How Yoga Transformed My Leadership Style

Full transcript

Anxiety and yoga transformation

Welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today, we're joined by Crystal Bell. Crystal, welcome to the podcast. You. I'm so glad to be here. Do you mind giving us a bit about yourself and what do you do? Of course. So my my current workload is interesting. I have two different sides of my life that I like to say. I'm a corporate executive, so my title is president of enterprise solutions at a publicly traded software company. I've been in that role about four years and moved up the ladder in professional services at that company. And I also co own a yoga and wellness studio and do small business coaching. Do I like to say that I have kind of a zen side and that it's what helps me to be a clear thinker and bring a lot of clarity to my leadership team on the on the software front. I live in the Detroit, Michigan area in The United States, and I'm married, and we have two dogs. So that's a little bit about me. Okay.

And what actually made you start a yoga studio? Yeah. So I've been practicing yoga for over fifteen years now and took my yoga teacher training about four years ago. And I had been going to the studio, which is local to me, as a student for many years. And I watched them go through COVID, and I was just kinda watching them struggle financially, and I could tell they were really stressed, right, which is not the vibe you want at a yoga studio. And I had started to work with them from a business coaching perspective and really helped them get clear on their mission. They had three owners at the time and they weren't really aligned on what they were actually doing. Were they a yoga studio? Were they a wellness studio? Were they a community center? So we first sat down and kind of refined the mission and then took a hard look at their finances and had some really hard conversations about what it means to be an owner and a founder and what kind of work it takes to own and run your own business. Out of that conversation,

I really loved the space. I loved the community, and I felt like I could bring a lot more profitability to the space, so I offered to buy out two of the owners and have owned it for a little over two years now. We've had our first two profitable years since they started and opened their doors, have expanded membership, and really just changed the overall awareness of the studio as just a yoga studio to really being a community and wellness space. We do a lot of different events, and I teach five classes a week, so it helps me to bring awareness of myself, my presence, my breath into my executive job where things can get really crazy. It helps me to remember to breathe, to slow down, to be clear, and remember that, you know, everything changes, and so whatever happens today might not be there tomorrow so that be present with whatever it going on. Okay. That's wonderful story. And you started as a business analyst and worked your way up Yeah. Right? To To president. At my corporate space. I started as a business analyst, like you said, eleven years ago.

Tech's unexpected challenge

I was actually a customer before that and had the opportunity to move over into the company because I loved the people, I loved the software that we were working with, and moved up through the ranks. So I started as a business analyst, really loved working with customers, and found a good perspective of what it means to be customer focused, which is one of our core values, understanding that the customers have to feel and see value. We also want to work with people that we like. Right? That's a very important part of of being in sales and being in services and being in software is that we're spending a lot of time with our customers. So I built some really strong relationships with customers, gave spent a lot of time listening, and over the years moved up, took over the professional services division, ran that for two years, and then had the opportunity to step into the the president role leading the executive team. So it's been a wild ride. And since I stepped in in 2021, we have over tripled our EBITDA, doubled our revenue, and really found a lot of clarity in

what is driving results and what was just adding noise to to our operations. So it's been a really fun time to to be a leader, especially as a female leader. What would you say was the turning point in your career where things really started to accelerate? That's such an interesting question. I think for me, it was maybe around 2018. I was growing in my career. I was just stepping into a director role, and that was really when I started getting serious about my yoga practice as well, again, in Michigan. I had moved from Washington State. And at that time, I think my brain was all over the place, right? Like, was really focused on climbing the corporate ladder, but I was also riddled with anxiety. Being a high performer kind of my whole life and growing up with some perfectionist tendencies, I really just was working all the time. I would check my email before I went to bed, go to sleep, wake up in the middle of night, check my email. It was the first thing I did when I woke up, and I thought that if I was doing more

that I was gonna be more successful. Right? And I and around that time, I was just like, I can't do this anymore. I turned off notifications on my phone, and I really worked into my practice i slowing down. And I I think that that shifted how I thought about success was that it wasn't about volume or how long of hours you were working. Right? Like, there's an adage that you should be the first one in the office and the last one out. But maybe that person is just taking too long to do their work. Right? Like, that doesn't necessarily mean that the person that's spending the most time is working the hardest. You have to really focus on what it is that you're trying to achieve and how to maximize your energy and capacity in the things that make the most difference. So I think that between the yoga practice and forcing myself to slow down, really think about what was going on and how I wanted to show up as a leader, began to build a lot of trust with the people that I was reporting to and the people that were under me.

We began to grow and and really be successful as a team. And I I I if I had to point to one thing, I do think it might be that. Mhmm. And you spent time in county government before actually moving to tech. How do you think that public sector experience changed the way you actually think about building software for those organizations? So I will tell you, I never thought I would work in in software. That was not part of my intention. And I expected to be in the arts and nonprofit. That was sort of the path I was on. I have my Masters of Arts Management as well as my Masters of Business Administration, and I just expected I would be working in a nonprofit or a government agency because I've always been very mission driven. And it really wasn't until I started becoming a customer and working in government that I saw how much people don't understand how software works at all.

