SoCurious Spotlight: Lauren Zion, Head of Business Operations

“A big source of inspiration in my life is my grandfather.” 

Lauren Zion, Socure’s Head of Business Operations, shared that her 97 year-old grandfather remains committed to a daily exercise routine, stays open to new people and perspectives, and continues to challenge those around him to be their very best. His example inspires her, and has provided her with a blueprint for how to live, and live well.

Lauren is incredibly motivated by her grandfather’s outlook on life. It’s a major contributor to what drives her to be curious and to seek ways to use that curiosity to creatively solve business problems.  This outlook is what brought her to the startup world, where she began her career in advertising technology. As she quickly rose through the ranks, she developed a deep understanding of the importance of business operations and how the operations discipline is critical to business strategy and execution. 

After almost 8 years in adtech, Lauren then joined Socure in June, 2021 charged with launching the company’s first centralized business operations team within the Finance Org, working to help streamline and optimize processes while focusing on intentional system design, data quality, and establishing unified and reliable metrics.  She explains,  “At the time, there wasn’t a fully dedicated business operations function, so it was and continues to be very exciting to think through how we can stand up this group and build the necessary habits and behaviors to support Socure’s growth with operational excellence top of mind”. 

When Lauren joined, she knew that building out her team from scratch wouldn’t be without hard work, but she was encouraged by Socure’s collaborative culture. Lauren says about the teams she works closely with: “We hear each other out and encourage new ideas knowing  there are multiple ways to approach each  initiative, especially when it comes to building scalable workflows and processes.” Socureans as a whole are open to new ideas, and collaborate selflessly, a core principle at Socure, to help one another achieve important goals. 

Lauren applies her collaborative nature to all of her work. In the last 10 months, she’s been carefully thinking about two different elements within the Business Operations sphere: business intelligence (a team that is hyperfocused on building out the internal analytics and operational reporting muscle at Socure) and bPMO (a centralized business operations program management team focused on rethinking scalable workflows and overseeing cross functional change management initiatives). Ultimately, Lauren’s team’s biggest impact on Socure lies in creating more lines of communication, scaling more effectively, and driving operational excellence throughout the organization while connecting disparate operating silos.

Lauren explains, “As a company, we are in a really exciting phase where there’s a lot of opportunity for additional process and operational creativity that you know can make a huge difference in terms of efficiency to help Socure continue to scale. We’re big enough where a change to a process or workflow is going to be felt beyond a single department or group, but still nimble enough to make these changes pretty quickly, and directly see or feel the impact of our efforts. ” 

Lauren’s grandfather instilled in her key life values like always performing at your best and challenging yourself to do and learn more with each new opportunity, and he loves hearing that she is able to apply these values to her work each day. Creating meaningful impact for the business, as well as millions of people who are affected by Socure’s mission, is the cherry on top.