Center of Gravity: Customer vs Employee vs Investor
Every company has one true center of gravity — know which, and re-engineer incentives to move it deliberately
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 88%
Halligan's claim that companies have a single center of gravity — customer-centric, employee-centric, or investor-centric — and that shifting it requires deliberate, structural change, not slogans. HubSpot was over-indexed on being employee-centric (best-place-to-work #1) and consciously moved its center of gravity to customers.
Origin
Brian Halligan's reflection on HubSpot's evolution; he contrasts wanting-to-be-liked leadership with Toby Lütke at Shopify, whose employee scores 'aren't that good' while the company thrives.
Core principles
- 01Wanting to be liked, and chasing best-place-to-work status, is probably not a good feature in a CEO.
- 02A high employee-NPS with a low customer-NPS is a warning that the center of gravity is in the wrong place.
- 03You can and should trade points of employee-NPS for points of customer-NPS if the imbalance is severe.
- 04Culture only shifts if you change the structural incentives, then repeat the message endlessly.
How to run it
- 1
Diagnose your current center of gravity
Honestly assess whether the company is customer-, employee-, or investor-centric. Compare metrics: if employee-NPS is 60 and customer-NPS is 25, you're employee-centric and imbalanced.
Pro tip Signs of an over-indexed employee center of gravity: half of a four-hour management meeting spent on employee eNPS, and topping best-place-to-work lists.
- 2
Decide the trade explicitly
State the trade you're willing to make — e.g. 'I would give up 10 points of employee net promoter score to get 10 points of customer net promoter score' — and communicate it.
- 3
Change the comp plan
Re-engineer incentives to match the new center of gravity: HubSpot paid the management team not on revenue but on retention and net-promoter score.
Watch out Slogans and posters alone won't move the center of gravity — you must move the money.
- 4
Put customers physically in the room
Bring a customer panel into monthly management meetings and board meetings; run the panel yourself and ask deliberately tricky questions ('What do you love about us? What do you hate about us?') to pull out the bad news.
Pro tip Asking what they hate makes them 'look at their shoes' — push through the discomfort to surface the real feedback.
- 5
Repeat relentlessly and over-correct
Say the same thing over and over; the bigger the company, the more obvious and repetitive you must be before the shift sinks in.
In the wild
Early HubSpot was #1 on Glassdoor's best-place-to-work and Halligan was the #1 CEO, driven partly by his co-founder and a powerful head of HR. Management meetings spent half their time on employee stuff. Halligan decided to trade employee-NPS for customer-NPS, changed the comp plan to pay on retention and NPS, and installed customer panels at management and board meetings.
→ The company's center of gravity moved decisively to customers while still caring about employees — a deliberate cultural re-engineering.
Common mistakes
Optimizing to be liked / best place to work
Chasing employee-NPS and best-place-to-work status can over-index the company on employees at the expense of customers; wanting to be liked is not a strength in a CEO and can mask a weak customer relationship.
Trying to shift culture with slogans instead of incentives
Posters and speeches don't move the center of gravity; without changing the comp plan and putting customers in the room, the old center of gravity persists.
Is it for you?
Best for
CEOs who sense their company is optimizing for the wrong constituency and need to re-anchor its culture.
Not ideal for
Early-stage companies still searching for product-market fit, where formal NPS instrumentation and comp redesign are premature.
From the transcript
“I do think companies have one center of gravity or another.”
“I would give up 10 points of employee net promoter score to get 10 points of of customer net promoter score.”
“We changed the comp plan. So the management team got paid not on revenue but on retention and net promoter score.”
“what do you love about HubSpot and then and then what do you hate about HubSpot”
From the episode
Sequoia CEO coach: Why it’s never been easier to start a company, and never been harder to scale one
Brian Halligan (co-founder, HubSpot)