For Bobbi Brown, one of the perks of starting over after leaving her namesake brand was being “freed” from the constraints of a large corporation.
The beauty founder said she learned a valuable lesson from that experience: “Layers are dumb.”
“The most important thing is I learned what not to do,” Brown said at The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Council Summit on Wednesday. “Not to waste time, energy, money.”
When Brown launched her namesake brand in 1991, she was 34 years old and handled every aspect of the company.
“I used to interview every single person in the beginning. Every single person,” Brown said on a recent “Master of Scale” podcast episode discussing the release of her recent memoir, “Still Bobbi.”
In the years after she sold her company to Estée Lauder and signed a 25-year non-compete with the beauty conglomerate, that dynamic started to change, and toward the end of her time at the company, the brand became “very process-oriented.” Brown described becoming increasingly excluded from hiring decisions as the company expanded.
Estée Lauder did not reply to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Consultants and KPIs
Part of Brown’s lesson to not waste resources and energy is to “not hire a lot of consultants,” she said at the WSJ CMO Council Summit.
When she founded her new company, Jones Road Beauty, she said she stripped away unnecessary layers. The founder said she’s “narrow-minded with what needs to get done,” but loves hearing others’ opinions.
She also said she doesn’t understand why traditional corporate measures of metrics, like key performance indicators, or KPIs, are needed to assess performance.
“You either did a good job and sales are good, or you did a bad job,” Brown said.
Brown isn’t the only leader who has expressed frustrations with corporate bureaucracy in recent years. After a spike in hiring during the pandemic, many Big Tech companies have spent the last few years cutting back staffing, trimming middle management, and flattening organizational layers.
Brown said at the WSJ CMO Council Summit that she’s maintained the same entrepreneurial ethos she had as an early founder and that she’s still the “same Bobbi” who was cold-calling from the Yellow Pages.
“I love being scrappy,” she said.
