Adam Torres and Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann discuss FitCEO.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres and Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann, Founder of RMK Group, LLC, explore RMK Group, LLC and Rebecca’s new book, FitCEO: Be the Leader of Your Life.
About Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann
Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann is a versatile, seasoned CEO with broad leadership experience as a Financial Services Leader in sales & marketing, risk management, and international business operations. Her extensive expertise in the financial services industry and outstanding record of leading highly successful business turnarounds, has resulted in effective scaling of new businesses and expanding of existing operations globally for Fortune-50 FS organizations. Her success stems from an innate ability to build, inspire, and lead exceptional teams.
About RMK Group, LLC
RMK Group LLC focuses on a four-pronged approach to business culture: Operational Excellence, Client Centricity, Employee Engagement, and Shareholder Return.
Rebecca brings an operator’s mindset and experience to the practice. Working with start-ups and established businesses during all phases of growth RMK Group LLC advises CEOs & C-Suites in the fin-tech, identity & security, data, consumer products, reg-tech, wealth, international payments and multiple other industry sectors on a range of strategic and professional growth areas.
Advisory services include: business strategy, growth plans, scaling and hyper-scaling — building high performing teams (C-suite & next level) — market growth planning, including international geographic expansion —partnership development, revenue generation — risk management & good governance — as well as overall establishment of routines to enable a start-up to prepare for each growth stage via talent, investment, infrastructure and capability.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I have Rebecca MACRA Kaufman on the line, and she is a founder over at RMK Group, LLC.
Rebecca, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. It’s fantastic to be here. All right. Well, it’s it’s great to meet you. And I’m excited to get into R. M. K. group LLC and what you’re doing in the C. E. O. advisory space. But 1st thing 1st, the way I like to start this 1 is I’m a huge fan of books of authors. It’s not easy to get a book out there into the world nor to get people to read it.
So I love to support authors. I was told that you have a book. Fit CEO. So I kind of want to start there. Talk to me about this book and why you wrote it. Great. I love talking about fit CEO, be the leader of your life. And fit CEO is one word the way we write it. It’s really about achieving holistic health in your Super busy life at work at home and at play.
And what I mean by that is emotional, mental, physical, spiritual health as a leader of a company, a leader of your home, a leader of your job, a leader of your life. And it’s a passion. what, Brought me to write the book, if you will, is it’s all my life hacks of having been a CEO who spent lots of time traveling and eating hotels and airports and airplanes and trying to figure out with two kids and a husband and a crazy job.
How could I stay mentally, physically, spiritually fit? And so I share all my. Hacks in the book and my co author Lillian So is a personal trainer, yoga therapist and has all the expertise in the body and mind combo. Now, I know that in any book, of course, there’s going to be many takeaways, many different things you want the readers to get.
And we don’t have to spoil the whole book, but I do like to give my audience just a little bit of some takeaways from there. If there was a central, you know, theme or idea or just in general, what, do you hope that your readers walk away with after, reading the book? You know, the book is really about a simple, easy practice.
Around habits for success, become the fit person that you want to be at all levels. And so it’s really a series of and practices that you can do five minutes, ten minutes to up your game in all the areas that you want to. Can you share maybe one of the practices? One short way to say it is an intentional That’s total health as a leader, maybe share one of the practices with the audience. Sure. Okay. So I’ll give you an example. So we talked about a power move and a power move. One of them is taking things off your calendar. And so we look at a lot of time blocking. How do you time block exercise?
How do you time block time for yourself time blocking time for your business? And so a lot of the habits that are around And that one example is to give some insights into time blocking. Another example would be little things like, park two blocks away from where you’re going and add a four to five minutes of walking.
Another example is a lot of talk around walking meetings. I used to do walking interviews. So instead of sitting across the table from someone face to face, if it was a nice day, let’s go out and do a walking interview. Either both of us on our phones or both of us in person. What an amazing way to meet somebody.
I used to walk with most of my candidates, and not only did I get my steps in, but it was a much more relaxed, less intense interaction. That sounds lovely to me. I like it. I want to switch, gears here a little bit. RMK Group LLC. Maybe tell me a little bit more about the business, please.
Sure. So the business houses all of my activities. My main activity within the business is advising CEOs. Or C suite members, primarily CEO and primarily startup CEOs, but I do have a larger company CEOs and private company CEOs or C suite. So I say the most common is a, the either the founder and the co founder of the clients working through things like what’s the culture of the company going to be, what’s their intentional plan of attack to be successful?
How are they going to communicate? How are they going to build a high performing culture? So, for some, I bring my 30 plus years of experience to their, let’s say, Okay. 10 years of engineering brilliance. And for others, they may have all that experience, but not necessarily running a larger employee base.
So I have clients at their startup, but they have 800 employees. And so they’ve never built the systems that you need to manage through other leaders, to manage your growth and your culture and your client success. So that’s my main business. The two other. For three other areas I house under Armored King Group LLC is I speak on leadership in the book.
So FIT CEO fits there and all the leadership. speeches or talks or keynotes that I do, and then I’m also a director on board. And so some of that I house within that total business. How did you get into the business of advising CEOs? Like where’d that begin for you? Well, my career journey is 30 plus years of financial services.
I’ve had roles such as president of a bank, CEO of a bank, chairman of a bank. I’ve done a lot of turnarounds. My expertise really is leading large teams to high performance, and I wanted to help, if you will, the ecosystem of where I live. I live in San Francisco, so when I decided to leave corporate America, where my last team was, you know, 2400 people, I wanted to come back and offer the skills that I had, but more in the startup Ecosystem here and it’s been our win win.
So most of my referrals come from venture capitalists or the lawyers who advise these firms. So when someone starts a company, or it’s going through multiple phases of funding, they’ll often often want to bring in advisors with expertise in different areas. So I really bring in that management company building expertise.
