IAM1356 – Founder Helps Businesses Accelerate their Growth

Andrew Bartlow has 25 years of Human Resources and Talent Management experience at organizations across a wide spectrum of sizes, maturity stages, and industries.

He is the co-author of “Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High Growth Organizations,” has a master’s degree from the top program in his field, and has been CECP, SPHR, Six Sigma, and executive coaching certified.

Andrew leads Series B Consulting, which helps businesses articulate their people strategy and accelerate their growth while navigating rapid change. He also founded the People Leader Accelerator, which is the preeminent development program for startup HR leaders.

• CEO Story: With 25 years of HR experience in large corporate companies now has 3 companies everything in between involving Chief HR Officers as well as startups. Supporting HR to HR.
• Business Service: Focusing on helping founders and HR leaders to be more successful.
• Secret Sauce: The vast experience that can help other people navigate the challenges more gracefully.
• CEO Hack: Time blocking – calendar of getting things done. The importance vs the urgency concept.
• CEO Nugget: Treat your career like a marathon, it's a long road, focus on accumulating experience and that will allow you to accumulate wealth. The story of delayed gratification.
• CEO Defined: Partnership and co-leadership in collecting small and might teams to go far.

Website: www.seriesbconsulting.com , www.peopleleaderaccelerator.com

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/bartlow

Book: Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High Growth Organizations

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Transcription

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00:20 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:47 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Andrew Bartlow of series B consulting and people leader accelerator. Andrew, it's great to have you on the show.

00:58 – Andrew Bartlow

Gresham, really appreciate it.

01:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, appreciation is all coming from here. So what we're gonna do before we jump into the interview, of course, is to read a little bit more about Andrew so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's working on. Andrew has 25 years of human resource and talent management experience at organizations across a wide spectrum of sizes, maturity stages, and industries. He is the co-author of Scaling for Success, People Priorities for High-Growth Organizations.

He has a master's degree from the top program in his field and has been a CECP, SPHR, 6 Sigma, and executive coaching certified. Andrew leads series B consulting, which helps businesses articulate their people strategy and accelerate their growth while navigating rapid change. He has also founded the People Leader Accelerator, which is the preeminent development platform for startup HR leaders. Andrew, great to have you on the show. Your bio has me all choked up. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:53 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah, hey, really appreciate it. Yeah, it's a mouthful, isn't it?

01:56 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. You're doing so many phenomenal things. So what I wanted to do to try to kick everything off was just kind of rewind the clock, and hear a little bit more about how you guys started what I call your CEO story.

02:05 – Andrew Bartlow

Sure. Yeah, really appreciate it. So my personal journey as a founder and CEO, I 3 different businesses that I've started and I'm running currently. You mentioned Series B Consulting, which is my consulting advisory work where I work with private equity and venture capital companies directly across their portfolios. Second, I work with HR leaders as a mentor to them, helping them navigate their careers and their journeys to be more successful HR professionals and executives. That's a people leader accelerator. And then third, I have something going on semi-still at the moment where I'm creating a piece of performance management software.

As people are working remotely, we're trying to figure out who's working on what, are all aligned, and are doing the right things, and trying to make that a little easier for organizations. So it's all central to HR practices. And that's really my entire career, 25 years, as you mentioned, of human resources work inside giant companies like GE Wells Fargo, and Pepsi. And now as founder of my own little, you know, single shingles and everything in between from, you know, chief HR officer of a mid-cap public company and as well as involvement with a number of startups.

So yeah, I just, I just started businesses doing what I know best, which is working in the field of human resources and supporting other HR people. So I'd call it HR for HR nowadays. There you go. I absolutely love that. And the word that was kind of coming to mind is like kind of building a moat, so to speak, where you have a certain amount of excellence and it sounds like you've been able to kind of tackle it or help maybe even solve problems from different vantage points. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's fair. And boy walking in the people's shoes that you're trying to serve is priceless, right?

So I've been an HR professional for decades and I know what it's like. And so those folks that try to serve the community that have never done this, it's a little more challenging. And then working directly with CEOs and founders. I'm a CEO and founder myself, a couple of times over. And so just makes you better at what you're doing when you're serving people where you know what they're going through.

