Episode 10: Featuring Dr. Suzi Potts, Founder, SP Consulting
Picture this: A small business owner walks into a board meeting knowing they need to restructure — lay off people they’ve worked with for years, reposition senior leaders who no longer fit, make calls that will define whether the company survives to the next generation. They’ve got the financials. They have the plan. What they don’t have is anyone in that room who understands the human cost of what they’re about to do.
That’s where trust gets built or broken.
Dr. Suzi Potts knows this moment well. With 25 years as a senior HR executive in the wine and spirits industry — including 16 years at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits and eight years as the people strategy architect at Wente Family Estates, the longest family-run winery in California — she’s been the person in that room more times than she can count. She also knows what happens when there’s no one like her there: organizations hit a burning platform they can’t recover from.
Only 2% of all CEOs worldwide have ever been CHROs. The people making the most consequential decisions about talent, culture, and organizational design rarely have that expertise in their own seat. Suzi left a prestigious SVP role — not because she failed, but because she saw a better model. One that gives small and mid-size family businesses access to board-level people strategy exactly when they need it, without committing to a full-time C-suite hire.
In this conversation, Suzi and Kim explore what it actually takes to build that kind of trust-based partnership, why the fractional model works better than most organizations expect, and what Suzi learned by betting on herself when everything in her professional life said don’t.
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What You’ll Discover
- Why P&L is a lagging indicator — and what the real leading indicator is for organizational health
- The case for fractional C-suite models and who they’re actually built for
- How Suzi restructured her own client relationship at Wente Family Estates — with radical transparency
- What “seasons and reasons” looks like in practice for high-stakes people strategy
- Why 2% of global CEOs have been CHROs — and why that number matters
- What it really takes to bet on yourself when the income’s uncertain and your husband just lost his job
- The one piece of advice Suzi gives everyone navigating a hard transition
Episode Highlights
[00:00] Introduction: The Gap Nobody’s Talking About Kim frames the problem: organizations facing critical inflection points — growth, restructuring, generational transition — without anyone in the room who understands the human side of the decision.
[04:08] The Impossible Standard: HR as Afterthought Suzi names what she refused to accept: that people strategy only matters at the point of catastrophe. “They think, I need my HR person, because until then… as long as I have the CEO and the CFO in the room, I don’t really need the people discipline.”
[06:01] What She Built Instead: The Fractional CHRO Model Suzi walks through how she identified her niche — family-owned businesses navigating pivotal moments and why privately held organizations became her sweet spot. Real issues shared openly. Decision-makers whose names are literally on the door.
[13:16] How Fractional CHRO Actually Works She breaks down the two modes: consultant behind the curtain, and fractional CHRO at the table. “If you can’t afford it the whole time, don’t just not do it. Buy it in small dividends.”
[14:15] The Wente Case Study: Transparency in Action Suzi describes how she navigated her own evolution from consultant to fractional CHRO at Wente Family Estates — including the honest conversation about where she’d delivered and where the structure had fallen short.
[17:34] Trust as the Foundation of This Work Kim and Suzi dig into what makes the fractional model work: the trust that has to be built before the hard conversations can happen. “I also had to be okay with it might not work.”
[18:14] Advice for Leaders in Transition Whether it’s a personal career pivot or an organization trying to find its footing: ask for feedback from people who will tell you the truth, then balance that with what you know about yourself.
[20:06] The Bottom Line for Business Owners “You absolutely can’t afford to not do it, because you’re already compromising. Your results are reflective of exactly the things that you’re not addressing.”
[21:00] The Movement: Betting on Yourself Suzi closes with what she wants people to carry: if you believe you’re ready to bet on yourself, others believed it long before you did. And you can build something rigorous and fulfilling — and still leave at a set time to teach your yoga class.
Key Takeaways for HR Leaders
- People strategy isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the leading indicator you’re ignoring. P&L reflects what already happened. The decisions about how your humans are behaving, where they’re misaligned, and what’s quietly eroding performance — those happen upstream. Organizations that treat HR as a break-glass resource are always responding to consequences instead of shaping outcomes.
- Fractional isn’t a compromise. It’s a smarter access model. Most small and mid-size organizations assume chief-level people strategy is out of reach. Suzi’s model proves otherwise. The fractional CHRO brings board-level thinking during the specific seasons when it matters most — without the overhead of a full-time executive hire. For family businesses at inflection points, that can be the difference between a good transition and a costly one.
- The most important trust-building skill is honesty about your own limitations. Suzi rebuilt her relationship with her longest-standing client by doing something most consultants won’t: she told them where she’d delivered, where she’d fallen short, and what needed to change. That kind of transparency isn’t just good ethics — it’s what makes trust elastic enough to hold through a restructuring.
About Our Guest
Suzi Potts brings 25+ years of HR leadership in the wine and spirits industry. She most recently served as SVP, Head of People at Wente Family Estates — the sixth-generation, longest family-run winery in California — where she sat on the Senior Leadership Team and led the full people function through a successful company restructuring. Prior to Wente, she spent 16 years at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, the largest wine and spirits distributor in the country.
Now founder of SP, LLC, she serves as a fractional CHRO for family-owned businesses in wine, spirits, and hospitality — including Wente Family Estates, The Wine Group, Peju, and Peter Michael Winery. She holds a doctorate in industrial-organizational psychology and is a certified yoga teacher — her counterweight to a career spent in high-stakes rooms.
Connect with Dr. Suzi Potts
LinkedIn: Dr. Suzi Potts
Email: suzie@suziepotsconsulting.com
Notable Quotes
Dr. Suzi Potts:
“P&L is a lagging indicator. The leading indicator is really, how are the humans behaving? What are we seeing, breathing, touching, feeling? Organizations miss this until it becomes a burning platform they honestly can’t recover from.”
“If you can’t afford it the whole time, don’t just not do it. Buy it in small dividends.”
“If you believe you are ready to bet on yourself, others believed it light years before you did.”
“You can kick ass and be kind.”
Kim Bohr:
“It feels very binary sometimes for organizations. And when you think about how critical that strategic people partner is — that’s often missing in smaller organizations. And it shouldn’t be something they just can’t even afford or fathom.”
“There are no simple answers. What I appreciate is the vulnerability you brought to this conversation — so others can relate to that journey not being a straight line.”
About Courage to Advance
Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders are building the organizations they wish existed, companies that prove business doesn’t have to be dehumanizing. Hosted by Kim Bohr, President and COO of SparkEffect, each episode features executives who refuse to accept that traditional corporate practices are inevitable, sharing the experiments, resistance, and breakthrough results of choosing human flourishing alongside business success.
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