Leading With Empathy and Strategy: Building Mission-Driven Government Solutions

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Susan Kearney  0:31

Hi, I’m Susan Kearney, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast where middle market owners and CEOs talk about founding businesses, growing them and scaling them and sometimes exiting them as well. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC. We’re a team of seasoned business owners and C suite executives. We work with CEOs of privately held companies to build more valuable businesses and help them with Exeter transition on their own terms, if they should decide to do that. You can learn about us at newportllc.com. Today, I’m excited to be talking with Lisa Mascolo. Lisa is an accomplished CEO and a board director. She has a passion for leadership development, and I hope we’ll dig into that a little bit during our conversation today. She’s currently the CEO at Voyatek, and previously spent a lot of time as a very senior and successful executive with both IBM and Accenture. So you can see she has a very kind of varied professional past, and I’m I’m excited to learn about it. So Lisa, welcome. We’re pleased to hear you. I’m excited to have this conversation. I appreciate it. Great. So let’s start off on the professional side. Tell us a little bit about your professional background. Is there a common thread that runs through the experiences you’ve chosen to have? Tell us just a little bit about it.

Lisa Mascolo  1:54

So I would say it sort of started when I was a kid. Yeah, my paternal grandfather was a New York City employee, and when I was a little kid, I used to accompany him. We lived in New Jersey. I used to accompany him back to the city. In the summer, I’d sort of beg to go back to the city with him. And he was, he was a precursor of two things, 1311, and take your kids to work day. And he worked for the Department of Consumer Affairs in New York City, and basically he was 311, on feet. So he’d go into, and this is a long time ago, he’d go into the office, and many, you know, come out with a stack of trouble tickets. And we would go, you know, I he’d have a stack of trouble tickets, and me in the other hand, and we’d go, sort of door to door, talking to people about what were the complaints that came in overnight, and what could the city do to help ameliorate the challenge? And they were everything from, you know, simple things like the neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking, to more important, in fact, impactful Human Services things. And so I really got the bug for public service and for consulting, and so for me, that’s really the thread that’s run through my career, which is being able to help government do its mission better, right? I’m all about our clients. Our clients are great government agencies. Sometimes they pay their bills on time. What I really like, though, is the fact that our clients have clients, and we serve our clients, clients. And so for me, that’s sort of, sort of the thread that’s run through my career is helping government be better.

Susan Kearney  3:29

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I love that story about him being 311, on his feet, because I did wonder, looking at your background about how you chose to work in the government sector rather than in their private sector, because I have noticed that thread in particularly state and local government, which a lot of people don’t really think about too much, but can be very satisfying. Well,

Lisa Mascolo  3:52

if you think about where you live and what we do as people, we drive on roads, we send our kids to school or we go to school, state and local government, and I spent a lot of time also working for us, federal government and other countries governments as well, state and local government or provincial in a place like, you know, Canada or Australia, the provincial governments are the ones that List most directly serve the citizens. And so if you’re really passionate about the mission, doing work in the state and local space is really important. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  4:30

that’s great. I love that. I love that my dad did work in state and local government. And so maybe we have that common thread in our background. So how did you come to be a CEO and a CEO at Voyatek.

Lisa Mascolo  4:45

So as I am fond of saying, I was a founding partner at Accenture. So I was at Accenture for about 30 years, and then I retired at a point in time in my family life that required a little more attention I went to. Un retired, as I like to say, for the first time, and took the role of CEO of a small federal systems integrator. Re retired, got lured into IBM, and spent about four years at IBM, and re retired, I have un retired for the third and final time, and that happened in the fall of 23 so private equity owned a company. They bought another company, and the objective was to put the two companies together. Those two companies that came together ultimately became Voyatek. So I became the CEO of the combined entity in call it October of 23 and we launched the Voyatek brand name in April of 24 so just about a little over a year ago, we hit the market as Voyatek.

Susan Kearney  5:48

And what was it about that particular opportunity mean you seem to be quite good at unretiring, but still, what was it about this particular opportunity at Voyatek that caught your eye or struck your fancy, or where you thought you might be particularly impactful.

