Episode chapters
Episode recap
HR inside a private equity deal often learns about the big people decisions after they are made, tucked into a company update alongside everything else. Nicole Logue argues that HR does not have to sit there. Across eight years at an organization that became at least five different companies through acquisitions and ownership changes, she operated at every stage of the PE lifecycle, from pre-acquisition to exit, and she makes the case that relevance is earned, not granted by title.
Why does HR need to understand how the business makes money?
Because talent strategy is built on it. Succession plans, critical hires, retention bets, and the employer brand all trace back to where the company earns its revenue and which departments carry the growth. Nicole puts the bar plainly: "if you don't understand the revenue, opportunities, targets, market share, whatever that driver is for the reason that your business exists, you don't have an understanding of the business." Once an HR leader can name the two or three departments that drive growth, comp advocacy and workforce planning stop being guesses.
Who should HR learn the business from first?
Follow a clear order of allies. Start with the department leaders you already partner with and ask what came out of the annual planning and target-setting sessions. If that stalls, go to finance, who can teach valuation and cost structure. If that stalls, go to sales and marketing. "imagine how grateful they are to get the opportunity for somebody who's simply curious. Not challenging, not coming to them with objections, but truly coming in with a, hey, help me understand." Then multiply it: put an L&D person in the room so the lesson spreads instead of stopping with you.
How does HR's role change across the business lifecycle?
Think about selling a house. What you invest in before a sale, right after an acquisition, and heading toward the next exit are different decisions. "the pre-acquisition phase is really about understanding your data, understanding your organization. Who are you in the market? What is your differentiator?" A costly multi-year platform that makes sense the year after acquisition can be wasted money when a buyer is only months away.
How does HR get into the value creation plan?
Through trusted, one-on-one relationships and pointed questions, not public forums. The sensitive headcount and leadership moves usually sit a layer below the plan and are held close. Tying a people fact to a known goal is what changes the dynamic: "there can be this sort of dismissal that HR isn't really relevant. Well, if I'm asking a really poignant question and I can tie it to what I know the long-term goals to be, all of a sudden, now HR becomes relevant."
What is the fastest way to get up to speed in a PE deal?
Treat it as a learning process and be willing to be wrong out loud. Nicole's reframe is that "all of those things are knowable. That's the thing that people forget." The pace follows from a willingness to expose gaps: "your speed of education is directly tied to how quickly you are willing to be wrong or to at least expose that you are wrong."
The HR leader who connects a people signal to a value lever stops hearing about the plan secondhand and starts helping to write it.
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Episode transcript
Nicole Logue (00:02): If you don't understand the revenue, opportunities, targets, market share, whatever that driver is for the reason that your business exists, you don't have an understanding of the business. One of the easiest pathways ought to be through whatever partnerships you have with different department leaders. At least annually in most organizations, there are pretty intense planning sessions, targeting sessions, where there are very clearly defined revenue or earnings goals that leadership teams within organizations are given. If you're not a part of those, maybe your role isn't at the highest level. Ask what happened in those meetings. HR is in a unique position to be interconnected and have that opportunity to see into all the verticals. You have a unique perspective in how they all connect. You understand those things from the people perspective, maybe more so than the folks who are sitting at the table who are looking at it strictly from a financial perspective. Every bit of information you gather around the why-do-we-exist concept is just going to put you in a position where you can create an even stronger employer brand. If you as an HR leader are charged in any way with helping to understand how to create a succession plan or how to create the talent model of the future that this business specifically will need in the future, you have to understand how the business makes money. It's a unique thing to have the opportunity to go through acquisitions or any type of change of control processes with the company that you're with.
Logan (01:36): Hi everyone and welcome back to Pulse by HRBench. In this episode, we're diving into what it takes to lead HR inside high growth private equity backed companies. My guest is Nicole Logue, an experienced HR leader who's operated across every stage of the PE lifecycle, from pre-acquisition to exit. She shares how HR can become a strategic partner and a driver of business value. We cover how HR leaders can get closer to how the business makes money, what your role should look like at each stage of the business lifecycle, and how to get involved in and influence the PE value creation plan. Whether you're new to PE or looking to sharpen your edge, this episode is packed with hard-earned insights you won't want to miss. Let's get into it.
