By April Uchitel, CEO and Founder of THE BOARD

Every Thursday, THE BOARD brings you industry insights from our Members to your inbox.

As the year closes, we’re looking back at one of the most electric chapters in THE BOARD’s history. Every Thursday in 2025, our members:  fractional executives, founders, operators, and industry-shaping experts delivered BOARD BRIEFINGS that hit a nerve across LinkedIn and inside companies of every size.

These weren’t think pieces.
They were playbooks.
Signals.
Warnings.
And sometimes, love letters to the future of work, culture, and leadership.

We're sharing the standout themes and most-read insights of the year the ones leaders bookmarked, forwarded, debated, and brought into the boardroom.

And we’re just getting started.

THE BIG THEMES THAT DEFINED 2025. WORK IS BEING REWRITTEN. IN REAL TIME. 

From business continuity that centers human life (Erin Erenberg & Elizabeth Coppola) to people leverage as capital allocation (Faheem Siddiqi) to the rise of fractional work (Stephanie Dobbs Brown), 2025 made one thing clear:

The traditional model is done. Flexibility, expertise, and continuity aren’t perks — they’re survival tools.

BRAND BUILDING SHIFTED FROM REACH TO RESONANCE.

2025 was the year marketers admitted what the data already knew: the Big 3 were breaking down. Amy Kapolnek, Lacey Norton, Leslie Holmes, Jennifer Ritter, and others showed us:

• Substack, Reddit, and OnlyFans are the new frontiers

• Community > content

• Resonance is the real driver of conversion

• AI is rewriting GTM in ways no funnel can contain (Tina Eskridge)

The takeaway?
Brands that matter aren’t chasing algorithms, they’re choosing connections..

FASHION FACED IT’S RECKONING. 

With global turbulence, tariffs, and collapsing predictability, Briana Swords and Sydney Badger gave fashion leaders the clarity they needed:

• “Made in America” myths

• Dynamic pricing and micro-markets

• Anti-fragile portfolios

• Why fashion now requires fractional navigation more than ever
  

In short: The old fashion playbook isn’t broken. It’s irrelevant.

LEADERSHIP GOT REAL. AND HUMAN. 

From communication gaps that derail M&A (Faye McCray) to arts institutions becoming undeniable (Christopher Ritter) to internal culture shaping external brand (Your Brand Is a Mirror), our experts called out what leaders often avoid:

You can’t build trust, scale culture, or lead through chaos if you don’t first tell the truth.

THE RISE OF INTELLIGENCE DRIVEN CREATIVITY.

AI didn’t replace creativity, It reframed it.
Our members showed how:

• Authenticity beats automation (Kevin Hamilton)

• Product education drives long-term growth (Arif Isikgun)

• Language systems scale clarity (Stevie Wilson)

• Covert Circularity moves around resistance (Karuna Scheinfeld)

2025 proved that smart creativity is the new competitive edge.

OUR 2025 GREATEST HITS.

• Business Continuity: The Risks You’re Not Ready For: Erenberg & Coppola

• The Big 3 Are Broken: Kapolnek & Norton

• How to Build a High-Performance Culture: Siddiqi

• AI Just Rewrote the GTM Playbook: Eskridge

• Why Fashion Brands Need Expert Navigation (Parts I & II): Swords

• Marketing Through Chaos: Bleers & Weiss

• Resonance, Not Reach: Holmes & Ritter

• The Traditional Work Model Is Over: Dobbs Brown

• Your Inauthentic AI Content Will Destroy Your Company: Hamilton

• The Unsexy Work That Builds Iconic Brands: Wilson

• The Spinach in the Smoothie: Covert Circularity: Scheinfeld

• Fitness, Feelings & Finding Your People: Minkove

A year’s worth of expertise distilled into weekly briefings that changed how leaders think, hire, build, navigate, and grow.

AND NOW… 2026

If 2025 was the year leaders woke up,
2026 will be the year they act.

We’re expanding.
We’re elevating voices.
We’re doubling down on the topics executives are demanding:

• Fractional innovation

• Brand acceleration

• Cultural intelligence

• The future of work

• Product strategy

• Finance, governance, and risk

• Founder operating systems

• AI-native leadership

And yes, every Thursday, we’ll be right here.

Thank you for reading, sharing, saving, and bringing these insights back to your teams.

We’re honored to be in your inbox.

Here’s to a bold year ahead.
See you in January.

THE BOARD

Over the holidays, explore a library of 2025 BOARD BRIEFINGS, a curated collection of the ideas that moved leaders forward this year.

THE BOARD sits uniquely at the intersection of Brand, Business, and Culture. 1:1 advisory, project-based experts, fractional leadership, and curated DREAM TEAMS help you move faster, smarter, and with far less risk. Let’s talk!

Fractional talent is the future, and THE BOARD is where it lives info@theboard.community

By Allison Henry Aver, Founder and Creative Director of Letter A and Katie Irving, Founder of Moonshot

This article first ran in THE BOARD BRIEFING, our weekly LinkedIn newsletter for founders, leaders, and operators building in the new economy.

In a recent LinkedIn live episode BOARD experts Allison Henry Aver, Founder and Creative Director of Letter A and Katie Irving, Founder of Moonshot, a fashion concept studio specializing in product innovation and strategy got together to discuss Brand vs Product strategy. As partners that collaborate across clients in apparel, beauty, and consumer goods, they shared one theme that comes up again and again:

Brand strategy and product strategy can’t live in separate rooms anymore. The brands winning today are the ones that build them together.

Katie put it perfectly when she described her work:
“I help brands figure out what to make, why it matters, and how it fits into people’s lives.”

My work focuses on the identity, voice, stories, and visual world that bring that product to life. When these two pieces aren’t in sync, brands drift—fast.

Today, we’re sharing a real example of why this alignment matters more than ever.

WHEN BRAND AND PRODUCT BREAK APART

Katie and I recently partnered on a heritage, family-run jewelry brand looking to scale from wholesale to global DTC. They came to me asking for a rebrand. They wanted to “look like” another successful jewelry brand they admired.

But it quickly became clear that the problem wasn’t visual identity.It was clarity.

Their product was high-quality, beautiful, ethically made—yet interchangeable with countless others in an oversaturated category. They couldn’t articulate what made them different. They had many lanes they could play in, yet no real clarity about which lane they should own.

I knew this wasn’t a design problem. It was a product strategy problem.

So I brought in Katie.

WHERE PRODUCT STRATEGY CHANGES THE STORY

Within one conversation, Katie surfaced what had been missing: a clear, differentiated product point of view rooted in what the founder had actually built his career on.

This wasn’t about trends or industry benchmarks. It was about owning the real product story that already existed—but hadn’t been articulated.

Once that foundation was set:

• The founder finally understood his lane in the market

• He stopped chasing competitors and reacting to trends

• He gained confidence in creative, assortment, and messaging decisions

From there, my team could finally build an identity system tethered to something real:
distinctive symbolism, language, visual cues, and storytelling that all tied back to a product POV with substance.

That alignment changed everything.
The brand now shows up with clarity, cohesion, and purpose—not generic jewelry messaging.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BRAND IS THE WEAK LINK 

From the product side, Katie sees the consequences immediately:

• Product loses direction

• Teams chase competitor moves instead of customer needs

• Trend-chasing replaces a long-term vision

• Stores and sites feel like collections of random “key items”

• Photography and signage stop telling a cohesive story

In short?
Customers feel it. And they check out.

Product needs the brand to set guardrails, emotion, and context. Brand needs the product to root the vision in reality.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW MORE THAN EVER 

The last five years have pushed brands to the edge:

• Performance marketing overshadowed storytelling

• Rapid trend cycles created chaotic product decisions

• Shifts in consumer behavior left brands scrambling to stay relevant

• Many brands drifted away from their original identity

We’re in a moment of identity crisis across categories. But this is also a moment of enormous opportunity.In a crowded, fatigued market, the brands that will break through are the ones with:

• Clarity

• Consistency

• A differentiated product story

• Brand storytelling that actually means something

This is why companies like Puma—and earlier, Gap—are formally merging brand and product functions under unified leadership. The market is recognizing what many of us in the industry have felt for years:

Brand and product are not separate disciplines. They’re one continuous system.

SO WHICH COMES FIRST: BRAND OR PRODUCT? 

The truth?

Neither. They must be built together.

When product and brand strategy work in tandem from day one, the result is a brand with:

• Cohesion

• Confidence

• A clear point of view

• Stronger creative and stronger product decisions

• A foundation that scales

This partnership is where the real magic—and real growth—happens.

Katie and I now say the quiet part out loud: We don’t want to do this work without each other.

If this topic resonates—or if you're navigating misalignment between your brand story and your product direction—reach out to either of us. It's one of our favorite subjects and core to the work we do with founders and teams across the industry.

Brand and product are no longer separate.Your customers don’t experience them that way.
Your teams shouldn’t build them that way. 

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going…

THE BOARD sits uniquely at the intersection of Brand, Business, and Culture. 1:1 advisory, project-based experts, fractional leadership, and curated DREAM TEAMS help you move faster, smarter, and with far less risk. Let’s talk!

Fractional talent is the future, and THE BOARD is where it lives info@theboard.community

By Caroline Rothwell Gerstein, CMO and Brand Architect. 

This article first ran in THE BOARD BRIEFING, our weekly LinkedIn newsletter for founders, leaders, and operators building in the new economy.

I took my first equity-only board advisor role six months ago. An AI-tech startup. No cash. Just equity. My initial reaction? “This better be worth it.”

Here’s what happened: minimal time commitment, opened doors to three new client contracts, introduced me to impressive founders and investors, and fundamentally shifted how I think about compensation.

(Note: Under NDA, so can’t share names or specifics—but the lessons are worth discussing.)

That experience made me realize: we are all still figuring this out. Fractionals, brands, board members—everyone’s navigating compensation structures in real-time, often without comparing notes or learning from each other’s wins and losses.

So let’s talk about it.

THE MARKET IS SHIFTING.

Fractional executive rates jumped from $176 to $213 per hour this year  —a significant climb that reflects how much the market has matured. Monthly retainers are averaging close to $10K across roles. On the surface, it looks like we’ve arrived.

But here’s the question nobody’s asking: what happens when the market contracts

Economic uncertainty is real. Funding environments have tightened. The early-stage startups who’ve been our best clients are the most vulnerable when capital dries up. Fractionals who’ve built pure-cash models might find themselves squeezed when budgets contract. Meanwhile, those who’ve negotiated equity alongside cash have built in both downside protection and upside potential.

THE STORIES THAT MATTER.

Let me share what’s actually working in the market right now.

A SaaS startup brought on a fractional CTO with equity and milestone-based vesting. Six months later, they’d launched their MVP ahead of schedule and closed a major investment round . The equity component wasn’t just compensation—it was the reason the CTO stayed through the late nights and the inevitable pivots. They had skin in the game.

Another company used a hybrid approach, blending cash with equity that vested over four years. Two years in, they’d hit 300% revenue growth . The fractional executive didn’t just execute—they became a true partner because their success was tied to the company’s success.

These aren’t unicorn stories. These are real engagements with practical structures that created alignment between what the fractional needed and what the company could afford.

FOR BRANDS: WHY THIS MATTERS.

If you’re a founder or in-house executive reading this, here’s what you need to understand: offering equity to fractionals isn’t about being cheap. It’s about creating partnerships that actually work.

When equity arrangements align the executive’s success with the company’s growth , everything changes. Fractionals with equity think in quarters and years, not weeks and months. They make introductions to their network because your win is their win. They stay through the messy middle when most vendors would have moved on.

This is especially true in fashion and consumer brands where reputation and relationships drive everything. A fractional CMO with equity will leverage their personal brand to elevate yours in ways a pure-cash vendor simply won’t. They become ambassadors, not service providers.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED (AND LOST) ALONG THE WAY.

Years ago, I worked with a brand that eventually raised significant funding and exited. My compensation structure was straightforward: monthly cash retainer. Good money at the time. I felt fairly paid.

What I didn’t negotiate: any participation in the enterprise value I helped build. When they brought on a full-time executive after their raise, that person got equity. At exit, that equity was worth more than everything I’d made across multiple years of strategic work.

I learned the hard way that if you’re building value, you should participate in that value.

But that AI-tech board role taught me something equally important: equity-only deals can work brilliantly when the time commitment is minimal and the strategic value is high. Board advisory, key introductions, strategic positioning—these don’t necessarily need cash attached if the equity is meaningful and the company has a real path to exit.

It’s never been about cash versus equity. It’s about structuring the right mix for what you’re actually building together.

THE REAL QUESTIONS TO ASK.

For early-stage companies, equity stakes typically range from half a percent to one and a half percent, with milestone-based vesting that protects both sides. Hybrid models work best when you’re committing real hours—base cash keeps the lights on while equity captures upside.

Growth-stage companies offer smaller equity percentages but higher cash, which makes sense given their maturity. The key is understanding acceleration clauses—what happens if they get acquired before your equity fully vests?

Late-stage and PE-backed companies rarely offer straight equity to fractionals, but performance bonuses tied to exit multiples can be substantial. The structure matters less than the alignment.

And market conditions change everything. When funding flows freely, cash retainers climb. When capital tightens, equity becomes the currency of choice. The fractionals who can move fluidly between models survive market shifts.

WHAT WE SHOULD ALL BE DOING.

Start every compensation conversation with alignment, not rates. Ask: “How should we structure this so we’re both invested in the same outcome?” Not “what’s your budget” or “what do you charge.”

Have the equity conversation early, not at renewal. Understand the company’s cap table and whether there’s a realistic path to liquidity. Get everything documented—strike prices, vesting schedules, acceleration clauses. This isn’t the place to wing it.

