Founder Series: Navigating Uncertainty & Disruption
w/ Meghan Corroon, Founder & CEO, Clerdata
Buzzwords like “grit” and “resilience” often complicate how we talk about the psychological and emotional pressures of business building. As it turns out, you can possess both and still have days where you—and your leadership choices—look and feel like a dumpster fire.
I’m always inspired by how our founders navigate uncertainty and disruption. Even more uplifting is how they are redefining what it means to build resilience and show grit... while also caring for themselves and for others.
It's a pleasure to showcase a few of their stories, in their own words, in this new series. Enjoy!
Meghan Corroon, Founder and CEO, Clerdata
1) Knowing what you know about how quickly and significantly circumstances change, how do you think about long term planning? How do you balance the upsides of long term planning with the need to be dynamic, in real time?
I don’t personally work well when I don’t have a firm grasp of the overarching strategy and long-term plan (or sometimes just a medium term plan). Kind of like a strong yoga stance, if your feet are planted firmly in the right places and in alignment, you can be more dynamic with your arm movements. That’s how I view having a clear longer-term strategy in place and then tweaking it as new market evidence and opportunity emerges.
2) What’s your take on transparency with your team? How do you decide what to share and what to hold back?
I tend to lean heavily towards transparency. In my previous career I hired and grew very large teams across the globe, and there’s a balance to transparency and efficiency/ appropriate levels of sharing info. When we’ve onboarded new team members, I am clear that I lean heavily towards open and transparent culture and usually ask them how they like to work and what their past experiences showed them about internal info sharing. Sometimes people need different things to be their strongest in a team.
3) How do you help your team navigate uncertainty? In what ways, if any, does uncertainty guide how you set and measure performance goals and other KPIs?
Measurement is my love language and my security blanket, so I’m always asking the team “are we asking the right questions?” I work on measurable, specific question formation and then create the KPIs we need and nothing more. Measurement can be revelatory OR a burden depending on how thoughtful a team is with it.
That being said, measurement can’t fundamentally mitigate the level of uncertainty we are facing as start-ups. To be honest, my experience working in highly volatile and resource poor settings like Central Africa, and staying calm and alert to changes around me, is the skill set I most use with myself and leading my team.
4) Do you use any techniques / approaches for managing stress and prioritizing mental health (yours or your team’s) that you are willing to share?
Meditation, living in a super calm small town, walking my dog, and spending time with my family all help me balance. I really encourage the team to view rest and recovery as part of the job and I try to think of it that way as well. This is a marathon not a sprint and we all left comfortable jobs to do this adventure so we should enjoy ourselves!
5) There’s been a lot of conversation about the importance of “resilience” in business building. What does that word mean to you, if anything at all?
I really don’t love start-up culture buzz words. I don’t have an opinion of the word when it’s not anchored in a real context of some kind.
6) Startup culture has long celebrated “grit” as a pre-requisite for success, but often done so in a machismo way. If you could write your own definition for the word grit, how would it read?
Since I didn’t come from the business world originally I don’t think I have the same negative connotation of “grit” as machismo. I worked for so many years with friends and colleagues in places like Nigeria and the DRC that I think of grit as a mental flexibility to reframe your situation no matter what circumstances you find yourself in so that you can keep going in a positive way. Anyone privileged enough to be able to work on a US-based start-up and take on the risk required has so many resources at their disposal compared to the majority of people.
7) What’s your favorite way to blow off steam or recharge after a tough day?
Cooking for my family, knitting, reading sci-fi, attempting to rock-climb 🙂.
8) If you could give one piece of advice to a new founder starting out today about how to survive the uncertainty of building a company, what would it be?
Be very selective in what advice you take on your journey (including this!). Figure out the difference between what is perceived as “valuable” and what is “of value” to you. Vet mentors as much as they might be vetting you, especially as a woman and/or POC Founder. There’s a lot of business advice out there that’s based on nothing of substance.
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Clerdata is the intelligence software connecting the digital marketing world to brick and mortar sales in today's dynamic marketplace. Clerdata gives CPG companies a data edge to drive better marketing and trade decisions through actionable insights and recommendations.
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