Connecting to Maddi Ingham, former Chief of Staff at Verve Super, now founder. In this episode, I dial into a conversation with Maddi Ingham, 2x Chief of Staff, now working in stealth on her next venture. Maddi's career is a testament to her commitment to creating a better world for people and the planet. We explore her journey from management consulting to her catch-all role in Verve Super’s acquisition—a remarkable all-women-founded exit celebrated as “the business story we need” by Women’s Agenda. We dive into her experiences solving complex early-stage problems, the role of trust in navigating M&A processes during leadership team parental leave, and the impact of executive partnerships. Maddi also shares her thoughts on gender equality, her operator insights gained from CliftonStrengths, and the importance of building a supportive community of peers.
In this episode, I dial into a conversation with Maddi Ingham, 2x Chief of Staff, now working in stealth on her next venture. Maddi's career is a testament to her commitment to creating a better world for people and the planet. We explore her journey from management consulting to her catch-all role in Verve Super’s acquisition—a remarkable all-women-founded exit celebrated as “the business story we need” by Women’s Agenda. We dive into her experiences solving complex early-stage problems, the role of trust in navigating M&A processes during leadership team parental leave, and the impact of executive partnerships. Maddi also shares her thoughts on gender equality, her operator insights gained from CliftonStrengths, and the importance of building a supportive community of peers.
Episode note:
When discussing the gender pay gap, Maddi uses binary language (e.g., “man” and “woman”). We recognise that this isn’t always the reality for some parents.
Find Maddi:
Maddi's Northstars and frameworks:
ANZ operators—ones to watch:
Other folks mentioned in the episode:
Connecting to Maddi Igham, most recently Chief of Staff at Verve Super, now Founder:
Laura: Maddi, it's a pleasure having you here. Thanks so much for joining me.
Maddi: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Laura: Let's start by getting to know Maddi. Can you share where you grew up and some of your early experiences that shaped you?
Maddi: As you might've guessed from the little twang in my voice, I grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand, so South Island New Zealand in the cold. Very lucky family life: two wonderful parents and an older sister, who I was desperate to be like, which is phenomenal because she is one of the smartest people I know, so very tough act to follow. I was in Christchurch most of my life before I went down to Dunedin University in Otago so it got even colder, and I studied law and accounting there.
Laura: I am currently in the south of New Zealand. It's minus five today in Queenstown.
Maddi: Yeah. That was me for about five years at university. I look back and I don't know how I physically survived in that cold. I freeze in Sydney's 16 degree temperatures.
Laura: What a contrast. I was in Sydney in early April and it was gorgeous, perfect, sunny weather. People were in puffer jackets then, so I can only imagine we need to send help now. So I'd love to know who or what had the biggest influence on you when you were growing up.
Maddi: I think probably the two most obvious ones are my parents. I could list a bunch of things that I learned from them, including work ethic, attention to detail slash grammar. But also how to be a good person and care for community around you. As I mentioned, my sister's a couple of years older than me so I very much followed in her footsteps. If Harry did rowing, I did rowing, if Harry did basketball, I did basketball, so I probably have heard a thank for a lot of my extracurriculars and also for getting a good reputation with teachers before I'd even started. I think I was really lucky with my schooling. I've had pretty phenomenal teachers all the way through that taught me various things and kind of pushed me. I had wonderful sports coaches that tried to get the best out of me and a close relationship with a bunch of my Lecturers at university, which was also really helpful.
Laura: Oh, it's always so wonderful when you have an older sibling to follow in their footsteps. What does she do now?
Maddi: My sister, like a lot of my family is an engineer. I butcher her role because she's doing really cool stuff, but it's basically engineering for new technologies. So really innovative new technology, but that is new to the market. They do all of the engineering to make sure it's safe.
Laura: You mentioned your wonderful sports coaches earlier. Do you think that athlete mindset has helped you in your career?
Maddi: 100%. I did sports throughout every year growing up and I overloaded myself with the number of sports that I did. I did basically, as many as you physically can. I was very lucky to have a mum that ferried me around to all of these various different activities. Then when I was in high school, I narrowed in on rowing, which to anyone who's rowed is very competitive. That was nine trainings a week; up early mornings, away every second weekend for the whole of summer. Very intense. I actually caught up with a friend the other night who I rowed with, and that was such nice reminiscing because we've spent so much time together it's such a comfortable friendship. I was really lucky the family support. As I said my sister rowed before me so by the time I came along, my parents were well and truly embedded in the parents scene. Mum was doing a lot of the fundraising. Dad was doing everything, I think he personally fixed everything in that shed at some point or another. So, yeah. Made it a lot easier for sure to have that support. I was lucky, the time that I was rowing , my high school was quite strong and so we had really good coaches and a really good program and really good girls in the program to row with.
Laura: Let's dig in there. What was a lesson from a coach that you still find useful today?