Logan (02:20): Nicole, is there anything else you would like the audience to know about you?
Nicole Logue (02:25): I love being in the HR space, especially in organizations that are in high growth. It's a really exciting place to be. And so I'm excited for anybody who's looking to learn a little bit more about how to be successful and really wrap their arms around that piece and enjoy it.
Logan (02:38): Great. Well, why do you like being in organizations that are high growth?
Nicole Logue (02:41): I get bored easily. One of the reasons I
Logan (02:45): All of ours.
Nicole Logue (02:47): had so much longevity, I think in my last role I was with my organization for eight years. In those eight years, we were at least five different companies. Started out purely tech and then rolled into providing telephonic based services and then just grew and changed and morphed with different acquisitions and then different ownership partners that came to the table. It really was a constantly changing organization.
And those are the types of places where I feel as an HR professional, you get the greatest opportunity to take what you've learned about phase one, phase two, and then really kind of preserve that DNA in the culture as you get into those other phases. And I think that, you know, kind of getting to be the keeper of that culture on some level, while still adapting and flexing with all those other changes that come with the kind of growth and scale that you want in a really successful high value organization. Those things to me were just a great cross section. So I love those environments.
Logan (03:40): Yeah, I mean, and there's something different about a high growth organization. Before HRBench, I came from VC backed, high growth and everything was like 50% growth and everything changes. It's like, you know, you can't do what you can, but incremental stuff isn't what people are looking for. They're looking for like something that's going to explode growth. It's almost an entirely different mindset.
Nicole Logue (04:07): Yeah, you've got to be able to shift too as you get from what you need in one place. If 50 employees isn't the same as that 100, isn't the same as that 400. So that understanding of how to keep your knees bent and how quickly you go from one to the other, you have to be able to change with that same pace.
Logan (04:22): Yeah. And so in that high growth environment, I think that's a really good way to, cause you're thinking about growth. You're thinking about dollars and revenue. And so a lot of times when I talked to HR professionals, we're not always talking about how businesses are making money. But kind of in our prep for this, you had said really HR leaders need to figure out how to get close to how the business makes money. And so that's kind of where I want to kick this off. From your experience, or what advice do you have for HR leaders in learning how to get close to how the business make money, and why should they do that?
Nicole Logue (04:58): Yeah, no, I do, I think it's absolutely critical. First and foremost, if you don't understand the revenue, opportunities, targets, market share, whatever that driver is for the reason that your business exists, you don't have an understanding of the business. You need to understand all of those pieces around where are you trying to position in the market, where's your organization trying to go, what are they trying to lead, what are they trying to draw in.
And every bit of information you gather around the why do we exist concept is just going to put you in a position where you can create an even stronger employer brand. Imagine how compelling it would be if you understand those pieces. You can teach your recruiting team those things and then they can actually use that as a part of their message out to the market. That gives you a better opportunity to attract the talent that's actually attracted to the kind of goals and targets and objectives that your organization is after.
But more than just kind of directionally understanding where the company is going, you know, an understanding of where there is the highest value in the organization, which departments are most critically responsible for whatever that targeted growth is. In those high growth environments, you're not gonna be dealing with something that's, let's just do the same thing we did last year. You're almost always gonna be looking at a way of saying, okay, we did this last year, how do we make it bigger? How do we make it faster? And there's generally just a couple of key spots in the organization that help achieve that.