I happened to have a leg up because I was really young at the time. I was 25 when I started my manager role at the county government that I worked in, and people would come to me because they didn't know how to turn on their computer. Right? Like, we still had full desktops at the time. They are very resistant to change because and what I learned about it was that it's not that people are dumb. Right? Everyone is very, very smart and intelligent, and they were so good at their jobs. But a lot of times in county government, people are in those jobs for fifteen, twenty, thirty years sometimes. And that you get so good at what you're doing, and you really become a master of your craft that when something changes or shifts like technology, it can be really scary and disarming, especially if you don't trust that the people that are building the software have any idea what you really do. Right? So having a deep understanding of what the customer is actually doing and what's going to create efficiencies versus create roadblocks is important. I think as

having come from the customer perspective and moved into the software perspective, the sales perspective, the the one thing that sticks out to me the most is that a lot of times in sales and in software, we're going say, like, yeah, we're gonna make this more efficient. We're gonna add this automation process, and we're going to take paper out of it, and we you know, it's intended. The intent is that it's going to solve human problems. But sometimes what happens is if we don't really understand what the person that's actually running the software needs to be doing, we can either overcomplicate the screen so it takes them way longer to type in the things that they are used to seeing on their screen every day. Or we can automate it to a point that it's frustrating to the user because they're used to a certain process, and they might be used to going from one to two to three to four to five to six to seven. And now maybe we're automating it from one to seven, but then there's an exception that goes back to two. And so that can really slow customers down,

and they're not seeing the benefits initially with the software that they're investing in, and it can become a really difficult conversation. So I think listening and spending time watching people work is really important as well as understanding the work that your technology is trying to resolve. Mhmm. And you run both the enterprise solutions and also the professional services. Right? Those are very different muscles. How do you kind of balance out building the product and also delivering for your clients? Yes. So in my role, like I said, I grew up in professional services. Right? So I was used to having a product that we knew we could customize, we knew we could tailor. And then when I've as I've risen to to the present, I have to oversee the entire organization. Right? I had to learn what it meant to be a salesperson. I had to learn what it meant to be a product manager and and understand what it also looked like to support the software that we were building. Right? So having a holistic understanding, I think, has taught me the importance of saying no. So from the product perspective, as a developer,

the customers and the service implementers are going to want to say yes. Right? Sales wants to say yes to a customer. We want to add things to the product. We want to make it cool. We want people to be excited about it. But the product team has to make sure that it's going to work for the most people and and make sure that it stays stable, that it stays secure, that the user interface doesn't get over complex. Right? There's a lot of decisions and understanding that go into the product management side that from a sales and services perspective, we don't always think about. Right? We're engaging with the customer. We're working on understanding their paths and making sure that things work. And especially as we've moved from a perpetual install tailored solution model to a lot more cloud Sas readiness and and clarity of a a niche a niche solution versus a a long customized and drawn out implementation, having to walk a tightrope between functionality and feature and practicality of of the software is really a challenge. So that's what I've learned is that I have to kind be a mediator

a lot of times in my executive role to think about what's gonna bring the maximum benefit to all our customers without overengineering or creating multiple different lines and strings of code that are only good for one one particular group. Right? Those are really difficult conversations because we want to kinda meet everybody where they are without making the product Frankenstein. So Mhmm. And, Crystal, what's your vision for the next few years? Where are you taking things? My vision for the next few years is is really the path that I've been on for the last couple, I would say, about three years now that I've been really leaning into building a strong leadership team and and succession plan across the board and helping my team, my customers, and those around me to think about everything that they're doing, every impact between clarity, having clarity, then moving to action in order to get measurable results. Right? So if we're just doing tasks, it's not really meaningful. Being busy, like I said at the beginning, doesn't actually make something successful.

And I think as we move into this age of AI to where every software has to say they do something with AI, even if they don't know the difference between a large language model or an agent or a, you know, a generative model, like, you have to say it because that's what customers wanna hear. So I think that understanding how to balance what's happening in the technology space right now with AI and using it intentionally and responsibly is also something that I'm working with a lot on my team and myself. Right? When AI first came out, it was fun to, you know, put yourself in a picture of the eight that you're in eighteen hundreds, like, with wearing a fancy dress. But there's so much more to it than that and really harnessing what value it brings to humans so that we can have the experiences that we want to have. I don't want AI to do art for me. Right? I want AI to to analyze something that might have taken me three, four, five days or three, four, five weeks. I want AI to go out and do research

so that I can make intelligent conclusions, not provide conclusions to me. And I think that that's something that's really happening right now as everything is developing really quickly. And so trying to educate my team and my customers around what appropriate and intelligent AI looks like and how to integrate it intelligently into our product so that it's not just a flash name on the screen because it has to be there, but it's something that really helps people to do their work. And that's that's really important because I think we lose the value if we're just using it for a chatbot because people still wanna talk to other humans. Right? Like, it's we can still answer questions, and we wanna make connections. And it's important that we don't lose those skills, and we have AI do the things that are actually hard so that we can use our brains for what they're for. Yeah. You're definitely right that there is a big AI bubble currently going on.

And where can people find you, Crystal? So great question. I'm about to launch a website. So, hopefully, by the time this podcast airs, it'll be live. That be coming soon, and it's www.clarity-with-crystal.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, which is crystal ivy bell, or find me at my yoga studio, which is breatheyogacom yoga at dot com. Okay. Great. Crystal, thanks for joining the podcast, and we'll see you in the next for having me.