Maddi: There's definitely a piece around resilience. I think in any sport you have the highest highs and the lowest lows. We did this exercise called, 'Super Comp', a little bit of a sadistic name. Basically one week out from nationals, we would go down to Twizel for a long weekend and we would row, we would race as much as we could until all of our muscles basically had ripped so that they would grow back stronger in time for nationals. Two of the coaches were science teachers and they basically used our rowing coaches, almost like a science experiment to test all of the newest theories coming out of science around sports and athletes. That weekend alone built so much resilience because there's nothing more demoralizing than when you're on your sixth race of the day, you've given it everything you have, someone around you is probably puking or crying and your coach go [ ] anyone who can't see that I'm doing a little finger in the air spin around thing. He wouldn't even say a word. It was just spin around back to the top. You just have to get through it, you have to put your head down and do the work. Great times. Also some of the worst of times.
Laura: So transitioning from sports, what did you initially envision for your career?
Maddi: I had no idea. If you ask me at different stages of my life it varied from hairdresser to teacher to police detective to fighting in the U S Supreme court. I'm not American. That's not possible. I narrowed in on my university degree by ruling out the degrees I knew I didn't want to do and that left me with law and commerce. To show how undecided I was, I started my commerce degree with a double major and a minor to hedge my bets because I had no idea which of them I might want to do. I had a bunch of internships most summers I was working and I tried to get really early exposure to law and to accounting firms. Through that process, I learned quite quickly that accounting probably wasn't for me. I really enjoyed some of the more problem solving aspects of it, but I didn't enjoy doing a tax return or making financial statements. That part is quite a big part of the job. After that, I was like, okay cool, I'll probably be a lawyer. I'd really enjoyed my family and my criminal papers so I thought it was a safe bet, but I actually got dragged along by a friend to the BCG ( Boston Consulting Group) open evening that they had. It was in the middle of Orientation Week so I sacrificed a couple of hours of partying and I went along and they absolutely sold the dream. And so I ended up going into management consulting and to this day, I've never practiced law or accounting.
Laura: For many folks in the startup ecosystem, management consulting, seems to be a key step into the startup world. Was it like that for you?
Maddi: BCG absolutely sold the dream and at the time I applied I thought they had an Auckland office. They actually didn't so BCG was instrumental in getting me to Australia. I moved to Sydney for that job. Everyone kind of knows management consulting is a pretty tough job and I think it's only with the hindsight of now, that I've realized it wasn't the work for me.
Laura: At the time, I became quite demoralized that I wasn't smart and I took that personally, you know? To quote Michael Jordan. I did two years there, but by the end, as I think the common story in startups, I was quite burned out. I had a couple of projects that were long hours and really intense work, and then combined with not feeling I was getting it or great at that there were elements of the job I was really good at like my clients love me, my comms were relatively good but some of the key tenants of consulting I was really struggling with.
Maddi: I was lucky that I had a couple of friends from BCG that had moved into startups or knew the startup space quite well. Both of them recommended that I did the Startmate fellowship and got a chance to chat to both those mates and ask them what the program looked like and kind of knew what it was like going into it. And then made the call to quit BCG, which is very stressful and do the fellowship.
Laura: So the quitting itself was stressful?
Maddi: Very stressful. I'm not the type to quit without a job lined up.
Laura: Yeah, totally agree. Um, on reflection, what are the one or two things from your consulting days that have stayed with you throughout your career?
Maddi: The first is the ability to look at a problem that you've never come across and not freak out. Like go, I have no idea how to solve this but be able to break it down into actionable chunks or steps and then identify the resources or the places you can go within each. When you're in startups, you're dealing with a new problem every single day and you have absolutely no idea how to solve it and I think if BCG hadn't trained me for that kind of problem solving mindset, I would find it a lot more difficult especially when I came up against a really meaty problem. I think the second one is just the ability to get shit done. I still don't know if I've ever looked as intensely as those hours. Not only is it long hours, they're really intense. Every half an hour you're producing something, you're in a meeting, there's actions. It's a very fast pace .
Laura: I guess you could say it's true hustle culture, but powerful skill sets all the same and sounds like the perfect training ground for startups.
Maddi: Great training, especially when you're young and you're willing to sacrifice your life for a couple of years
Laura: Yeah, on that actually, I talked to your best friend Abby and she described you as incredibly smart with a great balance of working hard and enjoying life. Does that ring true?
Maddi: Absolutely. When you not enjoy your job, you use your weekends kind of one of two ways. One, you go hermit and you sleep and you try and catch up and you want to be at home because you're not at home at all. Or you go the other way where you're trying to make the most of your weekend. And so I was trying to make the most of my weekend and catch up with all the friends I hadn't been able to see midweek because of the hours , which is obviously a recipe for burnout. In some regards COVID actually probably helped me because it forced me to stay at home and catch up on some sleep.
Laura: Looping back to Abbi. She also mentioned one of your strongest personality traits is your ability to always prioritize friendships. What I took from this conversation was your ability to impact relationships at scale, which I thought was a really special gift that you actually bring to the startup ecosystem, too.