If your understanding of how the organization is gonna do that can align to those departments, those people, those critical hires, those critical retention folks, you then get to come to those different departments with a better understanding of why you might wanna advocate. Let's say there's a budget issue with comp over next year, but you know there's, because you understand how the company is intending to grow their revenue, let's say it's through like a tech offering, and you understand that there are three or four developers who maybe have a critical understanding of a certain programming language. You don't understand all these components about why they're so valuable to the company if you don't have a good understanding of what the long-term end game is for that department to contribute to the bottom line. So the more that you can get in there and understand exactly what it is in the 18-month plan, the three-year plan, maybe five-year plan, how are the owners of the organization, whether that's original founders, or newly acquired PE investors, how do they define value success and making sure that you understand those pieces so you can take the talent strategy and use it to complement all of those other business strategies that they're trying to apply.
Logan (07:29): That's an example with the developers who know a specific coding language, and understanding what the product roadmap is coming is an interesting one because that can help. I would imagine that helps you start to think about the overall people strategy of where are you going to start in, or what areas and skill sets need to be valued for the current roadmap that's gonna be developed.
Nicole Logue (07:58): Yeah, yeah, if you as an HR leader are charged in any way with helping to understand how to create a succession plan or how to create the talent model of the future that this business specifically will need in the future, you have to understand how the business makes money and what the marketing and sales departments see on the horizon. How do they look at the future of whatever product or service that you're involved in and how do they see that value creation manifesting in the next several quarters?
By understanding those key critical pieces, your ability to be able to align talent to those objectives can sometimes make the difference between accelerating achievement of those goals or at least helping those other leaders who aren't directly involved in the people function recognize how important taking care of the people is to achieving that overall goal. Without someone there at the table who's looking to make those connections, you may have an executive leadership team that's uninformed on how critical a certain skill set is and how hard it is to find in the market.
Folks who aren't deeply in it, you know, looking at resumes or sourcing LinkedIn every day, they may not understand, no, no, this one person with this great understanding of the certain programming language is absolutely critical to your future strategy. And the people making the strategy and the people who understand the dynamics, the experience, what each person brings to the table in their KSAs, you're not able to put those two together and you run the risk of making a huge mistake as it relates to either retaining or thinking that that kind of talent is just available anyway.
Logan (09:31): Yeah, and what's the KSA?
Nicole Logue (09:33): Knowledge, skills, and ability.
Logan (09:35): Almost don't want to use this, but I'm going to anyways. And it's the sports analogy of like how teams operate and like what skill sets, like if the strategy goes and why like players move across different teams all the time is because you're trying to fit that in. I know we don't want to see that in job markets with all these different shifts and constantly having to move people around, but it's almost something similar in that if the strategy has to change.
I know in the current environment, especially for tech companies, you moved from growth at all costs for almost a decade into profitability. And if you have a whole set of people that have operated in growth at all costs, it's very difficult to make that profitability shift. I know for me, like I didn't really operate in, I only operated for growth at all costs for like two years in an org that did it. Everybody else was probably, it's like an entirely different mindset.
So I can see why some of that was a little bit tricky. But I want to, so HR leaders should know how the business makes money. Like, how do they go about learning how the business makes money?
Nicole Logue (10:42): I think one of the easiest pathways ought to be through whatever partnerships you have with different department leaders. At least annually in most organizations, there are pretty intense planning sessions, targeting sessions, where there are very clearly defined revenue or earnings goals that leadership teams within organizations are given. If you're not a part of those, maybe your role isn't at the highest level. Ask what happened in those meetings, find out what happened there.
But when you're able to take that kind of understanding of what's going on and you can begin to pull it back in, you start to understand then where those departments are that are gonna have key drivers. Like if it is in your technology group, well then go to your technology officer if you've got the relationship there and try and gain the insights from your CTO. If not, chief of staff, somebody in the organization that is involved enough in the people function to understand what are the skills, what is the work that we have to be able to get done with human hands, and do we have those human hands.
Whoever those people are, they're going to be thinking in those terms. Those are folks that you can go to and you can ask them. You can try to get that insight from those relationships. If you can't get their time or you're not making any progress in gaining an understanding, or maybe they're speaking in terms that just don't click with you, finance is typically another easy ally to be able to go to and connect in with finance. They understand if you're a people-based business, they understand how that salary component, the cost and overhead associated with your labor affect how you cost a product you take to market. They understand how that's going to affect long-term forecasting. Where do we need to scale to be able to get more value out of each dollar we spend on people? Your finance team is going to have a great understanding of that.
