Benevity’s CEO on transitioning from a CFO role and the importance of mental health

In this episode of the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast, Heidrick & Struggles’ Sean McLean speaks to Kelly Schmitt, the CEO of Benevity, a Calgary-based leading global provider of corporate purpose software. Schmitt discusses the importance of mental well-being and shares how she role models maintaining her own health and wellness to make sure her colleagues feel comfortable doing the same. Schmitt, who was a three-time CFO before accepting the CEO role at Benevity, also talks about making the transition and shares some advice for finance leaders who aspire for the top job. Finally, she offers her take on the future of work and shares how she and her chief people officer work together to promote DE&I within Benevity and navigate the changing expectations of employees.

Some key questions answered in this podcast include:

• (2:44) You and I have spoken at length about the importance of mental well-being, which is perhaps now more important than ever. How do you maintain your own health and wellness, and how do you encourage your colleagues to take care of themselves? 
• (5:17) You were a three-time CFO before accepting the CEO mantle at Benevity. What’s that transition been like? Any advice for finance leaders who aspire for the top job? 
• (8:52) Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share that might help other Canadian organizations succeed internationally? You’ve been part of several that have achieved this.
• (11:43) Could you share your take on the future of work, which is of course being hotly debated currently against the backdrop of a war for talent? What are your thoughts? How have you and your chief people officer worked together to navigate the changing expectations of employees over the past couple of years? 
• (13:46) As CEO of a high-growth organization, how does DE&I factor into your strategy?

Below is a full transcript of the episode, which has been edited for clarity.

Welcome to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of senior-level executive search and leadership consulting services. Diversity and inclusion, leading through tumultuous times, and building thriving teams and organizations are among the core issues we talk with leaders about every day, including in our podcasts. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Sean McLean: Welcome to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. I’m Sean McLean, partner at Heidrick & Struggles and a member of the global Industrial and Financial Officers practices. In today’s podcast, I’m excited to be talking to Kelly Schmitt, CEO of Benevity, a Calgary-based leading global provider of corporate purpose software. It’s one of Western Canada’s most successful technology stories, having reached unicorn status in 2020. Notably, Benevity’s clients have donated over $10 billion to more than 326,000 nonprofits. Benevity added over 100 clients in the last year alone. Prior to her role as CEO, Kelly was CFO at Benevity, and prior to that, CFO of Solium and Smart Technologies. Kelly, thank you for joining us today. 

Kelly Schmitt: Thanks for having me, Sean. Excited to be here. 

Sean McLean: Kelly, we’ve known each other for a long time, and you’ve always had huge capacity. In the last few years, you’ve started a family, moved from one high-growth Calgary technology company to another, taken the CEO reins from a founder, orchestrated the deal that made Benevity a unicorn and navigated a pandemic. The list just goes on and on. So my first and most important question is, how are you doing? 

Kelly Schmitt: To add to that list, we also did a couple of acquisitions, we’re expanding the company overseas, we’re trying like many companies to navigate the impact of the economic climate on the business, and I’ve been rebuilding the executive team. I hit super-elite status with Air Canada this year, which tells you how much I’ve been on the road on the speaking circuit. And our four-year-old daughter threw up during the night last night, so I was cleaning puke off the carpet this morning. So if I’m honest, I’m pretty tired.

But the more serious answer is that taking on the CEO role and trying to fill the shoes of a very visionary founder is not an easy task. And so it’s true what they say, that it’s lonely at the top. The job can be very lonely, and I feel such a deep level of responsibility to our team, our clients, our investors, all the causes, and the vulnerable people who rely on Benevity for support. And so it’s hard not to feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Thankfully for me, our founder, Bryan de Lottinville, is still involved in the business part-time, mostly as a sounding board for me, and that’s made the job a little less lonely. But yeah, it’s flat out.

Sean McLean: Kelly, you’re amazing, and you still have your sense of humor. 

Seriously, though, given all the things that we’ve all gone through these last couple of years, my colleague James Serrano recently published an article discussing the prevalence of fatigue in the workplace. You and I have spoken at length about the importance of mental well-being, which is perhaps now more important than ever. How do you maintain your own health and wellness, and how do you encourage your colleagues to take care of themselves?

Kelly Schmitt: It’s tough to do, but it’s very critical for me to continue operating at this level with the schedule I have. So I have a fairly rigorous routine that involves a workout first thing in the morning, six days a week. I take an adrenal cocktail and a bunch of supplements to give me energy and boost my immune system. I have a mindfulness coach. I try to sleep at least seven hours a night most nights. And I also take time both to take care of myself, like going for a massage, as well as to enjoy my kids.

When I manage to do all of these things is definitely when I’m at my best. If I let any of them slip, however, things can spiral downhill pretty quickly. For example, I let myself get a bit too run down this fall, and before I could rectify the situation, I picked up a pretty bad respiratory infection that took me two months to get rid of.

And so it was a good reminder that I need to schedule in these regular breaks to rest and recharge, regardless of how many things are happening in the business, because I’m no good to anyone, my family or Benevity if I’m sick or burned out.

