Peer Effect
Best way to scale? Your peers have the answers.
This is the podcast for scaleup founders looking for insightful, actionable wisdom from some of the best operators around. Each week we’ll explore one secret that other founders and experts are using right now and how to implement it.
It’s practical wisdom to build the company AND life you want. Hosted by renowned founder coach and advisor James Johnson.
You’ve survived to £1m, now let’s scale to £10m+.
Peer Effect
Turning Adversity into Success - with Mariane Bekker of Upward
Mariane is the Founder of Upward, a boutique recruitment agency based in Silicon Valley and specialising in Software Engineering roles in San Francisco, New York, and remotely. She launched it after the learnings of growing her previous engineering team as a CTO to 50 people.
Today she takes us back to March 2022.
At the time, she was working 100 hours a week, taking care of her young kids, and having no work-life balance.
To add to this pressure, Mariane received an angry email from an influential woman in tech, who felt ghosted and who said will no longer recommend the services the company was providing.
However, Mariane used this incident as an opportunity to reflect and realign her priorities. She decided to stick to her vision and make client satisfaction her top priority.
In this episode we discuss,
- The importance of client satisfaction
- How crucial delivering top-notch service is to the exponential growth of a company
- The importance of purpose in entrepreneurship.
Mariane stresses the importance of providing the best service to clients, maintaining a good reputation, and remembering one’s ‘North Star’.
Tune in to this eye-opening episode on resilience and finding a purpose. Learn from Mariane’s inspiring journey and discover how she came around to finding her purpose in business.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
So I'm delighted to welcome to show today Marianne Becker. She's the founder of Upward. In her last role she managed to scale the engineering team to 50 people and do creating a diverse team as well, and in her first year at Upward she got to a million over a million dollars in revenue. Welcome, Marianne.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I'm very excited to be here.
Speaker 1:So everything's going well today. We're jumping in the coaching time machine. When are we going back to?
Speaker 2:We're going back to March 13, 2022. I was on my computer and I received a very angry email from an influential woman in tech, telling me that we had ghosted her, she hasn't heard back from us in two weeks and that she no longer wants us to help her find a role and she's not going to recommend our services to any woman in the tech industry. She also told us in the same email that she no longer wants us to contact her and to delete all of her data from our system.
Speaker 1:Wow, that must have been quite the moment. How did that feel to receive that?
Speaker 2:So at that moment my heart started beating really fast. I got very anxious and I felt hopeless and defeated. I was already working 80 to 100 hours a week while being a single mom of two young kids, and I had given it my all. I felt hopeless and defeated. I had started a poor recruiting with the vision to help advance women in tech, and here was a woman in the community that we were trying to support being very angry at us and no longer wanted to work with us. But worst, we had a detractor and that could be very risky for our reputation in the industry.
Speaker 1:And how long into the business were you at this stage?
Speaker 2:At that stage. It's been a couple of months that I was exploring that idea, but I have been working on it nonstop for two months, not having even one day off, without any social life. Literally, I was just working and taking care of my kids.
Speaker 1:Wow, it almost sounds like, it felt like it was kind of, in some ways, the end, almost from the way you're describing it.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It felt like the end of my business, but also all those doubts started creeping in. I knew that, as you said, in my previous job I was director of engineering, so I wasn't in recruitment. So then I started wondering whether entrepreneurship and working in an industry that I've never worked before was the right move for me.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like in your previous role you got to a very senior position or a big team. You clean what you're doing, but even then doubt was creeping in.
Speaker 2:And another thing also is that I was betting on this business to be able to support my two kids and at that point my youngest one. He had a disability and he required constant treatment which cost a lot of money. It wasn't only doubts about whether I can really succeed in a different industry, but also doubt whether I can financially support my kids for the next few years. At that point it was the first time in a very long time that I just closed my computer and I was feeling so hopeless that I couldn't even work anymore for the next few days. So I took some time off to really reflect on what is next for me.
Speaker 1:Okay, so sorry to set the scene. So you've got just other business. It's kind of a passion project slash, a belief that there's something real business in there to build. You've shown you can do it in your previous job, where you've scaled a diverse team of tech people to 50 people plus. But you stepped away from a good salary security industry you know little about and you have this moment of just shock.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And you know I started thinking okay, what should I do next? Should I just stop starting to make this business grow and try to find a job? Or should I continue going with all this uncertainty and all those doubts in my head?
