Over the last two business quarters, ACV has added three leadership roles as part of its plans for growth.
Buffalo-based ACV, a unicorn that went public in March 2021, recently hired Joe Mappes as chief commercial officer, Winston Benedict as chief information officer and Andy Shaevel as chief experience officer. All three roles are new to ACV, are vice president level positions that report to members of the company’s C-Suite and are part of the startup's growth strategy.
“We’re being very deliberate,” said COO Vikas Mehta. “We’re sort of taking a step back and looking at where we want to be a few years out, and we’re looking at big opportunities in market. We’re also looking at the team, the level of seniority and expertise that can help us unlock and grow.”
The business, an online marketplace business for automotive dealers, has mainly focused on the dealer-to-dealer marketplace. But as the commercial market is recovering from the pandemic, new car supplies are ramping back up.
Thanks to both the maturity on the company’s core side of the business (dealer to dealer) and predictions that the commercial market will grow to pre-pandemic levels, ACV wanted a senior leader to focus on going after the commercial market opportunities.
That’s why the startup created a chief commercial officer role. Mappes, who is working from Ohio, had experience on the wholesale side and commercial market and servicing side.
The business also needed more talent to help it scale. Before creating a chief information officer position, the company had a more junior employee doing information architecture. As ACV, which employs about 2,000 globally, grows, the company gets more complicated with more technology stacks, which created the need for a CIO and hiring Benedict, who is based in Michigan.
“Winston was a great find,” said Mehta. “He was someone who had taken companies from our size to the next level. He’s done that both in the U.S. but also spent a bunch of time abroad.”
Being customer-focused has always been a part of ACV’s business model but previously the focus was split across multiple executives. Company leadership wanted to consolidate that effort by creating a chief experience officer role.
Shaevel, who works out of Buffalo, has more than three decades of experience investing in, founding and scaling at least a half a dozen companies. A big part of his career was spent in the automotive and financial services space, including co-founding Remarketing Services of America, which manages the sales of off-lease and repossessed cars, in Buffalo in the early '90s.
Shaevel was active in the business for 15 years. The company was acquired after five years in business by DaimlerChrysler and in the early 2000s was sold to Fiserv.
“I think the learning curve in terms of the industry is basically nonexistent because he knows the industry,” said Mehta. “Andy is coming in to basically to be the primary person for customer experience across ACV, and that is both inward and outward looking. How are we organized? How are we basically supporting our customers? Where do we need to deploy next generation tech?”
Shaevel was also drawn to the role because of the great culture fit. ACV already had clearly defined values, solid data, engaged workers and communication with customers.
“My focus is really on ensuring that ACV delivers exceptional customer experiences that lead to deeper recurring relationships,” he said. “The way in which we can fuel organic growth is to transition transactional customers to deep recurring satisfying relationships where honestly we earn their advocacy for our brand, for our marketplace and for our adjacent services. So when we pull that off, I think that will create an organic engine that really allows us to grow."
Ultimately, companies must be self-aware and continually evaluate what is needed to help them scale. Mehta said he and CEO George Chamoun talked about adding a chief experience officer for a couple quarters before moving forward with the new position. And the "right" timing is different for every business.
"I think a lot of it comes from discussion, clarity of objective (and) pros and cons of scaling the way we are or leaning on current leaders to scale vs. kind of making a deliberate decision of: Okay, now we’re big enough," Mehta said.
