How We Do Good Business, Not Nice Business
Andrea Spiegel is an operations and management consultant based in Vancouver, BC, with 15 years of experience in leadership management spanning multiple industries, including entertainment, wellness, service, trades, and manufacturing. She enjoys working with visionary founders, helping them define long-term goals, identify gaps in current systems, and map out tangible strategies for sustainable growth. One of Andrea’s greatest passions is bringing order to chaos and witnessing the freedom her clients feel as their business becomes aligned with their vision. When she is not strategizing with clients, you might find Andrea engaging with her community in one of her favorite not-for-profit organizations or skiing Whistler with her family.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Some of the favorite job titles Andrea Spiegel has been called
What Andrea learned from the LA film industry
Why she left entertainment to work in yoga
Andrea’s thoughts on maternity leave and women’s careers
The beauty and challenge of working in a smaller company
Why she was drawn to yoga after LA
What she means by doing “good” business versus “nice” business
Where leaders need to place their priorities
What specific thing she learned from Kevin Lang that Andrea values
The value of process when coupled with innovative thinking and what people need to be successful
In this episode…
Andrea Spiegel took what she calls a “not straight pathway” to her current career at URGEO. Born in Calgary, AB, she first moved to LA to work at a literary agency in the film industry. From there she moved up to Vancouver, BC, to work in yoga. She started teaching at YYoga and went on to become the Regional Operations Manager. After her maternity leave, she went to the lighting design company McCormick Studio which is where she was introduced to Martin as a mentor. And that led her to URGEO.
The through line in all Andrea’s career moves is a love of creative industries and her ability to create very elegant systems that allow people to be creative. She also realized that many things that appear definitive are actually negotiable, that companies are composed of people whose decisions can be questioned by the curious and confident. What Andrea also saw was the inversion of performance management: instead of caring about the performance of the people being managed, the care was about the performance of a manager. She took these things to heart.
In this episode of What CEOs Talk About, host Martin Hunter and guest Andrea Spiegel discuss leadership and managing people, the value of redirection over criticism, and how the best process is developed with the people using it in mind. Andrea is clear that the value of elegant systems is not simply efficiency and revenue, but that people can work in them. She wants CEOs and entrepreneurs to be able to get back to doing the thing they started the business to do, instead of spending all their time doing the business.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Contact email: info@urgeo.com
‘Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know’ by Adam Grant
‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable’ by Patrick Lencioni
Resources recommended for CEOs and leaders:
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