In terms of encouraging colleagues to take care of themselves, something we do at Benevity, particularly when we’re in a time of rapid change, which there’s been a lot of these past two years, is we remind our leaders about taking care of themselves and how to manage their energy and understanding what lifts them up, so they can be very intentional about working through challenging times.

When we look at the company-wide perspective, for the past two years we’ve done something called Me for We Week, where the whole company is off work at the same time for the same week. We, of course, have our traditional vacation program, but one of the best ways to disengage is when you know no one is counting on you and your email’s not blowing up, because your colleagues are off, too. And we found that people come back really refreshed and energized, even though it’s a pretty short time. It’s the quality of the break versus the quantity.

But I think whatever you do, it’s important for the CEO and the executive team to role-model it so that people truly feel like they can take time for themselves. One thing that I personally role model is I go offline when I’m on vacation. So when I take two weeks off in the summer, I’m off Slack, I’m off email, for the whole two weeks. The only way anyone can reach me is to call me, which of course they don’t. 

Sean McLean: It’s so refreshing to hear a CEO admitting that they’re human. And the missing piece often is that role-modeling piece, as you know. It’s really great to hear how you approach that. 

Kelly, you were a three-time CFO before accepting the CEO mantle at Benevity. What’s that transition been like? Any advice for finance leaders who aspire for the top job? 

Kelly Schmitt: Ha ha. Am I allowed to say don’t do it? I wouldn’t wish this job on anyone. I’ll start with the second question first. For finance leaders, if you decide to take on the CEO role, the most important thing is you hire an amazing team, including an incredible CFO to replace yourself, if that’s the role you’re moving from because you need to be confident in the skills that you bring to the CEO role but hire people who are the very best at what they do, particularly in areas where you are weaker. So for me, that’s product and engineering. One of my first hires as CEO was an amazing chief product officer who’s made a big difference in our business, but I’ve also added a new chief people officer, a CTO, and, very recently, a new CFO as well.

To have a well-functioning company, you need a well-functioning executive team. And for that, you need a very high level of trust. So hiring people that you trust to do the job is key. I found that when I was a CFO, I really knew enough to complete any finance-related task myself if I needed to. But as CEO, that’s just not the case. You have to work through others because you’re not the expert anymore.

I think the other piece of advice is to put your ego aside and be willing to ask for help. There’s no way that you will have had all the experiences you need to be a great CEO. So I take all the help and advice that I can get.

As for how the transition to CEO has gone for me, the biggest part of that transition was shifting from being mostly internal facing to being external facing. I didn’t necessarily envision myself as the person on stage speaking at conferences or being the company’s top salesperson, so all of that was new to me. Given that I was dreading having to do those things, to be honest, probably the biggest surprise to me once I got into the role was how quickly I was able to adjust and how much I actually enjoy it now. I think what it comes down to is that I love Benevity and I believe in our mission, and now I get to spend a lot more time talking about Benevity, so what’s not to like? 

Sean McLean: That’s an awesome perspective, Kelly. It’s surprising how often we see former functional leaders continue to try to be the smartest person in the room, and it just doesn’t work as CEO.

What would you say are the leadership skills and experiences you have found to be essential as CEO, particularly at a private equity–backed company? Is anything unique when working with the financial sponsors?

Kelly Schmitt: This is an area where having a CFO background is really helpful because the private equity sponsors are very finance-oriented. One of the skills that has helped me is the ability to take the complex and make it simple for people to understand.

As you’d expect, a lot of people internally at Benevity don’t understand how the private equity world works, and so I find it’s important to educate them on what our investors are looking for, the metrics they care about, so that we’re really working together as a team to deliver on both the business results and the social mission, and it’s not a mystery why our investors are happy or unhappy.

Flipping it to the investor side of the equation, it’s very important to be able to tell the story of what’s happening in the business to the investors and to the board. What was our plan? What’s changed? Where are we now? Where are we going? You can’t just set a three-year or five-year plan and then put it on autopilot. You’re never done. It’s always evolving and changing, and so you have to be able to tell that story behind the numbers. 

Sean McLean: Kelly, you know that I’m passionate about helping Canadian companies succeed on the global stage. Any lessons you’ve learned that you can share that might help other Canadian organizations succeed internationally? You’ve been part of several that have achieved this. 

Kelly Schmitt: This is a good question. If you’re planning to expand internationally, whether it’s through acquisition or even organically by setting up a new location, the number one success factor that I’ve seen is culture. It’s also the number one factor when an acquisition isn’t successful.

So if you’re buying a company, the cultural fit of its people with your team is the most important thing. And at Benevity, we’ve actually walked away from acquisitions that made sense on paper, made sense for our product portfolio, but where the cultural fit did not exist. 

And if you’re expanding organically, it’s kind of the same idea. Sending leaders from Canada overseas to help establish those new operations and having people who can ensure that the cultural practices are consistent is really important. 