Sometimes they’ll have a second advisor. That’s more of a. Industry expert. I am an industry expert in financial services, but often they’ll bring in, let’s say an M and a expert or compliance expert or depending on what their business model is. And so very interesting. what are some of the challenges in today’s market that you see some of these startup CEOs having?
Like, what are what are some of the challenges they’re facing? Well, the biggest challenge always is getting the right talent. I think high performance culture, building a high performance culture, and hiring, retaining, and developing talent that you can really trust and delegate to and run with is probably the number one thing I see.
And then the second thing is capital, trying to get the right amount of funding at the right time is super hard, especially now. And of course, everyone believes that should start to get better, but that has been very tough for founders. So you have to think through, like, extraordinarily your expense, your burn rate um, through the trade off with investing in growth.
And that’s a constant challenge for startup CEOs and I say underpinning all that’s always growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. Yeah. And trading how much growth versus profitability. So we work through a lot of that, but number one is always people. Amazingly. Yeah, we need people. That’s the thing.
We love them and boy they bring a lot of challenges too. I think the area that I do focus with a number of my CEOs, depending on where they are in their phase, their company phase, is also board relations. because when you start, you don’t always have a board, but as you grow, the VCs want to be on your board, and then as you bring in independent directors, and so I’ll work with a number of CEOs on what is the board dynamic, board culture, board development, who are the right members of the board and how can they have the best relationship with the board to grow the business and really tap into the expertise of the board.
So there’s a lot of work there. We can go on and on, but those are the kinds of areas that I help. These companies with. Yeah, and taking it a step further, I understand that there some pillars that you coach on in terms of when it comes to running a business in general. can you speak on those a bit?
Sure, and you know, they’ll sound incredibly motherhood and apple and basic, but if you focus on the basics, it works really well. Yeah. So I have four pillars I tend to focus on. If they didn’t sound basic, then it would be off to me. It’d be like, okay, well, I’ve never heard that in my life. Then I’d be like, okay, let’s go.
Go ahead. I just got to throw that in there. If they don’t sound like something that, you know, you should be doing or heard a variation of then I’d be worried. Go ahead. Please. Right? So killer number one customer. The light, like, are we producing a product or service that really is helping the customers thrive and be successful?
So customer delight, customer engagement, customer success. There’s so many names here, but that’s pillar number one, all about the customer. You’ll be surprised how many companies I talked to who don’t actually say the word customer as often as I do. The pillar number two is really the employee engagement.
So that is the hiring, retaining, developing talent motivating talent, teaching. I think it is often the hardest area for startup CEOs and C suites to engage in both hiring, developing, retaining. And inspiring their teams. So the teaching part and the inspiring part, I think is really where we spend a lot of time.
The 3rd pillar is what I’m going to call operational excellence and a lot falls into there. But are you producing this product with excellence? Is it quality? Is it compliant? Is it legal? Is it working smoothly and delivering what you promise? And then the 4th pillar is really shareholder return. is this making money?
Yeah. And as you go through these, I would imagine when you’re onboarding a new client or a new CEO, like when you say these four, like somebody’s, you’re probably weak in one versus the other, right? Like, so when you go in there, like, talk a little bit more maybe about your process and how you assess and how you, get into the weeds with the clients.
Cause I’m guessing they may be strong on one area, but really weak in another, or like, like, or how do you do that? Sure, every client pretty bespoke because they’re in different. Yeah, I figured phases of their development, you know, if they’re really, really early stage, we may, we might be working on the most basics.
Like, what is the product? And when are you gonna have the MVP it’s gonna be around? How do you have enough money usually their own money or early angel seed type investor? So really the early time is that customer product value then it’s like they’re a little bit older like then What’s the plan like a six month plan?
Normally you think larger companies do five year plans, but startups don’t do five year plans You know, it’s like how are we going to get from here to there? Where are we? It’s going to achieve this year, the next six months, really milestone based to deliver things. That would be very early startups. When they become more successful series A, series B, series C, have more money than they start having finance teams and sometimes HR teams and chief revenue officers.
And, you know, the focus on growth. And so there, how are you often prioritizing the right thing? Because once you start getting bigger, you get overwhelmed by all the customers. All right. If you will customize demands and if you customize everything, you die, right? So how do you stay the course on your mission and value and vision?
And that’s where that planning comes in. So I spent a lot of time planning with them. I’ll start interviewing employees too, to just make sure like that the culture’s okay. Right. Are you really mission driven and aligned and feeling. company. So a lot, just that’s that turnover stuff. So there’s many pieces to it, but always along those pillars.
Amazing. Rebecca, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show. And I’ve enjoyed learning more about your book, Fit CEO and also RMK Group LLC. That being said, if the audience, if somebody wants to check out RMK Group LLC or also even just pick up a book, so Fit CEO be the leader of your life.
How do they do that? Sure. So easily the book fit CEO one word is on Amazon. If you prefer a price or it’s audible or Kindle, but if you prefer a small bookstore, you can go to book Topia or just order at any bookstore. But the get it tomorrow book is Amazon. And then my website is R. M. K. group. L. L. C.
dot com. And there has the links to the book and Amazon and it has descriptions of my work and for clients who were willing for me to list who they are, they’re listed and scrolling at the bottom of the screen. And then also on my website or other podcasts as well as articles I’ve written if you want to see more about four pillar culture or innovation or.
Amazing. And for everybody that’s listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put those links in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over and be and pick up a copy of that book. Fit CEO, be the leader of your life, but definitely do that and check out the, the RMK group LLC website as well.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new. Brace to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Rebecca, thank you so much again for coming on the show. Thank you, Adam. It has been a real pleasure.