Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
This week on Culture Leaders, I sat down with Frank Vela, the CEO of Constant Contact, and someone who says his number one job is being in the people business. It’s not just a soundbite. His leadership is rooted in making work human from how he speaks to investors about valuing employees to how he equips first line managers to lead with clarity and care. He talks openly about aligning AI innovation with people. First values, how to scale culture across 1200 employees and why it’s worth slowing down the spreadsheet to preserve the soul of the company. We also got into the balancing act of remote work, results driven leadership and what it really takes to build trust and accountability in today’s workplace. Frank believes that when people start repeating your values as their own, that’s when you know they’re doing it right. It’s a meaningful and honest conversation about leadership at scale. Please welcome to the podcast Frank Vella. Frank Vella, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m so excited to chat with you. What is your why?

Frank Vella:
Hi Jessica. Well, thanks for having me. What’s my why? I am passionate about people. I just love building teams, working with teams, being a mentor and seeing the improvement and the satisfaction and the lives you can change while you’re doing what you’re doing, both with the people you’re working with, but the people and companies your product gets to influence. It’s a charge. I love it.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And so as the CEO of Constant Contact, I mean I would imagine that it requires you to balance multiple interests, right? You’ve got the of the business and the profitability of the business and the advancement of the business in terms of things like ai, which we’re going to get to obviously, and then the people and the connections. And so how do you balance those things? How do you stay on the balance beam

Frank Vella:
By getting around people a lot. Quite frankly, when you’re doing it right, they don’t compete with each other. Sometimes they don’t all come together in the same month or the same day or the same quarter, and sometimes you need to do some tough things that seem like it’s counter. But fundamentally, the aspects of running a business, serving a customer is all about people. Rule number one, we start every meeting with we’re in the people business and the number of times I have to say that in a board meeting to investors that say, Hey, just a reminder first and foremost, I’m in the people business. And that’s an important leveler to just get everybody agreeing upon the importance of people, whether they’re customers or your employees. You need people to make it work and we are fundamentally in the people business,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So that’s interesting. Tell me what’s happening in a boardroom when you’re having to remind the board that you’re in the people business, what are they talking about or thinking about?

Frank Vella:
Generally a spreadsheet that talks about top line and bottom line revenue and costs and spreadsheets. Our sales and sales are positive and negative and negatives are costs and generally people are costs people as a cost. And so there are times when your costs don’t align with the quarterly performance you’re going to have. And theoretically, it’s easy to adjust the costs to match and realistically it’s not if I run with fewer people today, can I actually get them productive, engaged and delivering like the people I have today in the next quarter on a spreadsheet? I certainly can on a spreadsheet. This number can go from here to here in a quarter, but in running a business and having people deliver against very important objectives, it doesn’t come in and out quite that fluidly.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So are you talking about the morale impact of having layoffs, for example, or are you talking about retraining people after they’ve been let go and then rehired? What is the negative impact you were just alluding to

Frank Vella:
All of the above. People don’t want to sit on pins and needles wondering if their job is at risk on any given day first. Second, there is the value of experience, institutional knowledge. I know the product, I know the customer, I know how to get things done in this company. It takes a little bit of time in any company you’re in, and so I worry about that rubric. It’s like solving for a Rubik’s cube. I have the red side done, but the other three sides are not all aligned. And when you have them aligned, you want to make sure that you’re not randomly messing up that Rubik’s cube again.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So I’m so excited we’re talking about this because when I was preparing for this conversation, I was thinking about how your business is really, I think the most obviously at the forefront of AI advancement. I mean marketing generally the lead generation content, those things are all where you’re seeing AI already make huge leaps in strides in taking us to the next century, right? Manufacturing cars will eventually be an AI thing. It’s not yet today, but we can see it in digital marketing more than anywhere. So it feels like you’re probably way ahead of the rest of the CEOs that we typically talk to and understanding how it can impact business. So how do you talk to your employees about that? Because the fear is there, AI will replace me. That fear exists everywhere. Probably more so with you.

