Be really clear

as a business

on why you exist

This week’s Up-Close interview is with Jim Rudall, Head of EMEA at Intuit Mailchimp and former Head of Revenue, EMEA at Shopify. In this interview, Jim dissects the importance for leaders to maintain a constant learning mindset and also have the ability to set a clear vision for their team. Additionally, Jim emphasises the important of knowing a company’s purpose during both the good and bad economic times.

What is your career highlight to date?

So I have thought long and hard about this, and what I have landed on is the following – it was three weeks after I founded my own company. At that time, I was working for a business that was on a good trajectory, but I had made the decision to quit my job and start my own business with a friend of mine. We did that, and it turned out to be a good idea. We were really excited, got some funding, and suddenly found ourselves in a rented office, questioning if we were in over our heads.

About three weeks later, we gained traction really quickly, everything went well, and we had to hire our first employee. I had never hired anyone before, but we found a guy called Pete. Fast forward about two years, and Pete was pretty much running the business.

We had grown substantially, employing around twenty-five to thirty people and hiring fresh graduates from university with great talent in sports and other areas. This whole experience was one of the most rewarding highlights of my career. Seeing Pete step into the role of COO felt like a series of lessons for all of us. We learned how to hire, how to coach, how to develop talent, and how to create environments for people to thrive. His success was the manifestation of our ability to do all that, and it was truly great and a proud moment.

“I had never hired anyone before, but we found a guy called Pete. Fast forward about two years, and Pete was pretty much running the business.”

In your experience, what are the top three attributes of a great digital leader?

I want to remove the word "digital” as I think that the attributes of a leader are common irrespective of where they sit. I believe the ability to set a really clear and ambitious, tangible vision and direction is crucial.

Everybody, I believe, who has a sense of purpose and believes in what they're doing needs to have some kind of "why", and they need to have that clear direction. They need to know the answers to questions like why are we doing this? Why is it important? Where does it lead us?

There is this idea of the spot on the wall, which gets to the heart of how you get everybody rallied around this thing that you're trying to achieve. How do you get everyone united and understanding what it means? The ability to set that inspirational vision is really important, no matter how you do it.

The second attribute I think leaders need is the ability to understand the environments and systems required to achieve that vision. I often talk about these two principles of clarity and competence. Clarity pertains to the vision - Where are we going? Why are we doing it? Competence concerns the environment you build, the systems you implement - everything needed to enable success. Understanding what is required in terms of people, systems, processes, tooling, communication, and all those elements is essential.

As for the third skill, I don't really think it's a skill, but rather the ability to learn all the time. It is very easy to feel like you've discovered the perfect playbook for success and take it with you everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, it's important to have playbooks and models, but the best leaders I've worked with are constantly re-examining what they know, seeking new inputs, and figuring out how to apply them. So the way I see it, the three skills or attributes are: clarity in setting the vision, understanding the necessary systems required, and the ability to keep learning and growing.

In your opinion, do you need different skill sets for different stages of company growth, for example from start-up all the way through to listed?

I believe you need the three attributes of leadership discussed above all the way through. Whether you're a startup, a scale-up, or listed business, I think there is a baseline set of skills that will ensure - as much as you can ensure - success in those endeavours.

I think you need to do different things clearly, and I think it's more about what you enjoy the most.

Take a capable person, for example, who can do all that is required to create a startup and to get it off the ground from scratch. What I observe is that they really enjoy what they do – there is an innate understanding of what gives them excitement, energy, and allows them to inspire. I believe you need to genuinely enjoy all of that – the challenges, the highs, and the lows.

If you're running a start-up, you need to truly enjoy the ridiculous pace of a start-up business where everything's coming at you, and you're trying to figure out which one of a billion problems you solve. When you are at the listed phase, you need to really enjoy the nuances of iterating, maintaining, evolving, and pivoting a big, hefty business. I'm sure there are some specific skills that are completely relevant, but I think it's more about what you derive value from, what you would enjoy most, as well as where you get your energy from that really matters.

This also might change during your career. You might really enjoy the startup phase at some stage of life, but find much more value in the big, listed business at another point, but the most important thing, in my mind, is you have to enjoy it and get your energy from it, whatever phase you are in.

Reflecting on the instability of the last three years, how has the current economic and market context impacted your strategy?

I look at the turmoil of the last three years in two distinct periods. Three years ago – during my time at Shopify - we had to figure out how to operate as a remote-first business, and that wildly changed how we thought about communication, leadership and taking care of our teams and people. It had a huge influence on learning to be a leader in a totally new and different way. This was also coupled though with a wildly successful time for us at Shopify. The lockdown during the pandemic, from a commercial perspective, drove tons of activity for us, so we also had to figure out how to take advantage of what was happening while focusing on the foundational aspects and ensuring that we didn't fall off a cliff when things inevitably changed again. This lockdown period hugely influenced how we thought about leading teams.

Then, moving into this second period, we have all come out of the pandemic and lockdown, and the market conditions have changed, along with other events that occurred over the last year. Leaders across all industries have had to think about how to set their company up to navigate the headwinds. In my strategy, I always think about long-term success - being a 100-year company - so as leaders, we've had to take the business and the teams on this journey of sustained success for us to continue to thrive. The work now is harder in these conditions, so much of this then becomes about communication, expectation setting, and your vision and direction. Your long-term mission is still there, but how you talk about what the next year means, and how you discuss the next two years, is different. Therefore, you've got to figure out what that communication looks like - how to tell stories that will inspire and engage in a different way.

