Quick Questions with Paul: Chief Marketing Officer
When he's not hiding his hobbit toes, dreaming about packing up the family for a full immersion experience working abroad or trying his hand at coding, Paul is our Chief Marketing Officer here at SwipedOn. We caught up with Paul for a quick-fire round of questions to learn more about him and what a day in the life is like at SwipedOn HQ.
What does a day in the life of you at SwipedOn look like?
My day typically starts with a check of the overnight action, since most of our lead activity is from the northern hemisphere and comes in while we're asleep here in NZ. The inbound lead funnel is crucial to our business growth so I always make sure there's nothing at the top that's interrupting that flow. There's a fine balance to find between volume and quality of inbound leads, and the sales team lets us know if we're not getting it right! Our marketing website takes a fair chunk of my time with the continual developments we make with new page additions or landing page testing. I would typically do the rounds of our various advertising platforms too and check the data, looking for any outliers that may point to a trend. Sometimes there's some user acceptance testing I can help with, or even try my hand at hacking out some website code... everyone's a coder, right?
What do you like about working at SwipedOn?
The people, first and foremost - just a good bunch of peeps with a good mix of personalities. Everyone has got great individual talent and combine to do awesome stuff. Always a pleasure to be in the office. Also enjoy being part of a local success story and being one of the first full-time employees. From a marketing point of view, it was a completely blank canvas when I joined and that was pretty exciting. Being 100% digital marketing allows me to use data and analytics to prove ROI on marketing spend, which was near impossible in my previous roles in a much more traditional marketing world.
What do you particularly like about what we’re doing with SwipedOn?
We'll take you from a paper visitor book to a secure digital solution in under 10 minutes!
What three words would you use to describe your role?
1. Analytics.
2. Leads.
3. ROI - Return on investment (actually that could have been the 3 right there)
What is your SwipedOn screensaver?
The depths of space
What did you do in your previous working life?
After studying mechanical engineering at uni, I joined Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, which was a great company to work for, especially as a new grad - a real NZ success story. I did engineering for the first year or two and then put my hand up to be a Product Manager, where I learnt that I actually liked the people side of business more than sitting behind a computer designing widgets. I then spent the next 15 years in marketing and sales at F&P, both in NZ and in overseas offices. We made the family decision to move to the Bay of Plenty in 2015, where I took a year off full-time work, and became an avocado farmer while also looking after our young kids. I stumbled across SwipedOn when it was just Ben here in Tauranga and made a connection right from the get go. Been a fun journey so far!
What do you do in your free time?
Two kids aged 5 and 7 steal about most of my free time. The avocado orchard takes up a decent amount of the weekends too, as does the "life-sentence block" (lifestyle blocks are a myth). Outside of that, I love sports - I play tennis, golf, squash, touch rugby and football, and would happily give any sport a go at least once.
What are three things still left on your bucket list?
We want to do a full international immersion at some stage in the future - pack up the family and go live on the other side of the world for a decent chunk of time. I would also like to pick up flying again - I did enough hours to go solo and would like to carry that through to getting my PPL. Lastly, turn at least one of my kids into a sporting superstar, to pay for my retirement.What’s on your SwipedOn playlist?
Bogans and Bitches - look it up. It's a thing.
If you were stuck on a desert island and you could choose one person from the SwipedOn team to come with you, who would you take and why?
Tough decision, but I'd say Judea - she climbs the Mount pretty much every day (and was a force at the climbing wall) so if the island was anything like where they filmed the Castaway movie, you need someone who can climb mountains, trees, etc to find the best food. Plus, she's in sales, so I'm pretty sure she could talk us on to any passing boats - always be closing.
Let’s end this with a weird fact about you…
Sheesh... I don't know about that... I think I've got Hobbit toes. You can pretty much compare my feet to Bilbo Baggins.