Lisa Mascolo  6:04

For me, it’s really hard to say no to the mission, and the challenge that our public sector clients have. My view is that if you can make a difference, you should, and so that is a little bit of a tug on my heartstrings, because I do think that it matters. And when the opportunity came up, it was intriguing to me, clearly, primarily because it was in the state and local space, public sector, and we do some federal work as well, really important work at the intersection of fraud, waste and abuse. And it is a private equity backed company, which is not a space that I had played in at all. So the opportunity to do the stuff that I love in an environment that I maybe didn’t necessarily understand, ie, private equity, was pretty hard to say no to,

Susan Kearney  6:51

frankly, yeah. And so tell me about your time. And well, first tell me, are there any particular problems you solve for your government clients? Are you focused in a particular area. Or do you do a broad set of

Lisa Mascolo  7:02

solutions? Or we are, I like to describe Voyatek as a purpose built government solutions company, right? We are only about government. I love my time at Accenture, and I love the fact that I was a founding partner at Accenture, and Nonetheless, when I led that public service business globally, you you still sit at the head table of a big company, and you make decisions that are the right decisions for the whole company. Some days, they might also be the right decision for your piece of the business, and other days, you would say, not so much. In this case, we only make decisions about our sector. We only make strategic decisions or tactical decisions, about what we think is really going to make a difference for this client set and and that really does, that really does matter to me, and I think our it matters to our people, and we’ve created a culture in an and an environment where I think people want to be. This is it’s a complicated market. These are complicated times. Our attrition is really low, and I think it’s because we’ve created an environment that is a place where people want to be. We’ve We’ve spent time on the culture created what we call the Voyatek idea, which are those four letters right, which is involvement, decency, empathy and accountability. So we’ve created the culture, and from that, we actually have multiple platforms that we serve our clients. We serve tax and revenue, Health and Human Services and justice and public safety. To me, creating the culture is important, right? I don’t care how good you think you are in any of those vertical domains. Without the culture, without creating a place where people want to be, I don’t care how good you are in the domain. If you don’t have people, you’re not going to be able to serve so we spent some time really thinking about the culture and thinking about the integration of these two entities, and now we’re really focused on scaling that in each of those three vertical domains. And we would argue that what we do in each of those three vertical domains is at the cold face. It is mission work. It’s not back office. Somebody needs to do that. That’s just not us. We do the mission work. What we do is hard, and we do it well in each of those three verticals.

Susan Kearney  9:28

What lessons did you learn easy or tough in the transition? I have two in back. Mine. The first one the transition from a large organization like IBM or Accenture to a smaller, middle market company. What came easy to you? What did you not expect that you needed to learn?

Lisa Mascolo  9:48

The first time I learned the lesson was after I retired from Accenture and became the CEO of the federal systems integrator, relatively small company. I. And you call it, you know, $30 million and not to say that’s a big who cares, but I couldn’t tell you, in my Accenture world, when was the last time I ran a client that was, you know, only 30 million bucks. So you’re like, how hard can this be? The point that I absolutely needed to learn was there’s a big difference between being the Group Chief Executive of thing inside a big thing, and being the place where the buck stops, right? You make a bad or a dumb decision, real people don’t eat. And that’s a that’s a huge responsibility, and it’s a lesson that I carried. You know, from that environment to this environment, Wojtek is obviously a bigger company, and nonetheless, you know, I’m it, right? You do something stupid. And so what you really learn is that the leader’s job, the end of the day, the leader’s job is to listen and learn. Then you can lead. If you start talking first without actually listening to people, you’re not going to learn anything, and you’re going to not be very good as a leader, yeah? And your

Susan Kearney  11:05

company and your team are not going to be able to excel in a way that they’re proud of, right? Yeah, right. The second transition that came to mind for me was you pulling together those two companies into one, and that’s often very, very difficult. Most of those kinds of integrations and mergers don’t work. What’s the secret to your success? Is it back to the culture piece and really being thoughtful about that? Or is it other things?

