Like a lot of young girls, Olivia Mariani had an interest in fashion as she was growing up. Though she had dreams of becoming a fashion designer, her life led her in a more practical direction as she studied in college and sought jobs after graduation.
While Mariani loved fashion, she wanted to find a career field with broader options that would allow her to apply her creativity and background in writing. This desire led her to the field of marketing — an interest she first discovered in one of her college classes.
After college, Mariani found herself working for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company offering a product targeting marketers. So it happened that in her first professional job, Mariani managed to learn about marketing while selling her company’s service to other marketers.
During that period, Mariani watched the technology industry grow exponentially in real-time, and when she identified marketing automation as an expanding sector, she focused her efforts there. She became an expert in marketing automation as a response to demand from industry trends she had witnessed while attending conferences.
After realizing tech was her calling, Mariani started working with a startup company called Fiscal Note, where she focused on revenue marketing.
“Previously, the company had mostly been focused on PR and not necessarily growth marketing,” she says, “But the company had aggressive targets to hit. And I happened to have that exact background, so I was able to lead the marketing team.”
While often rewarding, working for a startup can be stressful. “Each quarter is like a year for most other companies,” Mariani says. “I wondered what it would be like to work at a publicly traded company.”
After stepping away for a while to work for a more established organization, Mariani determined she didn’t care for the slow pace and wanted to return to a high-growth atmosphere. Moving back to SaaS, she applied her talents in the nonprofit space, doing lead growth and marketing.
During this time, she realized she preferred high-volume transactional sales instead of the enterprise side of the business. During the pandemic, Mariani began to consider a change in her career — a thought that shocked her husband.
“My husband said, ‘You’re crazy. Why would you start a new job?’ It was around the first quarter of the pandemic, so things were uncertain, and I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m just getting an itch.’”
Mariani subsequently interviewed at Curbio, feeling that the company and its mission were a great fit for what she wanted in a professional role. “I had security [knowing that not only was it] a genius product, but we have the security of great investors and a leadership team that will take this [in the right direction],” Mariani says.
When she started with Curbio, the marketing team was only Mariani and one other person. Now, it’s grown to 20 people during her first 18 months with the company.
Mariani says she’s gotten everything she asked for. “I’ve gotten budget resources; I get mentorship. I’m working with an executive coach, and I’m part of this executive team that has been so supportive, and the company has doubled year over year. This is the first time I’ve been with a company, and I want to stay here until the organization exits. I want to be part of their growth.”
While Curbio is currently experiencing fast and substantial growth, Mariani says the company values its employees’ personal lives as well as workers’ productivity as team members. She says it starts from the top down, with everyone putting forth their best efforts while in the workplace.
She says that with remote working opportunities, the company has gone the extra mile to offer flexibility for employees, making it possible to spend more time with their families or develop personal interests while also driving productivity.
Transparency plays a core role in the company’s operations and attitudes toward its employees. Each team member is kept up-to-date on what’s happening with Curbio, and they know what direction the company is headed at all times.
“Luckily, the mission at Curbio hasn’t changed,” Mariani says. “It’s the same North Star: we want every homeowner and realtor to use Curbio when they’re putting a property on the market, and we want to make it really simple, delivering through the experience.”
“We have a lot of touchpoints for employees,” she continues, “whether it’s through our all-hands-on-deck meetings, through surveys, through presentations, and through cross-functional alignment. Those North Star goals are our key initiatives that we are going to execute as a company.”
Mariani says that she believes clarity is an essential pillar of Curbio so that team members feel like they truly have a purpose in their roles within the company. “If you feel like you’re on a hamster wheel or you’re doing a lot of work without a clue as to why, most people are eventually going to question that,” she says. “The fact that we all know where we are headed is a big part of the culture.”
She added that among Curbio’s core values is humor, which sets their organization apart from many other startups and real estate companies today.
She says that everyone on her team and the executive team shares similar senses of humor, allowing for casual and stimulating conversations among Mariani, her higher-ups, and her teammates.
“We will share these memes about marketing all the time. And I think that humor and having a light approach to things, like Slack channels, people will form relationships. Even though we have team members who do not work in the same area, they can get virtual coffee and talk on their own, just getting to know each other,” Mariani says.
She explains that one of her favorite parts of working for Curbio is the company’s overall trust in each team member and the freedom she has to create and present ideas without, in her words, “death by collaboration.”
“At Curbio, it will play out like, ‘Hey Olivia, you’re the marketing expert. We’ve aligned our overall strategy and we want you to do your thing. If you tell me you’re going to put wrap banners around buses, I’ll believe you if that works with our product,’” she says, adding that the same philosophy applies to all employees in the workplace.
While Curbio stresses workplace culture and goes above and beyond to create an atmosphere where employees feel heard and valued, Mariani says that outlook doesn’t diminish the company’s focus on achieving results.
“Results come above all else. Yes, we want to have a great culture, but at the end of the day, we have to drive results. This is a venture-backed company that is signing up to double year over year. If we don’t produce, then testing those fun workplace ideas doesn’t matter because they won’t happen,” she says.
Mariani adds, “There’s a balance of keeping everyone on track. You need to know the metrics and have visibility into the business. So I’ve prioritized making really strong dashboards, working with my analyst on every question.”