For brands, remember that fractionals with equity behave fundamentally differently than vendors. That shift in behavior and commitment is worth the dilution, especially in relationship-driven industries where trust and reputation compound over time.

The fractional executive market has exploded to over half a million professionals, doubling in just two years. As this space matures, compensation structures will become more sophisticated, more varied, and hopefully, more equitable for everyone involved.

WHERE THIS GOES.

The future of fractional work isn’t just about flexibility and freedom. It’s about building equity—literal equity—in the companies we’re helping scale.

That AI-tech board role that started with just equity and a handshake? It’s become one of my most valuable professional relationships. Not because of what it paid, but because of what it opened up and who it connected me to.

Sometimes the best deals aren’t about maximizing cash today. They’re about structuring for the long game and betting on alignment over certainty.

Start having these conversations. Share what’s working. Learn from what isn’t.

Because we’re all figuring this out together.

THE BOARD sits uniquely at the intersection of Brand, Business, and Culture. 1:1 advisory, project-based experts, fractional leadership, and curated DREAM TEAMS help you move faster, smarter, and with far less risk. Let’s talk!

Fractional talent is the future, and THE BOARD is where it lives info@theboard.community

By Cynthia Spitalny, Marketing Executive | Growth & Brand Strategist | AI & Digital Innovation | 2 Strategic Exits & 1 IPO | ex-epocrates/athenahealth |Award-winning marketers

This article first ran in THE BOARD BRIEFING, our weekly LinkedIn newsletter for founders, leaders, and operators building in the new economy.

HOW WOMEN ARE REBUILDING SYSTEMS, STARTING WITH HEALTHCARE

For centuries, medicine has treated women as smaller men, with a shrink-it-and-pink-it mentality. Now, a new generation of women isn’t waiting to be included—they’re rebuilding a broken system from the inside out.

For most of modern history, women have had to ask permission to participate.

In 1848, the first women’s rights convention convened in Seneca Falls—but women still couldn’t own property independently in most U.S. states. It wasn’t until 1974 with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a full century plus later, that a woman could open a credit card or secure a mortgage without a male co-signer.

And as recently as 1993, women were still excluded from much of clinical research—until the NIH Revitalization Act finally required federally funded trials to include them.

That means the solutions driving modern medicine have been built, tested, and validated primarily on men, with a male POV, and then funded by other men.

Even lifestyle products meant for women often weren’t created by them. The first commercial tampon, patented in 1931 by Dr. Earle Haas, was designed by a man. So was the birth control pill, co-developed by Gregory Pincus and John Rock. The modern speculum—still used in nearly every gynecological exam—dates back to a model created in the 1840s by J. Marion Sims, a physician who infamously experimented on enslaved Black women without anesthesia.

These facts aren’t trivia—they’re a reminder of just how deeply women’s health has been filtered through a male lens.

So it’s no wonder that many women feel unseen in healthcare. This way of thinking and designing products and protocols that excluded women as developers and thinkers, yet were built for women, were the first forms of cancel-culture that hushed, contained, and dismissed women’s voices.

BREAKING OLD SYSTEMS AND BUILDING BETTER ONES 

Today, that’s changing. And not because the establishment decided to make space—but because women stopped waiting for permission.

Across industries, women are dismantling frameworks built by and for men—and rebuilding systems that work for them.

In healthcare, Dr. Mary Claire Haver is reframing menopause with science, not stigma. Dr. Stacy Sims is rewriting sports physiology around female biology. Chelsea Hirschhorn, founder of Frida, is shaping what it means to have access to postpartum care tailored to truly support women. And Halle Berry of Respin Health, is proving that digital care built around women’s transition into menopause doesn’t just fill a gap—it redefines the standard of care.

Beyond healthcare, the same pattern holds. Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble) built a safer social platform by centering women’s experience, after being pushed out of Tinder which she had co-founded. Morgane Sézalory (Sezane) and Amy Smilovic (Tibi) have redefined leadership around longevity and integrity, not burnout and bravado.

Women aren’t leaning into the old systems anymore. They’re quietly, steadily, re-architecting them so that they work for them and more broadly, for other women.

A NEW ERA OF HEALTH INNOVATION STARTING WITH WOMEN

The rise of digital health is also accelerating a shift that I am seeing in health tech, but in this case for FemTech solutions that are rewriting the rules of meaningful healthcare for women.

Cycle tracking, hormone mapping, and tele-menopause platforms aren’t just new categories—they’re acts of reclamation.

By designing products informed by women’s perspectives and data, female founders are closing decades-old gaps in research and care. Analysts predict the femtech market will exceed $100 billion by 2030, but the more meaningful story to me isn’t market size—it’s systemic change.

WOMEN ARE NO LONGER PASSIVE “PATIENTS”, THEY ARE ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS AND IN MANY CASES THE ARCHITECTS OF WHAT COMES NEXT.

Less disruption. More personal solutions by design.

As someone who’s spent over two decades helping brands launch and evolve, I see this moment as more than a market correction—it’s a cultural reckoning. And I’m elated to be tapped by FemTech brands to shape this next gen in tech innovation as someone who has been starving for these types of solutions and is also living and experiencing the life shifts that ushers in such solutions. I am the patient, the user experience participant, and the marketing expert wrapped into one neat package.

And from my vantage point, I am excited to see that we are shifting from extraction to empathy, from “one-size-fits-all” to deeply personal solutions in health tech. The goal of FemTech isn’t necessarily disruption; it’s customized design. Building systems that finally reflect the people they serve.

This isn’t the glossy “Girlboss” version of empowerment but applied to systems that are intrinsically built by men, for men. It’s the infrastructure of greater equity AND equality for women—powered by data, driven by experience, and grounded in purpose.

THE BOTTOM LINE

When women lead the design of systems that are intended to serve other women—whether in medicine, business, or technology—those systems are smarter, fairer, and more sustainable.

The future of women’s lifestyle, wellness, and health isn’t pink-it-and-shrink-it anymore. It’s personal. It’s meaningful. And it’s long overdue.

THE BOARD sits uniquely at the intersection of Brand, Business, and Culture. Fractional talent is the future, and THE BOARD is where it lives. 1:1 advisory, project-based experts, fractional leadership, and curated DREAM TEAMS to help you move faster, smarter, and with far less risk. Let’s talk!

By Erin Erenberg, Founder & CEO of Chamber of Mothers and Elizabeth Coppola, Emergency Manager and Certified Business Continuity Specialist

Every Thursday, we deliver curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

Recently, we had the privilege of hosting two remarkable women for a conversation that redefines how we think about business continuity: Erin Erenberg, Founder & CEO of Chamber of Mothers and Elizabeth Coppola, Emergency Manager and Certified Business Continuity Specialist

Together, we explored a critical question: Are businesses truly prepared for the inevitable life events that impact every employee — and, ultimately, the bottom line?

REDEFINING BUSINESS CONTINUITY 

When we hear “business continuity,” we tend to think of backup systems, data recovery, or disaster response. But Erin and Elizabeth invite us to think bigger — and more human.

As Erin shared, the Chamber of Mothers was born after the U.S. failed to pass federally subsidized paid family and medical leave in 2021 — leaving families and businesses to absorb the impact. “Every working person will experience care needs in their lifetime,” she said. “Yet we’ve built a system that assumes they won’t.”

Elizabeth reframed the issue from a risk management perspective:

“We plan for fires, floods, and data breaches. But every employee will face a life event — a birth, a death, a health crisis — and most businesses are not prepared for that disruption.”

This insight transforms how we view care in the workplace. Life events aren’t “personal” problems; they’re continuity risks — predictable, recurring, and financially measurable.

THE COST OF IGNORING LIFE EVENTS 

According to Elizabeth, for every dollar spent on preparedness, businesses save between $6 and $13 in recovery costs. Yet, most organizations fail to apply that logic to human sustainability.

When caregiving responsibilities collide with work, as they inevitably do, the consequences ripple across operations:

• Loss of institutional knowledge

• Declining productivity

• Increased turnover

• Burnout and disengagement

As Erin noted, “We lose trillions from women leaving the workforce, not because they want to, but because our systems make it impossible to stay.”

PLANNING FOR THE PREDICTABLE

Every company purchases fire insurance or invests in cybersecurity, but very few have “life event insurance.”

Preparedness, Elizabeth said, means identifying essential business functions and planning for who will carry them forward during an employee’s absence. Whether it’s parental leave, eldercare, illness, or bereavement, the risk is not if — it’s when.

She advises leaders to ask:

• Who are the key people your business can’t function without?

• What happens if they’re suddenly unavailable?

• Have you built in support systems — like fractional or interim talent — to maintain continuity?

“Preparedness isn’t just about surviving disasters,” she said. “It’s about ensuring your people — and your business — can thrive through life.”

A NEW LENS FOR EMPLOYERS

Erin highlighted a common fear among founders: “Many business owners want to support paid leave but worry about operational strain. Preparedness changes that conversation.”

When companies normalize leave, and plan for it, they reduce anxiety on both sides. Erin points to organizations like THE BOARD which connect companies with experienced fractional leaders who can step in temporarily.

“Imagine if every company built life events into their continuity plan,” she said. “You’d not only protect your business, you’d strengthen trust, loyalty, and culture.”

FROM BURNOUT TO BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY

The conversation closed with a powerful reminder:
Moms, and caregivers in general, have long “figured it out.” But that patchwork approach comes at a cost: burnout, attrition, and, ultimately, business instability.

As Erin said, “We’re amazing, but we’re not superheroes. If we don’t build community and preparedness into our workplaces, the system breaks — and so do we.”

The outgoing U.S. Surgeon General once noted that parents were so overwhelmed they were getting sick. His conclusion?

“THE SOLUTION IS COMMUNITY.”

And that’s exactly what this conversation calls for — a collective shift from seeing care as a personal burden to recognizing it as a shared business responsibility.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Business continuity is human continuity. Life events are not disruptions — they’re realities every business must plan for.

• Preparedness pays off. For every $1 invested in planning, companies save up to $13 in recovery costs.

• Normalize leave and care. Treat caregiving as a strategic business risk, not a personal inconvenience.

• Build systems before the crisis. Relationships, coverage plans, and fractional talent pools are your insurance.

Human sustainability = organizational resilience.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE Follow: @Chamber of Mothers and chamberofmothers.com to find a local chapter

Join the conversation: How is your company planning for life events as part of its business continuity strategy?

THE BOARD sits uniquely at the intersection of Brand, Business, and Culture. Fractional talent is the future, and THE BOARD is where it lives. 1:1 advisory, project-based experts, fractional leadership, and curated DREAM TEAMS to help you move faster, smarter, and with far less risk. Let’s talk!

By Faheem Siddiqi, CEO at FinanceWithin | Finance, Accounting, HR partner for founder-led companies

Every Thursday, we deliver curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

PLAYBOOK FOR STAYING LEAN, BUILDING CLARITY, AND UNLOCKING PEOPLE LEVERAGE 

Every founder and CEO says people and teams are key assets. But when you walk through the halls of most startups or mid-market companies, or spend time with members of their team virtually, you don’t see an asset. You feel an orchestra warming up without a conductor. The music is loud, the instruments are expensive, and the energy is high. Yet the sound isn’t coordinated.

In my experience, average tenure in many startups and founder-led companies hovers around 15 months. The first 6 are about learning the business, the next 6 are about trying to make an impact, and the last 3 are spent looking for another job or quietly disengaging. This happens not because people lack motivation, but because the system they operate in was never designed to develop them.

High-growth companies are rarely built on heroic talent. They are built on structure, clarity, and rhythm. Great people join broken systems every day, and they leave not because of pay or workload, but because they cannot see a path forward. Structure is what creates oxygen for ambition.

REVOLVING DOOR PROBLEM

The most common symptom of a founder-led company in adolescence is turnover. It begins with leadership changes, followed by burnout in the middle, and disorientation at the junior level. The business continues to grow, but the organization stops compounding.

You start to see it in small ways. Debates repeat without resolution. Decisions lack consistency. Informal hierarchies form around personality rather than function. The founder starts every Monday fighting fires instead of building systems. The leadership team keeps “realigning.” The best performers begin to leave quietly.

I learned this lesson through experience. In my early years, I believed culture and charisma could compensate for missing design. I thought if you hire smart, driven people and give them autonomy, they would figure it out. They did not. Autonomy without structure turns into chaos. Culture without accountability turns into noise.

When good people leave, they rarely blame the company. They blame the experience. And the experience is the product of the systems around them. Most teams are not operating like “true teams.” They are groups of individuals trying to fill gaps that should not exist.

WHY LEAVERAGE BEATS HEADCOUNT

My goal for every founder-led company is to stay as lean as possible for as long as possible. This is about discipline and saving money. Operating leverage is the purest form of discipline.

When a company is small, the instinct is to hire as soon as a recurring problem appears. Each new hire adds complexity, and complexity compounds faster than growth. The best founders understand that leverage comes from systems, not from adding more people.

If you want to maximize enterprise value, the right formula is clarity and leverage (not your headcount). Great operators scale with small teams because small teams create tight feedback loops. Tight loops create faster learning. Faster learning creates better decisions. Better decisions create compounding advantage.

Every hire increases coordination cost. Each new communication node slows decision velocity. Before hiring, ask one question: does this person increase leverage or reduce it?

Founders who scale cleanly are ruthless about leverage. They treat each role like a small business within the business. They measure value creation by output and results. They know that discipline in the early years helps buy freedom later.

STRUCTURE BEFORE PEOPLE

Most companies hire backwards. They start with people and then try to design structure around them. It feels human and intuitive, but it creates chaos. You cannot build a house by buying furniture first.

