Lola.com CEO, Mike Volpe, shares how he is aligning his team to disrupt the $1.3 trillion business travel market

In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com, a SaaS platform disrupting the $1.3 trillion business travel market. As the former CMO at Hubspot, Mike provides an interesting perspective on growth since he now oversees all of the key growth levers in the business.   

Initially, Lola wasn't focused on the B2B market. The founder previously helped build Kayak.com so he has a strong background in the consumer travel space.  But by studying their early passionate customers the Lola team realized their product was resonating most with business travelers. Given Mike’s background growing B2B SaaS companies, he was an ideal CEO to recruit to help lead the company into this opportunity. 

Mike credits Lola’s rapid growth to having a fantastic product serving a very large market. Lola provides value to both travel managers and road warriors. For travel managers, Lola helps them save significantly on their travel expenses and gain better visibility and control over their corporate travel. For road warriors, Lola helps improve the overall travel experience. 

As CEO, Mike believes an important part of his role is to keep the overall team aligned and pulling in the same direction. One of the most effective ways he helps to drive this alignment and cross-functional collaboration is through a monthly full-day meeting between the functional leads. By carving out a full day, they go beyond surface level reporting to actually working with each other to achieve the company objectives. 

Another key part of Mike’s role as CEO is to ensure that the company isn’t just growing quickly but it is maintaining strong unit economics as it does so. He explains that the B2B travel space has attracted so much investment capital that it would be easy to pursue growth at any cost. He believes that it is critical to take a more sustainable approach to growth. 

Learn more about CEO Mike Volpe at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevolpe

Learn more about Lola at www.Lola.com

 

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