Nicole Gifford, Business Operations Associate, is responsible for overseeing our company wide operations and ensuring we scale efficiently. She joined us in 2021 and has been making a huge impact ever since, whether that’s building out business development partnerships or cutting down our time spent on quarterly planning processes.

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Can You Tell Us About Your Role at GlossGenius?

In short, my role as Business Operations Associate is to provide cross-functional leverage across some of the highest impact areas of the company. I’m the sole directly responsible individual for ensuring the company-wide business operations are making us more efficient and scaling as we grow – things like our planning cadences, internal communications, and transparency initiatives fall into this bucket. I also have a rotating roster of special projects in my wheelhouse, with a particular emphasis on GTM (right now, I am partnering very closely with our Business Development Team to manage some emerging channels) and public relations. 

What Has Your Growth Looked Like at GlossGenius?

I’ve been fortunate to evolve a lot during my time at GlossGenius! I entered the org in late 2021 as Executive Assistant to our founder and CEO, Danielle Cohen-Shohet. From day one, I was able to take on small projects in niche areas to help cover gaps as the company grew.

Thanks to my diverse professional background (and history of rolling up my sleeves!), I wore many hats and was happy to do so – everything from real estate to accounts payable to press liaison! As I learned more about operations across GlossGenius and my interests and competencies became clearer, I dove deeper into areas like our company town halls, quarterly planning cycles, and PR strategy.

I let my natural curiosity lead and raised my hand whenever I saw an area I wanted to transform. After some time, it felt very natural to begin to transition into a new role that would allow me to maximize my impact across the company. In June of 2023, this was cemented in the form of a new title and set of responsibilities.

In Your Opinion, What's Unique About GlossGenius?

I love our uniquely strong spirit of customer centricity. I have a lot of personal ties to the beauty industry and identified strongly on an individual level with the mission of GlossGenius before I even joined.

In working here, I am proud to say that we all care very deeply about our customers and making them as successful as possible. This high level of consideration guides our decisions and ensures that our growth is in lockstep with our customers’. It’s a really special thing! 

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How Do You Foster Collaboration And Innovation On The Team?

I’ve been lucky to work closely with C-level executives for my entire career, and I try to infuse what I’ve learned from those experiences into best leadership practices I actively use each day. I find that the best leaders are good listeners who empower others to speak up and take ownership – if you see something, say something.

I try to create a safe, collaborative environment that encourages those around me to always share their feedback, thoughts and reactions. Raising my hand to engage in thoughtful discussion and action has been the key to success in my career; I always want to empower others to do the same.

We Are So Customer-Centric – How Does This Impact Your Day to Day?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the stories we need to tell externally to provide value and create interest vis-a-vis our customers. On the press side of things, I’m partnering with our Data Team to find exciting ways to share useful insights with our customers and the wider audience of beauty pros – we’ll continue to iterate on this in 2024.

I keep this hat on in my partnership work, where the content we push to our partners’ audiences must have a similar type of impact. I love the idea that the messages I help share externally not only generate excitement about GlossGenius but provide inspiration and insights that can help business owners run their operations better. 

What Are Some Ways You are Raising the Bar?

I am always looking for ways to streamline operations to keep efficiency core to our DNA as we grow. Developing easily digestible and implementable guides for certain fledgling partnership motions after lots of experimentation and searching for “hacks” was a big initiative I tackled recently that was a prime example of this ethos.

On the traditional biz ops front, I am continuing to optimize our quarterly planning process to get it down to a repeatable, simple-to-understand science. We’ve cut down the time spent on these quarterly processes significantly since I took them under my wing – I am very proud to say that we now spend much less time planning and much more time executing, all while keeping a super high bar for what excellence in OKR building looks like!

What Does A Day In Your Life Look Like?

The beauty of my life at GlossGenius is that no two days are the same. I create some routine with careful list-keeping, daily priority recalibration, and regular time reserved for follow-ups.

A typical day can look like setting intentions for the day in the morning and then some heads-down work on ongoing projects, like sending outbound notes to prospective partners, building a new partnership initiative proposal, reviewing quarterly planning documents – just to name a few examples!

Then, I’ll often take meetings throughout the afternoon with stakeholders across my various worlds – this ranges from our executive team, external partners, interviewees, and colleagues across our internal departments (Data, Business Development, People Ops, and much more). I’ll close out the day with necessary pings and summaries and get ready to do it all over again tomorrow! 

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‍GlossGenius is actively hiring across many departments – check out our open roles here.  

Additionally, below is some recent press you may be interested in:

• TechCrunch: GlossGenius Increases Valuation, Raises $28M in Series C Round of Funding
• GlossGenius Named a Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startup 2023
• GlossGenius Named to the Forbes Fintech 50
• GlossGenius Named a 2023 BuiltIn Best Places to Work Winner
• BeautyMatter: GlossGenius and the Power of Customizable Beauty SaaS
• Fast Company: The 10 Most Innovative Retail Companies of 2022