Structure defines the lanes that allow people to thrive. Without it, even top performers will fail. I have seen A+ players struggle inside B- systems because there was no clarity on ownership, decision rights, or progression.

When a founder says “we’re hiring fast,” my first question is always, “for what structure?” If you cannot sketch your org chart on a whiteboard and explain why each seat exists, you are not hiring strategically. I have made this mistake many times, and some of them have been expensive lessons. My good friend, Ayman, has coached me on this.

Structure-first means defining three things:

• The work that must be done, including core functions, priorities, and metrics.

• The altitude at which the work must be done, whether strategic, managerial, or operational.

• The accountability loop, meaning who decides, who executes, and who supports.

Once those pieces are clear, you can hire based on altitude and role fit. Without that clarity, every hire is a guess.

Lack of structure is the main reason talented people leave promising companies. It is not about pay or perks… It’s about context. The human brain craves order. When there are no defined lanes, ambitious people will create their own. And usually, they do that somewhere else.

THE TECHNICIAN, THE MANAGER, AND THE ENTREPRENEUR 

Michael Gerber’s E-Myth remains one of the most important books on company building. It describes three mindsets that every business needs: the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur.

The Technician is the craftsman. They know how to execute with precision and care. They take pride in their work and value depth.

The Manager is the integrator. They turn vision into systems and keep the business running smoothly.

The Entrepreneur is the visionary. They see around corners, take calculated risks, and challenge the current model.

Most people naturally lean toward one of these three. The most valuable team members are those who embody two. They can zoom in and out. They understand how short-term execution connects to long-term design.

When you find someone with all three traits, you have a true business leader. They can switch altitude naturally and handle context shifts without friction. They become leverage multipliers for the organization.

The common mistake is over-hiring for one mindset. Too many Technicians and the company moves slowly. Too many Entrepreneurs and the business loses focus. Managers are the connective tissue that keep the system balanced. A balanced team self-regulates and reduces the need for constant founder intervention.

DECISION TREE FOR BUILDING TEAMS

When designing a team, the key strategy is sequencing. What to build in-house, what to outsource, and how to mix the two determines leverage.

A simple decision tree I like to follow to help create structure:

1. Should we hire in-house or outsource the work?
   If an external partner / vendor can deliver stronger capability at better economics, lean outsourced. The goal is not ownership but outcome. You do not need an in-house bookkeeper. You need clean books. You do not need a full marketing team. You need scalable and efficient customer acquisition.

2. If in-house, do we onshore or offshore?
   Onshore roles handle context, client interaction, and decision-making. Offshore roles handle process, repetition, and execution. When used correctly, time zones become leverage, not friction. Done well, offshore capability increases throughput and optionality.

3. Within that structure, who are the deciders and who are the doers?
   Deciders own the “why” and the “when.” Doers own the “how.” Blurring that line destroys accountability. Deciders set direction; doers execute it with autonomy.

4. Which roles are fungible and which are non-fungible?
   Some roles are interchangeable. They can be trained or replaced with minimal disruption. Others carry institutional knowledge, relationships, or creative judgment. You need to know the difference because your retention strategy depends on it.

When you apply this logic consistently, your org chart starts to design itself. You prevent the mistake of hiring reactively and instead become intentional about team design. The structure feels natural and coherent.

DESIGNING YOUR ORG FOR FLEXIBILITY

High-performing teams operate like elite units. They are small, highly skilled, and mission-oriented. They can move between offense and defense without losing coordination.

Flexibility comes from designing with gradients rather than binaries.

• Full-time versus fractional: fractional leaders give you altitude and perspective without fixed overhead.

• Onshore versus offshore: blending both provides cost leverage and capacity without losing control.

• Generalists versus specialists: generalists scale early, specialists deepen moats later.

• Centralized versus distributed: centralized strategy and decentralized execution.

Thinking in gradients prevents rigid decision-making. It helps build an organization that adapts without breaking. Flexibility is about maintaining integrity while changing shape.

COACHING AND PROGRESSION

People retention is about momentum.

Talent stays when they feel they are doing meaningful work, contributing at a high level and growing faster inside your company than they could anywhere else.

Every team member needs three things:

1. Clarity: they know what success looks like

2. Progression: they can see a future inside the organization

3. Feedback: scoreboard is clear… they never have to guess if they are winning

Designing roles around altitude levels [Technician, Manager, Entrepreneur] creates a natural path for advancement. People can move up in altitude as their skills and judgment mature. That structure turns your organization into a growth system.

Coaching is a compounding function. A strong coach does not aim to fix all problems. They increase awareness. They help people see how their work connects to the broader system and build independence.

CULTURE AS A SYSTEM

After working with many companies as an advisor, investor, and consultant, I’ve learned that culture is the invisible operating system of a company. It is how people behave when leadership is not in the room.

Many founders treat culture as an aesthetic. It’s not a vibe.

A strong culture is a pattern of high-quality, consistent decisions made over time.

To build a culture that scales, make it clear and observable.

• Reward ownership and accountability

• Encourage clarity and direct communication

• Promote both speed and sound judgment

• Create an environment that feels safe to speak up and take initiative

Healthy cultures have tension… the right kind of tension. The kind that forces better communication, sharper thinking, and higher accountability.

Companies with “great vibes” often collapse because no one wants to speak the truth. Teams with quiet, disciplined cultures tend to outperform because truth is part of the daily rhythm.

Culture setting is not episodic or set once… it must be maintained. It’s also directly tied to structure. High performance cannot exist in a low-clarity environment.

OPERATING LEVERAGE IS A PEOPLE STRATEGY

When founders talk about leverage, they often mean financial or product or technical leverage. The highest form of leverage is people leverage. It happens when people multiply each other’s strengths faster than they multiply each other’s frustrations.

Ask any experienced operator, and they’ll tell you that a great team acts as a capital multiplier. A bad team acts as a capital sink.

When people leverage is right, cash lasts longer, growth becomes predictable, and systems self-correct.

Building a high-performance team is about designing a structure that compounds talent. It begins with clarity, expands through coaching, and sustains through accountability.

The best founders I’ve worked with always think in terms of leverage. Every hire changes the company’s DNA. Hire too quickly and the structure breaks. Hire too slowly and momentum fades. The art lies in sequencing growth at the pace of learning.

The best teams are made up of people who share alignment, clarity, and mutual respect. They push each other without breaking. They know what they are building and why it matters.

If you want to build a high-performance team, begin with structure. Then fill it with people who can live within it and make it stronger.

Goal every founder should set: Stay lean. Build clarity. Coach often. Reward results and ownership.

The highest form of scale is more leverage from the people you already have.

Subscribe on Substack to Capital & Clarity, By Faheem Siddiqi · Launched 5 years ago

I write on startups, capital markets, and finance. I also share lessons from advising and operating private businesses doing $10M-250M+ in revenue. My goal is to make the complex simple and the abstract concrete.

THE BOARD sits uniquely at the intersection of Brand, Business, and Culture. Fractional talent is the future, and THE BOARD is where it lives. Reach out (DM!) us for 1:1 advisory, project-based experts, fractional leadership, and curated DREAM TEAMS to help you move faster, smarter, and with far less risk. Let’s talk!

By Amy Kapolnek, Founder, the fwrd group, Fractional CMO, Growth Strategist, Indie Brand Specialist & Lacey Norton, Commercialization & Operations Executive, Advisor, Thoughtful Builder of Brands, Teams & Systems, GTM Expertise

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

We just wrapped an amazing conversation for THE BOARD’S series Piping Hot, and we couldn’t wait to share some key takeaways with you.

Amy Kapolnek and Lacey Norton, both longtime brand builders who’ve spent their careers inside indie CPG and scaling challenger brands, share what they see next.

THE BIG IDEA: THE OLD MARKETING PLAYBOOK NO LONGER WORKS.

WHY?

Because the cost of paid media is up, and performance is way down. Brands are being forced to rethink how they connect with customers.

Meta, Google, TikTok = more expensive, less effective.
Audiences are tuning out.
Connection isn’t disappearing — it’s evolving.

SO WHERE ARE OUR BRANDS HEADING? 

We’re seeing a powerful rebalancing of strategy — and a rise in digital grassroots marketing. Think early brand community energy, but adapted to today’s landscape. The new playbook is all about:

• AUTHENTICITY

• INTIMACY AT SCALE

• PLATFORM EXPERIMENTATION BEYOND THE BIG 3

NEW CHANNELS, NEW PLAYBOOK

Here are a few channels and shifts we're exploring:

REDDIT – Real conversation. Real accountability.
Redditors are savvy, informed, and brutally honest. It's not about selling — it's about listening and participating in existing conversations.

“You can’t fake it on Reddit. If you try, they’ll smell it from a mile away.”

SUBSTACK – Storytelling is making a comeback.
A home for long-form, founder-led content that invites your audience into your purpose, not just your products.

Check out how Rare Beauty is doing this brilliantly.

ONLYFANS – Hear us out.
Beyond the headlines, it's a platform giving taboo or underrepresented voices actual power. It’s authentic, direct, and community-driven — and that’s why it matters.

TYB (Try Your Best) – Loyalty reimagined.
Founded by Ty Haney (Outdoor Voices), TYB rewards super fans for participation, not just purchases.

Think: building with your community, not marketing at them.

EMERGING PLAYS WE’RE WATCHING

Community is becoming the new marketing channel (take it from us - we’re built on it at  THE BOARD!)
Connection isn’t fading — it’s being redefined.

We’re heading into an era where earned, genuine relationships will outperform paid reach every time. And the brands who invest in building community — digitally or IRL — will win.

Stay tuned — we’ll be unpacking this even further in our upcoming Lunch & Learn session, exclusively for THE BOARD members. We’ll dive deeper into frameworks, examples, and how to operationalize these channels for real impact.

Thank you for being part of this conversation. 

Let’s keep pushing the playbook forward and sharing results along the way!

#IndieBrands #CPGMarketing #BrandStrategy #DigitalCommunity #RedditMarketing #Substack #OnlyFans #TYB #LinkedInLive #CommunityBuilding #GrowthMarketing #FutureOfMarketing #PipingHot

THE BOARD is a vetted collective of C-Suite talent from Fashion, Beauty, Tech, and beyond — ready to build DREAM TEAMS or provide on-demand 1:1 strategic guidance and project execution.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

By Briana Swords, Consultant | Merchandising, Retail and Sales Expert | Customer Experience | Start-Up Specialist

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

This week’s special Board Briefing is a two part series, this is part two!

PART 2: BEYOND TARIFFS: BUILDING FASHION BRANDS THAT THRIVE IN PERPETUAL UNCERTAINTY

What's become crystal clear is that tariffs were just the wake-up call. The real challenge—and opportunity—is building fashion businesses that thrive in perpetual disruption. After two decades in fashion, here's what I know: uncertainty isn't a phase to endure—it's the permanent operating environment. The brands that will dominate the next decade are those that transform their relationship with uncertainty.

As a member of THE BOARD—a collective of C-suite consultants from the world's most influential brands—I specialize in merchandising, retail, and customer experience transformation. 

THE REAL LANDSCAPE: MAPPING MODERN CHAOS

The Velocity of Change Fashion cycles that once moved seasonally now shift weekly. A viral TikTok can make or break a product overnight. Hero products representing 30% of revenue can become "uncool" in three weeks—not from competition or quality issues, but from cultural shifts no one saw coming. Brands can watch their bestsellers evaporate without warning.

The Fragmentation of Everything There's no longer one fashion market—there are thousands of micro-markets. Gen Z shops differently on Tuesday than Thursday. Geographic preferences that held for decades evaporate overnight. Price sensitivity varies wildly within the same demographic based on category, occasion, and mood. The monolithic "target customer" has shattered into countless fragments.

The Economics of Impossibility Customer acquisition costs have tripled while lifetime values shrink. Inventory financing costs more than some businesses' profit margins. The unit economics that built fashion empires no longer compute. Brands with CAC exceeding first purchase value by 40% are now considered "successful" by industry standards—a sign of how distorted the economics have become.

BUILDING ANTI-FRAGILE FASHION BRANDS: A MODERN PLAYBOOK

The capabilities that separate thriving brands from struggling ones in today's volatile market:

From efficiency to optionality

Efficiency optimizes for stability. Volatility demands optionality—the ability to pivot quickly without catastrophic cost.

The New Operating Model:

• Multi-Speed Operations: Brands that run core products on 6-month cycles, trends on 6-week cycles, and viral response in 6 days—revolutionary capability from the same team.

• Portfolio Architecture: The optimal product mix balances risk and opportunity across proven sellers, growth plays, experiments, and a % reserved for unexpected opportunities.

• Strategic Redundancy: Single points of failure can kill brands. Smart operators maintain multiple suppliers per category, channels per market, and alternatives for everything critical.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS BEYOND TRANSACTIONS

Research reveals that uncertainty fundamentally changes shopping psychology. Customers are buying identity, community, and values—products are just the vehicle.

Understanding the New Consumer:

• Customers buy identity when external identity markers disappear

• They crave community more than products

• They'll pay premiums for reliability in unreliable times

• They demand values alignment when traditional institutions fail

Building Unshakeable Loyalty:

Successful frameworks transform transactional customers into loyal communities through three core strategies. Creating genuine belonging means making customers feel part of something larger than a shopping experience—a community that reflects their values and identity. Providing stability involves delivering consistent experiences across every touchpoint, becoming customers' reliable anchor when everything else feels chaotic. Enabling personal expression means helping customers use products to communicate who they are, especially when traditional forms of self-expression become limited or unavailable.

MERCHANDISING ARCHITECTURE FOR VOLATILITY

The traditional seasonal merchandising calendar is obsolete. Today's winners build dynamic systems that respond to opportunity in real-time.

Assortment Strategy That Adapts:

• Core Foundation: Predictable sellers that ensure cash flow

• Trend Response: Fast-turn items capturing cultural moments

• Innovation Lab: Test products exploring new territories

• Opportunity Reserve: Open-to-buy for unexpected chances

This framework helps brands weather significant demand shocks while improving margins.

Price Architecture That Flexes: Moving single price points triggers abandonment. Instead, successful brands restructure entire architectures—using good/better/best tiers, strategic bundling, and subscription models. The result: substantially higher transaction values with maintained conversion rates.

Inventory Intelligence: Smart brands are shifting to shorter commitments, frequent deliveries, and regional strategies. Core products get safety stock; fashion products stay just-in-time. Exit strategies are planned before entry. This approach reduces inventory liability while improving in-stock rates.

Financial Flexibility: Smart margin management comes through mix optimization, not just price increases. High-margin "halo" products elevate entire categories. Subscription models and presale programs provide predictable cash flow. Strategic restructuring of loyalty programs can dramatically improve cash flow by encouraging frequency over transaction size.

The brands winning in chaos aren't those with perfect predictions—they're those building systems that thrive on change itself.

TECHNOLOGY AND SUSTAINABILITY AS ACCELERATORS

The convergence of technology advancement and sustainability demands creates unprecedented opportunities for prepared brands.

AI That Actually Works: Practical applications are driving real value across the industry. Demand forecasting improvements are reducing markdowns by a third or more. Personalization done right is lifting conversion significantly. Service automation, when thoughtfully implemented, enhances rather than replaces human connection. One accessories brand implemented AI-driven demand forecasting and reduced their markdown rate from 45% to 28% in a single season. 

The Sustainability Premium: Economic uncertainty is accelerating conscious consumption. Brands with resale programs, transparency stories, and repair services are commanding substantial price premiums while deepening customer relationships. A contemporary brand launched a repair service that not only reduced returns but created an entirely new revenue stream while building unprecedented customer loyalty.

THE TIME IS NOW

The convergence of tariffs, technology, and cultural change has created a moment where everything is up for grabs. The brands that will win aren't necessarily the biggest or best funded—they're the ones that recognize when they need specialized expertise and act. 

Whether you need merchandising restructuring, customer experience transformation, or retail innovation, the time to move is now. As part of THE BOARD collective, I bring not just my own experience, but access to a brain trust of fashion's most seasoned experts.

THE BOARD is a vetted collective of C-Suite talent from Fashion, Beauty, Tech, and beyond — ready to build DREAM TEAMS or provide on-demand 1:1 strategic guidance and project execution.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

By Briana Swords, Consultant, Merchandising, Retail and Sales Expert, Customer Experience, Start-Up Specialist

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

This week’s Board Briefing is a Special 2 Part Series - Part 2 drops next Thursday!

PART 1: WHEN TARIFFS THREATEN EVERYTHING

As a fashion consultant specializing in merchandising, retail, and customer experience, I am used to helping brands navigate disruption. But what I'm hearing from brands now at trade shows, in showrooms, and across my client portfolio is unprecedented: an entire industry grappling with changes that threaten the fundamental economics of fashion.

I'm a Member of THE BOARD, a Collective of Executive level Consultants who've led transformations at the world's most influential companies. My perspective—as I am seeing patterns across many brands simultaneously—is what I want to share.

THE UNFOLDING CRISIS

"A Canadian Retailer just cancelled our entire Spring order!! We spent three years building that relationship."

This was the reality check I heard from a US fashion brand at NY Market this year. Despite their products technically qualifying for CUSMA exemption, the retailer simply didn't want to deal with the paperwork uncertainty. They weren't alone—I spoke with brand after brand grappling with decisions that could determine their survival.

The fashion industry is facing its most complex trade disruption in decades. It's not just the tariffs themselves—it's the cascading uncertainty that's paralyzing decision-making at every level. When SSENSE, with its primarily US customer base, faced new Canadian goods tariffs threatening their cross-border model, it became clear: no brand with international operations is safe from this disruption.

THE NEW REALITY: UNDERSTANDING THE FULL IMPACT

This isn't a simple price increase that can be passed along to consumers. The current tariff structure is creating interconnected challenges most brands are unprepared to navigate:

THE IMMEDIATE SHOCK: When potential tariffs ranging from 10% to 60% were announced, Fashion brands faced an overnight existential crisis. Brands manufacturing in India are grappling with 50% tariffs that essentially double their landed costs. Chinese fast fashion retailers face even steeper challenges. The elimination of the de minimis exemption—that $800 duty-free threshold—has affected giants like SHEIN, and destroyed the unit economics for hundreds of Tik Tok brands that built their entire fulfillment strategy on drop-shipping individual orders from Chinese manufacturers.

THE RIPPLE EFFECTS NOBODY SAW COMING: What makes this crisis particularly acute is how it's fragmenting the global fashion market. Canadian retailers are turning inward, focusing exclusively on domestic suppliers. European partners hesitate to place orders, unsure whether US brands can maintain consistent pricing. The psychological impact on consumers is equally devastating—when customers see different prices for the same product across markets, or when they're asked to pay an "import fee" at checkout, both perceived value and brand trust erode. 

Years of carefully cultivated brand value can unravel in a single confusing transaction.

THE FAST FASHION RECKONING

While many in fashion rightfully question the rise of ultra-fast fashion, SHEIN's forced transformation offers critical lessons for all brands. This company built a $100 billion valuation on a model that exploited the de minimis loophole—individual packages shipped directly from Chinese warehouses to US consumers, duty-free.

When tariffs and de minimis elimination threatened to triple their prices, SHEIN was forced into a complete business model transformation:

• Building North American warehouses (hundreds of millions in infrastructure)

• Shifting from drop-shipping to traditional inventory holding

• Fundamentally changing how they forecast, plan, and fulfill orders

This isn't a success story—it's a cautionary tale. 

If a company with SHEIN's vast resources struggles to adapt, smaller brands with legitimate business models face even greater challenges. The same policy changes forcing fast fashion to reckon with its unsustainable practices are also threatening responsible brands caught in the crossfire.

THE DECISION PARALYSIS TRAP

EVERY POTENTIAL SOLUTION CREATES NEW PROBLEMS:

OPTION 1: ABSORB THE COSTS Some brands maintain prices and accept margin compression. But absorbing 25-60% tariffs isn't sustainable—this is a guaranteed cash flow crisis.

OPTION 2: PASS COSTS TO CONSUMERS Fashion is discretionary spending with specific psychological price thresholds. In my experience redesigning price architectures, when products jump pricing tiers, brands often see conversion rates crater as they enter competitive sets where they have no established position.

OPTION 3: RELOCATE PRODUCTION Moving production takes 12-18 months minimum for new supplier relationships, sample development, and quality control systems. Meanwhile, you're paying tariffs on existing production while investing in new supply chains—a double hit not all brands can sustain.

WHY TRADITIONAL APPROACHES ARE FAILING

The playbooks from previous disruptions don't apply here. 

This isn't a demand problem solvable with discounting or a temporary supply chain disruption. It's a fundamental restructuring of global trade requiring entirely new strategic frameworks.

Fashion brands typically plan 12-18 months out, but tariff policies can change overnight. Most brands lack trade policy experts, customs classification knowledge, and economic modeling capabilities. Even well-capitalized brands struggle to fund both crisis management and growth simultaneously.

MERCHANDISING AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN CRISIS 

1. Assortment Architecture in Chaos Smart brands are discovering that strategic SKU rationalization actually increases sales while reducing complexity. The key is identifying which categories to protect versus sacrifice. 

2. Pricing Psychology Expertise Moving prices isn't just math—it's behavioral science. Understanding threshold resistance and reference pricing makes the difference between customer retention and mass abandonment.

3. Customer Journey Redesign When tariffs force changes, the entire customer experience needs recalibration. Successful brands map friction points and redesign touchpoints to maintain conversion despite higher prices. 

4. Inventory Intelligence In volatile times, inventory becomes either a brand's biggest asset or liability. Sophisticated open-to-buy planning, markdown optimization, and flow strategies protect cash while maintaining freshness. 

5. Loyalty Economics in Crisis When acquiring new customers becomes prohibitively expensive, retention is survival. Brands that restructure loyalty and service programs to accelerate purchase frequency and increase basket size can offset tariff impacts through customer behavior rather than price increases alone.

REAL IMPACT: HOW EXPERT GUIDANCE MAKES THE DIFFERENCE

Here's what successful tariff navigation can look like in practice:

Merchandising Transformation: A contemporary brand completely restructured their assortment strategy by identifying their "fortress products"—the 20% driving 60% of margin—and protecting those while strategically editing the rest. Result: double-digit sales growth despite significant cost increases. The key was recognizing which products truly matter to both customers and margins.

Price Architecture Revolution: An accessories brand moved from single price points to a good/better/best strategy that maintained opening price points while moving margin to higher tiers. Customers self-selected into higher margins, feeling they had choice rather than facing forced increases. This psychological shift from "price increase" to "options" made all the difference.

Customer Experience Elevation: When a luxury contemporary brand had to raise prices substantially, every touchpoint was redesigned—from website to packaging to customer service scripts—to communicate enhanced value. The price increase became a brand elevation opportunity, with customers embracing the premium positioning.

These transformations share a common thread: success came from reimagining the business model, not just reacting to cost pressures.

THE HIDDEN OPPORTUNITY IN CRISIS

Disruption creates opportunity for those who move decisively. While competitors are paralyzed by analysis, brands that act with expert guidance can:

• Capture market share from hesitant competitors

• Negotiate better terms with desperate suppliers

• Lock in customer loyalty through superior crisis communication

• Build capabilities that provide permanent competitive advantage

The brands using this crisis to reimagine their business models, rather than just preserve them, are positioning themselves for success whether stability returns or chaos reigns.

THE PATH FORWARD

The question isn't whether tariffs will fundamentally change your business—they already have. Every day you operate with yesterday's model in tomorrow's market increases risk. 

The expertise to transform exists—the question is whether you'll access it while you have room to maneuver, or wait until crisis forces your hand. 

This is where specialized expertise becomes invaluable. 

As someone who believes in the power of products to tell compelling stories, create genuine customer connections, and spark inspiration, I help brands navigate these challenges through strategic product planning, expert merchandising and buying, and customer experience design. These aren't just services—they're the tools for building meaningful relationships between people and brands, especially when those relationships are tested by economic disruption.

THE BOARD provides tailored, short-term, dedicated expertise—the competitive advantage fast-growing companies need in times of unprecedented change.

THE TIME IS NOW

Whether you need merchandising restructuring, customer experience transformation, or retail innovation, the time to move is now. As part of THE BOARD collective, I bring not just my own experience, but access to a brain trust of fashion's most seasoned experts.

Look for part two of this conversation next week: BEYOND TARIFFS: BUILDING FASHION BRANDS THAT THRIVE IN PERPETUAL UNCERTAINTY

THE BOARD is a vetted collective of C-Suite talent from Fashion, Beauty, Tech, and beyond — ready to build DREAM TEAMS or provide on-demand 1:1 strategic guidance and project execution.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

By Tina Eskrige, GTM Strategist - Product Marketing, Brand & Growth Architect.  

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

For years, Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy was a formula: define ICPs, build funnels, run campaigns, optimize conversions. But the rise of AI isn’t just about efficiency — it’s fundamentally reshaping how companies discover, engage, and retain customers.

The old GTM was about filling funnels. The new GTM is about closing loops. Here’s how forward-thinking companies are already making the shift.

AI IN CUSTOMER DISCOVERY: INSIGHTS WITHOUT THE FOCUS GROUP

Traditional customer research runs quarterly or annually, often missing fast-emerging shifts. AI compresses that timeline — analyzing digital signals in real time.

• Persona Building: Platforms like Clearbit and 6sense use AI to analyze intent data and update customer personas dynamically.

• Market Mapping: AI surfaces emerging demand pockets early, letting companies reposition before competitors even notice.

CHANNEL IN PLAY

6sense helped PGi uncover in-market buyers and launch predictive campaigns that generated more qualified leads while reducing acquisition costs.

FINAL WORD
Discovery isn’t static anymore. It’s continuous, predictive, and always-on.

AI IN DEMAND GEN: THE FUNNEL GETS PERSONAL

Batch-and-blast is over. AI enables individually tuned campaigns that evolve in real time.

• Adaptive Messaging: AI can generate and test micro-variants of subject lines, CTAs, and timing.

• Predictive Outreach: AI scoring goes beyond firmographics, ranking leads based on intent, engagement, and buying signals.

CHANNELS IN PLAY
Sandler adopted HubSpot’s Breeze AI and saw higher click-through rates alongside a fourfold increase in sales-qualified leads. Aerotech used HubSpot AI to boost win rates by 66% while saving sales teams hours each week. Salesforce Einstein, widely deployed across Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, powers predictive lead scoring, next-best action recommendations, and campaign optimization.

FINAL WORD
AI transforms demand gen from mass broadcasting into precision matchmaking.

AI IN CUSTOMER SUCCESS & LOYALTY: RETENTION AS THE NEW GROWTH

Acquisition costs are climbing. AI is giving brands new ways to drive retention and loyalty — turning growth into a loop, not a line.

• Proactive Retention: AI predicts churn and triggers personalized save campaigns.

• Community & Support: AI chatbots handle common queries, freeing human teams for high-value interactions.

• Upsell Triggers: Recommendation engines keep customers discovering new products and features.

CHANNEL IN PLAY
Sephora uses AI across its “Beauty Advisor” ecosystem — from Virtual Artist try-ons to personalized recommendations — boosting engagement and conversion with tailored experiences.

FINAL WORD
In an AI-first GTM, retention isn’t an afterthought. It’s the growth engine.

THE BOTTOM LINE

In my experience, the companies seeing the biggest gains from AI aren’t asking, “Which tool should we plug in?” They’re asking, “What does our GTM look like in an AI-first world?”

When discovery is predictive, demand gen is hyper-personalized, and retention is proactive, growth stops being linear.

It becomes a loop — every customer signals the next decision.

And here’s the hard truth: in 12 months, the GTM leaders won’t be the ones who filled the biggest funnels. They’ll be the ones who closed the loop.

THE BOARD is a vetted collective of C-Suite talent from Fashion, Beauty, Tech, and beyond — ready to build DREAM TEAMS or provide on-demand 1:1 strategic guidance and project execution.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

Members Anna Bleers- Fractional CMO, Founder FEARLESS Strategic Marketing and Erika Weiss - Fractional CMO, Founder Elevated Brand Consultancy, Adjunct Professor at Loyola Marymount University sat down on last week's PIPING HOT Ep.22 to talk about how the strongest companies turn uncertainty into opportunity, and why chaos is often the best stage for clarity.

IN TODAY’S ECONOMY, UNCERTAINTY IS THE ONLY CONSTANT

Inflation continues to climb, and grocery costs are nearly 29% higher than they were at the start of the pandemic. Consumers are feeling the squeeze—and businesses are too.

So how do we market effectively in an environment defined by economic disruption?

As fractional CMOs working across industries, and as brand and marketing educators, we believe the answer lies in a long-term strategic asset too often undervalued in chaotic times: brand equity.

WHAT IS BRAND EQUITY AND WHY NOW?

Brand equity is the value of your brand in the minds of consumers. It’s the emotional connection, recognition, trust, and loyalty people associate with your business. In times of uncertainty, brand equity isn't a luxury—it’s a lifeline.

When consumers are being more cautious with every dollar, brand equity gives you pricing power, resilience, and a sustainable competitive advantage.

“If this business were to be split up, I would be glad to take the brands, trademarks and goodwill, and you could have all the bricks and mortar, and I would fare better than you.”
– Jon Stewart, Former Chairman of Quaker Oats

SHORT TERM GAINS VS. LONG TERM GROWTH 

In a downturn, the instinct is to pull back on brand investment and focus on promotions and short-term sales tactics. But decades of global research—especially from Les Binet and Peter Field (IPA, WARC)—consistently show that while performance marketing may deliver a quick bump, it doesn’t build lasting value.

A Key Insight: Sales activations drive short-term spikes. Brand building drives long-term growth and profit.

Promotions may temporarily increase revenue—but without a strong brand foundation, you’re stuck chasing the next sale.

HOW TO BUILD BRAND EQUITY IN CHALLENGING TIMES

Brand equity is not built overnight, but it doesn’t require massive budgets either. Here are practical ways brands—especially startups and mid-sized companies—can invest in long-term equity now:

1. Reconnect with Your Mission and Customer Experience

Brands like Starbucks are returning to their roots, focusing not just on convenience, but on meaningful in-store experiences and emotional connection. This “third space” strategy rebuilds customer affinity and loyalty.

2. Listen Actively and Engage Authentically

Today, marketers have unprecedented access to real-time customer sentiment—from social listening tools to Reddit threads. Leverage that data to understand what your audience truly values, and speak their language.

3. Make It a Two-Way Conversation

Too many brands talk at customers. Instead, understand what matters to them and reflect that back through your messaging and offerings. Great brands solve real problems in people’s lives—and connect emotionally.

4. Harness the Power of Brand Advocates

Brands like Mike’s Hot Honey are growing not by spending big, but by empowering raving fans to become evangelists. Advocacy lowers customer acquisition costs and amplifies trust.

5. Be Distinctive, Attention-Grabbing, and Consistent

Brand building is about being memorable. That means showing up with a clear voice, recognizable visuals, and delivering on your promise—consistently.

Consistency is one of the most overlooked, yet most powerful, brand strategies.

6. Live Your Values Boldly

During the formula shortage, Bobbie (an infant formula brand) chose not to capitalize on demand. Instead, they prioritized their subscribers, staying true to their mission. That bold choice strengthened their brand in the eyes of their core audience.

WHAT THE BEST BRANDS ARE DOING NOW 

More companies are openly prioritizing brand equity—even in tough times:

• Molson Coors, Ralph Lauren, and Kenview have each committed to long-term brand building over short-termism.

• Starbucks is doubling down on experience under CEO Brian Niccol.
  
  

Mission-driven, customer-connected brands are outperforming by staying true to their core.

FINAL TAKEAWAYS

In times of uncertainty:

• Double down on what works.

• Optimize budgets wisely, but don’t cut brand investments.

• Focus on emotional connection, storytelling, and consistency.

• Be bold, be clear, and be true to your brand.

• Use your brand equity as a lever for pricing power and growth.

Don’t just market through chaos—build resilience through brand.

WE’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU:

What are you seeing in your industry? How is your brand navigating economic uncertainty?

Let’s keep the conversation going.

THE BOARD is a vetted collective of C-Suite talent from Fashion, Beauty, Tech, and beyond — ready to build DREAM TEAMS or provide on-demand 1:1 strategic guidance and project execution.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

By Amy Kapolnek, Founder, the fwrd group + Fractional CMO, Growth Strategist, Indie Brand Specialist, Beauty + Wellness Leader, Contributing Expert + Speaker 

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

For years, the marketing playbook revolved around the same platforms: Instagram for visuals, Facebook for community, Google for search and Email for retention. But the digital landscape has shifted, and brands that want to stay relevant must look beyond the usual suspects. 

Three emerging (and sometimes unexpected) platforms - Substack, OnlyFans and Reddit - are quietly reshaping how brands reach, engage and convert audiences. 

Here’s how forward-thinking companies are tapping into them.

SUBSTACK: THE BLOG REINVENTED

Substack has transformed the humble newsletter into a powerful publishing hub for brands. What began as a tool for independent writers is now a channel where brands can:

• Build A “Living Blog:” Instead of housing insights or announcements on a static blog that few people actively visit, brands can deliver thought leadership and storytelling directly to inboxes. Substack’s clean interface and subscription features make content feel more like media than marketing.

• Partner With Credible Voices: Brands can sponsor newsletters or collaborate with top Substack creators as a way to leverage their loyal readership. Because these writers often cultivate niche but highly engaged audiences (beauty insiders, wellness enthusiasts, financial analysts, cultural critics), the partnership feels authentic and targeted.

CHANNEL PLAY

Rare Beauty leaned into this by launching Rare Beauty Secrets on Substack. Instead of polished social posts, they send letters that feel personal and handwritten: team reflections, product sneak peeks and candid conversations about mental health and purpose. No hard sell, just authenticity. The payoff? Their open rates outperform typical email blasts, and subscribers discover them directly through Substack’s own platform. That’s the power of depth over noise.

FINAL WORDS

Think of Substack as influencer marketing but with long-form substance and community-driven trust baked in.

ONLYFANS: BEYOND THE HEADLINES 

Often associated with adult content, OnlyFans is being re-framed by savvy marketers as a new frontier for partnerships. Its top talent now includes fitness trainers, chefs, musicians, and lifestyle personalities who command deeply engaged followings willing to pay for access. The key is to shift perspective: OnlyFans isn’t just adult entertainment - it’s a monetized creator economy with untapped potential.

• EXCLUSIVE COLLABORATIONS: Brands can partner with creators to offer behind-the-scenes content, tutorials or even product demos that feel intimate and exclusive.

• MEMBERSHIP MODELS: The subscription format aligns perfectly with brands experimenting in loyalty or “insider” programs. Imagine a skincare brand partnering with a wellness creator to launch a members-only routine series or early product drops.

• EVENT TIE-INS: For campaigns tied to launches or cultural moments, creators can host live streams or Q&As that cut through the noise and drive real-time engagement.

CHANNEL IN PLAY

When you hear OnlyFans, beauty marketing may not come to mind. But that’s exactly why Urban Decay made waves by partnering with creator Ari Kytsya in their “anti-bland” campaign. The collab was unapologetic, raw and stirred conversation across the industry. Some called it bold, others controversial, but everyone was talking about it. Urban Decay proved that showing up differently can cut through the clutter in ways a standard influencer campaign never could. The goal wasn’t shock value but more about visibility and daring to meet audiences where loyalty already runs deep.

FINAL WORDS

The platform’s brand image is only beginning to clean up and very slowly. There’s still a strong cultural association with adult content, and that stigma won’t disappear overnight. For brands, this means two things:

• Partnerships on this platform must align authentically with your positioning.

• Your target audience should already be open to, or at least comfortable with, the platform.

REDDIT: THE INTERNET’S FOCUS GROUP

Reddit remains one of the most underutilized channels in beauty - and one of the most powerful. Known as the “front page of the internet,” it thrives on user-generated discussions across thousands of subreddits (or communities). Brands are realizing its power in three distinct ways:

• SOCIAL LISTENING: Subreddits serve as unfiltered focus groups. Whether it’s r/SkincareAddiction, r/Beauty or r/Fitness brands can observe authentic conversations about consumer frustrations, product gaps and emerging trends, most often months before they surface elsewhere.

• COMMUNITY BUILDING: A brand that shows up respectfully (not salesy) in relevant subreddits can build trust and credibility. Hosting AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”), answering questions and sharing real value can position a brand as an authority within niche audiences.

• PAID MEDIA: Reddit’s ad platform has quietly matured, offering highly targeted placements based on subreddit interest groups. The ads feel less intrusive because they’re served within the context of the conversation.

CHANNEL IN PLAY

For their Water Bank collection, Laneige didn’t just run ads; they listened. By monitoring communities like r/AsianBeauty, they picked up on unfiltered conversations around skincare frustrations, then designed campaigns that spoke directly to them. Instead of generic promos, Laneige placed thoughtful ads in the very threads where those conversations were happening. The result was a campaign that felt native, earned trust and converted curiosity into consideration.

FINAL WORD

Used well, Reddit becomes both a listening tool and an activation platform - a full-circle channel for brands that value insight and authenticity.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The future of marketing isn’t about chasing every new app. It’s about recognizing where audiences are already spending time, attention and money. Substack, OnlyFans and Reddit may not look like traditional marketing channels, but they’re where culture, community and commerce are converging.

Forward-thinking brands that explore these platforms now - before they become mainstream - will have the advantage of shaping the rules but also capturing market share, deepening community loyalty and unlocking new streams of revenue.

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether your brand needs a 'Dream Team' to create a data-driven roadmap for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

By April Uchitel, CEO & Co-Founder of THE BOARD.

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

THE BOARD IS AN AGGREGATE OF SYMBIOTIC COMPONENTS.

While “ecosystem” is overused today, it’s still the right word to describe us. 

Our components include vetted BOARD Members, our collective professional networks, the brands, retailers, and tech companies we support, our collective resources, plus a deep well of shared expertise and earned wisdom. Layer in curiosity, a drive for innovation, “what’s next,”  and “how can we help?” —and you have THE BOARD ecosystem.

We engineer moments where these components light up together, achieving strategic results lifting everyone. Opportunities to activate all components are what we love the most. Sometimes we drive them, sometimes the market pulls us in—but always toward solutions we’re uniquely built to deliver. We listen closely—we never chase.

When Warby Parker launched in 2010, the DTC model ignited a movement. Shopify soon became the backbone of owned digital storefronts. Venture capital firms poured billions into “e-commerce enablement” tech. Then Amazon changed everything. Now TikTok Shop is a formidable force, and AI dominates every conversation.

Through it all, consumers shopped at breakneck speed while venture capital fueled software solutions to help brands compete on acquisition, retention, LTV, customer experience, and more. During this time, many Members built careers at Fortune 1000 brands and retailers, as well as at leading digitally native brands, helping to shape the evolution of the consumer sector. Others joined big tech leaders like Google, Apple, and YouTube, while still others grew with emerging technology companies - myself included. 

Fast forward to 2022, when I launched THE BOARD. From day one, the inbound interest from tech providers was constant —sometimes via VCs and PE firms sending portfolio companies our way, other times through founders referring one another, and often through BOARD Members connecting us to platforms they were advising. Our lens is always about unique fit, and it quickly became clear that as a bridge, we were game changers.

 And the BLACK BOOK was born.

The goal then, as it is now, has been to select technology partners that solve acute problems and deliver real value for executive decision-makers. By getting close to the products and founders, we can champion the needle movers that we ourselves would have chosen in our former seats.

Our ecosystem is robust on one hand, but delicate on the other. Unlike venture capital, which deploys financial capital for financial returns, we deploy “relational capital” for long-term value and reputational impact. Therefore we choose our partners very wisely.

OUR TECHNOLOGY FILTERS

We only work with companies that pass through a set of filters we’ve honed over time:

• Proven ROI & Differentiation – Does the technology deliver measurable ROI (revenue growth, cost reduction, or both) and fill a real gap in the brand tool stack?

• Product-Market Fit – Does it have strong case studies with brands we know and admire?

• Strong Founders – Are the leaders credible, visionary, and deeply entrenched in the consumer sector, solving meaningful problems for brands and retailers?

• Problem Acuteness – Is the technology addressing a pain point urgent enough that senior brand decision-makers will immediately recognize its value and be motivated to adopt it?

• Scalability via THE BOARD – Can our ecosystem help this company meaningfully scale? We only partner when we know we are uniquely positioned to help.

Each year, numerous tech companies approach us. After applying these filters, and our well honed instincts, only a select few move forward into a strategic partnership.

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: WINNIN

One partner I am excited to highlight is Winnin, especially given the explosion of focus on cultural relevance. Everywhere you look—press, industry experts, CMOs, CDOs, and CEOs—cultural marketing is front and center.

Winnin passed all of our filters:

• Highly Differentiated – Winnin is an AI-powered cultural intelligence platform that drives cultural marketing strategies. It analyzes behavioral data from all major video platforms to deliver predictive insights, identify white space opportunities for innovation and audience strategies, and fuel UGC-led growth for the world’s largest advertisers.

• Strong Case Studies – Winnin works with high-growth brands and global enterprises like L’Oréal, Unilever, Netflix, AB InBev, Danone, and Google to bring rigor to cultural marketing and deliver growth.

• Strong Founders – BOARD member Halley Morrissey spent six months working closely with CEO Gian Martinez, a visionary creative executive who built his career at Coca-Cola before founding Winnin a decade ago. Halley also collaborated with Winnin’s Head of US, Rodrigo Maroni, a highly respected thought leader in the advertising world. Over this time, she developed case studies with CMOs and SVPs of Marketing and Digital at Winnin’s largest enterprise customers, who consistently praised both the team and the technology.

• Acute Problem Solving – Global brands continue to struggle in today’s video-first, culture-first world, losing Share of AttentionTM not only to direct competitors but also to cultural ones. Winnin enables them to “turn on” a cultural marketing strategy that accelerates their Share of AttentionTM growth.

US Growth Opportunity – Winnin has built a strong foundation of Fortune 1000 customers across LatAm and has proven US enterprise demand. They sought our help expanding into the US across beauty, fashion, CPG, and tech—sectors where THE BOARD has its deepest networks.

Like many ecosystems, our’s is both resilient and delicate, wide reaching and intimate. We only introduce elements that feel truly organic, ensuring they fit seamlessly with what already exists. Winnin has quickly struck that balance—building authentic connections across THE BOARD and within our extended network of brand stakeholders. As a collective, we’re excited to support their U.S. expansion and continue learning together along the way.

As a network of deeply connected leaders,The BLACK BOOK Program is baked into our DNA. We're committed to meeting, vetting, and championing differentiated, high-ROI technology solutions. As the consumer economy shifts faster than ever, AI commands trillions in investment dollars, and decision makers are inundated with pitch decks and promises,THE BOARD is uniquely positioned to read both consumer and brand demand, and to put our stamp of approval only on the solutions truly worthy of our relational capital.

Always grateful to our extended network of investors and industry peers, equally invested in impacting business. And to our brand and retail partners—thank you for trusting us to help you cut through the noise. Having been in your seats, we know how precious your time is, and we work hard to deliver best-in-class products truly worthy of it.    

The BLACK BOOK is much more than a resource—it’s a signal of where business is headed— and THE BOARD is here to listen, lead, and connect the dots.

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether your brand needs a 'Dream Team' for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

For more BTS + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

By Beauty Executives Leslie Holmes, Fractional CMO/CBO & Transformational Coach, —Jennifer Ritter, Product Development & GTM Expert.

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

Lesley and Jennifer recently unpacked the emotional side of brand building—where strategy meets soul—on our bi-monthly LinkedIn Live series, Piping Hot. Here’s the breakdown, ICYMI!

RESONANCE IS MORE THAN A BUZZWORD. IT’S SCIENCE.

In today’s saturated consumer landscape, brands aren’t just competing for attention—they're competing for connection. As two longtime builders of beauty, wellness, and lifestyle brands, we’ve witnessed firsthand what separates brands that last from those that merely launch.

At the heart of lasting brand success is one core principle: resonance over reach.

Resonance isn’t just a spiritual concept—it’s rooted in physics. When something vibrates at a certain frequency, anything on that same frequency begins to vibrate, too. This isn’t just a metaphor—it’s a playbook for how to build brand loyalty.

When your brand is fully aligned—your purpose, your message, your product—you create a frequency that attracts the right people. Not just any people—your people.

You stop chasing customers and start becoming discoverable. Memorable. Magnetic.

BE EVERYTHING TO SOMEONE. NOT EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE. 

In a rush to grow, many brands cast too wide a net. But the brands that create legacy are laser-focused. They serve with intention. They create products that matter to their audience.

You don’t need a million people to like your product. You need the right people to love it.

Brands like Laneige, Benefit Cosmetics, and Stila are prime examples of this. They’ve built consistent resonance through a focused, always-on approach.

• Laneige has made its lip mask synonymous with nighttime rituals.

• Benefit has owned the brow category with unwavering clarity.

• Stila is synonymous with its cult-favorite eyeliners.

These brands didn’t build massive portfolios overnight. They leaned into one thing and did it so well that consumers came back again and again.

YOUR FOUNDATION COMES BEFORE YOUR STORY. 

A surprising number of brands skip the basics: their mission, vision, and values. They dive into product without a clear reason for being. But without a strong foundation, even the best marketing or the trendiest product won’t last.

We often reference New Balance as a standout comeback story. Once dismissed as outdated, it found its footing again by returning to its roots: comfort and support. But it didn’t stop there. It paired that core identity with bold new storytelling, influencer partnerships, and a smart play for the dad-shoe revival—all aligned with its values.

LAUNCH AND LEVERAGE. DON’T LAUNCH AND LEAVE.

A big takeaway for any founder or marketer: launching is just the beginning. Too many brands put all their energy into the launch, then walk away. Instead, launch and leverage. Build on what’s working. Reinforce what resonates. Educate. Re-engage. Evolve—but always in alignment.

You’re not just selling a product. You’re building a relationship. And relationships are nurtured over time.

WHEN BRANDS MISS THE MARK: DISSONANCE.

The opposite of resonance is dissonance—and it’s a fast track to confusion and distrust.

We’ve all seen it: brands known for bold, playful identities suddenly pivoting into clinical skincare, or abandoning their hero products for a trendy new vertical. Without a clear narrative, it feels jarring. Off-brand. Inauthentic.

This isn’t about avoiding innovation—it’s about evolving in alignment with your brand’s soul.

STAND FOR SOMETHING CLEAR.

Your customer should never be the one figuring out who you are. That clarity must shine through in your product line, your website, your Amazon listings, your social content—everywhere.

At the end of the day, brands that resonate deeply with their audience have one thing in common: they know who they are.

And when you know who you are, your audience will too.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR FOUNDERS AND BRAND LEADERS.

Build resonance before chasing reach.
Stand for something specific.
Know your brand’s frequency—and stay on it.
Launch with purpose—and keep building on it.
Evolve strategically, not reactively.
Double down on alignment, not just aesthetics.

If you're building a brand (or rebuilding one), remember this: 

Depth creates longevity. 

Resonance creates raving fans. 

And clarity creates conversion.

Let’s stop trying to be everything to everyone. Start being unforgettable to the right ones.

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite leaders across Fashion, Beauty, Tech and beyond. Whether you need a curated 'Dream Team' to power your next move or an on-call advisor to provide sharp, objective feedback, THE BOARD has you covered.

For BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

CLOSING THEM ISN’T A MATTER OF MESSAGING. IT’S LEADERSHIP.

Let’s be honest.

Most M&A announcements are written for investors, not the people who actually make the business run. The press release promises efficiency and vision. Inside, employees are left guessing what comes next. That uncertainty can turn even the strongest deal into its biggest liability.

Here’s the cold, hard data on why that matters: M&A deals fail at eye-opening rates, typically 60–90% fall short of delivering expected value, with people-related issues and poor integration cited as the primary culprits (BPE Search, 2025; Phoenix Strategy Group, 2025). Up to 70% of these deals don’t succeed at all (WTW, 2025). And even among completed transactions, 47% of employees leave within a year, and 75% depart within three, often due to cultural misalignment and unclear messaging (EY, 2025).

I’ve spent my career at the intersection of law, media, and strategic communications. As a lawyer, I learned when silence protects and when it creates risk. As a media executive, I saw how quickly silence can cause leaders to lose control of the story. Today, as CEO of a communications firm, I guide leaders through disruption, helping them craft strategies that stay consistent, credible, and clear.

Across industries, The Five Communication Gaps crop up again and again. They explain why even strong strategies stumble, and why closing them makes change take root.

THE PRIORITY GAP 

The tell: employees are still grinding on projects that leadership quietly abandoned.

Leaders love to announce bold new goals. But too often they fail to name what is no longer a priority. Without that clarity, teams default to the familiar. Legacy projects drag on. Whole departments keep running plays that don’t matter anymore. The result is wasted effort and the perception that leadership is out of touch.

Closing the Priority Gap requires discipline. Leaders must be explicit not only about what matters now, but what doesn’t. The moment employees are told what to stop doing, energy shifts. They can redirect toward the work that defines the future instead of spinning wheels in the past.

THE TRUST GAP

The tell: rumors spread faster than carefully crafted talking points.

Silence feels safe. But it isn’t. Leaders often wait until every detail is final before they speak. By then, employees have already written their own story. And fear travels faster than fact. This silence hits hardest in the middle. Managers are the people employees turn to first, the ones expected to translate strategy into daily action. When managers don’t have answers, they improvise or retreat. Either way, trust erodes.

Choose presence over perfection. Share what you know, admit what you don’t, and establish a cadence so people know when they’ll hear from you next. Just as important, arm managers with updates and talking points so they can lead with confidence. People can live with uncertainty if they trust their leaders are being honest. What they cannot live with is silence.

THE ALIGNMENT GAP 

The tell: the press release says “growth” while LinkedIn says hiring freezes.

Employees read press releases. Customers scroll headlines. Partners compare notes. When the story inside doesn’t match the story outside, credibility collapses.

Alignment doesn’t mean parroting the same words to every audience. It means building one consistent story with different points of emphasis. Employees want to see how their work connects to the future. Customers want reassurance. Investors want confidence. The foundation must hold even as the tone shifts.

I have seen organizations lose trust overnight because their external message of momentum clashed with internal experiences of constraint. Closing this gap requires consistency in substance and precision in delivery. Without it, even true messages ring false.

THE ADVOCACY GAP

The tell: people share half-truths that travel faster than official updates.

Employees are not passive recipients of communication. They are the brand’s most powerful advocates. Every meeting, every client call, every social post carries the story forward.

When employees don’t understand the reason behind a change, they unintentionally dilute the message. They speculate. They fill in gaps. And their version, however incomplete, spreads.

Equip stakeholders with simple, confident language to explain the change. This isn’t corporate spin. It’s empowerment. When people understand how the shift connects to purpose and to their own work, they stabilize culture inside and amplify the brand beyond.

THE CONTINUITY GAP

The tell: change feels like chaos instead of progress.

In every transformation, leaders focus on what’s new. What gets overlooked is what’s staying the same. Without that anchor, employees feel unmoored and customers see instability.

Closing the Continuity Gap means reminding people of the through line. Connect the change to purpose. Emphasize what will endure. Continuity shows that the organization is building on strength, not discarding its identity.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Every transformation raises the same question: will people stay with you?

Employees, customers, and partners decide quickly whether they believe the story being told. The Five Communication Gaps show up in nearly every organization. Closing them isn’t a matter of messaging. It is leadership. And when leaders take them seriously, communication stops being a support function. It becomes the system that carries strategy from announcement to reality.

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether your brand needs a 'Dream Team' to create a data-driven roadmap for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

By Stephanie Dobbs Brown, Builder | Operator | Investor in Women | Former CMO of Intercontinental Exchange & NYSE

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox

THE LABOR MARKET WE ONCE KNEW IS GONE. RESHUFFLING HAS BEGUN.

The recent New York Times piece on NYC (NYT) hiring paints a grim picture: private-sector payrolls barely grew in the first half of the year, major industries are shedding jobs and uncertainty hangs over businesses and workers alike. But while the numbers are stark, they mask a more important story: the labor market we once knew is gone and a new economy is quickly taking shape.

Yes, restaurants and tourism are feeling the pinch from tariffs, supply chain disruptions and post-pandemic shifts in consumer behavior. Finance and insurance (and just about everyone else) are grappling with AI-driven efficiencies, automation and the on-going saga of hybrid work, leading to layoffs and office reshuffling.

Globally, 85 million jobs are expected to be displaced by AI and automation by year-end (World Economic Forum). NYC’s challenges are part of these broader structural shifts reshaping the world of work.

Different sectors are being hit by different things, yet together they point to a single fact: the traditional model of work is over.

THE INFLECTION POINT

Post-Covid, AI and a host of other structural changes have permanently changed how, where and what we work on. Like the internet revolution or the industrial era, these changes disrupt old hierarchies, but they also create new opportunities for those who adapt

Three forces stand out:

1. AI AUGMENTATION

AI isn’t just another productivity tool; it’s a fundamental shift in how work gets done. Companies want employees who can integrate AI into workflows, not just use Chat GPT as a glorified search engine. Businesses are being built and entire functions are being redefined by people who know how to pair human judgment with machine intelligence.

2. FRACTIONAL WORK

The 9-to-5 model no longer fits the needs of companies or workers. Companies need specialized skills sometimes but not all the time - driving demand for fractional executives and project-based talent. The global fractional market is projected to hit $9.2 billion by 2026 with North America making up 42%. For businesses this means on-demand expertise and significant costs savings on average 40–60% (LinkedIn).. For workers, it means autonomy, flexibility and diversified income streams.

3. LOCATION FLUIDITY & THE OFFICE ADVANTAGE
The remote work wave was just the beginning. Today, just 20% of LinkedIn job postings are remote or hybrid but they attract 60% of applications (CNBC). The future isn’t “remote versus office” - it’s fluid. Companies source talent globally while recognizing that innovation, culture and high-stakes collaboration thrive best in person. The office is evolving into a strategic hub for creativity and cohesion, while distributed teams extend reach and capacity.

A NEW WORK PARADIGM IS HERE

The labor market’s shift doesn’t mean fewer opportunities, but it does mean different ones. A new work paradigm is here and both companies and individuals face the same choice: adapt, or be left behind.

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether your brand needs a 'Dream Team' to create a data-driven roadmap for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

By Sydney Badger, Founder of Mile One, a boutique supply chain and sourcing firm; author of the fashion and sustainability substack, Tabs Open.

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

With tariff pressures back in the headlines, we’re once again asking — can fashion ever truly be Made in the USA? What’s myth, what’s reality, and how should companies respond in this chaotic time?

Let's talk about tariffs, manufacturing and where our stuff is getting made these days amidst the noise of Trump’s first seven months (ugh, so long to go). These on-again, off-again tariffs are now in place as of August 7th and we have yet to see the impact they’ll have on the price of…well, everything, and, you know, the economy, and the disillusionment that the rest of the world has with America.

“IT’S MIDNIGHT!!! BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TARIFFS ARE NOW FLOWING INTO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!” Trump proclaimed just before the deadline in a post on social media.

Flash quiz: what’s the current tariff rate on products coming into the US from Vietnam? Canada? China? TBH, I don’t bloody know because it’s impossible to keep track. So I’ve been using this handy reporting from Yale’s Budget Lab to keep abreast of wtf is going on and NY Times’ map for real-time (I think?) updates on country by country tariff rates.

NY Times Tariff tracking map

According to Yale, as of August 1st, consumers face an average effective tariff rate of 18.3%, the highest since 1934. The effective tariff rate considers both the tariff on the final product (i.e. dress) and the tariff on the imported inputs (fabric, thread, buttons etc.) And, in case you’re curious, Vietnam - one of the largest producers of fashion globally - is currently at 20%, Canada at 35% (!!!) and China at 30%.

My not-so-hot take is that fashion manufacturing is most definitely not coming back to the U.S. About 97% of the clothes and shoes sold in the U.S. are imported, according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. Quite simply, we don’t have the labor, skillset or infrastructure to meaningfully increase clothing production in the U.S.

But there is a lot of opportunity for the local circular economy: recommerce, reverse logistics, maybe recycling although I’m still not convinced that the economics will pan out (nor are some experts I’ve talked to). I’ve talked about returns before and that’s still an $890 billion problem in the US alone. Plenty of work to be done in this space and I plan on deep diving the world of recommerce, tech and logistics infrastructure in a future post. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates that the “fashion industry could see waste recycling rates surpass 30%, generating new fibers with a raw material value worth more than $50 billion and creating approximately 180,000 new jobs.” This needs to be further examined

I spoke to the head of sourcing at a large ecommerce brand with a huge fashion and home business (over $700MM) and they told me that they’d already moved 100% of their production out of China in the last 6 months. And this is a supply chain that was predominantly China-based for the past 6 years. That’s no small feat. I was surprised to hear that they’d moved that quickly in response to some of Trump’s announcements given that other leaders’ responses have been to wait it out. “Trump just wants a deal and the second Wall Street turns on him, he’ll back down.” Plus, they say, it’s all too unpredictable to do anything strategic.

Most fashion companies have already moved sourcing out of China with lower wages luring companies to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India and even into Africa in the past ten years but the latest tariffs are really throwing a curve ball at every company with a global supply chain. But no, these orders aren’t moving to the US.

Let’s examine the bigger Trump strategy, to bring manufacturing - and jobs - back to the US and reduce reliance on other countries. Is it possible? Not for fashion my friends! This article by a manufacturing expert who has had a seemingly credible perspective on manufacturing having worked in Chinese, Mexican and US factories shares a really compelling breakdown on why bringing manufacturing back to the US won’t work.

It’s long so, if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, here are a few of the takeaways that I think are spot on:

Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better… It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.

You cannot underestimate what 40+ years of manufacturing prowess, experience, supply chain infrastructure does for a country, and for its culture. America is so far removed from manufacturing now that we don’t have any idea about how stuff is made. Nor do we really care. We care (maybe) about the materials, we hope they were made in a factory that was clean and paid people fairly but, we really don’t want to know.

When I was testing out different taglines for Public Habit in 2018, we experimented with something along the lines of, “Quality, straight from the factory floor.” Or, “Quality, factory direct to you.” Ok, I know they both suck but, we teased out the fact that having the word “factory” in our tagline was a major turnoff. No one wanted to hear about the factory unless it was an atelier or a workshop, whatever that means. But, the idea that 99.99999% of our clothing is mass-produced in a factory, typically on the other side of the world, by a worker who gets paid less than $300/month (current wage rates in Vietnam), no thank you we say. I don’t want to see it.

And the difference I felt in China is that manufacturing is part of their modern DNA. Millennials and Gen-Z, while they don’t aspire to work in manufacturing, they understand how it works, the economics of it, the importance of it, and they still don’t want to do it.

We have forgotten how to make products people wrongly consider to be basic, too.

More of the above. We don’t have this muscle anymore.

By the time “made in America” has begun, we will be electing a new president.

It typically takes up to 2 years to set up and establish a fully functioning factory and, guess what, most of that machinery required to run a cut and sew factory would be imported. I haven’t seen any talk of substantial subsidies for US clothing manufacturing, have you?

I do see that there are some exciting innovations happening right here at home, like Unspun’s on-demand weaving machines, but this is an expensive, sub-scale operation at this stage. And they are certainly seeing some tailwinds right now from the general panic around overseas supply chains. Additionally, there is a lot of momentum in reverse logistics, sorting, conditioning and recommerce but, the circular economy is still the Wild Wild West as far as I can tell.

Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive healthcare.
They don’t want to be sewing shirts. The United States is trying to bring back the jobs that China doesn’t even want. They have policies to reduce low value manufacturing, yet we are applying tariffs to bring it back. It’s incomprehensible.

Perhaps most importantly, Americans don’t want factory jobs. We love being a consumer economy and we are so good at it. We’ve become a service economy and many economists believe that this specialization globally is good for productivity (but also good for persisting post-colonial tropes).

LA garment factory

Manufacturing clothing in the US is here, mostly in LA, some in NY and some in the South. And most of the workers in the industry are Hispanic or Latino. Listen to NPR’s Planet Money ep on “Made in America” to remind us what these jobs look like and who’s actually doing the work today. The norm is to pay workers - often undocumented workers - by the “piece-rate” and they’ll make something like $0.10/piece. So, the more they finish, the more they get paid. That leads to a lot of long hours and back-breaking work. And, at the end of the day, an LA garment worker, paid under-the-table in cash, is making about $1500/month, including overtime. And that’s still in conditions that could be much worse than you’ll find in Vietnam or Sri Lanka. And that’s still over 5x the cost of wages overseas. The maths doesn’t match.

So, what would I do if I were running a Global Fashion supply chain today?

When I work with brands today, either in an advisory capacity or as a client with Mile One, I have the same advice regardless of who I’m talking to, large or small. I’m particularly hopeful that in this really wild moment that we’re in, small businesses can find some opportunity to differentiate and rethink their operations more nimbly than bigger operations. You have less to lose and lots to gain.

1. Diversify. From chaos arises opportunity and now is a great time to rethink your supply chain to build resilience.

2. Double-down on material inputs. Where are you sourcing your raw materials? Can you hold more greige and hold it so that you can have more flexibility when it comes to your finished goods production?

3. Maintain an open line of communication and cement long-term partnerships with your key suppliers. They’re just as nervous as you are.

4. Experiment. Where is there an opportunity to test something new that you’ve been holding off on? Resale? New category? New channel? I would lean into the uncertainty and see what you can unlock that could also diversify revenue or reduce channel reliance.

So, do I think there will be pockets of production in America in the next twenty years? Yes. Especially for small-batch, highly automated (and expensive) quick turn production or merch. Look to Unspun, Resonance, Tailored Industry to see some of the emerging, tech-enabled, low waste production solutions in the US. And, of course, there’s always merch. Some of my favorite partners: Bio Blanks in LA, Midnight Supply printer in Washington, and of course, Mile One for your one-stop shop.

But, America’s fashion production days are behind us with better, faster and cheaper production too well entrenched overseas to ever be economically viable in the US. And that’s not a bad thing. Let’s specialize, embrace a globalized world - warts and all - and realize we cannot self-isolate if we want to prepare for the next 50+ years of chaos and change. 

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether your brand needs a 'Dream Team' to create a data-driven roadmap for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

Thursday, August 21, 2025

By Faheem Siddiqi, CEO at FinanceWithin | Finance, Accounting, HR partner for founder-led companies

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

PEOPLE LEVERAGE: BUILDING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURE AS A FINANCIAL STRATEGY

The most durable and valuable companies are built by strategically maximizing three forms of leverage: 

1. Capital leverage

2. Product & systems leverage

3. People leverage

4. Each is critical, but too often, “people leverage” is treated as an afterthought

Capital and systems determine how far and how fast brands can grow, but people determine whether that growth is sustainable. The right individuals in the right roles, operating within a high-performance culture, can dramatically shift both revenue trajectories and margin profiles. Done well, people leverage is not “soft” HR. It is a financial strategy: a direct driver of profitability, working capital efficiency, and enterprise value.

This essay explores the importance of people leverage as a construct: how HR and people operations can function as a strategic growth engine that multiplies financial outcomes.

THE FINANCE WITHIN PHILOSOPHY OF LEVERAGE & GROWTH

Capital Leverage

Strong liquidity and a disciplined working capital strategy are non-negotiable. Every dollar should work harder than the last. Shortening the cash conversion cycle, protecting margins, and fueling profitable growth. Smart capital structures enable growth without sacrificing resilience.

Product & Systems Leverage

Scale is sustainable only when supported by the right products and systems. Automation, tech enablement, vertical integration, and process design reduce operational drag and expand margins. Hero SKUs, category architecture, and innovation pipelines drive velocity and enhance margin. 

Systems turn complexity into a competitive advantage.

People Leverage

A high-performance culture is a growth engine. The right people, in the right roles, with clear accountability, can have a significant impact on the desired future state of a company. You can build enterprise value from talent density: A-players in every seat, operating lean, aligned to strategy, and accountable for outcomes.

The problem is that many companies treat HR as a compliance function and people operations as admin support. I see it differently. 

People leverage is a form of capital allocation. 

Just as balance sheets measure efficiency of financial assets, an organization’s talent structure reflects the efficiency of its human capital.

WHY PEOPLE LEVERAGE MATTERS

Headcount Sets Your Cost Base

For startups and even mid-market companies, payroll is a meaningful part of opex. Every key hire shifts the cost structure and the break-even point. A few mis-hires or carrying underperformers can weaken culture, create cognitive load, impact margins and compound problems over time.

Talent Is a Force Multiplier

Top performers aren’t marginally better, they’re exponentially better. An A-player can deliver 5–10x the output of an average hire, with higher accuracy and strategic contribution. In a lean operating model, one extraordinary hire can replace several mediocre ones while improving speed and quality.

A dear friend of mine, Ayman, once said: “You’re 1 hire away from cutting your problems in half. And 2 hires away from having a completely different company.” That’s the power of strong talent.

Culture Protects and Accelerates Value

A high-performance culture reduces turnover, shortens ramp time, and keeps execution aligned with strategy. Lower churn cuts recruiting costs; institutional knowledge compounds. The result is velocity. Moving quickly without breaking fundamentals, which translates directly into financial performance.

People Decisions Are Capital Decisions

Every hire, promotion, and incentive is capital allocation. Compensation design is an investment strategy; incentives dictate behavior; org design sets the limits of scalability. When leadership frames people as a capital decision (not just an HR function), talent becomes a direct driver of the P&L and enterprise value.

BUILDING PEOPLE LEVERAGE: CORE PILLARS

Hiring for A-Players

• Top 10% talent in every seat: Companies should raise the bar on talent density. Each hire must meaningfully improve performance relative to cost.

• Cultural and strategic fit: Skills matter, but alignment to business objectives matters more.

• Rigorous process: Structured interviews, case studies, and reference checks reduce hiring mistakes, which can cost 2–3x salary.

Compensation as Capital Allocation

• Pay for outcomes, not activity: Incentive plans tied to revenue, gross margin, or cash flow sharpen accountability.

• Equity and/or phantom equity: Well-designed long-term incentives align employees with enterprise value creation, especially for non-fungible talent.

• Benchmarking: Comp bands should reflect both market rates and company financial constraints.

Org Design and Headcount Discipline

• Stay lean as long as possible: Every new role should have a clear ROI case.

• Span of control: Avoid bloated middle management layers.

• Scalable org charts: Design today’s org with tomorrow’s scale in mind.

Performance Management

• Clear KPIs tied to financial metrics: Marketing tied to LTV/CAC, ops tied to fulfillment cost, finance tied to cash flow, etc.

• Quarterly reviews with accountability: Evaluations should be forward-looking (how to improve) and have clean lessons learned from the past on what went wrong.

• PIPs and RIFs: Address underperformance quickly. Protect culture by refusing mediocrity.

Leadership Development

• Coaching and training: Developing managers compounds people leverage.

• Succession planning: Anticipating leadership gaps prevents disruption.

• Execution coaching: Teaching leaders how to connect strategic goals with operating decisions keeps organizations sharp.

HOW PEOPLE STRATEGY DRIVES FINANCIAL METRICS

Revenue Growth

• Better talent in sales and marketing increases top-line growth.

• High-performing product and merchandising teams build assortments that drive velocity.

• Aligned organizations execute faster, capturing market share before competitors.

Gross Margin

• Strong ops and supply chain teams negotiate better vendor terms, optimize COGS, and improve fulfillment efficiency.

• Cross-functional alignment prevents margin leakage from mispricing, discounting, or poor promotions.

Operating Expenses

• Lean, high-performance cultures require fewer people to achieve the same output.

• Retention lowers recruiting and onboarding costs.

• Accountability reduces waste and non-value-adding activity.

Cash Flow

• Incentives tied to working capital metrics (DSO, DPO, inventory turns) directly improve liquidity.

• Compensation tied to free cash flow ensures leaders treat cash as the scarce resource it is.

Enterprise Value

• High-performance teams reduce execution risk.

• Talent density drives operating leverage: fewer people, greater output, stronger margins.

• Clarity and accountability accelerate decision-making and preserve organizational velocity.

• Durable cultures compound over time, protecting downside in downturns and capturing upside in growth cycles.
  

EXAMPLES OF WHAT I’VE SEEN

Case 1: Staying Lean through Scale

A DTC brand scaling from $20M to $75M in revenue resisted the urge to triple headcount. Instead, they hired selectively for A-player roles in supply chain, finance, and growth marketing. Their headcount grew only 40% while revenue grew nearly 4x. The result: operating leverage expanded EBITDA margins from 7% to 11%.

Case 2: Compensation Design and Cash Flow

A CPG company tied bonuses for its sales team to gross margin dollars, not top-line sales. This shifted behavior away from discount-heavy deals that eroded profitability. Within a year, margin contribution improved by 300bps, generating an incremental $2M in gross profit.

Case 3: Performance Management and Turnover Reduction

A retailer suffering from 40% annual turnover implemented structured onboarding, career paths, and quarterly reviews. Turnover dropped to 20%, saving ~$800K annually in recruiting costs while improving store-level revenue per employee by 12%.

THE CFO-CHRO PARTNERSHIP

The CFO and CHRO should be natural allies. Finance brings rigor, metrics, and capital allocation discipline. HR brings insight into talent, culture, and organizational behavior. Together, they drive “people leverage” as a financial strategy.

• CFO Role: Ensure compensation, headcount, and org design decisions align with financial goals.

• CHRO Role: Build the systems, processes, and culture that maximize the productivity of human capital.

• Joint Role: Translate people strategies into measurable business outcomes. Tying every hire, promotion, and incentive back to P&L impact.
  

COMMON MISTAKES THAT ERODE PEOPLE LEVERAGE

1. Over-hiring: Scaling headcount ahead of revenue creates fixed costs that can be hard to unwind.

2. Tolerating underperformance: One mediocre employee lowers standards for the entire team.

3. Misaligned incentives: Paying bonuses on revenue when margins are thin destroys enterprise value.

4. Ignoring culture debt: Just as companies accumulate technical debt, they accumulate cultural debt when they compromise on talent density.

5. Separating HR from strategy: Treating HR as an administrative silo ensures it won’t drive financial outcomes.

PEOPLE AS THE ULTIMATE LEVERAGE

 Capital leverage and product & systems leverage are powerful, but people leverage is what makes them work. A company can raise meaningful growth capital, but without the right people and culture, it will burn cash and stall. A company can build automated systems, but without accountability and alignment, those systems will be underutilized.

High-performance culture is not a “nice to have.” It is a financial imperative. By treating HR and people operations as capital allocation levers (on par with debt, equity, and working capital), companies can build more durable, more profitable, and more valuable brands.

The essence of people leverage is simple:

• Fewer, better people

• Aligned to strategic outcomes

• Measured by financial results

When leaders embrace this philosophy, they unlock the highest return on investment available: turning human capital into drivers of business performance. 

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether your brand needs a 'Dream Team' to create a data-driven roadmap for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK.

August 21st, 2025

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

THESE AREN’T SEPARATE CONVERSATIONS

When people talk about brand, risk, and governance, they tend to talk about them in isolation. Brand sits with marketing. Risk with legal or compliance. Governance with the boardroom.

But, in reality, they’re anything but separate. Brand shapes how risk shows up. Risk influences how the brand is experienced. Governance determines how both are managed, prioritized, and sustained. These aren’t separate functions. They’re different ways of framing decisions about what the company stands for, how it shows up, and what it’s willing to stand behind.

And yet, they’re rarely treated that way. Brand is often managed as something external – a message, a campaign, a visual identity. Governance is procedural. Risk becomes shorthand for legal exposure or compliance checklists. Each operates with its own scope and vocabulary.

But these functions should be deeply intertwined. This isn’t about adding complexity. It’s about creating the kind of alignment that allows bold decisions to take root – and hold up under pressure.

IMBALANCE HAS CONSEQUENCES

When brand, risk, and governance are in balance, leadership moves with more confidence, teams execute with more clarity, and the brand becomes more resilient – not because it’s rigid, but because it’s grounded.

But, balance is the key. When it slips, the damage may be quiet, but it’s rarely trivial. 

In creatively driven environments,  it’s not uncommon for things that don’t quite feel “on brand” to get waved through under the name of creativity or innovation. A new product direction. A provocative campaign. An influencer partnership. None of them are fatal in isolation. But over time, they add up.

And because the risk doesn’t carry obvious red flags – there are no lawsuits, no viral backlash – it doesn’t show up as a “risk” at all. Governance often isn’t part of the conversation until much later, if at all.

But absence of controversy is not the same as alignment. 

Without a shared understanding of what the brand truly stands for – and structured oversight to reinforce it – decisions start to pull in different directions. Not because anyone is being careless, but because no one is asking the harder questions: Does this reflect who we are? Will it still make sense a year from now? Are we building something coherent—or just moving quickly?

What once felt distinct becomes inconsistent. What once reflected purpose starts to blur. You see it in a loss of pricing power. In teams making decisions based on different interpretations of the brand. In loyal customers no longer recognizing what drew them in to begin with.

This isn’t about stifling creativity or innovation. It’s about anchoring it with structure so that the brand evolves with intention, not by accident. 

BRAND IS BIGGER THAN MARKETING

One reason imbalance happens is that brand itself is often misunderstood. It’s treated as something outward facing – a campaign, a tagline, a visual identity. Something the marketing team leads and others support.

But that framing is too narrow. Brand isn’t just what a company says. It’s how it behaves. It shows up in how decisions get made, how leaders communicate, how teams prioritize, how people are hired, and how the company responds under pressure. Marketing may bring the brand to life externally – but internally, brand is shaped across the organization.

And if the people inside the company don’t understand or believe in it, the brand breaks down long before it ever reaches the customer. 

Because brand is intangible, it doesn’t sit on a balance sheet. It may shape creative direction, but too often, but it rarely receives the same strategic weight, oversight, or operational accountability as other drivers of long-term value.

That’s the blind spot.

Brand is an enterprise-wide system. It sits at the center of trust, reputation, identity, culture, and stakeholder expectations. It shapes how the company earns loyalty, attracts talent, and builds resilience.

It’s not just a reflection of the business. It’s the structure that holds it together.

But it often gets overlooked. That is, until something goes wrong.

Boards and leadership teams don’t need a new framework to fix this. But they do need to widen their lens.

Not just: Is the brand tracking with consumers?

But also:

• Are we reinforcing the brand internally in the way we lead, hire, and operate?

• Does our governance structure support what we say we stand for?

• Are we treating brand as a core business system or something that lives off to the side?

Because brand doesn’t live in one department. And if it isn’t clearly understood or supported at the highest levels, it becomes everyone’s job and no one’s responsibility.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET IT RIGHT

When brand, risk, and governance are aligned early, something shifts. 

Creative decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. They’re shaped by structure – not to water them down, but to sharpen them.

Teams move quickly, even provocatively, because they’ve already asked the hard questions: Where is this likely to land? What does it signal? Are we clear on where we’re taking a risk and why it’s worth it?

The best creative work I’ve seen didn’t happen in spite of governance. It happened because of it. Because the right people were in the room at the right time. Because there was shared language around risk. Because no one was guessing where the line was or waiting for a crisis to find out.

The kind of alignment doesn’t require more process. It requires earlier conversations. It requires brand, legal, comms, and leadership to stop handing off decisions like a baton – and start shaping them together. It requires governance to be seen not as a barrier to creative freedom, but as the thing that makes it sustainable. Risk isn’t treated as something to avoid, but as a lens to help the business see more clearly. And brand isn’t reduced to a creative output, but recognized as the connective tissue across functions.

When companies get this right, they’re not just safer. They’re bolder. Because they know when to take a risk - and how to stand behind it when they do.

THE CASE FOR BETTER PARTNERSHIP 

Brand, governance, and risk aren’t competing forces. They’re co-pilots. When one takes over without the others, decisions skew – and so does the business.

This isn’t about structure for structure’s sake. It’s about making sure the right things are in the room early enough to shape what comes next. If brand is treated as surface, or risk as a checklist, or governance as a sign-off—clarity gets lost. Decisions get made, but not always with the full picture in view.

In the companies that get this right, brand becomes more than expression. Governance becomes a tool for focus. Risk becomes a lens, not a red flag.

And that kind of alignment doesn’t require a new framework.
It requires better partnership.

It means asking different questions.
It means making space for more than one perspective.
It means recognizing that brand isn’t something to protect after the fact—it’s something to lead with.

And it starts by treating brand, risk, and governance not as separate conversations, but as a shared responsibility.

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether you need a 'Dream Team' to create a data-driven roadmap for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK!

August 7th, 2025

Every Thursday, THE BOARD BRIEFING brings you curated industry insights directly from our Members to your inbox.

Let’s not pretend

Public Relations didn’t evolve—it stalled. 

While the world reshaped itself post Covid, the industry clung to pitch calendars and soft metrics passed off as strategy. Execution got buried in bureaucracy. The fight, the urgency, the creative edge—all went missing.

Since then, the universe has expanded.

Clients have always required precision and relevance. Now, they demand velocity. No more soft-porn presentations. No more dog and pony shows. 

That’s why fractional PR isn’t a trend—it’s a reckoning. The wise and the well-capitalized know where to find pressure-tested expertise—and how to deploy it exactly where, and when, it matters. 

And if you are serious, so should you.

To the old-school doubters: this isn’t your grandmother’s part-time PR. It’s high-impact, senior-firepower—on call, on target. 

AND THE DATA IS CATCHING UP

LinkedIn profiles identifying as “fractional leaders” rose from 2,000 in 2022 to 110,000 in 2024. The Frak Conference reports 120,000 total fractional executives in the U.S. alone—double the number from two years ago—and nearly a third work in marketing or communications. 

I founded Workhouse 25 years ago. We’re still driving legacy campaigns and award-winning work across culture, fashion, entertainment, and lifestyle. Workhouse isn’t a relic—it’s present tense. Our team moves like SWAT. 

I go on missions.

In a creative conflict, some may call for sharpshooters, not platoons. That’s why I joined THE BOARD—a collective of veteran C-suite leaders who embed precisely when clarity, speed, and impact are nonnegotiable. No ceremony. Just sharp thinking, fast action, real results.

In 2019—well before the AI revolution systematically destroyed the written word—I wrote Public Relations Riot, a white paper that dared to ask: “Will PR adapt—or be erased?” It wasn’t a provocation. It was a warning. Six years later? You can still smell the smoke.

Let’s dig into some more devastating data:

More than 10,000 media jobs have been eliminated across the U.S. and U.K. in the last two years. Entire newsrooms—Condé Nast, Hearst, The Washington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed, NBC, ABC, LA Times, Vice—have slashed staff, gutted coverage, and folded titles. Over 3,800 roles were cut in 2024 alone. 

THESE AREN’T BELT-TIGHTENING TRIMS. THEY’RE AMPUTATIONS.

Legacy media is no longer where news lives. It’s migrated—to Substack, to podcasts, to LinkedIn feeds, paid media, social media, and creator-driven platforms. The audience didn’t vanish. They rerouted. But most of the industry still pretends we’re pitching in 2001 using Burrelle books and a broken fax machine.

A few months ago, a founder came to me in freefall. Funding was slipping. Press had gone quiet. They were “re-evaluating.” 

He booked an hour together through THE BOARD. 

By the end of our call, we had a story that made sense. Four days later, they had national press. They didn’t need a reset. They needed a response. Their story wasn’t broken. The process was.

*Fractional doesn’t have to mean fractured. It can mean focused. Embedded. Exact.

And it’s not for everyone. Some companies require full-service agencies like ours, long-tail planning, deep resourcing. And that’s where Workhouse remains a trusted force. But when speed and decisive clarity are the only currency? That’s a different ball game. 

That’s THE BOARD.

Make no mistake: this isn’t a funeral for PR. 

It’s a field report.

The industry didn’t fall—it calcified.

The audience didn’t vanish—they migrated.

And the firms still clinging to legacy hopes and dreams? Pretty much speaking to an empty room.

If your publicist is selling presence over purpose, your story is inert. If the coverage you’re getting doesn’t shift reputation, revenue, or recognition—it’s camouflage, not strategy. And if your “plan” opens with a PowerPoint? You’ve already lost time you can’t afford.

At the intersection of apathy and algorithm, fractional isn’t a pivot. 

It’s a power move.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Nelson is the Founder & CEO of WORKHOUSE, a 25-year-old creative agency driving earned media and brand campaigns across entertainment, culture, fashion, and lifestyle. He is also a Founding Advisor on THE BOARD, a collective of senior C-suite talent offering fractional leadership in public relations, communications, and brand strategy.

BOOK AN OFFICE HOUR

Get real-time clarity from someone who’s been in the trenches.

Book a 1:1 with Adam here

THE BOARD is a vetted community of C-Suite talent from worlds of Fashion, Beauty, Tech and more. Whether you need a 'Dream Team' to create a data-driven roadmap for what's next or an on-call advisor to provide objective feedback on your strategy, THE BOARD has you covered.

For more BTS conversations + in depth insights subscribe to ABOVE BOARD on SUBSTACK!