My guests this week earned her very first dollar selling avocados with her neighborhood friend, took her first job as a retail warehouse employee and was actually one of the original baristas before Starbucks made it such a mainstream profession. So how did she wind up in payments? You’ll have to tune in to find out! Spoiler alert: it was a tough choice between deodorant and financial technology.

Clover Network CMO Andrea Gellert is here to help me kick off our annual Women Leaders in Payments month!

For those of you who may not know, Clover is the leading cloud-based POS solution for small and medium sized businesses in the U.S. They offer a front office solution for payment acceptance, as well as a technology platform for business management. As for their competitive advantage, Andrea touts not only their capacity to offer enterprise-grade solutions for small businesses but also their genuine emphasis on the human connection – creating a business model that focuses much more on the relationship than the transaction.

We spend some time talking about her most eye-opening moments throughout the span of her career, including how to facilitate and sustain the startup pace-of-change, high-energy environment regardless of the company size, as well as how your efforts tend to get diffused when you explore absolutely every business opportunity for your brand.

Tune in to hear Andrea talk about her journey to CMO, including the guiding principles that have helped her navigate her career and why it’s always so important to start any journey with the end in mind. We also discuss the most powerful lesson she learned from a round of constructive criticism that continues to influence her management style even to this day.