Frank Vella:
Well, we’re a software development company. We build software and the objective of our software is to make it easier for our customers to get things done that they need to get done. And really important in our talk track is our client is a small business. A small business does not have a marketing department or a big marketing budget, but they do have the need to market in order to compete with their larger rivals that do. And the benefit of technology, and in particular artificial intelligence, is technology that enables them to get things done without the budget and the people that a larger organization has. So we use it in our product so that our customers can do more of what they’re good at, run their business and market effectively. In our business, it’s a growth lever. We haven’t laid anyone off because of ai, but we’ve grown faster because of ai. We can launch products more quickly, we can evolve our marketing spend dynamics on Google more quickly because we use AI to report more quickly. So we’ve used it as an enabler to just make us faster and more agile with the objective of making our customers faster and more agile.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So tell me, how many employees ish do you have right now?

Frank Vella:
Around 1200 employees.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Okay, so that’s a large scale to manage all the way down to the hearts and minds of every single individual. You’re not having one-on-ones with all of your employees, so how do you scale that people oriented mindset and those beliefs, those shared beliefs that you’re trying to instill at that level?

Frank Vella:
It’s never a straight line and it is never as scientific as one might think it is. And so I spend a lot of time focusing on my first line managers. I believe the most important role in any company is the first line manager. They manage my 1200 employees. There’s probably 75 employees between me and the first line managers, and those people manage the rest of the 1200 of our people. And so how do we enable them to have conversations? One of my mantras to that team, and one of the things we do here that I’m proud of is we have communities, a first line manager community, a director and VP community to enable them to do their jobs better. Now sometimes that’s just information sharing, nothing like being a manager and an employee of yours comes up and says, Hey, I just heard we’re doing this as a company and you don’t have the answer.
So I love to equip them with information. I love to communicate. You think you’re communicating well and often you find that there’s always room for improvement. And so we look for feedback. We poll our employees several times a year and we actually read the feedback, review the feedback, and then react upon it. Now, not always as quickly as everybody would like, but it’s a dynamic loop and sometimes we can do better and sometimes do amazing, but I think it’s about the consistency and the sincerity with which we tell the story of what’s going on in our company and our employees range from people who support customers to people who build software, to people who deliver invoices. And we share a passion around the small business and we wrap our stories around how what we’ve done effectively enables a small business to do what they need to do. That resonates ubiquitously. We’re a 30-year-old company. I’ve been here for four years and I’ve been so fortunate to inherit this culture of we care about the small business and it’s been something for me to be able to work with and leverage in the story I tell about our company to our own employees.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s very cool. So the stories you’re saying, these are stories about your customers, the small business that thrived or had some success because of support that you were giving them primarily?

Frank Vella:
Yeah. When ask,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Could you tell us one,

Frank Vella:
There are so many. If you’re a small business, you generally start your small business because of a passion you have in something or something you’re really good at. And it’s hard. You’re a small business owner, Jessica, you’re running. It’s hard. You have to be everything to all people all the time. And what you don’t have time to do is market, but we have to market. We have to get the word out there. We have to tell our constituents what we’re doing. Small businesses are also community-based. And one of the things we did this year in the Boston area we’re headquartered in Boston, is we sponsored the community annual holiday market and we did sponsorships. We sponsored 12 small businesses from founders who just couldn’t afford to get into the market. We did their marketing, we paid for their booth, and we got them kickstarted. And the stories that come out of that, you’ve helped me kickstart the business, you’ve helped me market. We tell our people now that the holiday’s over, don’t forget about your customers and the ones that were good to you during that period. Don’t forget them in January and February. So we helped them with that. We’ve got small businesses that tell us we’re mission critical to them, whether they’re nonprofits getting the word out on what’s happening in their communities or small businesses and the stories, they’re just personal and they resonate one by one.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s really sweet. So how do you share it? Is it in town halls? Do you have emails? Do you have a Slack channel? What’s the logistics of sharing those stories? Because I think storytelling is one of the most powerful motivators in business, and people don’t do it enough because they don’t know where or how.

