I work at Finix Payments. For the last 11 months I was leading our team of 3 fantastic Customer Success Managers. Last month I had an amazing opportunity to move over to our Payment Operations team as the Head of Customer Service to build and grow our first line of customer support!

How big is it?

I work with 2 Customer Service Representatives and 1 Exception Management Analyst. We plan to add more Finixians to the team early in 2022.

Where are your teammates located?

All over the United States! In my Customer Success role, we had people in Cincinnati, Boston, and San Francisco. Currently I work with folks in Ventura (CA), Los Angeles, and Virginia.

Not to sound cliche but it's about clear communication and trust. And that would be both managing up and down.

This is a tough one! We have weekly team meetings with individual 1:1s following that. We also leverage Slack and the Donut app to pair people for virtual Donut dates. Finix has also done a great job trying to foster a collaborative work environment that can be harder to manage in a remote world. We have also brought people together who are in the same area to create a more meaningful connection with your colleagues.

I have always been a people person, in particular I love working as part of a team. Being remote can be incredibly isolating and ensuring that everyone feels like part of the team is a big challenge that many of us face every day.

We have been fortunate enough to have a great People Operations team that supports some great team building activities. We’ve done cooking classes, cocktail making events, and even a Tango class session. We’ve also done some seriously interactive online quizzes and sometimes even managed to coordinate Super Smash Bros and Mario Kart tournaments!

When new employees join Finix they share who they are, where they are coming from, and a fun fact at our all-hands meetings. This usually gets the Zoom chat firing and spin-off hangouts can happen, which is great!

Slack is probably our number one used tool for that! We have music, food, travel, reading, and movies channels. My favorite would have to be our pets channel where I can overshare pictures of my two pugs!

I am part of the Gain, Grow, Retain online community of Customer Success professionals. We have two tracks - one for leaders (or aspiring leaders!) and one for individual contributors.

I try to read Extreme Ownership every year as I love the principles they cover. Primal Leadership is another favorite of mine and someone recently recommended The Checklist Manifesto to me, which was a seriously great read.

All of these resources have massively helped me grow as a leader. I am also incredibly fortunate to have a wonderful People team at Finix who invest in all Finixians and their growth!