Lisa Mascolo  11:34

So in our case, I would say it’s, it’s really two things. First, we had a lot going for us as a combined entity from the get go, and that is that both companies were purely focused on the government sector. And if you looked at the written mission of both organizations on their website prior to the two organizations even knowing each other, you would say, I don’t know they’re written by the same guy. Very common commitment to our clients and the causes that our clients have and the missions they need to discharge. So we had a really good, solid, common platform to stand on. We all care about serving the public sector. We all care about our government clients and the people that they serve. So that was the first thing. It didn’t necessarily make it easy easy. It certainly made it easier than it might otherwise have done, because you still have two very different cultural ways of approaching and and in that case, two different sets of capabilities. And so it gets to the sort of the second thing, which is how we did the integration. And I refer to 2024 as the year of integration. 2025 is really the year of being Voyage. And the integration was initially thought to be by the private equity guys who I love. I think sage win is the private equity. And I think those guys are terrific. They rise to the top of my benchmark, which is, which is, just be a good human. And they had determined that they were going to spend a decent amount of money on an external third party to do integration. And my answer to that is, no, absolutely not. We’re going to do our own integration. The people who need to work together need to work together, not be told to work together. And while some might argue that we took longer than maybe we could or should have. My view is that we took exactly the right amount of time to achieve really solid integration. Not to say it was all hearts and flowers in the doing, and there’s still there continues always to for there to be work to be done, but we did. We integrated ourselves, right? We took the two companies, we created a leadership team across the two organizations, and we did the work ourselves. And I think that was a real secret to the success. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  14:10

there’s certainly two schools of thought on that, right? Do it ourselves is bring other people in. And I you know, sometimes when you bring someone else in, the leadership team gets a little bit divorced from the effort and in the long run, that’s not going to be very successful. So I really respect you taking on a new job and then putting your foot down in that way to start the way that you

Lisa Mascolo  14:32

well, it’s just, you know, it’s an interesting challenge to be a leader who has to sort of slide into a situation that already exists. I’m fortunate in that it was, it was and is a really good team, and still personalities and different people with different perspectives. And again, my view is you’ve got to listen. You’ve got to hear what it is they’re trying to tell you and what their aspiration. Are and why they aspire to do what it is they say they want to do. How do you knit that all together? That’s the leader’s job.

Susan Kearney  15:06

Yeah. Speaking of that being the leader’s job, I know you have a particular soft spot in your heart for the topic of leadership and leadership development. Tell me about your leadership style and how that shows up every day at work for you,

Lisa Mascolo  15:24

we all learn lessons. Sometimes you learn things the hard way yourself. Sometimes you learn by observing. And I probably have two or three my guys would say five or 12 things that I constantly tell them. One of the things that’s critically important to me is that I’m the same whether the door is open or the door is closed. I worked once for a leader who I won’t name, and that person was completely different when the door was closed versus when the door was open, when the door was open. That leader, as I like to say, gave great talk. Sounded really good, compelling. Talked about things that mattered to people when the door was closed and it was, you know, the executive leadership team, not so much. And I find that to be sort of largely disrespectful. And I, I took exception the other day to to a LinkedIn post that I saw about, you know, the day of the nice boss is over because times are tough now. An effective leader needs to do and be and say the same things when the door is open or when the door is closed, when times are easy and when times are tough, if you if you aren’t consistent in your messaging, and the things that you think about that people really need to know, right? I really want them to know. What are the two things that if I’m in a jam, she would tell me to do? So I know I’m going to get it mostly right. The only way to do that is, one, to model it, and two, to be really clear in the way in which you talk about the things that matter and and you need to be fundamentally just a nice person, just be a decent, empathetic human being. I don’t know everything, but I can tell you that my guys aren’t my people are going to tell me stuff if they don’t think I’m approachable, or they don’t think I’m going to listen to whatever it is, they have to tell me. And leaders need to, you know, my first dictum is, leaders need to listen and then learn, and then you can go, lead.

Susan Kearney  17:37

Yeah, that’s sometimes difficult as well, because you want people to tell you the truth without being Yes, people right? You want to hear the hard truth, and so you need your team to be as authentic back to you as you’re trying to be to them. And that takes that trust foundation that you’re talking about, that that knowledge of what you want, and the fact that when the door is open, or whether it’s good times or bad times, you’re going to get what you’re going to get, and everybody knows it, and that’s how we operate. I love that. I love that. Tell me about some of your proudest moments as you’ve gone through this down this path the last 18 months or so.