Frank Vella:
I try to be a communicator. I smile when I say that because sometimes I’ll reach feedback and I’ll really sigh and I’ll say, man, how did I get that feedback? I have done this and this and this, but I’ll tell you what I try to do. I send an email to the entire company every Wednesday, what’s going on in the company, just highlighting something they may not know about that’s going on in the company. Sometimes it’s a customer story, sometimes it’s an employee story, sometimes it’s a product launch. And so every Wednesday you get an email from me that I take 30 minutes to write. It’s rather casual, it’s off the cuff and it goes out to the company. Every month we do an all company town hall and it is 15 minutes of something being presented. Again, a product, a story, an initiative, and 40 minutes of q and a.
Any question, what do you want to hear about? We can’t always answer all the questions. We make sure we follow up in a Slack channel that the answer is published to. We have an annual kickoff in two weeks. We’re going to bring the entire company together to a location in Boston and train and motivate and party and have fun with our entire employee base. And then we’re just accessible. I worked for a founder once who used to be so proud of what he called management by walking around, and we haven’t mandated people in the office every day, but Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays are pretty full. And I love just walking around, looking in a room, seeing eight people in a meeting and sitting in. And what I’ll say is, no, no, don’t stop because listening to you keeps me from believing my own BS because if I don’t hear it from you, and then people will get back to what they were saying and I’ll get to hear the real problems they’re solving that helps me run a company better. And so I love the informality, the approachability, and the two-way dialogue that we get from that. And I’m proud of it. I know we do well, we get good feedback and I know we need to continue to do better because things change and people’s expectations change. But being sincere and trying and being transparent really go a long way.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, it’s funny because I was doing an orientation yesterday at a local nonprofit to do volunteer work with them, and at the end of this four hour training thing, they said, we’re going to walk you around the offices now so you can just get a sense of who we are. And so we’re doing a tour and every single office we stop and we say hello to the person. They say, oh, thank you for volunteering. What are you interested in? And I’m having a little, and I’m thinking, I can’t wait to see if the CEO does the same thing. And we get to the end of the tour and the CEO’s door is closed and she’s like, that’s our CEO. Anyway, moving on. It was the only door that was closed. And I made an assumption there, it could be that the CEO O is a bad CEO or it could be that he was out of the office that day.
Maybe he’s sick, right? Who knows. But I noticed it as the only one that had a closed door. And I think it’s hard for, you can’t be everywhere at all times, right? You can’t be in all the conversations, and I’m sure there are people with 1200 employees. There are people who probably think you don’t communicate enough and others who are sick of all the communication that you’re spending. And you have to find that balance. And there’s also different preferences. And how do you gauge your own success? I mean, beyond the survey responses, how do you know if you’re on track or doing well in your own leadership journey? Not the results of the company necessarily.

Frank Vella:
That’s easy. When people tell me my stories, they’re their stories, I won. And that’s how I gauge it when I walk into one of those impromptu, and I’m pointing there, I just did it on the way back to my office here and I walk into one of those impromptu meetings and I hear people talking and something I’ve been trying to get through to the organization for a couple of weeks or a couple of months is being talked about. And it’s their idea. I don’t want to say it’s their idea and it’s their idea because through osmosis and through enough sharing of information and data, it has become their idea. And I also love being wrong. I often, I don’t want to be right. I don’t want to be right on a hypothesis. I’m happy to be wrong. Take it from here and find the data or find the reason and tell me what right looks like, but at least I know you’ve done some work around it and you’ve given it some thought. And so that’s my litmus test.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I do not share that. I love to be right. I don’t like to be wrong at all. I mean, where does that come from in you? Is that something you’ve always held or is that something you’ve learned over time?

