Anyone who’s watched “Succession,” the addictive saga about the mega-wealthy Roys, knows how it ends (spoiler alert): the family business doesn’t always remain in the family.
As president of XBInsight Inc., Kathi Graham-Leviss has seen that unfold in real life during the two-plus decades since she launched her executive management and coaching firm.
“We’ve had client situations where the son isn’t the right person to lead the company to the next level and we’ve been able to show that with clear and specific information,” she said. “There are many aspects to a succession planning program, but the nice thing is we also have the technology and data to work with them.”
Graham-Leviss grew up in Huntington, Conn., with a twin brother and another brother just 11 months younger.
“We were Irish twins,” she said.
Even at an early age, she was thinking ahead.
“I was president of my class. I was the first football manager of my high school team. I was always challenged,” she said. “We were a very tightknit community, but I really wanted to go to a city for college.”
However, her dad was a gym instructor and her mom taught first grade, so funding was an issue.
“We had to figure out a way to pay for school,” she said.
She opted for Boston University, majoring in communications with a minor in journalism, and did internships at WCVB-TV ABC 5 and WEEI radio, taking advantage of the resources they and the city had to offer.
“I really wanted to be an editor of a magazine,” she said. “Then I found out there was no money in it, so I went into sales.”
After BU, she got an MBA at Northeastern University and eventually went on to a job at WHDH-TV CBS 7 in Boston leading a sales team. She was on track to grow and run the TV station, she says, but decided it wasn’t what she wanted to do; she was more attracted to the business side of broadcasting.
Graham-Leviss spent several years in radio and TV sales, packaging, selling and tapping into nontraditional revenue in creative ways, putting together one particularly memorable program during Super Bowl XXIV that tied in with convenience store chain Store 24, which was operated by The Store 24 Inc.
After 14 years in broadcasting and five years working for a consulting firm, Graham-Leviss launched XBInsight in 2001 after seeing a need for executive workplace hiring and coaching that she knew she could fill.
“There was no assessment that measured both performance and fit,” she said. “The last firm where I’d been had very expensive consultants traveling all over the U.S.”
At the time, her job was to start new markets and write and facilitate the training for sales teams. She soon discovered that companies didn’t have the right people with the right talent.
“We had to run multiple assessments because fit and performance did not exist in one tool,” she said.
Graham-Leviss also saw the wisdom of identifying and measuring the skills and abilities of people who were successful in their jobs to compare against future candidates. There are still only a handful of assessments on the market that help determine whether someone will be successful once they’re in the job, she says.
“I started the executive coaching business to generate revenue while we were building that database,” she said.
After years of learning a lot about many industries, Graham-Leviss has developed a database of thousands of jobs that predicts how successful someone will be at work from both a fit and performance perspective. Clients have ranged from CVS Health Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to the NFL.
“We’re vigilant about validating our data and making sure that it’s performing for our clients and doing what it needs to do,” she said.
In an expansion that was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Graham-Leviss plans to ramp up the company’s technology division in 2024, hiring as many as a dozen additional staffers, including a CEO.
Graham-Leviss spends part of her workday working from her 1750 farmhouse in Portsmouth, where she lives with her husband, a lawyer who practices business litigation. The couple, who have twin teenage boys and a son in his 20s, have lived there since 1990.
An early bird, Graham-Leviss is up by 4:30 a.m. and, cup of tea in hand, spends an hour answering clients’ emails, some of whom are overseas.
“I love being outdoors and running, walking my dog and using the Peloton,” she said. “I am mostly alone when I do these and it’s my quiet time. I enjoy being outside very early in the morning to start my day.”
From 8:30 a.m. on, the rest of the workday is spent problem-solving with clients, coaching, meeting with staff, doing sales presentations and planning.
“It’s my favorite part of the job when we have a positive impact and make a team or person successful,” she said. “It’s not about us; it’s about our clients. I never want to leave a session where we’re not making an impact.”