Lisa Mascolo  18:17

I do think the work that we did with respect to integration, was a really good decision. And I think the decision to decide to brand the company, we’re not going to call it this company or this company, we’re going to call it something very different, because it’s about the intersection of these two things. And more importantly, we ran an employee contest to name the company, yeah, which was great. And, you know, I made sure people understood I was sort of really serious about it. It was a $10,000 prize, if yours was the name that got picked. And we had, we had almost 200 submissions. And the nice thing about it was we had submissions from people who came together, who were from the two legacy organizations. That was really cool. And I’ve told this story before too, but one of my favorite entrance that we did not pick was submitted by an employee who asked their kid and said to the kid, geez, based on what it is, Mommy does for a living, what would you name the company? Six year old kid, apparently said, without thinking about it, well, I would call the company solve a source, because you solve problems. And the kid was obviously into dinosaurs, yeah, which is kind of cool, yeah, we didn’t pick it, yeah, and, and the name ultimately came from a software engineer who thought about the Voyager space mission and said, you know, Voyager has lasted longer, gone further, discovered, more, contributed more than. Anybody ever expected, and we should call the thing Voyatek, because that’s what we’re going to

Susan Kearney  20:05

1. Oh, man, that’s so great. That’s so great. It is that software engineer still hanging around? Voyatek, yes, perfect, perfect. Let’s turn on to to you personally. A little bit here. You said a little bit about you were raised in New Jersey and headed downtown in New York City with your grandfather, but tell me a little bit more about what it was like where you grew up, and what lessons you took from that experience that you have brought to your adult life in your career.

Lisa Mascolo  20:34

So I was born in the city. I was born in the Bronx. My father was a salesman, and so I wouldn’t say I really grew up anywhere. And we lived in the Bronx, we lived in Connecticut, we lived in New Jersey, we lived in Pennsylvania. And so I I really didn’t grow up anywhere necessarily, except I would argue that I grew up and learned a lot. Clearly, you know, we all learn stuff from our parents. I learned a lot, and I think a lot of the really important lessons I learned, I learned in the barn. I spent a lot of time in the barn. I was a horseback rider. I taught little kids how to ride. I worked for a woman who was brilliant beyond her place and time in the world, in terms of what it really takes to be a good human, what it really takes to lead. What do you have to do in complicated situations? You know, sometimes when you’re dealing with little kids and big animals, lives are at stake. How do you deal with that? How do you teach that level of responsibility and a lot of the way I think about situations really comes from all of the work that I did with her in that space. And I went from, you know, getting my first paycheck when I was nine years old for muck and stalls for a weekend, and that was really the only she was really until I graduated college, she was the only person I worked for. And there was a level of responsibility and trust that was really important. And she didn’t, she didn’t ask me or tell me to do a thing, until she was really certain the first couple of times that I would absolutely get it right. And after that, she was pretty okay saying, I’m pretty sure you can do that, and I’m pretty sure you can do it, so go do it. And that that that sense of empowerment

Susan Kearney  22:33

when you’ve properly taught people how to do their job is really cool. She was a great teacher. Yeah, sounds like she was hands off, but kind of like we’d all like to be as leaders, delegating, but holding you accountable. But she was

Lisa Mascolo  22:49

hands on until she knew that you weren’t gonna, you know, put a little kid’s life or a horse’s life at risk. And so a lot of that gets to my view about show and tell there are some things you model and there are some things you just tell them. If you’re pretty sure the risk is significant, I’m going to tell them you probably should not do that, and here’s why. Otherwise, you know, I think you model the right behavior and you trust people, and half the time as a leader, you end up learning something both about the person and what you’ll do differently the next time. Yeah, that’s right.

Susan Kearney  23:29

And so when you went off to college, and as you were graduating from college, what did you think you were going to spend

Lisa Mascolo  23:35

your life doing? Well, I certainly spent my life before deciding where I was going to school, thinking I was going to be a veterinarian, that was my thing. And then I realized that it was going to take a lot of money, which was not available. And so I decided to study physics. So I started college as a physics major, quickly realized that those people were way smarter than I was, and switched to a curriculum and at the time we called systems planning and management. So think about it as you know, the the origination of systems work. Computer systems work. How do you build computer systems? And decided that I was going to, you know, I was going to school in order to be able to get a job, have a career, and do the things that I wanted to do.

Susan Kearney  24:32

And you actually spent a good deal of your adult life doing that. Yeah, that’s, you know, I took a a poll, a kind of a lazy poll, but a poll one time about 10 years out of college, of the people in the room, and there were several dozen of them, and of those people, 15% did what they studied in college as a profession 10 years after they get out of college, and everybody else was doing a completely different thing,

Lisa Mascolo  24:58

sure, and I’m not. It’s not like I’m sitting around, and these are only old people would know this. It’s not like I’m sitting around writing a compiler. What you know, the skill that that I learned in that space was really about logic and problem solving and how to decompose a problem and how to think about it, and how to engage with a potential client in understanding the requirements and solving the problem. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  25:21

yeah. So I know you have a busy schedule because you have not only your CEO work on your plate, but also you do board work and community work, and you, of course, would like to have a life as well. Tell me some of the daily rituals that you have found that help keep you grounded or organized. You know, kind of help? Help you get through the day and contribute to your success?