Speaker 2:But, I think really what guided my decision at that moment was the power of why. So I started this business to help advance women in tech and I knew that with upward recruiting I could have a bigger impact on making the tech industry more inclusive than going back to a nine to five job. So at that moment I said to myself all right, I'm going to keep going, I'm going to continue giving it my all. This is just a small step back, I can do it. So, even though I had all those doubts in my mind, I think I also realized that I really care about making a difference in the tech industry and I want to give it my all.
Speaker 1:It's quite interesting that that change. So you've basically two days before you've shut your computer. You can't work, you're taking some time off. What helped give you that? Help reconnect you to your vision.
Speaker 2:I was trying to map out the next six months of my life and there are two roads that I could take. One would be to just shut down my business, apply for a job and then get a director of engineering job at a company and I could still have an impact by trying to hire more women engineers within my company. But then I just impact maybe at most 50 women and then I help one company become more diverse. And then I said, okay, well, I did that in the past and it was still not enough to move the needle in the tech industry. So that's if I continue doing that, although it'll have a small impact, it's not the impact that I was looking to bring. And then the other path was okay, what if I try to make upward recruiting work and instead of just impacting one company, I can work with dozens of company in the next year and help change the career growth for hundreds of women within a short period of time.
Speaker 2:And I think really what gave me my clarity is the experience that I lived For the last 15 years. I was the only woman in the room in a male dominated field and there are a lot of challenges that I had to go through. So I knew that I wanted to make tech a place that is more welcoming for female engineers so they can strive and then help out the next generation. So I think my motivation really comes from my lived experience, the challenges that I faced and, wanting it wanted to make an impact in making the tech industry more inclusive.
Speaker 1:Even the time when the financial realities of it not working were quite significant, your mission was strong enough to help you move past that.
Speaker 2:Correct. And also when I stopped working for the next few days I spent a lot of time with my kids and I have two young boys that I love so much and I wanted to give them a good example of perseverance and resiliency. And I said to myself even though my kids are too young to understand, I want to be able, in a couple of years, to go back and tell them hey, I took this risk and I was able to do that, and I was able to persevere and create a company that has a lasting impact, even though there were some challenging times. So I wanted to also set a good example for them. So that really motivated me to keep on going.
Speaker 1:And, in terms of your lived experience, what were the things that triggered this? It sounds like it's a real passion and a real cause.
Speaker 2:So I could go back to the beginning of my period after engineering and college and forget being the only woman in the room. I was the only woman in the entire building for four plus years. What that means is that every time that I had a class and then I would go and ask a teacher for help, they would look at me in a different way that they would look at my male colleagues. And even I had multiple math teacher. What are you doing here? What is that for you mind as men? So you're not going to succeed in it.
Speaker 2:Everybody was trying to put out in my mind that because I was a woman, I could not succeed as much as my male colleagues. So that was one experience. And then at that point I kept going because I loved coding and technology and I knew that this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. And then, when I started working in tech, I even had one of my manager told me you are getting harassed by your male colleague because you are wearing earrings and nice clothes at work. If you did not want to get harassed, why are you still wearing? Why are you wearing nice earrings? Why are you putting makeup and that kind of has been my experience for many, many years.
Speaker 2:Not only that, even when I was a director of engineering and when I was managing multiple teams, I would go in a meeting room and even though there would be probably like two or three level of direct report, my boss would still ask me to take meetings and volunteer for women activities. And all of these things add up to just one. You're not focusing on the task that really help grow your career as a woman engineer, but also is, in a way, defeating. I guess being a woman in tech taught me resiliency that helped me at that moment when I was feeling defeated, to not give up and continue.
Speaker 1:I think that's very powerful. I think everyone has doubts. I think everyone's smart has doubts. Not everyone has doubts, but it sounds like you've really developed a skill in dealing with them.
Speaker 2:Exactly exactly. And a lot of now entrepreneurs tell me okay, no, I'm starting this idea of what is the secret to success, and I really believe that it's the power of why. Why are you doing the things that you are doing. If you have a strong mission and you know what you want to accomplish, then, even when doubts creep in and even when there are challenging times ahead, you can continue persevering and not give up, because it's easy to give up in those moments and say, hey, I'm going to go to the option that is less risky. But knowing your why will help you not only grow your business but continue the past that you think you should be on.
Speaker 1:And so you found your, why young, and it's very powerful, and you've really lived it. How do you have gone about discovering it, or how did you go about discovering it? Was there a particular moment that really brought it alive for you?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so, I think.