Maddi: She's honestly, such a good friend. I got so lucky with her. She was just a random flatmate and yeah, one of the best friends. But yeah, trying to put friendships first when you're working 60 hour weeks and have no weeknights, it's very easy to quickly feel like you're missing out on people's lives or you don't know them as well as you'd like to know them, because you don't have a chance to.
Laura: Is that what formed your diary?
Maddi: My diary?
Laura: So apparently you're so caring that you've got everybody's health issues listed in your diary, their birthdays, when to reach out to them, so this organisational trait.
Maddi: I think this didn't come from BCG, this came probably more than the last couple of years when I've got a lot more organized, cause I've been doing ops for companies and so I've recognized the value of really good systems. So in my friends contacts in my phone if I'm ever with them and they order particularly a coffee, but I try and do it for Alcoholic drinks or food and snacks as well. I've write it in the note section of their contact so that if I'm catching up with them for coffee and they're running late, or I just want to do something nice for them, I know their coffee order and I can get it. Everything is in my calendar, if someone's got an important doctor's appointment or they getting some results or they have an exam or it's their birthday, it's in my calendar.
Laura: Oh Maddy, you're just incredible. What a great human. You mentioned Startmate, which is an Australian accelerator. How did their Women's Fellowship help you take the leap into startups, and how did it put you on a path to becoming a Chief of Staff?
Maddi: I give Startmate so much credit for that program because it has completely changed my career. For those that don't know, the Women's Fellowship is a part-time program so you can do it alongside your role, that's aimed at getting women out of traditional corporate career paths and into startups to improve the ecosystem diversity. I think for me, the first thing was being around this phenomenal community of women that were in the exact same place I was where they were kind of doing the dream job, but where either feeling really shit about the performance or they were super burned out. I think a lot of women just come into that program feeling like they've got the dream and it's not working out for them and so what what's wrong with them? And that's absolutely what I was feeling. So definitely that community and solidarity piece was huge for me, but I also went in knowing zero about startups. I don't know any roles. I don't know anything about their funding and how they got it. I didn't know any players in the scene. I didn't know any people in the scene. I wouldn't have even known where to start to look for information so that basic training and understanding was incredible.
Laura: Having been through the fellowship, it's a great way to make that transition. From the fellowship you landed a Chief of Staff role, and I understand that you didn't really know what a Chief of Staff was before then, so tell me about that role.
Maddi: I had no idea. I learned about the role through the Startmate program and quickly identified that the role could be right to me in terms of the skills that I already had but also the skills and the exposure that I wanted. My boss reached out to me on LinkedIn with a LinkedIn message that on reflection shows how much of a yes person I was at the stage.
Laura: I was just trying to absorb everything. It was something like, hi Maddi, I'm building an early stage startup and I'm looking for people like you. Are you interested? It totally could have been me walking into the world's most dangerous situation.
Maddi: I agree to get coffee with him, and it was quite funny that he was thinking about me for a Chief of Staff role or someone with my profile. It just felt very kismet that the role that I wanted was basically handed to me by a random LinkedIn message. I took that role, it's gone into administration since, but it was a food tech founded through COVID recognizing that if restaurants don't have bums on seats, they have no revenue stream. And so trying to find a way that they could get a revenue stream that's not Uber Eats because a lot of the premium restaurants don't want to do an Uber Eats of the world because it's hard to control quality. The concept was those restaurants could do a premium frozen meal because the quality's a little bit exhibit control once it's frozen, because it stays in that state. As we grew, we expanded into pantry items, desserts and we had a whole range, which for anyone who's worked in ops cold chain is not fun.
Laura: What did your day to day look like, or what were the main projects you were working on? during that time?
Maddi: we were a relatively capital intensive business, we did three funding rounds in the year I was there. One of the co-founders, he was incredible at raising capital, just knew exactly what investors wanted to see, what metrics we needed to hit. I assisted on those, but it was mostly led by the founders. The other big projects were we acquired a business in Melbourne that at the time was called Co Lab Pantry and we rebranded the combined organization so that instead of us being ChefPrep and them being Co Lab Pantry, because they had a more established customer base we rebranded the whole organization as CoLab, which is really funny knowing your role and your company. I was only there for a year, but it was pretty action packed. When I started, I was the fourth employee and it was early days so there was a range of setting up systems and processes and we had a huge amount of hiring. We went from four to 32 or something, which I was responsible for onboarding all of them and setting up all of those processes. It was huge, huge growth.
What did you learn from that experience?
Maddi: Oh so much. The one that I come back to all the time is learning the system. It was pretty much my first exposure to Notion, HubSpot, using Gmail instead of Outlook. Getting comfortable with the tools and knowing how they worked because knowing how your tools work and getting to a relatively advanced level is such a huge unlock, especially if they have anything to do with productivity or information management. That was a super simple but obvious one. Also because we were capital intensive, there was a huge focus on our metrics in ways that perhaps other companies don't need to have if they're much more profitable. Learning the unit metrics that are important to track the company health, but also customer health, your margins on your products so you can price them properly. That was a huge learning for me because I had never had to do that. I'm not sitting there tracking BCGs health, it's this huge global organization. Apart from can they pay me, I didn't need to know. So trying to figure out, and it sounds so obvious, but what metrics are important to ensure that this company will survive was critical and very helpful. There's probably a bunch of other quirks and nuances, stuff that I'd never done before that I just had to figure out.