04:26 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like you have the opportunity to meet people where they are. Cause as you said, you're in the exact same shoes and have that exact same experience, which allows people to not feel like they're left on an island and not sure what to do, go left, go right, or up or down. You have that experience, and you can kind of guide them along the way, it sounds.

04:44 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah, Well, it shifts the way that you operate from theory to practice, from real understanding and empathy versus ideas that you have only read about. Yeah, so That's my focus is helping founders and helping HR leaders be more successful.

05:05 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I appreciate that, and great to hear about the different entities that you have and how you've been able to do that. But you said something that I almost wonder if that's part of the thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique. Is it that actual tangible experience that you have and the empathy and things that you talked about because you've gone through those experiences? Do you think that's part of your secret sauce and what's such a part of makes you unique?

05:25 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah, absolutely. I really think so. It's that been there, done that. I know what good looks like. I know what fast feels like. I've been a part of some wildly successful organizations and some true rocket-ship high-growth organizations. And just have enough laps around the track where I'm not just turning to one tool time and time again. You're able to understand the right context for the right intervention. I write sometimes about like, don't fall in love with forks. A fork can be great unless you're trying to eat soup.

Don't just walk into your next company and try to apply something that you did elsewhere or that you read about or learned about at your CEO dinner over the weekend. Just understand what works for you. And that's, I think my secret sauce is I've got a bunch of my own stubbed toes that I've accumulated over the years and can hopefully help other people navigate their challenges more gracefully than I did.

06:32 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And that's why I appreciate the work that you do. Obviously, it helps out those organizations, whether they're trying to scale, grow, or do whatever it might be. But it also, I imagine trickles down to the organizations when you're talking about that human aspect of people. It doesn't all, it doesn't, isn't just within the organization, it's their families and so many things that are kind of tied to the impact it sounds like that you're making.

06:53 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah, well, thank you. Yeah, really appreciate it. That's how I entered this work. You know, human resources was not something that a lot of people thought about when they went to undergrad. I got into this work growing up in East Peoria, Illinois, which at the time was the headquarters of Caterpillar, a Dow component. They had a three-year labor strike with the United Auto Workers, their union. And that is what brought to my attention the field of human resources, through labor negotiations and the effect that it had on the entire community.

Everybody worked for the company or knew somebody associated with it and that giant organization. And then the individuals, the workers and management, and boy, it just seemed like there's a lot of action, There's a lot of opportunity for impact. And so that's what drew me into the work was that your really meaningful experience being in the midst of that 3-year labor strike when I was in, I think it was high school, late high school kind of.

08:00 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, you know, you talked about your varied experiences. I can't imagine an entryway into that labor strike might be one of the best experiences in the sense that once you kind of get through that and you understand, you know, those things then they probably can set you up for anything that you have to kind of deal with.

08:17 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah, there was definitely the school of hard knocks early and throughout my career for sure.

08:22 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, well, I absolutely appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

08:35 – Andrew Bartlow

Oh, wow. Well, it may be somewhat widely known. I turn to 2 things that are helpful for me. One is time blocking. That is just absolutely essential for me to get anything done. I can't manage my mental list and post-it notes don't work for me. So when I have something to do, I put it on my calendar and maybe that's a week out, maybe that's the same day, but I make sure that it's calendared. And sometimes I move it, but at least it gives me a chance, at least it gives me a chance of getting it done. So time blocking is really valuable for me.

And then the other concept that I talk a lot about with people that I mentor and I use it myself is the Eisenhower matrix, the importance versus urgency concept. And so you know, that leads to time blocking where lots of people end up spending too much of their time working on whatever happens to be in front of them or whatever the most recent email is that popped in. And so I really try to spend as much time as I can on those things that are really important that may not have a hard deadline. And so that's helped me make a lot of progress with my businesses and be, I think, a little bit more successful.

09:51 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And a lot of times you see that the people that reach that success don't just happen upon it. They actually execute and have a plan and a strategy to get there. So absolutely love hearing a little bit behind the scenes related to that. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I usually say you might tell your favorite client or if you have to do a time machine, you might tell your business.