Speaker 2:When I was 16, I worked at a women gym and I spent probably 70 to 80% of my time talking to other women and learning more about them, and I met so many women out there that were struggling to support themselves, to support their family, and were very unhappy with the way their life kind of turned out.
Speaker 2:But more than that, they had to stay in relationship that didn't serve them, didn't serve them right, and I think at that moment I realized that continuing to learn and continuing growing in your career ensures that for the rest of your life, you don't need to depend on anyone else, which means that you have the power to make your own decisions and you don't have to stay in situations that are disadvantaged to you.
Speaker 2:So, after talking to so many women that they didn't have the financial circumstances to be able to make their own decision and to live a happy life and to support their family, I think it really built my drive to ensure that I will never be in a situation like that, that for the rest of my life I can depend on myself and be in an industry where I can support myself financially, and I also met so many women around me that ended up basically sacrificing their success to make sure that they get married and they have kids, because that's kind of the number one goal. We are taught in my culture that they couldn't strive as much as they wanted to.
Speaker 1:Because it feels like in that moment there's potentially a conflict because you've got there's a strive for financial dependence, so they don't know anyone else, which should no-transcript in the short term is served better by a CTO rolled in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And then you've got a very and you can sort of you can still help your mission by, say, on a small scale, by growing the first team, or you can risk your financial independence. While really dialing up the mission side, you come to crunch point. The mission wins, mission still wins.
Speaker 2:Mention still wins.
Speaker 1:How does that then guide you over the next six months to respond to this? So you've launched, you've got this piece of really bad feedback, you go no, no, I am going to. This is the right thing for me. My mission is clear. How do you respond?
Speaker 2:That mission that guided me for 15 years was so important to me, I took a step back from the business and I tried to figure out what can I do now to make sure that this does not happen again. And I think I learned one of the biggest lessons that entrepreneurs learn, which is client satisfaction should be your number one priority. And at that point, once I said, ok, it is very important that we provide the best service possible so we never get that email again. I try to identify a way to update or change our processes to make sure that we don't ghost the candidates anymore. Then I had to reflect back on OK, well, how do I do that now? I don't have that much experience in the recruitment industry, but I know how to leverage technology to make myself productive and my team productive.
Speaker 2:So then we ended up automating everything that we could automate by leveraging all different tools that were available to entrepreneurs online, and because of that because we basically were able to streamline the entire candidate process every week, we were able to find and interview 50 to 100 women a week. The result of that is that we started filling every role that we take on within four to five weeks, when the industry average was three months to six months. Because then, because of the company, became so happy that we were able to fill those positions but not only fill this position with great engineers, but also help them build a diverse team they started to not only refer us to their founder friends but also to their investors. Once the investors found us, they started referring us to all their portfolio companies and we grew exponentially from there and we were able to achieve a million dollars in revenue within a year and a half of operations.
Speaker 2:So actually this I'm glad I didn't give up.
Speaker 1:Are you glad you received the email?
Speaker 2:I'm so glad that I received this email. Because of this email, we were able to streamline our process and scale and ensure that we provide the best candidate experience, which gave us all these amazing referral and reputation in the industry. So that email was a blessing in disguise.
Speaker 1:Have you ever spoken to that lady since?
Speaker 2:I haven't. So after I received the email from her, I actually went to Amazon and I bought this $100 gift card and I send it over to her apologizing. But she never answered. So I think at that point we just lost her and I knew there was no coming back from it. But I'm hoping, now that in-person events are happening again, I'm hoping to meet her in one of them and explain to her the situation and just thank her for the feedback that she provided.
Speaker 1:It sounds like if she'd ghosted you in return, it wouldn't have triggered anything. But if you hadn't emailed you back and explained how she felt, if she'd just not dealt with you again, it would have been a massive missed opportunity.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. If she hadn't emailed me, I think I would just continue being busy. It's very easy as a founder to find things that keep you busy and easily work 80 to 100 hours a week without focusing on your core values and trying to create a great experience for your client. So not only did she trigger all, she made us more efficient we were able to scale because of her but also she taught me, I think, the most important lesson that you can learn, which is the client comes first and you should make sure to always provide the best experience possible.
Speaker 1:It sounds like she shocks you out of that. So at the moment your head was down, you're in the business, you're working 80 to 100 hours just kind of doing everything that you could, and she almost shocks you into a helicopter of view of your own business.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I had to step back for a few days and just re-evaluate my priorities and everything that we were doing, so I'm so thankful that she shocked me in order to arrive to the different learnings that I gained from her email.
