I recently went one-on-one with Kelly Crompvoets, CEO of ARCpoint Labs
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Kelly: When I look back on my career, a few things stand out. My path here was never a straight line. I started near the bottom and worked my way up, and at almost every step there was some part of the job I had never done before and had to learn on the fly. Early on, that used to rattle me. With time, I realized that not knowing something is not the problem. Being unwilling to go figure it out is the problem.
I have also been lucky to have mentors, though I am fairly sure most of them never realized they were mentoring me. I watched how they managed, how they worked, how they treated people, and I decided what I wanted to carry forward. I also worked alongside people whose style I knew I never wanted to copy. Honestly, I paid just as much attention to what I did not want to build. Figuring out what to avoid turned out to be one of the fastest ways I found to build a healthy team culture.
For most of my career, I have worked with and for people who value quick thinking, transparency, and a sense of humor. That gave me the freedom to chase ideas, try things, and both succeed and fail in a place where it was safe to do either. I am grateful for those people to this day. The experience that shaped me the most, though, had nothing to do with a job. In November of 2018, I lost my son. He was 18. He had just finished his first semester at university.
There is a phrase, here one day and gone the next, and until you live it, you cannot really understand how true it is. Everything I had been treating as urgent stopped being urgent. When I had to drop everything and get on a plane across the country, I learned very quickly how soft a “hard deadline” actually is. I also learned the importance of a strong and supportive team who could keep the work on track when one person had to duck out. I also learned how important and meaningful core values were when they had to walk the talk.
I carry all of it with me in how I lead now. A launch date that’s missed because of unforeseen issues in testing, understandable. A deliverable that missed the mark because the team member didn’t fully understand the ask, let’s learn from that, resocialize the request, move forward, and not repeat it. However, continually asking team members to take away time from their friends and family with after-hours requests because of poor planning or an inflated sense of self-importance (at any level). That one I cannot accept, at any level.
When my son died, no one stood up and talked about his grades. He was remembered for being kind, for being thoughtful, for being the person who showed up for others. That has stayed with me. Nobody is going to remember us for our slide decks, our KPIs, or how fast we answered an email. They are going to remember how we pulled together to solve a problem or help a customer out of a jam. And for the parents on my team, I would much rather they be remembered for making it to the awards assembly or the lunch hour at their kid’s school. When people first hear me say this, some of them wait for the catch. In all these years, I have yet to see one person take advantage of it.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Kelly: Start by defining what success actually looks like. Not just in the data and the analytics, but anecdotally too, the things people tell you that never show up in a report. When I can picture success clearly, it is far easier to plan for it, and it gives the team something real to rally around and buy into. One thing I remind myself of often is that success is subjective. Ask ten people what success looks like and you will get ten different answers, so it is worth getting everyone aligned on the same definition before you start chasing it.
Build on a strong foundation. Whatever you are selling or providing, it has to hold up. It is a lot easier to scale a business when your marketing promise is backed by a genuinely good customer experience, because then the story you are telling is one you can actually deliver. One trap I have watched businesses fall into is selling faster than they can deliver. Growth is exciting, but if operations cannot keep up, you end up with unhappy customers and a reputation problem that is expensive to undo. Make sure the back of the house can support whatever the front of the house is promising.
Think about how and where to scale. Are you going deeper into the markets you already serve, reaching new customers in familiar territory? Or are you moving into brand new markets altogether? Breaking into a new market costs real time, money, and effort, so be honest about that and build it into the plan from the start.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Kelly: On sales, bring the customer something of value, in whatever form that takes. Nobody wants to be sold to, but everyone appreciates being helped. The best salespeople I know barely feel like salespeople. They ask good questions, they listen, and they solve a real problem. The sale ends up being a byproduct of being useful.
On marketing, find the why and lean into it with an emotional hook. Surround yourself with people who are creative, strategic, data-focused, and curious. You will rarely find all of that in one person, so build the team so the gaps are covered and the strengths add up.
On branding, get clear on how you want customers to see you, and how you want them to feel when they think of you. Do the research. Turn those words into visuals. Then test, and test again, and launch. Once you have your brand, protect it. No leeway on logos, colors, or fonts. Set the standard early and hold the line. Consistency is what earns trust over time. When customers see the same look, the same tone, and the same promise everywhere they run into you, it tells them you are steady and paying attention. Branding can and should evolve, but every change should be deliberate, never accidental.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Kelly: An effective leader can stay a step removed from the company’s reactiveness. When everyone else is spun up, that is exactly when the team needs someone steady, someone who can slow the moment down and ask what is actually going on and what the real fix is. They can inspire the people who do the actual work, and they never lose sight of the fact that those people are the ones getting it done. And they hold a clear vision for where the company is going and what its success looks like, so everyone else has something to aim for. That doesn’t mean being the loudest person in the room. More often, the most useful thing a leader does is stay calm when everyone else is not, and point the team toward a clear next step.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Kelly: Have the confidence to take a risk. Take accountability when you get it wrong, out loud and without spin. And when things go right, share the credit with the team that earned it. The willingness to be wrong in front of your people, and to own it, buys you more credibility than pretending you have all the answers ever will. I will also say this. Some of the best leaders I know are the ones who admit they sometimes feel like impostors. The people quietly worried about whether they are good enough tend to be the ones paying attention, staying humble, and doing the work. That self-awareness is a strength, not a weakness.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Kelly: These apply whether you are running a company, a department, or a volunteer board.
Be resourceful, at every level. Whether you are setting an example for the team or double-checking something you were handed, the ability to find good information quickly never stops being useful. It matters just as much in the corner office as it does on the ground floor.
Stay passionate about the work, because that is what carries you through the hard days. I learned that with every step up I took, I moved closer to being the person responsible for solving the problem. The bigger the role, the bigger the challenge, and caring about it is what makes the challenge worth taking on.
Learn to listen before you react. Most of the time, what someone says at face value is not the whole story. If you slow down long enough to understand where a frustration is really coming from, you make far better decisions, and people trust you more for it.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Kelly: Build high trust, and be intentional about it. Years ago I sat through a talk about how high trust leads to high productivity, and low trust leads to low productivity. Something clicked. I suddenly understood why, at the company I was with at the time, some projects flew and others stalled out for no obvious reason. It was almost too simple, and I have carried it into every role since. The best teams I have been part of were not the ones with the most talent on paper. They were the ones where people trusted each other enough to say the hard thing, ask for help, and cover for one another when it mattered.
Do what is best for the people. I am a firm believer that a strong work product is the direct result of the time and energy you put into developing a team. Part of that is pushing the people who want to stretch and grow into bigger thinking. Just as important is recognizing the people who are happy executing in their lane and helping them feel fulfilled right there. A high-functioning team needs every seat filled, and not everyone has to be chasing the next rung to matter.
Adam: What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?
Kelly: Be transparent. But transparent does not mean saying the first thing that pops into your head. Be thoughtful about how you deliver it. I am a fast processor, so this one took real discipline. My instinct is to say the thing the second I think it. Learning to hold it for a beat and consider how it will land and what questions it will raise has probably saved me more times than I can count. The truth still lands best when you have taken a moment to think about the person on the other side of it.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Kelly: For all the strategy and the metrics and the plans, leadership really comes down to people. Take care of them, be honest with them, and give them room to do their best work, and most of the results you are chasing tend to follow. If I have learned anything worth passing on, it is that the human moments are the ones that stick. The rest is just work, and the work gets easier when the people are taken care of.
