Smart In Your World

“I thrive on variation, and no two days are the same,” Scott says, adding that having previously worked in technology helped. “Controlled chaos is always part of the tech sector.”

To her point, consider the path of company ownership over the past fifteen years. Vocus, her original employer, went public with an IPO in 2005, her first experience with a public offering. Nine years later, in 2014, investors took the company private, and merged it with a competitor in the space, Cision. The “new” company engaged her department and outside counsel in a number of M&A projects to support the mission of becoming a global powerhouse in their industry.

Then, in a somewhat unusual move, the company went public again in 2016 through a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) transaction. Scott explains the SPAC functions somewhat like a holding company using a pool of money to buy an existing company, which then becomes the publicly traded company. “It’s an interesting process, with a shorter time frame for going public than with a typical IPO,” she says. About a year later, the company’s executives rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

“It’s not possible to get this range of experience everywhere,” Scott says. She began when Vocus had about one hundred employees; today, it’s forty times larger. And while she acknowledges the wild evolution of the industry itself drove much of that, she’s been associated with a company that earned its confidence in consolidating smaller, innovative startups into the larger organism that Cision has become.

Importantly, Scott feels the company has maintained a “start-up vibe, much like in the tech sector,” as she describes it. “It’s a bottom-up culture, and we’ve been able to keep a lot of that mentality.” True to that ideal, and arguably in an example of a deft strategic ethos, many of the attorneys reporting to her come from the legacy legal departments of acquired companies. “They bring a lot of value. They know the contracts and understand each of their respective businesses and histories. We learn from them.”

Now Scott sees the internal lines at Cision blurring between HR, finance, product, sales, and legal—to optimal outcomes. “My background in tech, for example, helps me ask about how new acquisitions and technologies will work and integrate with our existing services,” she says, adding, “With this kind of growth and these many new functions, we can’t work in silos.”