Speaker 1:And when you took that step back so clearly, you were doing a lot pre that email 80 to 100 hours. You're working hard. When you got this new perspective, how much of that that you were previously doing did you just stop?
Speaker 2:So the next few days, once I decided I'm not going to give up and this is my why and I'm going to continue going, I spent the next few days not changing anything that I've been doing. I just wrote down every single task that I would do during the day. Then I was able to categorize everything by order of importance and found a few tasks that I could delegate. So I hired a few contractors that I found online and gave them that, which really freed up my time to try to think about this business more strategically, and that's when I mapped out the customer journey. That's when I researched automation tools and then had time to implement them successfully.
Speaker 1:I think it could be quite comforting working those 80 to 100 hours. In some way, it feels like you couldn't be doing any more. You're doing everything that could be expected of you, you're applying to emails, but without really taking that step back to go. Is this actually getting me closer to where I need to get to?
Speaker 2:Exactly. It's so easy to just spend time doing menial tasks or tasks that don't provide high value, especially when you're in it, without having more strategic vision of where you want to take your company. Even now, if I wanted, I could spend 80 to 90 hours just responding to emails, but I know now that that might not be the best use of my time. So it's really important to prioritize what is the most important thing for your business and making sure that you're not getting distracted by tasks that can take a lot of time but do not provide the highest value and the highest return on investment.
Speaker 1:It's something I work my coaching class on, this idea that our instinctive response is to go faster and do more, but often that's not. The right response actually is to pause, take a step back and actually to go slower and do less and just make sure you're doing the right things and you're doing them properly.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and in my case, because I had two young kids, I could not possibly have spent more hours on doing menial tasks and working more. I had to figure out what I can accomplish with the same amount of hours that I was spending. But also, another thing is that because I was spending 80 to 100 hours a week and I was barely sleeping, my mind was not as clear as it could have been. And I think if I had continued down that path, within a few weeks I would have been burnt out, and maybe this burnout that I felt would have made the doubts that I already felt about the business even stronger and made me stop what I'm doing. Right, because at that point I could have been hey, you know, I've been working 80 to 100 hours a week, I'm not sleeping, I'm not happy. I could go and get a nine to five stable job and still, you know, have a good life with that job.
Speaker 1:It's really interesting when you look back and like reframe what actually happened. I mean because, like certain, so today, how many hours a week do you try and work?
Speaker 2:So today I work 30 to 40 hours a week. I no longer put in 80 hours a week. I was able to hire the right talent and they're doing an awesome job in a leading parts of the business. That was taking so much of my time and now I'm able to spend even more time with my kids and I finally have a social life. So the last few weeks I've been going to different networking events and meeting so many founders and women in tech, and I just feel much happier now than when I was working 80 to 100 hours a week.
Speaker 1:And assuming you're not getting one of these emails a week, how do you manage to keep that distance?
Speaker 2:I think I figured out what are the my priorities for the business, right Like the top two, three things that will make this business successful, which is having a great candidate experience, having happy clients and making sure that we're always sending high quality engineers to my company. Once I had those three goals very clearly defined, it helped me kind of prioritize and focus on what I want to spend my time on and what can bring the highest return to the business. And another thing also is because we were able to make a million dollar in revenue. This allowed me to expand my team and hire the right talent. So now I feel like I'm in a good place where I can just focus on the priorities and I have people behind me that can support our business and continue growing it.
Speaker 1:Having taken time to sort of look back at this moment, what's the main thing that struck you today?
Speaker 2:You could easily be spending 80, 100 hours a week working on your business and not provide the highest value to it, and I think one of the biggest lessons that I learned is that the client is everything right. Your reputation can make or break your business. If I had to go back and started again, instead of just focusing on 100 things at a time, I would just focus on providing the best service that I can to the candidates and to the companies that I work with. So that was a big lesson that I learned. And I think the second lesson that I learned is in those moments of doubt, when you're feeling like your business is over, that's it, there is no. You know your reputation will be ruined. You're going to shut down to just remember why you started the business, what is your North Star, and keep going in times of difficulty, and I really believe that that's what sets successful entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs who gave up is the power of their why that's been absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for sharing.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.
Speaker 3:As you heard today, coaching opens up a whole range of insights and areas to explore. If you have a potential moment to revisit and the podcast, or just want to learn more about coaching, book in for a 30 minute chat with me at peer-effectscom.