And if you can't get into any of those two on any speed or can't get the answers you're looking for, I have always found that the sales and marketing group are a great ally. They love to talk about the product that they're selling out in the market. A lot of times they're talking to people who are kind of sophisticated and challenging them. So imagine how grateful they are to get the opportunity for somebody who's simply curious. Not challenging, not coming to them with objections, but truly coming in with a, hey, help me understand.
When you look at the landscape of the market over the next 12 months, what do you see that we're missing in our product or in our service offering? What is it that you know that we're trying to build into this? How does building that component change your ability to sell in the market? What other customers could that open us up to if we could just create this kind of offering within the talent in our organization? If we can change what we deliver to the market because we change who we hire? What can that do for you, sales? And how can you make more money for the organization, create more value in the company, simply by us being able to do these backend things that enable the organization to get to a place quicker.
Logan (13:35): Yeah, the finance and sales piece are super interesting. I worked for an organization where the CFO took it as his responsibility to be a teacher of how they look at their P&L statement, how they classify costs, where they do everything. And it's super interesting because they'll talk you through valuations. How are you valuation? In tech businesses, a lot of times it's multiples of revenue. In a manufacturing business, it's going to be multiples of EBITDA and how they run all of that. And they'll probably sit down with you and talk about it. I've never had a finance person not get excited and sit down and get into the nuts and bolts of how numbers are moving.
Nicole Logue (14:21): One of the other areas you can actually use that is, if you consider, if you're brave enough to ask the question and acknowledge you don't know the answer and you need someone to help you. A lot of times the HR has L&D resources under their leadership. And so imagine if you were able to actually get one of your L&D folks to kind of understand what it is finance is trying to teach you, how many other general operators or general business leaders could benefit from sort of capturing that information and then being able to share it with more people. If you have the chance to gain that perspective, then you can multiply it and share it with other people. Now you've just got accelerators all over the place that HR is helping to move forward in the business. HR is helping to equip that workforce with the knowledge to become better, to look at things differently. And that's often the challenge in PE-backed organizations.
Logan (15:09): Yeah. And I know some types of organizations will be a little close to the chest with their finances and their revenue numbers, but I think in PE they're not, because it's all you're driving towards, profitability and an exit of some sort. So it's going to be a lot more open with that. And so when you get into that environment, you're going to have the opportunity. I think you're going to have the opportunity to be able to learn that side of the business. And it's such a big piece.
The other one that is a really good call out is the sales team. And I was a sales rep early in my career, and then I became a marketer. And even in the marketing side, it's surprising how many marketers don't want to talk to the salespeople. Sometimes they're going to tell you things you don't want to hear about like how things are operating.
Nicole Logue (15:56): And students really are going.
Logan (16:00): You're going to get a real pulse on the market and really understand which products and categories and things move the fastest and that people are like super interested in.
Nicole Logue (16:11): Yeah, most of those sales groups also have a strategy. Whether they've developed it themselves or they've been given it by sales leadership, they understand what their targets are. They're typically, you know, they're the ones that go first. They're the ones that have to get into the market to give you the access to those revenue dollars. And so they generally will have a really well outlined plan. Have we got to get to this much revenue by that date? This is how we're gonna be able to do it.
So even just understanding some of those different targets and asking, what makes you nervous about this plan? Where do you feel like we've got the biggest chance of blowing our competitive lead? And getting that sense, those people are the ones thinking about these things every single day because it affects their commissions. Those are really important checks to people. And so for you to get in there and truly offer yourself as, no, I wanna be a resource. I wanna understand what causes that concern for you so that I can take that information into the rest of the business and try and alleviate that concern through the work being done in other places.