Laura: You moved on after a year. Let's talk about your next role as it's a great case study of you as an operator. What came next?
Maddi: While I love eating food, I'm not really a foodie. Whereas when a role at Verve Super came up, that was absolutely up my alley. It was another Chief of Staff role. For anyone who doesn't know Verve Super, it's a female focussed superfund that's aiming to close the super gap between men and women, which depending on the day and the source sits somewhere between 20 to 30% in Australia. The way we do that's kind of cool. The majority of our members, I think about 75% of our members are women and so we try to offer additional ancillary services around the superannuation so they can get one-on-one coaching to help get there finances in order, or if they're planning for a child to help them with that preparation financially and emotionally, or if they're changing jobs to get them career support or maybe entering the workforce. We also reflect that in the way we invest. So it's all ethically invested because we recognize that if we don't have a planet to live on this kind of no point pushing for change, but also we use the WGEA data, the workplace, gender equality agency. We use their data to rank companies on how they performed on gender metrics and then from each industry, once we removed industries from a negative screen. So for instance, we don't invest in mining. So we didn't have mining companies. We would invest in the top five or so companies that were top performing the best on those gender equality metrics, which is an Australia and maybe a world first.
Laura: You also joined Verve at a pivotal moment for the company. What was happening at that time and how did it shape your role?
Maddi: I joined at a really interesting time. Verve been around for about five years when I joined. It was a very different stage in terms of time but they'd maintained quite a restrained growth path, especially in terms of team. I think it was only a team of about. 10 or 12, something like that. Superannuation for the last five years has been extremely turbulent in terms of you had COVID and there was early release of funds into superfunds were having to build these processes to allow people to withdraw money from their super fund, which has never been done before and had very little warning. And then you had this increasing regulatory push, where all of the challenger super funds that started around the same time as Verve pretty much none exist now, because of this huge regulatory push and consolidation. So coming in, it was like, this advanced company that had a really strong member base and a really strong value prop. But a lot of the stuff I'd been building at ChefPrep slash CoLab, they didn't have. So for instance, I spend a lot of work getting Notion up to scratch so that information was easy to find or setting up a company calendar, just day one things that they just hadn't had a chance to do. And there was another really interesting time because we were also launching Verve Money, which was the second product. And so that was an ethical investing app that was invested similarly to Super portfolio but to help try and get more women involved in investing and understanding investing.
Laura: I spoke to Chrissy, who's one of the co founders, before our chat today, who mentioned that you joined at a critical time. Why did the co founders need a chief of staff?
Maddi: Interestingly, I wasn't hired knowing what was going to come. That's such a hook. I'm going to leave that sitting there for a little minute. It was actually a push as my understanding from my board, in recognition that the company was growing and with the increased regulatory pressure, Christina and Alex were both spending a lot of their time on compliance related things alongside our Head of Compliance who's wonderful. They needed that extra exec support in there because of how much bigger their roles were getting because of this changing environment and superannuation. So I was hired as most Chief of Staffs are to support the execs and to be that overflow capacity and little did we know that we would have three of our leadership team go on mat leave within six months and I would be cover for all three of them, including two of the three co-founders, the CEO and the COO.
Laura: Mic drop.
Maddi: Yes.
Laura: I feel like this is a really interesting story because as the Chief of Staff you do serve as the double for your executive or as a force multiplier, but in your case, your role involved a lot of decision making and communication often on behalf of your executives. How did you manage that?
Maddi: Absolutely. So the first cover was for Alex COO who had some quite serious family things going on. We started one week me shadowing her on her one-on-ones and things so that I could get up to speed in case she needed to drop off to basically the next week she had to drop off and it was almost like radio silence for one or two months. So I was thrown into covering the COO job. I'd obviously seen what she was working on for my first three or so months, but I've only really been shadowing her for one week. That was a big learning curve, but I had the full trust of the team and at no point did I ever feel like I was being second guessed or watched or curtailed. And I don't think I would've been able to perform the same way that I did if I hadn't had that trust. Then, Alex came back for a couple of months, but was pregnant. So the decision was made that her role would stay with me and she would pick up more one off special projects. There were a number of really big pieces of work that we had to do and so she led those and then I maintained her day to day responsibilities, so the meetings with the team and the more day-to-day ops work that she had. At the same time, we were also preparing for Christina, the CEO's mat leave period. I was spending a lot of time with Christina to try and get across the top priorities for the business, what she really cared about and what she really needed to see, how to define what's a phone call to her versus a text versus what would be captured on a weekly email. Identifying those priorities and the severity of things, which was a lot of work. Should I drop the next bomb?
