HVTO UNDER 30 Q&A:
Ryan Seaton
Vertical Marketing Manager
Fiserv
Matt Swain: We're the OutputLinks Team. This is Matt Swain from InfoTrends interviewing Ryan Seaton from Fiserv. Ryan, thank you very much for your time today.
Ryan Seaton: My pleasure.
Matt: As you know, we are starting an interview series of young professionals in the industry.
Matt: Why don’t we start on a personal level? Tell us about Ryan Seaton outside of work.
Ryan: I live in suburban Minneapolis/St. Paul with my wife Anne, two children (son Brody 5, and Hadley 1), and our dog. My interests outside work include baseball, fishing, and coaching my son’s soccer team. I also love to travel and enjoy live music.
Ryan Seaton and his family.
Matt: Great, I’m sure coordinating a bunch of five-year-olds on the soccer field feels like a job in itself! Let’s move to your other job, where you are with Fiserv. Were you with Personix before you were with Fiserv?
Ryan: Yes, I was. I was hired by Personix, which was owned by Fiserv for many years but allowed to operate under the Personix name until 2009 when all companies under Fiserv leadership transitioned to a new Fiserv brand.
Matt: How long have you been with the company?
Ryan: About five years.
Matt: Did you have other employment straight out of college before you ended up there?
Ryan: I worked for a non-profit focused on sleep medicine called The American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It was a starter job and provided a good experience which helped me move right into the corporate world.
Matt: Interesting. Generally working with a non-profit requires that you wear many different hats, allowing you to learn the entire business. I'm sure that was valuable to you.
Ryan: It was, yes.
Matt: What drew you towards this industry?
Ryan: Actually there was a sequence of personal decisions I had to make. One of them was getting into the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. I was getting married at the time and the Academy was relocating away from the region.
Matt: Oh, I see.
Ryan: And so I started looking for a job and this one really seemed to hit everything that I had experience in and encompassed all the factors that I considered to be next steps in a career path. I landed here and it has been a great ride ever since.
Matt: Well, it is certainly encouraging to hear that kind of success story. So location was most important to you, followed by topical interests.
Ryan: Yes. I had worked in a smaller print shop going through college, I even interned at one. So, I was familiar with the print industry. I don't think I was necessarily prepared for the high volume that I was stepping into. So, I wouldn't say I was comfortable with it, but you know it's a very big industry.
Matt: Certainly. It's a big industry that seems so small at times.
Ryan: You're exactly right.
Matt: In terms of your education, you did an internship with a printing company at one point, but was there any other piece of schooling – whether from high school or college – that prepared you for what you're doing today?
Ryan: Not specifically related to high volume transactions, but the biggest thing I think that I needed to realize was the Business to Business aspect. When you're younger and you’re thinking about going into marketing or communications, you think a lot about Business to Consumer marketing and that really kind of stuck with me. I don't even know what the percentage is now, but at one point it was about eighty percent of all marketing is geared toward B to B. From a technology perspective, there were things that we had to do throughout college that involved working at the printers and working with mass mailers. That certainly opened my eyes to how technology was playing a role in the printing industry.
Matt: Sure.
Ryan: But, I mean as far as specific classes that were geared toward the industry, I didn't really have any of that. I don't even think they were offered.
Matt: Understandable, maybe if we took a different angle, were there certain general studies classes that helped better prepare you for the work force today?
Ryan: The importance of targeted messaging was certainly something that we covered. I remember there was a class called Consumer Behavior that talked about buying trends in certain age groups and looking back probably was my first introduction to transpromotional concepts.
Matt: So, for those people that think TransPromo is brand new, there you go – you were introduced to it in 2001. Did you feel like your recent education gave you an advantage over others who had not taken the newer marketing courses that you took?
Ryan: Going back to the Consumer Behavior course, I think my colleagues and I were first introduced to behavioral marketing in the professional environment around 2005. I was able to understand a little more about the dynamics at play than some of my colleagues who were quite a bit older than I was. So, that's certainly a good example.