HR is in a unique position to be interconnected and have that opportunity to see into all the verticals. You have a unique perspective in how they all connect. You can use that perspective oftentimes to be able to learn from one side in order to help educate another who may not think to talk to each other on regular basis.
Logan (17:27): Yeah, that's a really good call out. So I want to dive into kind of the next topic and we're going to sit around a little bit of this revenue piece, but really it's as the businesses, as your business is evolving or a business that you're getting a part of is evolving, what is HR's role in the different stages? And so I want to talk first about how you think about the different stages and then what you would classify as different stages and then how HR's role sits in each of those.
Nicole Logue (18:04): Yeah. You know, I think maybe an analogy that a lot of folks could potentially relate to would be trying to sell a property, either something like a car or trying to sell a home or something like that. In each stage of that process, you have a different perspective, right? If you're looking for a home, you want a certain kind of, you know, you've got your certain standards. But if you're getting ready to sell your house, you may not be thinking, it's time to renovate the bathroom with the latest and greatest. No, in fact, a fresh coat of leg neutral paint, that's pretty much all we need there in order for buyers to think that they can see the potential then in this. We don't have to fully flesh this out with the latest and greatest. This is probably a project for the next owner.
And I think it's the same thing when you're looking at the different stages of an organization as it goes through its life cycle. While you're looking and you're maybe on the market, if you will, hoping that someone buys, there may not be an interest in prioritizing the most incredible learning management system, let's say. Those can be costly multi-year investments, and maybe you are gonna get purchased by someone who has an in on getting a discount on that platform. And so it's gonna actually be a waste of money or an unnecessary cost to take on that really great solution at that time.
You could get on the other side though of the acquisition, and now it could be, wow, we recognize this gap in knowledge share or education internally within the organization. And so now it does make sense to make that investment. Similar to that bathroom, you've got a tub and maybe you want just a shower. Well, now the right people are at the table to make the decision on where to put those bigger dollars and how to invest those. There's also a timing on that, right? Because if the point is you've been acquired or bought and you're eventually going to sell again, well, in the beginning, there's going to be a likely more interest in making those investments early on so that the current owner gets the opportunity to really benefit from that investment as much as possible over the term that they're going to own the organization.
You may not need that robust learning program in place once you've been able to go through and create a system of knowledge and education. And so they weren't going to want to make those investments quickly after acquisition, but maybe they want to be closer to the end of those agreements and those contracts as you get into looking for that next exit or that next buyer.
Logan (20:32): Yeah, that's a really good analogy on the selling a piece of property and kind of renovating. I remember vividly a conversation I had with our HR leader at one of my last companies and she was talking about, cause she had gone through an exit and the company I was at was kind of pursuing that, that was their ultimate goal. And she was telling me, she's like, well, a lot of times what you have to do is get the org to look like something that gets bought and that exit may happen in like a really rapid time period. And that's kind of, I think that you're talking about there, like you have to think about that, the pre-stage and the post. So given that, like what's HR's role in these different, in like getting stuff set up for an acquisition during the kind of like the PE period and then the exit out of PE.
Nicole Logue (21:25): Yeah, I think, based on the experiences that I've had, the pre-acquisition phase is really about understanding your data, understanding your organization. Who are you in the market? What is your differentiator? What is it about your people, especially as the HR person? What is it about your people that creates that value proposition of why the organization is in such a special place on the market side? And again, that comes down to understanding how does the business make money and being able to then correlate how the people impact that ability to make money.
But then there's also going to be general data that they're looking for, general compliance data, general trends in data, and the ability to demonstrate that you know what's happening with the data trends in your organization, that you can find them, you can identify what they could be tied to, even if it's speculative, and to be able to go out and try a solution to see if it impacts those, you know, some of those negative numbers, thinking in terms of like attrition or lack of retention among your highest performers. That cross section even of multiple different data points to truly understand that high impact work group, your ability to be able to understand those things, speak to those things.