10:14 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah, I think this would be a bit of career advice. And boy, this was just super valuable to me early on. My first job right at grad school, I worked at Pepsi for John Beresford who went on to become head of HR at Pepsi and went on to leave HR and become the president of S&P Global. So, true senior executive giant company. I was always so anxious to move up and get that next promotion or do the next thing. And his bit of advice was to treat your career like a marathon. You know, it's a long road.

Focus early on on accumulating great experience and that'll allow you over time to accumulate wealth, to get paid for it. And If you have great experience and you've managed to sock away a few bucks, then all the choices become yours. I think that's a story of delayed gratification. Cal Newport writes about that in a number of different ways. You know, so good, they can't ignore you is his famous book. Yeah, and so I think that's a good reminder in today's age where people are jumping jobs so quickly and there's an opportunity to get a pay raise which could be meaningful, but boy like really work on accumulating foundational experience. And that sets you up really well.

11:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely love that. I love that you use the word foundational cause I was kind of envisioning a house where you have a strong foundation, you make sure that you are taking time and care to make sure those bricks on the foundation are put in place. And then you start to be able to reach higher and higher. But if you're jumping like you mentioned, whereas sometimes you were jumping from thing to thing to thing, you don't have that strong foundation. And while you might have that pay raise, eventually those things can come tumbling down, it sounds like.

12:07 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah. Hey, I wasn't sure that I wanted a career in HR at one point. I entered the field and was fortunate enough to be in a really strong grant program for it and some great organizations, but I was disappointed. I was like, Oh, people don't get it. There aren't a lot of practitioners that are doing this work the way that it seems like it could be best done. And, you know, I thought many times about switching out or moving into a project management role or moving into the operations.

Instead, I doubled down, built that foundation, accumulated the experience, And now my businesses are helping to elevate the profession. So my beef with the work was not enough people are doing it the way I thought it could be done. And now my business is helping people to upskill and be more competent and be more confident doing this type of work.

13:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that so much because the opportunity is in the frustration. A lot of times we kind of forget the solution that you can provide but by putting the time in being a master of your craft being an overnight success and putting in the 10-plus years of work, that allows you to not just be a practitioner or somebody that solves problems, but also a leader in the field and making a huge impact for organizations and people within them. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Andrew, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:42 – Andrew Bartlow

Oh, wow. Yeah, honestly, I don't actually use the title CEO for myself. If you look at my LinkedIn profile and I invite your listeners to link in with me, I use the terms co-founder and managing partner. I don't know who said it, But I connect so closely with the idea that if you want to go fast, go it alone. If you want to go far, go with others. And so even though I'm a founder and I'm probably the driving force and chief executor of lots of things that I'm working on. In every case, I'm working with others. And so I'm collecting a team and finding people that can be additive to whatever I'm working on. And so, you know, I, Chief executive officer, yep, you get stuff done. But boy, I really think about partnership and co-leadership and collecting a small and mighty team to go far.

14:43 – Gresham Harkless

Andrew, of course, appreciates that. And I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get out of you, get a copy of your book, and about all the awesome things that you're working on.

14:58 – Andrew Bartlow

Yeah, yeah, again, really appreciate it. So you mentioned my book, Columbia University Press published the middle of 2021. It's up for a number of different management book of the year awards, fingers crossed. It's called Scaling for Success. You can find that on Amazon or on the Columbia University Press website. Series B consulting, as you mentioned early on, is my single shingle advisory and consulting shop where I work with a number of different types of organizations and individuals.

One-on-one mentoring for HR leaders is my favorite thing that I do through that. But the area where I'm spending the most time lately is with PeopleLeader Accelerator. Check out a website by that name, www.peopleleaderaccelerator. And that's a development program for human resources professionals. We both have an executive MBA style like really intensive for half a year where you go through it and build a community. We also have some shorter sprints and some workbook playbook guides that again just help elevate the profession. So you'll really hope that your audience has an opportunity to check some of that out.

16:09 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information of course in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you. Truly appreciate you my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:18 – Andrew Bartlow

Okay. Thank you so much.

16:19 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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