Meet Amy Hegarty: The Woman Leading Synchtank Through Change

When I found out I was going to become CEO of Synchtank, I had two reactions at pretty much exactly the same time: “Oh shit” and “Yay.” Weirdly, both were exciting.

The “oh shit” was because I already knew enough about the business to understand what I was taking on. There was a lot of work to do. The “yay” was because I could also see just how much opportunity was sitting inside Synchtank, which was one of the reasons I’d joined the company in the first place.

I joined Synchtank as Chief Revenue Officer in December 2023. I came in thinking I was there to grow revenue and help scale the business. It became clear pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to be quite that simple.

Synchtank had been around for over 13 years at that point. We had great people, great customers, great technology and an incredible amount of knowledge about the music industry. There was also a lot to untangle. We had built a lot over the years, but we weren’t always great at explaining how it all fit together, sometimes even to ourselves.

So I started asking questions. A lot of questions. Who are we? What are we really good at? What problems are we actually solving? Who are we solving them for? How does everything we’ve built fit together? And maybe the biggest question of all: who do we want to be?

Those sound like simple questions. They aren’t. By June 2024, I was CEO.

I wish I could tell you there was some big movie moment where I sat behind the desk, looked around and thought, Wow. I’m the CEO now. There wasn’t. I was already knee-deep in it. There were customers who needed answers, decisions that needed to be made, a team that needed clarity and a business that needed to move forward. So I got on with it.

That’s probably a pretty good description of how I operate in general. I like getting in the weeds. I’m curious and I ask a lot of questions, sometimes probably too many. I want to understand why we do something a certain way, and “because that’s how we’ve always done it” is almost guaranteed to make me ask five more questions.

Had I stopped during those first few months and really thought about the weight of becoming CEO - the employees depending on me, the customers depending on us and how many people could be affected by the decisions I was making - I probably would have freaked myself out a little. Maybe it was better that I didn’t.

One of the first things I wanted to change was how openly we communicated: with our employees, our customers and each other. I wanted us to be honest about where we were, clear about where we were going and realistic about how long it would take to get there. Some of those conversations weren’t easy, but I would take a difficult, honest conversation over pretending everything is fine every single time. Now, two years later, we’re hearing customers tell us they can see and feel the difference. That means a lot to me.

I’ve also learned something about myself along the way. Becoming CEO didn’t suddenly turn me into some polished, mysterious “CEO version” of myself. Thank God. I’m still direct. I’m still transparent. I still don’t pull many punches. But I’ve become much more aware of how I lead and how the decisions we make affect everyone involved. Strangely enough, that has taken me back to the very beginning of my career.

Before I ever worked in technology, SaaS or music, I spent ten years as a social worker. For a while, I think I forgot how much that experience shaped me. As I moved through my career, I learned from some incredible people, but I also started to build this idea in my head of what a successful executive was supposed to look like.

I’ve always described it as putting on my “Amy work suit.” Every morning, I would zip it up and become the version of Amy I thought I was supposed to be at work. Then I’d come home, rip it off and go back to being me. The more senior I became, the more I realized how exhausting that was and, more importantly, that I didn’t want to do it anymore.

At some point I just decided: I’m not going to spend my career being someone else’s version of who they think I should be. I can be direct and driven and expect a lot from people while still being empathetic, curious, human and completely myself. Those things don’t make me less effective as a leader. If anything, I think I’m a better one because of them.

These days, I find myself drawing on those social-work roots more and more: listening, asking questions, trying to understand what’s really going on and remembering there’s a human being on the other side of almost every business problem. That doesn’t mean lowering my expectations. I still make hard decisions, hold people accountable and push when I think we can do better. I just no longer believe that being a strong leader requires me to put empathy aside or leave part of myself at the door.

Recently, someone asked me what has kept me going through some of the spicier parts of the last couple of years. I’d love to say I magically stop thinking about Synchtank when I shut my laptop. I do not. I’m pretty terrible at disconnecting.

What I do have is an incredible support system. My husband Michael, my family, my friends and our dogs give me a safe place to land and remind me that there is an entire world outside Synchtank. They make me laugh, give me perspective and remind me what actually matters.

The younger version of me definitely didn’t have “CEO of a music technology company” on her bingo card. Yet here we are.

Maybe that’s one of the bigger things I’ve learned over the last couple of years. Becoming CEO didn’t suddenly make me a different person. I still ask too many questions. I’m still impatient. I still get things wrong. But I’m much more comfortable with all of that than I used to be.

I spent a lot of years thinking I needed to change parts of myself to fit some idea of what a successful executive was supposed to look like. Becoming CEO has actually taught me the opposite.

Turns out, I never really needed the work suit in the first place.