Lisa Mascolo  25:46

I guess I would say, you know, I could say the really obvious stuff, like, get a good night’s sleep, and I don’t always do that. I actually am, though, and I coach a couple of younger people, and I’m constantly on them when they’re complaining about something or other, I’m like, how much water are you drinking? I am a fanatic about water. Your brain runs on fuel. 95% of that is water. You can’t be hydrated enough. In my view, if you’re going to tackle some of these complex challenges, you also need to be able to walk away and go take a walk and clear your head. So I wouldn’t say, I’ve got lots of rituals. Sometimes I will start my day by doing laundry. I like laundry because it never talks back and it stays exactly where you put it. And you know, it never gives you any trouble. So it sort of feeds my need for control, yeah, but I would, but I would say that for me, it’s I do think being properly hydrated is critical. And I do think being able to say, You know what, I’m going to be five minutes late, I need to go take

Susan Kearney  26:53

a walk. Yeah? Yeah. I love that. I actually learned that lesson when I had kids in one of those parenting books, which was, step away, take a deep breath, clear your head, and then go on. So thanks for sharing that. That’s great. This is my last question for you, Lisa, and that is, what advice would you give to other CEOs in middle market, kind of size companies? What have you learned the hard way that you’d like to help them avoid? I

Lisa Mascolo  27:23

I guess, I guess you would say that the accumulation of experience is learning, sometimes learning stuff the hard way. For me, the I do think the most important thing, if you are the leader of a business, a for profit business, slightly different when you’re talking about nonprofits, although not a lot. If you are the leader of a for profit business which is dependent upon others, right? If you’re a two person shop, I guess you could do the work of two people and get it all done. If you’ve got 500 people, or 1000 or 50,000 you can no longer do the work of all of those people. So those people have to whether they phrase it this way or not. Those people have to be invested in your success. They have to want you to be successful. They have to want the company to be successful. And if they don’t, you’re screwed. And and it so it becomes really important to be an empathetic leader, to just be a decent human being. There’s nothing wrong with being a nice person. There’s nothing wrong with being a nice leader. Nice doesn’t mean, as I’ve said in this thing the other day, nice doesn’t mean having low expectations. Nice doesn’t mean accepting the unacceptable. Nice means being clear and consistent and compelling in your messaging so that people understand and it means setting expectations. So for me, it’s all about being a good human. Because when you’re a good human and things are complicated, people stick by you and stick by your company when you’re consistent, whether the door is open or closed, people know what to expect, and they want to be in an environment where they’re respected and they have a voice. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  29:14

you sound like someone I would have liked to work for in my career, for sure. That’s great. That’s just terrific. Well, this is the Growth + Exit podcast, and we’ve been talking to Lisa Mascolo, who’s the CEO of Voyatek, Lisa, thanks so much. It’s just been great getting to know you a little bit. And I’ve I’ve learned from you, as I always do, any last thoughts you want to share before we say goodbye.

Lisa Mascolo  29:41

Thanks for the opportunity to chat. And I again, believe strongly in the sector that we operate in. Voyatek’s a great company. And I’m, you know, I believe, believe strongly that if you can make a difference, you should. I will not on retire again. And. Yeah, but it’s, it’s been and I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. In case any of my people are listening, right?

Susan Kearney  30:08

If you can make a difference, you should, and I, and I believe that, and it makes the days that are tough, not so tough. Yeah, that’s great. Well, now I’m going to have to start shadowing you on LinkedIn for the next years and years, so I can find out when you retire again and if you un retire. I wish you and your colleagues at Voyatek all the best. I hope you’re around as long as Voyager and as effective as that mission, or maybe maybe longer. So thanks. All right. Thanks,

Lisa Mascolo  30:36

Susan. I appreciate it.

Outro 30:37

Thank you for listening to the Growth + Exit podcast sponsored by Newport, a unique national business advisory firm. If you enjoy this show, be sure to share a like and subscribe for future episodes.