Frank Vella:
I like to be right too. I like to know so good that the work, I like to know that it comes from this. I know if I’m pondering a marketing problem, I’ve been around, I’ve done this for a long time, I have a good hunch of what my company competitors are doing and I’m going to come up with a hypothesis and sometimes I might push that on people just try this. Now, where I don’t mind being wrong is I know I haven’t come to that with the full on subject matter expertise that a marketer might or that someone in finance might if it’s a financial hunch. And so I’m completely cool if you come back and say, taking your hypothesis, have the data, talk to a few customers. You’re directionally right, but this is the real right answer. I celebrate that. Beautiful. You’ve made it better. And that’s what good people will do. They’ll take a good idea and they’ll make it better.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So you’re a technology person. I mean, your background is all technology except for your brief. I know you started as an accountant and then wanted to be more with people, right? But your company, a software company is in the digital marketing world. In the small business world, I know you have a lot of exposure with small business. Do you think that to effectively lead a technology company, you need to be a technology person? Or is the industry or the client arena more important or does it not matter? Is it really just about your leadership style?

Frank Vella:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Having grown up in technology, I only know one answer. Technology works at a certain pace. You have to keep up with the pace. Technology enables you to solve problems. Earlier on in this call, you talked about AI and you said, well, cars are not manufactured that way, but your software is and your customers use it. And absolutely right. In technology, you get to be on the forefront of that all the time. And so coming from that world I think helps and it matters. I didn’t start there, as you said, I was an accountant. This management by walking around, it only works if it’s sincere. I would rather do that than sit at my desk and read 50 emails. And that’s why I guess I didn’t survive as an accountant. I think you have to have the ability to understand the technology. I worked at Microsoft for 10 years and Microsoft was really a culture that was, not everybody needed to be a technologist, but everybody had to have the savvy to be able to understand a technical conversation to some level. And I think that’s good foundational expectation for growing in a technology company. And as an exec in a technology company, there’s a lot of benefit you get from having grown up in tech for

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Sure. I was at Oracle for 10 years and they were the same way. You didn’t have to be a technologist, but you needed to understand the full stack. You had to understand technical terms in order to have any credibility in the room, which I guess I judged that at the time probably because I didn’t have that technical, I was faking it a lot. Oh yeah, absolutely. Infrastructure as a service, I totally know what that means, just pretending. But at the time it felt closed-minded, like why don’t you get some creative artist out here or something completely out of left field to come in and give you a brand new perspective, which they did through acquisition. The company culture evolved a lot. Is there an acquisition strategy with constant Contact? Are you growing in that way?

Frank Vella:
We have grown in that way. The market over the last couple of years has made that more difficult on every key initiative you evaluate your propensity to build it, how long will that take and how much money will it take? Is there something technology wise or people wise I can acquire to do that faster? And what are the economics around that? So yeah, we’re tech and we’re private equity sponsored, and the combination of those things gives us the access to be able to be acquisitive when it’s advantageous for us.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So you went public and then you went private again? Is that what happened?

Frank Vella:
Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
And you were brought on when you went public?

Frank Vella:
I was brought on when we went private, when we took the company

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Private. When you went private. Okay. That’s what I was trying to understand. So you weren’t the CEO when the company was public. I wanted to ask you about the difference in leading a public versus a private company, or do you have experience with that?

Frank Vella:
Yeah, one of the big differences is the ability to invest in the things that are important to you. And in a technology company that’s innovation. And I’ll use our company as an example. We were part of a larger public company, and I would say that in our part of the business technology waned for a few years. If we rolled out of that environment and we remained public, there would be a lot of expectations to run at the same margins we were before and to not change that. And I got the breathing room in the first year to reset that to

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Ensure

Frank Vella:
That I was running responsibly, but that for a few quarters I needed to spend on new infrastructure and I needed to spend on innovation and replatforming so that I could grow more later. And that has worked out well. And so there are so many similarities. You still have investors and they still have expectations. They’re just not public market investors. They’re private investors,

