 to buy my first pair of Doc Martins, which were brown suede. Questionable choice.
Mike:
Sure. Not the standard.
Susannah George:
I don’t know. You made a comment about good taste earlier. Must have evolved over time. I do not remember, however, the marketing. I suspect it was the very early days of influencer marketing and the influence probably was a cooler, bigger kid in the neighbourhood.
Mike:
I love that. Susannah George, it has been so good to chat to you today, and thank you for your generosity both here and on stage, your vulnerability and your expertise and your insight. It’s been unreal. Thank you for joining us.
Susannah George:
Thank you for having me, Mike.
Mike:
That is all for this episode of MVP, the Marketer’s Most Valuable Podcast for State of Social and Dear Storyteller. We hope you enjoyed the show. Give us a rating and review on iTunes and Spotify, and we’ll be back with more episodes soon. Thanks so much.