And if you're not at the table during these pre-acquisition meetings, your ability to be able to point out to the folks in the room why that information is important, framing it in a way that helps tie it to value. Listen, as you have these conversations around the value of this certain tech product, don't forget to point out that team has a tenure of like six years, if that makes sense. Don't forget to point out that team brings in interns every two or three years because they want the most innovative minds working on that product. You understand those things from the people perspective, maybe more so than the folks who are sitting at the table who are looking at it strictly from a financial perspective. So that can be your opportunity to advocate in that pre section.
During acquisition, a lot of times it comes down to understanding now what does the new owner want out of their organization? What's their vision for what the future looks like? Most times organizations that make an acquisition, they spend months pouring over information, pouring over consultant reports, trying to understand what is the market play here? And what are those three or four things we could tweak in this company to really put it over the edge? Generally if original owners or founder owners, operators could actually make that leap, they would do it themselves. They might not need to pull in that extra investment group. But in getting that influx of cash or capital, you've got another group now that has an idea of what that future would look like.
And so being up at the table as a player who can be neutral about that, right? Not making it personal, understanding it as these are the types of moves we need to make in order to grow the business to where it needs to now go in its newest evolution. Being willing to sort of, as I even said in the beginning, honor where you came from and how you've kind of grown into the organization you've become and preserve the core pieces of that, but being flexible enough and enthusiastic enough to be able to lead the rest of the company through those types of transitions. I think those are really important pieces in the post-acquisition.
And then as you set up for that next partnership, that next acquisition, what is that target? Is it a public offering? Is it an acquisition by a strategic partner? Is it simply to create this as the new core and acquire up underneath the label that you're a part of? So I think there's all kinds of understanding that needs to happen when you're with that new acquisition group to even understand what their long-term strategy looks like. The sooner you do that, you can start to help understand how the people function can make an impact on that, either accelerated, or even be able to say, hey, you have this as part of the plan and I think this is going to do more damage than you realize. Here's why. And again, that's an opportunity for you to be able to pull in data, different data points around retention, attrition, employee surveys, any employee sentiment that you have access to. Those are the parts where sometimes you can use that data to help create a bigger, a better and more well-informed picture for the executives who are ultimately gonna make those final decisions.
Logan (25:30): Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in there. And one of the things I wanted to pull on a little bit was during the acquisition piece and the buyers kind of trying to figure out what the market play is. And going back to the start, if you know how the business makes money, you can then position at least the HR function as a strategic partner in that, of how the people strategy hits with the market play and what that market play is going to be. I would imagine that that's probably a really great connection there in that process.
Nicole Logue (26:07): Yeah, and I think, you know, if you're at the table and you've got the opportunity to truly understand what is this long-term strategy. And sometimes it might take a little bit of time, right? And a company coming in and buying a business, they understand it from the perspective that they were given during that due diligence and that transition process. It can sometimes take, depending on the complexity of a business, it can take quite a while sometimes for that new ownership team to truly come in and understand what really is happening in the business and how what the reality is may then have to change what they thought reality would look like based on initial findings, investment thesis, things like that, that kind of give them a sense of like, here's what the company should look like.
But all of those due diligence reports, that entire process of understanding an organization for the purpose of buying it also comes with this idea of, and here are the recommendations for how to get the greatest value out of this acquisition, whether it's, and the timeline. If you're looking to do a quick turn, here's where your opportunity is in the market. If you're here for a longer investment period, this is where you can create real value. So there's often a sense of where the organization needs to go and all of the different steps along the way that need to happen in order for the organization to reach the potential that its new ownership group sees in it.
Logan (27:25): Yeah, that's what kind of time, like, so that's a really good segue to our next question about the playbook. But what kind of timelines are you thinking, like in perspective, like what's like a quick turnaround timeline? What's longer?
Nicole Logue (27:37): You know, it really varies. It's kind of all over the place. You know, there could be some short capital fundings that are going to be an 18 month turn after a certain return or a certain kind of growth objective. There's going to be other organizations that recognize now we're here for the longer haul. We're going to spend the next 10 years acquiring smaller businesses in order to create a collection of similarly sized or similarly situated businesses because we want to go from being regional or local market into a more national market, right? So let's go gobble up everybody that's doing this nationally. That can take a lot more time than simply, hey, if we can just go out and land contracts with these four major players in our industry, that's all we need in order to create the kind of value we're after. Maybe that's only gonna take two or three years.