Simultaneously, at Intuit Mailchimp, we also think a lot about our customers. These economic times have hit them in so many challenging ways, so we need to figure out how we, as a business, can rally around their challenges, which is ultimately what we're here to do. Essentially, the mission hasn’t changed at all as it is sort of irrespective of the market conditions, yet our approach to solving these problems is constantly being revisited.

What would your advice be for leaders leading through economic challenges for the first time?

I think this advice is true irrespective of good times or bad – it is about being really, really clear on why you exist as a business. Do you know the value you're adding, the problems you're solving, and the value you are bringing to your customers? Do you really understand that? If you do, then you have a much better chance of success, regardless of the market conditions. And when things get harder, remind yourself and pivot back to the reason you were there to begin with.

At Intuit Mailchimp, we talk about having our customers at the heart of our approach and everything we do. I think it is important for all organizations, irrespective of their size or the conditions they are in, to get crystal clear on why they exist in the first place. If they know that and can articulate it, then they can focus on the right things. It is very easy to get distracted and do tactical things that pull you away from your basic strategy or mission, so stay focused. In my network, I meet a lot of people who, when they face challenges or get pulled off track, it's because they're not quite clear on what it is they're here to do, so knowing your “why” is the most important thing.

“Over time, successful people pick up tons of different skills, which they then apply to the thing that makes them ultimately really successful, and that just really informs my thinking about where I'm spending my time. I encourage my team to do the same.”

What trends have you seen emerge in your sector in the last 12-24 months? Further, looking to 2025 and beyond, what do you believe the future of your sector looks like?

That's the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I would say the last 12 to 24 months has been about going back to the first principles of commerce and marketing. The lockdown was telling for any business that sold online and was also a driver for businesses that didn't go online. It caused a big paradigm shift in commerce that we are still seeing the effects of. Now that things get back to “normal” - whatever this normal is! - a lot of businesses have been presented with a completely different organization compared to the one they had before Covid lockdown. Therefore during this time – both at Shopify and Intuit Mailchimp - I have spoken to a lot of customers and it has taken me back to the underlying question of: What are the most important things we need to do? How do we make sure we are fit for purpose? How do we make sure we've got everything we need? This period has kickstarted re-examining the business, consolidating, and ensuring that you understand how you make money, ensuring that you understand where you don't make money and building your business around those principles.

On the back of this, we now see a lot of investment in the idea of true multi-channel. Many purely online businesses suddenly realized that when they came out of lockdown there was a gap in their strategy, so they have gone into physical shops. On the other hand, traditional bricks and mortar retailers who went online suddenly realized that it's a hugely successful channel in the right circumstances when complimented with physical retail. We saw this trend from retailers of recognising that commerce and marketing communications are about delivering a great brand and customer experience to people who want to buy and engage with you, so no longer think about it as two separate channels. There is this trend where a lot of businesses are trying to figure this out, and asking themselves: how do we create the best experience irrespective of channel, and how do we ensure we understand what really drives our business and makes it successful outside of these challenging times?

Despite the cost of living issues, increases in inflation, and all the challenges that consumers are under at the moment, consumers are still willing to pay more and engage with brands that speak directly to their values as a consumer, particularly around things like sustainability. When we project these things forward, we can see that organisations who continue to invest in a positive experience and a positive contribution to the ecosystem as a whole are very attractive to consumers. Consumer behaviour has definitely changed, and they are very value driven. Right now, those values are really anchoring in the idea of not being a net drag on the global ecosystem when buying things. This shift is really resonating, so I see this influencing the sector more and more in the coming years.

“we now see a lot of investment in the idea of true multi-channel. Many purely online businesses suddenly realized that when they came out of lockdown there was a gap in their strategy, so they have gone into physical shops”

I keep up to date in my world in a couple of ways. Firstly, I have a standard RSS feed for the highlights of what's going on. There are loads of places to go for high-level industry news and information, like Retail Week and Marketing Week are some standouts that come to mind. When it comes to learning in general, I try to be broad. Occasionally, I read specific leadership books. Recently, I read a couple, one of which is called "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink. There are great books out there about how to be a better leader or evolve your leadership philosophy, and I read them fairly regularly, but I try to be really broad most of the time. I try to move across many different industries, lots of different themes, and an array of sources. I like hearing interesting, clever people talking about things. I just read a book called "Range" by an author called David Epstein, for example, who talks at length about how important it is to try a lot of different things. Over time, successful people pick up tons of different skills, which they then apply to the thing that makes them ultimately really successful, and that just really informs my thinking about where I'm spending my time. I encourage my team to do the same.

I also listen to history podcasts, political broadcasts, sports broadcasts and business podcasts. The "Diamonds in the Detail" podcast I think is fantastic, but then I'll also spend my time just randomly taking recommendations. I'm reading a book right now called "What We Are in the Future" by William Macaskill. The book talks about the idea of long termism, which says that when you make decisions that have a seismic impact, you need to think about future generations as people in the same way as you think about people that exist today - they will be affected by the things that we do so we need to think of them not as some distant abstract concept, but as real people. And if you think about them as real people, then that influences the decisions that you make.