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
But they’re still looking at the quarterly results. That is the other story less often told story of private equity is the way that it’s painted out. There is that private equity slashes and burns. But actually when a private equity company buys a new organization, they have a longer runway three to five years. And so oftentimes in the beginning, there’s deep investment in that business to help it grow. And that’s an opportunity that is not afforded public companies because all eyes are on the quarterly results. So you were sacrificing the quarterly results intentionally with the support of your investors for long-term, which is, I mean, that’s just not the story told about private equity. So much juicy to tell the story about the Red Lobster story or whatever these horrible slash and burn stories because these rich people are so easy to demonize.

Frank Vella:
And I would say everybody also says private equity as one ubiquitous thing. And it’s not every organization has their own investment thesis and their own people and their own operating models. I can’t speak highly enough about how my private equity firm is so supportive of what I do on the people front. The first question is about growth, not cost cutting. What do you need to grow Frank? How do we enable growth? And of course, growth is a big value creator. So if I get this company growing the way we want and the way we have over the last four quarters, then of course that’s great for everybody. And so one size doesn’t fit all, but I’ve been doing this for four years next month with this company and these sponsors from private equity, and it’s been great for the company, it’s been great for my customer, and we we’re having a blast.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That is a really important point that it’s so easy to call private equity one thing or technology companies as one thing. And the reality is there are private equity companies that have wildly different motivations and focus areas and investment strategies than others. I mean, Pete Stavros at KKR, he is at the forefront of the employee ownership movement and he is trying to get the employees of all the companies in the portfolio and other private equity portfolio companies to invest in their employees by giving them equity so that they can have a shared sense of ownership and accountability for the results so that all boats rise together. In absence of that strategy, how do you drive accountability in your employees in this day and age, especially when they’re not all in the office every day, as you said?

Frank Vella:
Yeah, and the pandemic has thrown a lot of change. And I remember early days of the pandemic and then coming out of it, and I felt people wanted a rule, Frank, what’s the rule? How many days do we have to be in? And in hindsight, it was great, but it was harder than I anticipated to say there is no rule. The rule is be an adult and do what you need to do to work with your team and to get done what you need to get done. In technology, I’ve been afforded the luxury of being remote for many years prior to the pandemic in my household, we are two executive income earners. We had to manage two careers. And so if I had to pick up the kids and feed the kids and read them stories and put them to bed, then I worked from 9:00 PM till midnight, and that worked and it got done.
If you want to hire diversity into the workplace, you don’t want to disadvantage a part of your working group because they have these demands. And so we balance that by having clear objectives by creating, we’re working on this really diligently now by having cross-functional work groups that say, Hey, this team of people from marketing and product and engineering are working on this problem and these are the objectives. And does everybody understand what their role on the project team is? Yes. And then here are the milestones. And a project manager helps bring that to fruition with enough checkpoints. Sometimes it’s daily, depending on the scope, sometimes it’s weekly and letting people work at their pace to bring it together to the right outcomes. And sometimes this happens on Monday morning, I had to be on a call with people from California, Australia, the uk, Boston and New York, and it was 5:00 AM for somebody in California, and it was 8:00 AM for me in Boston, and it was 10:00 PM for somebody in Australia. We try to do that. Very rarely. It’s just a tax on everybody’s lives, but everybody knows if you’re calling that meeting, then you’re doing it because it has to happen. And respect is an important element for me. So respecting people’s differences and needs, but not lowering your expectation professionally of them is the combination that seems to work for me and for us.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I think a lot of employees feel infantalized by their employer because they’re forcing people back into the office ultimately because they don’t think employees have integrity to give it all. The theory is that they’re doing laundry or they’re not focused, and so therefore we need to force them back into the office so that we can watch them. And that Spotify billboard that went up in New York saying, we only employ adults or something like that,

