Liz Slape joins Movista as Senior Vice President of Growth
Growth, leadership and intention are pillars of Movista’s forward-thinking company strategy. In their new reality, where YOY revenues have doubled in five of the past 7 years, this Software as a Service (SaaS) company’s upward trajectory has been fast-paced. To proactively help manage what could potentially be fraught with growing pains, Movista is making some very intentional moves towards strategic growth. Especially where they are focused on the expansion of their leadership team as an investment in organizational strength.
“We’re heading in to our 8th year of business and have been in a hyper-growth phase for a while now,” says Stan Zylowski, Movista President and Co-Founder. “As part of our move-forward plan – we knew we needed to structure the team in a way that would accommodate our increased headcount and talent base. By putting strong leadership in place, we’re ensuring that we’ll drive our business forward with the same level of outstanding service and operational excellence, while meeting pace with our growth.
It makes me think of the movie JAWS. When I look at our org chart, I think, ‘we’re going to need a bigger boat'.
The newest incarnation of this strong leadership model is Liz Slape, who’ll be heading up Movista’s Sales, Marketing and Communications teams in her new role as Senior Vice President for Growth.
“Liz is such a great addition to our talent portfolio,” said Zylowski “Her business savvy and proven experience with growing client accounts are right in line with our strategy and focus. She’s been able to help clients, like Kaiser Permanente, Tyson Foods, Proctor and Gamble, Sam’s Club and Walmart, with development of key areas, such as marketing, strategy, operations and scalability. It’s her positive attitude, energy and this great background that will help guide us smoothly through our transition from the “small and mighty team” mentality we started with – to a more grown-up version where we’ll start to see a team with more specialists, instead of generalists. Giving people a chance to really dig in and excel on projects that are right in their wheelhouse.”
April Seggebruch, Vice President and Co-Founder says, “Our business has continued to grow at such a fast pace, we realized that we needed to start bringing more people onboard as dedicated resources, in order to focus on the areas that will make the most impact.” She added, “When you’re in a startup, everyone gets used to wearing many hats to get things done. Now that we’re more “grown up,” it’s exciting – and a little humbling – to see how much our original concept has expanded. It’s allowed us to bring so many awesome people onboard to support the business. We look forward to watching Liz expertly guide the team toward our growth objectives.”
With her passion for startups and small businesses, Slape says she enjoys “creating business growth and opportunities. Since they’ve already been on an upward climb, Movista is well-positioned, and I’m excited to be joining the company at such an exciting time. I believe their goals and my skillset will be a perfect fit – and the people here are amazing. It’s such a great group – I can’t wait to see what we’re going to accomplish together.”
Movista co-founders, Zylowski and Seggebruch, are both retail veterans who’ve had first-hand experience with the various pain points and obstacles that can accompany field work, as well as the challenges involved in managing distributed and mobile teams or fleets.
The scenarios they each routinely encountered in their time with major retailers caused them to start asking the question: How can we make this type of work more efficient, organized and cost-effective? In 2007, when they met in the MBA program at the University of Arkansas, they created the concept for a business that would aim at making field team workflow and management better all-around. A few years later, they decided to take the leap of faith, believing in the power of this idea – and left their corporate jobs to start Movista LLC in 2010.