So really it's gonna depend on where your, what industry you're in, how rapidly your industry will change. And then really kind of the margins you'd be looking at in order to return the investment that the owner's now looking for. But all of those things are knowable. That's the thing that people forget, right? It feels really foggy and, like, unclear. But every one of those points, every one of those, like, understandings can be had if you have people who are looking at it, if you simply ask for that question to be answered. I've often been able to go under the guise of, I'm just HR, I don't know, because I'm not in direct operations, I'm not in direct finance. So a lot of times in those transactions, there can be this sort of dismissal that HR isn't really relevant. Well, if I'm asking a really poignant question and I can tie it to what I know the long-term goals to be, all of a sudden, now HR becomes relevant. And if I do ask a question because I don't really know it, somebody's gonna wanna educate me because they want that next piece of information that I might be able to bring with the people perspective interlaced into that opinion.
Logan (29:28): So everything is knowable and you just have to ask the questions. Is it because somebody already knows what all of that is, so it's really just there's a set of stages that you're going to move along that just needs to be communicated?
Nicole Logue (29:42): Yeah, that's been my experience, is that especially in dealing with boards and, you know, investment backers and things like that, they've already got an understanding and an idea of how they want to see the organization evolve. I think that sometimes it's this feeling of like, well, they know where we're going, but they're looking for me to give an answer. Is it because they were looking to see it from both on the same page? Sometimes it's just a matter of simply asking. Where are we going? What's the new direction? Being open enough to know that that can be shared without there being some kind of major, like, revolt or backlash from bringing you in on the process. Being a cooperative and collaborative partner in executing the plan that they have, it could change three, four times before it actually comes to fulfillment. But at least being there as like an eager and willing participant to help shepherd through that change.
There's already change in the works. The whole reason these types of acquisitions happen is because something exists now that's great and someone sees the opportunity to change some things and make it even better. So that ultimately means things will change. The sooner you can communicate that, yes, we get it, it's gonna change, let me help, let me bring this process along, the faster you can gain access to some of those critical things and help them go more smoothly, help people be impacted as minimally or fairly with as much opportunity to process those changes as you can possibly get.
Logan (31:11): So in those stages of the new person that's bought, is that like playbook plan that they see, is that different than, because I know value creation plans get tossed around a lot. Is that what that is or is a value creation plan something different?
Nicole Logue (31:26): I think a value creation plan is, in my experience, has always been a general anchor point, right? And you can drill into it and you can get some specifics, but there is even more of, I think there's even a further layer down in, no, the reality of what we're going to have to do here isn't going to include changing these four people and their roles. It's going to be adding in this other person or having this one exit the organization. And if there's a sense that like you may not be on board with that or be able to handle the process of that, that high level executive transition, that can be where I think HR can sometimes get caught off guard or feel a little uninformed.
But the faster you can acknowledge and truly get folks to understand, no, I understand these changes will be coming. If I can help with a long-term plan, you're even at a point then where you can make recommendations and suggestions. Hey, you've got this idea on structure. You haven't seen this amazing person over in this department who's buried three layers deep. I think we need to pull them and put them in some kind of special project. So you get the opportunity when you ask for that landscape to be able to help again. It's making that talent and those people connections for folks who don't yet understand the business and accelerating how they can execute the plan, just by demonstrating simply what you already know about the organization that they've now stepped into.
Logan (32:52): Yeah. Do you have advice for HR leaders that are trying to get involved in those plans? Like maybe they already know, they've asked some questions and now they're trying to get involved in helping execute it. Do you have any advice for them?
