Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Cary Lawrence of Decile On The Five Things You Need To Know In Order To Create A Highly Successful Tech Company

Happy clients will be one of your best referral sources — About 10% of our new customers come from former clients, whether it’s a direct introduction or a mention of Decile at an industry peers conference

As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women Leaders in Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cary Lawrence, Decile.

Cary is the CEO of Decile, an all-in-one customer data and analytics platform whose mission is to help e-commerce brands grow profitably. Decile spun out of SocialCode, a digital marketing firm, in July 2020 where Cary was a co-founder back in 2010. Prior to SocialCode, she worked in the Ad Innovations group at Washington Post Digital and served as a Program Associate at the Aspen Institute in the Communications and Society Program and has roots in the agency world.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

In all honesty, it was a breakup in my mid-twenties. I was living in Boston at the time enjoying a career in advertising when an unexpected split with a long-term boyfriend forced me to take a step back and evaluate all of my life choices. It was during this moment that I decided that I wanted to segue from traditional media to digital media. In order to not have to start my career over from scratch, I decided to apply to graduate school to hone my digital media skills. So in that one year, I moved to Washington DC, started graduate school and began the next phase of my life. During that time I met my now husband, and re-launched my career with a focus on digital marketing and technology.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

Prior to starting Decile as CEO, I was the GM of the technology business unit at my previous company, SocialCode. I remember coming out of a challenging meeting with my CEO and some external clients and other internal stakeholders and sharing with my CEO after the meeting that I didn’t think I ever wanted to be CEO. It seemed like too much pressure and too many complex issues to manage through. She listened to me and chided me saying, ‘Cary, no man would ever say that they don’t want to be CEO. You are 100% equipped to do that job.’ At the time, I had smaller aspirations, but sure enough, when she was ready to step down and we spun Decile out of SocialCode, the joke was on me because she tapped me to be the CEO of Decile. And I’m pleased to say, I’ve had no regrets.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

My first job after college was working at an advertising agency as an Account Executive. One night, in my early twenties, I had a client launching a huge full page print advertisement in the Wall Street Journal in order to announce a new product launch. The Director of my account team was out of the office the day that we sent the final proof to print, and I was put in charge of the final review and approval. At some point in the production process, two of the digits in the phone number had been transposed and I didn’t catch the mistake. The ad went to print and was published the next morning with the incorrect phone number. This was a $50k mistake and I had to get on the phone with the most senior client and explain what happened. Fortunately, our media team was able to leverage good will with the newspaper so they could re-run the ad the next day as added value, but I never forgot that mistake. I learned the importance of accountability and the importance of flawless execution. To this day, I re-read every email and double-check every attachment before I hit send. I also make sure that I am empathetic when junior members of my team make mistakes.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

When I reflect on my career, one time period that I remember being extremely difficult was during the scaling phase of my first start-up. When we started, there were three female co-founders and we built something great from scratch, but as we grew larger as a company we brought on some more senior talent and I saw my role and prominence within the company diminish a bit. It was hard not to take it personally, but once I shifted my focus to learning and appreciating the additional experience and talent of the newly brought on senior members of leadership, I started to see myself grow quite a bit as a leader. Ultimately, I believed that the CEO and COO of the company were good people who wanted to do what was best for the company, while also helping me to advance in my career. That mindset allowed me to stay positive and focus on what I could control.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

‘The only thing you have control over is your attitude.’ — Victor Frankl

Ever since I was a child playing youth sports, I focused on staying mentally positive as a way to turn around my physical performance. I am a glass half-full person who always believes that others are coming to a challenging situation with good intentions. I believe that outcomes are strongly determined by putting in the effort and having the right attitude and right people surrounding you.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

Decile is a customer data and analytics platform whose founding mission is to help brands grow profitably. Our belief is that a marketer’s most valuable asset is their first-party data. But leveraging that data to drive meaningful and actionable insights is oftentimes difficult. Decile simplifies this process with business insights that help build loyal customers, optimize product strategy, and drive lifetime value for your brand.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I think that one unique quality about Decile is the depth of care that our team applies, not just to Decile outcomes, but to our client outcomes as well. In the SaaS world, such a high touch level of support and thoughtfulness about client goals and successes is rare. We once had a client describe us to another prospect as ‘a SaaS company that feels more like managed service.’

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Yes! At Decile right now we are honing and improving our predictive customer LTV models to better predict the value of a newly acquired customer based on their individual attributes. This allows us to help marketers create audience segments that are most likely to make an additional purchase and drive high lifetime value for the brand. Additionally, by providing better signals into the advertising platforms, marketers can reduce marketing waste.

Let’s zoom out a bit and talk in more broad terms. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in Tech? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

When I think about the status quo regarding women in tech, what I wish for is a broader cohort of female leaders at the most senior levels. I think that one way to help solve this would be to create a greater pipeline of women and other underrepresented talent for filling senior roles. Unfortunately, as wonderful as personal referrals can be for identifying trusted talent, they can sometimes create the unintended consequence of perpetuating the hiring of the same type of leader. Networks like CHIEF have started to try to solve this challenge, particularly as it relates to building a network of senior female leaders. Additionally, industry conferences should ensure that panels of the thought leaders are not composed of 100% males.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in Tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

One obvious challenge is that women are often starting families and acting in the role of primary caregiver during their 30s and 40s, a crucial growth period in their careers. It can be challenging to start and stop career momentum, but to forgo the opportunity to have a family is a sacrifice that many women don’t want to, and shouldn’t have to give up. I agree with Sheryl Sandburg’s advice to find a great partner who can help you balance both family and career.

Another challenge is that there simply aren’t as many women in tech as there are men. Females represent only 17% of all tech CEOs. I think it’s important for women in tech to embrace what makes them different, and to not lose the empathy and skills that make them great leaders. Representation is so important for all underrepresented populations, so I always encourage the women on my team and in my career circles to participate on panels and speaking events.

What would you advise to another tech leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?

In the past I have made the mistake of waiting too long to make personnel changes if a leader is not working out. In my experience, the quickest path to boosting growth and sales is to uplevel the talent at your company. You want to make sure that any toxic individuals are transitioned out and that everyone at the company is aligned to the mission and all in on helping to achieve it. Once the right team is in place, everything will start revving.

Based on your experience, can you share 3 or 4 strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

Kick off every new engagement with an implementation and onboarding call to make sure everyone has the same expectations at the start. Identify the key business challenges your customers are trying to solve for which will in turn, drive better engagement and outcomes leveraging your tech. Don’t minimize the impact of a top notch Customer Success team for product adoption and user experience.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful tech company?

1. Hire the right people — After two unsuccessful Sales Management hires at my company, I have learned that senior hires need to have both aptitude and integrity. One without the other does not work.
2. Find the right product to market fit, test and learn until you do — Our business didn’t really start to scale until we found the right pricing strategy and the right ICP (ideal client profile)
3. Understand your unit economics — In order to scale/grow profitably you need to make sure you’re tracking the key unit economics. It’s something we track, monitor and report on a monthly basis at Decile.
4. Build a predictable and scalable sales model — After 2–3 years of trying to hire the right sales executives and build a functioning sales operation, we finally have enough data to start predicting more accurate sales production, and in turn, a more accurate financial forecast. It also gives us more levers to use when setting expectations.
5. Happy clients will be one of your best referral sources — About 10% of our new customers come from former clients, whether it’s a direct introduction or a mention of Decile at an industry peers conference

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I would love to share a meal with Sheryl Sandberg. Her career and personal story resonate with me so much as a working mom. She has handled every challenge with strength and grace and comes across as authentic and vulnerable at the same time.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!