Diva Tech Talk was honored to interview Michelle Accardi, President and Chief Revenue Officer at rapidly growing Star2Star Communications, a global VoIP telecommunications vendor. Headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, Star2Star offers proprietary, hybrid unified voice and data communications solutions, in “the cloud,” to tens of thousands of customers globally.
A well-known aphorism says: “Life is what happens, after we make other plans.” That is true of Michelle, whose original aspiration was to be a Broadway star. “So, I moved to New York City” after early graduation from college. Discovering that Manhattan was an exorbitant place to reside, (“and I didn’t want to wait tables”), she took her first job in sales and “wound up, really liking it!”
In karmic fashion, the CFO of a small technology company was at the front desk when a young Michelle cold-called with her resume. Infresco Corporation, (a joint venture with CA Technologies/Computer Associates), was “willing to take a risk” on her: a political science major, with no tech experience, studying for LSAT’s, and exhibiting boundless energy and drive. “I took a job as a ‘Gal Friday…’ and when I got there, I was so intrigued.” The company was creating “really interesting technology” to convert “green screen” mainframe applications and databases and “make them look like really beautiful Websites.” Quickly, fearless Michelle was talking to every team member to discover how she could be of ultimate help to the mission. “I was doing things I had never done, before,” she said, like creating Access databases, and loving it. Her boss, who headed Infresco’s marketing, counseled her to reconsider becoming an attorney. “You have a natural aptitude for technology and people.” She took his advice and “never looked back.”
Within one year, CA Technologies merged Infresco into the larger corporation, and Michelle began her upward CA trajectory. “They were starting a reference program at CA and needed someone who knew all the (Infresco) customers. I was recommended.” CA offered Michelle a $25,000 bonus to make the customers referenceable. She misunderstood CA’s timeline for this, and beat it by a dramatic 11 months, enabling 200 customers to become referenceable in slightly more than a month vs. the year CA had forecasted. “CA had never seen anything like that, so they offered me a big salary jump to move to Long Island, New York. Within 6 months, I was managing a customer reference team in North America and, in a year, managing that globally. Then I met a gentleman, running our product marketing group (Tarkan Maner, now Chief Commercial Officer for Nutanix). I followed him into product marketing, and years later, field marketing.” Then Michelle worked with the talented George Fisher, (now President for Verizon) who eventually headed sales for CA. Michelle’s team was able to create portals to provide North American customer insights to a highly dispersed sales team. This catapulted her into many successively more important CA Technologies roles.
Along the way, Michelle gained valuable insights. In her field marketing role, she was struck by how much more she learned by “getting close to the customer.” In her sales enablement position, she implemented “fun projects to motivate people.” She eventually wound up as Vice President for digital transformation at the end of her 17-year CA tenure. “Digital, for me, was the biggest ‘leap’ because this was the time when digital marketing was just starting, and I was asked to take on a technology team, lead a web design, architecture, and IT team. I learned a lot about ‘agile’ as a methodology.” Michelle acknowledged that, without even knowing systematic agile development, she had been a practitioner of this communication-heavy process for her entire career. “Technology is always going to change,” said Michelle. So, her mantra is “drop in with both feet.”
Moving to Star2Star is a full circle story for Michelle. The company was co-founded by Norm Worthington, who was also the co-founder of Infresco. When Michelle reconnected with Norm, and his cofounder, “it was Kismet,” she said. “I could see the opportunity and the awesome technology.” She started as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer. “Actually, I was marketing employee #2. My job over the next 18 months was to build a team and a strategy. We built every piece of content, and the Website; and recruited a great team. Then I turned my attention to other areas of the business.” She became Chief Operating Officer and was mandated to drive operational systems and excellence. “We recruited other talent. Then I was asked to become President and Chief Revenue Officer and took my next leap!” Michelle has been having fun. “It has been really challenging to learn all these different aspects of running a technology company, driving it to the next level.” She describes the broad offerings of Star2Star as consistently expansive. “We offer so much: collaboration, contact center, text messaging, workflow integration of communications into every business process you can think of, mobile applications, text-based alerting, desktop communications as a service, and much more.” Michelle noted “we also have the only desktop solutions certified to work in a Citrix environment. We don’t just do cloud communications. We help you with your entire network.” Star2Star offers an optimized SD-WAN service to ensure call quality, essential when people are working from home. “We have a lot of proprietary technology that allows us to do things that our competitors can’t.” Industry analysts have noticed. The behemoth of market research/analysis, Gartner, has recognized Star2Star for the last six years as a Magic Quadrant leader in unified communications. Michelle, herself, has been named a role-model channel leader for the last six years as well by CRN.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated Star2Star adoption. In response to the crisis, Michelle is justifiably proud of the company’s stellar customer-focused philosophy. Ever the empathetic leader, her team ensured all company employees moved into a work-from-home environment, using Star2Star’s own technology. “Then we went to our base of customers.” Star2Star helped each customer deploy effective remote working scenarios; and created innovative payment programs to support customers experiencing negative economic consequences. “Communication is the lifeblood of any business. We didn’t want to be the bill that put any of our smaller companies over the edge.” Star2Star has also used this period to diversify even further. “We moved into digital transformation projects for a number of customers in the restaurant and retail spaces. They needed curbside pickup applications.” So, Star2Star provided those. “Doctors’ offices needed testing.” Star2Star provided that. Many customers needed enhanced employee alerting systems. Star2Star provided them. For a nonprofit customer, and other health facilities, Star2Star provided text alert services. The company has pivoted consistently to assist clients, which has fueled their own constant growth.
Michelle acknowledges that being a woman has only minimally affected her career. She and her husband juggle a large family of 6 children. Her husband serves as the “stay-at-home” parent, and “I see a lot of ‘reverse sexism’,” which is a challenge,” she says. But she revels in the fact that “women are built to adapt” and she feels capable of taking on many increasing responsibilities. If she has a regret it is that “I should have gone into entrepreneurship” at her career’s advent. “People who take the risks when they are young” succeed more dramatically, and sooner. “I think balance is a fallacy,” opines Michelle. “Do things that you love, with people you like,” is her philosophy of success. “And just have perseverance. Nothing is going to be perfect, anywhere.” She vividly remembers her realtor father noting that “the grass may look greener, over there, but it’s generally because there is a septic leak.”
Michelle’s essential advice to other aspiring women in tech is succinct. “Feel the fear and do it, anyway.” Seize opportunities; make the most of them. “You really have nothing to lose.”
Michelle Accardi can be reached at maccardi@star2star.com and followed on Twitter at @1marketingmaven.
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