Laura: The next bomb being you helping quarterback Future Group's acquisition of Verve Super. There are so many layers to this role, Maddi.
Maddi: Yes. it's a little crazy looking back. So Alex was back and doing these big projects that we had and I get this call from Christina one day and she said, okay, go outside. You know, that's never a good okay. I remember walking around this park that was next office and she was basically saying that the regulator has really been moving to consolidate super funds in the hopes that that will lead to better member outcomes, better efficiencies, et cetera. And so we'd examined or Christina and Alex and our head of compliance had examined a whole bunch of different options and had decided that a sale was the best option to ensure that Verve would continue as we know it and our members would be looked after in the way that we would want them to be looked after. And that was about four months, I think before Christina was due to give birth and about two months before Alex was due to give birth. So it was a big time. I kind of had this theory that when things are really hard in an organization, if you have the right team, it's actually really fun. Even though it's super stressful and there's a lot going on and tensions can be high. I think it's when you get the best collaboration. I know that I work better and faster when I'm overloaded so I think it was probably the time where I have maybe done the best work of my career. it was intense.
Laura: First, of all, congrats for getting through. I'd love to know how did you manage to keep your shit together, especially with the challenge of fast tracking context sharing to ensure you had all the relevant information from Christina to be successful.
Maddi: You just get through, you just have to get through. There's not an option at that point. I was really deliberate about how I spend my spare time. I was trying to not make a lot of plans on the weekend. I knew I'd probably need to catch up on some sleep on the weekends. I was making sure I could extract as much information from Alex and Christina's brains as I possibly could. Christina had had a difficult pregnancy with her first child and so in some ways that was actually helpful because we and our board were preparing for her to be on bed rest for a significant portion of her second pregnancy. That preparation that we did, as soon as she told the board, she was pregnant was really helpful later when she didn't end up needing to be on bed rest, thankfully. I think it's preparation as much as possible and then just a recognition that you need to get through and to rely on whatever resource you have around you to get through. Christina was around literally until the night she gave birth. I was sitting there and I was like, I'm pretty big on capacity and if I thought about what she was dealing with. I can't imagine even in this position where you're selling your business, that you've devoted five years of your life to, and then you're also quite heavily pregnant and so you might not be able to see that through. If I thought about that, that was what made me anxious. But for anyone who doesn't know Chrissy, she has worked for the UN for a number of years. At one point I remarked to Alex that I didn't know how Chrissy was so calm and Alex turned around to me and said, yeah, well, I guess if there's no bombs falling near her or gunshots around her. It's probably quite a good day. And when I thought back around Chrissy's bio. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Chrissy and I worked hand in hand for the last month of her pregnancy, which is when the acquisition was really heating up. We were in constant communication. We had a really intense Google sheet tracker so that if, and when her baby came, I would know exactly where she got to and exactly what I needed to pick up. We also had a wonderful advisor who's worked in M&A for her whole life. I actually don't think I would've got through the acquisition without her., especially once Christina had dropped off with her baby.
Laura: For operators who, like myself, maybe haven't experienced operating through an acquisition yet, what insights can you share about the M& A process itself? And in your unique circumstance as a Chief of Staff, slash CEO slash COO double. What were the key areas you focused on during the acquisition?
Maddi: I'm gonna have to get a little bit careful because I'm not sure exactly what I can say, but acquisitions are intense. They'll take a lot of resources from whoever the team working on it is cause it's the top priority for the business. It's often something no one has done before, so everyone's trying to figure it out at the same time. Nothing moves in acquisition along faster than when the CEO goes: I'd just like to remind everyone that I'm due to give birth in eight days so if we could agree on this point and move on, that would be great. And you'll spend a lot of money on lawyers. There's a lot of coordination that you need to do. Anyone who actually has expertise in M&A is probably going to cringe listening to this section so maybe just fast forward for those people. You have the negotiation stage, which might be with one party or multiple parties where you're talking about what the terms could be, what the value of your organization is. They're trying to get the price down and you're trying to get the price up. Then you get to what's called a term sheet, which the main points that would go on a contract are agreed, so that includes the purchase price that you need the structure of that purchase price basically the major terms that would go into the actual sale and purchase contract. Then you have this extensive due diligence period where it's definitely a lot more focused on the business that's being acquired. They're requesting a lot of information to make sure that there's no massive red flags that would make them not want to purchase that company. You do also do a little bit of reciprocal due diligence on them because as a board, you have an obligation and as a Superfund, we wanted to make sure that we were doing the best thing for our members and you get into more of the negotiation of the sale and purchase agreement, which is the long form contract and that has the terms from the term sheet. It's a pretty doozy document. Then you have the process of getting