„Our belief is that the opposite of failure isn’t success, it’s clarity“
Nina Müller, Global Program Director of Butchershop® Global
Butchershop has joined AVCO in February 2022. Learn more about our new member from Nina Müller, Global Program Director of Butchershop® Global, with whom we had a talk.
Can you briefly introduce yourself?
I am Nina Müller, Global Program Director of Butchershop. Throughout my 10+ year career, I’ve worked with some of the world’s most successful brands, ranging from early and late stage startups to fortune 500 companies such as Nike, Zenefits, RingCentral, and Grail.
I was born and raised between Germany and the Silicon Valley. I’ve attended Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, on a full-ride athletic scholarship for the Division 1 Women’s Volleyball team and graduated with a major in Marketing and minor in German. I kicked off my career in Product Marketing at Cewe HQ in Oldenburg. In 2014, I moved back to the Bay Area and spent seven years in San Francisco working at digital and creative brand agencies. In 2020, I returned to Germany with my husband Felix. We’ve recently welcomed our first child, a son named Leander.
Together with the Butchershop team I have turned an unwavering emphasis on clarity into the Beat Failure™ methodology, helping leaders steer through the challenges of inflection points ᠆ whether they be at a moment of growth, scale, evolution, transformation or launch.
What is your company’s activity, what is its competitive edge?
Butchershop is a global growth and transformation company born and raised in Silicon Valley with offices in San Francisco, Vienna, and Guadalajara. We connect consulting, creativity and technology to help brands break into emerging markets or break out to lead them. With our entrepreneurial pedigree, we have turned an unwavering emphasis on clarity into the Beat Failure™ methodology that helps companies steer through the challenges of inflection points, including moments of growth, scale, evolution or transformation. We measure success by our ability to change perceptions and increase awareness, retention, interactions, impressions, conversions, and revenue.
Our 15 years experience working with (unicorn) startups to Fortune 500 companies out of Silicon Valley taught us the lesson and skill we acquired about how to effectively Beat Failure™. On the basis of this approach we helped to grow, scale, IPO and structurally change companies and base our interactions on the goal to establish long term relationships with one another.
What are your main projects/targets for 2022?
As one of Butchershop’s five core product offerings, strategy and consulting draws on the company’s Beat Failure™ methodology to help companies steer through the challenges of inflection points. One of our goals is to offer our expertise via hosting and facilitating ‘Clarity Session’ workshops using this methodology, helping companies, VCs and startups break into emerging markets or break out to lead them.
The Clarity Session is a two hour facilitated workshop designed to give visibility to leaders and teams in organizations around what possible failure points may arise on the path to success. Whether the focus is on growth and transformation, the next funding event, starting a new initiative or campaign, responding to a market shift, building a new product, scaling into a new market or just managing transformation, we enable companies to do it fearlessly from the start by transforming pitfalls and risks into clear priorities, strategies and team alignment. The session focuses on one question only: What will cause XYZ to fail?
During the two-hour session, your group will be prompted to put failure points, fears, and concerns on the table. Your Butchershop facilitator will host, help organize, score, and rank these items to create clear areas of focus. The session can be hosted live or digitally through Zoom, and will use Butchershop’s proprietary app called Priio®. Priio is created for companies at inflection points aiming for growth or transformation to gain maximum clarity.
As experts in the US market, we also aim to offer our services in discovery, strategy, brand and execution for companies looking to expand to the US.
In an ideal situation, what would you change or improve in the current VC/PE market?
We have spent the last 10 years working with CEO’s, founders, entrepreneurs, startups, and fortune 500 companies, and we observed a trend. Over and over again, we see is that there is too high of a focus on what success looks like. The road to success is difficult and can be blinding. These people and companies are faced with the most common problems – a lack of clarity, misaligned product, brand, and marketing strategies, disagreement amongst stakeholders, gaps in strategic approaches, unrealistic budgets and timelines, and no plan on how to tackle the unknowns. Focusing on success is the wrong mindset, and actually sets people up for failure.
Our belief is that the opposite of failure isn’t success, it’s clarity. And the only way to achieve ultimate clarity is by tackling failure points first. The question should therefore be, ‘What will cause XYZ to fail?’. What would make your idea, your project, your brand, your business, your team, your strategy, your culture, your investment, fail?Failure becomes our friend and ally on the way to strategic decision making. And this is an area of improvement that we believe could benefit the VC space greatly. After many conversations and working with VCs, there is a lack of a process and diverse approaches to risk assessment. We proved that our expertise helped US VCs implement a standardized process in order to assess risks and identify mitigation factors which could help the European VC landscape as well.
Which one of the following topics inspires you most and why? – Sustainability, Equality, Education, Regulation
Equality: Butchershop is working toward greater parity in diversity, equity and inclusion and has launched programs like Equity for Equality (E2) which raises funds for arts and education in the BIPOC community with over $203,000 raised and donated. We also launched of Priio, a self-service SaaS platform that helps other agencies and their clients Beat Failure™, while emphasizing diverse voices in the decision making process.
Thank you very much for the interview!
