Ep 15 - Building a World Class Growth & Marketing Team with Yiota Avram and Matt Breuer

Join us for this edition of the Growth Leaders Circle. This week we will be learning from the minds that built and managed the Growth & Marketing teams at Buffy & Cornershop by Uber.

Yiota Avram and Matt Breuer discuss how to get started when building your team out, what roles you should prioritize as first hires, and how to improve performance and culture especially when there are new hires. We also discuss our favorite interview questions to assess candidates and how to bridge the gap of feeling like a family to a company when you scale from a small team to 50 employees.

Here’s What We Discussed: 

• [00:17] Our speakers introduce themselves and share their background 
• [02:33] Insight on processes for getting started with building a team early companies and start-ups
• [08:38] Matt talks about Buffy and what it’s like for a startup to go from zero to reaching its first milestones 
• [12:42] Matt’s opinion on contractor/agency versus in-house teams 
• [14:36] Growth Person Vs. Brand Person: What makes a better first hire? 
• [18:57] How to maintain a positive culture while setting performance expectations when building out your team 
• [25:59] Yiota shares her thoughts on the downsides of channel specialization or channel isolation 
• [28:08] How to prepare a new hire for a blended role  
• [34:39] What attributes and identifiers make a growth team “world-class?”
• [40:36] From family to company: Tips on bridging the gap when growing from a small team to 50+ employees   
• {44:30] Yiota and Matt share their favorite questions to ask during interviews to assess candidates 
• [48:00] Our speakers share their favorite recent growth stories and learnings   

About Our Speakers 

Yiota Avram, CMO at Cornershop by Uber – Yiota is the CMO of Cornershop by Uber. Cornershop by Uber is the app that connects your front door to your city’s top stores in as little as 60 minutes. Founded simultaneously in Santiago, Chile, and Mexico City in 2015, they now operate in eight countries across the Americas: Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Canada, and the US. In July 2020, Uber acquired a majority stake in the company, providing an important injection of capital that allowed us to access more resources to continue building and improving our service over the upcoming years. 

Yiota manages a team of ~80 global marketers across LATAM & North America to build Cornershop/Uber Grocery on-demand grocery+ delivery business. 

Matt Breuer, Former Chief Marketing Officer at Buffy – Matt is the former CMO at Buffy. Buffy is on a mission to help us live comfortably – without making our planet uncomfortable. That’s why they use earth-friendly fabrics and manufacturing methods to create more sustainable products, from the first sketch to the last stitch and beyond. They don’t just help you feel good today. They contribute real good for tomorrow. 

At Buffy, Matt oversaw the revenue strategy marketing, creative storefront, and merchandising, while driving the company’s sustainability efforts and launching new products. In 2020, Buffy achieved profitability while revenue grew more than 30% year-over-year, and the company expects to surpass $100 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2021.

About Our Moderator

Anish Shah is the CEO & Founder of executive search agency Bring Ruckus. Anish has worked in-house in Growth roles at Snapfish and Getable. He started Bring Ruckus as a Growth consultancy 11 years ago working with 40+ clients, then re-focused his firm on executive recruiting for Growth leaders.

 

Quotes

“What is your skillset as the leader and then who do you need first full time to compliment your skillset?” – Yiota Avram 

 

“For me, it's important to have the skill set of both market evaluation, and ground positioning differentiation, in addition to the more typical quantitative growth marketing skills. Because you need both of those skills when you are figuring out the proposition.” – Yiota Avram 

 

“What does it look like to go from zero to those first few milestones? When I look at what we did at Buffy in the early days, for me, it's a reflection of where we placed that early focus on, and what capacity we needed to build inside the work.” – Matt Breuer

 

“Your first full-time hire has to understand performance… They have to understand the performance implications to keep opening up runway for all of the teams and folks that'll end up reporting into that marketing structure.” – Matt Breuer

 

“Yes, there is specialization in new channels, but at the end of the day, it's similar principles. And from a career progression, I find that so many of my team members love the idea of learning the other channels and connecting the dots beyond their individual siloed channels.” – Yiota Avram  

 

“I've always been really laser-focused on where we are eliminating any chance that we've created perverse incentives for people to pursue things that will make them or their work look really good yet be totally disconnected from whether the overall marketing program is succeeding.” –  Matt Breuer

 

“What I'm learning is that, yes, you can still scale, but you don't necessarily need to incorporate bureaucracy. So what's the minimum of cadences that you need to organize the team, but at the same time, feel like a startup and a family.” – Yiota Avram

 

ABOUT RUCKUS

We are growth leaders who recruit your game changers. Visit https://bringruckus.com and connect on LinkedIn. Subscribe and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Google Podcasts, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts!  

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