that signed with all of your investors and throughout all of that, you have this layer of we need to be communicating with our team, we need to be communicating with our board, we need to be communicating with our members maybe, we need to be communicating with the lawyers, we need to be communicating with the investors. There's just a lot of keeping everyone updated. I wasn't super involved in that first negotiation stage. A lot of that was led by the founders and by our advisor, with the support of our lawyers. Once the term sheet was signed, that was where I got more involved. I led that DD process. So making sure that we had all of the documents that the purchaser needed to see, making sure that we're having meetings with the right people so that they could understand any quirks of the business. That was when Christina's pregnancy was getting quite late and so we were working really closely to manage all that investor comms piece. I think she dropped off as we were starting to negotiate the sale and purchase agreement. And so she said just give me a couple of days and then we can chat about what's important. An acquisition moves so quickly, right after a couple of days so much has happened. I said Chrissy, I'll give you one week. And so she gave birth on I think it was like a Thursday night and then the following Friday, we had a phone call and I was like here's what I need. But she did actually come up to Sydney for SXSW on the Monday. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. So I managed to grab her for some very quick questions on the Monday. Let's get whatever I can now. Side note. I've never known how many people you need to email when a CEO gives birth. I spent four hours on the Friday, just contacting people. It's just something I never thought about, but yeah, so many people to tell. And so anyway, we had the sale and purchase agreement. Once Chrissy went out, Alex came back two days a week, but because I was so in the details of the acquisition, she managed a lot more of the day-to-day business so that I could stay focused on the acquisition and she didn't have to get as much up to speed. She was really phenomenal from a team comms perspective because I think when you're so deep in the detail, you're just making decisions and go, go, go, go, go. I think it was so helpful to have Alex come in almost from the outside perspective and be like, Hey, have we thought about this? What do we need to do here? I actually disagree. I think this would be the better approach. That was super helpful to have her come in. And then also where I needed to make a decision, I could lean on her for, what do you think Chrissy would do in this scenario? Do you think that this is the right call and how to explain the context to her and she could be like, yeah, I think so or actually I think that's a Christina question. Save that for your next call.
Laura: Looking back, what do you wish you'd known at the start that you know now?
Maddi: Someone actually asked me, now that you've done that, if you started your own company, what would you make sure was in your shareholder's agreement, or what would you make sure you did at the start? And I'm like, It was just so fast paced. I don't think I had time to put any learnings in my brain. Which is so sad, it feels like almost a wasted opportunity. There's little things, there's little quirks, like for instance, the way our shareholders' agreement was drafted, which meant we needed to make sure we had everyone on board. Other than that, it was jus t go go go, which is really sad and not very helpful for any listeners.
Laura: On that, were there any moments when you needed to make an SOS call to M&A friends or other operators for advice?
Maddi: This is what's really difficult is M&A processes are confidential and so there's no one you can call especially in the startup space where, you know, networks are so tight. I couldn't risk telling anyone what was going on and so I kind of have support from friends, like, oh, it's so busy, your executives are out, you're doing that. And I'm like, that's so insignificant right now. That was the biggest thing of my career at the time when I first figured that out and then that's been completely dwarfed by this acquisition, but I can't tell you anything about this acquisition. Cause it's confidential. And so I think that's where we got really lucky with our advisor Kaleena. She was someone that had been through processes before that I could rely on. And kind of was in it was me. We also really wonderful support from our board and so they were available if questions came up and we had a lot of board meetings through that process.
Laura: To wrap up our discussion on the acquisition, I'd really love to take a moment to highlight this as a powerful example of a successful chief of staff and executive partnership. Is there anything you'd like to add about how Chrissy and Alex set you up for success?
Maddi: I don't think I could have done that with any other execs. I think about this all the time. The way Christie and Alex, not relinquished control that makes it sound like they just up and walked away, but the trust that they had in me. Especially when I first started covering for Alex, I'd only been at Verve for about three or four months. It hadn't been a long period of time, but the absolute trust and the feeling that I wasn't going to have to justify the decisions I made later just unlocked me to be able to work so much faster, so much better, because I think if you're in a state where you're like every decision I make, I'm going to have to justify why I made that later. It really hits pause, right. And I think those justifications are things I'm doing anyway, when I'm weighing up both sides of the decisions. But if I'd felt like I would have to defend things later or I'd be really questioned later, I think it would have been a completely different scenario. So to their absolute credit, I have no idea how I did it. I don't think I could have done what they did, but Yeah, honestly, some of the best leaders I've ever worked for. Huge props to them for doing that.
Laura: I'm sure they're going to be so humbled by this. This is such a nice testament to their work as leaders. I know you're passionate about the work you did at Verve to help employers tackle the gender pay gap. Did you want to touch on this?