Frank Vella:
It

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Was so popular because it wasn’t about the remote policy. It was about the sentiment of, thank you. That’s right. I would imagine a lot of people like to think they live with integrity sometimes, but sometimes a lot of the time, probably truly so. And we are also a remote company where we allow, there is an office and people go to the office, but I work a hundred percent remotely, so does our CEO even. And we’re really focused on results, and we found that that wins. And we also don’t do it in a destructive way in which, I mean, I feel very comfortable saying, I hear my three goals for the quarter. I’m not going to meet the third goal. Saying that to my ceo, EO is not a scary experience. It’s an honest experience and the reaction isn’t, well, what’s wrong with you? The reaction is, okay, can we help you? Why not? What happened? It’s treating each other like adults. Where else does that show up other than in remote work policies

Frank Vella:
Warehouse? Does it show up? I guess the balance piece I think is what you’re asking. It
Shows up in the way we treat each other. I think. I like to think as an objective setter, I’m tough, but fair. And so when you use your example of, I can say I can’t make that objective this quarter. Well, hopefully you’re not doing it on the 89th day of the quarter. Nobody likes to be surprised. This is ceo. That’s the one thing that is tough to digest. But if the response to that is tell me why, and there’s a respectful environment, then respect breeds respect. And if your CEO’s response to that is, well, that’s unacceptable, Jessica, and whatever follows, what are you going to do? You’re going to pick up the phone and call eight people on your team and say, okay, the boss just said this is unacceptable. We have to. And it cascades. And as an employer, I remember sitting at a table with someone who was on your podcast recently, Dan Streetman, good friend of mine.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Oh, really?

Frank Vella:
And we were at a table of six or eight CEOs at this conference, and we were working on a project they gave us, and it was after the pandemic. And Dan and I shared this philosophy of we weren’t going to mandate back to work, and your employees have leverage. And at the other end of the table are these four CEOs saying, oh yeah, when the tide turns, then the leverages coming back to us and they’re coming back to the office. And Dan and I looked at each other and said, really? Do you really think you have the leverage? It doesn’t work that way. If you’re hiring intelligent people that are results oriented, they will find a place to take their skillset elsewhere. And so the point there is there are are people who won’t be adults, and you have to deal with that so that the adults are not paying the price for the non-adults. And respect is a word that resonates in my room all the time.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, I think that’s such a great point also because you see that not all CEOs are alike. Four of them were in one camp and two of them were in another camp. And that’s been my experience in the consulting work that we do. And something that I think gets lost because there’s headlines and clickbait are more interesting and more profitable, frankly, than nuanced journalism. And so it feels like right now there is a divide that’s growing between leaders and employees. And that is something that I think will be very destructive to culture generally. Not just work culture, I mean societal culture. We have to get that figured out. It’s starting to feel like a head scratcher. Is that something you’ve spent time thinking about?

Frank Vella:
We think about it a lot. And sometimes the expectation is, well, you’re a technology company and they’re a technology company and they did it, so why aren’t you? And you have to defend it. And I’ll come back and thankfully the shareholders in my company haven’t held that.
They respect management and how we work, but it’s results driven. I get to demonstrate that we have had successive quarter after quarter successes, and it’s working. And I’ll go back 10 years, 20 years to my days at Microsoft, and I remember Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were running the company, and I remember there saying, you hire intelligent people, you equip them with data. And that was the day where data sharing with employees was very progressive. It was, what data do you need? Okay, somebody will give you a picture or a snippet of that as opposed to give me the Excel spreadsheet and that resonated. And then make sure that you’re dealing with the people who abuse that. So yeah, some, yes, as an employer, you might have leverage to pull that off and you might have leverage today, or maybe you’re just doing it for a different reason. Maybe instead of a layoff, you’re going to handle it this way. I don’t want the optics of laying off people, so I’m going to be the company that mandates everybody back to the office mathematically figured out that’s going to have 4% of my company resign. I don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, but it is a balancing act that you have to respond to as a CEO who does something different in the same industry for sure. And the benefit of good results gives you the breathing room you need to navigate through it.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah, I think a lot of that is confirmation bias in action too. I mean, it sounds like you as a CEO will see Elon Musk do that with the federal government in that, that they wrote in the Wall Street Journal or whomever and say, well, that’s not the way I would do it and continue running your business the way you would. There are people though that were interested in that thinking about it, wondering if it was a good idea. They’re seeing someone else take the risk. They’re seeing how that plays out in the media. They’re seeing how it plays out in the business and then saying, okay, well yeah, no, it is a good idea. And they were just looking for an excuse to make that decision anyway. And ultimately in the long run, we’re going to see what works, right? I mean, the story will be told. Reality will be the story. Yeah,