Matt: Great insight. So that leads into my next question – what challenges did you face as a young professional entering the work force?
Ryan: I think my biggest challenge is that I work remotely from a lot of our technology, so I cannot access the plant floor and see it on a daily basis. I think I initially struggled with understanding some of the process flows, but over the years, as I began to visit our print facilities more often, I became a lot more comfortable. That was really the toughest thing that I went through. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with my age or not, but...
Matt: Well, it speaks to one of the challenges of working in this technology age, working remotely and being responsible for things that might not be tangible to you.
Ryan: Yeah, until you see them. Our facility in Indianapolis has one of the largest pre-sort machines (outside of a post office) in the world and I wasn't able to comprehend that until I actually saw it in action.
Matt: Right.
Ryan: It was explained, how the software works and things like that, which was pretty amazing. But that was probably the toughest thing that I had going on and, you know, just the overwhelming size of the print shops compared to what I was used to. We were doing small runs of a couple of thousand, maybe even up to twenty thousand, and here we're doing minimum runs of two hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand.
Matt: So from there, what were some of the advantages of being a younger person entering the industry?
Ryan: The fact that I have embraced technology at an early age. That gave me a head start and I was able to comprehend a lot of transpromotional ideas before other colleagues. Another personal advantage I had is that I had a tremendous mentor at Fiserv, Richard DeTingo, who would really take the time to help me, you know, walk through and answer questions and just kind of help me understand more of the actual production side of the output. That was a tremendous advantage and I probably wouldn't be where I am now without his guidance.
Matt: You know, I think that's a great point in that when you entered the workforce, you didn’t have to play catch up in terms of new technology and understanding of new platforms, per se, but you did have to catch up on the years of industry experience some of these guys have. When you're entering any industry, having a mentor can get you on your feet much faster; certainly more so than if you’re left to learn everything on your own without that industry wisdom straight out of the gate.
Ryan: I agree.
Matt: What advice do you have for recent graduates entering the industry, whether it's print in general or more specifically in this high volume space?
Ryan: I would say embrace the new technologies you're seeing. One thing that's really exciting to me is watching how the multi-channel space has evolved, even in the short time I've been employed here. For instance, people are getting their bills sent to their cell phones, we have seen advances in multi-channel delivery methods and personalized URL campaigns, and there are other new technologies that people probably hadn't even thought of five or six years ago.
Matt: Right.
Ryan: And now consumers are demanding it. If Fiserv hadn't embraced those types of technologies and aimed to develop a product for it, we wouldn't be competing today. So I think I would tell recent graduates to embrace the new technologies and have a good professional network.
Matt: Yeah, that's a great plan.
Ryan: Using social networking sites like LinkedIn, even Facebook, those type of networking tools can be very helpful. If I have a question on something, I can just post a question to one of my groups on LinkedIn and get four different responses. So I can see how different people interpret the question or how things are done in different companies.
Matt: Great advice. And what advice would you turn around and give to their perspective employers, which may even be you?
Ryan: My advice would be to take the time to properly train and be patient. Answer questions, because that's really the only way the young professional is going to learn and catch up on the years of experience that you or another colleague has. Employers should focus on information sharing and continue nurturing new hires in the industry once they are onboard.
Matt: That's valuable. Is there anything else that you would like to share with the OutputLinks team?
Ryan: High volume transaction output is a very important industry in the world, even with the movement to suppress paper and turn to electronic delivery, paper is not going away. I can see how someone could see the printing industry as a pretty boring profession, but there's a lot of technology behind it. And once you see all the integration, it's really remarkable and it’s a very powerful vehicle to get messages across to customers and targeted prospects – be it by a printed or electronic delivery. I’m glad to be a part of it!
Matt: Great. Ryan, thank you very much for your time!
Ryan’s Book Recommendations:
Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayers
MicroTrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne