In this interview, host Pete Crosby talks with Charlie Granger, Chief People Officer at Revelesco, about why organizational culture should be treated as a core strategic driver for B2B SaaS and AI‑native businesses. Granger explains that many founders mistakenly leave culture to chance, assuming that hiring smart people will automatically create a strong culture. He outlines a four‑step framework: (1) give culture a seat at the leadership table and discuss it regularly; (2) define and document clear values, principles, and expected behaviours; (3) operationalize culture by embedding those values into hiring scorecards, performance reviews, compensation, and leadership accountability; and (4) measure culture through engagement surveys, retention data, pulse checks, and leadership KPIs. The conversation highlights how culture is the “invisible operating system” that holds a company together during performance tension—periods of slowed growth or missed targets—when other levers like product or sales may falter. Granger warns that culture often frays after the 10‑person mark if values aren’t reinforced, and that scaling requires continuous evolution of cultural norms. He provides diagnostic questions for CEOs to spot cultural blind spots and stresses that early investment in culture pays off by making scaling less disruptive. The interview concludes with practical advice on how quickly a cultural turnaround can begin once a focused effort is applied.
Chapters
Today, I'm super excited to be introducing our very own Charlie Granger at Revelesco. Charlie has had an incredibly interesting career so far, having started in sales. I remember we've worked together for nearly 15 years now, and when we first met, you were the top, top, most successful salesperson in an extremely fast-growing SaaS business. And then, what's so interesting I found about your career is that you, whilst you had that experience of unlocking growth as that business scaled, you then became obsessed with how teams are built, and then the human element of that, and the human Um, and then you actually retrained into a Chief People Officer. Okay. The one question we're going to ask you today is, what do you wish more CEOs knew?
I wish CEOs knew, or at least were more aware of, just how expensive, painful, and distracting it is when you don't treat people and culture as a core part of your business strategy. And the mistake I see too often is that founders leave culture to chance. So, they assume because they've hired smart, exciting people, that culture will just happen. And so, naturally, you focus on strategy or product roadmaps and convince yourself that your culture is fine. But the truth is, if you don't make culture tangible or strategic, you pay for it in ways that often hurt most, right? So, missing targets, high costs.
So how should they be thinking about this as a CEO? And, you know, we're coming together, we're bringing our senior leadership team, we're building our strategy. How often and how should they structure their thinking around building the right culture?
The first, the first step is actually giving it a seat at the table. It sounds simple, but the first step is, is it discussed? Is it considered? Is it talked about? And then the second thing is Is it operationalized? Have you, have you defined, measured? Do you evolve your culture? Like, do you— okay, you've defined it, but do you measure it? Do you know how to measure it? Do you know how to measure what great looks like?
And when you say, is it discussed, is it talked about, what kind of things would a successful business be Well, the first thing would be, have they defined their culture?
So, do they have values and principles? Have you actually put that into place? Do you know, as a CEO or leadership team, what are the expectations and behaviours that you're looking for? And have you clearly written those down? For example, the best cultures aren't, like, nice. They're clear. They're obvious, right? So, great leaders have not only modelled behaviour, but they've written those down, and they've shared those through the organisation.
Mm-hmm.
The other example is it coming into one of the steps that I work with a lot of founders on, or leadership teams, is the activation and measurement section of culture, which is often forgotten. So, I guess, to come back to your question of, it needs a seat at the table, it needs to be on the agenda. Either you have somebody in place that manages it, or you talk about it in leadership teams. Great, you know what those values are, you've started talking about them, you've defined them.
Yeah.
But how often is it measured and measured and used throughout your business? If you don't have measurements in place, or you haven't embedded it into your organization, which is what I call operationalizing your values, then you can't— it's harder to talk about at, you know, leadership meetings because you haven't got things to review.
Exactly. And so, let's talk about measurement because it's CEOs don't need to be told, you've got all of these problems. What they need to understand is which problems do they solve in what order, and which are— how do they do that in order of priority? And so, in terms of measurement, when we're thinking about this, how should they be measuring it?
If you want and need commitment from your team and your leadership, so, you need to get alignment, how you do that is you build it into all of your systems. So, for a few examples might be, do you include your values in hiring scorecards or hiring wrap-ups? Are they, are they part of the performance reviews? You know, do you promote or not promote based on evidence that you have against the values that you've created? Do you give feedback based on those values? Another one is aligning and holding your leadership team accountable. So, this is more because if we're focusing on CEOs, CEOs directly impact the leadership team, and one of the things that they can forget where they can have the biggest impact on culture is, do they measure their leadership team against the values? Not just expecting their leadership team to go and do it in performance reviews or in hiring, they also need to hold their leadership team accountable against that. So, a few examples might be, do you tie bonuses and promotions to behaviors that reinforce culture, or do you measure leadership impact as much as you measure revenue and churn?
Hmm.
And an example of that might be, as in what you were saying around, well, how can you tell, or how could you perform, how can you track that to growth, let's say? It would be, of that leader, what is their retention of their high performers? So, what's the attrition like in their individual team? What's the engagement like? Do you measure the engagement of that team? How well do they collaborate? Do you do pulse surveys to understand how the team are working? What are the KPI dashboards that that leader has created? How well does their team achieve their OKRs? That's like how you could measure a leadership impact against values.
And how do you specifically measure engagement?
So, there's, you know, there's huge pieces of research on the types of questions that you can ask, but how you measure engagement specifically is usually through a survey to give you specific data, and the rest would be through retention of the team.