Nicole Logue (33:05): Yeah, I think it's going to depend on the access, like how involved, because typically the knowledge of the specifics and the plans, especially if it involves an adjustment in critical headcount or high level, highly visible headcount, a lot of times those things can be really sensitive and they're held really close to the vest and they're made very confidential. But the ability to sort of find out who you can have candid conversations with. Find out where you can have, I wouldn't suggest doing a lot of these things in a very public forum. You may get access to a lot more information, a lot more insight if you get the opportunity to demonstrate your sense with someone else just on a one-on-one conversation.
But simply calling out in those high trust areas, those high trust relationships, hey, I suspect based on what I know about where we're going in the market, based on what I know about how quickly this PE group turns over their investments, I suspect we're gonna be looking to make these four changes. Have you seen anything about that? If that's where we're going, let me in on it, let me help. Just sometimes acknowledging that you're wise enough to know that things are going to have to change and acknowledging that you want to be a part of helping to successfully implement those changes, doing those in a place where you have already established trusted relationships. This can go a long way in just getting you the opportunity to be a part of some of those conversations and some of that planning.
Logan (34:37): Yeah, that's really good advice. And I would imagine if you can get a part of that, that's a really great career move generally.
Nicole Logue (34:41): Yeah, and it gives you access to opportunities, situations, conversations, strategic thinking that aren't always available, especially in a steady state organization. It's a unique thing to have the opportunity to go through acquisitions or any type of change of control processes with the company that you're with, especially if you actually get to be the person who's there with a voice and sort of feeding into the information about what the best decision is around these changes, rather than somebody on the other side who's just being told about it in the semi-weekly newsletter, however the notices go out.
Logan (35:20): Well, great. Nicole, I appreciate the time to be able to walk through this. I think that all of this stuff, one of the things I've noticed is that you don't get a lot of public conversations talking about how to operate in these environments. And I think that, honestly, like we talked about at the start, growth is where fun stuff happens. And that's where a lot of the interesting things are happening. So I really appreciate the time and walking through us how this environment operates. Is there anything else that you would like to leave the audience with today?
Nicole Logue (35:52): You know, I think to your point, it's a unique environment. It's a unique opportunity to be able to engage in a transaction with PE or out of PE into PE, whatever that looks like. And so because it's unique and because there aren't a lot of folks out there that you can immediately lean on, it is an education. Everyone going through it is kind of learning, and remind yourself of that. Sure, there's going to be people in the room who have done this before. There's also going to be folks in the room who haven't done it before. You're not going to be the only one if this is the first time you've gone through it. And that means it's a learning process. And your speed of education is directly tied to how quickly you are willing to be wrong or to at least expose that you are wrong. So get out there with the questions, get out there with the curiosities, get out there with a what if we thought of it this way, even if you're wrong. The faster you can do those things, the faster you can learn what right is, and the faster you can learn how to then be a more well-informed partner to the rest of the team that you're supporting.
Logan (36:55): I really liked that. Get to figure out where you're wrong faster. I really liked that. Exactly. And we all got to learn. Well, again, thank you, Nicole, for taking the time.
Nicole Logue (37:04): Absolutely.
Logan (37:05): Last item, where should people connect with you?
Nicole Logue (37:08): Probably through LinkedIn. And that's going to be the best place, and got all my contact information through my LinkedIn profile.
Logan (37:17): Perfect, and we will link all of that in the show notes for everybody.
Nicole Logue (37:20): Perfect.
Logan (37:20): Well, great. We will leave it at that. And after this episode, I want to say good luck to everybody learning through these environments.
Nicole Logue (37:28): Absolutely.
Logan (37:29): So thank you, Nicole.
Logan (37:30): Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Pulse, the podcast that has real conversations with HR leaders linking people to performance. HRBench is the people analytics platform that turns HR data into business strategy. It connects to all your tools, HRIS, ATS, payroll, surveys, whatever you're using. In just a few clicks, you get over 45 metrics instantly visualized in boardroom ready dashboards, benchmarked by industry and company size. Book a demo at HRBench.com and we'll build you a custom benchmark report using your data.