From U.S. Corporate to Australian PE: Shaunte Mears-Watkins’ Rise to CEO

Shaunte Mears-Watkins always knew she had leadership potential. However, the role of CEO in a fast-paced private equity-owned company wasn’t in her sights as a young woman climbing the career ladder in the United States. But then again, neither was settling in Australia.

As a young graduate, Shaunte pursued a traditional career path, building her reputation in the consumer goods sector and working with industry giants, including Procter & Gamble and The Clorox Company. She also gained valuable experience in the cosmetics industry at Bare Escentuals. Additionally, she played a crucial role in the transformation of Clif Bar from a family-led business to its eventual sale to Mondelez International.

In 2018, Shaunte was tasked with running the ANZ operations of a multinational consumer goods company. It was her first experience in Australia, and she and her family quickly fell for the lifestyle. Soon after returning to the States at the end of her contract, they decided Australia would be their permanent home.

In 2023, Shaunte secured the role of CEO for Advanced Cosmeceuticals, a beauty and aesthetics distributorship that had recently acquired multiple brands, had more than 70 staff, and a customer base comprising over 2,000 clinicians across Australia and New Zealand.

A family-led business of 16 years, Advanced Cosmeceuticals had recently been acquired by Gresham Private Equity.

Laying Foundations

Shaunte says her early career progression in large, global organisations was traditional and methodical, and she credits it for her fundamental cross-functional and business understanding.  Over the years, she acquired experiences and developed skill sets that prepared her for future senior leadership roles. However, as she progressed, she allowed herself to explore organisations of different sizes and stages of development. After working in both large and mid-tier organisations, she found herself excited by the potential that lies in the mid-tier.

“I realised that a larger company didn’t necessarily equate to more agility or opportunity; I’d been able to apply my skillset in mid-market companies in a way that could make a difference quickly, and that was quite fulfilling to me… the mid-market companies tended to be on a different and faster growth trajectory than mature multinational companies.” That realisation has proven critical in preparing her for the challenge that Advanced Cosmeceuticals – as a mid-market company – presented.

Finessing Her Approach

As her first foray into private equity and, having been given the delicate task of transforming a long-held family business, Shaunte said one of the first challenges she faced was the need to finesse her leadership style.

“You want to take all the training and learning you’ve gained from large organisations that know how to operate companies at the biggest scale. But you’ve also got to realise that family-led organisations have a lot of heart. Many personal connections have been built into customer and supplier relationships over the years. And that’s hard to replicate when you walk into the unknown… you have to earn those stripes.”

Reflecting on her success, Shaunte said, “Analytical thinking and agility are critical and, frankly unsurprising traits needed when walking into this sort of role … But I think that listening is also essential. Listening with curiosity is the skill leaders can often miss when coming into organisations at this type of inflection point.”

Building a Unified Culture

Another of the initial challenges she faced was creating a unified culture and clear expectations in ways of working.

“Because the company has grown through multiple acquisitions, each of the acquired organisations had their own culture,” she explained. It was very important to establish a new collective culture that, once again, honoured the past while setting clear expectations for the future.

“We needed to honour enough of each of the prior company’s values… while being clear about what we would reward and what we would accept, and what we would not tolerate in the new organisation.”

This led to establishing five carefully identified core values: excellence, integrity, care, accountability, and initiative.

Additionally, over time, she has needed to make adjustments to the team, “always with the hope that every individual comes in with a balance of expertise and curiosity that enables you to get to the place you’ve envisioned quickly, and can help build the plan for the phases after that”.

With the major structural changes now bedded down, the focus is on growth by continuously identifying unmet needs and emerging technologies in the global beauty marketplace and then adapting these innovations for distribution in the local context. And it’s not only about sales. For Shaunte, the priority must be educating and assisting clinicians to support their customers better because driving their success will also ultimately grow Advanced Cosmeceuticals.

“We’re working in the beauty category and specifically, in the ‘beauty as a science’ category. There is a lot of growth to be had as our collective knowledge about ingredients and delivery mechanisms continuously improves, ultimately helping people achieve the aesthetic outcomes they want,” she observed.

Evolution as a Leader

There are very few for whom leadership comes naturally, and Shaunte freely admits that learning to lead effectively has required a journey of personal growth.

Having been one of few women and people of colour in leadership positions in her early career, she realises now that in those early days, she built an armour around herself that proved to be unhelpful.

“At school, at university, at work, I always felt and knew that I had the skill set to do whatever the job required because I was the one who always… did the homework, I always studied.

“But I showed up differently… in how I approach the work, what I look like and my background. So early in my career, I tried very much to overcompensate for this – I put up this armour that I would have all the answers because I’d done my homework, and I wanted to prove it.”

Working with a coach and undertaking behavioural assessments revealed that while she excelled at pattern recognition and problem identification, her lack of transparency and vulnerability hindered her leadership potential and created barriers in leading others.

“It was really uncomfortable for me to work on transparency and vulnerability,” she reflected. “But the thing is, it was very apparent to people that I wasn’t approachable... I easily expressed that I had the logic, but I didn’t have the authenticity, and that was holding me back.”

This realisation led to a decade-long journey of personal growth. “I decided that I was going to prioritise bringing authenticity into my leadership style ... I’ve worked on this for several years, and I now think that it has made me pretty unique as an executive. It has also helped me build a strong, committed team and made me able to see opportunities that others don’t. It has also helped me to listen well because you can’t listen if you’re not vulnerable or open to others who have something valuable to contribute.”

While this personal development work continues, Shaunte is now focused on sustainable leadership practices. “One of the things I’m working on now, especially with all the rigours of a CEO role, is taking the proper time for rest and rejuvenation, which creates the space to come up with the next thing,” she explained. “I’m not sprinting to complete one short term project. I need to be able to sustain my level of contributions for a long time.”

The Private Equity Advantage

Despite the constant pressures of her role, Shaunte said working in private equity is energising.

“It is energising to work with highly intelligent people, to be able to move quickly without undue restriction, test, learn fast if something’s not working, pivot quickly,” she says. “We’re not just making it up; we’re taking an informed risk... depending on how things look, we either accelerate, abandon, or adjust.”

And growth is what excites her. “It’s the expectation and the ability to see what the next rung of growth could be, that keeps me excited… I think there is so much potential in this market and so much we can do to help improve our positioning in it. And that doesn’t mean the way things were done before was wrong; it just means that I can see an opportunity to take it to the next level.”