So, let's say that I'm a CEO and founder of a SaaS business, and we've got around 10 people in our sales team, and we are almost hitting target every month. It seems to be working, and they seem to be really trying, but I haven't yet invested that much in culture. Culture doesn't have a seat at the table when we talk about it in So, how should I be thinking about culture if I'm nearly hitting my targets, and they seem to be starting to get things working? Why should I start thinking about culture, and what are the kind of things that's going to impact in the long run, that it's going to help the business to do enough so that it's worth investing in culture?
So, culture usually, it frays in moments. It doesn't kind of, like, collapse, like product or growth, which is why it's important to get the foundations right from the beginning. So, where you would see it go wrong is often in performance tension. So, let's say all companies at all stages, and if we're focusing on the sales team, there may be a time in that company's lifecycle or within that sales team's lifecycle that they're going to miss targets or the growth is going to start to slow. And when pressure rises, culture is often what breaks first. or it's what holds you together.
Right.
So, if you don't focus on it, you're risking, down the line, that when that performance tension increases, that you haven't built a foundation that means that team can understand how to be resilient, move through change, know what behaviours are the right behaviours that will then get them back on track. And then, often, if you haven't focused on culture, Before that point happens, then you see things like, um, managers can start to excuse, like, toxic high performers because they say, oh, but they deliver. And so then they focus just on those few key people that deliver, but ultimately it's not sustainable in the long run because you really need, you know, 60, 80, ideally 100% of that team operating well.
Mm-hmm.
And I'd say what you— metrics show you watch what is working, but culture shows you how long it will continue to work for.
That's really interesting, and it reminds me of one of the conversations that we had at the Whole Revenue Summit when one of the CEOs had founded his business and exited the business at $450 million. And when I asked what did he think was one of the most important things about the success of the business, culture came up as a significant part. Because he said that the reason that it did, that he felt it did so well as a business, is because they spent such a lot of time on the culture in the beginning of it, that the business, as it scaled, inevitably went through really tough periods. And what they found is that it's not When everything's going well and everything is successful that they do the best work. It's when everything's, when they're going through a really hard time and everybody pulls together and they support each other. And it's not so disruptive that it really breaks everything just because they go through a rough patch. Because they've got that foundation, it makes it a much easier scaling journey.
Yeah, exactly. Because culture is your invisible operating system. You know, it's often referred to as the lever that runs the business when you're not in the room. And so, if you do have That foundation set, you have clearly defined what your culture is, you have operationalized your culture and built it into your measuring systems, then when you're either in performance tension, you have set again that foundation of the behaviors that people know, the way that you do things around here.
And is this— how easy is this to maintain as a business scales? If we're looking to get these businesses from, let's say, $5 to $10 to $50 to $100 million in ARR, Within, you know, a 5-year period, that is a significant amount of growth. So, how easy is it for these businesses to be able to maintain that?
I'd say, when I kind of break down culture into the simplest set of steps, which, 2 of which I've already mentioned, it's define, and then activate and measure, and then evolve. And so, to answer your question, that comes down to, like, culture isn't static. So, as you scale, you have to redefine what's working. For example, CEOs often move leadership through the business, or people say, the leader that got you to X million isn't going to get you to Y million. And that's the same, I think, with culture, is obviously, you need to have that foundation. But, I mean, it becomes a bit of a buzzword, right? But let's say it's the ways of working, the operating principles, the values, the behaviors, whatever it is you want to call culture, you do need to continue to give it that seat at the table. So that you have clearly defined it, you have made it tangible, it is strategic, because then you're able to keep evolving as the business grows.
Okay, that's, that's really, really interesting. So, can you just tell us a little bit more, um, about where you've seen this go wrong in businesses? We've touched on it a little bit, but what I'm looking to understand is, for any of the CEOs or founders or leaders that are listening to this, how can they actually identify when they're at a point where This is going wrong. We need to do something about it.
Well, some examples of stages I could start with. So, if you are in the scaling stage, that is often where values start to dilute because they've not been written down. So, as you get beyond that 10-person workforce mark, that's when people tend to have not defined and reinforced their values. So, therefore, it's a risk. So, that's one of the places where I see it go wrong. One I've already mentioned, which is The performance tension. So, if you're a CEO and you know you're starting to slow on growth, or you're starting to miss targets, that is often where it can start to go wrong. And culture is a thing that you need to be able to lean on because you're in that performance tension. So, that might be a time where you need to think, do I need to zoom in on my culture and my behaviors, not just my numbers and my metrics? I would say a really simple one is Can you ask yourself as a CEO, when was the last time you treated culture as a strategic driver? So literally you just sit and say, when, when was the last time that I looked at culture as a strategic driver? Have I ever done that? And could it be a blind spot for me? That takes so little time to achieve. Culture is what happens when you're not in the room. So it's the thing that you can rely on. It is the lever that drives your business when you're not there. Are they bought in? Is there a level of trust? How do they adapt to change? Do they believe you communicate well? And actually analyze what you're dealing with and diagnose the problem to then work where the gaps are.
Yeah. And how, how long does it take, if you were to go and work inside a business, how long would it take you to really start shifting things and turning things around so that the business's culture was at a place where it could start to really start to build to be great?
I think if the CEO and the leadership team are bought into the project and belief that culture is a strategic driver, then it doesn't need to take very long at all. I think if the leadership team are dubious that culture is a strategic driver, which to answer the initial question, for me, it is an expensive, painful, distracting mistake to make, and I've seen time and time again. That it is a problem, but if the leadership team or the CEO don't believe in culture, then it can take a long time.
