Assemble Case Study
How an early stage start-up partnered with our team to outsource strategic projects so they could focus on their roles as founders.
Overview
Founded by registered nurse Tessi Flood and seasoned entrepreneur Wes Jules, Assemble connects nurses to shared knowledge, resources and each other. Assemble is built by nurses, for nurses, and empowers nurses as professionals. Learn more about Assemble here.
As with many early-stage companies, Assemble’s co-founders have been wearing many different hats, among them building SOPs, structures, and tracking tasks. As they juggled all these responsibilities and more, Tessi and Wes recognized a need for someone else with business context to step in, identify performance-based insights, and act on them so that they could bring their focus back to founder work. They needed a Chief of Staff.
Situation
In selecting a firm to provide a Chief of Staff, Wes knew what he was looking for and why the circumstances were right for taking this step. Having worked with fractional CFOs before, he knew that fractional staffing was a great way to test out a hire and make adjustments accordingly. He saw the Chief of Staff role as another place where the model could help ensure he hired the right talent.
“In a world where you can bring in fractional headcount that scales up or down with you but can build the expertise, that, in my opinion, is always the way to go,” said Jules. “You’re limiting potential harm on both sides.”
Co-founders Tessi and Wes interviewed several fractional Chief of Staff firms, but at the end of the day, there was only one winner: Keziah Wonstolen and Vannin Chief of Staff.
The Assemble founding team felt encouraged by Wonstolen’s assuredness. It was clear to them that she had placed talented Chiefs of Staff in the right companies many times before. They also appreciated the way she positioned herself as a business partner, not as a salesperson making a pitch.
“She took a genuine interest in who we were as founders, the mission of our company, and what we were looking to build,” says Flood. “She asked a lot of pointed questions about what we were trying to solve and why we were seeking a Chief of Staff.”
Wonstolen dug deep into Assemble’s needs and pain points, making sure that she fully understood what a Chief of Staff’s role would be for the organization going forward.
“It felt a little bit like matchmaking in that she wanted to understand what the projects would look like…[so she could] then select the perfect fractional Chief of Staff who had the right skill set, the right approach, and the right qualities to be able to solve those problems and really jump in and support Assemble.”
Soon after that call, Assemble onboarded Chief of Staff Dawn McDougall.
Approach
McDougall made a major impact on Assemble. Three of her main areas of focus included tracking hospital launches, defining processes for nurse creators, and helping the founders define and take action on team culture.
Hospital Launch Tracker.
One of the first projects she worked on was a system to track the launch of new hospitals who signed on to Assemble as customers. The tracker had hundreds of moving pieces, and McDougall oversaw all of them. Not only did she build a system that had clear owners at every stage of the process, but she also held daily 15 minute standups with everyone responsible, organized a postmortem to continuously update it, and then built out a template for future hospitals to onboard to Assemble. “I sat with [McDougall] for 30 or 45 minutes, and within a day or two she put together a launch tracker that factored in the cost of the event, people required for the event, utilities required for the event…all that sort of stuff, including…the people responsible [for every step],” says Jules. This tracker helped streamline the customer onboard process and also gave Assemble insight into how to improve their offering in unique ways that further resonated with their customers.
Creator Processes
Another project Dawn spearheaded was the creation of project management processes for nurse creators. She designed a user flow for creators and coaches to submit work, ask for information, and get necessary support from the Assemble team member overseeing the creator-coach relationship. Her system built in markers for timeliness and transparency that made the entire nurse creator journey simpler and more intuitive.
“She created a lot of workflows we still use that are immensely powerful for being able to stay up-to-date in support of our nurse community,” says Tessi.
Culture
Last but not least, McDougall made a significant impact on Assemble’s culture. A lot of companies wait until they are larger to invest heavily in culture, but McDougall created an intentional, fun action plan for this small organization. Among her changes: Friday talks where team members share about a topic of interest to them, introducing profile photos on Slack so everyone on Assemble’s remote team could see each other’s faces, and creating a unique Assemble emoji for Slack.
“What was great about [McDougall’s culture-building efforts] was that Dawn not only listened to what we were looking to build, but then actioned that independently” says Tessi, “which is what you want your Chief of Staff to be able to do.”
Results
Assemble’s engagement with Vannin Chief of Staff resulted in these positive outcomes:
Cost reduction of hospital launch by 30%.
Acceleration of hospital launch from 1 month to 1 week.
Streamlined staffing abilities, which enables more national launch opportunities.
Increase in the team’s willingness and ability to collaborate, as evidenced by the increase in the number of project channels and Slack activity.
Conclusion
After engaging with Dawn McDougall and Vannin Chief of Staff, Assemble is better prepared for day-to-day operations as well as major growth and expansion. They’re continuing to work with McDougall, whose latest slate of work includes GTM project management and even more upleveled support.
“[Dawn and Keziah are] both incredible value-adds, not only from their acumen but also from their general approach. [They always have] very can-do attitudes, a growth mindset, and [they’re] super positive overall. I think it’s rare that you find that,” says Wes.
To learn more about Assemble, visit their website at www.comeassemble.com