And the other thing that I’ve learned in my career is that you cannot apply a North American lens to everything. We tend to do that, even though we know we shouldn’t. You have to be curious. You have to display humility and value the different mindsets of your international team and create space for them to bring their knowledge of those markets to the table because they know things that you just don’t know and can’t know.

Sean McLean: That’s such a great point on culture, and as we know, mission can be a real driver of culture. Your mission is to act as a catalyst to infuse a culture of goodness into the world. What does that mean to you, and how do you instill this into the culture on a day-to-day basis? 

Kelly Schmitt: When we think about our mission, the reason we use the word culture is because every social issue that we’re facing in the world today—whether it’s climate change, food insecurity, racial inequity, whatever it is—requires behavioral change at the individual level to solve. And so we are trying to enable that by helping companies to connect their people with a sense of purpose and to deliver social impact. That’s what we’re getting at when we talk about a culture of goodness.

When it comes to instilling it into our own culture, we have a new weeklong onboarding experience for new employees, and I’m the first speaker on the first day of that onboarding for every new person who joins Benevity. We share our moonshot slide, and we talk about the culture and what we’re really trying to achieve. Once you’re into the company, we talk about our “why” during every major period of change. We talk about it at celebrations, we talk about it in company presentations, we tell client stories and cause stories at weekly town halls, and all of those things engage and energize our people and just remind them why we’re here.

We also walk the talk, though, so we ourselves regularly volunteer. Last week, our entire executive team served breakfast at the drop-in center here in Calgary. So it’s important to actually live the mission as well. 

Sean McLean: Given that, I’m excited to hear your take on the future of work, which is of course being hotly debated currently against the backdrop of a war for talent. What are your thoughts? How have you and your chief people officer worked together to navigate the changing expectations of employees over the past couple of years? 

Kelly Schmitt: This one’s been a bit of a roller coaster for us, as I’m sure it has been for many companies. I think the biggest thing we’ve done is we try to engage our people in the conversation and, as much as possible, use real data to make decisions versus being swayed by some of the loud voices or hearing what people want anecdotally.

For example, we recently made some decisions around our facility's footprint. We surveyed our team, which is about 1,000 of us now, about how and why they use our offices or why they don’t use them. And we also looked exactly at where all of our 1,000 people are living today, right down to the postal code. And we used all of that data to make decisions, which involved closing our Toronto office, subleasing our Victoria office, and shifting to a co-working space, and we’re going to sublease a floor here in Calgary as well. And so for us, we didn’t go to the extreme of being fully remote nor did we force people back, because neither of those options really suit us. And so we’re trying to find the right balance.

I think the reality is that even though the market has slowed down a bit now, life has changed. The way we work has changed forever. I personally am a big fan of that in-person interaction, and I myself come to the office most days. But having to be in a physical office five days a week primarily disadvantages women, particularly if they’re the primary caregiver. And so, as a company that is very serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion, that’s a really important factor for us. And so now when we come together physically, we do it with more intention and there’s an actual purpose versus it being a mandate.

Sean McLean: Again, it’s refreshing to hear that. We see many organizations rushing back to a particular model without taking the time to really ask why or what their employees want. What a great approach.

Kelly, let’s end on this critical topic. As CEO of a high-growth organization, how does DE&I factor into your strategy? 

Kelly Schmitt: As a tech company that is 54% women, and an executive team that’s over 50% women as well, it’s very central to the fabric of Benevity. It might be interesting to know that we’ve never had targets around these metrics; we just have achieved them by trying to reinforce the behaviors that are really needed to make a change in this area. And one example of that is we have almost as many men as women who take months of parental leave, not weeks but months. And we have programs that support and encourage them to do that, and that’s just a behavioral and a societal thing that we think every company should do. 

As a female CEO, I also feel quite responsible to be vocal on this topic. I think I was quoted recently in an article saying “that’s pathetic” to the recent stats of the number of women on boards and in executive roles here in Alberta. 

But day-to-day at Benevity, I consider the principles of DE&I and how I build and lead my own team, and how I set expectations for the rest of the company. And for us, many of the initiatives are grassroots, such as employee-led resources or affinity groups. But we also put resourcing against company-wide efforts. You’ve got to be doing both to really make a difference in this area. 

Sean McLean: Kelly, I’ve so enjoyed the conversation today. We started with the note that Benevity’s clients have donated over $10 billion to more than 326,000 nonprofits, which is simply incredible. Hearing you speak today, it’s also evident that you’re having an amazing impact on your colleagues and providing a great example of how a Canadian company can succeed. Thank you so much for your time today. 

Kelly Schmitt: Thank you, Sean.

Thanks for listening to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. To make sure you don’t miss more future-shaping ideas and conversations, please subscribe to our channel on the podcast app. And if you’re listening via LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, why not share this with your connections? Until next time.

About the interviewer

Sean McLean (smclean@heidrick.com) is the partner in charge of Heidrick & Struggles’ Calgary office and a member of the global Industrial and Financial Officers practices.