Maddi: It was so fun. Verve's always been a pretty strong advocate when it comes to women in general, but particularly where it overlaps with financial security, financial safety, financial education, financial literacy. And I just love reading about those topics in general, if you looked at my book case, there's probably, dozens of books that are on ancillary topics. But I think for me, it was also just this huge learning around what the state in Australia was cause I perhaps didn't know that as well as in New Zealand or a lot of the books are American states. And then at the start of this year I got to write a toolkit to help employers that wanted to tackle the gender pay gap. Cause obviously WGEA's now started reporting gender pay gaps at companies with more than 100 employees, I think. That was this big moment earlier this year with that data got released for the first time and so a lot of companies that have talked the talk on equality were then faced with quite a disappointing gender pay gap. So I got to do a ton of research into the gender pay gap. I got to prepare this toolkit, which basically helps employers identify actions that they can take and how they would help impact their gender pay gap. Then my favorite piece. I got to write a little common myth, debunking, like all the common things you hear and why they're actually not true. For instance, one of the common ones is, women make choices to go into underpaid roles or lower paid roles, like teachers and nurses and things. And so that's the choice that women make. And it's like, first of all, no choice is made in a vacuum, but second of all, we undervalue professions that are dominated by women. So if you look at teaching, for instance, teaching used to be a highly prestigious role. The top students would become teachers. You had to be top of your game to be a teacher and the majority of teachers will men. And so it was seen as like an academic role. Whereas now the majority of teachers are woman it's seen as like a caring and a nurturing role. And that's something that we as a society undervalue and there's tons of examples. Software programming has gone the other way, where it started being dominated by women and now it's dominated by men and we've seen the reverse impact it's across like graphic designers. There's a whole bunch of industries where this has happened, that it's like a documented phenomenon. Or people saying women are making choices and we should tackle the bias that was like where people were being deliberately discriminated against, but the rest is decisions and there's factors that go into that. And I agree, absolutely we should address bias but when Australia has the second highest childcare rate in the OECD (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) and it's 60% of an average salary will go on childcare. Then I would argue does that couple have a choice that they can just put their child in childcare. No, probably one person has to stay home. And when you already have a gender pay gap. Odds are the woman's going to stay home, particularly because they actually experienced like the trauma of the birth, assuming it's a birth child. Traditionally the woman would be the one that stays home, which then kind of further perpetuates this. And so people go but you know that woman's chosen to stay home and so she's lost that experience or shouldn't be paid as much. But again, that choice wasn't made in a vacuum. That choice was influenced by decisions that we as a society have made. If we can change those, then maybe that can change the gender pay gap.
Laura: On this topic and from an operator's perspective, especially when we work closely with executives or lead functions ourselves, what proactive steps can we take to effectively manage upwards on topics like closing the gender pay cap?
Maddi: I think the first thing to note that I would caveat is this is a really sensitive topic. People do get really defensive and it's a really difficult problem in some cases to solve. There's a lot of things you can do, but for instance, one of the top things that a company can do is to offer really generous parental leave policies. But I recognize that in a startup, when you have really tight cash resources, you can't afford to pay someone on parental leave and then also pay someone to cover their role. A lot of startups just don't have that cash. And so I think while that toolkit, and it's still available on the Verve website for anyone who's working on this now, gives a lot of suggestions and kind of ideas and things that you can do. First of all, there has to be recognition that this is a difficult problem to solve and it's not going to change overnight, but it's just putting those steps in place. Then there's like other really simple things you can do. If you're a male leader in a startup and you have a child. Take parental leave. The more men take parental leave, more you bond with the baby, but also, the more it stops, oh, I can't hire a woman because she's going to take parental leave because she's early thirties or whatever, you see that attitude comes through. Or there's other things, I know some companies that actually report salaries and so they have this transparency. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but there's a ton of actions that you as a company can do. You can do the research. You can look at that toolkit and identify which ones would work for your company, your company stage, but also your company budget or your company priorities.
Laura: I love the simplicity of this advice, and thank you so much for breaking it down for different situations. My takeaway is just to get started in some way, shape, or form. I would love to focus now on you as an operator. We've heard many of your strengths come through already in your story, but how would you describe your biggest strengths as an operator?
Maddi: At Verve we did this thing called CliftonStrengths, which for anyone who's done it, I think a lot of people love it and I'm absolutely obsessed with it. I'm not a podcast girl on the whole, but I was listening to one of the CliftonStrengths podcast the other day. That's how much I love CliftonStrengths. In my top five, I have Woo, which is you love meeting people, winning them over, getting to know people. I have communication and I have positivity. My top strengths is definitely just people. I really love meeting people. I really love working with people. I'm a massive extrovert. That and the communication piece seems to go hand in hand. It's probably one of my big strengths. Definitely head down and get shit done kind of attitude. You need that in a startup because you are being hit with things from all directions and you need to be able to effectively identify the problem and prioritize where this sits on your list of priorities and then just get through it, get it done. And so I think one of my other strengths is something called activator, which is you're really good at getting shit started. If someone's like, " maybe we should think about", you've already written the project plan and you're divvying up tasks and you've started your first one. It's you getting it going. That's really valuable in startups. The flip side of that is often, it means I have 50 things on the go and I've finished none of them.
Laura: I love CliftonStrengths. It was such an aha moment for me to understand my operating style. It just started to make so much sense. You mentioned positivity is one of your strengths, which Chrissy also highlighted. She mentioned something really real on the phone to me that When you're a founder and you've got the stress of your business, It's hard to celebrate the wins, and something she's always appreciated from you, Is that you are the celebration. You're the one physically showing up on calls with your party hat to ensure no win would go uncelebrated in the business and I just wanted to share that feedback with you. I thought it was lovely.