Frank Vella:
Reality will be the story. And I chuckle. I’m like, well, it’s always easy for somebody to wish a mattress in somebody else’s office but not their own. And there is no mattress in my office, and nor is there one in any of the engineers cubes or offices out here. And so yeah, you’re right. Media loves to pull that and show a picture of beanbag beds under desks that get pulled out. Okay.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
That’s not your vibe. You say

Frank Vella:
It’ll come out in the wash.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Yeah,

Frank Vella:
I’ve worked in the startup world where there’s this prospect of if we get this product out and we get valued at this and we do this and I’ll make this, and I get that, I have seen that in play. And I have lived in a world where I worked at a startup virtue stream and we needed to get product out. And did we pull all-nighters? Of course we did. It’s like studying for your exam all night in college. But it wasn’t the working culture of the company. It was the urgency of finishing something for a customer in this timeframe. But yeah, I’m sorry.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
So it’s temporal. It’s timely based on the circumstances. Well, we’re going through that too. At Culture Partners, ultimately it’s a marathon, but there are times where there are sprints, something happening that is timely that we need to up our game a little bit. And what I’ve always appreciated about our CEO is he lets us know when we’re in a sprint and when we can just run at a steady pace and that he’s an Ironman athlete. So he loves to speak in these kinds of race metaphors, but they’re very understandable for everyone to understand. One of the things we’re discussing right now is we decided to make a change to our product, and we’re discussing at the moment is now the time for that change given all of the other priorities, can this product change shift? We want to make sure that we’re making smart decisions rather than just running it all fronts at all times. And so we’re in a thoughtful conversation about that. And sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.

Frank Vella:
Absolutely.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
I have so enjoyed this conversation. I’m so grateful for you for being so transparent. My last question, which is my favorite question, is what is something that you don’t get asked about very often that you wish you were asked more often in conversations like this,

Frank Vella:
I’m going to frame up this entire conversation as indicative of that. We talked about, this was a Seinfeld episode, we talked about nothing, but we talked about a lot in that timeframe and it’s the important stuff. And the very first question you asked was, what’s my why? And that almost threw me for a loop because typically the first question is, so how’s your company doing? Tell me a little bit about are you growing and what’s your NPS score? And those are important metrics, and I could ring those off the back of my hand, but I come back to we’re in the people business and you asked about how we do what we do, not just what we do. And that is really the important conversation and it resonates. And so I’m grateful for the opportunity to have been able to ramble, hopefully not too long in certain directions, but been able to ramble about the things I love about this great company. I get to lead.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Well, thank you so much for joining us. It’s such a great, hopefully this podcast about nothing has been entertaining for the listener and I learned something, so I am imagining that they did too. Thank you so much for sharing, Wes. It was a total pleasure. Where can people learn more about you or about the company if they want to dig into all of those other questions you said I didn’t ask you about?

Frank Vella:
Yeah, so LinkedIn is great. Both Constant Contact is on LinkedIn and me, Frank Vela, I’m on LinkedIn and certainly on our website. Constant contact.com is one that’s been around for a while, and we’re proud of our heritage and proud to be today’s innovator as well.

Dr. Jessica Kriegel:
Beautiful. Thank you so much, Frank.

Frank Vella:
Cheers, Jessica. Thank you.