Our new Client Services Director had a stellar career at one of the world’s best-known brands, rising through the ranks from a graduate recruit to oversee global online engineering, on the way setting up an innovation hub that changed customers’ brand interactions, redefined experiences and broke down internal barriers. He left to fulfil a childhood dream to get a commercial pilot’s licence. Having spread his wings – metaphorically and literally – he’s joined Dootrix to help steer the next phase of our growth. Mark Lapicki explains how his experience at a leading consumer brand will provide new strategic insights and service levels for our clients.
Making a difference for Dootrix’s clients
I knew Dootrix’s Chief Technical Officer, Kev Smith, from university. As his friend, I was really proud of how he and Chief Executive Officer Rob Borley had grown the company, building on a reputation as technical experts to the point where they can compete with much larger service providers.
Having been client side, my experience is that you can have really good service delivery but poor account management, and vice versa – but it’s rare to excel at both elements. Where I can add value to Dootrix and its clients is by bringing my corporate experience to mature the client account experience.
As Dootrix’s Client Services Director, it’s significant that I have always sat on the other side of the table and can blend my experience and expectations with a career of technical expertise. My role here is in two parts; internally, helping develop the team to unlock another level of potential, and externally, leveraging my technical experience running complex portfolios of projects and teams to help our clients achieve more. My goal is to help ensure that we’re not just a great technical team, but we’re also great communicators, bringing forward difficult conversations, challenging assertions, and ultimately delivering the right solution at the right time, blending in our wider combined team experience to drive innovation where appropriate.
Innovation to push back boundaries
I joined Estée Lauder when I graduated from Portsmouth University. I spent a decade as a developer before taking on management roles in the online side of the business, becoming the Head of Engineering for the UK, then overseeing online production for the UK and EMEA. Our team built and maintained a portfolio of global e-commerce websites during a time of enormous online growth.
In 2015 I was asked to set up a Retail Innovation lab in London. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to really figure out how innovation should work at scale within a large corporate environment. My goal was to seamlessly incorporate digital into retail journeys in order to drive greater consumer experiences and a better connection between our digital and bricks & mortar assets. I learnt a lot about how to use system knowledge as a passport to unlock new and exciting business opportunities. Creating an innovation culture relies on empowerment, to overcome blockers and drive stakeholder engagement, as well as a portfolio of concepts which can reliably demonstrate that innovation really can deliver significant growth and challenge the status quo. There is a discipline and rigour to creating a sustainable innovation engine. That engine relies on mechanism to elicit fantastic ideas from every chair, to pick out the ones which have strategic applicability and then timebox solutions with a heavy emphasis on getting early access to data which can empirically reinforce the concept or help you reconsider it.
In 2018 I was invited to work from New York overseeing global engineering, online. I led a large team composed of engineers in several countries plus various IT suppliers maintaining the online presence of the different brands. In this environment I really had the chance to work closely with our supplier teams and learn the trade that I now bring to Dootrix.
Revisiting a childhood dream
Coming out of lockdown, I had been with Estée Lauder for 22 years. I was very happy with everything we had done. I felt that if I were going to step away from the company this was a good time to do it, so I decided to take a sabbatical to fulfil a childhood ambition and learn to fly.
I approached this in the same way that I approached my professional life; to bring discipline and rigour to learning. I was really interested to get into the detail on aircraft systems, meteorology, navigation, and the various other 13 subjects which make up the Airline Transport Pilots License.
Towards the end of the two years that I set aside for this, I went on a course which teaches Multi Crew cooperation, and I was amazed by how relevant professional pilot training is to a corporate environment. So many challenges that we face every day in the office - from communication to managing dynamic and stressful environments – are the bread and butter of how a modern flight deck operates. I’m now really excited to be able to bring some of that learning back into everyday life at Dootrix.
An exciting opportunity
Kevin reached out to explain the opportunity at Dootrix and I was thrilled to get a chance bring my various experiences together and help lead and change an amazing small business which is ready for the next stage of growth.
If you want to be like Mark and join an exciting, fast-growing company then, become a Doo’er
