A former consultant and a Harvard MBA graduate, Enova chief operating officer Greg Zeeman spent 15 years in a number of banking industry departments, including sales, operations and general management.
In Zeeman’s view, this cross-department experience provides a solid foundation for his current job, which is to constantly look for ways to streamline Enova’s operations. That can mean anything from ensuring compatibility between different tech systems to ensuring his team is happy and motivated.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Every day looks different, but my focus — and the team’s focus — is on ensuring that we’re providing great service to our customers and continuously finding ways for the business to operate more effectively. While I’m responsible for setting the vision and long-term strategy, on a day-to-day basis my goal is to help my team by connecting dots and clearing any roadblocks to success.
What do you spend most of your time on?
Enova has spent more than 12 years innovating, launching new brands, expanding into new geographies and adding people to its team. That growth is not stopping (in fact, we’ve recently ventured into the analytics-as-a-service space with Enova Decisions). But with all of that growth, we’ve recognized there are benefits to bridging any operational or technological differences that exist between our lines of business and becoming more unified in our processes. This work will set us up for better scalability and even greater success in the long term.
What are the biggest challenges of running a tech organization?
Technology changes over time. Since Enova has launched new brands over the years, we have businesses operating on different technology platforms. One of our challenges is evolving both legacy and newer platforms into a more cohesive services platform. Thankfully, we have a great team that finds creative and successful solutions when challenges pop up.
What is the most significant change you've introduced as COO?
In the past year, we created a global operations team. This centralized task force is focused on standardizing processes and technologies that can be used across the company. For instance, right now they’re working on taking call center technology that’s been very effective for one of our brands and implementing it across the various lines of business.
How do you build company structures that incentivize good work?
Building and maintaining a motivated team starts with really caring about your people. I truly value my team’s feedback, ideas and opinions, and I am a huge believer in action. When you listen to employees’ needs and ideas, and then actually do something about it, you build trust and loyalty.
Images via Enova.
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