Maddi: Startups can be hard, especially for the founders when they've been in it for so long and it's their baby and probably bunch of the resources on the line. But you have to celebrate those wins when they come, because you're going to have a tough period at some point. And also, why would you not want to celebrating wins is fun.
Laura: Now, let's look ahead. You've recently left Verve Super, and I'm dying to ask, what's your next big move?
Maddi: It's a tricky decision because I obviously loved it there. There's not much I can say right now, but I am currently co-founding a FinTech with an impact lens to it. So sort of feels like it's staying in the Verve wheelhouse with that impact fintech. Not much more that I can say there just yet. Watch this space.
Laura: Oh, amazing. That's so exciting. I know how much you love an impact business and it's just so wonderful to see you package up all of these strengths and skills and embark on your first founder role.
Maddi: Yep. It's funny. When people ask through the acquisition, if you were a founder, what would you do? And now I'm sitting here going, oh no. What do they need to learn from that? There's still a bunch that I don't know how to do, but at least I know how to find the answer.
Laura: Well all the best for the new venture and we're very much looking forward to following along and supporting where we can. A big part of the podcast's value add is for other operators to learn what tactics, frameworks and people in the industry have been your North stars. I'd love to hear yours.
Maddi: For me, I learn the best by speaking to people and so I think The resources that have been the most helpful have been the various slack channels I'm on. So we have the Startmate one that I got through being on the Woman's Fellowship, we also set up a chief of staff one, which I know you're in , which is incredibly helpful for asking questions. I've always found that when I'm the most inspired is when I come away from a conversation where I've learned something with someone else, they've explained the way they are doing something in their company that I can go implement. So for me, that's probably a big one. I'm currently doing another Startmate program called Ladymates, which has been phenomenal for that learning and the workshops they've done has been really helpful. I have an insane amount of startup books on my shelf. I probably read about half of them. I find for me, I remember little tidbits or little moments, but I'm not sure that's the best way for me to implement really actionable solutions. Then in terms of other things that have just been really helpful, I think you might've actually mentioned that Airtree has a really great open source library. There's a company called open org, they also publicly sourced a bunch of policies. Future group, actually who acquired Verve Super, they have a bunch of open source, predominantly HR policies that I've relied on previously. Or just asking people my networks.
Laura: And I feel like in our chief of staff group, you're always really good at offering insights, whether somebody's trying to solve a challenge for an organization with one to 10 people to 50 to 100 to 250 plus. Is there a common theme there in terms of the advice that you give?
Maddi: That size thing was really interesting cause I've definitely hung out more on the early stage. I think I really enjoyed that. I really enjoy getting something from zero to 80, rather than taking it from 80 to a hundred. For me, that's the really exciting bit. And so I think I can give advice more in those earlier stage problems, whatever they may be, or earlier stage resources. But I also find , problem has a common root cause. If you're having a people problem at a five person organization versus a people problem at a 200 person organization. Odds are the root causes are similar. It's led by culture, it's led by bad comms, it's led by bad process or policy. Even though the problem in its manifestation is wildly different, the cause is probably quite similar so I think you can take early stage learnings and apply them to late stage problems. I think also vice versa, because from the chief of staff that are working at the 200 person organization, it's really helpful to hear the problems that they're having now to try and prevent those while you're building in the early stage.
Laura: Talking about learning the best by speaking to other people, this podcast is all about lifting other operators up. So who's another Australian or New Zealand based operator doing incredible things or at the top of their game?
Maddi: There's so many people that I want to call out, but I have to give a shout out to my OG chief of staffs, that when I was brand new into a startup and I had no idea what I was doing. They were deep in the thick of it with me also experiencing the same things. And so that is a Phoebe Pincus who's now COO at Startmate, Zoe Champtaloup, who is general counsel and director of ops at Perx Health and Alex Carr, who's chief of staff at ReGen Ventures up in Byron bay. They kept me sane in that first year and so I'm giving my shout out to them.
Laura: Yes. They're all such amazing humans.
Maddi: Oh, wonderful humans. Yeah. Lucky to call them friends.
Laura: So shout out to you three and I feel like this is coming to a natural end. So as we navigate this journey of becoming better operators together, do you have a piece of advice or a tactic to share with our listeners that has helped keep you grounded through this bumpy, messy, enjoyable journey?
Maddi: Yeah. Those are all good words. Okay. Piece of advice. You'll never the first person to do something , and it's something I forget, like I'll be sitting there trying to build something from scratch. When a 30 minute conversation could get me five hours a head. You're never the first person to do something. Find the person that's done what you're doing and ask them for advice.
Laura: Amazing. Well, Maddi, thank you so much for sharing so openly. It's been great. Where can people find you?
Maddi: Thank you. I'm on LinkedIn—Maddi Ingham.