Name: Anton Lipkanou
Title: COO
What are your job responsibilities?
Everything and nothing. I call myself “janitor of everybody,” because what needs to happen but is not done by someone else is done by me. That means I take care of pretty much the whole life cycle of the business, starting from sales to execution and support. However, I’m more and more becoming a resource the team can tap for ideas, which is awesome.
How long have you been at Delve?
Five years. I started back in May of 2016, and at the time I was number five globally. So I’ve seen and been part of this journey pretty much since the beginning.
What does a typical work day look like for you?
The beauty of my job is that there is never a similar day, because there is just so much to do. Ultimately, my role is increasingly becoming the enabler for others. And that means one day I will be talking to clients, mentoring and counseling some of them who are frustrated in their positions. Another day, I would focus five hours of my time on recruitment. On a third day, I would just make sure I talk to the team and we go through their issues.
I still maintain weekly hour-long one-on-ones with every department director, and honestly that’s the best time spent. It allows me to do so much more with them.
So there’s really no such thing as a “typical” work day. The only thing that is always present in my day is worrying about financials, because ultimately, we are a for-profit business.
What is the best part of your job?
Seeing people grow and enabling them to do it. When I say people, I mean both internal and external. I was the fifth hire initially, and now there are 90 of us. I have watched some of my peers grow from junior analysts to directors of 20, 25-people teams.
And I love to watch clients grow. We’re helping some of our clients do some good for the world.
How do you stay connected with your teammates when you’re working remotely or traveling, et cetera?
Lots of chatting. If you ask my team, I believe they would mention that I’m usually available 24/7, which is unhealthy for me, but healthy for everybody else.
What are you excited about, work-wise, for 2021?
A good friend and an old mentor of mine was always saying that 95% of the problem is defining the problem, and only 5% is finding the solution. I finally feel like we’ve defined the problem we’re solving at DELVE. I’ve never before felt as good about the market we are in and about our understanding of the market forces and of what is driving consumer choice.
And the exciting part is that right now we’re in execution mode. We know exactly what we’re doing. We know what we need to be doing. And now it’s down to the fun part.
This year is the one when we are planning to ensure that we deserve our place in the market, because we are doubling down on the work we’ve been doing for the last five years. And it’s exciting. It’s like when you hit the highway coming off the shoulder and you just hit the gas.
My favorite martech tool is…
Slack, because the power behind every martech tool is people, and Slack connects people.
Outside of work, you can find me…
Detailing my car. I don’t know why, but I love doing that. It gives me so much peace of mind to clean something tangible. I hate cleaning my house, but cleaning my car is great. Or, if it’s summer, you can find me trying not to break my bones going down the bike park slope on my mountain bike.
Something few people know about me…
Is that I got into Marketing kind of by accident! I was working as a programmer coding on Java Core when I attended a conference with the word “programmatic” in the title, thinking I was attending a conference on programming. It ended up being about programmatic marketing, and I was hooked. Not being a native English speaker plays out nicely sometimes, I guess.
This year, I’m planning to DELVE DEEPER into…
This year I’m definitely planning to delve deeper into how larger businesses are run. Greg and I have been on this journey for a while. We’ve done a lot together, but are we doing 100% of what we can for our clients and for our people? No. We’re at maybe only 50%. And we’re at this exciting stage where this 50% is already enough for enormous success for us and for our clients. So how much more could we do if we could reach 100% of our ability?